How to implement physical gods without stealing the show

>>48263246

By keeping them in the background, little more than moving scenery.

bump for interest

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They are not characters. The players do not talk with them. They do not explain things. They do not consider mortal viewpoints. They do not sit down and have a chat.

They are forces of nature. They do, and the world shapes itself around them. It cannot but. They operate on a level completely divorced from what the players operate on.

>>48264504
This

>>48263246
I think it would help if you explained why it is you want physical gods in your game as opposed to the "standard" way.

Having said that, >>48264504 is pretty sound advice.

>>48263246
How the fuck would you have them steal the show of anything unless you as the GM acted to have them steal the show?

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>>48264504
The best way, I think. And it helps get away from the standard dungeon fantasy cliches; having gods which are demonstrably immensely powerful and utterly inhuman forces much more contemplation of religion and its role in society than 'pray to god, get spells' does, for instance. Also gives a lot of opportunity for general oddities; a series of forest groves crossing a desert in the footsteps of a long-ago plant god here, a mining town harvesting shed chitin there (the inhabitants driven a bit mad by long-term divinity-poisoning), etc. Very, very interesting if done right.

>>48264618
Not OP, but lets say you want to play a game in which the PCs are big damn heroes who save the world. You also want gods to be physical beings of immense power on that world. It's easy to run into roadblocks when you stop to question why the gods (assuming some of them are Good) don't just save the world themselves instead of leaving it in the hands of some random adventurers.

There are ways around this of course, like saying the gods are barred from interfering too much by an even higher power. Maybe the gods aren't good and none of them want to save world, not evil either, just not good. Maybe something is weakening them and they know they won't be able to stop the evil before they crumble and fall. Perhaps the bad guy has/is/does a special thing which protects him from the gods but not the PCs.

>>48263246
Make them so big that the players can't get a good picture of them in their heads.

>>48264770
Or it could be that "saving the world" is a human conceit. As far as the gods are concerned, the world will be just fine after all of humanity is blasted from the face of the planet or sucked into an endless nightmare. A little different, sure, but they are probably old enough to have seen continents break apart and reform, mountain ranges weather away to nothing.

It's just a blip on the radar.

>>48264804
Reported for meta discussion

>>48263246
The party's Cleric has to take a pilgrimage to their gods sick bed and talk them into granting them spells before each adventure.

They are all sealed of dying. Except the god of wine (et al.), they just have a really nasty hangover.

Make the player characters gods, too.

For an interesting look at the idea of Gods as physical beings, check out Final Fantasy XIII. It has the fal'Cie - something like biomechanical God machines, who sustain the human population through their existence. They also sometimes take humans as extensions of their will, giving them weird powers and a Focus - a goal to achieve that the fal'Cie can't do itself. If the human fails, they get turned into weird bio-mech undead, haunted by their failed goal.

If they succeed, they get turned to crystal and kept until the fal'Cie has another task for them to perform, again and again, meaning you're fucked if you fail and trapped in a constant loop of servitude and imprisonment if you succeed.

They're pretty rad.