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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1886891" data-attributes="member: 3146">I'm curious about this contention regarding Greek culture. In many historical cultures male infidelity has been "officially" frowned upon but generally accepted anyway. However, it seems at odds with what I know of greek culture to say that female infidelity enjoyed the same acceptance. The trojan war was fought over Helen, Ulysses killed all of Penelope's suitors (and his wife was intentionally putting them off), and Aphrodite was punished for her unfaithfulness to Hephaestus (even though that is portrayed as a rather horrific mismatch in the tales). Plato, of course thought all of these tales of the gods' infidelities to be scandalous and expected the audience of his dialogues to agree with him.That doesn't sound a whole lot like acceptance of married women having multiple lovers to me. (Even if it is usually the womens' lovers who are killed rather than the women themselves--a more likely read on the attitude might be that taking another man's wife is an insult to him and if he doesn't repay you with violence then you're obviously stronger and better than him. (An attitude that Elijah Anderson finds to still be present in the street codes of inner city youth). So, taking another man's woman gets you respect if he doesn't do anything about it but his killing you in revenge gets him respect. That would account for nearly all of the literary reactions to infidelity I know of: Menelaus had to get Helen back, Ulysses had to kill his wifes' suitors, etc but Ulysses time with Circe and Calypso just makes him more the man).For that matter, the tales of Hera's wrath at Zeus and Medea's vengeance upon Jason seem to indicate a certain ambivalence towards even male infidelity.And, of course, it's a huge leap to step from tacit acceptance of infidelity to positive expectation of it.Given my experience playing D&D and the knowledge that only actual PCs have their encounters (generally) crafted to be winnable, I would say that there are several orders of magnitude in the difference of the odds of the paladin dying and not coming back and Bob Peasant being killed by an angry housecat. (Not that the housecats aren't a grave danger <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )</blockquote>

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