Theoretically a flying PC might be able plink the Tarrasque to death from the air with save cantrips, but it would take hours to chip away the HP and would in no way be a realistic outcome in-game. As several of us have said, you can only push the structure of the game so much before you’re just playing “I pull my infinity-infinity magic sword from the air and win” with this kind of hypothetical. It’s not that it’s completely out of the question, it’s just so far beyond something the game is written to accommodate that the answers aren’t actually you playing the game, they’re you telling a story around the game. Also, there are rules for breaking a wall, in point of fact, and honestly pushing to use a completely unrelated skill you have a better score in for a roll is being a munchkin, not creative imo. It’s not about being terrified to use one’s imagination, it’s understanding that “I use my imagination” is not carte blanche to make any ridiculous scenario you can think of possible, particularly in a game where someone else is running the overarching narrative.
It’s also fair to say the the Tarrasque in the book falls woefully short of most players expectation, hence why there are a slew of home brewed versions ( arguing from the widely unbalanced to the actually moderately balanced for CR 30).
Killing the 5e Tarrasque is easy. I think the stat block is actually sufficient to present a Tarrasque-tier encounter when there's a DM behind it, hyping it up, making buildings fall beneath its feet, but that's... Not really how most people interact with the Tarrasque. Most people will never face one, because it's a pretty major event, and I think DMs tend to want to create events like that from scratch, in order that it'll better fit their vision. We just read about the Tarrasque instead. Read its stats, read about strategies for killing it in a vacuum. And experienced that way, it's not very impressive. Finding exploits for this thing is easy. And I mean, nine years the Tarrasque has been out. It's solved. We've had plenty of time.
For what it's worth, I think the most satisfying answer to the question "how would you kill a Tarrasque in a real game" would depend hugely on the context. In OP's games, assuming everyone else at the table is approximately on the same page as OP, I think they'd probably prefer something like "we use Mirage Arcane spells to make the Tarrasque think it's going to a big city, but really it's going over an ocean. Then we Dispel Magic the illusory ground and it falls into the ocean. We've prepared some kind of chemical nonsense that we looked up on Google that makes the water less dense so the Tarrasque can't swim out, and just sinks and drowns." Meanwhile in my game I'm currently playing, the best answer would be something like, "Getting advanced notice because of Divination or some such, we collect every potion of enlarging we can from across the continent using a donation drive. We get the best alchemists to combine them all together. We go out to meet the Tarrasque on the battlefield and drink the super growth potions. It doesn't work properly and we end up having to fight the Tarrasque while randomly changing in size every turn between Tiny and Tarrasque-sized."
The players handbook had zero rules for ship combat. Was that impossible according to RAW?
Ghosts of Saltmarsh formalized rules for ship to ship combat, but clearly such was possible prior to the release. In fact other official 5e modules had opportunities for ship to ship combat without clear game mechanics.
5e was intentionally written to be vague on many rules to allow for DM discretion.
The players handbook had zero rules for ship combat. Was that impossible according to RAW?
Ghosts of Saltmarsh formalized rules for ship to ship combat, but clearly such was possible prior to the release. In fact other official 5e modules had opportunities for ship to ship combat without clear game mechanics.
5e was intentionally written to be vague on many rules to allow for DM discretion.
I like you.
You actually get the point of this thread.
I want creativity, not bog standard answers that only work in a vacuum. I want a compressed story with enough detail that i can imagine what you did and how you did it. Maybe you killed Death by making everything immortal, thus destroying the very concept of death itself. Perhaps you killed the Tarrasque by using a group of infinite level 1 characters. Sure that would never ACTUALLY happen, but it's still an answer.
I don't need combat logs, stat blocks, or the 7-10 book saga of you and your party from level 1 to 20+ (only the last half dozen chapters actually touching on the cool thing). But give me more then "So i did the whole "heroes journey" trope, till eventually we ran into (thing). I cast some spells / made some attacks, enough of them eventually landed that (thing) went down."
The thing is, creativity on this level isn’t gameplay, and if we’re not using any of the material from the books as a basis we’re not even talking D&D anymore; you’re just talking abstract story concepts with no frame of reference. Which I don’t object to in principle, but it’s a little out of place in a D&D forum.
As a side note, there is material for both structure damage and siege equipment in the DMG, so it’s entirely possible to build ship combat by combining the two.
A ship is a lot easier to intuitively understand than a god. Let's briefly enter a universe where this is not the case.
Is a ship sustained by the faith of its crew? Maybe! Is a ship immune to everything except what comes from other ships? Hard to say! Hmm, I wonder if a ship even truly exists in a physical form, or maybe it's just a figment of the collective unconscious? Could be! Can a ship be tricked by mortals? Who knows! How big can a ship be? It's anybody's guess! What can a ship do, exactly? No idea! If a ship has a physical form, where would you find it? Dunno!
