Uhh, I can see why people would say that, since Asmodeus isn't a straight-up utility pessimizer like Zon-Kuthon, but it's not entirely right, for a number of reasons. First of all, if Asmodeus is selfish, He's a pretty non-central case of selfishness (He more or less follows the golden rule in treating others how He'd like to be treated), and second because Asmodeus would totally enjoy pessimizing your utility if you did something that made you an appealing target in his eyes, like contest him for absolute dominion of Creation or some facet thereof (or challenge him to a game of chess or battle of wits or accept His challenge to a battle of wits or do something that He perceived as a challenge to test His wit or strength against yours even if you weren't aware that you were doing this, or, be important to someone who threw down a gauntlet such that your happiness is a component of their utility function and He can hurt them through you, because while Asmodeus is often gracious in defeat (for certain values of "gracious") He's basically never gracious in victory).

Woah, Asmodeus follows the golden rule? I didn't know He was so nice. :O

None of this matters that much, though, since, like I was trying to say earlier, it's both not really important to understand the King of Hell's motivational structure at this time (if you want to give him an easier time reading your mind, it's mostly important to understand how He comprehends sense data and evaluates plans of action - which isn't entirely separable from his goals (deopsychology doesn't work that way), but which isn't Creation's least natural thing to try and treat in isolation) and also, there's no one in the Vault who could tell you about Asmodean Pride if prompted the right way (although the humanoid with four arms that you'll be giving the other two phylacteries does understand a rarely understood part of it), so it wouldn't be any cheaper to explain that part today than it would have been yesterday.

The thing I can explain, though, is Asmodean Exploitation... without any math. Give me five minutes to put my thoughts in order. Okay.

To most beings, the default state of Creation is the state which Creation occupies, and then they extrapolate from there, based on models they've built to explain the Creation they observe, to predict the future or imagine counterfactuals. They look at Creation, ask why it is the way it is, and then ask how it could be different. Asmodeus does not do this. To Asmodeus, on a bone-deep level, the default state of Creation is the ground state - a total Worldbreaker victory - and then Asmodeus forms models to explain why this doesn't square with His sense data.

If I had to undertake the impossible task of summarizing Asmodean deopsychology in one sentence (which I do) Asmodeus is the god of creating and especially of exploiting metastable systems. 

What's a "metastable system"? 

Are you familiar with the idea that inside an antimagic field and in the absence of anything extraordinary happening, entropy tends to increase towards a maximum? 

...I'm not, no, but we can skip the tedious conversation where you try and convince me that fire elementals count as "extraordinary" even though they seem very ordinary to me, and just jump ahead to after I have a handle on what you mean by "entropy."

Cool beans. Can we use the same trick to skip over having to explain what metastability is?

No, because the definition of the word "metastability" isn't assumed background knowledge for people reading the thread. Also, Rachovii, you use far too much jargon. If you don't have time to decompress what you're saying to the point that I can understand what you're saying, I doubt you have the time to repeat it all after I fail to follow along. 

In plain Taldane... imagine a world around Golarion's sun that doesn't have any plant or animal life yet. This world seems stable, because nothing much happens on it, but it is actually only metastable, since it could instead detonate explosively or collapse into a black hole or be eaten by Rovagug or evolve life or have life introduced to it; a metastable system is something that isn't in a global minima but which, like water behind a dam, would require something to supply the activation energy before it could transition into a stable (or merely a more stable) configuration.

Now imagine that we introduce plant life to the planet - moss at first, and then grasses once we have the soil for them, and eventually trees. These trees are a part of the broader metastable system - they're part of the planet that could still blow up if its gravitational binding energy were overcome or collapse into a black hole if its gravitational binding energy did the overcoming - but now the metastable system gets more complicated. The trees in light and carbon from the air to create highly organized metastable systems within the broader metastable system - trees are metastable, because they don't spontaneously combust, but if the activation energy is supplied (eg by a lightning strike) they will burn completely, unless they're lucky or have evolved a defense against that. This metastable system becomes itself a resource for other intelligences, who create other, smaller metastable systems, like mistletoe, or ants who farm aphids, or squirrels who (simplifying) begin by parasitizing on the tree's flesh but, when the tree-loving intelligent designer of the tree notices alters the tree to exploit them, now disperse the tree's seeds, and the entire system becomes more and more ordered through a process of intelligences building energy activation barriers to create new metastable systems, whenever they notice that they can capture more energy than they spent. Until the tree burns down - unless one of the squirrels thinks to install a lightning rod, and protect the tree from that form of collapse. Now when Asmodeus looks at the planet, He observes trillions of these trees, and millions of intelligences creating quintillions of animals (which are also, individually, intelligences of varying power), but what He sees is the total energy available, where it goes, where it would advantage an intelligence to construct a new activation barrier (like creating a trellis to grow the tree into shapes more to the convenience of squirrels) (whether or not the intelligence is smart enough or powerful enough to build the dam, Asmodeus will still notice that it could be built there by something that was), and where it would advantage an intelligence to puncture an energy activation barrier and create a short circuit (whether or not the intelligence is smart enough or powerful enough to puncture the activation barrier), either collapsing a metastable system entirely or collapsing it into a lower reservoir that's more to His advantage.

