Quote from: Ratman_tf;1129228What loot does God drop? Probably fishes and loaves.

Well buckets of XP for a start.  Just be careful of them respawning!

Quote from: Shasarak;1129233Well of course Scientology is more rigorous and foundational, it is based on Science!

Especially the part about Xenu and aliens being chained to volcanoes on earth and then blown up to pieces with nukes 75 million years ago!

I'm pretty sure it's sarcasm but I couldn't resist

Quote from: Jaeger;1129222Just because you may know that a particularly powerful being exists -that does not mean that you believe them to be a god/gods.





It's only possible because the of way D&D designers have set up the settings pantheon to be utterly ridiculous itself.

Scientology is a more rigorous and foundational system upon which to base one's beliefs that the pantheon of Faerun.

Religious pantheons in D&D are a prime examples of fictional "religions" created by irreligious people based upon how they think religious people believe/act.

Greetings!

*Laughing* That's so fucking true, Jaeger! I agree entirely. I have for a long time felt the same way. The designer's whole envisioning of religions, and how religious people think, believe, and view the divine, and the world as well, is often mind-boggling, and gives me fits. There was a time I would get really exercised about how stupid their presentations of religion was, before gradually just giving up entirely on them having any kind of genuine skill and solid philosophical and theological imagination. Irreligious people is damned right, my friend. Their stupidity and gross simplicity and over-simplification, and just WTF isms of how they design religions and present religious faith can get obnoxious.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK;1129241Greetings!

*Laughing* That's so fucking true, Jaeger! I agree entirely. I have for a long time felt the same way. The designer's whole envisioning of religions, and how religious people think, believe, and view the divine, and the world as well, is often mind-boggling, and gives me fits. There was a time I would get really exercised about how stupid their presentations of religion was, before gradually just giving up entirely on them having any kind of genuine skill and solid philosophical and theological imagination. Irreligious people is damned right, my friend. Their stupidity and gross simplicity and over-simplification, and just WTF isms of how they design religions and present religious faith can get obnoxious.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

It's not the irreligious part that makes it bad tho, it's the lack of empathy and imagination.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1129209Now those are games I would love to hear more about! The first is close to my preconception of the gods/demons requiring worship/sacrifice as sustenance or risk dying.

And the second just sounds so... Unique, in the best way possible.

Thanks, the first campaign involved high elves that sailed into the world on ships woven of starlight to fight their eternal foes the trolls who had raised up an island pentegram with five volcanos.  The high elves are not properly atheists, it's just that they believe themselves to be gods and everyone else is just a pretender.  The demons are the bound gods of the trolls trapped in the hell spikes far above the earth in the great darkness beyond the stars.  For each hell spike there is a hell seed which can be awakened by a single drop of blood and bring hell raining down from the heavens.

In the second campaign, the gods were gesalt beings forged by covenants writen on their flesh in liquid fire.  Vast hosts of people merged into singular beings, not content to worship gods but desiring to be fully part of their gods.  And these made war in the heavens on the primal elementals, the titans and won a great victory casting the burning ones into one heap which is called the sun and the air, earth, and water into another.  They walked upon this earth and created man to break it up and tear it down and leach the very life from the bones of the earth.  But the titans gave birth to creatures of their own which seek to destroy men and restore their creators.  Then the gods rose from the earth and set watch in godsholm to watch and wait for the last sparks of life to pass from the earth.  In time, some elves became corrupted and made alliance with men to elevate themselves above their kin and the races were sundered.  In the lands where the gods walk is the great road which is soft under foot and hard under hoof and wagon wheel.  It runs straight and true, flat and level over rivers and through mountain ranges a thousand miles square it marks the boundaries of the high kingdom where the gods are still worshiped and godsholm is ever visible in the night sky.

I have no comment on Pathfinder - I'm only barely familiar with it.

But the religion and atheism within game-worlds can be fascinating stuff. I approve a variety of approaches. The standard pseudo-polytheist in D&D is boring mostly because it's a backdrop that isn't explored.

I've had some pretty interesting characters in the HarnWorld setting - which has a polytheist set of religions with a little more flavor baked into them. There are real schisms even within churches ostensibly devoted to a single god. Priests have powers, but those are seen as a product of their devotion, and the gods don't take an active hand in running the churches. So, for example, I had an Agrikan priest who publicly was part of the primary church -- but was secretly devoted to a splinter sect, The Order of Eight Demons. He had genuine faith and devotion to a god often seen as the evil god, and was ruthless himself but also had some key ethical values.

