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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 9523195" data-attributes="member: 6796468">Cartoon, Movie, TV show. Anything he could get.Though according to the FBI he spent most of that time snorting cocaine while hooking up with sex workers who he also explicitly vilified in his work... But. Y'know. YMMV. That was also 1980-85, not 1975/76 when the book was being written, formatted, printed, and eventually published.Anyway. The fact that he wrote the foreword means he was more involved in the process than standing around, looking pretty, and snorting blow. It means he was:1) Aware of the work.2) Read the work.3) Wrote for the work.You could certainly argue he didn't do that for all the work (not everything had a Foreword by Gary Gygax, after all), but he was clearly at least tangentially involved with this one.I see this as pure supposition. Dude owned the company and wrote the foreword. Plus he was GARY GYGAX. Though the fact that Jim Ward said he wanted more to the book than it had is also a little telling about how "Uninvolved" he was.Again, this is an ad hominem side-step which ignores the thrust of the actual argument while focusing on semantics.Hey, cool beans! OTHER people can have their own positions and arguments separate from my own. WILD.Anyway, yeah. Both Adonai and Vishnu can both have stats. The point is that they both didn't. Because of the cultural biases of the writers and the time which is kinda the entire -thrust- of my argument.Uh... Yeah, basically?That there's a cultural cognitive bias behind the decision not to include the Tetragrammaton in the book (or in other books) of religious figures because of the expectations that you even carry to this day. That he would be an "Overdeity" and thus undefeatable, for example, since no one could ever be strong enough to fight him.Which is kind of a nice parallel that I don't think you've actually recognized, either...Was it -actually- a business decision, though?Did Rob Kuntz and Jim Ward sit down, stat out Adonai, and then go "This might cause social backlash against WotC. We'd better not." or make it all the way up to Gygax who saw Jesus as a demigod and went "No. We can't do that. We'll get in trouble!"Or was it just not a thing because of a cultural bias to view other people's religions as "Myth" and one's own religion as "Truth"?Hey, I mean, why would it anger the community to have Adonai statted out? According to your Logical Position he would OBVIOUSLY be an overdeity whose stats are so powerful no one could ever hope to defeat him.So why would anyone be angry at having their God presented as the omnipotent and omnipresent undefeatable "Real God" of D&D?Heck. That might've undermined some of the Satanic Panic if they could say "Oh, yeah. There's demons in the game. But God is there to give you the power to fight them. See?" and then open the page to Jesus's blessed statblock.Again, this is a Strawman. I'm not saying they intended anything. I'm saying their persistent cultural bias resulted in them excluding the Tetragrammaton from their book on Gods.I mean, as noted, being able to say "God is a part of this world and is the most powerful entity in existence and directly gives power to his followers to fight against demons and monsters" -probably- wouldn't have hurt their business outright.If anything, it might've resulted in more fundamentalist christians playing the game to be "True Believers" in God and recreating Bible Stories as campaign.Not that they don't do that, today.Okay... but what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?Then why bother to ask when it's utterly irrelevant? Or did you feel it was some kind of "Gotchya" question?No, not really. I've made it incredibly clear from start to finish. Somehow you just haven't gotten the point, yet because you're digging around in the weeds on side-topics and tilting windmills and straw men that have nothing to do with what I've actually stated.Yup. This is a thing. Etymology would say Christian Religion is -also- Mythology, but it wasn't included because of.... c'mon. You can say it...Ideological cultural bias, yup.Yeah, this is not a thing I'm arguing. Never has been.See, here I think is the core of the problem. You're seeing "Blame" I'm saying "This is a thing that occurred and a likely explanation of why."You're looking to deflect "Blame" or other negative statements, where I'm just pointing out historically accurate information referencing what people do and don't consider acceptable for D&D books and why."No one is allowed to criticize or discuss a topic unless they're ideologically pure" probably isn't a good rule-base for a forum which discusses topics...WILD how that works. Also probably shouldn't quote the Bible.You're welcome!AHHHH... So Capital G god -isn't- Mythological. He's REAL. And thus doesn't fit into the book? That's where we're going with this?Okay... so... why make him an Overgod instead of just a Greater Deity? Why make Greater and Lesser Deities instead of just "Gods"? Why not make him an Overgod and just have him be something PC's can't fight but Greater Deities can instead team up on?And follow up: Why not make rules for character apotheosis to include whatever BS reason you 'Can't fight an Overgod'?Uh huh. Surely could've been a bad decision. I'm positing that it was never even -considered- as a possibility.Especially since, later, during the height of the Satanic Panic, they added Satan's stats through Dragon Magazine. Showing that they were aware of it, and actively including Satan in the book. Which kind of feels like shooting yourself in the foot if you're trying to -avoid- controversy about having Demons and Devils in your game, already.Hmm. Seems like that might not be why they made this choice...EXCEPT for one group of Mythological Figures.Which you continue to say would not have been equal for some reason...Oh, that's your reason, there. Also irrelevant.I've written a campaign setting where powerful Water Elementals are "Gods" that players can kill in the world. In the same way that Conan the Destroyer slew Dagoth. Remember him?<img src="https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/monstermovies/images/7/76/Dagoth2.jpg/" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The idea of creating "Greater" deities itself is a political choice which placed the pantheons -in- Gods, Demigods, and Heroes on unequal footing.The only reason to make Adonai into an overdeity is because you choose to as a writer and designer. Any other explanation is Watsonian tosh.Maybe your gods are just designed badly? There's no reason a level 20 character with no epic boons shouldn't be able to fight and kill a god except that the writers don't want them to.Again, there is no logic. There is only the decision making of the writing staff.Cool beans. Could they all have been given 12 hit points, instead, and had parity? Nice. Again, this is not a "Logic" issue. This is the writers deciding to give them however many hit points.And has no bearing on making the Tetragrammaton into an overdeity with 1000hp or 12hp or a billion hp.It's all ideological.All Ideological.Except one. Which is left out due to a cultural bias that has been on display this entire time.Y'know that's a good point. It didn't include the Canaanite deities or the Babylonian ones, either. Nor did it include Zoroastrianism.But since it was the 1970s, those things were all kind of tied up in hard academia and still being heavily researched and studied rather than being something easily distributed to the public (and thus writers like Kuntz). So I'm gonna chalk that up to just not knowing enough about it to really get into it to any serious degree.Neat!It follows an ideological structure, not a logical one. If it were a logical one pretty much all the gods would have a strength of "Nil" since they don't interact with the world or the people in it except when they decide to and have precisely the amount of strength required by the legend they're taking part in.But because the writers are taking mythological religious figures that categorically do not exist and pretending they do for a game they put them into categories and give them values that ultimately only reflect their personal idea of what that god "Should" be.See above response.Worth noting that Satanic Panic started in 1980 and basically resulted in MASSIVE SALES of D&D and D&D Related Materials for nearly 20 years, making it the main name in every household in the US as relates to TTRPGs.So if it would've triggered Satanic Panic 4 years earlier it might've been a good business decision.That said, why would it piss them off, again, to have their God reflected in a game world as, apparently, the single most powerful being in the game?If the answer is "Because he could be killed by player characters." then you're back to dealing with the people who are saying it's a bad thing to have modern religious figures in D&D games for reasons of cultural appropriation.Which is not my argument and not my kettle of fish.</blockquote>

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