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[Forgotten Realms] The Wall of the Faithless
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<blockquote data-quote="AnotQuiteSimpleSoul" data-source="post: 7516271" data-attributes="member: 6972064"><p>The thing to keep in mind when dealing with gods, especially the 'good ones', is that they're playing a game.</p><p></p><p>Mortals are their pieces, and the local reality is their board.</p><p></p><p>Gods, DnD style ones anyway, almost never battle one another directly outside of creation/dawn of history stories, and there's always a litany of reasons for this, some quite creative and logical, but the end result is still that most divine conflicts are resolved (or more precisely not) by urging, poking, or outright ordering one's mortals to mess up the other guys mortals. This is basically why orc hordes are a thing, Gruumsh hates just about everyone and the feeling is mostly mutual so gruumsh's followers (orcs mostly) spend a lot of their time gathering up into big crusades to go kill everyone else, or recovering from their last attempt to do so.</p><p></p><p>As such mortals who opt out of the game are useless to the gods, or at least far lower value, this makes them low priority for divine aid or consideration. </p><p></p><p>This is compounded by the tendency to present 'good' deities as being the ones who more scrupulously follow the rules of the game or advocate for them to be followed, never scheming to massively tilt the whole thing in their favor, and just generally being more content with their 'rightful' slice of the pie. </p><p></p><p>This creates a systemic issue where despite often being labeled with a 'good' or 'chaotic' alignment the vast majority of non-evil deities end up being either lawful neutral, or true neutral, in practice. Basically they'll watch out for their own, but everyone else can go hang. Although some will be more diplomatic and/or consistent about it than others.</p><p></p><p>Now this can be obscured some since most deities are open to new recruits so they tend to try to appeal to people on some level, but once a soul dies it generally can't be recruited to a new faction, barring shenanigans. </p><p></p><p>So even 'good' deities, maybe even especially 'good' deities, are massively unincentivized to give a damn about souls that aren't going to them except in the case of how to make said souls come to them rather than other deities. It's more efficient to try to snatch souls that would otherwise go to your competition since that not only nets you extra souls, but denies them to an enemy as well.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AnotQuiteSimpleSoul, post: 7516271, member: 6972064"] The thing to keep in mind when dealing with gods, especially the 'good ones', is that they're playing a game. Mortals are their pieces, and the local reality is their board. Gods, DnD style ones anyway, almost never battle one another directly outside of creation/dawn of history stories, and there's always a litany of reasons for this, some quite creative and logical, but the end result is still that most divine conflicts are resolved (or more precisely not) by urging, poking, or outright ordering one's mortals to mess up the other guys mortals. This is basically why orc hordes are a thing, Gruumsh hates just about everyone and the feeling is mostly mutual so gruumsh's followers (orcs mostly) spend a lot of their time gathering up into big crusades to go kill everyone else, or recovering from their last attempt to do so. As such mortals who opt out of the game are useless to the gods, or at least far lower value, this makes them low priority for divine aid or consideration. This is compounded by the tendency to present 'good' deities as being the ones who more scrupulously follow the rules of the game or advocate for them to be followed, never scheming to massively tilt the whole thing in their favor, and just generally being more content with their 'rightful' slice of the pie. This creates a systemic issue where despite often being labeled with a 'good' or 'chaotic' alignment the vast majority of non-evil deities end up being either lawful neutral, or true neutral, in practice. Basically they'll watch out for their own, but everyone else can go hang. Although some will be more diplomatic and/or consistent about it than others. Now this can be obscured some since most deities are open to new recruits so they tend to try to appeal to people on some level, but once a soul dies it generally can't be recruited to a new faction, barring shenanigans. So even 'good' deities, maybe even especially 'good' deities, are massively unincentivized to give a damn about souls that aren't going to them except in the case of how to make said souls come to them rather than other deities. It's more efficient to try to snatch souls that would otherwise go to your competition since that not only nets you extra souls, but denies them to an enemy as well. [/QUOTE]
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