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Originally Posted by Frozen_Feet
6) "God needs prayer badly" - recently I've started to feel that the idea of gods being dependant of worship has become somewhat overused in fantasy settings. More than that, most don't think too deeply of how this actually works, which causes it to run head first into many of the same logic problems as point 1).
To summarize my feelings on this, it's okay with me if a god eats its worshippers or gets some other tangible benefit from them. Once it's something ill-defined and abstract that grants them their powers, it raises the question of how can they be powerful enough to be called "gods" in the first place.
I agree that this is overused, though it's the least of several evils; you really should come up with some reason gods grant people power, and since making it a symbiotic relationship is the easiest way to do it and gods being powered by worship is allows gods to remain mostly offscreen as opposed to e.g. them eating worshipers, "gods need prayer badly" can be preferable to the alternatives.
I have seen a take on it that I like, however: Gods' power depends on the prevalence and prominence of things in their portfolio. The more fire there is in the world and the more the metaphysical concept of fire is invested with significance, for instance, the more powerful a god of fire is. Gods only care about and oversee their worshipers and churches to the extent that they spread their portfolios and thus maintain and increase their patrons' power; Olidammara doesn't care about Joe the Adventuring Rogue because Joe makes sure to say his prayers every night, he cares about Joe because every time Joe steals something the prevalence of thievery increases Olidammara's power by a minuscule amount, and if Joe steals enough stuff for his community to see thievery as a major problem the increased prominence of thievery in the public consciousness increases Olidammara's power as well. It's almost animism/shamanism writ large.
This helps explain some common setting features. Gods of adventuring-relevant things like war, magic, and nature are more prevalent than gods of non-relevant things like fertility, trade, and craftsmanship because (A) the servants of war, magic, and nature are more powerful and thus better able to advance their portfolios, (B) a broader portfolio (e.g. nature > the harvest) means more power for the god, and (C) tons of creatures are part of nature and fight things with magic, but a much smaller subset of creatures (intelligent, civilized humanoids) really care about having kids, haggling in the marketplace, or making tools. Racial deities exist and only accept clerics of their race because granting power to members of that race gives the best expenditure of power-to-advancement of portfolio ratio, and empowering a creature within their portfolio is better than empowering one not within it. And so on and so forth.
But yeah, if I never see another "Praying really really hard makes your god more powerful" setting it'll be too soon,.
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Originally Posted by historiasdeosos
3. ^ Although it does make sense if gods are concrete, confirmable entities. But I don't care for this because it saps all the mystery out of the world. If you know with 100% certainty that gods are watching and evaluating you, and will cast you into the Abyss for eternity if you do bad things, no one except the extremely mentally ill would do anything worse than petty theft.
4. People worshiping evil gods for the sake of evil. Real people might worship an evil god for power or desperation, but no one does it "for the evulz". I sort of feel like this is related to the inherent silliness of the alignment system (see #10). It smacks of laziness and results in over-the-top, Card-Carrying Villains.
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Originally Posted by sktarq
12. Obvious alignment. If the abyss, hell etc are real and the place where people go when they die, and people through magic or what not KNOW this then why would anyone risk it? It directly follows that evil for evil makes even less sense in a world where this is true. Evil has to attract it followers who presumably make most of their choices at least somewhat rationally. I mean people don't wake up and choose to BE EVIL anywhere but in comics and BADLY written RPG's as far as I can see.
I see this complaint a lot, and I think it's a side effect of living in a culture that sees things from a monotheistic perspective. People being "cast into the Abyss for doing bad things" doesn't happen in D&D, at least not with that value judgment attached, and people don't do things "for the evulz" any more than they do them for the good...ulz.
If you're good, do lots of good things in life, and follow the teachings of a good god, you're sent to a Good afterlife as a reward. If you're evil, do lots of evil things in life, and follow the teachings of an evil god, you're sent to an Evil afterlife as a reward. That's the key thing to remember: evil people are judged by their evil patrons, not good gods. People who love slaughtering innocents and inferiors all day find the Abyss as rewarding as someone who loves working with math and logic all day finds Mechanus rewarding. If you're lawful good and follow a lawful good god and don't act lawful good enough, you're not sent to the Abyss, that's where chaotic evil people go. You still go to Celestia, it's just that people who try being lawful good and suck at it become lantern archons or merge with the plane itself instead of becoming a more powerful outsider or serve their god more or less as-is.
