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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 8596915" data-attributes="member: 926">One thing that I really wish more D&D settings would get right is the portrayal of actual polytheistic cultures, where all of the Gods are acknowledged as real active forces in the world that cannot be realistically denied and are actively worshiped/appeased by just about everyone, and people who choose to devote themselves to individuals Gods are in the extreme minority (just as Atheists would be quite rare, with the term in this case adhering to the original Ancient Greek meaning, not the modern use of the term.) People who devoted themselves to individual Gods would be members of that God's Cult, with Cult being used in the classical, non-pejorative meaning of the term, coming from the root of the "cultivation" of a God. Several settings include a few paragraphs where they try to explain this polytheistic setup, but then the majority of adventures and setting details have the writers just reverting to treating religion as some kind of hodgepodge of "multi-monotheism" with most people adhering to a single God and virtually ignoring the rest. Actual polytheism doesn't work that way.Almost all D&D writers just treat the respective settings' religions as being like modern American monotheistic practices, with the common people choosing a God out of the lineup to devote themselves to, instead of looking into the actual practices of real polytheistic societies like Ancient Greece or Rome to get an idea of what such a religious culture would be like.  Even using the Shinto practices of modern Japan would be a fantastic paradigm for modelling polytheistic/animist religious cultural practices. Instead, we basically just get some kind of assumption that Sunday mornings are filled with all the villaage Lathanderites going to their local church for morning services, while the followers of Tempus go to His church, and the Sharities all go to the undergound Church of Shar for their Evil Church Service, or something.  Where the reality should be that 95% of normal people don't single out any one individual God for devotion and there aren't any Sunday Morning Services with the Priest of Tempus giving his congregation a sermon on the glories of war.  Because, unless you are a devoted member of a specific God's Cult, you would run the risk of offending all of the other Gods.  Only actual Cult members would restrict themselves to a single God, such as Priests, Clerics and Adventurer-types, and even they wouldn't dare to deny the divinity of the other Gods.  But those are people who live in a parallel culture of people who live outside of mainstream society and therefore need to adhere to more mystical, magical principals to survive in a harsh world of magic and monsters and politics.Also, I have always stressed to my players that the priesthoods of Gods are absolutely not made up of all, or even mostly, Clerics.  Clerics should be a definite minority in most religious hierarchies, as they are specifically the militant fighting arm of a Cult, trained in arms, armor, and combat magic; they are most certainly not everyday priests.  And the head of any religious hierarchy should almost definitely never be a member of the Cleric class, unless it is the priesthood of an especially militant religion such as Heironeous or Tempus.  A local Priest of Pelor who manages the village shrine should be someone trained in counseling people and have no Cleric levels, and most likely have no levels in anything (or, in the case of 3rd Edition, have levels in Expert, or perhaps Adept if they were especially well-educated.)  I have always wanted to play a PC who is a Priest of, say, Heironeous, but who is just a Fighter without any Cleric levels.  Having the social position of Priest does not require one to have the profession/class of Cleric.</blockquote>

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