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How does one become a deity? I read Deities and Demigods, but some things are either not explained or not mentioned at all.
Not a RAW answer, but if your dm agrees with you, there's nothing wrong with you taking epic actions to take on a divine portfolio.
For instance:
Just don't expect it to be easy.
Well, here is how my group did it, without the DM's approval (until the last moment of course, he could probably have said "NO.")
We all had fake names, for some reasons (mainly being paranoid, but also because we had betrayed every king in the world at least once), and the DM had forgotten that the names we were using were not our real names
We started saying we wanted to make the world's biggest magic school / magic guild. We wrote a school chart, including bullet point 8: "On 8th day of 8th month, all followers should participate to a cult in the name of [Real name of PJ1], God of [Domains he wanted to get], etc.."
We then went and beat the tarrasque (hint: she can be drowned), in order to build fame. Then we recruited people, converted other schools and guilds, beat people who disagreed, until we had several millions of people following us.
We conducted the cult, the DM asked "Wait, who are those gods by the way?"
We showed him our character sheets, especially the "Name" part. According to his own words, he was "impressed and horrified at the same time".
He thought it was cool, and wanted to go that way, so gave us a Rank 0.
Profit.
Again, it depends entirely of the DM's willingness to go with it, but this is a way of achieving it.
I'd say that this is mainly a DM decision, and depending on the type of gods in the world you are playing, might end with converting the PC to a NPC.
For example...
I once played a wizard that worshipped the god of knowledge. When they read some older than the gods scrolls the god got to know about some ancient knowledge and disappeared. As a consequence I lost my priest spells.
Some days later, we finished successfully the campaign. We were playing in a very heroic way and my character died in the last minute. The dragon we awoke (who was a lot more powerful than the gods) resurrected my PC to take the place of the lost god of knowledge. This was a reward from the DM for good role playing during all the campaign, and was a good and reasonable solution for the world we were playing.
Of course I lost the character anyway, but the next time we were playing within the same world it was nice to know that the god of Knowledge was my previous character.
So in summary, I think it should be something that
More specifically, the one titled Demigod. These replace your first four epic feats with a single one, which grows in power up through level 30.
...As you travel through this epic destiny, you gain a small following of worshipers, which grows with each level until you become a full-fledged deity, and enhances your inherent divine power.
Note that the demigod epic destiny does not use the demigod traits outlined in Deities and Demigods. This is to keep the demigod's abilities more in line with the rest of the party, and for simplicity's sake...
The capstone ability at level thirty --
When you reach the end of your destiny quest, you become a true deity (if a minor one). Perhaps you create your own divine domain and portfolio, or perhaps a deity you had a close connection with gives you a piece of his power in respect for your incredible service.
There are rules for increasing one’s Divine Rank in Deities and Demigods. You have to have Divine Rank 0 to do that, though. There are very few mechanical ways to achieve that (the Dragon Ascendant epic prestige class from Dragons Of Faerûn, for example), so mostly you just have to rely on some plot development; see Simon Gill’s answer for ideas on that.
At the risk of having a DMG thrown at my head... there's always Pun-Pun. Divine rank can be acquired through (ab)use of Manipulate Form and Ice Assassin.
Not recommended as anything other than a theoretical exercise.
There are several ways. For instance:
In the end, is up to the DM to decide whether a player can become a god or not.
There's alot of ways to do this "by the book" but.. it is completely up to the DM wether or not you can become a god/deity.. My DM could do a scenario where we travel on the road and i get stung by a bee and become the god of bee's for all he cares.. ANYTHING can turn you into a god if it suits the DM.. Pretty simple..
RAW, there's no way to do it. RAW is chock full of ascended mortals, of course, but the whole point is that they got there by doing things that can't be done. That they're not in the rules could be called a rule in and of itself: take something impossible and do it anyway.
