Setting

>misinterpreting the stat block as the deity itself, instead of just an avatar manifestation of that deity

This is yours and everyone else's problem.

For any religious society, it is a known fact that Gods exist.

>former mortals
>implying a lot of typical PCs wouldn't try to reach apotheosis

Its a common trope. Ffs Greek mythology is full of people spiting the gods.

Create more transcendent gods and make it clear that there is no apotheosis.

>And then become a deity yourself.
Reminder that D&D before AD&D had becoming immortal as a natural progression from normal levels.
Also I'm like 80% percent sure gods having statblocks became a thing in Time of Troubles during the AD&D days. That one big Forgotten Realms story event where gods were forced to descend and became very much killable. Can't really blame 3.5 for that.

just because they exist, doesnt mean all people recognize their divinity
some might just see them as powerful people

An assumption you mean. "I know something is true for sure because I believe the bad evidence that has been given to me to prove it" is fundamentally different from "I know something is true because I can see it with my own eyes and interact with it." In most settings where gods play a significant role they are actual people that do stuff in real time and can be conversed with and shit.

There's plenty of justifiable reasons not to worship a god. The person may not believe they are a god, but just a powerful being. They may believe that the only difference between the 'god' and themselves may just be the amount of magic they can channel. They may just not see the god as having much impact on their day to day life and it just never crosses their mind.

You can acknowledge the being's existence without wanting or needing to worship it. Denying their existence is probably seen as an outcast, though.

>Not actively worshiping a god = wasting your entire life
?????

Well, speaking as a protestant myself there are a few problems with that.
Take any random set of DnD deities for instance. Sure they're very powerful but none of them are omnipotent/omnipresent/omniscient. This represents a few theological problems. If one god is saying don't do evil stuff and another god is saying do do evil stuff, what makes one wrong and the other right? Why should I listen to any one god over any other god?
The other problem is the gods are typically represented with aligning themselves with the external forces of good or evil. With the god of any given monotheistic religion that isn't how it works, when I say God is good, I don't mean good as in an adjective but as a noun, God is literally the very force of Good and virtue but living and moving. So when God gives moral commands those aren't a guy who tries to be good giving some advice, that is goodness itself telling you what's good and bad. If the gods are just strong dudes giving advice, well who really cares?
Of course that all really depends on the setting I suppose.

In my setting becoming a god means letting go of most of your personality and becoming more of a force of nature.

Those who become demi gods feel a constant draw to give up their "humanity" some actively try to lose their status and kill their own worshipers to avoid becoming a god

Worship of any deity has to be done correctly or you risk end up being cursed

Clerics are very rare and only come about when a deity requires a mortal pawn to bring balance to the domain they are responsible for sometimes losing their powers when the divine mission they are sent on has been completed

They're more trouble than they're worth. They expect you to put up with their LITERALLY earth-shaking squabbles, and what do you get in return?

NOTHING.

No it isn't; or at least it isn't supposed to be. It's not that they literally know, as much as they have faith.

>being a slave
No deity is worth of worship. Purge world of these otherwordly menaces and let humanity be humanity in peace.

Congrats on discovering the twist to Pillars of Eternity that delivers the killing blow to an already mediocre-and-declining plot.

>fuck what deities have become. An end-game boss. That is what power creep has done to D&D.
>Shit like this is why i am starting to believe we need a hostile takeover of the hobby by OSR folks.

Nigga we've been stabbing gods in the face since 1980.

(Probably earlier, but the earliest mention I can remember of an adventure module including a perfectly killable deity is D3 Vault of the Drow)

I don't understand this

Most human cultures have formerly human Gods or Gods derived from older Gods

>That massive booty
hnnggg

Nigga, we've been stabbing gods in the face since ancient times.

Just so we're all on the same page we do all realise that the Godhead exists because it is by definition the sum of everything that exists, right? And that we have empirical evidence that the big bang happened so the Uncaused First Cause is also an actual thing? And that the little-g gods religions are based on are metaphysical ideals used to personify the morality systems that allow us to coexist without fighting all the time and as metaphysical things they are just as real as laws and languages, right?