Well, gosh. It's a lot harder to figure out how to destroy a ship now, isn't it?
Now let's hop over into the universe where everyone has a really good idea of what a god is because we've all seen them, there are old ones in museums, etc.
Is a god sustained by the faith of its people? No, the faith of the people is a sort of currency that gods use to play arcade games, nothing more! Is a god immune to everything except what comes from other gods? No, they're a little more resilient than the Tarrasque but not invincible! Hmm, I wonder if a god even truly exists in a physical form, or maybe it's just a figment of the collective unconscious? They have a physical form, and they don't have a non-physical form, except for Ghostius, the God of Ghosts! Can a god be tricked by mortals? No, they can read minds even through Mind Blank and they're very smart! How big can a god be? The largest god is 45 feet tall! What can a god do, exactly? They can cast every Cleric spell, give magic spells and powers to mortals, and hit really hard with their favored weapons! If a god has a physical form, where would you find it? Every god lives on the Plane of Gods, which has one-way windows down into the Plane of Mortals through which the gods cast their spells and watch the affairs of mortals. Many of them have castles or other fortifications to protect them from other gods. The smallest gods, which stand only 9 feet tall and represent niche domains such as RPG discourse, serve as soldiers, house staff, and so on, to the larger gods. Some gods wander, if they're strong enough to survive alone. Some form adventuring parties. Occasionally things get into the Plane of Gods that aren't gods. These things usually get eaten by gods like Bugzor, the God of Insects. Gods never come down to the Plane of Mortals, because it's gross and full of mortals. Extermino, the God of Killing People, has plans to fix that, but most of the other gods enjoy their arcade games so they don't really want him to succeed. They can go to other planes but they get bored easily so they don't stay for very long.
Now we have a clear, if rather narrow, understanding of what a god is like. It surely doesn't encapsulate every god concept you might have, and that's by design. This whole exercise requires us to be referring to the same thing and we just haven't been, at all. Now we can. Go wild.
The thing is, creativity on this level isn’t gameplay, and if we’re not using any of the material from the books as a basis we’re not even talking D&D anymore; you’re just talking abstract story concepts with no frame of reference. Which I don’t object to in principle, but it’s a little out of place in a D&D forum.
As a side note, there is material for both structure damage and siege equipment in the DMG, so it’s entirely possible to build ship combat by combining the two.
Have you considered that by thinking about things, that are not already hard coded into the game, that you might find interesting ideas to play out as both a PC and as a DM. D&D is not designed to support someone recreated The Matrix. But if you put your mind to it, you could find some combo of workarounds / homebrewing/ and "close enough" to make such an idea come to life.
The "correct" way to deal with a locked door, would be to unlock it or break it down. But if those options fail, you probably wouldn't raise to much of a fuss if someone simply broke the wall NEXT to the door. Will have to look again, but pretty sure there aren't hard rules about how to break through a wall.... So is the player "not even playing D&D anymore" because they thought outside of the box?
As someone else pointed out, for a while 5e didn't have ship to ship combat. If you wanted ship to ship combat, you should just play a different game; because gosh darn it, it's not in the rules books, and how DARE you try and do something not in the official books.
your side note is so VERY confusing, because it seems like you understand the idea of combining ideas together to make a new (non canon) answer to a problem. But absolutely refuse to do that with regards to a God.
Need a stat block? Make a stat block the feels right. I mean there is nothing stopping you from literally taking a bog standard Goblin, and morphing their stats/ abilities/ etc... to make them a proper mid to late game Boss fight. So why is it suddenly impossible just because I called this goblin a God?
Need a reason for the players to be directly interacting with a God? Again, make something up. I'm hard pressed to believe that every little thing you have in your games can be 100% tied back to source material. You've never had an NPC with access to an item or spell that they shouldn't technically have access to? Maybe altered an existing spell to work a little differently, so it better fit the overarching tone you were going for? Perhaps given someone ancient 'lost' tech (that's really just the DM stealing some BS from their favorite non D&D media) or a companion that shouldn't be possible to have as a companion. Never had a place in your world that wasn't already established via the source books or canon stories?
As an aside, you claim that I'm using material not in the books. I can make a lot of my personal ideas work with modified versions of canon spells/items/effects. Sure they aren't 100% RAW, but they fall close enough to probably not bother any DM with even a hint of flexibility. (and let's be honest, if you are allowing God fighting, you are flexible) EX: I need to bind a God? Sure let me just use these mythical chains of Imprisonment, that have been modified to apply an Antimagic Field like effect on the bound target.
