D&D General The purpose of deity stats in D&D.

[Alzrius]

Yes indeed. Tim may have been unable to see it at the time, being stuck with a limited perspective only 2.5 years into this hobby, but epic heroes who can actually fight and humble or even kill gods are 100% in the mythic tradition that D&D draws from.

Reading Kask's foreword, I don't think it was that he looked down on the idea of players fighting gods per se, so much as it was trying to shame power-gamers and munchkins with PCs far beyond what he thought the gods themselves should be like into reining themselves in.

Clearly, that plan worked wonders.

 

[James Gasik]

That's certainly part of it, but for me there's always been another reason, which is the "top-down" style of building a campaign world.

That's essentially where you build the major aspects of a campaign world first, and then start filling in the details. How does magic work? What planes of existence make up the cosmology? Who are the gods and what are they capable of?

Answering these questions first, and having subsequent details be built off of those answers, lends itself to verisimilitude in the campaign world, encouraging players to invest in the game. This way, there's an answer as to why things are the way they are, and even if the PCs don't know what it is at first, they can go looking for it if they want without the DM having to scramble to come up with something that might not fit the campaign world.

Issues of "Why didn't the gods appear personally to fight this world-ending threat?" or "Why don't the good gods just wipe out the arch-fiends if they're so much more powerful than them?" cease to become potential plot-holes or inconsistencies this way, instead becoming underlying mysteries of the campaign that the PCs can choose to investigate as they reach the higher levels.

Likewise, while having stats for the gods abets this, it's important to remember that it doesn't necessitate it, simply because DMs who don't like their deities to be defined can simply ignore such a resource. "In my game, the gods are unknowable and un-statted; we're not using that sourcebook" completely solves any potential problem of munchkinism run amok, while DMs who don't like that approach have a product that they can make use of (instead of having to write custom rules themselves, which is a lot more work).

Gods, nothing. You could just say "high level NPC's" in general.

Imagine a setting like Faerun, where you can't throw a rock without hitting an archmage, then wondering why anyone would need the PC's in the first place! Baldur's Gate 3 was a great game, but in my head the whole time I was playing, I kept thinking, "Man, I know like 30 canon characters who could solve this mess with ease!".

 

[MGibster]

Reading Kask's foreword, I don't think it was that he looked down on the idea of players fighting gods per se, so much as it was trying to shame power-gamers and munchkins with PCs far beyond what he thought the gods themselves should be like into reining themselves in.

Ha! There was a rumor the producers of Starfleet Battles tried to do the same thing with the introduction of the Klingon B-10 battleship. Fans kept demanding battleships and Task Force Games introduced the biggest, stupidest, most impractical ship in the game and were surprised when many players responded with, "More, please!"

There is precedent for mortals fighting the gods and winning in western myths and legends. With a little help from Athena, Diomedes stabbed Ares in his nethermost belly forcing him off the field of battle at Troy. (Ares goes and cries to his father about what a mortal had just done to him.) Hercules fights a few gods, but when you're the son of Zeus I guess you can get away with a lot.

 

[Mannahnin]

There is precedent for mortals fighting the gods and winning in western myths and legends. With a little help from Athena, Diomedes stabbed Ares in his nethermost belly forcing him off the field of battle at Troy. (Ares goes and cries to his father about what a mortal had just done to him.) Hercules fights a few gods, but when you're the son of Zeus I guess you can get away with a lot.

Hercules is one of the examples which first leapt to mind. Folks can object that he's a demigod himself, but then I might reference the entry for the Fighter class in the 2E PH (p26):

The fighter is a warrior, an expert in weapons and, if he is clever, tactics and strategy. There are many famous fighters from legend: Hercules, Perseus, Hiawatha, Beowulf, Siegfried, Cuchulainn, Little John, Tristan, and Sinbad. History is crowded with great generals and warriors: El Cid, Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Charlamagne, Spartacus, Richard the Lionheart, and Belisarius. Your fighter could be modeled after any of these, or he could be unique. A visit to your local library can uncover many heroic fighters.

I really liked how 4E fulfilled that promise with the Demigod epic destiny, although I imagine 3E did something similar.

 

[Queer Venger]

"If it bleeds, we can kill it."

best line ever! Yeah, for me the reason to stat deities is for when the players get too big for their britches and decide to take them on, or think they can do a better job of being a god.

 

[Alzrius]

I really liked how 4E fulfilled that promise with the Demigod epic destiny, although I imagine 3E did something similar.

Similar? It had a direct 3.5 back-conversion of several epic destinies, including demigod, in Dragon #363.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I don’t think it is just for fighting.

The quote in the OP suggest it was also to shame table that got to high levels. "Oh, Odin is only level 40. What a sham it is for you to be level 45' and all that.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Given that the introduction even points out that there were PCs at that point that could kill Odin and they included all the stats anyway ... it was a high-level Monster Manual.

You can detail the gods and their religions without telling how many hit points they have or what loot they drop if you kill them. The mythology books that would have been most familiar to the TSR writers, like Bullfinch's Mythology or the wonderful D'Aulaire's books of Greek and Norse myths, managed to do it without ever discussing how easy it would be to kill them.

The only purpose of the stats was because they wanted to model them as big monsters. And given how gonzo D&D was right from the start in the 1970s, they knew full well that Zeus and company's days were numbered.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Thinking about Supplement IV, this was 1976. I don't know that the game yet had any way to encompass beings without stats. That was, perhaps, the only way that they could conceptualize them within the world of D&D at the time.

 

[Mercurius]

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