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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2876610" data-attributes="member: 7240">Personal rather than bureaucratic governance has been the rule through most of human history. Your idea that bureaucratic rule, based on the rule of law is typical of how pre-modern socieites have been governed is not accurate. Feudal governance, what we are talking about here, is largely personal in character. The throne rules when there is a militarily powerful, forceful personality on the throne; when such an individual isn't there, governance is largely local; the role of the king recedes into the background.While despotic states (as opposed to feudal states) have tended to build institutions national institutions with more life to them like the Byzantine and Chinese bureaucracies, the case I am making here is that because of the even greater inequality of power in D&D worlds, relatively flat organizations like despotic states are much less likely to arise.On what basis do you make this claim?Except in Indian polytheism, there is no general "faith" in a polytheistic society. What you get in polytheisms are competing philosophies with different ideas about what the cosmological system means. In ancient Rome, Platonists, Aristotelians, Pythagoreans, Epicureans and Stoics competed for the role of defining the overarching social, moral and metaphysical system that the universal belief in the gods entailed. Similarly, in China, Buddhists, Confucians and Taoists competed for this role. Even in India, where the Brahmin caste existed and Vedic thought had a special place in defining the social order, Vedic thought nevertheless competed with Sikhism, Janism, Buddhism, etc.I think you have an incorrect idea of what polytheism looks like on the ground. I see nothing in the D&D rules saying that polytheism works the way it did in India; I am therefore inclined to see it working as it has everywhere else. So, what institution are you talking about?Again, you misunderstand polytheism. The cults don't work together. They share assumptions. This is like saying that in a capitalist society, corporations don't compete with eachother. Corporations operate within a shared understanding and economic environment; this should not be construed as cooperation.Also, what institutions are you talking about?What institution are you talking about?But you are assuming static, stable institutions. I think this may be because you conflate a system being stable with the institutions within it being stable. To do so is to misunderstand feudalism.Since when!? Again, you are acting as though the way government works in the 21st century can be helpfully generalized to the past.Make a game mechanical argument for why this should be true.How is this skill focus necessary to convince the court that you can kill them all in 12 seconds? All this skill focus would do is confer +3 to a diplomacy check or whatever. In my view, the circumstance bonus conferred by killing people to such checks would be decidedly larger.These people are the real rulers some of the time. Not all of the time. And this depends on circumstances.But government by stable bureaucratic institutions based on the rule of law is an incredibly recent development.</blockquote>

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