Pepper in some lore about Gods and their physical power being tied to magic output, and you've closed a loophole on having the God simply break the chains with their supernatural strength, or use their magic to otherwise escape. Assuming you did so early enough in the story, it also prevent the feeling from players that you are simply "pulling things out of your ass".
A ship is a lot easier to intuitively understand than a god. Let's briefly enter a universe where this is not the case.
Is a ship sustained by the faith of its crew? Maybe! Is a ship immune to everything except what comes from other ships? Hard to say! Hmm, I wonder if a ship even truly exists in a physical form, or maybe it's just a figment of the collective unconscious? Could be! Can a ship be tricked by mortals? Who knows! How big can a ship be? It's anybody's guess! What can a ship do, exactly? No idea! If a ship has a physical form, where would you find it? Dunno!
Well, gosh. It's a lot harder to figure out how to destroy a ship now, isn't it?
Now let's hop over into the universe where everyone has a really good idea of what a god is because we've all seen them, there are old ones in museums, etc.
Is a god sustained by the faith of its people? No, the faith of the people is a sort of currency that gods use to play arcade games, nothing more! Is a god immune to everything except what comes from other gods? No, they're a little more resilient than the Tarrasque but not invincible! Hmm, I wonder if a god even truly exists in a physical form, or maybe it's just a figment of the collective unconscious? They have a physical form, and they don't have a non-physical form, except for Ghostius, the God of Ghosts! Can a god be tricked by mortals? No, they can read minds even through Mind Blank and they're very smart! How big can a god be? The largest god is 45 feet tall! What can a god do, exactly? They can cast every Cleric spell, give magic spells and powers to mortals, and hit really hard with their favored weapons! If a god has a physical form, where would you find it? Every god lives on the Plane of Gods, which has one-way windows down into the Plane of Mortals through which the gods cast their spells and watch the affairs of mortals. Many of them have castles or other fortifications to protect them from other gods. The smallest gods, which stand only 9 feet tall and represent niche domains such as RPG discourse, serve as soldiers, house staff, and so on, to the larger gods. Some gods wander, if they're strong enough to survive alone. Some form adventuring parties. Occasionally things get into the Plane of Gods that aren't gods. These things usually get eaten by gods like Bugzor, the God of Insects. Gods never come down to the Plane of Mortals, because it's gross and full of mortals. Extermino, the God of Killing People, has plans to fix that, but most of the other gods enjoy their arcade games so they don't really want him to succeed. They can go to other planes but they get bored easily so they don't stay for very long.
Now we have a clear, if rather narrow, understanding of what a god is like. It surely doesn't encapsulate every god concept you might have, and that's by design. This whole exercise requires us to be referring to the same thing and we just haven't been, at all. Now we can. Go wild.
While i disagree with some of your lore (personal take on how i would define a god), and would probably change few things, this is basically what i was looking for.
Now the real fun:
I believe i've said before that i don't want people to kill MY Gods (i can do that perfectly fine, thank you very much), i want them to kill their own. Sooooo, be honest; given the lore you've written thus far, how quickly could you come up with a way for a mortal to kill a god in your lore? My guess, is pretty quickly. Now let's say i kept 15% of that lore, and asked you to kill a God in this new world.... How long do you think it would take you to come up with an idea? (I'd guess a lot longer then it took you to come up with an answer within your own lore world) Or perhaps a better question; do you think your original answer would still work? Maybe... But probably not. So it stands to reason that you would probably come up with a different answer that works better within this other lore. Is either answer wrong? No. Is one answer better then another? No. Is it fun to theory craft a variety of ideas of what a God is, and how one would go about interacting with them? Personally, i'd say yes.
I think that the Greek/Roman gods were a family and actually killed their parents, the titans.
So if they could kill each other then in some way they too could be killed.
Nope. They explicitly couldn't kill the Titans, nor could the Titans kill them.
Cronus swallowed all of his children when they were born to prevent them from being able to overthrow him, but the last child, Zeus, was hidden by Cronus's wife Rhea and Cronus was tricked into swallowing a stone. After Zeus grew to adulthood, he overthrew Cronus, castrated him, and imprisoned him in the depths of Tartarus just as Cronus had done to his own father, Uranus. The other gods were freed from Cronus's belly, alive and fully grown.
The idea of any of the Olympians or Titans actually dying originated in the 20th Century. It was not part of the original mythology, where it was possible to wound them and imprison them but they could not die. This was an important part of what divinity meant to the Greeks. Other immortal beings could be killed by exploiting a weakness, but the gods themselves had no such weaknesses to exploit. They could be tricked, they could be bribed, they could be impressed, they could sometimes even be frightened (Ares was, prior to being mixed up with the Roman god Mars, a notorious coward who would flee from anyone that stood up to him). But they could not be killed.
