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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8401041" data-attributes="member: 7006">This brings up a point that I personally have never really liked in most of the default ways D&D and tables in general have appeared to run the game... the idea that demons and devils can get "promoted" to become deities.What exactly is so important about beings "gods" that make it the highest level of immortal being out in the cosmos?  And why is every other extraplanar being considered "less than"?  Who made this decision?  Who gets to decide that this is the case?  Who is the ones that actually "promotes" anyone in the first place?Now yes... the true answer to these questions of course is "the designers of Dungeons & Dragons".  The people who write these books and create the fiction we read are the ones who have perpetuated this idea that "gods" are more important than everything else.  So I'm not going to argue that... that answer is the answer and there's nothing I can do about it.But in terms of in-game fiction... "generic" D&D doesn't really have an overbeing such as Ao (from the FR) that is the true tippy-top entity in the cosmos that is the one that determines levels, ranks, power etc of the extraplanar beings that exert influence over the Prime Material Plane.  The kind of entity that would decide that "deities" are the highest rank a creature could be, and then could "promote" a demon or devil to "deity-status".  Because without that... I just bounce off the idea that gods are more powerful than demons and devils as a matter of course, and thus it behooves the game to have "evil" gods to give evil characters someone to pray to.  As others have said... I see no reason why "clerics" couldn't just pray to Mephistopheles or Baphomet to get their divine powers.  (Excluding of course the default baseline out-of-game that the "designers of Dungeons & Dragons" have written it down that Clerics get spells only from deities and Warlocks get spells from everything else-- which again, I can't argue with and thus won't.)At the end of the day it doesn't really matter because people end up just making up what they want for their pantheons anyway.  I know that... so this is all just peeing into the wind.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I just know that my preference would be that it was ONLY the non-deity extraplanar beings that had actual alignments... Archangels  and archons all fell more or less within the Lawful Good sphere (with some variance for individuals here and there)... most Archfey and fey fell within the Chaotic Good sphere (again, with some moving outside of it, like the Queen of Air and Darkness)... Archdevils and lesser devils were mostly Lawful Evil... and Archdemons and their ilk were Chaotic Evil more or less.  And then... over all of these creatures were the True Gods... and NONE of them had alignments whatsoever... because they are above all human understanding and trying to put a morality onto their actions would be ridiculous and folly.  The ocean is not "evil" just like the sun is not "good".  Everything in the world has its positives and negatives, so the deities that personify these aspects of the world should not be defined in that way.  And that way people of all types and moralities can worship and pray and gets spells from whichever gods they darn well please.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Just my preference.</blockquote>

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