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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9406462" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, the main reasons to do this--the main reasons players want this--are all quite simple and extremely hard to replicate with angels. Devils are fine, do whatever you want there (after all, for much of history, most peoples' "demons" were literally just another people's gods). But gods, specifically good gods (and thus, implicitly, some evil gods that oppose them), have uses that are extremely difficult to replicate. Those are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">"Well done, my good and faithful servant." A mere angel saying this stuff, even a powerful one, simply cannot hit the same way as an actual deity doing so. It feels different to have the gratitude of a god.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Changing a god's mind. Again, it's different to actually impact the gods themselves; an angel may be set in their ways as much as a god can be, but by their very nature it matters more to affect a god than to affect an angel so.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Finding faith, or returning to it after having abandoned it. Angels are powerful and good and worthy of respect, but they're rarely (IMO never) going to be the targets of genuine devotional love, nor of the bitter disappointment of a lapsed believer.</li> </ul>Again, all of these things hinge on the very fact that deities ARE so big and important--for them to genuinely care, to genuinely listen, is precisely what makes it matter that they have morally good goals and that one or more PCs have, had, or (re)gain a personal and caring relationship with them.Perhaps this is just my actual IRL faith talking, but if you took the above things and swapped out an actual literal deity (e.g. Bahamut, one of my favorites) for a mere angel or archangel, it would lose the vast majority of the impact. It wouldn't completely ruin it...but it would get perilously close. One of the greatest faults of Pullman's antireligious screed, His Dark Materials (a story that is good despite its explicitly intentional antireligious polemics), is that it commits this specific thing. "God" doesn't exist, the Church is explicitly a lie, "the Authority" is just the first/oldest-still-existing angel (and a horrible, vicious tyrant, science-denier, and all-around monstrous horror in angelic form.)</blockquote>

Verification