Pathfinder Ascension
Oct. 8th, 2018 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been reading more about gods in Pathfinder, and while I started out amused, I am currently pretty much annoyed. Like, I understand the entire setup is meant to be so flawed you can get literally endless hours of Drama out of it, but even so it's bloody annoying. Racist, ablist, misogynist, and not just in the evil gods, or rather, quite a lot in ways that certain qualities get ascribed to Evil alignment. There's an entire evil god for women who got pregnant as teenagers and are Bitter about it. There isn't one I've found so far for women who are single parents and on the whole pretty cheerful about it. So that's an Issue.
So I feel like even in universe I would come to the point where I'd get all social justice cleric about this.
And so I have a Plan, should I ever play Pathfinder:
Become a god.
This might be considered insanely ambitious, especially given that there's a god specifically for killing people attempting to become gods, but, there needs to be such a god, because there's actually several established pathways to apotheosis, including the one that Cayden Cailean took while drunk. I feel like if one drunk adventurer can make it all the way down that path, others can manage and all.
Which would mean I'd have a whole cult of assassins dedicated to killing me before I got a chance to try, which is nifty. ... it's neat to have a nemesis.
But the reason I'm annoyed is how violently exclusionary so many aspects of this world are. I mean Sarenrae's focus on redemption is a pretty good start, but even so, clerics are encouraged to solve the really big problems with a good being killed. I do not think you can in fact be good if you're solving problems with murder. I realise this goes against genre conventions. I'd say most adventurers manage neutral on a good day.
But then the alignment grid is broken, several different ways. (and here I delete several paragraphs). Almost any character I can think of can be described in such contradictory ways they come out Neutral. Though that might just be me reaching because I like Rogues. But I found Mickey Zucker Reichert's whole series a more useful and plausible set of definitions of Order Chaos Good Evil, and if that doesn't sell you on Neutrality as an active choice nothing will. It focuses on the failure modes of all the extremes and presents Neutrality as Balance, which is not entirely possible with the definitions as Pathfinder has them.
... I mean there's a ton of gods, so maybe I'll find Balance is one of them, but the only true neutral gods I've found so far are the ones who don't, or can't, care, like nature and death and the god of magic who went mad from Seeing Too Much.
Magic is one of the gods who ascended. Just got too good at magic, boom, is a god. Broke his brain but so it goes, apparently.
The stories seem to be doing that thing where deliberate ambition is Evil. Like, the beings who are seeking to become deities deliberately, they're mostly demons and officially Evil. The beings who already became deities after being something else, they either did it be being loyal followers of an existing god, or by pursuing perfection in their narrow portfolio. Magic or martial arts monks, they kept getting better at it until deification. Or a couple of adventurers did it by their excellence in their field combined with being Chosen. Deliberately seeking power is apparently Evil.
Boo to that. You just need to seek it to make things better for everyone. To share.
So I would set out to be a god. And I would gather a team to work together with.
... if the gods are feeling particularly snarky this might result in becoming a multi headed being or only being a deity when we work together, but honestly those sound like fun too.
I would gather a team, and I would make sure that team included many sorts of outcasts. I mean all the sorts would take a while, but, you know, get some diversity in here. Actively collect a half orc and a half drow and whoever else gets kicked out on the edges of existing societies. Make sure we're at least half women. Build a team.
And find a way to show how it'll be in everyone's best interests to work together while having a lot of angles covered. Like, if we've all got the same motive, that's not the first test of the system, that's being unified already. Making a team work and aiming them at a common goal requires the kind of skills I'd want to promote.
... and would be really bad at in real life, but then, in real life I would not be an adventurer.
Basically, recruiting the Justice League for this would be Boring. Recruiting the Legends would be more interesting. But pulling it off with the Legion of Doom would be A+ demonstration of the kind of qualities I'm not sure are already represented in the pantheon. Especially if I could come up with a reason for not killing Darhk and persuade him there's a reason to not kill everyone else. I mean, it's a bit difficult to work with anyone who wants to kill everyone else. You have to change their mind at least a little. It would be a Challenge.
But then someone questing to become a god with Thawne, Merlyn, Darhk, Snart, and Rory, would very probably run in to some heavy opposition from quite reasonable people who were not mantis assassins even a little.
... like I said, fun!
... you'd have to recruit them as well, which would be another Challenge.
Like, it's all very well talking about redemption when it's easy, or when it's your friends who haven't really done much yet, but the heroes on TV always seem to come down on 'except that guy' and just straight up end someone. But within the genre conventions of both television and Pathfinder killing them doesn't end them anyway? So it's just putting the problem off for later? So you might as well try and sort things out now.
