Never stat a god

[Thrawn4]

Extra Credits did something on not statting Cthulhu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DyRxlvM9VM

EDIT:

You probably prefer a more reputable source. Have a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a more in-depth analysis of incomparable values:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/va...commensurable/

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Values, such as liberty and equality, are sometimes said to be incommensurable in the sense that their value cannot be reduced to a common measure. The possibility of value incommensurability is thought to raise deep questions about practical reason and rational choice as well as related questions concerning topics as diverse as akrasia, moral dilemmas, the plausibility of utilitarianism, and the foundations of liberalism. This entry outlines answers in the contemporary literature to these questions, starting with questions about the nature and possibility of value incommensurability.

[Brookshw]

OP: Thanks for the elaboration, I think I have a better idea of what you're looking for (I hope). As I mentioned, you may want to look into Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. Another option could be to look into the rationalism and empiricism debates which have some relevance to the topic in so far as a statted god is on some level a projection of the rationalist side while unstatted gods which can only be understood through encounters work as a reasonable parallel for the empiricism views. Oddly there might be some interesting discussion in books on Aesthetics in art, if you have any interest I'd be happy to check my records, I think Gombrich could be relevant.

Or maybe discussions on unkillable video game creatures would help? Or, though it's a bit of a stretch, simply cheating in video games.

[TheCountAlucard]

Last post on this thread before I go to bed…

If killing gods is impossible, we can't have the story of Old Man Henderson, and that cannot be permitted.

[Frozen_Feet]

The easiest way to explain it is if you give a god one million hp, someone else can make a character with two million hp

This rarely follows from the actual rules. In fact, at least in 3.x D&D, you can stat a god to be entirely invincible to all non-gods and then play the god in a way that prevents any other gods from arising... accidentally. The possibility is pretty well hidden in the obscure rules text of Deities and Demigods, but it's there.

There's also the fact that only the GM can, by default, choose to play a god, and the mechanics that reliably allow for low-level characters to ascend are spread across multiple books and limited to a couple of items and abilities. And a moderately powerful god can pretty easily make it so that there's no Pazuzu, no Sarrukhs and no infinite wishes.

[supergoji18]

The Internet is an amazing place. Only here can a discussion about where to find a good reference for an essay turn into a heated debate about whether gods should have stats.

Well, might as well add my two cents.

It all depends on what the intended feel is. If gods are meant to be the supreme forces of the universe/personifications of its components whom are so far above everything else they are incomprehensible to even the most powerful and long lived cosmic beings, then they should not have stats. Example: Marvel's cosmic beings who are so powerful and mysterious their full powers are completely incomprehensible, and the only times they have ever been defeated by a mortal was when said mortal wielded some McGuffin so absurdly powerful that it turns anyone who wields it into a cosmic being themself.

If gods are meant to be "like us but bigger," they should have stats. Example: Norse Mythology, where gods dying was not only possible but was an important part of an end of the world prophecy. To a lesser extent, the Olympians of Classical Mythology, while clearly above all other forms of life (asside from the even older gods), are still flawed and still able to experience things like pain (IIRC, there was one myth where a god was burned by candle wax and fled in pain. Don't remember the name of the myth, but it did involve Aphrodite and her son).

Forgotten Realms gods should have stats IMO. Divinity in this setting is as fluid as water and gods rise and fall as regularly as flies. Plus, there's the whole "you need worshipers to live" issue which pretty much makes them the mortal's b****es.

[johnbragg]

Since the thread has completely drifted into the mechanics of deicide in D&D...

... I personally favor the Roman approach.* When the Romans were sufficiently fed up with adherents of a certain god or set of gods, they went in and decimated (or worse) the population, razed the main temple(s) and the city it was in for good measure, and scattered the rest of the population throughout the empire. If gods derive their power from their worshippers, then to kill a god it is necessary to deprive him/her/it of worshippers, either directly by the sword or indirectly by breaking the communal bonds of worship.

