Gods

Do you prefer gods that are very serious or ones that are wacky, funny or otherwise unusual?

Depends on the setting.

>faggot non-answer

Ah, the cancer of Veeky Forums, still spamming itself.

I like my gods like the Greek liked 'em.
Vaguely omnipotent, immature, and very bored.

I feel like anything short of The One True He Above should be flawed, fallible and constantly stepping on eachother's toes for kicks.

Depends on the setting- if its a more serious or darker setting, I quite like my gods either aloof / almighty but inhuman, or dead / absent / nobody knows where they came from, maybe they were never any gods, just people who, in tme, got worshipped as history blurred the truth of their lives.

In more light-hearted settings, I like it when the gods are more human and relateable, the sort of gods you could meet walking down the street and not know about it, or even gods where everyone knows they're a god, the sorts of god you can talk with, be friends with, or the sort of god you could shoot with colouful bullets to stop them if they start doing something stupid.
Junko did nothing wrong. Jouga a shit.

Actually it raises a fairly good point.
Gods would generally be so outside of the regular perspective that they should come across as somewhat inconceivable in motive and means.
If the setting is a particularly serious and dark one, then wacky crazy hammy as fuck deities would be good.
On the other hand, the gods being the only serious thing in a pink-hat campaign works too.

I can't really work with gods that are too human or "weak". To me, gods are supposed to be associated with grand cosmic or metaphysical concepts, like Love, Organic Life, Physics, etc.
Or a single god that covers all of them at once. Too many "small gods" dilutes the concept of godhood. Also, statting up gods is pretty much a setup for failure. Once they have stats, they become just another monster for the players to slay. Most of the time I just use the GM as the setting's one true god and let them decide who gets divine intervention and who doesn't.

If you can extrapolate that bullshit from those four words, than you can extrapolate that OP asked "in your preferred setting."

I think a pantheon should be mixed. You should have some serious God. But then God of tricks should be a mischievous giggling God.

A God is an embodiment of an idea. Just personify an idea, and you have a God.

I like the idea in the book Small Gods.

Gods are more large and powerful if more people say their name.

Not a lot of people are worshipping Logr, God of stone tools. So he's a relatively small God and can't do too many things. But everyone knew Zeus. So he was huge. He was powerful, and he ruled the sky.

Why, only the most serious of gods, of course.

Usually I just leave them out entirely. Still have religions of course, and maybe a few Powerful Entities Mistaken For Gods here and there. But usually just don't bother with them (or at least, don't speak to whether they're real or not).

If I'm going to do a pantheon though, I'd lean toward generally serious with one or two tricksters / weirdos mixed in for flavor.

Like a God of wyrd magic.

The reason why witch magic works like Ork tech.
That'd be fun to role-play.

That's more of a modern view of what a god has to be, but it's not universal. The classical roman/greek gods, for instance, were basically just humans with powers. They can do whatever they want, but their actual motivations are very human (and quite base, in a lot of cases). Which you choose should fit the tone of your setting, so give it some thought.

The "worship = power" concept is super common in settings where gods are protagonists (like Small Gods), since it gives them something to do and provides a source of threat. The old strategy game Black & White was an example of the type.

The really interesting innovation on the idea in Small Gods was that the main character's church is huge and thriving, but he's starved for power anyway because he only has one actual true believer. The countless thousands of "worshipers" are actually worshiping the church and false idols, not the god himself. Lots of unsubtle social commentary abounds.

I like gods that are obligated to their worshipers, even if it's for something as menial as not wanting to have songs sung about how the great deity got pestered by a local sect one day and smote them all in a flash of fury for completely missing the point.

>Like a God of wyrd magic.
Do note that traditional "wyrd" =/= modern "weird". It's current meaning as "strange" a bit of a corruption. Wyrd is your fate or destiny - it turned into "weird" by way of being used to describe things whose purpose is not immediately obvious or which seem portentious in some way.

To my mind a Wyrd God would be like the Destiny character from Sandman. "With each step you take through Destiny's garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness."

