Religions in D&D

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I have always wondered why most FRPGs shy away from telling us anything about the religions in our game worlds; I mean religion is one of the most powerful forces in the time period our games are set up to 'faux' model, especially in D&D where we have a cleric class. There's not even any good advice on creating them either in the ton of supplements we've got from Paizo, WoTC or any of the others.

These days we are a mainly secular society, putting a pretty big gulf between us and people who lived in the Middle Ages.

People tend to play Medieval Western Europe because we're all basically familiar with it (although we tend to make a lot of mistakes and/or skip things), including being basically familiar with its religion. Moving apart from it (often due to things caused by magic, but even things like economics and guns) simply creates more work. I think a lot of gamers ignore religion simply because it's a detail of the setting, rather than something they're interested in.

I don't think there's a lot of interest among most gamers. This isn't to say there isn't an interest among some gamers, but I doubt it's enough to be profitable.

It doesn't help that many in-game religions seem to have restrictive codes of conduct. If I'm playing a cleric, I want as few such rules as possible. A wizard has fewer restrictions, and even if they lose their power (someone stole their spellbook, for instance) that's clearly covered in the rules. A "clerical code of conduct" (or paladin code of conduct) simply enables a DM and player who disagree to see the player's character disempowered.

We know zero about the rituals of Boccob's church, nadda about followers of Pelors' religious beliefs and ziltch about Garl Glittergold's bizarreness. Why is that? I can't help but feel that this might be political correctness again; after the 'witchhunts' of the 70s and 80s directed at our hobby. Or is it just that the vanilla settings never include this kind of stuff?

Putting aside politics... you're talking about details. In many cases nearly irrelevant details. A while back a similar thread cropped up, where a DM (I presume) was talking about performing rituals when taking a ship out to see, with real costs for not performing the rituals (Umberlee-inspired shark attacks IIRC). This emulates the type of rituals people performed way back when (I think this was inspired by legends of Poseidon)... but is nearly alien to modern thought processes.

It also created in-game issues. How much does the ritual cost (and recall that PCs don't like to spend money on anything but PC gear because of game design issues)? How often do you get attacked? Are these CR-appropriate encounters? Do you get XP for them, and should you deliberately taunt Umberlee? What if you're not evil (Umberlee is) and/or worship another non-sea god?

There's also too many in-game gods, breaking the rule of conservation of detail. There are probably more real-life religions than there are in any setting within D&D, but most of us are only passingly familiar with a few real-life religions. To learn even the basics of a setting's religions takes time and effort, and to learn about the doctrine and dogma takes more.


This is not something I see in a lot of fantasy settings. In A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance, most Westerosi follow "The Seven" and are passingly familiar with the "old gods" of the North. There are some other cultural groups, the Iron Islanders, but you would learn about their religion as you learn about their culture.

This is before we get to the part about rules. Forgotten Realms and the 2e sphere system were famous for making a wide variety of different types of clerics... but at the same time it broke niche protection in a big way. You might have a cleric that is basically a wizard and can't heal, for instance (a death cleric), which makes sense, but in a mechanical sense is not good for the game.

 

[Li Shenron]

I have always wondered why most FRPGs shy away from telling us anything about the religions in our game worlds; I mean religion is one of the most powerful forces in the time period our games are set up to 'faux' model, especially in D&D where we have a cleric class. There's not even any good advice on creating them either in the ton of supplements we've got from Paizo, WoTC or any of the others. We know zero about the rituals of Boccob's church, nadda about followers of Pelors' religious beliefs and ziltch about Garl Glittergold's bizarreness. Why is that? I can't help but feel that this might be political correctness again; after the 'witchhunts' of the 70s and 80s directed at our hobby. Or is it just that the vanilla settings never include this kind of stuff?

For more of my musings on religion in world-building see http://waysider.co.uk/on-belief-in-rpgs/

Well, I don't know what are your expectations about "telling about religions", but I have the 3e Faiths & Pantheons and IMHO it's a great book choc-full of useful information about religions of the Forgotten Realms fantasy setting.

Each major deity gets at least a full page describing the dogmas, cults and relationships with other religions. Minor deities only get half a page, but the text is quite small so that's not as little as it sounds. Honestly I think this is a good starting point. Even several (but not all) its prestige classes work fairly well for adding details on their corresponding religions. The only thing that the book doesn't give you, is a good list of existing temples and NPC in Faerun for each religion.

Eventually there are so many deities in FR, that to squeeze them all into one book still didn't leave more space. I still wonder tho, who the hell really ever used the stats of those deities :/ Each major deity in that book got another full page just for the stats. Some gamers must have lobbied WotC that they wanted deities' stats, but if WotC had avoided that, then each major deity could just have had easily twice as much info. But again, the info therein is quite good IMHO for both a Cleric player and a DM.