The Carthaginians gave the Romans no trouble after the Third Punic War, and the Hebrews/Isrealites/Judeans/Jews gave them no trouble after the Third Roman-Jewish War. I'd say killing a god in D&D would require the same scale of effort.

(Even this would only reduce the god to Divine Rank 0, or maybe even not that far. But if you've wiped out the priestly heirarchy and broken the psychic connection between the god and the worshippers, the god himheritself is basically just a high-CR monster, a different flavor of demon or devil venerated by secretive, scheming cultists.)

* EDIT: Whoa, just re-read. Please read "I personally favor" to mean "If asked as a DM how a god could be killed I would respond thusly" not "This was awesome and kewl."

[spineyrequiem]

Arachne was turned into a spider when she dared compare her weavings to Athena's.

Original story's much less pleasant than this. They have a contest and Arachne weaves a tapestry about what an unpleasant chap Zeus is. When Athena loses, she fills Arachne with guilt about insulting the gods, so Arachne runs off and hangs herself. Athena finds the body and turns her into a spider as an act of mercy, so she can weave all her life, though mortals will destroy her work without a thought.

[Eldan]

Since the thread has completely drifted into the mechanics of deicide in D&D...

... I personally favor the Roman approach.* When the Romans were sufficiently fed up with adherents of a certain god or set of gods, they went in and decimated (or worse) the population, razed the main temple(s) and the city it was in for good measure, and scattered the rest of the population throughout the empire. If gods derive their power from their worshippers, then to kill a god it is necessary to deprive him/her/it of worshippers, either directly by the sword or indirectly by breaking the communal bonds of worship.

The Carthaginians gave the Romans no trouble after the Third Punic War, and the Hebrews/Isrealites/Judeans/Jews gave them no trouble after the Third Roman-Jewish War. I'd say killing a god in D&D would require the same scale of effort.

(Even this would only reduce the god to Divine Rank 0, or maybe even not that far. But if you've wiped out the priestly heirarchy and broken the psychic connection between the god and the worshippers, the god himheritself is basically just a high-CR monster, a different flavor of demon or devil venerated by secretive, scheming cultists.)

* EDIT: Whoa, just re-read. Please read "I personally favor" to mean "If asked as a DM how a god could be killed I would respond thusly" not "This was awesome and kewl."

Alternatively, evocatio, the other Roman approach.

You send your priests to stand in front of the enemy city and promise their god that Rome will build him a more magnificient temple than he has now if he forsakes the enemy.

Why kill if you can ally?

[johnbragg]

Alternatively, evocatio, the other Roman approach.

You send your priests to stand in front of the enemy city and promise their god that Rome will build him a more magnificient temple than he has now if he forsakes the enemy.

Why kill if you can ally?

That was the usual Roman policy. Carthage and the Jews were the two exceptions.

But the topic was the mechanics of deicide in D&D gaming. And I'd argue/fiat that bringing down a god requires destroying the religion that supports the god(s).

How Christians fit into that policy at various times I will not discuss, because of forum policies on discussion of real-world religion.

[TheThan]

The spoony One has something on this subject . (this is part two of a rather epic rant, but it’s the relevant part.)

[Segev]

You pretty much nailed the key component of knowledge is power.

My own personal interpretation on it is related to the concept that names have power. In my studies of neural networks, I have had more than a passing interest in how human minds tend to grasp and learn concepts. I have found, anecdotally, that when I learn a new word that defines a concept I had previously grasped but not been able to define in a single word, I start to see more and more examples of that concept in things that I had previously missed. I start to make connections and evaluations, and find more and more places to use that word.

It tends to greatly increase my understanding of that concept and many things related to it, to the point of forming relations in my mind which I had been unable to make before.

This has led me to tend to think that fiction writers who want to make a profound and wise being are making a huge mistake when they have said being scoff, "You humans and your need to name things. Why can't they just be what they are?"