From the view that powers come from devotion and organization, rather than from the god directly, it's possible to have splinter sects.

I don't have a problem with atheist paladins. Stuff that's more peculiar rather than the boring standard can be good. The original paladins were the peer of Charlemagne's court -- including a spell-casting enchanter. The original D&D paladin was purely Christian-themed, which was peculiar since the setting didn't include Christianity. I don't see paladins as inherently being religious first and foremost -- I see them as being heroic and chivalric knights. I think a sneaky, underhanded paladin of a trickster god / animist cult would be more against the mold -- despite genuine faith in their deity -- compared to a heroic and chivalric knight who isn't religious.

I could see a few approaches to a non-religious paladin. One would be a paladin devoted to a non-religious cause that granted powers, but didn't have a deity or religion associated. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they are imbued with powers and given a purpose -- but there is no conception of a deity or organized religion behind that power.

Alternately, I could picture a world with deities, where a deity selects a champion and imbues them with powers -- even though the person themselves doesn't have any devotion to or faith in the deity. This is similar but distinct, because the deity is putting trust and faith in that person, rather than demanding obedience and service. I think that sort of a character could be interesting.

The problem is the word "paladin". That's why I prefer "champion" and the champion can exist for most any god. That was the cool part of multi-classing. As a champion of a trickster god, my PC would be a cleric-thief and away we went.

As for atheism in fantasy, that's cool in settings with no gods who interact with the setting. I've had PCs who rejected the gods in a setting, but it gets odd when the cleric keeps chucking out spells.

In Planescape, there was the Sign of One where you could worship yourself as a god. I had a super fun with a Gully Dwarf Cleric who KNEW he was the only true god in the universe and even convinced monsters to back off because the universe would end if he ever died. So much fun. I prayed to myself and got spells every day! What more proof of my divinity would you need?

As for Paizo, don't expect anything sensible or non-agenda driven from that crapass company.

Also find standard D&D religion really boring. It actually lacks so many aspects of real life religion that makes it interesting. All of the various beliefs, the schisms, the relationships with non-believers, the rituals, the holidays, religious canons, taboos and prohibitions. Religion is so much more than worshipping a fire god to fire powers. Morality is so much more than the alignment axis. In some ways, the certainty that is assumed in D&D religion makes it less interesting. Having mystery as a part of religion allows for a lot of interesting interactions. People of different religions can debate what is the truth, different priests within the same religion can argue what the will of god(s) is, etc.

How can such mystery exist in a world where priests have supernatural powers? Well, I suppose for one thing, most priests shouldn't have supernatural powers. A priest is an expert, not the cleric class. A cleric is more like a saint, a legendary individual who is granted powers by their deity. Or are they?

Paladins and clerics both should have religions, but not necessarily deities. They must be devoted to some supernatural force or principle which grants them supernatural abilities. It shouldn't have to be a polytheistic god, but it should be something. The essence of role playing a paladin or cleric isn't the powers, it is the devotion to something higher than themselves.

Can someone be an atheist in such a world? I don't know, it depends on how one defines atheism. Obviously, supernatural beings exist. A atheist in real life could view an alien with vast knowledge and abilities beyond any human, though there would be no special requirement to worship that creature. With standard religion, a deity isn't just something more powerful than ourselves, it is a being with moral significance not merely great knowledge or abilities. In pagan religions there were being of great power, titans or giants for example, who rivaled the gods but were unworthy of worship. Could someone like in a D&D setting and extend this thinking to all of the deities?

I think with fantasy world religions, we need to be careful not to assume that the people who live in that world don't have access to the player's handbook. For them, magic and religion should both be wondrous and mysterious.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1129180In your game you can houserule whatever, but, according to the mechanics of the game there are churches to worship the gods, why?

And clerics and paladins need to follow a code or loose their divine powers.

It's not that clear in all cases. For over a decade, the D&D Eberron setting has featured a world where nobody--not even powerful outsiders (e.g., solars)--have actually seen the gods' faces or heard the gods voices. Still, divine magic is present in the faithful...even those that follow very different interpretations of what their deity "wants" them to do. They don't lose their powers for going rogue (though the mortal institutions of their religions are likely to censure them).

