D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[Lanefan]

You'd have to change the fundamental assumptions about the D&D pantheons, though. Even then, you still couldn't commit or pretend at idolatry. Your PC could I suppose, but not you the player. Even those gods with names mirroring real world mythologies don't mirror them exactly and don't pretend to be those real world gods. Ares the D&D god of war is not the Ares of the real world Greek mythology. He's just an approximation that doesn't try to be a real world god. A player can't be an idolater by pretending to follow a non-god.

I was referring to in-character idolatry. What the real-world players do is up to them.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I was referring to in-character idolatry. What the real-world players do is up to them.

But what if my character is, in-game, roleplaying his own character who is worshiping gods not recognized as real in the setting. Would that be second-level idolatry, I guess?

Or, even more intriguingly, what if my character's character worships a real-world (Earth) deity, but that deity is considered fictional within the game world?

 

[pemerton]

it's pretty strongly implied there that we have polytheistic worlds right out of the gate.

Even Moldvay Basic states:

Clerics are humans who have dedicated themselves to the service of a god or goddess

And Acolytes are listed in the monster section as having any alignment.

Again, I'm completely baffled where this notion of monotheism comes from and how 5e is somehow different than pretty much anything that came before.

Being dedicated to the service of a god or goddess permits polytheism. But it doesn't imply it. In the first ever Moldvay Basic game I GMed, one of the PCs was a cleric, and while I don't remember much about the details of that game, I don't think we ever thought of the religious/cosmological situation of the game as being polytheistic. And as I posted upthread, polytheistic clerics give rise to the inevitable question - why is the cultist of [the Rat God; the god of forest ponds; etc] wearing mail and wielding a mace just like a mediaeval holy warrior?

Yes, there are evil as well as good clerics (and potentially neutral ones too, though not originally in AD&D) - but the implication in early D&D can easily be drawn that these cultists draw their power from dark "gods" who are really demons etc.

While I believe invoking Tolkien in these discussions is pretty much analogous to Godwinning a thread, I'd point out that in the Hobbit and the LotR, religion plays pretty much zero part in the fiction. There are no priests, no churches, and, AFAIK, zero mention of any religion whatsoever. Granted the Similarian changes this and adds to it, but, if your knowledge of Middle Earth comes from the first two works, it wouldn't be hard to think that Middle Earth is pretty much godless. It's not monotheistic.

There is no organised religion portrayed in the Hobbit or LotR. But it is not godless. Someone sent the Istari to Middle Earth, and then sent Gandalf back. And Gandalf confronts the Balrog with the words "I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor". These are religious allusions, although one needs to go to the Silmarillion to get any detailed sense of what they are allusions to.

the DM is the arbiter of the setting, and the non-player beings in it. If the divine gets involved in the game, it will be the DM making the decisions as to what happens.

This may be true of some games. It may even by typical of all games. But it is not universal.

In the games I run, the GM doesn't make all the decisions about the actions of the divinities. A good chunk of that is determined by the players of PCs who serve various gods.

plenty of people worship a monothoistic deity, but if they're deeply religious it doesn't matter whether D&D replaces their deity with one different fictional deity or multiple fictional deities

As long as it's not their deity it's idolatry to them

I don't think Yaarel agrees with this at all, judging from this post:

Do I want a monotheistic campaign setting? The short answer is, yes.

<snip>

In a monotheistic game setting, the Divine normally intervenes only subtly and indirectly, because, the Divine desires humans to make the world a better place by means of human effort. The risk to humans is real. The good that humans do is real. Normally God is hidden. God is most ‘visible’ when other humans are doing good things. In other words, if the DM wants to supply the team with help via some NPCs or items whose opportune timing is ‘miraculous’, that can be fine and fun. But in terms of actual game rules, monotheism is part of the background flavor without any need for mechanical rules.