The truth is, in naming it, we gain the ability to not just better understand it, but to appreciate it better. To recognize it as distinct from other things, and thus tell that the pattern of colors is actually our mother's face, and not just part of a background swirl of wallpaper.

Giving things numeric representation, making them modeled in mathematics, does something similar. It allows us to evaluate something which we previously could not comprehend in relative terms to something else.

What is the extra value of being perceived as white, straight, male, whatever? The problem, the ethical problem, that I see in chasing down that academic inquiry is that it has internet viral potential. If the American public knows that the average male person of color would pay $54 dollars a month for society to treat them statistically the same as a white person, or that the average white person would accept $150 a month to be treated without privilege, there are big ramifications.

This one's going to be very, very difficult to do meaningfully. The reason is that you have to define, very specifically, what differences people will experience for being treated with or without "privilege." And the inherent nature of the argument is that people do not consciously perceive the way their biases create and grant this privilege.

Tell a white guy that you're giving him $150 to treat him without privilege, and he'll insist that he's being treated worse than that black woman that you've paid nothing to. That you're inventing abuse to heap on him to justify the $150. Tell a black guy that the $47 you've charged him to treat him with "white privilege" is earning him equal treatment, and he'll still look at any situation with the suspicion that he's not enjoying the same privilege as that white guy who got paid $150 not to get the privilege the black guy supposedly bought.

To assign a value to something, to quantify it, you must also be able to qualify it. That is, identify its specific qualities. You can run a bidding system to determine the value of a good or service iff that good or service is explicitly defined. You may not be able to tell if it's because it's "beautiful" or useful or "cool;" you can just tell that somebody was willing to pay $X for it.

But if you cannot identify the specifics of the good or service, you cannot really say your quantization of it is valid.

Let's say you paid me $150 to do without my alleged "white male privilege" for 1 day.

You've assigned a value to it. Presumably, if I agree to it, I'm agreeing that is the proper value for the privileges I apparently enjoy for my sex and skin color.

But how do you specifically define the privileges I will fail to enjoy?

Because the quantization of their value is meaningless if agreement cannot be reached as to what they are, and specifically how they manifest in every situation.

An example of quallifiable (though not necessarily believably doable, today) approaches would be to pay me $150 to appear to all the world as a black woman for the specified time period. (The obvious troubles start with just how unconvincingly I'd pull such a charade off; one would have to hypothesize that the charade is achieved by Sufficiently Advanced Technology, or by Functional Magic.)

The reason this is the point we'd have to go to is just simply that we probably couldn't agree on what privileges I do enjoy for my sex and skin color. I'm sure people can agree to a degree that advantages exist...but what they are, and where PRECISELY they'd show up and how they'd manifest?

You're tackling more than just quantization of value of these with your proposed paper. You're going to have to tackle qualification of these things.

I wish you luck, sir; it's a fascinating concept, but I am unsure how to really broach it.

[Yora]

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[Eric Tolle]

In my experience over the last three decades of gaming, 99% of the time when a GM refuses to stat a god, and makes it an actual presence in the game, it means a simple thing: the GM is telling you HE is the god of the game, and want's his bots licked. I.E.: "I am the GAWD of this game! I wear the VIKING HAT! And you will shut up and LISTEN TO EVERY GODDAMN THING I SAY!"

Seriously: you've dropped into the game something that can't be killed, can't be defeated, can't even be looked at crosseyed without turning the PC into a tree. The only option the players have is total submission. Why the hell am I supposed to be interested? Why should I hang around when you've turned the rpg into a game of solitaire?

Seriously, in nearly every case I've seen, putting an omnipotent, invulnerable god into the gameplay means at best the scenario is going to take a turn for the seriously annoying, and more likely, the game suddenly ends or becomes a pointless exercise in "GM may I?".