A ship is a lot easier to intuitively understand than a god. Let's briefly enter a universe where this is not the case.
[very clever stuff]
Well, gosh. It's a lot harder to figure out how to destroy a ship now, isn't it?
Now let's hop over into the universe where everyone has a really good idea of what a god is because we've all seen them, there are old ones in museums, etc.
The faith of the people is a sort of currency that gods use to play arcade games, nothing more! They're a little more resilient than the Tarrasque but not invincible! They have a physical form, and they don't have a non-physical form, except for Ghostius, the God of Ghosts! They can read minds even through Mind Blank and they're very smart! The largest god is 45 feet tall! They can cast every Cleric spell, give magic spells and powers to mortals, and hit really hard with their favored weapons! Every god lives on the Plane of Gods, which has one-way windows down into the Plane of Mortals.
Now we have a clear, if rather narrow, understanding of what a god is like. It surely doesn't encapsulate every god concept you might have, and that's by design. This whole exercise requires us to be referring to the same thing and we just haven't been, at all. Now we can. Go wild.
While i disagree with some of your lore (personal take on how i would define a god), and would probably change few things, this is basically what i was looking for.
You were hoping we would define what a god is before explaining how our characters might kill one?
Is it fun to theory craft a variety of ideas of what a God is, and how one would go about interacting with them? Personally, i'd say yes.
Okay, well, so long as we now know what we're here to do, after ten pages.
While i disagree with some of your lore (personal take on how i would define a god), and would probably change few things, this is basically what i was looking for.
You were hoping we would define what a god is before explaining how our characters might kill one?
Is it fun to theory craft a variety of ideas of what a God is, and how one would go about interacting with them? Personally, i'd say yes.
Okay, well, so long as we now know what we're here to do, after ten pages.
it's not perfect. But I'm not great at finding the right way to balance "enough detail, for you to start making informed choices (maybe don't use fire against the Fire God)" and "too much detail, so you are now focused around defeating a hyper specific God (You built a character who only uses water based attacks; great against a Fire God, not so great against any other kind of God).
Would you be happier if i made a new thread and gave you a specific homebrew God to fight against? With an amount of lore equal to what a player could reasonable find / an amount of lore accessible if the players took specific side quests, and passed specific ability checks / or an amount of lore that could only be gained by A) getting into the BBEG's inner circle or B) Somehow getting another God to tell you divine secrets?
Honestly, without better definition than, “It’s a god,” it’s impossible to talk about killing it. One of the reasons I don’t have an issue with seeing stats apply, even if they have the “Divine Resurrection,” on tap. Kill Auril by somehow destroying Winter and making an eternal Summer. Obviously ridiculous as neither are legitimately possible.
How much detail do you want? And how specific do you want that detail?
Are talking surface level stuff like:
Where the God came from? (A God spawned from a maritime culture is probably going to be different then a God spawned from a landlocked culture)
Are they a mortal who gained Godhood (Hercules)? VS. A being that was always a God (Zeus)? VS. The embodiment of a concept (Thanatos/Death)?
A description of what their physical form looks like. (You'd probably fight a 4 armed God differently, then you would one with only 2 arms)
OR. Are we talking specifics like:
So this God is clearly (reference) who is known to have (specific) exploitable weakness. (mindlessly target the glowing weak point)
or "While you wouldn't know it from the in-game lore or by looking at them, turns out that this God's stat sheet says they are is actually really terrible at (stat)." (Create a character who specifically functions as a counter to this one fight, but you would never actually play long enough to get to this fight)
While i disagree with some of your lore (personal take on how i would define a god), and would probably change few things, this is basically what i was looking for.
You were hoping we would define what a god is before explaining how our characters might kill one?
Is it fun to theory craft a variety of ideas of what a God is, and how one would go about interacting with them? Personally, i'd say yes.
Okay, well, so long as we now know what we're here to do, after ten pages.
Would you be happier if i made a new thread and gave you a specific homebrew God to fight against?
I'm not really bothered either way, but I think you'd get answers a lot closer to what you're after.
How much detail do you want? And how specific do you want that detail?
About as much as exists for a regular BBEG monster like a lich.
Where the God came from? (A God spawned from a maritime culture is probably going to be different then a God spawned from a landlocked culture)
Probably not relevant here.
Are they a mortal who gained Godhood (Hercules)? VS. A being that was always a God (Zeus)? VS. The embodiment of a concept (Thanatos/Death)?
Could be useful. (Is Thanatos an embodiment of an idea, or is he a guy with a job?)