 

[pemerton]

This is a topic on which I have fairly strong views.

I think a primary reason why many fantasy RPGs do not put religion front-and-centre is because they do not have the mechanics, nor the broader orientation/approach to play, that would make it front-and-centre.

I think this is related to the "modelling" approach to many fantasy RPG rules - they aim at modelling, in various ways, physical events such as swordfights and lockpicking, and even when they don't model these (eg D&D's hp and AC don't really model very much) they determine outcomes by reference to them.

Whereas nothing in these rules typicaly models either the processes of, or the outcomes of, religious commitment as experienced by the religious person. Hence religious commitment becomes essentially neutralised in play, while mechanistic, physicalistic explanation are foregrounded, either expressly in the rules, or by allusion (as we model luck, for instance, by the generation of random numbers through the rolling of dice - how does this take at all seriously notions of providence, divine fortune and the like?).
[MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] and [MENTION=49017]Bluenose[/MENTION] have mentioned Runequest and Glorantha upthread, which tries to replace physicalistic and mechanistic explanations with mythical ones. (Though I'm personally not sure that RQ's ultra-simulationist mechanics are the best tool for conveying this.) Of versions of D&D, I think 4e goes furthest in integrating religous commitments and religious motivations into players' choices for their PCs, for instance via its distinctive build options for religious characters (even the fact that paladins can wield their weapons with CHA rather than STR takes us closer to the idea of expressing sainthood or divine grace in combat, rather than brute strength powered up by a Bless spell). But there is scope to go a lot further.

 

[pemerton]

I have always wondered why most FRPGs shy away from telling us anything about the religions in our game worlds

<snip>

We know zero about the rituals of Boccob's church, nadda about followers of Pelors' religious beliefs and ziltch about Garl Glittergold's bizarreness. Why is that?

There were bits and pieces of stuff in 2nd Edition: some in the "Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide", and considerably more in the "Complete Priest's Handbook". For 3e/OGL, didn't Green Ronin's "Book of the Righteous" touch on this?

No end of fantasy "religion" has been churned out for D&D and other FRPGs.

<snip>

When Gygax introduced his Greyhawk deities, he had religous elements.

<snip>

So did the annex of Deities and Demigods, and so have many, many other products. (Book of the Righteous is a good one).

I have the 3e Faiths & Pantheons and IMHO it's a great book choc-full of useful information about religions of the Forgotten Realms fantasy setting.

Each major deity gets at least a full page describing the dogmas, cults and relationships with other religions. Minor deities only get half a page, but the text is quite small so that's not as little as it sounds.

Personally, I think this sort of approach to religions - essentialy encyclopedia entries on rituals and dogma - is one of the less engaging ways to bring religion into a fantasy game.

Firstly, it tends to impose a type of "fixedness" on religous belief and practice that is out of line with the reality of human religious experience. New cults and new practices become a focus of play in terms of "How does this differ from orthodoxy" which in turn leads to the question "Who made them do it?", at which point religion just becomes another device for setting up power politics and either investigations or McGuffins. The fact that it's religion rather than, say, dress codes does no particular work.

What is distinctive about religion in a fantasy game, I think, is the way it changes meaning and purpose for the protagonists and antagonists. I think the game becomes more interesting when these distinctive features of religious conviction are able to emerge in play.

It doesn't help that many in-game religions seem to have restrictive codes of conduct. If I'm playing a cleric, I want as few such rules as possible. A wizard has fewer restrictions, and even if they lose their power (someone stole their spellbook, for instance) that's clearly covered in the rules. A "clerical code of conduct" (or paladin code of conduct) simply enables a DM and player who disagree to see the player's character disempowered.

There are a lot of other - and better - mechanical ways to model religous conviction than the classic D&D model of GM arbitration and power-stripping.

The game should be set up so that players who are playing religious characters, and who want to impact the ingame situation, have a reason to adopt approaches that express their convictions. So a paladin should serve better as a vehicle for having such impact when played as valiant, than when played as sneaky. 4e goes some way towards this via its class and power design. But there's plenty of scope for going further.

 

[Bluenose]

There are a lot of other - and better - mechanical ways to model religous conviction than the classic D&D model of GM arbitration and power-stripping.

The game should be set up so that players who are playing religious characters, and who want to impact the ingame situation, have a reason to adopt approaches that express their convictions. So a paladin should serve better as a vehicle for having such impact when played as valiant, than when played as sneaky. 4e goes some way towards this via its class and power design. But there's plenty of scope for going further.