[BootStrapTommy]

There is a premise, well known to RPG players who value atmosphere and roleplay, over optimization and rollplay, where you never make stats for the obviously powerful. Be they gods or cthulu, one should never publish a stat block, because the nature of their entities and power is that they cannot be defeated in combat. They can only have their plans foiled.

Translation: Lazy GMs who like to railroad

This basically all boils down to "Don't stat the gods, otherwise your players will fight them."

The question is, "Why shouldn't they fight gods?"

What's wrong with the players fighting the gods? Sounds to me like a meager attempt to preserve railroading fodder.

[oudeis]

Don't mistake bad GMing for a bad idea. Using a God as the ultimate DMPC is the ultimate act of munchkining but it has no real bearing on the question. Inserting Gods as direct actors in a game is just as misguided as assigning numerical values to them. Indeed, I think the one implies the other: if Deities aren't in-game agents they don't need stats. If the time comes for/when a god to have personal interaction with the characters, and that's IF, it needs to be within very limited circumstances and with precisely-defined effects, for example:

• the campaign is in the final stretch and the players are badly off-course
• they somehow missed the vital clue or the obvious Item of Great Power left in plain sight that they will need to defeat the final boss
• the dice have been cruel and and bad luck has put them far behind where they should be
• a powerful or pivotal character is no longer in the game due to death or player absence
• it was always planned that the characters would meet their god/gods/patrons/whatever and the GM has plotted and circumscribed Divine involvement within narrow limits
• the players are just completely lost
• it would be an extremely cool but minimally-impactive cutscene

[goto124]

Sounds like you first have to figure out why the god is making an appearance to the PCs at all. Then figure out if it's bad DMing. If not, think if the players are supposed to be able to kill it.

[TheCountAlucard]

My first game session of Exalted, the god of the city we'd arrived in came up to us, and my brawler character clotheslined him.

In other words, it met none of the conditions you just tried to impose on me.

So please, oudeis, cut the dictating of how I and my table are supposed to use gods in the games we play.

[oudeis]

There is a premise, well known to RPG players who value atmosphere and roleplay, over optimization and rollplay, where you never make stats for the obviously powerful. Be they gods or cthulu, one should never publish a stat block, because the nature of their entities and power is that they cannot be defeated in combat. They can only have their plans foiled.

My first game session of Exalted, the god of the city we'd arrived in came up to us, and my brawler character clotheslined him.

In other words, it met none of the conditions you just tried to impose on me.

So please, oudeis, cut the dictating of how I and my table are supposed to use gods in the games we play.

From the official description of Exalted:

Exalted is a fantasy roleplaying game intended for 2-8 players. It is set in the mythic prehistory of the world, a time when gods still walked openly among men, the world was flat, and the restless dead roamed on moonless nights. Players take the role on the Exalted, heroic men and women granted blessings of power by the mightiest of the gods. The Exalted can slay gods with their blades and arrows, leap across vast canyons, master ancient and miraculous sorcery, endure the burning heat of the desert or the killing cold of the tundra with only their natural resilience, and outwit demons using their razor wit.

Using the Exalted core rulebook, players are able to take on the role of the Solar Exalted, mightiest among the ranks of the Chosen. The Solars were once rulers of the world, but were betrayed and banished for many centuries. Now their power has come back into the world, imbuing men and women with divine might. They are stalked by the Wyld Hunt and feared by gods and men for their incomparable power, which will only grow in the fullness of time. Will your characters attempt to rebuild the glories of ages past, or remake the world according to a new vision? Will your power save the world—or destroy it?

Exalted draws inspiration from three primary sources. Pulp fantasy such as the works of Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, Michael Moorcock, and Tanith Lee provide the underpinnings of the game’s style, while classical epics such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are sources of inspiration for the game’s scope and sophistication. Finally, Exalted draws stylistic touches from modern anime and manga to lend an active, high-power, high-energy feel to the Exalted and their supernatural allies and enemies.