A description of what their physical form looks like. (You'd probably fight a 4 armed God differently, then you would one with only 2 arms)
In D&D you wouldn't.
So this God is clearly (reference) who is known to have (specific) exploitable weakness. (mindlessly target the glowing weak point)
You might not have considered this, but human beings have a couple of really exploitable weak points. If you destroy, sever, or severely bludgeon the head, that's death. Pierce the heart, death. There's more, but there doesn't need to be for this point: We've been telling stories and playing games about killing people for as long as we've existed on this rock, and those weak points have been there the whole time.
It's only mindless if you don't put in any effort to make it a challenge. In D&D, for example, the rules have been designed in such a way where you can't just declare "I'm gonna cut off his head" and have it work.
or "While you wouldn't know it from the in-game lore or by looking at them, turns out that this God's stat sheet says they are is actually really terrible at (stat)." (Create a character who specifically functions as a counter to this one fight, but you would never actually play long enough to get to this fight)
Here's what I'd do. I'd adventure to level 20, start a monastery where I can train students. My party would take positions of authority in other aspects of society so that we could collectively nepotism our chosen champion all the way from birth until they're perfectly sculpted to kill god, even though they're useless at everything else. All their other needs are taken care of. We kill their regular enemies for them.
I'm currently running a "godslayer" campaign. Actually I am 1.5 campaigns into the story arc with Campaign three likely to end with the ultimate showdown.
In campaign one I turned a former PC with a beef against a god into an NPC. Campaign 1 was an official 5e module followed by a half dozen homebrew levels. My NPC played a very tiny role in the module, and much more important part of the follow up story. By the end of the campaign my players had grown to dislike some of the same enemies as my former PC.
Campaign 2 involved my NPC right from the start in a significant manner. The players wanted to take care of some unfinished business. They have already met many of their former PCs, which has been fun for them. if all goes according to plan they will figure out a serious puzzle regarding how to kill the BBEG. Also by level 20 they will be super powerful with magic items to further boost their power.
Campaign three will focus on accumulating the things needed to gain access to the BBEG and the magic items this party will need. As the players progress, I will run some nostalgia adventures with their former characters manipulating other entities to take actions which will distract the BBEG and put him where he needs to be at the key moment. If all of this works, the heroes from all three campaigns will portal into the gods home plane and make their attack. There is a significant chance of a TPK wiping out three campaigns of level 20 heroes, along with vast numbers of allies.
But things might not go well, which would require a fourth campaign to even launch the attack.
Campaign 1 took 3 years of real gameplay. I tried to streamline campaign 2 for a one year story arc, but the PCs have not followed a straight path through the story, and I underestimated how long it would take. It will take about 2 years to complete. I'm targeting campaign three to take 1 year, so that will likely also be a 2 year campaign. That doesn't even account for the various nostalgia adventures. so if this group of players stay together and want to stick with this story arc, we are talking 8 years of weekly gaming to have one shot at killing a god.
Theoretically a flying PC might be able plink the Tarrasque to death from the air with save cantrips, but it would take hours to chip away the HP and would in no way be a realistic outcome in-game. As several of us have said, you can only push the structure of the game so much before you’re just playing “I pull my infinity-infinity magic sword from the air and win” with this kind of hypothetical. It’s not that it’s completely out of the question, it’s just so far beyond something the game is written to accommodate that the answers aren’t actually you playing the game, they’re you telling a story around the game. Also, there are rules for breaking a wall, in point of fact, and honestly pushing to use a completely unrelated skill you have a better score in for a roll is being a munchkin, not creative imo. It’s not about being terrified to use one’s imagination, it’s understanding that “I use my imagination” is not carte blanche to make any ridiculous scenario you can think of possible, particularly in a game where someone else is running the overarching narrative.
It’s also fair to say the the Tarrasque in the book falls woefully short of most players expectation, hence why there are a slew of home brewed versions ( arguing from the widely unbalanced to the actually moderately balanced for CR 30).
Killing the 5e Tarrasque is easy. I think the stat block is actually sufficient to present a Tarrasque-tier encounter when there's a DM behind it, hyping it up, making buildings fall beneath its feet, but that's... Not really how most people interact with the Tarrasque. Most people will never face one, because it's a pretty major event, and I think DMs tend to want to create events like that from scratch, in order that it'll better fit their vision. We just read about the Tarrasque instead. Read its stats, read about strategies for killing it in a vacuum. And experienced that way, it's not very impressive. Finding exploits for this thing is easy. And I mean, nine years the Tarrasque has been out. It's solved. We've had plenty of time.
