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  1. - Top - End - #31
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    On the other hand, saying 'you're standing on a railway track and it looks like you don't really know how to get off of it. There's a train coming. If and only if you agree to worship me, I'll rescue you' is, if not a threat, at least a form of extortion.

  2. - Top - End - #32
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by Darth Ultron View Post
    This is why gods have religions with servants, followers, priests and clerics.
    They need an extremely high density of mid-level Clerics to make this work. Very few settings posit that density. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk do not posit a world where every god has level 9+ Clerics in every city, or even a large number of them. Waterdeep-style massive trade centers have this kind of density of mid- and high-level religious figures, but most cities do not.

    If fact, the god can come down just once..do a couple miracles and say somethings and have their faithful believe in that for 2000+ years. Though in D&D a god could pop down every couple years too.
    Evidently not, or why have heroes? A fundamental premise of every D&D setting is that the gods are not the primary actors in the mortal world, even when it comes to the defense of their own faithful and the advancement of their own goals. So far as having a religion endure for 2,000+ years on the basis of "a couple of miracles," have you forgotten that the premise here is that there is a god actively working to deceive people as to the nature of the afterlife (because being an Evil peasant sucks in the long run)? If a Good god can perform a miracle to try and convince people of the truth, an Evil god can perform nearly identical miracles to deceive them.

    Some, like the Forgotten Realms or Planescape, have more clerics above 1st level in a single temple, then the whole Ebberon planet.
    You're looking for level nine, not level two. Every major D&D setting assumes that each level you advance puts you in a more and more exclusive club. If there are a hundred people in town who are level 3, then there are significantly fewer who are level 4. Absolute numbers vary based on what your starting population is, but Sigil is a puny city. The 2e Factol's Manifesto puts its population at well under a million. If 60% - roughly the entire adult population - have class levels, and 10% of them are specifically Clerics, your total Cleric population for all gods in Sigil, one of the largest cities in the setting, is 30,000. The majority of those will be low level. Sigil, being Sigil, can sustain a population of Clerics high enough that probably most gods have someone of at least ninth level lying around, but scale that down to medieval London and you have a starting population of 100,000, 60,000 adults, likely less than half of them have class levels in the first place - sure, there's lots of level 2 Rogue pickpockets and in a high magic setting the scholars all have levels in Wizard, but no setting has ever suggested that innkeepers are usually level 6 Rangers and blacksmiths typically have levels in Fighter. If having levels in Fighter or Wizard or whatever were the norm amongst random city dwellers - in any edition - then there would be more than two orcs in a dungeon with forty who were on par with a level 1 character as individuals, unless there is some reason why the monster races have a drastically lower incidence of class levels and yet still somehow manage to pose a threat to the good guys. Which means in non-Sigil cities where normal people live, you can expect the total number of characters with any class levels at all to be in the neighborhood of 10,000 being generous, it's unlikely more than 1,000 of them are Clerics (especially since you'd expect classes like Rogue and Fighter to be more common than things like Wizard and Cleric), and since higher level characters are more rare than lower level ones and we need at least level 9 before anyone has mojo that can confirm the existence of a deity, a city the size of London, England's capital, is likely to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.6 appropriately leveled Clerics. If that city has even one, then that one Cleric has a total monopoly on direct verification of the afterlife for a radius of a hundred miles or more.

    "High level NPCs are rare" is not a 3e thing, it's an inevitability of population statistics. 3e wrote down specific math, but no major D&D setting posits high level NPCs being significantly more common. It can't, because if they were, there'd be no room left for ordinary people nor any need for adventurers.

    Long range communication is not a problem for mundanes: see history.
    Which part of history did you have in mind?

    And you might note from history that religious communication does spread very well among the commoners.
    How many medieval Scots converted to Taoism?

    As I said above, this will only work if the god can somehow get rid of all the other gods from that city, and also get rid of any 'neutral' powerful beings that know the truth.
    As I said above, no getting rid of is necessary. Most cities (let alone smaller towns and rural hinterlands) are like this by default, as an inevitability of population statistics.

    Dead people who get a body and aren't just floating soul stuff that merges with its plane become petitioners, which can't gain levels and certainly plane shift.
    This is true in Forgotten Realms specifically, where the dead souls are rendered down to weak and mindless petitioners. Even by the gods of Good. As an intentional act, because they're perfectly coherent on the Fugue Plane, where they can bargain with Baatezu to become lemures (and possibly advance in rank from there). Allegedly, the main people who take this bargain are the ones who fear going to a negative afterlife, but the details really don't matter. Wherever you go, your consciousness is going to be obliterated and the soul husk left behind repurposed to become a drone for whatever god you end up assigned to. Becoming a lemure seems like a pretty good deal compared to that, if you don't mind the whole "being Evil" thing. In any case, seems like the gods would be way better off keeping their followers in the Fugue Plane where they can still remember how their class features work.

