The Misalignment of the Gods

[mlund]

Frightening because it implies America was once a terrorist nation or frightening because it is such a radical (un-thought prior) idea?

Frightening because such political topics are against board policy, perhaps?

Anyone can pay lip-service to "fighting for freedom" as a rationalization for even the most base, self-serving, depraved, and oppressive actions imaginable. It doesn't mean that there aren't instances where people might actually be fighting for human liberty - just that skepticism shouldn't be satisfied by a mere moniker.

Back to the matter at hand, I think Avandra sponsors the notion of change for the sake of improvement and growth - not change for the sake of change. Her description doesn't strike me as one that sponsors tossing down Good leadership to give Evil leadership a chance - rather not being overly rooted in Old leadership so that you don't give Better leadership a crack at it when it comes around. She seems very much focused on Dynamism rather than Entropy too.

- Marty Lund

 

[Staffan]

Melora opposes any grouping of people large enough to show up on a map.

This seems to be an exaggeration of the description from the PHB, unless you have some other source for Melora's creed?

PHB says:

Melora
Unaligned
Melora is the god of the wilderness and the sea. She is both the wild beast and the peaceful forest, the raging whirlpool and the quiet desert. Rangers, hunters, and elves revere her, and sailors make offerings to her before beginning their voyages. Her strictures are these:

• Protect the wild places of the world from destruction and overuse. Oppose the rampant spread of cities and empires.
• Hunt aberrant monsters and other abominations of nature.
• Do not fear or condemn the savagery of nature. Live in harmony with the wild.

Now, to me this says that she probably wouldn't be a big fan of Waterdeep, or what Saruman and his orcs were doing at Isengard, but it doesn't seem that she has any trouble with villages and even towns.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The issue is that 4e expressly points out that freedom and chaos and change wildness, and independence are Good, while obedience and unquestioning loyalty and class systems and deference and dependence are Evil.

Good = Chaotic Good; change for the better!

Evil = Lawful Evil; stagnate under tyranny!

4e got rid of the Neutral alignments so there is no longer a "just Good" and "just Evil". It's always one or the other flavor.

Melora probably works as unaligned. Avandra maybe should be, because she's Luck, but I think she's a bit like that personification of lady luck: positive, good luck.

 

[Cirex]

Frightening because such political topics are against board policy, perhaps?

That's why I was reluctant to use the word "terrorist".

Let's go back to the basic thingy. From the PHB :

The god of change, Avandra delights in freedom, trade, travel, adventure, and the
frontier.

Change is not good, nor bad, it's something neutral. Although when it's for good, people like to call it change, when it's bad, people call it crisis. Freedom, trade, travel and adventure are quite neutral (unaligned) terms in my opinion.

Her temples are few in civilized lands, but her wayside shrines appear throughout the world. Halflings, merchants, and all types of adventurers are drawn to her worship, and many people raise a glass in her honor, viewing her as the god of luck.

Nothing interesting here except the luck thingy. Luck is, again, a neutral term.

Luck favors the bold. Take your fate into your own hands, and Avandra smiles upon you.

So, if you don't praise for her luck and stuff (fate & Gods), she will smile upon you. Better than nothing I guess.

Strike back against those who would rob you of your freedom and urge others to fight for their own liberty.

This one is awful. I can see the good part if we are talking about a tyranny and slaves, but things are not so easy. There are laws that limit people, but those laws are to be respected, even if they cut a bit your freedom (like, freedom to insult the king!) Erathis is angry.

Change is inevitable, but it takes the work of the faithful to ensure that change is for the better.

For the better for who? Change is neutral, and if it goes better for some, it's worse for others.

Avandra would be fine as a revolutionary goddess that fights tyranny and all that. I think there was a God like that in Forgotten Realms (Laira?) that was Chaotic Good.
But Avandra fluff doesn't say anything specific about that, just talks about changing things and freedom.

An anarchist character that uses violent methods could worship Avandra. He thinks that overthrowing the King is for the better, the change of political system is good and his freedom to roam naked the town is really needed!

 

[pemerton]

Yes, that's exactly the complaint people are having - that purposefully and maliciously killing whole swaths of innocent people and attempting to topple empires just for the sake of doing so isn't seen as evil, and that the only explination given for this is "Well, Melora doesn't have NPCs for you to kill."

The explanation you state doesn't appear in the PHB or the DMG, as far as I know. The explanation actually given in the PHB is that Merlora is not aligned with the cosmological team whose goal is the spread of suffering.

