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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 8754986" data-attributes="member: 2209">Or it is seen as a reasonable, non-toxic approach and is just ruled on.Plenty of people think it is fine to choose your approach based on your build, so an eldritch knight fighter and low wisdom might think a religion skill approach is more effective and so choose that as their characterization approach if they can and run with it.Some will see it as ugly instrumentalism, others will be completely fine with it by focusing on whether the characterization is reasonable and how well done it is.I don't feel the options are that binary.Coherent, but not obligatory to allow it. A DM can reasonably say that charisma checks or intimidate is the skill to influence a person and while athletics lets you bend a bar in front of the person you are trying to intimidate, the actual thing you are going for is not the bent bar but the persuasive impact on the target person.A ton of varying considerations. Fiction is a big one. Tone of play. Are the rules hard or flexible. Does the DM want solid boundaries on supernatural effects or to regularly make judgment calls about what is reasonable supernatural effects to be done. It is a lot easier to make ad hoc judgments about things that would reasonably happen for things we have everyday familiarity with (social interactions, physical things) than for spontaneous magical effects.These are going to vary person to person, and even game to game with the same DM. They might want things to go one way in Conan world but another in Forgotten Realms.I said early on how I run things in my game, I go with the Conan/Eberron no direct evidence of the gods, clerics are essentially spellcasters of specific magical traditions. Anyone can pray, it is not going to have a supernatural effect unless there is more going on.I do this for the themes and tone I want in my game. The PC cleric's cult is dedicated to a specific, non-omnipotent, not-omniscient dragon who exists in the world. I like character's using gods names as curses "Crom!" "Tyr's severed hand!" "Blood and souls for Arioch!" and not asking for divine favor.I have specific DM decisions for my game that supports the game and story and theme and tone I want.I think this is primarily a DM call during the game. The player has stated their action, the DM adjudicates what happens. I think the DM should be primarily thinking about the game as a whole instead of the one player's desires.I agree that stories can be built in many ways. I personally think Conan stories are great. <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=":)" />I am not arguing "that is the wrong action declaration" I am just judging how to adjudicate the declared action.Who knows. I played in one for years where the Melnibonean pantheon was the main one, everybody used euphemisms for the gods in character so that the AD&D demon lord name rules did not come into play. Meerclaw the Neutral goddess of cats was a big PC cleric favorite, and even she can be capricious and cruel and play with her prey, we did not want her showing up unexpectedly.Eberron, has been pretty mainstream and a popular D&D setting for three editions now. It is in the 5e PH. The actual existence of the gods in Eberron is a mystery. Divine magic goes with the mechanical effects, and there are tons of believers in world, but there is no direct evidence of the gods.I think god cosmology varies widely in different D&D games.What literature are you thinking of? Most of the fantasy I read healing is either D&D inspired or is not prayer based. Wheel of Time magical healing is just magic, no prayers involved, for example.A couple things going on here. D&D is big and sprawling with a lot of mechanics and considerations. It is easier to judge on the fly a natural reaction to a social interaction or a physical capability that has familiar real life reference than to judge a reasonable magical effect that is balanced in an open ended magic system. It is easier to use magical mechanics as specific discrete defined effects. In the middle of combat where quick resolution for pacing is important it can slow you down if you have to make an open ended power adjudication. Even if you use say action movie logic for resolving physical things instead of real world physics, that is easier to judge than magical reality defying effects. Magic and powers have implications and it is harder to think through open ended ones than discrete powers. There are story considerations, world logic implications, game power implications. From the player side, discrete effects can be used and relied upon. Open ended stuff is open to DM vagaries, possible favoritism, and things turning out significantly differently than a player expects or wants.There are also matters of individual taste as to how fantastic their games are. Is it real world with some discrete magic? High magic? Fairy tale bendable world rules? Is magic a sharp defined tool or an art.Also this is touching on prayer, so there are some emotions for some in dealing with it as a topic.</blockquote>

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