Cartoon, Movie, TV show. Anything he could get.
Yes, as with any business person, expand into different markets.
Though according to the FBI he spent most of that time snorting cocaine while hooking up with sex workers
What someone does in their personal life as long as it hurts no one else is of no consequence to me.
who he also explicitly vilified in his work... But. Y'know. YMMV.
Vilified...or simply detailed?
That was also 1980-85, not 1975/76 when the book was being written, formatted, printed, and eventually published.
Anyway. The fact that he wrote the foreword means he was more involved in the process than standing around, looking pretty, and snorting blow. It means he was:
1) Aware of the work.
2) Read the work.
3) Wrote for the work.
You could certainly argue he didn't do that for all the work (not everything had a Foreword by Gary Gygax, after all), but he was clearly at least tangentially involved with this one.
He was the head of the company and wrote the Foreword. That's the extent of his involvement in that book to the best of our knowledge (going by what Jim Ward posted here on ENWorld a few years ago).
Anyway, yeah. Both Adonai and Vishnu can both have stats. The point is that they both didn't. Because of the cultural biases of the writers and the time which is kinda the entire -thrust- of my argument.
I already outlined the reasons why it didn't make sense.
Everyone has some degree of Cultural Bias so that's not a negative thing, just a matter of fact. Same reason D&D originally had a heavy Western-European Medieval cultural bias. None of that precludes other creators from around the world publishing their own RPGs with their own degrees of Cultural biases. Nor does it preclude D&D hiring creators with different cultural biases. But the bottom line is...
You can't please all the people all the time.
Uh... Yeah, basically?
That there's a cultural cognitive bias behind the decision not to include the Tetragrammaton in the book (or in other books) of religious figures because of the expectations that you even carry to this day. That he would be an "Overdeity" and thus undefeatable, for example, since no one could ever be strong enough to fight him.
Which is kind of a nice parallel that I don't think you've actually recognized, either...
Was it -actually- a business decision, though?
Who cares whether it was a business decision or not!? Clearly it was the smart decision.
Did Rob Kuntz and Jim Ward sit down, stat out Adonai, and then go "This might cause social backlash against WotC. We'd better not." or make it all the way up to Gygax who saw Jesus as a demigod and went "No. We can't do that. We'll get in trouble!"
Or was it just not a thing because of a cultural bias to view other people's religions as "Myth" and one's own religion as "Truth"?
Hey, I mean, why would it anger the community to have Adonai statted out?
I don't think it necessarily would anger the community. I think it would anger their families and rile up the people who were trying to get D&D banned at the time. Don't give your enemies ammunition.
According to your Logical Position he would OBVIOUSLY be an overdeity whose stats are so powerful no one could ever hope to defeat him.
Yes but I don't have the weight and fate of an entire company and its many workers on my shoulders.
Its easy for you or me to say Deities & demigods should have had stats for God...'just to be fair'. But if the outrage causes sales to plummet and people lose their jobs - then its your fault. So better to err on the side of caution.
So why would anyone be angry at having their God presented as the omnipotent and omnipresent undefeatable "Real God" of D&D?
Players likely wouldn't care. I suspect a lot of families would. Their pressure could have led to D&D banned from bookstores and toy stores.
Heck. That might've undermined some of the Satanic Panic if they could say "Oh, yeah. There's demons in the game. But God is there to give you the power to fight them. See?" and then open the page to Jesus's blessed statblock.
Again, this is a Strawman. I'm not saying they intended anything. I'm saying their persistent cultural bias resulted in them excluding the Tetragrammaton from their book on Gods.
No you are gambling with other peoples lives and money because you have no responsibility for them or to them when things go wrong.
I mean, as noted, being able to say "God is a part of this world and is the most powerful entity in existence and directly gives power to his followers to fight against demons and monsters" -probably- wouldn't have hurt their business outright.
If anything, it might've resulted in more fundamentalist christians playing the game to be "True Believers" in God and recreating Bible Stories as campaign.
Not that they don't do that, today.
Okay... but what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
I would have thought it was obvious. Some books are better not in the hands of impressionable minors.
Then why bother to ask when it's utterly irrelevant? Or did you feel it was some kind of "Gotchya" question?
No, not really. I've made it incredibly clear from start to finish. Somehow you just haven't gotten the point, yet because you're digging around in the weeds on side-topics and tilting windmills and straw men that have nothing to do with what I've actually stated.
The point is you think Cultural Bias is a bad thing, when in reality its just a thing.
Everyone on this forum and around the world has their own biases. Get over it.
Yup. This is a thing. Etymology would say Christian Religion is -also- Mythology, but it wasn't included because of.... c'mon. You can say it...
Ideological cultural bias, yup.
More meaningless buzzwords. You haven't explained why cultural bias is a bad thing...'ideological' or otherwise.
Yeah, this is not a thing I'm arguing. Never has been.
See, here I think is the core of the problem. You're seeing "Blame" I'm saying "This is a thing that occurred and a likely explanation of why."
You're looking to deflect "Blame" or other negative statements, where I'm just pointing out historically accurate information referencing what people do and don't consider acceptable for D&D books and why.
