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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7156206" data-attributes="member: 42582">The difference seems fairly clear to me: the various campaign books, which are full of information about the campaign world, tell us that there are multiple deities. That is, they present polytheism as a fact about the world.I guess it would be possible to treat the campaign guide as, in fact, a religous tract written by a particular adherent. But that's not how D&D campaign guides are presented. (Compare, say, Glorantha, which does present the cosmology from various ingame perspectives, and so does not settle theological disputes in the voice of the impersonal, factual, third person narrator.)And I'm equally confident that classic D&D, with clerics and paladins wearing heavy armour and wielding heavy weapons, and performing miracles most of which have a fairly obvious provenance in real-world traditions, makes it trivially easy to run the game as implicitly monotheistic. Even moreso when anti-clerics and evil high priests are treated as foul sorcerers and traffickers in demons (with their spells that animate the dead, inflict injury and death, cause darkness, etc).It's only the change to spheres of clerical magic, domains, specialty priests etc that makes this harder. Which is why I, at least, would single out later editions.Well clearly there are real-world beliefs about the ability of dark spirits to grant magical powers which don't involve attributing the status of god-hood to those spirits. I am envisaging that one would understand anti-clerics and evil high priests (and the dark spirits that empower them) through the same sort of lens. I agree with this. In my 4e game, I handle it in an informal way: because 4e is quite relaxed/flexible in respect of improvisation, the contrasts between power sources and their origins, the ingame meaning of dice rolls or power expenditure, etc, it is fairly easy to allow the narration of outcomes to encompass divine phenomena (if that seems appropriate to the player or the GM) even when the character involved is not wielding the divine power source.I think approaches to D&D that take a stricter view of the things that 4e is relaxed about, though, probably make the issue harder to smooth over via informal devices.</blockquote>

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