The demons and devils aren't lying when they tell you that sacrificing things to them is the easy path to Phenomenal Cosmic power, they just neglect to mention that if you want to start out in the Abyss as the torturer rather than the torture-ee when you die, you need to be really really evil, or you get to be a lemure or mane because you suck at being evil. Petty theft and manslaughter are worse crimes for an evil person to commit than grand theft airship and first degree murder, because it shows a lack of commitment to their ideals. And the fact that people can just phone up the Powers with
commune and
contact other plane and have them explain that, yep, evil gods reward evil behavior only provides more justification for evil people to be evil, not justification for them to repent.
So you shouldn't be trying to convert to a good religion no matter what, you should find the religion that matches your goals and outlook best and follow it as best you can, since that's the simplest path to the afterlife that's best for you. In fact, the worst thing that can happen to a villain is for him to be redeemed! If a demon-worshiper converts from CE to LG right before dying in a heroic sacrifice, the CE gods probably won't want him because he let them down, the LG gods probably don't want him because no one likes a traitor, and the N gods probably don't want him because doing very very evil acts and very very good acts in the hopes that they'll balance out is a Stupid Neutral way of seeing the world.
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Originally Posted by Yora
Waaay to many zeros for dates in the worlds past.
This is misused a lot in most 'brews, granted, but long histories aren't innately a bad thing. Earth is over 4 billion years old, after all, and the universe over 14 billion years old. Human history is comparatively short because we had to work our way up from amino acids in conditions lethal to humans all the way to our present state, and technological development has only skyrocketed fairly recently in geological terms because for the longest time our first priority has been survival and living long enough to do all that R&D.
Even if you assume a world like Earth and creatures like those in real life instead of the gods magicking everything into existence, when you have creatures like demons, dragons, elementals, and so forth who can survive early-Earth conditions easily, it makes plenty of sense for there to be an Age of Demons/Age of Myths/etc. like settings often do before humanoids come along. Ancient empires of more advanced races make a lot more sense when you consider that even elves with lots of predators, poor nutrition, and other early-human handicaps live much longer than modern humans do, giving them a chance to develop magically, societally, and otherwise much faster than humans once they develop sapience.
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Originally Posted by sktarq
13. Techological "pause". We have gotten from first planting seeds to today in what 12,ooo years. In many RPG's the most advanced techology is still the same longsword, early telescope, or at most clocktower they were using some 10,000 years ago. I might give you that the sword was the hardest thing to make that regularly was for even 1000 years, so I'll give 2000 max. Give me a reason that people can not learn and develop technology as fast in your RPG than they could in real life even though things like magic would AID technological development.
You're assuming that there's just one path of technological development, that "developing technology" means progressing exactly as Western Europe did in reality, but that isn't the case. Certain technologies might be developed much earlier than expected (e.g. the Romans had steam power but didn't bother to do anything with it), later than expected (e.g. there are still people today using stone tools in the rainforest), differently than expected (e.g. you can make cars with many different fuel sources), and more. So magic aiding technological development doesn't mean it gets you to guns and computers much faster than normal, necessarily, nor does it mean you get magical guns and magical computers.
You're also missing that D&D magic items basically
are technology. Vancian magic is basically a field of science and/or engineering: it's quantifiable, repeatable, predictable, testable, reliable, logical, and able to be learned and used without any form of innate talent. Its magic items are classified and stratified, widely recognized and standardized, and sold on the open market (by private individuals if not the stereotypical Magi-Mart). They have no reason to develop what we'd think of as technology, even enhanced by magic; you might as well expect the modern world to give up transistor-based computers and digital storage to start over with vacuum tube computers and magnetic tape, or even more drastically go back to using bronze and iron swords instead of modern weaponry but use modern processes and engineering to produce them.
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Originally Posted by historiasdeosos
11. The four classical elements (earth, wind, fire, water) being fundamental building blocks of reality. I used to love this sort of thing, but then I realized that it makes absolutely no sense on any level. It's cool when it's a cultural belief, but when you actually apply it to the physics of the world it makes my head hurt.
As with some other tropes, this
can be done well as long as it's not left at "Stuff is made of elements, because." See
here for a pretty cool and unique spin on the elements (and para- and quasi-elements) being actual (al)chemical elements.