God's questing you. Can another remove it?

[garhkal]

A sideline discussion came up, over on DF, in a thread about one class performing the task of another class, can it be done, and the discussion got onto making god calls (even to gods of evil or the like).. And someone mentioned "Sure you may petition this or that god to save your butts, but you better expect him to quest you afterwards.."
and someone else responded, then just keep making calls to get some other deity to neuter that quest, and replace it with a better one..

Has anyone ever played it, where if you got "Quested" cause of making a god-call (Divine intervention), another god could remove it?

[Halaster Blackcloak]

Oh hell no! If one of my players ever tried that, boy they would regret it!

Here's how I see it. If you ask a god for help and he decides to intercede on your behalf, you'd damned well better do whatever he demands from you afterwards. Now as a DM I wouldn't necessarily make that demand outrageously dangerous or ridiculously difficult. I'd make it a quest appropriate for the level of the party. So for example, a 3rd level party cries out to Thor to help them when they are ambushed by frost giants. If Thor sends aid, he is not going to tell the party they must track down and destroy Ymir or Cryonax or a great wyrm white dragon. He may demand they recover some lost relic where they end up fighting a party of trolls or perhaps he'll send them to kill a specific frost giant. It could be difficult and dangerous, but I wouldn't make it outrageously so.

So going back to the question, if you ask for and receive divine aid and are thereafter given a quest by that god, you're stuck with it. Try screwing him and you get a divine curse (for example, all your prime ability scores reduced by 1/2) until you complete the quest.

Worse, if you go to second god and say: "Hey, Zeus - can you lift the geas that Odin placed on me?", well...Zeus is going to be very, very pissed off because what you're doing is pitting one god against another. No god would appreciate his authority being overridden by another god, so in my games gods are very loathe to even consider that. It would result in constant divine warfare. So here's what I would do, if someone did that. Zeus would reply:

"Puny mortal! You dare pit the will of one god against that of another? You dare risk divine warfare for the sake of shirking your petty mortal responsibilities? Nay, I shall not grant they request! Further, once thou hast fulfilled thy duty to Odin, thou shalt thereafter be sent on yet another quest of my choosing and also pay a generous tithe to my church. Should you fail to do so, I will destroy you and everything you own! I will appear to you when your service to Odin is finished, so that your service to me may begin! Begone gnats!"

And yes, Zeus would send them on an extremely dangerous quest. And man, that tithe would cost them several magical items and a shitload of gold. They would never consider being that stupid twice. If they were actually stupid enough to ask a third god to intercede, I'd have that god simply reduce them all to worms or disintegrate them on the spot and I would say: "Well, that certainly was a TPK invoked by utter stupidity".