Arbitrary thematic restrictions forcing mechanical limitations.

[Dice4Hire]

Whenever I get a player asking questions about restrictions like these, I wonder if there is some powergaming reason behind it, and look very closely for it. Somethimes I am wrong, and it is jsut good character background building, but not often.

Yes, it can be kinda annoying when the DM is a real sticker for the rules, but I see that as a challenge to do the best with what you can. Being able to cherry-pick feats, domains, magical items and such freely can make for the most unbeleivevable characters, insanely min-maxed.

Of course soemth\imes it does work out.

 

[Kzach]

Looking over the list I didn't see any FR diety that obviously united strength and skill into a single concept, although to be frank, I didn't particularly see Dol Dorn as doing so either.

Again, this is the point I'm trying to convey. It's an arbitrary choice based on the particular whim of whatever designer had authority that day.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Why must it be arbitrary? First of all I remember 20+ domains, and certianly there are not enough dieties for every single 2 domain combination, even taking into account alignment restrictions.

Or maybe the combo was considered as overpowered, and thus eleiminated from consideration.

It did not have to be a deliberate decision to decrease your enjoyment of hte game.

 

[DracoSuave]

Who cares if you have Skill and Strength?

You can't use both at the same time anyways.

 

[LostSoul]

Again, this is the point I'm trying to convey. It's an arbitrary choice based on the particular whim of whatever designer had authority that day.

Yeah, but that's part of what goes into creating a setting.

If you don't like it - if you think, "Damn, it's lame that this God doesn't have the Strength and Skill Domains" - house rule it.

There is a creative tension that's created because no god in FR has those Str and Skill domains; use it! Come up with interesting reasons why they don't have those domains, and make it a goal of play to gain them!

 

[Ariosto]

The "Living Forgotten Realms" angle adds another twist or three. Maybe it would be better for the RPGA play to be less tied to a specific setting that way. I know the "living" deal is supposed to mean something, but is it really all that?

 

[Primal]

Well, FR has a tendancy to Time of Troubles/Spellplague everything to the Nine Hells and back every time some new edition comes out, and has had such an extensive list of gods that it required not one, but -two- heavy crunch sourcebooks just to detail it all, and with so many gods mucking about that even at one Chosen per god, every damn inhabitant of the planet above second level would be a Chosen... of course not accounting for the fact that everyone and their sisters were a Chosen of Mystra to begin with...

...yeah... they -needed- to trim the fat. The gods of Forgotten Realms only seem to exist for the purpose of bringing about an Apocolypse every couple decades or so. Pointless, really.

Pointless hyperbole; the original list and descriptions of deities in the Grey Boxed Set contains doesn't have more deities than Greyhawk or Eberron. The number swelled when every individual wanted to create/drop his own set (or even a whole pantheon's worth) of deities in FR; some of these fit nicely, while others were just "shoehorned" into the Realms. That resulted in the three "deity books" during the 2E era, and a single book ('Faiths & Powers')after 3E had come out.

Still, FR doesn't have nearly as much deities as some settings; I know DMs who literally have thousands of gods and goddesses in their homebrewed campaigns, and it doesn't feel . Neither is the existence of the Chosen (note: originally only Mystra had her Chosen; I guess the designers felt other deities need their own "paragons", too, out of balance reasons) problematic per se; if you ask me, ALL of your complaints -- the reason behind the existence of the deities, the number of Chosen, and so on -- derive from what I would call bad writing from authors and designers (and I don't personally think FR had too many deities; on the contrary, the pantheons are radically smaller than RW pantheons). You write in the first paragraph about how a DM is "green-lighted" to ignore the domain restrictions, but you don't think the same applies to "make the Realms your own"-advice presented in every FR campaign setting book, hey? No need to adhere fanatically to canon or make exaggarated complaints about a setting's problems if you haven't tried it (which I suspect is the case here; my apologies if I'm wrong).