 

[Staffan]

Oh, and another thing regarding gods and alignment. There's nothing that says people worshipping the god in question has to share the god's alignment. Paladins have to; clerics of aligned gods have to be unaligned or share the god's alignment; and clerics of unaligned gods can be of any alignment - but plain worshippers can be of any alignment.

That way, you can have clerics of Melora who focus on living in harmony with nature (unaligned or good) as well as those who seek to raze civilization to the ground (chaotic evil). You can have clerics of Erathis who seek to build up bastions of civilizations as shining examples of people coming together to help one another (Lawful Good), and you can have those who force people to conform to tyrranic caste systems bereft of all liberty, where the individual only exists to serve the state (Evil).

 

[Cryptos]

Or gods are more complex than these threads would suggest.

Ideally, every diety should be unaligned. Worshippers of every deity in history have been good, evil, selfish, generous, orthodox, lapsed, etc

Just get rid of alignment.

Agreed, agreed, and agreeeeeeed!

I think that WotC seriously chickened out on alignment. They removed it entirely from game mechanics, and in most of the game, if something didn't serve a game mechanics purpose, they left it out of the game. They didn't with alignment because they didn't want to turn people off with too much change. Alignment in D&D 4.0 is a marketing decision, and for all the debates and disagreements it can spawn, that's just shameful.

As for the gods, I've always felt that it was difficult to simulate faith exactly, as we understand it, when there is proof of gods' existence. Add to this a certainty that your god is good, and you've got the potential for all kinds of ugliness. My god is real + my god is good + I follow all the tenets of my faith = I can do no wrong. It's no longer roleplaying, it's a checklist of things to do.

After playing around with different campaign world ideas for months in preparation for 4th, and then several weeks after its release, I'm starting to feel like perhaps I'm just not a D&D player. I've followed it from Red Box to the present, and dabbled in it for a few games here and there, sometimes for months at a time. But it doesn't quite "do it" for me no matter how hard I try. I like the game well enough and many of the concepts, but I just don't buy into the setting assumptions and their conceits all that much, and anything that I make tends to either bore me to death as being too formulaic of D&D, or does not look like D&D. I've yet to find a setting that really makes me feel like someone's got it right.

I think a lot of this has to do with the way I feel about the divine aspects of it, and alignment, and the immorality of moral certainty. (Although I also have trouble wrapping my head around having so many intelligent humanoid civilized races develop on the same world, some considered "monsters" and others considered "people.") I guess I'm just not a medieval fantasy person.

I think that any system that tries to simulate the faithful in a situation where there is proof of gods and they are color-coded and broken up into teams for your convenience is going to be rife with problems.

I could just try banning divine classes and getting rid of alignment, I suppose, or emphasizing that divine classes are getting their power from a church rather than a god. I wonder how many D&D players would want to play in such a setting, however. That might be poll-worthy.

 

[Particle_Man]

Agreed, agreed, and agreeeeeeed!

I think that WotC seriously chickened out on alignment. They removed it entirely from game mechanics, and in most of the game, if something didn't serve a game mechanics purpose, they left it out of the game. They didn't with alignment because they didn't want to turn people off with too much change. Alignment in D&D 4.0 is a marketing decision, and for all the debates and disagreements it can spawn, that's just shameful.

Curse WotC for trying to make money by not "turning off" people that like alignment in their D&D games!

I think they did it right. Those that don't like alignment can take it out easy-peasy (just replace the alignment restrictions on clerics and paladins with that list of things the individual God wants done). Those that do like alignment get to have it. Unless one is worried about other D&D players having badwrongfun, what is the problem here?

 

[Riposte]

Bane RAW in the PHB is certainly not evil. There's nothing evil about him! Just goblins tend to worship him. I found that very odd when I first read.

 

[Andor]

Curse WotC for trying to make money by not "turning off" people that like alignment in their D&D games!

I think they did it right. Those that don't like alignment can take it out easy-peasy (just replace the alignment restrictions on clerics and paladins with that list of things the individual God wants done). Those that do like alignment get to have it. Unless one is worried about other D&D players having badwrongfun, what is the problem here?

The problem is that they didn't remove it or give it serious attention. Instead we got a half-assed approach that does favors for no one. That's what I object to personally. Do it right or don't do it.

What any individual group does at their table is their buisness. The tools WotC gave them however is all of our buisness.