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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6224612" data-attributes="member: 1165">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.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.</blockquote>

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