@OP: FR has a lot of cults and cabals, some of whom worship different aspects of the same deity than the "orthodox" worshippers. 'Power of Faerun' even includes mechanics ('Heretic of the Deity'-feat) for creating your own aspect of an established faith (you can ). LFR is naturally a different beast, but you could always ask a DM to allow you an alternative set of Domains.

 

[WalterKovacs]

You think thats bad, try feats with arbitrary non-thematic mechanical restrictions. Like racial class feats that have no actual thematic association with their race. For example, only humans can take reckless curse, which grants +1 to hit cursed enemies and grants them +1 to hit you. Why? Humans are no more "reckless" than several other races, including Tieflings and Dragonborn. So why are they the only ones who can take the feat?

Humans, unlike the rest of the races, had to be "given" a theme. Recklessness is one of the themes they gave them, in addition to mechanics involving action points and mechanics involving saving throws. Many of the other races simply have their feats tie into existing racial abilities, while humans don't have a specific one (instead just getting "more of their class".) Recklessness isn't just in that one feat. There is a human feat that rewards you for using all your action points, using all your encounter powers, risky aegis (which is similar to the reckless curse), there was also a similar feat for rogues to be able to increase damage at the cost of giving opponent's a better chance at hitting you.

 

[Jhaelen]

The "Living Forgotten Realms" angle adds another twist or three. Maybe it would be better for the RPGA play to be less tied to a specific setting that way. I know the "living" deal is supposed to mean something, but is it really all that?

I hate anything related to FR with a passion (well, not really, but I just don't like the setting, okay?)

So, naturally, I thought, RPGA is not for me. But actually, that's not the case. If everything you care about is playing with your friends (as opposed to playing at conventions), there's nothing to keep you from transposing those adventures to, say, Eberron.

Which is exactly what I did.

Regarding the thread's topic:
I felt similarly constrained by the way domains were assigned to deities and had the most difficult time deciding which ones to assign to which deity in Eberron.

But only until I realized what DracoSuave pointed out: You don't even have to assign the domains to the deities. Just ask the player which domains she's interested in and find a reason why it fits the player's choice of a deity. It's not as if the deities in Eberron actually care!

The only thing that worries me a bit (and that's also been mentioned here in this thread) is the OPs particular choice of domains. Because it includes the skill domain. I have a problem with the skill domain. The problem is: It's definitely, objectively better than every other domain. Which is why I might choose not to allow a player a particular combination including the skill domain.

 

[Celebrim]

Again, this is the point I'm trying to convey. It's an arbitrary choice based on the particular whim of whatever designer had authority that day.

No, that's not what I said.

There are several reasons to think that the choice of which dieties get the Skill domain would not be arbitrary.

In the FR, there is a very long list of dieties which are clear choices to recieve the skill domain - Tymora (who had it in 3e) and Gond for example. If you are assigning domain combinations to FR dieties, there is really no reason to shoe horn the Skill domain into a particular dieties portfolio because there are already plenty of dieties to choose from that have it. Of course, none have both skill and strength, but as I said, that seems reasonable from the description.

In Eberron, with a much smaller set of dieties, there is good reason to shoe horn poorly represented choices into a dieties portfolio to balance the pantheon as a whole. It is not at all arbitrary to say something like, "Hmmm... I've handed out the most intuitive domains to each diety, but under my current scheme only one good aligned diety has the skill domain (or whatever domain seems underrepresented)... now, which diety is short on domains and most seems plausible to gain the skill domain." When you are assigning domains you aren't creating deities in isolation.

Likewise, there is another very good reason to think that some other than an abitrary whim might be in play when assigning the Skill domain, and that is that pretty much everyone seems to agree that objectively its just better than every other domain. 'Power of Skill' comes up repeatedly when people talk about which feats are most broken or abusable. As such, if you aren't careful about how and where you assign it, you'll end up in a situation where pretty much every PC takes it as one of their choices.