>there are no benevolent higher powers that empower the good and righteous and ward off evil in his setting
>there are still a malevolent higher powers that empower the bad and wicked and corrupt the virtuous though
>there are no benevolent higher powers that empower the good and righteous and ward off evil in his setting
I actually like how TES handles this, where all the "Good" Gods more or less fricked off and let the world run on clockwork logic and occasionally step in to help in dire situations while the "Bad" Gods are just strong enough collectively to be a continuous threat but also just weak enough to be defeated by mortals because of the high magic and destiny frickery. It completely avoids the usual logic problems of Real Fake Gods without robbing the setting of the potential Good vs Evil storytelling.
TES's handling is fricking awful. It's almost DnD levels of bad. It basically boils down to "The gods are real but don't do anything... except when they feel like it. But even then it's never important, except when we have a new game to sell, then it suddenly becomes apocalyptic. It's OK though because a fricking mortal can stop them with the help of moronic plot macguffins that these literal gods never decided to take out of play beforehand."
Absolute schizo mess of inconsistencies and pandering to "theme-park" game design that shits all over its own setting. I cant see how it appeals to anyone with better than room-temperature IQs.
t. Mankar Camoran
The aedra are dead in TES. It's just the world is made up out of them so occasionally they get to "act," because it's made of them-stuff.
Why does a setting need good gods? What about creation suggests a force of cosmic good?
> Why does a setting need good gods? What about creation suggests a force of cosmic good?
Christian sensibilities demand that you have at least one god that you can align your character with that is unambiguously good and can be trusted without caveat. A fantasy god may not be all-powerful or all-knowing, but they need to at least be all-good. One of them, at any rate.
Which is very much just a christian demand. You look at other religions with gods, and you don't trust any of those guys even the ones that are nominally better than the rest. You don't pray to Poseidon because you think he's your bets friend who would never hurt you, you pray to Poseidon because please don't fricking drown me today I just want to go fishing and come back alive. Greeks gods, norse gods, etc all have their own character flaws and motivations that likely won't like up with yours, so even if you consider yourself their vassal you are still always at least aware that they might want something that isn't in your interests.
Christian god, meanwhile, is expected to be a cosmic babysitter. And the idea of the superbeings in charge not having someone fill that unambigously trustworthy good role makes some people uncomfortable.
Late Scandinavian pagans had a pretty high opinion of Thor, but yeah, a lot of historical religions have their gods being someone to be afraid of as well as someone who is owed worship.
>Christian sensibilities
>christian demand
>Christian god
You know there are 2 other ancient religions from the same region who also worship the same God, right?
Yes, but the sentiment is still primarily christian in nature. While Judaism and Christianity both worship the god of Abraham, their interpretations of that god are very different. The god of the old testament is a much more vengeful, wrathful god than the god of the new testament, and would not fall into the same cosmic babysitter role as the christian god does despite the claim that they are one and the same.
As I have never read the Quran, my knowledge of Allah is superficial so I'm simply not equipped to make the same comparisons there with any degree of confidence, but I think its still a safe bet that people like OP are approaching western fantasy settings from a primarily christian mindset.
If I included benevolent higher powers in a setting or game, there wouldn't be any conflict, or at best, the conflict would be severely reduced.
Just have the benevolent gods only able to work their magic through "true believers" who go through strenuous acts of piety and self-sacrifice in order to use their god's power. Like clerics who have to remain virgins and become ascetic monks or nuns.
That just makes the "god" seem anemic and not very godly at all.
What if its not that they are unable to empower others, but unwilling? The good gods have extremely high standards, because they know how easily mortals can be corrupted by power.
Because that actively ignores scenarios where granting a power-hungry devout would be more moral than letting the disaster they could have easily prevented happen.
Such a staunch refusal to grant power just because they don't follow the commandments and costing millions of lives doesn't demonstrate benevolence.
Your are mistaking pragmatism with good. The lesser of two evils is still an evil, anon. A being that is all-good cannot pick the lesser of two evils, because that would mean they are not all-good.
>a being that is all good can't pick the lesser of two evils, so it will pick the greater of two evils
Mhmm.
>[You] are mistaking pragmatism with good.
I was actually talking about benevolence, which is what the thread is about.
I'm also not sure why a godly being should have to nonsensically be out of control of their own actions as if they were programmed.
Wait does being a virgin give you powers? I've been robbed
>fantasy cleric
>zoomerhair black
Yep, it's [Current Year] hours
>80s adventurers in perms? SO FRICKING OLDSCHOOL!
>late 80s adventurers in feathered mullets! GROOVY!
>mid 00s adventurers in butterfly cut! CUTE! SHE CUTE!
>00s adventurers in quiff? CUTE AND PRACTICAL!~
>10s adventurers with side-buzz? EDGY AND COOL!
>20s adventurers with that decade most popular cut? Lame and gay I say!
This is you.
And the joke is that you are a zoomershit yourself.
>thin skinned zoomer homosexual also defends the sideshave
You can't make this shit up lmao
Side buzz was shit too btw, and it was nowhere as prevalent as the abomination in the op.
Nothing else in that post is true, there was never a single dominant hairstyle in previous decades, specially not one so moronic
>Side buzz was shit too btw, and it was nowhere as prevalent as the abomination in the op.
I don't think I have ever seen that short dread (?) style, ever, anywhere, except I guess occasionally in AI gens. What are you talking about? Can you show me some examples?
Nta and if anything, short dread was the coolest shit between 2002-2006, definitely peaked in 2004, where everyone tried their hands at it, since it was one of those "any homosexual can grew hair long enough for it within a season". But it was done without the side-shave, so go fricking figure.
>and it was nowhere as prevalent as the abomination in the op.