Generally somewhat wacky, as long as they're still a force to be reckoned with. Personally, I'm working with kind of a blend of the usual tropes - they depend on worship, are non-interventionist for the most part unless you count their churches, and they have personalities. They don't interact very much with their followers directly, but if you were able to look into the divine realm and see them talk to each other, it'd pretty much be like watching a sitcom. Managing mortalkind to them is basically like playing a strange blend of Civilization and Dungeon Keeper.

Genuinely, thanks for spoiling that book. I've tried both the paperback and the audiobook, but I somehow never made it through it.

I like gods from Thieves' World, they are very competing, meddling and interesting.

Serious and only serious.

Le whacky lol so random xd gods are fucking retarded and all gods that act that way would most likely have been killed by the time the adventure starts.

>Le whacky lol so random xd gods are fucking retarded and all gods that act that way would most likely have been killed by the time the adventure starts.

Do you even mythology?

Wacky. This way you can justify their incompetence to fight suffering and evil and their capricious nature.

It depends on the setting. Fantasy Not!Japan is going to practice a form of animism, for instance. However, I often take a kind of Mythos Dreamlands take. There are two sorts of gods. The ones most humans worship are like the gods of late antiquity, or even smaller: Immortal and without stats, often responsible for overseeing some elements of the world such as it is, but not eternal nor incarnations of universal truth. Thor may be a great warrior who is associated with thunder, but he is not fundamentally thunder. If he managed to be destroyed there would still be thunder. Everybody needs a hobby? Most of these gods are pretty aloof of mortals most of the time, though they still care (maybe not in a good way: you matter to them, but whether they like you or not is another story), but some might have habits of coming down and having fun on the mortal plane, especially ones with only minor followings and very odd jobs.

Then there are the other gods. The outer gods. The gods that exist beyond and behind the mild gods of earth. Gods few people outside cultists and academics know about because of their fundamental natures: They *don't* give a shit about you, and you can never really understand them. If it looks like this is false, like they're answering prayers or acting with comprehensible motives it's more likely to be either coincidence or (super)natural law. The druids may pray to Shub-Niggurath and have cool magical powers, but even if their power is derived from their object of worship, their object of worship isn't making a conscious response to them -- they just know and have mythologized the arts to take advantage of her existence. These gods are pretty much eternal and might actually be key to the cosmos and beyond. Can there be a time-space continuum without Yog-Sothoth, or are they one in the same? Well, you can't really find out experimentally so mortals will never know.

user, those gods aren't real. If they actually where alive they'd killed by the mortals once mankind learned how to forge weapons.

My personal favorite is one or two mega-deities that are distant, and then a bunch of anthropomorphic gods under them.

So that leaves wacky divine hijinks, and then something to keep them in check.

My current campaign is centered around the a megadiety is coming back and the gods need someone to clean up the universe before Dad gets angry at them.

That would be a no, then.

The greek gods are incapable of dying, and seeing the true form of one is a good way to have your brain melted. They use this incredible status to be drunken chucklefucks.

Then what might explain why how witches make things happen just by believing they should? Like a jar of frogs will explode into fire if the witch thinks it should. But to you it's just a jar of frogs.

I just can't think of something besides weird.

Eh. Tons of stuff has the Greek gods being fucked up by demimortals.

Iron Druid chronicles (Basically the Dresden files on crack) has Bacchus locked in a stasis chamber and Artemis disassembled and locked in clay.
Not real mythology but I guess it says something if the author feels comfortable doing that stuff.

Preacher is a good indicator of how little any author gives any fucks about the "invincibility" of any deities.

I prefer apathetic/lazy gods who have somewhat forgotten about the mortals/planet because they've gotten bored of it after living so long or found more interesting things to play with. It takes a trsmendous effort to get them to do anything.

What, like you want to have a category of magic that defies explanation and doesn't fit in other categories? And then have a god for that type of magic? I'm not disagreeing with the approach, just pointing out that "Weird" and "Wyrd" are homophones, but they don't mean the same thing.

Couple ways you could approach it. If you take the traditional "witches make deals with demons" approach, then any kind of dark/evil god could work as their patron. If you want them to be more nuanced, you might have a trickster god like Loki fill this role. If you're going for more of a "random and unpredictable" feel, you could do a God of Madness (like Sheogorath from Elder Scrolls).