No one in this thread us actually autistic enough to

No, wait, I see where I was wrong. Never mind.

The sheer amount of logical fallacies and assumptions in one post nearly made me vomit

Because it implies two things.

First, that their worship is based on their demonstrable power rather than actually some kind of inherent creator/created relationship. It's the difference between respecting your dad and respecting a playground bully.

Second, because it means they're not all-powerful and could be replaced by any sufficiently powerful rival, in some cases even a powerful human.

Claiming all sorts of ridiculous bullshit and then act all smug assuming people will disagree with you is more autistic than anything else in this thread.

Dumb frogposter.

what the fuck does any of this even mean

More people writing settings need to read up on how gods were historically revered, worshiped, and abandoned, and how much of our perception of them is shaped by modern portrayals. For example; much of our pop culture knowledge of the Greco-Roman Pantheon comes from what are essentially comedic stories involving them, their personalities exaggerated from what the literal "Secret Cults" of each deity perceived them as. Hera being a murderous shrew, Zeus being a dumb lech, etc, are pop-culture interpretations even of the original time period they came from.

Take a look at how the Assyrian Empire would "take gods hostage" by publicly declaring the native gods of lands they conquered to be punk-ass bitches who, while real, were way weaker and less cool than THEIR gods, and to rub it in would take down statues and icons of said conquered gods to ship back to their capitol.

Omnipotence/Omnipresence/Being the only divinity is a shitty, restricting set of manacles as a requirement for being worshipped. If the Greeks could worship some saucy tart who stepped out of the foaming jizz of a castrated titan, or the Chinese can keep adding Really Good Generals into their actual pantheon, then we can stop writing these lame stories of "but the Gods weren't always the only Gods!!!"

Really, a bigger issue is how that looks from the perspective of a character inside the world. These gods aren't real gods? The definition of god in the setting has a picture of them in the dictionary. There's no big capital G christian god to compare them to. On top of that, prayer and faith to them gives you real, tangible benefits in the form of good harvests or healing, often with a flashy lightshow so you know that it worked.

The only time you could even make an argument that the gods aren't anything special is when you're playing a shitty setting that allows your average wizard to simply study their way up to the point they can cast a fireball strong enough to kill a god. At that point, a particularly jaded and philosophical character might question the difference, but at the same time that develops setting hiccups where you have to ask why it isn't a problem that's come up before.

But so long as Wizards aren't able to pull off an imitation of an average Cleric or god, then the reasons to doubt them are flimsy at best and any ranting that the gods are just big wizards is going to be about as odd to everyone around as saying they're actually just giant mice and the world is made of cheese.

Fedoras have been brainwashed so thoroughly that religious people are like strange aliens to them.

Seriously some people act like the Lorraine Williams unkillable god bullshit peddled in 2E has been the rule forever. Gods have been killable more often than not and outside of 3.5 it can still be suitably epic

>Now orcus is just a CR 30 monster you can grind sidequests until you get high enough level to face him.
>grind sidequests

Why is your DM running your campaign like a videogame?

"known" does not equate to "accepted".

>Just so we're all on the same page we do all realise that the Godhead exists because it is by definition the sum of everything that exists, right? And that we have empirical evidence that the big bang happened so the Uncaused First Cause is also an actual thing?
How does it have anything with a personifed god interested in humanity or like 99% of people arguing that, God and Jesus or Allah or Vishnu?
There is still a HUUUGGE leap between and any form of religion. (Even the ones seeing nature itself as something somewhat conscious, benevolent and "spirtually holistic")
>And that the little-g gods religions are based on are metaphysical ideals used to personify the morality systems that allow us to coexist without fighting all the time and as metaphysical things they are just as real as laws and languages, right?
Uh no, there are no proofs at all that morality is metaphysical, maybe partially logical but certainly not a set of hard laws mathematics or physics.

Most Gods are venerated ancestors, or descendant from the PIE pantheon. Fucking Dyēus Phater refuses to fuck off.