So you're citing a game about characters explicitly stated and created to wield divine power to kill gods as a basis for how all other games should treat Divine beings?

Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play. You and and the other Super Saiyans from the Merry Old Land of Oz can play whatever games you want however you want.

[SiuiS]

Because stats are limits.

[JusticeZero]

Didn't one of the Deadlands core books say that about one of its garystu types?

[BootStrapTommy]

Because stats are limits.

Why can't gods have limits?

[Flickerdart]

Why can't gods have limits?

Because that encourages PCs to swing above their station, and you can't let them get too uppity or they'll start having ideas.

[BootStrapTommy]

Because that encourages PCs to swing above their station, and you can't let them get too uppity or they'll start having ideas.

Ideas are how group fantasy is done. If you don't want them getting ideas, get rid of your players and replace them with rocks. The only reason for players to not be able to take down gods is so the GM can heavy hand players with them.

[Flickerdart]

Ideas are how group fantasy is done. If you don't want them getting ideas, get rid of your players and replace them with rocks. The only reason for players to not be able to take down gods is so the GM can heavy hand players with them.

Rocks cannot be expected to scrape and bow to the GM's wisdom and glory in a sufficiently satisfactory manner. After all, where's the fun in putting someone in their place when they'd never left it to begin with?

[Knaight]

Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play. You and and the other Super Saiyans from the Merry Old Land of Oz can play whatever games you want however you want.

Right, because the power level of the game and the amount of roleplaying done in it are somehow related. For instance, Mythender, a game explicitly about trying to preserve your humanity while becoming something that isn't really a human - a game where you can become a god and it's a loss condition - obviously is less geared towards role playing than a straightforward dungeon crawler where those crawling the dungeons aren't powerful.

[BootStrapTommy]

Don't mistake bad GMing for a bad idea. Using a God as the ultimate DMPC is the ultimate act of munchkining but it has no real bearing on the question. Inserting Gods as direct actors in a game is just as misguided as assigning numerical values to them.

Unless of course, that's the plot line that people want to run, because the idea of mortals overcoming gods is refreshing slap in the face to the annoying trope of the gods' onmipotence.

Here, rebut yourself:

Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play.

[Arbane]

Unless of course, that's the plot line that people want to run, because the idea of mortals overcoming gods is refreshing slap in the face to the annoying trope of the gods' onmipotence.

Too true. Sometimes you just want to punch Elminister in the face, then beat Cthulhu to death with his own tentacles.

[daremetoidareyo]

My own personal interpretation on it is related to the concept that names have power. In my studies of neural networks, I have had more than a passing interest in how human minds tend to grasp and learn concepts. I have found, anecdotally, that when I learn a new word that defines a concept I had previously grasped but not been able to define in a single word, I start to see more and more examples of that concept in things that I had previously missed. I start to make connections and evaluations, and find more and more places to use that word.

It tends to greatly increase my understanding of that concept and many things related to it, to the point of forming relations in my mind which I had been unable to make before.

This has led me to tend to think that fiction writers who want to make a profound and wise being are making a huge mistake when they have said being scoff, "You humans and your need to name things. Why can't they just be what they are?"

The truth is, in naming it, we gain the ability to not just better understand it, but to appreciate it better. To recognize it as distinct from other things, and thus tell that the pattern of colors is actually our mother's face, and not just part of a background swirl of wallpaper.

Giving things numeric representation, making them modeled in mathematics, does something similar. It allows us to evaluate something which we previously could not comprehend in relative terms to something else.


This one's going to be very, very difficult to do meaningfully. The reason is that you have to define, very specifically, what differences people will experience for being treated with or without "privilege." And the inherent nature of the argument is that people do not consciously perceive the way their biases create and grant this privilege.

