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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 7157412" data-attributes="member: 6778044">But even the 3.5e rules just allowed a cleric to be philosophical in a polytheistic world. The entire section reads:"Every reasonably well-known deity has clerics devoted to him or her, so clerics can be of any religion. The deity most common worshiped by human clerics in civilized lands is Pelor (god of the sun). The majority of nonhuman clerics are devoted to the chief god of the appropriate racial pantheon. Most clerics are officially ordained members of religious organizations, commonly called churches. Each has sworn to uphold the ideals of his church. Some clerics devote themselves not to a god but to a cause or a source of divine power. These characters wield magic the way clerics devoted to individual gods do, but they are not associated with any religious institution or any particular practice of worship. A cleric devoted to good and law, for example, may be on friendly terms with the clerics of lawful and good deities and may extol the virtues of a good and lawful life, but he is not a functionary in a church hierarchy."This once again talks primarily about the religious approach of a single cleric, and nothing to to with whether the world is philosophical, monotheistic, or polytheistic, but then circles back specifically to the relationship of a philosophical cleric to the clerics of other deities.From there it gives an actual list of deities, instead of relegating them to an appendix. There are several more paragraphs about selecting a deity, with another two sentences referencing a philosophical cleric: "If your cleric is not devoted to a particular deity,  you still select two domains to represent his spiritual inclinations and abilities. The restriction on alignment domains still applies."Druids are explicitly separated from clerics, which is a bit of a change.But the polytheism is also discussed in the religion section of each race and in each class in 3.5e. The description section has a bunch more (and I checked 5e, the section on alignment also mentions deities briefly, in relation to evil deities creating evil races).Of course, then 3.5e has a whole section on religion and the gods of D&D, (and actually mentions that all characters might have a patron deity - something that actually relates to the OP). There are pages and pages of material in 3.5e and all of it polytheistic.I don't see how that's better than 5e. Other than that sentence in the alignment section, best I can tell, all of the references to polytheism (gods or deities) is entirely contained within the cleric class or an appendix, which is primarily a list. That seems to be a huge reduction of polytheism or religion within the PHB, bringing it to a level significantly lower than any edition since 2e. Of the many pages of polytheistic material in 3.5e, there are exactly 5 sentences about a "philosophical" cleric, and even then one of them is about their relationship to the churches of the polytheistic religion.I'm sorry, but the idea that 5e is "worse" in this regard just doesn't make sense. Moreso, with the amount of material that TSR published for AD&D and 2e, holding onto a few sentences as proof that it "explicitly supported" something that they never supported again (where were all the monotheistic supplements?), I think your definition of both explicit and support are quite different than mine.Among the "problems" D&D/AD&D was accused of in the late '70s/early '80s was heathenism and promoting other gods. Even the people who didn't know anything about the game thought it was promoting polytheism.</blockquote>

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