NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6758663" data-attributes="member: 2067">Hahaha, apparently there was value in making a thread! Interesting to see all the different takes on this. It's worth noting that the Olympians might screw you over in the afterlife, but it's not usually for forgetting their name, it's for things <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarus#Greek_mythology" target="_blank">like making a move on Zeus's wife</a>. If FR deities acted like Olympian deities, the Wall would just be where they cram people who were particularly worthy of their ire, the true enemies of the pantheon. Hell, it's probably where they would've jammed Cyric for starting the Spellplague, or Myrkul and Bane for starting the Time of Troubles, but they all seem A-OK with those guys continuing to not have an existence of eternal suffering despite their great crimes against the pantheon as a whole. Almost as old as those stories about the Olympians are stories about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates" target="_blank">people who probably thought they were not worth the devotion they claimed to demand</a>. If the Wall of the Faithless was something that I could have a PC who fought against, or had some hope of changing, the PC version of Socrates or Epicurius or Diagoras, it might not be such a glaring issue for me. If Kelemvor was evil instead of "just, fair, and comforting", it might even be in-character. I could buy something like the Wall of the Faithless from a deity like Myrkul. But there's zero suggestion that anyone in FR has any problem with the Wall. In FR specifically, the idea occurs to me that if my heroic character wants to worship someone who is worthy of admiration, none of the FR gods would qualify, since even the heroic gods of justice and mercy and compassion and defending the weak and sucklike seem totally fine with the Wall of the Faithless. If that was the goal, they clearly missed the memo that Carrots work better than Sticks when we're talking about super-fun make-believe times. I don't get anything from saying my fighter is totally in love with Torm aside from avoiding a horrible fate in the afterlife. There's no strong in-character or out-of-character reason for my PC to be totally in love with Torm (or anyone else). I dunno 'bout you, but the future my PC's leave behind is pretty important to my playing the game. I save the world because I want to play a hero who makes things better. The Wall of the Faithless says that if I don't give some credit to a magical best friend, that none of that world-saving matters - the ultimate fate of my character is grim and sad. Some incentive.[sblock=Real World Digression]Most non-theistic religions, and most polytheistic religions. In fact, the historical norm is to not really care about what one believed in - it was about the rules you followed. In the Tarterus example above, you don't see non-believers, you see major enemies of things the entire pantheon stands for.  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra" target="_blank">Samsara doesn't really care about your orthodoxy</a>. In Norse paganism, what seems to have been important for a good afterlife <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Norse_paganism" target="_blank">is more how you die than in who you called "Lord."</a>. In fact, one of the weird things about the Wall of the Faithless is that it's a pretty strongly evangelical Christian image (the unbelievers deserve to be punished) wedging itself in a polytheistic society (where being an unbeliever mostly just meant you were an outsider). You could believe in a flying spaghetti monster, but if you died a brave death on the battlefield in the context of Norse paganism, you'd go to Valhalla all the same. [/sblock]</blockquote>

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