See, that's the fundamental breakdown. You are insisting that the Wall must be interpreted as evil. I'm saying that I have no problems whatsoever with a religion that punishes the faithless. Your claims to the contrary ignore one very important fact - when people within those particular cultures you named repudiate the faith of their people, then they don't get to go to whatever heaven that culture claims.
Someone who ignores Ma'at and is from that culture, is judged and doesn't get to go to Egyptian heaven.
That's not really the way it worked. Ancient (polytheist) religion by and large doesn't care about what you believe in, it cares about what you
do. It doesn't matter if you believed in ma'at or not (or worshiped at her temples), you'd be judged by it all the same, and your belief in ma'at was irrelevant for how it weighed on the scale.
And so the Wall works like ma'at except that it also takes into account your devotion to some sky-person into account as well as a trump card. And since you can be good without giving two sods about any sky-person, good people are made to suffer. In a game about devotion to ma'at, we wouldn't have D&D alignments (it likely would not be traditional heroic fantasy!). In a game with D&D alignments, we wouldn't have this entirely separate and irrelevant metric determining whether you suffered in the afterlife or not, unless it was something evil.
At some point, when can the DM just turn to the player and say, "Get with the program"? Dragon lance as a setting is not about deeply nuanced moral issues. It's black hats and white hats straight up heroic fantasy. It's frustrating as hell to have one or two players who insist on playing a different game than everyone else at the table. Everyone else is playing heroic fantasy but, there's that guy who's trying to change the game to something else.
I'm cool with a DM setting limits on what they want, but if a DM doesn't set those limits, I don't see why I'm beholden to them. If the DM says "you must be a gully dwarf," then I'll be a gully dwarf. If a DM says "you must be Good," I'll be Good. If the DM says, "This game is about fighting the Cult of the Dragon," I'll make a character who fights the cult of the dragon.
"You must accept that the Wall of the Faithless is fine" is not a precondition of playing in FR. It
objectively isn't.
Trying to ignore the level of faith that is important in the setting because it didn't exist in the original boxed set ignores tons and tons of setting material. Good grief, how many gods are there in Forgotten Realms? How many of the factions in FR are directly tied to the gods? Harpers spring to mind. Good grief, Drizz't stories are all about Drow society which is a theocracy. Removing religion from the Drow and what are they? Kinda funny looking elves with a leather fetish? One of the best video games for FR was Baldur's Gate where you actually play the offspring of a god.
It's not like faith takes a far backseat in FR. It's right front and centre.
FR is a kitchen sink, so it's not always front and center. It's not front and center in most Drizz't novels, it's not front and center in the original boxed set, it's not front and center in 4e, it's not front and center for the FR Dragonborn, etc, etc, etc,.
Me, I'd rather play a setting for what the setting has to offer rather than try to rewrite the setting to suit my tastes.
The job of PC's is to rewrite the setting. If I'm not changing the world, my Hero's Journey isn't very Campbellian, now, is it?
Hussar said:
It's just that I just recently proposed a Low Magic, Sword and Sorcery campaign for Primeval Thule. First three character concepts that came back to me were a warlock devoted to the Old ones, a full on wizard and a shadow monk. It's very, very frustrating to pitch a concept, have the players say, yup, we want to play that concept, and then get concepts that are pretty much the exact opposite to the concept that you pitched.
If you say "I want to play a Primeval Thule game," these are all perfectly acceptable characters in most Primeval Thule games.
If you say "PT is a low magic setting," these are all still perfectly acceptable characters in PT, it just gives them some context.
If you say "I want to play a game with a low-magic PC party," the last one could STILL be an acceptable character, depending upon the calibration of "low."
It's not like you provided a list of classes or races - your players are likely still trying to figure out what that proposal means in practice. I think I've got an idea, but that's only after locking it down to "no at-will spellcasting" (and that still includes Vengeance paladins who can heal wounds with a touch and totem warrior barbarians who can speak with animals and monks that can heal their own wounds, two of which you decided to add even though the setting material removes them, so ¯\(°_o)/¯ )
Hussar said:
Could you play the Realms where faith and whatnot isn't a major mover and shaker? Sure, anything's possible. But, at that point, I really have to ask, why bother? Why not use a setting where that's true instead of stripping out major elements of an existing setting?
The Driz'zt stories seem to do just fine with him going "Uhh...this one, I guess," when asked about a patron deity. The HotDQ game you're in doesn't have ANY PC's that care about the gods (now that the cleric's dead).
FR's distinctive features lie in the common magic (yeah, red wizards know how to call back gods, run with it) and ancient history (that old castle and the Mere itself and the lizardfolk), IMXP. You play FR because you want to explore ancient magical ruins, have a world where wizards are a common feature, or have some association with the previous fiction. WotC uses FR as a staging ground because it's pretty generic, they don't have to alter Generic Plots much to fit within it, and they can just visit a few locales from the other media properties and run with it.