I don't think D&D has ever been a good system for modelling people's convictions and how they impact their actions, at least in terms of this having an effect on the character. Pendragon is good at this in it's own way, and Heroquest does a very good Glorantha in an entirely different way to Runequest. With the latter, a Humakti's Truth rune affinity powers the magic connected to the Truth rune. It also means that if they try to lie they're opposing one of their own abilities, and a reduction in that ability reduces the effectiveness of their magic. With the former, acting in accordance with your religion's tenets increases the traits involved, and there's a mechanical bonus for having those exceed a total - not always the most useful one, to be fair.

 

[pemerton]

Heroquest does a very good Glorantha in an entirely different way to Runequest. With the latter, a Humakti's Truth rune affinity powers the magic connected to the Truth rune. It also means that if they try to lie they're opposing one of their own abilities, and a reduction in that ability reduces the effectiveness of their magic. With the former, acting in accordance with your religion's tenets increases the traits involved, and there's a mechanical bonus for having those exceed a total

I think the use of religious affinities as augments is one of the interesting features of HeroWars/Quest.

I also like ways of framing characters into conflicts where religious consideration and affiliations matter.

 

[TerraDave]

Personally, I think this sort of approach to religions - essentialy encyclopedia entries on rituals and dogma - is one of the less engaging ways to bring religion into a fantasy game.

... at which point religion just becomes another device for setting up power politics and either investigations or McGuffins. The fact that it's religion rather than, say, dress codes does no particular work.

What is distinctive about religion in a fantasy game, I think, is the way it changes meaning and purpose for the protagonists and antagonists. I think the game becomes more interesting when these distinctive features of religious conviction are able to emerge in play.

.

I think thats the point for most games: to keep it in the background, where most gamers want it. The default approach allows it to be opted in as desired: a player can play some kind of priest or pray to something if they want to, or just ignore it, and the DM can have some temple or church be relevant or use religion or mythology in background, but otherwise can also pretty much ignore it.

In fact, I would go so far to argue that for a lot of campaign, the link between divintiy and healing means there is more religion then they would really want, which would be none.

In other games, the DM might be interested in religion as religion, as a church, as a philosophy, and you can do this, but it is some work.

 

[Storminator]

Hmmm. All the setting books I've read have tons of entries on religions. I suppose one could argue about their effectiveness as game aids, but they're pretty omnipresent.

I game in Eberron, and the structure of religion is something that has a pretty big effect on my gaming. We've got a lot of Dark Six, the PCs have made up their own cults, both players and I have made up little "daily rituals", and the game is turning on the Silver Flame and the Becoming God.

PS

 

[Cadence]

Personally, I think this sort of approach to religions - essentialy encyclopedia entries on rituals and dogma - is one of the less engaging ways to bring religion into a fantasy game.

Yes.

Firstly, it tends to impose a type of "fixedness" on religous belief and practice that is out of line with the reality of human religious experience.

That would come in at the very beginning of the set-up for the campaign world though, right?

If the world was one where all of the gods regularly spoke directly to their powerful spell-wielding representatives, and said clergy could call down angels in public then a lot of real world religious experience within a particular faith would be missing. It would be hard to set up a heretical sect or have a theological argument when both sides can get the answer directly. On the other hand, the conflict between faiths might even be worse since it would be harder to not be involved when god does actually appear and tell you to get going.

At the other end, if the deities only speak to worshipers (even spell wielding ones) through usually vague dreams then it seems like it would be easier to have those real world within-faith power struggles and arguments... even among the lawful-good.

It seems like that choice should also have an effect on...

There are a lot of other - and better - mechanical ways to model religous conviction than the classic D&D model of GM arbitration and power-stripping.

The game should be set up so that players who are playing religious characters, and who want to impact the ingame situation, have a reason to adopt approaches that express their convictions. So a paladin should serve better as a vehicle for having such impact when played as valiant, than when played as sneaky. 4e goes some way towards this via its class and power design. But there's plenty of scope for going further.

Is the game better served in these regards by having only ambiguous revelation?

 

[pemerton]

Is the game better served in these regards by having only ambiguous revelation?

You probably won't be surprised that I think the issue is more an "at table, in play" issue than a "fiction of the gameworld" issue.

So I think the issue of ambiguity - and related ideas around player flexibility, player doubt, GM adjudication by increasing the tension rather than dropping the alignment hammer - are important at the table than in the ficiton. So if a group could find a way to approach religion in this way whilst working with clear divine directives in the fiction - eg by giving the relevant player a degree of authority over the relevant backstory - then I don't think "ambiguous revelation" would be required.

I think thats the point for most games: to keep it in the background, where most gamers want it.

<snip>

In fact, I would go so far to argue that for a lot of campaign, the link between divintiy and healing means there is more religion then they would really want, which would be none.

OK, but I was responding to the OP and talking about ways of incorporating religion into play.

If a group didn't care for religion in play, then I wouldn't have thought they would find the "encyclopeida entry" approach that exciting either.