As I read it, Yaarel thinks that the way to incorporate monotheism into the game isn't by making up an (imaginary, therefore false) divinity, but by allowing the essence of the divine to be expressed in in-game events in just the same way as (a monotheist of a certain type believes) the divine essence expresses itself in real-world events.

I don't want to push the theory of divinity any further, for board rule reasons. But assuming I've properly understood Yaarel's approach, I can see at least two implications for game play arising out of it:

(1) Maybe there are no clerics - or perhaps clerics get reconfigured as a species of wizard; but any character can, via his/her actions, reveal the divinity at work in the world. So there is no special category of persons ("clerics") who are uniquely able to do this.

(2) The GM can't have the unique authority to determine the ingame significance of particular events occurring; and nor can players be obliged to see the roll of the dice as modelling nothing about the gameworld but the random chaos of a cold, indifferent cosmos. This latter approach is a good fit for a Conan-esque game, in which the world is cold and indifferent and humans must make their own fortune through self-assertion (of the sort that Conan excels at). But in a game of the sort Yaarel describes, it has to be open to a player to understand an ingame event which - mechanically - may be the result of a random die roll as expressing, in the fiction, the workings of divine providence.​

The games I GM tend to exemplify (2) - I see this as a necessary condition for the RPGing of a truly faithful character to be viable - but not (1), and so they wouldn't satisfy Yaarel's desire for a monotheistic game. (Assuming I've understood that desire correctly.)

 

[pemerton]

I don't see the challenge of creating a monotheistic campaign in D&D 5e. You pick the domain that best represents the deity (e.g. the default Life cleric). The other domains could represent aspects of the deity. They could represent patron saints for this deity. They could be other divine servants, such as angels (or devils). They could represent cults, sects, and other schisms. And just because there is only one deity (as per your world), maybe that is not the only way to gain divine power. Or maybe people don't know there is only one, but are convinced that everyone else is following some other dark deity.

See my post just upthread of this one for my attempt to explain what I believe [MENTION=58172]Yaarel[/MENTION] takes to be the challenge.

If a deeply pious person does not feel comfortable roleplaying someone who exists in a polytheistic setting, one likely would wonder how they survive consuming any fictional/imagined worlds that exist in modern media.

There may be a difference between reading about false gods and pretending to be a person who worships such a thing.

 

[Hussar]

Being dedicated to the service of a god or goddess permits polytheism. But it doesn't imply it. In the first ever Moldvay Basic game I GMed, one of the PCs was a cleric, and while I don't remember much about the details of that game, I don't think we ever thought of the religious/cosmological situation of the game as being polytheistic. And as I posted upthread, polytheistic clerics give rise to the inevitable question - why is the cultist of [the Rat God; the god of forest ponds; etc] wearing mail and wielding a mace just like a mediaeval holy warrior?

Yes, there are evil as well as good clerics (and potentially neutral ones too, though not originally in AD&D) - but the implication in early D&D can easily be drawn that these cultists draw their power from dark "gods" who are really demons etc.

True, but, being in service to "a" god, certainly implies polytheism. If you have "a" god, and not "the" god, you can very easily have multiple gods. And the fact that you can be in service to "a god or goddess" strongly implies that both exist simultaneously and that you choose one or the other to be in service to.

In any case, that line is hardly the only piece of evidence. The fact that EVERY SINGLE D&D setting has been polytheistic since day 1 (was Blackmoor polytheistic - there was a later City of the Gods module, so, I guess so). Arguing that D&D has ever supported a monotheistic set up is ignoring virtually every single publication for the past forty or so years.

 

[pemerton]

True, but, being in service to "a" god, certainly implies polytheism.

But that is the word used in the book. It's not necessarily the word used by the people of the gameworld. It leaves open that, in my campaign, when you choose "a" god for your cleric you can only choose the god that exists in that world.

Arguing that D&D has ever supported a monotheistic set up is ignoring virtually every single publication for the past forty or so years.

