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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6766865" data-attributes="member: 5834">The idea being represented in the FR is more one of sinning or doing something the gods don't allow. That is quite a common idea even in polytheism.I'm aware of this. That's why I admit faithlessness maybe isn't the best word. Offending the gods was a very real idea in polytheism and it certainly didn't have a great deal to do with what modern people might consider good and evil. And if the lamps says, "You will choose one of us to worship or you will end up on this wall." The person doesn't argue with the lamp. He does it. Let's say you appeared in the FR and started arguing this concept, the common man would think you were nuts and tell you, "You better pick a god to live with buddy or you're going to end up screwed."They all have faith in the gods in polytheism. It wasn't even a question. They sacrificed because the gods told them to without asking the question, "Is this good?". It was good because the gods said it was good. You are applying a modern idea of being allowed to not choose a god as in not follow the rules which the FR deities consider faithless. It is no different than failing to sacrifice and ending up in the mouth of a monster having your soul destroyed because you didn't pass the test of the feather.How is this different in the FR? Don't choose a deity, end up on the wall. How is that concept different? Your soul is still judged. You can still be judged false for not following your deities rules. This is the agreement and lesson of the gods. If you lived in ancient Egypt and the gods said choose one of us to follow or this happens, they would do it, not argue whether it was good or evil. To use your analogy, the lamp said this is how it works and you do it or the lamp is angry.And this is the afterlife model of the FR. The penalty for not choosing a patron deity is you go to the wall of the faithless. How is that different than doing something that makes you fail the feather test or offends the gods and getting cast into an unpleasant afterlife? You've read Greek myth. You could be the nicest person in the world and say one thing that offends Aphrodite, boom, you're a gorgon. You could live a great life in the Viking world helping people, but die by drowning and end up in Hel's afterlife.What the gods manage in the real world is irrelevant to their afterlife requirements. You still sacrifice to the appropriate god to get something like good crops. Good crops might happen anyway. But if you want to have an afterlife not on a wall, you pick a patron.This fits fine with the FR because they are not a united pantheon like the Egyptians or Greeks. They area very divided pantheon, even the gods of good, that require individual worship. Why does this idea of a punishment for not choosing a patron deity in a pantheon system like FR cause you such a  problem? I cannot think of a single reason other than it does not suit your idea of goodness. Then again I doubt the Greek or Egyptian idea of goodness would have suited you either. It wouldn't have mattered to them because if the Egyptian or Greek gods decided it was so, you would have no say in the matter.Yes. Uniformly unpleasant regardless of how "good" you were. Why is the FR Wall of the Faithless not similar? Why is the requirement to choose a patron deity in a pantheon system like FR not a good way to mirror how their system works? They are not a unified pantheon. Polytheism had punishments where good and evil were decided by the gods. So you want the FR to somehow come up with a single idea of good and then have the gods adhere to it in essence changing the pact they have right now. You basically want them to change the rules.Don't sell me on this idea that the Wall of the Faithless is any different than the feather test which could well include not paying proper respect to the gods (as a whole) as part of this test and ending up eaten by a monster for failure. This is not how the FR works. You go The Fugue Plane regardless of alignment. There are you judged by Kelemvor. Only once you have been judged are you sent somewhere else. You can petition your deity to take you in.You are too caught up in what the word "faithlessness" means rather than the entire concept of what the wall is for. It is the rules of the afterlife in the FR. No different than the idea of the Egyptian feather. The rules are clear. You know what you must do. You keep bringing up that polytheism doesn't have faithlessness, which is true only to the degree that people wouldn't even contemplate this idea. They definitely have punishments for breaking the rules often referred to as sin or evil. Just as they have an idea of goodness or purity. It isn't solely a modern idea. If you break the rules even if you wouldn't judge them as good, then you might end up in a bad place. For example, let's say you failed to serve your master correctly in ancient Egypt. Your soul is weighed and you are judged a disobedient slave even though you have been extraordinarily good feeding other hungry slaves and doing right by your family, thus you are cast into the mouth of a monster to be eaten. Would you be offended by that and start say rebelling against the Egyptian gods so that you would end up eaten as well? Or would you be a more obedient slave?The Wall of the Faithless is the same concept. It is considered wrong behavior to not pick a patron deity. You receive a punishment for it. Why? Because the pantheon isn't unified. This is the system they use to manage the afterlife because they don't generally have planes of a particular alignment that are protected without a deity. If you go hang on a Neutral Good plane in the FR afterlife without the protection of a god and his servants, then a group of demons can come grab you up. Even in some forms of polytheism the afterworld was filled with monstrous creatures that if you didn't have the protection of the gods, they would eat you. Or other unpleasant things would happen if the gods didn't manage the dead.How is this different conceptually as far as the general idea of it in the FR? There is a punishment for failing to pick a patron deity due to the structure of the plane. How is this different than say considering it an evil act not to properly serve your master as a slave? Or considering it evil to not have paid proper sacrifices to the gods? These were definitely sins in ancient polytheism that could get you sent to the wrong area if you failed to follow them. They were in essence considered sinful or evil acts.It is not enough to just be good, you must be good or righteous in the way the gods require (or the one god in the Egyptian myth from whom the feather comes) to have a pleasant afterlife.</blockquote>

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