How to Destroy a Deity in D&D

in Dungeons & Dragons the power cap that any adventurer can achieve is very straightforward you can basically make it to level 20 which essentially transforms you into a legendary hero whose power can echo throughout an entire realm a level 20 player character is so strong that most people will know your name evil villains will fear you and will attempt to hide from you and your stories will be written down on books that scholars will read for hundreds of years you will have the ears of kings and queens and gods will open their gates to the realms and beckon you forth when you die this is the epitome of what a player character can achieve but what have you aspired for more what if you want it to become a god what if you wanted to destroy a god these are the types of questions that are not answered in any of the fifth edition books but instead you have to go all the way back to third and sometimes even 2nd edition to get some of these answers answers that do exist by the way this is going to be the beginning of a small series of videos that I will be doing on dailies today we will talk about how gods are made what they need to exist and how they can be destroyed in our next video we will talk about how powerful can a god become what are their abilities and resistances and how does a godly avatar exactly work and then in the last video of the trilogy we will talk about the single strongest God in Dungeons & Dragons and what can that Daddy do that others cannot to start off know that gods are divided into multiple different ranks and these ranks differentiate the level of worship that these powers possess and what is the level of strength that they have you have greater powers intermediate powers lesser powers and then Dimmie powers what's particularly interesting about the way it works in Dungeons & Dragons is that these ranks are strictly defined by how many followers a daily has but also by the fervor of each of the followers this is very important to know because it explains how can evil gods of death and decay can have so much power even though they don't really have massive churches and widespread support from the vast majority of people they possess great power because the incredible fervor that their followers show to top it off these rankings can be influenced greatly obeyed temporarily by use of powerful worship ceremonies or artifacts so every time a Paulding of tear god of justice brings justice to an evil villain dere's gonna get a massive spike to its power level but same thing applies every time a cultist sacrifices an innocent to Baal god of murder this is why you always see those darn cultist doing dark ceremonies and sacrificing people to their dark gods they have to because they're dark gods don't have a lot of followers so they instead rely on strong fervor and ceremonies to keep up with the other deities but in essence the more followers they have and the more devout they are this stronger the deity will be all things being equal a demigod typically carries around a few hundred to a few thousand followers a lesser daily will have somewhere between a few thousand to tens of thousands intermediate powers will have hundreds of thousands while greater powers will have millions of followers things however of course are never equal not every follower grants the same amount of power to the deity and when push comes to shove not even the deities truly know the divine algorithm that goes behind all of this to make this even more interesting Daly's have very specific portfolios that define the topics things ideas or emotions that the Daly has power over Dallas god of storms and destruction has the portfolio of storms forest fires earthquakes tornadoes and general destruction so when it comes to these things he's particularly good at it and when his followers do these things Talos becomes stronger every god has a portfolio and it is the duty of the God to regulate and command over its Dominion if a God were to kill another God then the victorious deity simply takes over the portfolio and followers of the loser of course becoming stronger the reason these killings don't happen as often as you would imagine though is because knowing that this is a possibility many Daly's actually seek to form Pantheon's or groups in order to seek power in numbers Talos for example leads the gods of fury which is a collective term for destructive deities like Errol who commands winter Malheur who commands hunts and Amberleigh who commands to see Talos sa great power humber lease an intermediate while both malar and RL are both lesser powers Talos is there to protect the rest of this group but he doesn't do it out of the kindness of his heart he does it because all of them give Talos divine payment in the form of extra followers and sometimes in the form of a straight-up divine taxed where they give him some of their divine power in exchange for safety see unruly is powerful but if she wasn't protected than any greater daily that would like to have the C in their portfolio could go on and try to take her out and most likely succeed it is say God eat God world out there and everyone wants to become a greater Daley and they will do whatever it takes to get there and that's because the difference between a greater power and an intermediate power is actually huge for one typically a date he can only be killed by a power that is of the same level or higher Amberly for example could never kill Tallis if she tried Tallis would literally just reappear there is a major power discrepancy yeah an enemy major but it is more about there being a straight-up divine law about this if a deity of lower rank tries to kill one of higher rank the higher rank deity will simply just spawn