Battlin' the Gods

[Finarvyn]

This represents a flash-back to the old days when we ran quite a few adventures with one DM and one player. We were in middle school and (I admit) often were powergamers.

I'd never heard of a deity's "avatar" when we played in the olden days. Gods, Demi-gods, and Deities got us thinking about generating high-level characters and having "Hercules"-style interactions with the Gods. We had one uber-powered campaign where we would allow the characters to talk directly with the Gods, try to manipulate them, and potentially even fight them. (You know, like in the Hercules & Xena TV shows where the heroes go toe-to-toe with the gods ... only we did it before the TV show.)

I even statted out a "Reveree" character who was the personification of the DM (me) and one of my players would occasionally ask to talk to the "referee" and this character would appear. At one point I had an entire mythos worked out where the Referee had an arch-nemesis, a family, and so on.

The power spectrum was something like this:
6 Referee
5 Gods and Devils
4 Powerful Characters and Demons
3 Middle Characters and Tough Monsters
2 Starting Characters and Easier Monsters
1 1st level Common Folk

Nowadays I look back in horror at this campaign, but at the time we had a lot of fun.

Anyone else ramp-up OD&D to the point where the gods were more like NPCs?

[Zulgyan]

I have submitted a god to Fight On! that is totally in the style of "gods as NPC". I think that a party of five or six around the 10th level can have a fair fight with him. Parties of level 7-8 could even survive him if lucky. He still has some special powers that clearly makes him a divine being. This god also fights in a very indirect manner, so he's hard to get and has good means of escape.

I haven't ramped characters, but made gods smaller (though with god-flavored powers still).

You'll see the result with FO! nº2!

[coffee]

I've never done it in OD&D, and we were good and afraid of gods back in AD&D.

But we did have a conversation in 3e about gods and fighting them (because the characters get so powerful...)

We eventually arrived at the idea that gods could be subdued, like dragons, because you can't just go around killing off the gods. Then we escalated to the idea of selling them, like you can sell a subdued dragon.

We were getting pretty silly that night, I can tell you.

Best line came when somebody asked "Hey, have you got change for a demi-god?" (Well, we thought it was funny, anyway.)

[driver]

I enjoy using non-omnipotent, terrestrial "godlings." One of my favorite Judges Guild products is Unknown Gods ... a high-level PC party could feasibly battle many if not most of the entries.

I usually have more traditional "deities" in my campaigns as well, but even they're simply ultra-powerful extraplanar or outer-space entities, a la WFRP or Tekumel.