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That's more or less how it worked historically leaving aside that practices vary so widely that it's impossible to make a single claim. Priests didn't generally claim only their god was worth worshiping and would have attended public rites of other deities, it's just they were initiated into...

I don't have "druids" in my game as part of the "no real religion" rule and also because I find the D&D druid too narrow, but I do have shamans and shamans do work by a general transactional model of getting divine power through multiple sources. That makes, in your conception, all of my...

Mine as well. In my game the gods were the original inhabitants of the planet - called Korrel - and they originally just largely lived together as a family with petty drama but as a largely loving and functional family. They flirted, married, had affairs, broke up, reconciled, had kids, and...

Definitely not true of Oerth of Greyhawk, Oerth of Faerun, or Krynn. What D&D setting are you thinking of?

It's definitely heavily overdone. I think Pratchett popularized it and then everyone does it now. Except, it doesn't even really work in Pratchett's setting because it's really only the small gods in his setting that need it. The intermediate deities like "Death of Humans" (and to a lesser...

Which is not the definition of the word faith though. Different religions have different words for spiritual communion or the apprehension of the sublime, sacred, or numinous and that state is a commonly described state in religious practice. But I don't know one of them that uses faith in...

Your first estimate of 80 years is closer. By the time you get 200 years back, it's proveably the "trust" or "fidelity" mean that in common vernacular still only exists in phrases like "faithful spouse". You can demonstrate this by opening a 19th century dictionary like Webster's and looking...

As opposed to what? In a typical D&D setting, the model for a holy war is less likely to be a crusade or a jihad as it is to be the Greeks versus Troy - no less brutal and horrific for the fact there is no one god in question but a dysfunctional brutal family playing out their family drama...

Religion in my game is heavily based on historical reality in antiquity. Although I don't explicitly reference any real world belief my game is strongly influenced by Greek myth, Hinduism, and east African religious practice. There are over 1000 gods and I've never documented them all and I...

I had a friend who was 13 with an 180 pound bench press, which is considerably stronger than most adults but not nearly as strong as a strong adult. The record at age 11 is probably something like 110 pounds, which is still stronger than many adults. So yeah, you can have a 10 year old who is...

Thinking about my own answer, I realize that I have the same take on choosing a race. For something like Star Trek, I could care less if race had any mechanical support. In the source material, they are all just humans with bumps on their head anyway, and no race has in any sustained way...

I generally don't care within limits. Generally speaking, I wouldn't approve a character below age 16 or above age 65 (or racially adjusted range) without some serious discussion with the player and something in the stats to justify that take, and I generally encourage characters between age 18...

Very few players in my experience are playing a particular race for thespian reasons because they are deeply interested in a non-human world view or exploring the viewpoint of something whose biology is fundamentally different than humanity. Most players are playing a race primarily for the...

There are two things I am confident of. First, that humans have absolutely no understanding of what intelligence is or what is hard. We have assumed all through history until really the past few years that what was intelligent was what required rare skill in a human and usually lots and lots...

That's kind of like asking, "How serious do you like your movies?" or "How serious do you like your novels?" I mean, I guess it depends on the adventure and the game system and the group of players. If you take serious as the opposite of fun or as the opposite of funny, then probably not...

I never fully understood Gygax's 1e DMG until I spent a summer running a weekly open table for up to 12 strangers at the local fantasy gaming store. Things made a lot more sense then compared to my experience of running for 4-6 close friends. Also the way to understand Gygax's contradictions...

I don't disagree with you but that is the way it is at level 1 especially given the absurd difficulty of the caves (which at best serve as Dark Souls like trial by fire for newbies with even less of a tutorial section). First level characters simply lack any staying power and 1 to 2 mass...

I don't know. I do a ton of work but then every few years my excitement for prep wanes and I get burnout where I can't force myself to write. The latest period started about four weeks ago. Just can't make myself sit down and do the disciplined work of detailing out a game. This after a...

Left D&D for GURPS. Was frustrated by trying to document all my house rules for AD&D to fix it. Had difficulty verbalizing some of the concepts that I wanted to adopt. Just started feeling that it was too much work to completely rewrite a game system. Got into GURPS because I thought it...

Get used to high loses. IIRC, we started each player with two PC's and finished with like 5 survivors. There may have been more than seven deaths but its been a long time. Scrolls and potions for that price are steals. You are being overly generous. Charge that much for the local clerics to...