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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3949813" data-attributes="member: 2067">I agree the focus needs to be on the players, but I disagree that such a focus necessarily means excluding the world around the players (the world they're going to be saving and adventuring in, after all).Furthermore, I reject the notion that agricultural gods and doorway gods and peace gods are somehow inherently disagreeable as PC choices. Given that such gods could be good PC choices, that they ALSO make good NPC choices, enriching the world, AND that going with a big agricultural god, for instance, with areas of control ALSO related to PC interests (for instance, healing, or war) facilitates the 4e design goal of "fewer, more powerful gods," this was a FAILURE OF IMAGINATION.The 4e team FAILED to IMAGINE how gods of "trivial" things could also be given PC things, thus making them relevant in direct player experience, as well as useful tools for the DM, rather than exclusively one or the other.It's not a huge deal, it can and shall be fixed pretty easily, but it demonstrates one of the (fairly few) areas where the 4e team's focus on function completely ignored context when it could have been much stronger taking that context into account.For instance, my God of Agriculture is also my God of War (War to own new lands and farm them, war to feed the fields with fertile blood). My Goddess of Doorways is also my Goddess of Luck (between one world and the other, hoping to start off on the best foot, the liminal state and the possibility of it being good or bad). My God of Love is also my God of Violence(passions, closeness, visceral detail). War and Luck and Violence are all areas that are quite in PC interest, and so now my characters go to war with their shields died green (to bless the ground on which they fall), and they start new adventures with a night of gambling (to get out the bad luck before the cross the doorway of the town), and they fight villains who celebrate their marriages with mass sacrifices, bathing their wedding-bed in blood.Now, I wouldn't expect WotC to be quite THAT clever with their gods. But at the very slightest, they could do something obvious like a goddess of healing, childbirth, and agriculture (think AE's Greenbonds), a god of death and doorways (between this world and the next!), a goddess of love and protection (defend what you love!), something like that.And perhaps, since R&C is an early preview, by the time we hit the DMG, they'll have it (and I agree, that would be the perfect place to give it), or at least have tacked on world-building qualities to the PC gods. But the quoted statement, that gods of agriculture or doorways (or similar "non-adventuring interests") is hard to figure out in an adventuring context, and so should be left aside in favor of deities "designed for play," is entirely ignorant of at least how I play, and represents a pretty dramatic failure of imagination in failing to realize that adventuring interests can easily be tacked onto more substantial deities (and the other way around works, too).</blockquote>

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