back again this applies to all ranks except for demigod of course which are the lowest deities can also only be permanently killed whilst in their own domain but it is also there where they are at their strongest their magics tend to be maximized while in their own personal plane and most ladies also possess a plethora of divine Guardians and monsters that protect them from attack that being said the power discrepancy between a higher rank God and any particular deity is so big that it typically only takes a lot of time for preparation and a willingness to spend a lot of resources for that higher rank deity to kill one of lower rank provided that the lower rank god of course is not outside help whereas when it comes to two guards of the same rank duking it out the winner would require assistance from other powers a lot of high-powered mortals especially designed as ceremonies and spells artifacts are all of the above in order to win it is not impossible however for some of these divine protections to be circumvented but they would be the exception to the rule for example a couple of videos ago we talked about the Jasmine dagger a magical artifact whose power allowed for the slaying of gods it's special property being the ability to remove divine protections and manipulating the fate of divine beings with this dagger you could theoretically fully kill a god even as a mortal something that you of course normally cannot do so so far we have talked mostly about God's fighting gods but what about mortals fighting gods frankly it is described to us in the Lord that there's just plain isn't the way for a mortal to truly fight a deity of lesser rank and above the disparity in power is just unreal we are never given a blanket challenge rating for a god but based on the lore we can figure out that the overall average fighting level of a God without any divine properties or protections range between cr.42 CR 60 we know this because there is a CR 56 Titan that can slay any God one-on-one it's not just that he can but he actually did kill dozens of gods if you're interested in hearing about that I would recommend you check out my video on the single strongest monster of all time now the problem though is that it's not just that you would have to deal with a possibly CR 40 or CR 50 creature but the divine protections and divine abilities that come with being a divine divine abilities that are mostly there to deal with mortals which is the greatest strength that a God has gods can basically do almost anything that they want to mortals if they are higher-ranked enough some of them can literally just kill you by thinking about killing you we're actually going to talk about the specific divine powers granted to each of the ranks in our next video alas the only type of power that mortals have any chance of challenging our deme powers not just because they are the weaker deities but because most any powers have their domains in the prime material plain instead of the outer Plains this makes them not just easier to access by mortals but if the mortals had a particular way to kill the daily like the Jotham and dagger then killing the deity would be permanent since again you can only permanently kill them in their home plain there are also other reasons and most of which I hope to talk about on the next video but to give you a taste Demi powers need to use spells or items to teleport unlike the rest of the deities which can just innately do so which means you can counter spell them empowers and prevent them from running Lemmy powers can also only summon a single avatar per year which means you only have to deal with one avatar before you can challenge the real boss other deities can summon dozens if not hundreds depending on the rank which makes them hilariously impossible to defeat now the last way in which a god can die is through neglect quote deities need the power provided them by worship to exist one way for a power to die is for it to have no more worshipers to intentionally cause a powers death through this method is difficult even for most greater powers basically all the worshippers of a deity have to die or the power has to gradually lose worshipers so slowly that it does not realize this inevitable fate until it can do little to stop it powers can hang on as Demi powers as long as they have even one worshipper and even after they lose that worshipper it takes them a while to wither away while they ring the last bits of day fix uh students from the use of their name their serenity over the principles and ideals of their portfolio and even the awe inspired by tales about them as myth or parables during this time they would make every effort to get anyone to worship them to effectively ensure the death of such a deity at that point in all likelihood it would have to be imprisoned on its home plane and rendered unable to communicate with any mortal being eventually then you would die and quote now when a power actually dies it is magically transported to the astral plane for it to float for all eternity this is why when you travel in the astral plane you do see a lot of these enormous corpses of incredible creatures just floating petrified quote the itself drifts helplessly in the silver void of the astral occasionally stirring massive in slumber but never really connect and quote see a deity is never truly dead even in death just how a mortal can be resurrected technically so can I God but it is of course much more convoluted and complicated for a dating to be able to come back quote in order to live again as a deity a power must be worshipped and cannot have been utterly destroyed then something must be done to suddenly and massively direct a great deal of worship power into the deity this involves