For what it's worth, I think the most satisfying answer to the question "how would you kill a Tarrasque in a real game" would depend hugely on the context. In OP's games, assuming everyone else at the table is approximately on the same page as OP, I think they'd probably prefer something like "we use Mirage Arcane spells to make the Tarrasque think it's going to a big city, but really it's going over an ocean. Then we Dispel Magic the illusory ground and it falls into the ocean. We've prepared some kind of chemical nonsense that we looked up on Google that makes the water less dense so the Tarrasque can't swim out, and just sinks and drowns." Meanwhile in my game I'm currently playing, the best answer would be something like, "Getting advanced notice because of Divination or some such, we collect every potion of enlarging we can from across the continent using a donation drive. We get the best alchemists to combine them all together. We go out to meet the Tarrasque on the battlefield and drink the super growth potions. It doesn't work properly and we end up having to fight the Tarrasque while randomly changing in size every turn between Tiny and Tarrasque-sized."
The players handbook had zero rules for ship combat. Was that impossible according to RAW?
Ghosts of Saltmarsh formalized rules for ship to ship combat, but clearly such was possible prior to the release. In fact other official 5e modules had opportunities for ship to ship combat without clear game mechanics.
5e was intentionally written to be vague on many rules to allow for DM discretion.
I like you.
You actually get the point of this thread.
I want creativity, not bog standard answers that only work in a vacuum. I want a compressed story with enough detail that i can imagine what you did and how you did it. Maybe you killed Death by making everything immortal, thus destroying the very concept of death itself. Perhaps you killed the Tarrasque by using a group of infinite level 1 characters. Sure that would never ACTUALLY happen, but it's still an answer.
I don't need combat logs, stat blocks, or the 7-10 book saga of you and your party from level 1 to 20+ (only the last half dozen chapters actually touching on the cool thing). But give me more then "So i did the whole "heroes journey" trope, till eventually we ran into (thing). I cast some spells / made some attacks, enough of them eventually landed that (thing) went down."
The thing is, creativity on this level isn’t gameplay, and if we’re not using any of the material from the books as a basis we’re not even talking D&D anymore; you’re just talking abstract story concepts with no frame of reference. Which I don’t object to in principle, but it’s a little out of place in a D&D forum.
As a side note, there is material for both structure damage and siege equipment in the DMG, so it’s entirely possible to build ship combat by combining the two.
A ship is a lot easier to intuitively understand than a god. Let's briefly enter a universe where this is not the case.
Is a ship sustained by the faith of its crew? Maybe! Is a ship immune to everything except what comes from other ships? Hard to say! Hmm, I wonder if a ship even truly exists in a physical form, or maybe it's just a figment of the collective unconscious? Could be! Can a ship be tricked by mortals? Who knows! How big can a ship be? It's anybody's guess! What can a ship do, exactly? No idea! If a ship has a physical form, where would you find it? Dunno!
Well, gosh. It's a lot harder to figure out how to destroy a ship now, isn't it?
Now let's hop over into the universe where everyone has a really good idea of what a god is because we've all seen them, there are old ones in museums, etc.
Is a god sustained by the faith of its people? No, the faith of the people is a sort of currency that gods use to play arcade games, nothing more! Is a god immune to everything except what comes from other gods? No, they're a little more resilient than the Tarrasque but not invincible! Hmm, I wonder if a god even truly exists in a physical form, or maybe it's just a figment of the collective unconscious? They have a physical form, and they don't have a non-physical form, except for Ghostius, the God of Ghosts! Can a god be tricked by mortals? No, they can read minds even through Mind Blank and they're very smart! How big can a god be? The largest god is 45 feet tall! What can a god do, exactly? They can cast every Cleric spell, give magic spells and powers to mortals, and hit really hard with their favored weapons! If a god has a physical form, where would you find it? Every god lives on the Plane of Gods, which has one-way windows down into the Plane of Mortals through which the gods cast their spells and watch the affairs of mortals. Many of them have castles or other fortifications to protect them from other gods. The smallest gods, which stand only 9 feet tall and represent niche domains such as RPG discourse, serve as soldiers, house staff, and so on, to the larger gods. Some gods wander, if they're strong enough to survive alone. Some form adventuring parties. Occasionally things get into the Plane of Gods that aren't gods. These things usually get eaten by gods like Bugzor, the God of Insects. Gods never come down to the Plane of Mortals, because it's gross and full of mortals. Extermino, the God of Killing People, has plans to fix that, but most of the other gods enjoy their arcade games so they don't really want him to succeed. They can go to other planes but they get bored easily so they don't stay for very long.
Now we have a clear, if rather narrow, understanding of what a god is like. It surely doesn't encapsulate every god concept you might have, and that's by design. This whole exercise requires us to be referring to the same thing and we just haven't been, at all. Now we can. Go wild.