>there was never a single dominant hairstyle in previous decades
Zoomer larping as a boomer
Totally love all those pictures from back in the day that you're posting as receipts.
Why don't you post another picture with this hair style as a receipt?
>Anon literally lists the most popular hairstyle for past 40 years with the timeframe for them
>there was never a single dominant hairstyle in previous decades
Side shave was never popular irl. It's the definition of a forced meme.
... so you are Amish or spent the time between spring 2010 till about covid under a rock?
Watching Robin Hood series full of 00s hair was distracting too. Not that I personally see much point in being angry about the negress. There's so many disparate elements in her clothing and equipment so it's impossible for anything to really be out of place.
Have you ever seen a fantasy setting where all clerics, knights and paladins sport the same friar tonsure haircut? Or a single samurai character with a chonmage hairdo?
Unambiguously benevolent deities are inherently less fun to craft campaigns around than evil or morally dubious ones.
correct, because the threshold for being a demon is a lot lower than the threshold for being a god
The higher powers are neither good nor evil, just extremely powerful and very risky and costly to invoke. The results of their intervention are often calamitous.
Its not that the gods are evil, or that their power is evil. Its that you have to already be a crazy, desperate butthole who doesn't care about the consequences of what you are doing to call on them in the first place. A good person looks at the cost and recognizes that the short cut to power simply isn't worth the damage it would do, an evil person doesn't *care* how many innocents get caught in the crossfire, thats what makes them evil.
Like all sources of power, the people who want it the most can be trusted with it the least.
The party will end up overthrowing the nearest god/pantheon anyway. Might as well set them up as cool bosses.
Most settings unintentionally work under that logic just replace
>there are no good gods
With
>all the good gods are either incompetent or extremely hands off
Can’t have Not!Jesus immediately atomize Not!Satan the moment he tries to destroy the world, gotta give the PCs something to fight on their own
restating what
said
Isn't this question answered with basic level theology?
Absolute Good and Evil fighting over the cosmos and the hearts and lives of men is cool.
Regular, boring "evil" without good is lame.
Compare Frieren's demons with Unsong's and become enlightened.
>Absolute Good and Evil fighting over the cosmos and the hearts and lives of men is cool.
It's lame actually. Ordinary people fighting supernatural horrors with limited resources, on the other hand, is cool.
Name a single work with absolute Good and Evil in it.
Why should I? I wouldn't read such a work, the concept sounds tedious.
Your response was honestly even more pathetic than I expected. You are a moron whose opinions on art are based on quite literally nothing but his own deficit of imagination. Farewell.
Different anon, but how hard to grasp it is that when someone says "this is lame" it doesn't mean "an alternative version that's actually good exists", but that it is simply a lame concept?
I mean what kind of kindergarten-tier eristics is this shit anyway? "PROVE that this concept is good", when someone flat-out tells you it sucks?
So Berserk?
The Four Kings are literally benevolent higher powers who will help anyone who asks them to defeat Apostles and protect humanity. There are just, like, three people who know how to talk in a way that they can hear.
In my setting, there's no good or evil gods.
All the gods are pretty chill between each others, they all incarnate an element of the world and are all needed to make the world work properly.
Like two opposite gods don't like each others but they're more into ignoring each others than do anything else.
Although the more extreme portion of their cults like to bicker continuously.
But the gods, as a collectivity, are kinda rude and manipulative to mortals (big conspiracy).
In truth, there's one last God, who's the god of creation, he isn't good nor evil, actually he's more of a vegetable in a comatose state (the whole world is a part of him) and the others gods are actually working together to keep him that way.
Watching normgroids attempt to understand divinity is like the Revolutionary from Book of the New Sun, I'm filled with the sudden urge to buy a weather balloon and hang myself with it.
>there are no benevolent higher powers that empower the good and righteous and ward off evil in his setting
>there are still a malevolent higher powers that empower the bad and wicked and corrupt the virtuous though
This but unironically because humans can beat the crap out of these "higher powers".
If there is no higher power of good, that really just means that good isn't real, but rather a teleological description. I.E., if you're not talking about Good as an absolute, then it's actually just utility. Things you want, and things useful for getting the things you want. If there is no absolute good then there isn't really evil either, only behavior that offends you (either literally or figuratively, or actually these days literally or more literally) which is just a threat.
What do you call someone who views the entire world in terms of tools and threats? Because that's what denying the objectivity of morality actually is. And you know that this is true because it took them a while to realize how insane they sounded, that fricking homosexual Spinoza spend DECADES articulating in great detail how pleasure is a moral good and how you should build society to maximize that, like trying to calculate how many drams (oh sorry, I meant milligrams, gotta have decimal hedonism fricking homosexual French) of joy are included in an orgasm isn't completely sociopathic behavior.
Watch! Post that comic about adventure girl being drugged and hooked up to a lotus eater machine, post it and watch them come and defend it. Any human being seeing this understands that it is evil, it's inate, you could use a time portal gun to bring Hitler Siddhartha Moctezuma Benjamin Franklin Guan Yu Charlemagne Mohammed Shaka Zulu Toyatomi Hideyoshi and a sentinalese tribesman to the same place and show them that, they'd all agree it must be destroyed, but no AKSHUALLY it's impossible for instinctual understandings of things to be correct we have to ignore our instincts and wait 200 years to formally rationalize all of the data and discover that yes the gut instinct was correct and then pretend that we invented the idea. And this is why we should never have let the laity learn how to fricking read, there were no antinatalists before Gutenberg, just clergy.
This is just DMC. If you want to play as Dante it works fine I guess.
There are [Good] Demons like Sparta and Dante that hunt other demons though. In DMC, morality for demons is based on how much noble demon and/or human blood you have. Lesser pure-blooded demons don't even have a morality system. They're too low IQ. They're essentially barely-sentient animals who just want to eat humans.