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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7960353" data-attributes="member: 18">I think there are two things going on here myself.One is that these whole pantheon situations seem to be extremely ill-thought-through, confused, and conflicting, even within editions. I won't go into the whole deal, but basically every setting has "The gods adventurers might care about", which is very distinct from the gods people have actually cared about, historically. The fertility and health gods may exist but frequently get short shrift, which is er, unlikely. There's also a distinct lack of "In charge" gods. Sometimes someone is nominally head of the pantheon, or vaguely Zeus/Odin/etc. like but they're typically not strongly in charge (this is a bit less true in demihuman pantheons. This links to my next point.Two, D&D originates from the US, a strongly religious country (compared to say, Northern Europe). A significant proportion of pre-1990s D&D players were firm in their various faiths. I think this has lead to what the OP mentions in passing, which is the lack of "good guy Asmodeus" or the like, because if you had a trans-setting good guy god, and particularly if they were either also the head of pantheon, or not connected to a pantheon, that starts looking a bit like an Abrahamic god in the way Asmodeus often looks like the Abrahamic devil. So I think we have a surprising lack of stress on traditionally important "father-figure/protector" gods and pantheon heads, and a lack of "free agent" or trans-setting good guy gods because of this, because people naturally shy away from that. Not for "OMG HERESY!" reasons, indeed I think that's not a big deal, but rather because people didn't want to do something that might be offensive to them, or to others.I hope it's okay to say this and it doesn't fall under "no politics, no religion", because the religion is kind of immaterial (and is not being denigrated nor promoted), it's more how people negotiated the culture around this. I do think thought that it is important part of why the D&D has generally not had that sort of deity, and where it has the creators of those settings have sometimes discussed how this is an expression of or relation to their personal faith. If it is an issue, happy to delete these paragraphs (or for a mod to do so), but I feel it's impossible to correctly answer this point the OP raises without reference to this:There's also the "Bad Dad" issue, which is entirely different one, which I think also accounts for some lack of father-figure gods (relative to real life), in that a lot of D&D players historically have been young men, and it's probably fair to say that more young men aged, say, 14-24 have some rebellion/father figure issues to work out, than do not, so father-figure/protector gods get less play from that angle as well.Re: Demihuman deities I think an awful lot of that comes down to concept-fatigue on the part of setting creators. Rather than people having some strong, intentional idea that all Dwarves or all Elves worship the same gods, trans-setting, I think what happens is, creators work out a unique or adjusted pantheon for humans, and then they're like "Ugh all the demihuman races need one too?! Um how about they just use the default one for their race!", or something along those lines.</blockquote>

Verification