... I'm fairly sure many quite reasonable people would not find this logic persuasive.
But if you arrive at the Big Shiny of Ascension with a mixed alignment party, you could be very mixed. I mean, making a new Chaotic Evil god is not going to endear you to anyone, but having a very newly redeemed ex Chaotic Evil currently Chaotic Neutral, that's a player alignment, that works out fine. Get a six person party and you can cover all the player alignments no problem. ... but if neutrality is balance then there's a place for Chaotic Evil too?
The problem is in definitions of Evil of course. I mean, if evil means murder and torture and slavery, you can't really work with that. If evil means selfish then you've got a place to start.
Maybe take an ecosystems approach? I mean murder might just be a food chain issue.
I just feel that there's no room for Reichert or Diane Duane style stories in the setup as it exists now. Evil is a Thing and characters just kill it, instead of inviting it for a nice chat and to possibly contemplate what it really wants out of all this and if there's another way to get it. It's a model without much hope. Hope is pretty important.
Maybe the existing gods are cooler than they seem. Haven't read much yet.
But if I was in universe, as a player would be, and I saw what the existing gods had been doing with the place, then I feel a perfectly reasonable goal would be: Go get the power to do better.
Arrogant, but reasonable.
So I would set out to be a not-evil god who makes room for not-evil members of races that are entirely free willed but somehow in the textbooks as in fact evil, ugh. I would point out that peoples pushed to the badlands have quite a lot of reasons to be annoyed with the neighbours, and try and find a more equitable solution. I mean there's spells where ordinary mortals can create demiplanes, I feel fairly strongly that a lack of resources should not be the problem.
... also I feel fairly strongly that that would be a solution to Darhk, like, he doesn't have to destroy the world in order to start over, he just needs his own pocket universe. But it might be a tad bit difficult to arrange.
And I would make sure there's ways people can be mentally ill and not evil, which thus far I am not convinced the textbook arrangements make space for. I mean, there's gods of madness, but they're Evil gods. There's a basic problem right there.
Basically if I keep looking at structures of power and getting the urge to roll up my sleeves and join in to make it better, I don't see why that feeling should stop if the powers in question are gods.
So.
Obviously I'd probably fail, but, the delightful thing about a system where you know where all the souls go is you have a really good chance of having another try at it. Several of them, even. And if you know that, you might as well.
... as a player I'd probably be happier in a different world/system?
... but if I was playing in this universe I'd set out to Fix It.
I strongly suspect a number of other players think the same way and don't use the worst bits, but thus far I have been reading like wikis and official Paizo stuff, and it's all... annoying.
All this reading brought to you by yet another night I didn't sleep long and needed something else to think about.
So I feel like even in universe I would come to the point where I'd get all social justice cleric about this.
And so I have a Plan, should I ever play Pathfinder:
Become a god.
This might be considered insanely ambitious, especially given that there's a god specifically for killing people attempting to become gods, but, there needs to be such a god, because there's actually several established pathways to apotheosis, including the one that Cayden Cailean took while drunk. I feel like if one drunk adventurer can make it all the way down that path, others can manage and all.
Which would mean I'd have a whole cult of assassins dedicated to killing me before I got a chance to try, which is nifty. ... it's neat to have a nemesis.
But the reason I'm annoyed is how violently exclusionary so many aspects of this world are. I mean Sarenrae's focus on redemption is a pretty good start, but even so, clerics are encouraged to solve the really big problems with a good being killed. I do not think you can in fact be good if you're solving problems with murder. I realise this goes against genre conventions. I'd say most adventurers manage neutral on a good day.
But then the alignment grid is broken, several different ways. (and here I delete several paragraphs). Almost any character I can think of can be described in such contradictory ways they come out Neutral. Though that might just be me reaching because I like Rogues. But I found Mickey Zucker Reichert's whole series a more useful and plausible set of definitions of Order Chaos Good Evil, and if that doesn't sell you on Neutrality as an active choice nothing will. It focuses on the failure modes of all the extremes and presents Neutrality as Balance, which is not entirely possible with the definitions as Pathfinder has them.
... I mean there's a ton of gods, so maybe I'll find Balance is one of them, but the only true neutral gods I've found so far are the ones who don't, or can't, care, like nature and death and the god of magic who went mad from Seeing Too Much.
Magic is one of the gods who ascended. Just got too good at magic, boom, is a god. Broke his brain but so it goes, apparently.
The stories seem to be doing that thing where deliberate ambition is Evil. Like, the beings who are seeking to become deities deliberately, they're mostly demons and officially Evil. The beings who already became deities after being something else, they either did it be being loyal followers of an existing god, or by pursuing perfection in their narrow portfolio. Magic or martial arts monks, they kept getting better at it until deification. Or a couple of adventurers did it by their excellence in their field combined with being Chosen. Deliberately seeking power is apparently Evil.