Have you considered that by thinking about things, that are not already hard coded into the game, that you might find interesting ideas to play out as both a PC and as a DM. D&D is not designed to support someone recreated The Matrix. But if you put your mind to it, you could find some combo of workarounds / homebrewing/ and "close enough" to make such an idea come to life.
The "correct" way to deal with a locked door, would be to unlock it or break it down. But if those options fail, you probably wouldn't raise to much of a fuss if someone simply broke the wall NEXT to the door. Will have to look again, but pretty sure there aren't hard rules about how to break through a wall.... So is the player "not even playing D&D anymore" because they thought outside of the box?
As someone else pointed out, for a while 5e didn't have ship to ship combat. If you wanted ship to ship combat, you should just play a different game; because gosh darn it, it's not in the rules books, and how DARE you try and do something not in the official books.
your side note is so VERY confusing, because it seems like you understand the idea of combining ideas together to make a new (non canon) answer to a problem. But absolutely refuse to do that with regards to a God.
Need a stat block? Make a stat block the feels right. I mean there is nothing stopping you from literally taking a bog standard Goblin, and morphing their stats/ abilities/ etc... to make them a proper mid to late game Boss fight. So why is it suddenly impossible just because I called this goblin a God?
Need a reason for the players to be directly interacting with a God? Again, make something up. I'm hard pressed to believe that every little thing you have in your games can be 100% tied back to source material. You've never had an NPC with access to an item or spell that they shouldn't technically have access to? Maybe altered an existing spell to work a little differently, so it better fit the overarching tone you were going for? Perhaps given someone ancient 'lost' tech (that's really just the DM stealing some BS from their favorite non D&D media) or a companion that shouldn't be possible to have as a companion. Never had a place in your world that wasn't already established via the source books or canon stories?
As an aside, you claim that I'm using material not in the books. I can make a lot of my personal ideas work with modified versions of canon spells/items/effects. Sure they aren't 100% RAW, but they fall close enough to probably not bother any DM with even a hint of flexibility. (and let's be honest, if you are allowing God fighting, you are flexible) EX: I need to bind a God? Sure let me just use these mythical chains of Imprisonment, that have been modified to apply an Antimagic Field like effect on the bound target.
Pepper in some lore about Gods and their physical power being tied to magic output, and you've closed a loophole on having the God simply break the chains with their supernatural strength, or use their magic to otherwise escape. Assuming you did so early enough in the story, it also prevent the feeling from players that you are simply "pulling things out of your ass".
While i disagree with some of your lore (personal take on how i would define a god), and would probably change few things, this is basically what i was looking for.
Now the real fun:
I believe i've said before that i don't want people to kill MY Gods (i can do that perfectly fine, thank you very much), i want them to kill their own. Sooooo, be honest; given the lore you've written thus far, how quickly could you come up with a way for a mortal to kill a god in your lore? My guess, is pretty quickly. Now let's say i kept 15% of that lore, and asked you to kill a God in this new world.... How long do you think it would take you to come up with an idea? (I'd guess a lot longer then it took you to come up with an answer within your own lore world) Or perhaps a better question; do you think your original answer would still work? Maybe... But probably not. So it stands to reason that you would probably come up with a different answer that works better within this other lore. Is either answer wrong? No. Is one answer better then another? No. Is it fun to theory craft a variety of ideas of what a God is, and how one would go about interacting with them? Personally, i'd say yes.
Nope. They explicitly couldn't kill the Titans, nor could the Titans kill them.
Cronus swallowed all of his children when they were born to prevent them from being able to overthrow him, but the last child, Zeus, was hidden by Cronus's wife Rhea and Cronus was tricked into swallowing a stone. After Zeus grew to adulthood, he overthrew Cronus, castrated him, and imprisoned him in the depths of Tartarus just as Cronus had done to his own father, Uranus. The other gods were freed from Cronus's belly, alive and fully grown.
The idea of any of the Olympians or Titans actually dying originated in the 20th Century. It was not part of the original mythology, where it was possible to wound them and imprison them but they could not die. This was an important part of what divinity meant to the Greeks. Other immortal beings could be killed by exploiting a weakness, but the gods themselves had no such weaknesses to exploit. They could be tricked, they could be bribed, they could be impressed, they could sometimes even be frightened (Ares was, prior to being mixed up with the Roman god Mars, a notorious coward who would flee from anyone that stood up to him). But they could not be killed.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
You were hoping we would define what a god is before explaining how our characters might kill one?
Okay, well, so long as we now know what we're here to do, after ten pages.
it's not perfect. But I'm not great at finding the right way to balance "enough detail, for you to start making informed choices (maybe don't use fire against the Fire God)" and "too much detail, so you are now focused around defeating a hyper specific God (You built a character who only uses water based attacks; great against a Fire God, not so great against any other kind of God).
