4E just gave you stat blocks and let you decide whether they represented the actual god or not. 2E went (eventually) with the Avatars theory, which I think continued more heavily into 3E. Subsequent editions have gone back and forth on the mortality of gods. None of the Deities & Demigods entries were specifically Forgotten Realms but the following year the adventure module Queen of the Demonweb Pits culminated with players literally killing Lolth (god of spiders and drow), again intended at the time to be literally her and not just an avatar. (I'm not sure players followed Gygax's intended progress rate in practice, but that was the mindset behind level 20 gods.) 1E had a much lower level curve though and Gary Gygax at least anticipated that players wouldn't reach level 16 even in five years of weekly play sessions, so level 20 may as well have been level infinity. The gods here usually had an average level of 20 in five or six different classes at once. DeleteĪD&D 1st Edition absolutely had killable gods with statblocks that weren't yet qualified as "avatars", as first detailed in Deities & Demigods (1980). Which sounds like it could be kind of interesting in principle, but was never really supported by any of the sourcebooks. * Mortals with no divine rank don't stand a chance against a god, but the gods' stats are still meaningful because a PC could have or acquire a divine rank and become a god (or at least a demigod) him- or herself. (Though in practice I doubt many players ever had characters of sufficiently high level for this to matter anyway, which reduces this to the first case.) In which case, fully statted gods are just turned into super-high-level monsters to fight, which. * Mortals with no divine rank do stand a chance against a god. In which case, what's the point of even giving the gods detailed stats (and boy howdy, are their stats detailed the gods' stat blocks are huge), if they're unbeatable? * Mortals with no divine rank stand no chance against a god. Though really, I don't know that the whole divine ranks idea was all that well thought out. Faiths and Pantheons came a few months later and applied the Deities and Demigods rules specifically to the gods of the Forgotten Realms. It wasn't Faiths and Pantheons that established the rules about divine ranks. Extra parts of a living character are not the same as the remains of a dead character. I don't see how that would be meaningfully different from, say, cutting off a character's arm and casting resurrection on it to try to get another copy of the character. needlessly complicated.) You can only resurrect a dead character once the character is alive you can't resurrect them again, even if there were pieces left because you separated them before resurrection. And of course there are also teleportation spells, so killing a character, transporting the remains, and then bringing the character back to life would be. (There was in fact a "clone" spell, but it had its own limitations and issues. Jalen Wanderer Januat Lipkovits: Actually, the 1E and 2E rules were vague on a lot of grounds, and there certainly weren't rules explicitly addressing the case you bring up, but in this particular case, I doubt any DM would let a player get away with what you propose.
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