"No one is allowed to criticize or discuss a topic unless they're ideologically pure" probably isn't a good rule-base for a forum which discusses topics...
You can criticize anything you want but unless you are without sin, its comes across as hypocritical to slander others for their sins.
AHHHH... So Capital G god -isn't- Mythological. He's REAL. And thus doesn't fit into the book? That's where we're going with this?
He's not mythological in the eyes of Christians.
Let me ask you this if WotC did a 5.5E version of Deities & Demigods should they have stats for Yahweh/GOD/Adonai...?
Okay... so... why make him an Overgod instead of just a Greater Deity? Why make Greater and Lesser Deities instead of just "Gods"? Why not make him an Overgod and just have him be something PC's can't fight but Greater Deities can instead team up on?
Religions/Pantheons are equal. Therefore a Monotheistic Religion needs to be on par with a Polytheistic Religion.
And follow up: Why not make rules for character apotheosis to include whatever BS reason you 'Can't fight an Overgod'?
Probably because someone would fight him anyway - just like our campaign fought Greater Gods.
Uh huh. Surely could've been a bad decision. I'm positing that it was never even -considered- as a possibility.
Either way - so what?
Especially since, later, during the height of the Satanic Panic, they added Satan's stats through Dragon Magazine. Showing that they were aware of it, and actively including Satan in the book. Which kind of feels like shooting yourself in the foot if you're trying to -avoid- controversy about having Demons and Devils in your game, already.
Hmm. Seems like that might not be why they made this choice...
The argument back then was that the Demons & Devils were the villains of the game.
EXCEPT for one group of Mythological Figures.
Actually there were lots of Religions and Deities that did not show up.
Which you continue to say would not have been equal for some reason...
Common sense, game balance.
Oh, that's your reason, there. Also irrelevant.
I've written a campaign setting where powerful Water Elementals are "Gods" that players can kill in the world. In the same way that Conan the Destroyer slew Dagoth. Remember him?
The idea of creating "Greater" deities itself is a political choice which placed the pantheons -in- Gods, Demigods, and Heroes on unequal footing.
Anyone who reads mythology understands that not all gods are equal. The different degrees of Divinity simply reflect that. Zeus is clearly above Hercules, etc.
Just like Elminster isn't statted as a Level 1 Wizard.
The only reason to make Adonai into an overdeity is because you choose to as a writer and designer. Any other explanation is Watsonian tosh.
No its sound and logical game design.
Maybe your gods are just designed badly? There's no reason a level 20 character with no epic boons shouldn't be able to fight and kill a god except that the writers don't want them to.
Characters have Levels.
Gods have Ranks (or their own versions of levels).
Highest Level Mortal < Weakest Rank God.
I agree there is no reason a Level 20 character cannot kill a god, just like there is no reason they cannot kill the Tarrasque. But the greater the gap between mortal and immortal then the tougher the task becomes. Eventually the Probability of success becomes fractional and impractical.
Again, there is no logic. There is only the decision making of the writing staff.
Cool beans. Could they all have been given 12 hit points, instead, and had parity? Nice. Again, this is not a "Logic" issue. This is the writers deciding to give them however many hit points.
No because 12 hit points would have seen them weaker than low level Player Characters.
And has no bearing on making the Tetragrammaton into an overdeity with 1000hp or 12hp or a billion hp.
It does, you just don't seem to be able to grasp the idiosyncracies of game design.
The power of the gods is designed to be interactable with each rank above and below. Just like Character Levels don't go from adding d10 hit points to d1 billion 'out of the blue' for no reason.
Therefore power increases, but no so much that it prevents interaction with the previous level/rank.
It's all ideological.
All Ideological.
Pure nonsense.
Except one. Which is left out due to a cultural bias that has been on display this entire time.
Actually there were about a dozen religions not in the book. So it wasn't just one.
Y'know that's a good point. It didn't include the Canaanite deities or the Babylonian ones, either. Nor did it include Zoroastrianism.
It did have the Babylonian gods.
It follows an ideological structure, not a logical one. If it were a logical one pretty much all the gods would have a strength of "Nil" since they don't interact with the world or the people in it except when they decide to and have precisely the amount of strength required by the legend they're taking part in.
Its nothing to do with ideology.
As with Class Levels you create steps/ranks for power with each being incrementally better than the last.
But because the writers are taking mythological religious figures that categorically do not exist and pretending they do for a game they put them into categories and give them values that ultimately only reflect their personal idea of what that god "Should" be.
See above response.
Worth noting that Satanic Panic started in 1980 and basically resulted in MASSIVE SALES of D&D and D&D Related Materials for nearly 20 years, making it the main name in every household in the US as relates to TTRPGs.
So if it would've triggered Satanic Panic 4 years earlier it might've been a good business decision.
Spoken like someone with zero responsibility or accountability on their shoulders.
That said, why would it piss them off, again, to have their God reflected in a game world as, apparently, the single most powerful being in the game?
If the answer is "Because he could be killed by player characters." then you're back to dealing with the people who are saying it's a bad thing to have modern religious figures in D&D games for reasons of cultural appropriation.
Which is not my argument and not my kettle of fish.
Clearly.