a prolonged ritual in which the dead powers name is repeatedly invoked often massive quantities of offerings of the type most favored by the power are also made and sometimes artifacts are used to somehow direct the power generated by the ceremony more efficiently into the deity and quote any resurrected Devi brought back in this fashion always comes back as I Demi power and then it is up to the power to accumulate enough power to bring itself back up to whatever power is used to have typically they also only receive the bare essentials of the portfolios they used to have having more than likely lost many of their domains in death now I don't have to tell you of course that if a deity is dead priests and paladin's or druids that God spells from it will no longer get it also even though a dead deity is never truly dead it is effectively dead in the sense that it cannot feel anything you cannot sense anything or do anything vestiges are something very different which we might talk about at some other point the only thing a dead God can actually ever since is quote the speaking of its name during a ceremony to attempt to restore it to life and quote silently ponderously they float through the astral plane monmouth isles of rock adrift in an endless sea of silver once they were gods now they are little more than debris petrified husks of fading belief and forgotten prayer yet for many their memories linger their dreams live on and for some those dreams are terrifying nightmares of vengeance and conquest and death if I was about to end the video I almost forgot so how can a hero become a God as you can imagine most direct ways are not told to us in the lore but we're actually given the bare minimum of what is required in order to be able to achieve it usually the process involves a combination of things the accumulation of power the use of arcane rituals the use of artifacts the sponsorship of an already established power or some combination of these in raw game terms quote in order to even attempt to ascend into godhood a mortal in the Forgotten Realms setting should have achieved at least level 25 have one attribute score of 25 or above and have another attribute score of at least 19 she or he must then spend a great deal of time researching methods to attain divinity come up with a plan for doing so and confront great peril in order to execute that plan the plan was always involved at least two of these three things the performance of especially researched ceremony or spell of elaborate complexity great cost and great personal danger the use of an artifact or the sponsorship of a deity and quote when all of this is done then it all comes down to whether or not a oh the Overlord accepts your entry into divinity AO is the God of gods he is the hidden one the divine that makes all the decisions in the background he is of course the subject of the third video on this series but know that he and he alone gets to decide who becomes a god and he alone has the power to remove that power from you at his command quote often in attempts to attain divine status through power rituals or the use of artifacts failure in the form of a tacit no from AO results in the mortal becoming a lich being transformed into some other odd form of undead creature or being totally destroyed usually if a divine power is involved in some form of sponsorship of a candidate before a Oh a rejection means the mortal either continues on in life hoping to overcome whatever the cause of a us rejection was and to be given a second chance or passes on into the afterlife to become a powerful servant of the sponsoring deity in the outer Plains AO is never obliged to explain his decisions and quote guys thank you so much for watching I would like to personally thank my patron suborders Walker motley sack bowel Lucado fan berry mask and 5e magic shop Daniel Omar rusty rain Morgan Johnson biotech know Frank Daniel Luna doc feeder Brad Salazar the great Cody knee Terry Kolb Baracus law Omega scales Caracas de bulwark özil sound tech serie Alex Cookson square chicken Ariel Nelson benjamin busters io is awesome fall key 951 jacob crazzy Griffin Pierce and C Ron King for supporting me on patreon at the $25 level if you would like to support me as well then please head on over to patreon calm slash mr. Rex do support guys once again I would like to just thank you so much for helping every single one of you who watched the video everything one of you who comments and likes the video and of course especially to those of you that helped me out on patron just YouTube is going through a very harsh period right now with the with the coronavirus some commercials aren't really worth much videos are not really worth much even the views overall across the board tend to be bigger because most people are watching videos nowadays and the actual commercials are not worth much so the channel is it's currently you know it's things are rough as it is I would imagine for a lot of youtubers out there so I really want to take this time to appreciate every single one of you who supported me through all of the methods that I mentioned just before so just for a third time now thank you once again for watching I say it literally every video three times thank you thank you for watching but with that said I'll see you all next time bye bye

Channel: MrRhexx

Views: 574,824

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Id: xeyELL96Nos

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020

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[u/KamielFuller]

Basically runs down how gods get their power and the hierarchy of godhood

There are more videos in this series which include the strongest gods and what they can do and how to destroy a diety.