Wizards puts out a book called Deities and Demigods which purports to present the different pantheons in full color with complete statistics.  I have some pretty serious complaints regarding these ‘deities.’

First of all, and this is a glaring offense, the statistics given do not take advantage of the epic level handbook.  I don’t know which genius decided upon what reasoning to stick to this because it is evident from the text of Deities and Demigods that the Epic Level Handbook existed at the time.  I can only figure out one line of reasoning.  They must have wanted to maintain compatibility with the core rulebooks and figured that these deities would never see actual combat so they only need a sort of guesstimation of their actual abilities.  Given this line of reasoning, I wish they had just neglected to write the book at all, because the only reason you need stats is if you are dealing with opponents who might be somewhere in the same realm of power.     

Second, the Deities lack a CR.  Now, I understand the difficulty of estimating a challenge rating, but that is precisely why I wish they had given a suggestion or better yet, a selection of suggestions.  I will explain more on that in a moment.   

Third, I have recently accepted the devastating effect that magic items have on CRs and overall power.  I’ve always known that magic items contribute to PC power.  How could I not recognize such a thing? Yet I’ve always thought back to Mad Martigan from Willow who could pick up any sword and be deadly.  True, any 20th level fighter could pick up any sword and be a lot more powerful than a fully equipped character half his level, but that same 20th level fighter would get his hiney handed to him if he chose to fight a CR 18 or 19 dragon.  I’ve heard it said that for a character that loses equipment, you should adjust CRs down by 2.  In reality, the effect is a sliding scale.  At 5th level, the CR could be adjusted as little as 1 or not at all depending on how much magic and how specialized and equipment dependent the PC happened to be.  However, an unequipped 20th level character could suffer much more severely.  Even a wizard, who might have access to much of his primary attack capability, would suffer defensively and offensively.  Most notably, without the expected stat boosting items, the DCs of a wizard’s spells would often become too low to offer much hope of success.  With a lack of defensive items the wizard would likely be unable to stand the rounds of combat necessary before the enemy rolled a natural 1 and failed a save. 

The point being, that at 20th level and beyond equipment becomes much more iconic representing the character and being a significant chunk of that character’s power.  Especially for a fighter, who can’t cast spells, magic items are his only access to the variety of abilities necessary for a character to compete and survive in epic levels.  Odds are, the PCs will begin to have very specialized tastes in equipment meaning that what they own is tailored to their abilities and what they take from enemies will rarely function for them as well as it did for the enemy or as well as their own equipment.  For the DM, this has the perk of meaning that you can send more heavily equipped enemies against the PCs without worrying about over equipping them, but for the the PCs this means that the loss of one of their items has severe repercussions in the short term on their power and efficiency.  You may be asking how this relates to the deities for which this article is entitled?  Well, it’s quite simple.  None of the deities in Deities and Demigods have any equipment to speak of.  Each one comes with a severely underpowered iconic weapon and that is all.  The designers obviously intended this to be fixed by the one line caveat which reads ‘deities can make any magic items up to X value’ but for me reads ‘deities still require six hours of careful equipment selection to be viable opponents.’  I exaggerate, but not by as much as any of you who haven’t run an epic game may think.     

So, the Deities in Deities and Demigods make fine representations for dealing with sub-epic characters, but they make lousy representations for dealing with epic or extremely epic characters.  In point of fact, I’d bet on a well equipped 30th level character against almost any of those deities as they are written.  The deities ability DCs aren’t high enough to slow them down and their flat damage output probably isn’t nearly high enough.  Oh, and the heal spell doesn’t heal enough to keep you alive at that level of play.  Heck, the epic Gods don’t even have access to epic spells because of the exclusion of the epic rules from the book.  I can think of only one reason a deity would go into battle in the form the book presents them: Hubris.  Yes, hubris or extreme pride and overconfidence with perhaps a dash of contempt thrown in might make the Deities go into battle as represented simply because it takes too much time to dig out that +34 Vorpal longsword Correllian Lorethian hasn’t needed for millenia.  The only argument that fits those stats is a great deal of simple complacent overconfidence.  If you don’t mind showing your deities in this light, perhaps that is the very reason the characters wish to fight them.  Afterall, if the gods can’t be bothered to gear up for a real threat to their power, can they be trusted to aptly protect their followers?  This could be the basis of a really good Gods based campaign.  However, the basic fact of the matter is this.  These Gods need to be totally rewritten.  I suggest the following.    

I’d treat every deity in the book as an avatar.  Yes, I know they have avatars, but why not have avatars of avatars and why not have the real deities elsewhere busy with larger matters.  In fact, who is to say that the deities themselves don’t have an avatar per plane in a variety of planes where they are trying to increase their overall power and the actual deity exists outside the cosmos of the accepted D&D world?  Or, maybe the real deity is just taking a long nap, or still adventuring or who knows what.  In any case, someday if you want your characters to reach deityhood, they’ll have to face the true power of the gods.  That requires the following: 1. Rewrite the god using the epic rules, for crying out loud!  They’re pathetic as they stand.  Some of them could REALLY make use of a prestige class and why don’t they have legendary or even epic or godly prestige classes unknown to mortals?  Want some examples? Consider the dragon prestige classes presented in the Draconomicon. 2. Give them real equipment, and make their signature weapon/items a LOT more powerful than they are able to create on a whim.  They should have uber epic items for the few that they have kept from either their mortal existances or their initial clashes with other Gods. 

Don’t tell me Gruumsh and Correllian Lorethian haven’t got a kind of cold war going where they strive to one up the other in followers AND weaponry. 3.  Become very familiar with the God’s abilities and design some round by round tactics.  These guys are smart.  You should probably grab your PCs sheets too and figure out their weaknesses.  Any God who has actually begun paying attention will know those weaknesses unless they are very well hidden. 4.  Finally, what does a god do when he loses?  Remember, to really kill a Deity, you have to kill them on their home plane.  Otherwise, they just go home, like any other outsider.  Barring the few who are ascended gods, most notably Vecna.  When a God loses a stand up battle fair and square, does he consider what that means and try to do better?  Or does he just try to find a way to fight that won’t give the players a chance to defend themselves?  It’s a dangerous thing to beat a God.     So, there you have it.  The problem with deities.