    Being that this is both horrible and dumb, very few other settings copy it, and even the Forgotten Realms rarely remembers it. Something more or less similar to the depiction in Order of the Stick is more common (as depicted in 497).

  3. - Top - End - #33
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    On the other hand, saying 'you're standing on a railway track and it looks like you don't really know how to get off of it. There's a train coming. If and only if you agree to worship me, I'll rescue you' is, if not a threat, at least a form of extortion.
    Unless worshipping me is actually the only way off.
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    I've tallied up all the points for this thread, and consulted with the debate judges, and the verdict is clear: JoeJ wins the thread.

  4. - Top - End - #34
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    I'm just going to repeat my main point. If it's known that prayer empowers good gods, good characters should generally be quite happy to do so. The idea that good characters would not pray if they knew that simply being good people was sufficient to get into heaven, and thus deprive good gods, seems like the author being way too heavy handed. This is the case whether the gods are lying through their teeth about the whole "prayer is the only way to get into heaven" thing (the case with the post I first replied to), or if it's built into the metaphysics (wall of the faithless, where everything about it is dumb).

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    stuff about population dynamics
    What percent of earth's population can run high energy physics experiments? For that matter, how many playgrounders do you think are currently working at the bleeding edge of any scientific field? Now swing by the science and tech forums, and see how many knowledgeable people can chip in when something newsworthy comes out. Turns out that when reliable experts can give proof, there's a lot to be said for trusting that over expecting them to keep re-proving it to everybody who shows any level of skepticism.

    And evil deities could try to muddy the waters, but why would they? The resources you're devoting to making sure that a group of people don't worship anybody are resources not spent getting anybody to follow you. Evil gods would have just as much reason to want prayers and followers too.

  5. - Top - End - #35

    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    They need an extremely high density of mid-level Clerics to make this work. Very few settings posit that density. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk do not posit a world where every god has level 9+ Clerics in every city, or even a large number of them. Waterdeep-style massive trade centers have this kind of density of mid- and high-level religious figures, but most cities do not.
    This is simply not true, for the Forgotten Realms of 1,2, or 3E(3.5E). Now they might have ''made the Realms like Ebberron'' in 4e and 5E, and I don't know about those editions.

    Not every place has a temple to every god...after all FR has like 200 gods. But most cites does have at least five temples or so, with a mix of high level characters.

    Though I don't know much about Greyhawk, I don't think they are that low in clerics either.


    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    Evidently not, or why have heroes? A fundamental premise of every D&D setting is that the gods are not the primary actors in the mortal world, even when it comes to the defense of their own faithful and the advancement of their own goals. So far as having a religion endure for 2,000+ years on the basis of "a couple of miracles," have you forgotten that the premise here is that there is a god actively working to deceive people as to the nature of the afterlife (because being an Evil peasant sucks in the long run)? If a Good god can perform a miracle to try and convince people of the truth, an Evil god can perform nearly identical miracles to deceive them.
    Well, the gods sure are active in some D&D settings like Dragonlance, Greyhawk Planescape and the Forgotten Realms.

    And sure any god can try and ''trick'' followers away from another god...but they still have to do the miracles to make those people their own followers. So why take the effort to do the trick?

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    You're looking for level nine, not level two. Every major D&D setting assumes that each level you advance puts you in a more and more exclusive club.
    It is impossible to say this as a general statement for the dozen or so D&D settings spread over as many as five editions of the game.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    If there are a hundred people in town who are level 3, then there are significantly fewer who are level 4. Absolute numbers vary based on what your starting population is, but Sigil is a puny city. The 2e Factol's Manifesto puts its population at well under a million.
    True, Sigil is a puny city.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    but no setting has ever suggested that innkeepers are usually level 6 Rangers and blacksmiths typically have levels in Fighter. If having levels in Fighter or Wizard or whatever were the norm amongst random city dwellers - in any edition - then there would be more than two orcs in a dungeon with forty who were on par with a level 1 character as individuals, unless there is some reason why the monster races have a drastically lower incidence of class levels and yet still somehow manage to pose a threat to the good guys.
    Not exactly ''no setting''....The Forgotten Realms of 2E does this exactly. Most folks are usually well above fifth level in a class that are innkeepers or blacksmiths, though the world has weak folks too. Plenty of Innkeepers are above 15th level too, and a couple are liches, dragons or even gods.

    Otik Sandath, the innkeeper at the Inn of the Last Home, in ''low powered'' Dragonlance was a 6th level fighter in 2E

    I can also point to the 2E Dark Sun setting as having characters of at least 3rd level.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    Which means in non-Sigil cities where normal people live, you can expect the total number of characters with any class levels at all to be in the neighborhood of 10,000 being generous, .
    Well, we can go by what is printed in the books, not what ''you think''.