Boo to that. You just need to seek it to make things better for everyone. To share.
So I would set out to be a god. And I would gather a team to work together with.
... if the gods are feeling particularly snarky this might result in becoming a multi headed being or only being a deity when we work together, but honestly those sound like fun too.
I would gather a team, and I would make sure that team included many sorts of outcasts. I mean all the sorts would take a while, but, you know, get some diversity in here. Actively collect a half orc and a half drow and whoever else gets kicked out on the edges of existing societies. Make sure we're at least half women. Build a team.
And find a way to show how it'll be in everyone's best interests to work together while having a lot of angles covered. Like, if we've all got the same motive, that's not the first test of the system, that's being unified already. Making a team work and aiming them at a common goal requires the kind of skills I'd want to promote.
... and would be really bad at in real life, but then, in real life I would not be an adventurer.
Basically, recruiting the Justice League for this would be Boring. Recruiting the Legends would be more interesting. But pulling it off with the Legion of Doom would be A+ demonstration of the kind of qualities I'm not sure are already represented in the pantheon. Especially if I could come up with a reason for not killing Darhk and persuade him there's a reason to not kill everyone else. I mean, it's a bit difficult to work with anyone who wants to kill everyone else. You have to change their mind at least a little. It would be a Challenge.
But then someone questing to become a god with Thawne, Merlyn, Darhk, Snart, and Rory, would very probably run in to some heavy opposition from quite reasonable people who were not mantis assassins even a little.
... like I said, fun!
... you'd have to recruit them as well, which would be another Challenge.
Like, it's all very well talking about redemption when it's easy, or when it's your friends who haven't really done much yet, but the heroes on TV always seem to come down on 'except that guy' and just straight up end someone. But within the genre conventions of both television and Pathfinder killing them doesn't end them anyway? So it's just putting the problem off for later? So you might as well try and sort things out now.
... I'm fairly sure many quite reasonable people would not find this logic persuasive.
But if you arrive at the Big Shiny of Ascension with a mixed alignment party, you could be very mixed. I mean, making a new Chaotic Evil god is not going to endear you to anyone, but having a very newly redeemed ex Chaotic Evil currently Chaotic Neutral, that's a player alignment, that works out fine. Get a six person party and you can cover all the player alignments no problem. ... but if neutrality is balance then there's a place for Chaotic Evil too?
The problem is in definitions of Evil of course. I mean, if evil means murder and torture and slavery, you can't really work with that. If evil means selfish then you've got a place to start.
Maybe take an ecosystems approach? I mean murder might just be a food chain issue.
I just feel that there's no room for Reichert or Diane Duane style stories in the setup as it exists now. Evil is a Thing and characters just kill it, instead of inviting it for a nice chat and to possibly contemplate what it really wants out of all this and if there's another way to get it. It's a model without much hope. Hope is pretty important.
Maybe the existing gods are cooler than they seem. Haven't read much yet.
But if I was in universe, as a player would be, and I saw what the existing gods had been doing with the place, then I feel a perfectly reasonable goal would be: Go get the power to do better.
Arrogant, but reasonable.
So I would set out to be a not-evil god who makes room for not-evil members of races that are entirely free willed but somehow in the textbooks as in fact evil, ugh. I would point out that peoples pushed to the badlands have quite a lot of reasons to be annoyed with the neighbours, and try and find a more equitable solution. I mean there's spells where ordinary mortals can create demiplanes, I feel fairly strongly that a lack of resources should not be the problem.
... also I feel fairly strongly that that would be a solution to Darhk, like, he doesn't have to destroy the world in order to start over, he just needs his own pocket universe. But it might be a tad bit difficult to arrange.
And I would make sure there's ways people can be mentally ill and not evil, which thus far I am not convinced the textbook arrangements make space for. I mean, there's gods of madness, but they're Evil gods. There's a basic problem right there.
Basically if I keep looking at structures of power and getting the urge to roll up my sleeves and join in to make it better, I don't see why that feeling should stop if the powers in question are gods.
So.
Obviously I'd probably fail, but, the delightful thing about a system where you know where all the souls go is you have a really good chance of having another try at it. Several of them, even. And if you know that, you might as well.
... as a player I'd probably be happier in a different world/system?
... but if I was playing in this universe I'd set out to Fix It.
I strongly suspect a number of other players think the same way and don't use the worst bits, but thus far I have been reading like wikis and official Paizo stuff, and it's all... annoying.
All this reading brought to you by yet another night I didn't sleep long and needed something else to think about.