D&D 5E Everybody's got to have a Patron deity. Where did it come from?

[Lehrbuch]

I'm not a fan of this, either. It's a weird mono-theistic bent to a polytheistic culture. In a world where there are many gods the average person would seek to cull favor with many of them. Only the most fervent would opt to devote their worship to a single god and ignore or chide the others.

It's pretty normal in polytheistic religions that an individual has a special relationship with one or several gods (whether that is called a patron or something else) and that relationship can derive from all sorts of reasons, either choice or profession or family or astrology, etc. I don't think the suggestion is that one ignores or chides the other gods.

For example, if you look at Catholics: individuals often have a patron saint, and/or confirmation saints. Plus many saints are patrons of various situations, professions, nationalities etc. But there's no suggestion that an individual is antagonistic towards or ignore other saints, or that there is antagonism between people with different patron saints.

 

[Rod Staffwand]

Ehh, it's just another thing for players to pick from a list to "define" their self-important min-maxed characters.

Players like it for that reason. We DMs like it because we role-play the gods so, really, the PCs are worshiping us--as The Great Gygax, the Giver of Ones and Twenties, intended.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Ehh, it's just another thing for players to pick from a list to "define" their self-important min-maxed characters.

Players like it for that reason. We DMs like it because we role-play the gods so, really, the PCs are worshiping us--as The Great Gygax, the Giver of Ones and Twenties, intended.

No wonder so many of us behind the screen have over-inflated egos!

 

[Zardnaar]

FR you needed one to get raised. You also could not be a godless cleric on FR in 3.0.

If you were one of the faithless you had 1d10 days IIRC to get raised otherwise tough luck into the wall.

 

[MoonSong]

It's pretty normal in polytheistic religions that an individual has a special relationship with one or several gods (whether that is called a patron or something else) and that relationship can derive from all sorts of reasons, either choice or profession or family or astrology, etc. I don't think the suggestion is that one ignores or chides the other gods.

For example, if you look at Catholics: individuals often have a patron saint, and/or confirmation saints. Plus many saints are patrons of various situations, professions, nationalities etc. But there's no suggestion that an individual is antagonistic towards or ignore other saints, or that there is antagonism between people with different patron saints.

[/Tangent]
Well, Catholic saints don't really work like that. They aren't considered deities, nor worshiped. A saint is a virtuous person who is confirmed in liturgical canon to be in Heaven, as such they are held as examples of virtue and intercessors between God and the faithful. The prayers of the saints are full of "beg for us", "pray for us", "supplicate for us", and "pray with us". [/Tangent]

Now in polytheism, this special relationship isn't really that common. People pray(ed) to the proper god at the required times, and worship of certain deities is more common in certain cities or certain sects. In certain religions there is a deity that shape your fate according to your birth date, and then another that protects your family or clan. And another for you profession -that more often than not you inherited-, then the city deity, the tribal deity, and all the ones that are important because they work on key moments of your life. Basically when a deity becomes someone's patron it becomes the stuff of legends -like legendary emperors Minos and Ce Acatl Topiltzin, or heroes like Jason and Odiseus-.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I wouldn't say nobody paid attention to it.

It was on the AD&D character sheets: http://www.museumofplay.org/online-collections/images/Z005/Z00533/Z0053387.jpg

We always selected one in Greyhawk after the Dragon articles on the gods of Greyhawk if I recall. Of course, from the beginning clerics were specifically called out as being tied to the deities, but I don't really recall specific rules regarding them. Frankly, we might have just picked up on it because of the character sheet.

I think earlier character sheets just had a space for "religion" instead of both "religion" and "patron deity."

 

[Ilbranteloth]

No, it is specifically a Realms thing.

No it's not. The AD&D character sheets had a line for Patron Deity for years before the Forgotten Realms were published.

 

[Sunseeker]

I've never understood this to be the case, least of all in 5E. Sure, Paladins, Clerics, Druids because their powers are divinely granted. But the argument that "because there's a space for it you MUST have it!" is absolutely absurd. I've never seen anyone practice this is in real life. This sounds very much to me like "some people say..." which you hear on tv media outlets to essentially let them ask an absurd question which noone has really asked just to provoke a response.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

It's a recurrent meme. Not that I like to play like that, but I've seen it many times. Some DMs that insist you fill up that space, even if playing on a homebrew setting and some people I've played with consider it a necessary thing to have a complete character. And like [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] said, many character sheets, fanmade and official feature Deity on a very visible place.
Recently [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] mentioned in the FR thread that "everybody picks a patron" is intrinsic to D&D and not a Realms thing, and it got me wondering about where did it come from.

It's not intrinsic in the sense that everybody has to have one in every setting. But a cleric having a particular god was a part of the game (if not well supported), and the AD&D DMG even goes so far as to explain how certain level cleric spells are granted, up to 6th and 7th spells which are "granted by direct communication from the deity itself."

Of course, OD&D had Gods, Demigods, and Heroes although I don't recall any discussion in the book about what to do with the long list of gods provided. They were a common topic for articles in Dragon magazine, with the Greyhawk, monster gods, etc. (along with the Forgotten Realms before it was published). Of the articles in Dragon that weren't written by Gygax in the AD&D era, the ones about gods were probably the most likely to eventually see themselves in print in official books.

Of course, the original presentation (complete with stats as monsters) pretty much guaranteed that many players would just see them as super powerful monsters to kill.

Religion and the gods became so ingrained in the the BECMI line that you had the "I" - Immortals set where the PCs themselves could become gods.

So I wouldn't say that everybody having a patron deity is ingrained in the game, but the idea of religion definitely has been from the earliest days. I think that Dragonlance was the first where the gods (or lack thereof) was a central part of the campaign, though. That was seen as a radical idea at the time (which I think shows how the idea of having deities was expected), and the Realms was the first published campaign that I think really integrated the deities, simply because they were a significant part of Ed's campaign to start.

The transition to 2e was when the Realms tied the fate of the gods to the worshipers as directly as they did.

 

[see]

The transition to 2e was when the Realms tied the fate of the gods to the worshipers as directly as they did.

"As directly", maybe, but:

1) The 1980 Deities & Demigods, p.8, established as the AD&D default, "However, it is true that a god's power often increases and decreases as the number of his worshipers varies."

2) In "Down-to-earth Divinity" in Dragon #54 (October 1981), where the FR gods were laid out for the first time, Ed Greenwood wrote, "This follows the notion that gods possess power relative to the worship they receive, but I have deliberately left this idea vague and undeveloped, for players would love to learn such mechanisms in order to influence the relative power of gods for their own ends, and that type of manipulation upsets the balance of a campaign very quickly."

3) The original 1987 Forgotten Realms Campaign Set, in the Cyclopedia of the Realms book, p.10, also said, "The 'gods' of the Realms, also called Powers . . . grow or diminish in personal power in relation to the number of mortal worshippers [sic] they possess."

So, when there was that big announcement by Ao at the end of the third Avatar novel that the gods would depend on their worshipers? It was declaring something that had already been true in the 1e Realms, according to AD&D rulebook, first presentation of the FR gods, and the original campaign setting. (Which, to me, is a solid indicator of how well the people who came up with the whole Avatar Crisis actually understood what they were doing.)