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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2281386" data-attributes="member: 4937">You know, I've always found the idea of 'faith' being important to gods who dole out supernatural powers on a daily basis to be rather funny.   So long as the power stays on, how can you possibly have a crisis of faith?Sounds like a nightmare.  I would assume your Paladin is in touch with your local church.  You might want to have a doctrinal meeting with a local clergyman and compare notes.  I'd only get worried if it turned out the rituals you've been doing all these years were heretical.   As long as you are following orthodox rituals and calling on Sune, then I'd assume that you'd always been worshipping Sune.Is the power still flowing?  If it is, why worry?  If the power stops flowing, you don't have a crisis of faith.  You have a crisis of a tangible form.Why do anything?Wait a minute?  If the initial vision was from another goddess all along, then it might be nice for whatever goddess you've been following for faithfully for all these years to actually reveal herself, but the way the story sounds is that either a) its a false vision, in which case no worries, or b) you've never been a follower of Sune but it hasn't really made a difference.Why do you have to do anything?  Let's say Sune is dead/captured/incapacitated.   Can you do anything about it? (unless you're 30th+ level the answer is probably no).  Let's say all these years you've been worshiping some other deity.   Have you been doing things that Sune would have disapproved of?  If the answer is 'no', then what's the difference?   Let's say this other diety doesn't want to reveal herself.  What gives you - a mere mortal - the right to go probing into the affairs of the gods anyway, especially considering that so far you've not said one thing that indicates that this goddess is making you do things you wouldn't wanted to do anyway.   Let's say on the other hand that it's a false vision?  How will doing anything that gives it credibility help you out?Again, in a world with actively involved gods, there are no crisis of faith because faith is not required to believe in the gods (well at least not faith of any significant degree).Is it still working for you?Sounds to me like you aren't having a crisis of faith, but a crisis of hubris.   If whoever is behind your spell power isn't Sune, but someone else, and that person hasn't wanted to reveal this to you, then its a real act of hubris to act like you know better than your patron and start demanding that the deity reveal herself.Generally speaking, yes it would.   But if 'Sune' turns out not to be 'Sune' but say someone named 'Aphrodite', then switching from 'Sune' to 'Aphrodite' isn't really switching.   But if 'Sune' is 'Aphrodite' and she doesn't want to tell you, you are being terrribly nosy to worry about the dieties private affairs.  Imagine the situation from a mortal perspective.  You're a common soldier.  You take orders from 'El Cid'.  One day you here are rumor that 'El Cid' is dead, and you notice that the handwriting on the letters is a little different than before.  Still, the orders you recieve are exactly those that you'd expect to recieve from El Cid.   You've got no reason to believe that anything you are being asked to do betray's El Cid's cause.  Do you ignore the orders and go off on some personal quest to find out if El Cid is alive?  Or do you carry out your orders and wait for higher ups to deal with matters like this because you know you're just a lowly private.   Worst thing that could happen is that you end up causing panic in the army, or end up being a spy for the enemy, because El Cid really is dead and the forces of good are in trouble.   If you need to know, then you'll be informed.  In the mean time, do your duty.</blockquote>

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