Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8489033" data-attributes="member: 18">The whole deal with giving gods alignments is basically a bust in D&D in the longer-term, perhaps even moreso than races in the longer-term, and you're illustrating this really well. In the FR beyond some of the really creepy stuff you illustrate (which tends to be centered around demihuman gods) there's also sorts of horrible misbehaviour from "Good" gods which amounts to petty jealousy, mean-spiritedness and so on, with sometimes horrific consequences. Hell, I'm not sure any god in the FR who lets the Wall of the Faithless keep happening could be called "Good". Separately sometimes you have stuff generally like parts of the Ancient Greek pantheon being labeled "Good", which is practically an insult to them, as I don't think a damn one of them would have matched up with D&D "Good", nor wanted to (Prometheus maybe but he wasn't a god).All I've ever seen alignments for gods do is cause confusion and frowns, really. Players, like, normal, casual players, are vexed by a lot of deity alignments if they actually find out about them, in my experience. They were an endless subject of debate when we started playing D&D, and whenever players actually learn details about almost any god the "How the heck does [insert god] have this alignment?" comes up.Whereas if you just have the teachings of the god and the behaviour of their followers, it's much easier to work out how to relate to them.Causing a long-term problem though is the fact that the cosmology of D&D has been aligned with er... alignments, and thus the places the gods live in the Great Wheel cosmology are based on their alignments. Which means as long as you use that cosmology and don't revise it pretty majorly, some of these problems will be fixed in place. It feels to me like D&D could use a revised cosmology which based things more on the themes and interests of the gods than the alignments - that's already in there a bit of course, but it seems to be secondary to the alignments, where it should probably be primary. Also 4E was ahead of its time when it assigned Angels to all gods, not just the good ones. The Evil gods, as discussed before, currently have no official emissaries in 5E (because they took away Angels but had enough sense not to assign Devils/Demons).</blockquote>

Verification