Surprise surprise, trying to import a description of god and morality from a monotheistic religion into a setting that is explicitly polytheistic doesn't work.

Christianity might define God as Good, but in D&D there is a separate good/evil alignment system that is independent of any single god. In D&D, good is simply not defined by what any one god says. That's just how the setting works.

> If the gods are just strong dudes giving advice, well who really cares?
Because if you consistently listen to their advice, they might give you magic powers. That's as good a reason as any in my book.

Those aren't different thing from faithful's perspective.

If God is the force that created everything that is, that means God is absolute. So if God says that something is Good, that thing IS good. It's an absolute truth given from the above, and anyone who disagrees is wrong, simple as that.

But if gods are simply powerful beings... well, then that's it. If a god says that something is Good, that's just an opinion. Sure, he almost certainly knows better than any mortal, but it's not absolute truth. He might be wrong. If gods are absolutes or aspects of reality, that means the goddess of hunters is the best huntress there is - the best huntress there can be, in fact. But if they're usurpers who gained their divine power after the fact, there might be an even better hunter somewhere. And who knows if the other things you believed to be absolute are so, either.

None of this means that gods aren't worthy of worship(or at least reverence, if you're not particularly pious), but it's still a fundamentally different paradigm.

user never talked about accepted.

I see the difference, but I don't see how it's different. In fact a lot of religions, specially those "pagan" ones based around nature would argue that deities are interacting with you all the time. Remember: your PCs don't have the lore book telling them what is and what isn't divine.

This is true, at least in christianity and islam you're supposed to have faith no matter what. But, again, in practice even those two religions are full of people who started to have "faith" due to contact with the divine. How is miracles converting people different from your average interaction with a fantasy god? Again, players and npcs don't have access to the lore book that says "this is divine magic".

>If God is the force that created everything that is, that means God is absolute. So if God says that something is Good, that thing IS good.
Lets say we have 2 absolute creator gods that both define their own brand of good that are mutually incompatible. Good is no longer good, and anyone who disagrees is no longer necessarily wrong.
Another thing to point out is that almighty absolute entities fall apart fast when subjected to basic logic. Even the mightiest of gods would in pratice have to have some kind of hard limits to guarantee self consistency and compatibility with the universe in question.

>your PCs don't have the lore book telling them what is and what isn't divine.

No, but they might have a book that was written by the god or his clergy establishing what the god is about or how he interacts with his followers. Or as in alot of cases the clerics telling stories how their god works.

>I see the difference, but I don't see how it's different. In fact a lot of religions, specially those "pagan" ones based around nature would argue that deities are interacting with you all the time.
The difference is that pagans interpreted their purported interactions as interactions. If general paganism is what OP is complaining about I'd agree with you, but he's talking about settings where gods are actual characters that you can technically meet in person and have a face-to-face conversation. And even if some people don't worship them, if this were the norm it's unreasonable to think most people would see gods' corporeality as something that disqualifies them from worship. You used your pagan gods example, now consider the example of the deified Roman emperors who had their own temples and cults, or better yet, the Egyptian pharaohs who were worshiped as literal god-emperors, or even less than a century ago the ideology of Imperial Japan that purported their emperor was a living god or demigod and the entire nation was descended from gods. These are all of course examples of regular squishy humans, and in a setting where they are functionally all-powerful beings or were known to be such before their deaths there's no reason to believe the majority of people familiar with them would consider their humanity something scandalous or an argument against their claims of godhood. There are plenty of better arguments to make for that.

>I know something is true for sure because I believe the bad evidence that has been given to me to prove it

There's this thing called the devil's something something, and it's pretty much the concept that you can easily have reasonable doubt in god due to the nature of god.

After all, I could show you a very realistic video of a vampire. I could literally show you a real life vampire. I could tell you they exist and show you proof they exist.

But vampires aren't real, so you'd believe the video was special effects, the vampire was just a costume, and the blood sucking was some weird fetish.

Now relate this concept to actual almighty beings in settings where magic exists.

Well what if the Gods don't want to be worshipped? What if they want nothing to do with the mortal realm Just like IRL ?