Quote from: Shasarak;1129233I am not sure that is right.  I get the impression that Ed Greenwood knew what he was writing up and then the people who came in after especially us dear readers dont appreciate the context of living in such a world.

I don't get that impression at all. Religions involve creation stories, myths, dogma, practices, and so forth. If we go back to the gray box, there's basically no religion at all, just a listing of gods. We do eventually get some of that, in the context of things like the Avatar Trilogy and the specialty priests of Forgotten Realms Adventures, but they're still focused on the gods as singular entities worshiped individually as little pseudo-monotheistic deities, and not on a coherent pantheon or an overarching religion. And even if we blame the lack of religion in the FRCS on Grubb, and go back further to all those Dragon magazine articles Greenwood wrote, there's still an almost complete absence of anything divine. Greenwood loved writing about warriors and magic, not gods and miracles.

One thing that could be really useful, from a game standpoint, is defining the limits of gods, at least from the perspective of the PCs. What are the limits of their knowledge, when it comes to things like commune? What exactly does contact other plane put you in touch with? What can I learn from summoning a demon? The DM can leave the ultimate questions uncertain or unknowable, but it helps to define how they interface with the game mechanics. This can vary from campaign to campaign.

It's also useful to have some idea how religion works, overall. How often do gods meddle, and what remedies do people have? The default is to assume intervention is rare, but that's just modern prejudices. I can imagine a really fun game based on something like Homer, where the gods intervene constantly. The trick would be to quantify it, so the players can notice the signs and respond effectively, not to treat it as a deus ex machina (despite the name) they have no control over. Maybe they're mostly interested in name-level characters, and their hand can be deduced by omens, which might be divinable by spells, proficiencies, or seers. Also, how does appeasement work, what can people expect from their patrons, and so on. Think about it both at the PC and the campaign level, so the players know what they can do, and have some idea how to interpret the examples they run across.

Quote from: Vidgrip;1129169This is one of the reasons I really enjoy Fantasy AGE.  There are no mechanics that rely on active gods and no character class for cleric, much less paladin.  That is possible because it has no default setting with active gods.  There can still be religions in a GM's setting and of course those religions require clerics as administrators and may have holy warriors to defend them.  But if any of those people want magic, they have to learn the same spells that the wizards use.  Even that does not preclude real and active gods if you want to add them.  They simply aren't required in a system that has good, flexible mechanics.

If you choose a setting with real and active gods you should certainly validate it with clerics and paladins who properly honor those gods, so I understand why people are disappointed in the new Golarion.

Nail, Head ETC.  This is one of the reasons I absolutely adore Fantasy AGE.  DnD 3.5 and its derivatives have this problem where the game comes with all sorts of baked-in assumptions about your world which cannot be corrected without gutting and re-writing core classes.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1129195If you know such beings exist you don't need to believe jack shit. Plus Faith (religious faith) is the belief lacking evidence or even in the face of evidence against.

   No.

   Faith is belief in something based on an authority judged to be trustworthy, but without knowledge that compels the mind's assent.

The GURPS Fantasy setting Banestorm has always been interesting in that it has medival Catholcism and Islam complete with internal factions and disputes but the setting itself is largely agnostic.  There are demons though the way the races are set up as having homeworlds they were torn from by the banestorm indicates demons are probably in the same boat and may even be from the same world as centaurs, chimeras, and satyrs came from.  The fourth edition softens the agnosticism in light of things like the Blessed advantage but at the root of it, nobody gets magic from their diety.  Priests are an educated class and those with the talent might learn some spells if their order approves of such things but magic is magic.

In D&D they just game you the pantheons. The rest was up to the DM to make of it whatever they wanted. Its presented blank for a reason. Sadly way too many missed the point.

As for atheists. That one is actually kind of easy. The person follows a demon or some other entity that while not a god, does grant clerical power. Thats actually fairly common in D&D with this or that cutist clerics. Why not cultist paladins?

Also in AD&D the gods themselves actially did not grant most of a clerics power. They used tiers if intermediaries and only got hands on when a cleric accessed the top end magic.

Or you might have like in BX where power could come just from conviction, inner virtue or lack thereof, etc.