NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6113040" data-attributes="member: 4937">???  Well, I guess that's that then.  pemerton has spoken.  Err.... oh never mind.  I've no more desire to argue the meaning of words like 'can't', 'believe', and 'monarchy' with you, and I think I've proved my points well enough just through all the contortions you are going through here.   But one last one...Even if that was true, and I'd advise you to look to things like 'The Magicians' by Lev Grossman and 'His Dark Materials' by Phillip Pullman for counter examples that I think show that regardless of the cosmological framework those questions of whether the judgment of the gods is unquestionable can still be put into play, I don't think I've ever encountered a game of D&D in 30 years that was monotheistic or even dualistic in cosmological fact.  All were unvaryingly loosely based on (usually European) polytheism and all presented deities which - to the extent that there are stories about those gods and they matter within the campaign - are in their mythic conceptions and activities the equivalent to the Olympians in moral fallability.  For example, in probably the best known published D&D setting, the story of the Gods that is most well known to the players is that the were judged morally deficient by the auditors of the divine, and it is revealed that many are former mortals and fallable therefore in every sense.  This is the confusion that I spoke of.  What you have in mind seems to be less a natural consequence of D&D play, than at best assumptions about D&D play based on a small number of incidents or some other such thing.  My point being that, even if you want to quibble with this post, even once I've got you to concede that "Well, yes, for the purposes of Poseidon, these things don't stop a campaign dead even by my standards.", we've pretty much proven the point that all of your claims about moral investigation being impossible by any other framework than what you've been espousing are out of play.  And it's not like Poseiden himself wasn't right there in the orginal Dieties and Demigods rulebook.  Having a natural definition of 'true king' as it is normally defined in law and heroic fantasy doesn't prevent us exploring a story about a true king (or someone that for some reason thinks he is a 'true king') that doesn't have his rightful throne.  Beyond that, I'm tired of arguing.</blockquote>

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