When was the first time you heard someone say, “AD&D let you kill the gods?” After going back and reading the original books, did your opinion change? Or do you still think giving divine avatars game statistics was a mistake? I’d like to hear where everyone stands on this one. Send me a Voicemail! https://www.speakpipe.com/theevildm

I still run my games of Pathfinder 2e with the mindset I grew up playing: 1st and 2nd Edition.
The world doesn't care what level you are.

I remember an AD&D campaign I was playing in, where we met the Avatars of two Gods (Mielikki, and Moradin).
The encounter with Mielikki passed peacefully with the party thinking she was a really powerful Ranger called Likka, who pointed us to the correct path in this vast forest.
The encounter with Moradin... did not. For some reason most of the party (excluding my halfling thief Squirrel and the Dwarf Cleric) decided that the avatar was a Duergar High Priest masquerading as "Moradin" and attacked it.
And somehow killed it.
Roll on in game twenty years, and our cleric has invited all of us to witness a ritual that her Order has every 100 years.
We all go with her, and she's explaining the ritual to us and telling us that it was a very important communion for the Order.
We arrive at the temple, and are watching the Order performing the communion, culminating when... an Avatar of Moradin manifests on a large stone forge like throne. His gaze passing over all those gathered there... priests, monks, friars, clerics, guests... the party...
His gaze rested on the party. And then he stood up, pointing at us and in a voice, only a very angry dwarf could own.

"I remember you."

I think that Gygax was very much influenced by Michael Moorcock's Elric series, in which Elric himself confronted and killed a deity's avatar with Stormbringer.  The inclusion of that Mythos in the original printing was also not an accident.  I remember having the avatar vs. actual deity debate back when the book came out, and it was pretty clearly accepted by everyone I gamed with that it was the avatar of the deity on the material plane that was represented, not the deity itself.  I think the real issue of unsettled debate was what happened if you went to that deity's plane, would the deity have stats at all, and if so, were they the same as in the book.  At least in the groups I played in where we actually messed around with planar travel, the consensus was that the deity should be more powerful on their home plane, but if you managed to kill them there, it was the actual deity and a final "death".  I remember this particularly in the context of fighting Lolth and Tiamat, and various demons and devils,  and in one campaign with Norse Gods in the context of Ragnorak.  Beyond those actual examples, it was all just a hypothetical discussion.  The stats however, did give rise to a number of character debates (think Conan and Subatai discussing Crom and Subatai's god, lol) that often devolved into player debates about stats from the book.  Keep in mind this was all in the context of late grade school, middle school and high school freshman players and DM.

Deities & Demigods had a section in the prefix/introduction that listed deities' home plane advantages and abilities. Regardless of stats, the ONLY way a party could defeat one on its home plane is if the DM was running a Monty Haul campaign and allowed the players to kill it.

Called avatars before I clicked, still watching commenting and liking

Thor?

Part of Thor?

A Thor Thumb!

While I love Avatars, always used them in my stories, consider:
Dungeon and Dragon's Deities also work via Mantling.  

The process of Mantling naturally occurs when Divinity resides in Portfolio and not, well... mortal shells.  Once you realize the god is the fundamental power being possessed, and not the being possessing it, Stat Blocks becomes easier to understand.  A God forced onto the mortal plane and killed isn't 'slaying the Divine,' it is just one of the many steps when it come to Mantling a Divine Portfolio into yourself.

The real funny part, to me, is:
That Portfolio will change the new shell into the old shell....
You become the shape the Divine wants, not the other way around.

I remember having this discussion with my dm back in the 80s. Because I looked at the stat blocks, and he read the whole book. I remember thinking the idea of avatars was like the neatest thing

I would put a lot of the blame for that interpretation on Module Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Lolth is described as a Demon Lord / Demi-God and the module has an entire epilogue entry on the results of killing her. I believe it came out the same year as Deities and Demigods. The Immortals rules in 1986 certainly didn't help with this misunderstanding either.

Our game used Anubis as a "puppet master" behind the scenes. Yes we encountered Anubis and fought with that being several times but we never thought we could" kill " Anubis.

I remember a Dragon magazine editorial where Jim Ward describes letting the players pick anything out of Deities and Demigods and putting them up against Gamma World's Death Machines, just to show them how nasty the machines were.

The Cthulhu Mythos (in the first edition) is the exception.  Lovecraft's craetures were just very tough aliens.  Apart from Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, the can be killed

I remember the book specifically discussing avatars in the section on Vedic deities, since that's the historic origin of the concept under that name, but somehow missed it saying this applied to all pantheons. :)

The thing is, even if technically possible, no player character or group of player characters would be able to kill a god unless the DM purposely allowed it. I randomly selected a deity from "Deities and Demigod", and got Moradin; a Dwarven god. AC -9, 400 hp, 2x 4d10 attacks, immune to forged weapons, 60% MR, is a 14 level Druid, 15th level Cleric, 20th level fighter, 19th level illusionist, Max level psionics, and has 25 STR, 23 INT, 20 WIS, 21 DEX, 25 CON, 19 CHA. Just playing conservatively; a DM would TPK any high-level party against a solo god... and gods are never alone.

I remember running into a few of the Olympisns in one campaign when I was young (82 or 83). We knew they were avatars because it was made clear to us by the DM. I was playing a cleric at the time, so my reactions of reverance and deference to them set our party's response framework. The whole idea was inspired by Clash of the Titans.

I liken the Avatars of Gods to when a PC goes Astral and there's a chord that ties the PC to their astral projection. If your astral body dies, you revert back to the plane where your physical form resides while you are in the Astral plane. So I've personally never viewed the deities book as other than avatars. That may be because I lived when these books were first published so consuming the books was my hobby.

I remember looking through a friend's Deities & Demigods. He had an original edition. The one with this like the Cthulhu mythos. I took a good read through Cthulhu's stat block and thought, "Yup. No thanks." 😂

I didn't play a lot of AD&D 2E, but I did have all the original D&D box sets including the Immortal box set.

You kill an avatar on the prime plane, or you attempt to kill a god on its own astral plane. And fail miserablely.

Time to drag out the original dnd immortals boxed set

In my setting, gods live and die like kings. They can die and be replaced by other gods, such as their own children or even other gods. Its because of this I had to abandon the idea of making them unkillable but it opened pretty intriguing questions