Would you be happier if i made a new thread and gave you a specific homebrew God to fight against? With an amount of lore equal to what a player could reasonable find / an amount of lore accessible if the players took specific side quests, and passed specific ability checks / or an amount of lore that could only be gained by A) getting into the BBEG's inner circle or B) Somehow getting another God to tell you divine secrets?
Honestly, without better definition than, “It’s a god,” it’s impossible to talk about killing it. One of the reasons I don’t have an issue with seeing stats apply, even if they have the “Divine Resurrection,” on tap. Kill Auril by somehow destroying Winter and making an eternal Summer. Obviously ridiculous as neither are legitimately possible.
How much detail do you want? And how specific do you want that detail?
Are talking surface level stuff like:
Where the God came from? (A God spawned from a maritime culture is probably going to be different then a God spawned from a landlocked culture)
Are they a mortal who gained Godhood (Hercules)? VS. A being that was always a God (Zeus)? VS. The embodiment of a concept (Thanatos/Death)?
A description of what their physical form looks like. (You'd probably fight a 4 armed God differently, then you would one with only 2 arms)
OR. Are we talking specifics like:
So this God is clearly (reference) who is known to have (specific) exploitable weakness. (mindlessly target the glowing weak point)
or "While you wouldn't know it from the in-game lore or by looking at them, turns out that this God's stat sheet says they are is actually really terrible at (stat)." (Create a character who specifically functions as a counter to this one fight, but you would never actually play long enough to get to this fight)
I'm not really bothered either way, but I think you'd get answers a lot closer to what you're after.
About as much as exists for a regular BBEG monster like a lich.
Probably not relevant here.
Could be useful. (Is Thanatos an embodiment of an idea, or is he a guy with a job?)
In D&D you wouldn't.
You might not have considered this, but human beings have a couple of really exploitable weak points. If you destroy, sever, or severely bludgeon the head, that's death. Pierce the heart, death. There's more, but there doesn't need to be for this point: We've been telling stories and playing games about killing people for as long as we've existed on this rock, and those weak points have been there the whole time.
It's only mindless if you don't put in any effort to make it a challenge. In D&D, for example, the rules have been designed in such a way where you can't just declare "I'm gonna cut off his head" and have it work.
Here's what I'd do. I'd adventure to level 20, start a monastery where I can train students. My party would take positions of authority in other aspects of society so that we could collectively nepotism our chosen champion all the way from birth until they're perfectly sculpted to kill god, even though they're useless at everything else. All their other needs are taken care of. We kill their regular enemies for them.
Thanks, I'm glad you have enjoyed my posts.
I'm currently running a "godslayer" campaign. Actually I am 1.5 campaigns into the story arc with Campaign three likely to end with the ultimate showdown.
In campaign one I turned a former PC with a beef against a god into an NPC. Campaign 1 was an official 5e module followed by a half dozen homebrew levels. My NPC played a very tiny role in the module, and much more important part of the follow up story. By the end of the campaign my players had grown to dislike some of the same enemies as my former PC.
Campaign 2 involved my NPC right from the start in a significant manner. The players wanted to take care of some unfinished business. They have already met many of their former PCs, which has been fun for them. if all goes according to plan they will figure out a serious puzzle regarding how to kill the BBEG. Also by level 20 they will be super powerful with magic items to further boost their power.
Campaign three will focus on accumulating the things needed to gain access to the BBEG and the magic items this party will need. As the players progress, I will run some nostalgia adventures with their former characters manipulating other entities to take actions which will distract the BBEG and put him where he needs to be at the key moment. If all of this works, the heroes from all three campaigns will portal into the gods home plane and make their attack. There is a significant chance of a TPK wiping out three campaigns of level 20 heroes, along with vast numbers of allies.
But things might not go well, which would require a fourth campaign to even launch the attack.
Campaign 1 took 3 years of real gameplay. I tried to streamline campaign 2 for a one year story arc, but the PCs have not followed a straight path through the story, and I underestimated how long it would take. It will take about 2 years to complete. I'm targeting campaign three to take 1 year, so that will likely also be a 2 year campaign. That doesn't even account for the various nostalgia adventures. so if this group of players stay together and want to stick with this story arc, we are talking 8 years of weekly gaming to have one shot at killing a god.
From what I know of the Forgotten Realms lore, if a god's name is forgotten the god dies and their body appears in the Astral Plane.
with my Homebrew
-Yours Truly, The King Of Demons
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Commander of Demise, Fear me ye Mortals! Life's Bane