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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 7157458" data-attributes="member: 58172">Ilbaranteloth, I appreciate your detailed citations, along with the way that you interpret them. I will try focus on specific points. If you feel I missed something, bring it up again. I also appreciate your focus on the three 1e core books. These core books define my use of the 1e system. I homebrewed it, as instructed, and I never felt like I was ‘supposed to’ rely on splatbooks, magazines, or published settings.The 1e Druid treats ‘plants’ as ‘deities’. Nevertheless, these plants are still normal plants. They are divine in the sense of, life is sacred. Plants are ‘intelligent’ maybe in the way that living organisms are responsive.In reallife, plants are lifeform that seems weirdly altruistic to me. Philosophically, I admire plants.Here, we are talking more about 1e homebrew settings that I ran and played in.For my settings, I like religion to be subjective, cultural, without mechanical enforcement. I value transcendent monotheism, and it includes a kind of humane mystical streak. Whether a culture engages the divine infinity like Jews do or like Buddhists do, is fine.In my monotheistic settings, animism is never a problem. In reallife animism, at least the traditions that I find interesting, nobody ‘worships’ anybody. Humans themselves are a kind of nature spirit, and the whole point is to be a good neighbor toward other nature spirits. These forms of animism lack idolatry. There is openness to the infinite, and there is never a ‘slavery’ to a finite ‘image’. In other words, being compassionate yet cautious toward forces of nature, is good. Even holy. Some years ago, one of my campaigns happened entirely underground among the Drow. We played non-Drow who descended there on an adventure, and as it happened, kept leveling there, and never returned to surface life. The Drow culture ‘worshiped’ ‘Lolth’ (a fantasy reinvention of the name Lilith, who in some reallife folklore traditions was explained to be the mother the elves and trolls). In D&D, Lolth is officially a ‘demon’, unworthy of worship; those Drow who worship her are evil. Additionally, it is an error to worship any image, and Drow Clerics commit idolatry. Of course, we eventually killed Lolth, a monster with stats.We never felt obliged to make our own player characters commit idolatry.But today I am so sick of polytheism. Even Lolth will never happen again. If I use Drow, they would have nothing to do with her, or maybe, she could be a hostile nature spirit (of spiders?), or else a cultural construct.Incidentally, the 5e Paladin seems fine to me. ‘A vow is sacred’. The  extent of their ‘divineness’ is an ethical code of conduct. There is no  idolatry, there is no polytheism, as far as I can tell.I would probably present the 5e charisma Drow as female Dex Paladins and male Sorcerers, with both being Dex Fighters and Rogues.Yeah. The 3e Players Handbook fails to support, but at least officially permits nonpolytheistic Clerics.For a 3e game, I use the SRD which is setting-neutral enough. I keep setting assumptions in mind (cosmic, regional, and local) and let the adventures and the player questions flesh out the details.The answer is, because I cant.In other editions of D&D, I can use the core rulebooks or SRD to run monotheistic settings. The amount of extra work to do this is tolerable.4e is troublesome.I find, 5e impossible. The lack of setting neutral rules, means I perpetually confront references to polytheism, on many levels, in many critical contexts, in the classes, in the races, in the cosmology, in the spells, in the healing, in the instructions, in the mechanics, in the monster descriptions, in the local settings, everywhere. Polytheism is totalitarian. The 5e products are unusable to me.If D&D 5e puts out a 5e rule set that is truly setting neutral (similar enough to the 3e d20 SRD), without polytheism, so I can easily consult and flavor its rules for a monotheistic campaign setting, then I would be able to sit down and enjoy a game of the latest iteration of D&D.</blockquote>

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