I think that classic D&D - with its holy warriors in the form of clerics and paladins, and its demon-worshipping cultists in the form of anti-clerics/evil high priests and (perhaps) anti-paladins - makes it trivially easy to play a setting with miracle-working servants of the divinity who oppose cultists and sorcerers who get their magic from dark spirits.

ICE's Middle Earth RPG, which has a class list fairly similar to D&D's, uses more-or-less this set-up in its incorporation of clerics into its version of Middle Earth.

It's only when you get to 2nd ed, and all these specialty priests become a major thing, that the mechanics of the game make it hard to make the gameworld non-polytheistic (without ignoring or cutting all that stuff).

(And just for completeness: I don't think the sort of "monotheistic" classic D&D I'm describing would at all answer [MENTION=58172]Yaarel[/MENTION]'s concerns, for the reasons I posted not far upthread.)

 

[Aldarc]

See my post just upthread of this one for my attempt to explain what I believe [MENTION=58172]Yaarel[/MENTION] takes to be the challenge.

There may be a difference between reading about false gods and pretending to be a person who worships such a thing.

What challenge is here? Does the player actually believe in the existence of these false gods? If not, then they cannot possibly believe in their efficacy nor should it be a violation of their piety, though here I am presuming a Judeo-Christian framework. I'm sorry but any hypothetical person who believes that roleplaying a fictionalization character worshipping transparently fictionalized deities in a fictionalized world violates the player's theology would be clearly operating from misconceptions of both biblical text and religious traditions.

 

[Lanefan]

But what if my character is, in-game, roleplaying his own character who is worshiping gods not recognized as real in the setting. Would that be second-level idolatry, I guess?

Or, even more intriguingly, what if my character's character worships a real-world (Earth) deity, but that deity is considered fictional within the game world?

Demetrios1453: professional digger of rabbit holes.

A sub-game within the game...interesting concept. Tried it once, sort-of: my party found a room in a dungeon with a gaming setup - board, maps, minis, dice, etc. - and when the first PC sat in the "DM's chair" I put down my screen and said to the player's complete shock: "Well done. You're the DM now - have at 'er!". So after a bit of set-up he ran us through one module (Tomb of Horrors, natch) using the pre-gens; and when that ended I took back the helm and we picked up the main game right where we'd left off...and the PCs noticed the maps and minis etc. had changed to suit the sub-game we'd just played.

We didn't get too deep into religious or metaphysical stuff in that one, however.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

It's only when you get to 2nd ed, and all these specialty priests become a major thing, that the mechanics of the game make it hard to make the gameworld polytheistic (without ignoring or cutting all that stuff).

This doesn't parse. Did you mean to say it's hard NOT to make the gameworld polytheistic?

A few people in here have mentioned that Clerics to different deities in 1e all had the same spell lists, etc. I see this as simply an unfortunate limitation imposed by practical considerations such as page count in the books - if every deity had its own specific spell list for its Clerics (which in theory would be ideal!) it'd go on forever!

One thing that could have been done much more easily, or at least waved at, is the idea of deity-specific variants (DSVs) on some spells. I don't remember the Greyhawk deities but if there's, say, a deity of fire then some DSVs for that deity could be that Wall of Fire has a longer duration but Create Water is not available. So, no new spells, just a short list at the end of each one's write-up indicating any DSVs that apply to it. This probably would have had to wait until Unearthed Arcana, however, as the deities list wasn't really solidified when the original PH came out.

Lan-"still wondering how one deity can properly cover all 9 alignments"-efan

 

[pemerton]

This doesn't parse. Did you mean to say it's hard NOT to make the gameworld polytheistic?

Yes. Edited.

still wondering how one deity can properly cover all 9 alignments

In the monotheistic conception, anti-clerics and evil high priests don't get their powers from god. They are sorcerers who get power from dark spirits (as is alluded to in Tolkien - sorcerers who wield power conferred by Sauron or Melkor).