Tell a white guy that you're giving him $150 to treat him without privilege, and he'll insist that he's being treated worse than that black woman that you've paid nothing to. That you're inventing abuse to heap on him to justify the $150. Tell a black guy that the $47 you've charged him to treat him with "white privilege" is earning him equal treatment, and he'll still look at any situation with the suspicion that he's not enjoying the same privilege as that white guy who got paid $150 not to get the privilege the black guy supposedly bought.

To assign a value to something, to quantify it, you must also be able to qualify it. That is, identify its specific qualities. You can run a bidding system to determine the value of a good or service iff that good or service is explicitly defined. You may not be able to tell if it's because it's "beautiful" or useful or "cool;" you can just tell that somebody was willing to pay $X for it.

But if you cannot identify the specifics of the good or service, you cannot really say your quantization of it is valid.

Let's say you paid me $150 to do without my alleged "white male privilege" for 1 day.

You've assigned a value to it. Presumably, if I agree to it, I'm agreeing that is the proper value for the privileges I apparently enjoy for my sex and skin color.

But how do you specifically define the privileges I will fail to enjoy?

Because the quantization of their value is meaningless if agreement cannot be reached as to what they are, and specifically how they manifest in every situation.

An example of quallifiable (though not necessarily believably doable, today) approaches would be to pay me $150 to appear to all the world as a black woman for the specified time period. (The obvious troubles start with just how unconvincingly I'd pull such a charade off; one would have to hypothesize that the charade is achieved by Sufficiently Advanced Technology, or by Functional Magic.)

The reason this is the point we'd have to go to is just simply that we probably couldn't agree on what privileges I do enjoy for my sex and skin color. I'm sure people can agree to a degree that advantages exist...but what they are, and where PRECISELY they'd show up and how they'd manifest?

You're tackling more than just quantization of value of these with your proposed paper. You're going to have to tackle qualification of these things.

I wish you luck, sir; it's a fascinating concept, but I am unsure how to really broach it.

Pay company to identify mailing addresses of people in a region to sample. Send out mailer inviting them to take online survey, and give them designed qualtrics survey.

Self identify your race.

Would you be willing to accept $xx.xx to have a x% reduction in the chance of being pulled over.

Would you be willing to accept $ xx.xx to have a x% reduction in the chance of your child of graduating college? Where the xx.xx is from a randomly number generation program, and the percentages being pulled from Department of Justice/Education/Census stats. Piece together the revealed preference from performance stats from a menu. Willingness To Pay for the non-privileged classes/ WTA for privileged.

[TheCountAlucard]

From the official description of Exalted:

Yet you somehow missed or glossed over literally the first words. I'll go ahead and repeat them for you.

Exalted is a fantasy roleplaying game…

So please, quit stumbling over yourself in your rush to tell everyone about how I value optimization and rollplay over atmosphere and roleplay, because obviously that's not true.

So you're citing a game about characters explicitly stated and created to wield divine power to kill gods as a basis for how all other games should treat Divine beings?

Of course not! I'm the one providing examples of why your uses of "all," "always," and "never" are just plain incorrect!

Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play.

I have yet to dictate to a single person that they must run stories in this way. That's on you, bro.

You and and the other Super Saiyans from the Merry Old Land of Oz can play whatever games you want however you want.

And we do, thanks.

[icefractal]

Among munchkins and people who write too much fanfiction, perhaps. The rest of us understand that if you mess with entities that can create whole worlds or even just whole races, your punishment will be as unimaginable as their powers.

ಠ_ಠ
Oh yes, the mature players would obviously understand that it is an insult to put any sort of limits or bounds on the DM's power-trip the gods. Truly, the essence of maturity is unquestioning supplication to your superiors. Ideas such as player agency or shared creative power are the province of disreputable hooligans. [/sarcasm]

I was going into this thread with an open attitude, prepared to take the OP's premise that unstatted gods were a desirable thing at face value. But your combination of badwrongfun-declaring and unwarranted condescension is just too much. Being thrust about by forces you can't hope to challenge is one playstyle. It's not a superior one, and it's not a superior world-view.