>It's the difference between respecting your dad and respecting a playground bully.
Most religions respect their gods because they're both your dad and the playground bully. Generally the whole worship deal is more because of the playground bully thing, and the dad part takes a backseat. You can see this in polytheistic religions where gods of wealth, war, agriculture, etc, are worshiped a lot more than creation deities. Nobody ever worshiped a god because they're a god. They did it because they want something from him.

>Second, because it means they're not all-powerful and could be replaced by any sufficiently powerful rival, in some cases even a powerful human.
This was how it was pretty much everywhere before Abrahamic religion happened and made the world a much more boring place. It was pretty common when empires fell or civilizations collapsed that their gods had died or that it was the result of new gods taking over. Hesiod says life was much better under the Titans than under the Olympians, and the whole reason the world went to shit was that Zeus has a bad temper.

An eternity of peace among the likeminded in a paradisaical plane?

Even in that situation there would still be a good vs. non-good dynamic. If one god says to do A, and the other says to do B, then you can conclude that doing C is objectively bad since neither god supports it.

Hell, there was even an Immortal Set for D&D.

Elder Gods are being that exist beyond comprehension, before the genesis of existence. Not bound by the rules of the universe, the idea of birth and death does not exist.
Gods are beings that exist within the system of the universe, as conduits of the concepts of reality. This connection is called divinity. Gods are not beyond understanding but are beyond comprehension. Godhood is to command the rules of the universe but to inherently be a part of it, albeit at the top. While Divine Immortality is the highest form of imperviousness achievable by any being within the universe, the connection to a particular being is not impervious and can be removed, shared, or stolen.
Demi gods are being that have obtained a connection to divinity without being in control of the conduit of divinity that godhood affords. The god is the Administrator while a demi god is a guest account, afforded limited influence over a system. The power of demi gods ranges from performing slightly exceptional feats of strength, to being able to rewrite reality around them at will, to spending miniscule effort to continue living indefinitely. A demi being with sufficient power that has achieved immortality is difficult for mortals to distinguish from true godhood.
Mortals are the lowest tier of life. Some are able to achieve artificial immortality, or make themselves virtually immortal by ending the aging process or regeneration, or becoming undead. Regardless of how much power a mortal is able to amass, there is a clear barrier between them and divinity. Being able to access the rules that govern the universe is different from having a connection with it, and being able to alter it. The vast majority of mortals "rising to godhood" only amount to becoming a self sufficient demi god.

The rules of the universe are a tangled power hierarchy structure that the gods preside over. Only the gods of the highest structures are able to perceive of the true existence of elder gods beyond the system of the universe. The elder gods are hypothetically able to pull any being out of the system and raise it to an elder god, but of the infinite number of realities the elder gods exist outside of very few are worth notice much less consideration.
The more influence a god has on reality the more powerful it is considered. Godhood is to exist as a part of the brain, and to exert its power is to send signals to the nerves throughout the body. Regardless of function, the more of the body it controls and regulates the greater the power of a god is considered.
To steal divinity from a god is a difficult but not impossible task. Whenever a god exerts its power towards something, a relationship between the divine and not divine is established. Logically, the inverse is true, in that the not divine should be able to influence the divine. Nerves can be numbed, and computer permissions can be revoked. Divinity is control, and control can always be lost.

Nice pasta

Doing C wouldn't be necessarily bad if it isn't in conflict with A and B. Very few gods command you to breathe and even fewer punish you for doing it for not being told to do so.

Why wouldn't it? A god may not command you to do something as simple as breathe, but they will generally command you to live a good life, which includes actually living it and not killing yourself by refusing to breathe.

For example, if one god says that prisoners should never be kept, and another says that prisoners should always be executed ASAP, then keeping a prisoner for life would be wrong according to both gods. They have different views about the correct thing to do, but they would both be agreeing that doing this isn't what they want.

Makes you wonder what they thought they were before the reveal.

Religion is literal brainwashing though. How do you not see the irony here? Or do you just want (You)s?