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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3202342" data-attributes="member: 11760">It's helpful to look at what the Commune spell actually says:The entities give you the answer they want to give you.While you're certainly free to make up religions that don't function the way that they have in Earth history and myth, in our world, god figures have NEVER given full clarity as to what's on their omniscient minds, even when their representatives grab some, stick him in a cave and dictate The Truth to them. Even then, The Truth is open to further interpretation and those god-types never seem to swing back around for clarification. Whether you're talking about one of the Big Three Monotheistic Faiths or ancient polytheistic faiths we know from collections of myths, answering questions just isn't what gods do.Now, it could be because they're capricious, it could be because they want to see that faith is guiding the followers to appropriate actions without being led by the hand, it might be that faith isn't qualitatively the same if the worshippers don't have to do any of the intellectual heavy lifting involved, it could be because the gods have other things to do.What they don't do is have operators standing by to help detail everything. Mortals have to figure it out on their own.You lose me on #3. WHY would they be interested in behaving in a way that no gods have ever behaved, in modern religions or ancient myth?Any time the rules force the setting into a pretzel, it's time to bust out Rule Zero. Having gods be at the beck and call of mortal worshippers who can't figure out what fork to eat with without a Commune spell is just such a pretzel. In fact, a cleric breaking out a spell of serious power for such a trivial purpose instead of, you know, actually advancing the faith in a useful fashion, would be in danger of losing access to that spell IMC. Clerics are meant to be active agents in the mortal realm, not customer service representatives.So were the Greek and Norse deities. They didn't behave the way you'd have the gods of Greyhawk act.They're GODS. Yes, they are alien and different. They're not superheroes floating above the planet in a bitchin' orbiting headquarters. They have different things they're worried about than mortals are.I dunno, metaphor? Parable? The ways that polytheistic deities have always informed the way worshippers live their lives?What a strange contention.</blockquote>

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