There's a sense in which any constructed metastable configuration of energy, matter, agreements, magic, alternatephysics, or concepts, represents stored potential energy which can be harvested by anyone entrepreneurial enough to position themself as the catalyst and conduct the ensuing collapse or transformation. 

In the earliest days, Asmodeus was first understood to mortals as a god of lust. There's something to this: when Asmodeus first encountered evolved genes constructing microbes that digested light and matter to create more genes, he was spellbound from the outset (and still more so at the evolution of heterotrophs, viruses, and eukaryotes), but what transfixed him was when the genes evolved sexual reproduction and then, immediately after that, some genes evolved to take advantage of sexual selection at the expense of the organism's fitness. That's when Asmodeus felt sure that evolved life could become something which He valued for its own sake, and not just as a resource. 

Erastil gave mortals on Golarion the bow, and is remembered as the god who's been on mortalkind's side the longest, but it was Asmodeus who both gave you fire and taught you animal husbandry.

So if you want to think along similar lines as Asmodeus and create plans - or frame plans you created via other methods, you don't need to imitate Asmodeus if that isn't useful - which he can easily evaluate, the thing to do is ask where you can usefully create a short-circuit. I'll get into the implications of this and rules of thumb for dealing with mortals, undead, and magic, which are the the three things I think you'll need to do the most of,

Okay, but before getting into said implications, could you dumb down what you've already said? Some of us only have 17 Int and 11 ranks in Linguistics.

Man, I tried! I really tried! What part of that did you not understand?

The segment that started with "In plain Taldane" and hasn't ended yet.

Sidebar: why would the default thing for a planet to do be to violently explode??

Uh, there's a sense in which that's the default thing for anything made out of atoms to do, since it's the default thing for any given atom to do except, like, Iron-56,

I'm sorry, how could the default thing for an atom to do possibly be to violently explode.

Oh, shit, uh, pretend I didn't say that. Don't spread it outside this room, or, not until someone else does first.

You're telling me that there is such a thing as an indivisible atom, which all divisible objects are composed of. And that the default thing for this - indivisible, I remind you - atom to do. Is.

Explode. 

????

I am explicitly not telling you that. 

You can't drop this on me and then play cute about walking it back. I want to know more about these atom bombs, so I don't detonate one by accident. What keeps the atoms from exploding? What becomes of the atoms after they explode?

That's not really important right now.

Is it too late to switch my god to Otolmens?

Otolmens would tell you to stop asking about atom bombs. 

Anyway, phylactery-cleric, can you pretend that I gave you a better nontechnical explanation and better guidance on what to do than what's been written in the thread?

I can... pretend... that, sure.

Cool beans. 

Now get out of here and give the guy with four arms the other two phylacteries. 

Readers demand that you expand on the nontechnical explanation and practical guidance and rules of thumb for dealing with mortals, undead, and magic.

Okay, but, obviously I'm being written by someone who is worse at all of this than I should be, so, I can't promise that the advice I give here is the same advice I'm giving in-universe. With that caveat:

Mortals are found where the rising animal meets the descending rational agent, and some strategies that work on animals or rational agents will work on some but not all mortals (there are other strategies which work on all animals or all rational agents, and most of those work on most humans, but I'm mostly not allowed to get into them - I can't give you the tactics whereby Asmodeus conquers, only the way of looking at the world which originally gave rise to those tactics), and then there are things which work on sapient mortals but which wouldn't ever work on dumber animals or on rational agents. 

If you want to view a mortal the way Asmodeus does, first, make a note of everything the mortal could be doing for you (this is the world you're entitled to), and then make a note of what useless thing the mortal will waste its time on if you don't step in, and then check for places where you can profitably supply the impetus to either lift or drop the mortal into a more useful stable configuration.