    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    "High level NPCs are rare" is not a 3e thing, it's an inevitability of population statistics. 3e wrote down specific math, but no major D&D setting posits high level NPCs being significantly more common. It can't, because if they were, there'd be no room left for ordinary people nor any need for adventurers.
    It very much is. Even in generic 1E and 2E they did not say much about ''levels in the world'', other then to say, in the spirit of those editions that ''A DM can do whatever they want''.

    And, as said above, the 2E settings are full of high level characters. (Except for Ravenfloft, as that was 2E's ''Eberron''.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    As I said above, no getting rid of is necessary. Most cities (let alone smaller towns and rural hinterlands) are like this by default, as an inevitability of population statistics.
    Only in 3E and above(unless 5E fixed this?)


    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    This is true in Forgotten Realms specifically, where the dead souls are rendered down to weak and mindless petitioners.
    This is not how the Realms afterlife works.

  6. - Top - End - #36
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Quote Originally Posted by JoeJ View Post
    Unless worshipping me is actually the only way off.
    At the very least, worshipping any of the competing gods would logically do the same. And in the given example, it was the case of a setting where souls do go to an aligned plane but the gods felt the need to convince people to empower them by telling a limited version of the way the cosmos works. So, yes, extortion.

  7. - Top - End - #37
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    On the other hand, saying 'you're standing on a railway track and it looks like you don't really know how to get off of it. There's a train coming. If and only if you agree to worship me, I'll rescue you' is, if not a threat, at least a form of extortion.
    Hardly at all. An evil person can potentially still go to a good afterlife by choosing good, rather than evil. You may not go to any particular god's domain if you don't worship them, but according to the outer planes alignment transfer of souls, an evil person can repent and turn good and then go to a good plane in the afterlife without the "extortion" of a god.

  8. - Top - End - #38
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    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    I'm just going to repeat my main point. If it's known that prayer empowers good gods, good characters should generally be quite happy to do so. The idea that good characters would not pray if they knew that simply being good people was sufficient to get into heaven, and thus deprive good gods, seems like the author being way too heavy handed. This is the case whether the gods are lying through their teeth about the whole "prayer is the only way to get into heaven" thing (the case with the post I first replied to), or if it's built into the metaphysics (wall of the faithless, where everything about it is dumb).
    The promise of the afterlife isn't really about motivating people to be good, it's about encouraging people to keep going when it looks like none of their efforts are accomplishing anything. Things might be awful for you right now, but they won't be forever. Just hold on a little while longer and then your part in the great struggle will be finished, and you'll be able to rest easy in the arms of Heironeous, knowing that you did everything that was asked of you.

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    At the very least, worshipping any of the competing gods would logically do the same. And in the given example, it was the case of a setting where souls do go to an aligned plane but the gods felt the need to convince people to empower them by telling a limited version of the way the cosmos works. So, yes, extortion.
    You're assuming the gods believe that's how the cosmos works. Many of them probably don't. And since belief shapes reality on the outer planes, the cosmos probably doesn't work that way for their followers.
    Last edited by JoeJ; 2018-07-08 at 01:19 AM.
    Quote Originally Posted by MaxWilson View Post
    I've tallied up all the points for this thread, and consulted with the debate judges, and the verdict is clear: JoeJ wins the thread.

  9. - Top - End - #39
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by WindStruck View Post
    You may not go to any particular god's domain if you don't worship them, but according to the outer planes alignment transfer of souls, an evil person can repent and turn good and then go to a good plane in the afterlife without the "extortion" of a god.
    Up to a point, that is true, but according to Fiendish Codex 2, repentance is not enough to remove corruption - atonement is needed - the combination of the giving up of the material gains of the evil deeds, apologies to those wronged, and an atonement quest.

    Without those, corruption points remain.

    A being who dies and would normally go to another plane due to nonevil alignment, but to the Nine Hells due to Lawfulness and high corruption, who is repentant, gets transformed into a Hellbred - they get an opportunity to "ransom their soul from the Hells" by doing great good - but it must be great good. And a point is made that most hellbred don't succeed in doing this.
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    It's not a threat, because gods don't decide an evil person goes to the Hells, it's a fact of the workings of the Multiverse. Succu/Incubi and Night Hags wouldn't bother to corrupt souls before consuming them unless there was a tangible effect of evil upon the soul.

  11. - Top - End - #41
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    Quote Originally Posted by Darth Ultron View Post
    This is simply not true, for the Forgotten Realms of 1,2, or 3E(3.5E). Now they might have ''made the Realms like Ebberron'' in 4e and 5E, and I don't know about those editions.

    Not every place has a temple to every god...after all FR has like 200 gods. But most cites does have at least five temples or so, with a mix of high level characters.
    How many FR cities can you name with 9th-level Clerics to more than one god besides Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, and other massively influential metropolitan trade hubs? Phlan capped out at around 6th to 8th level for almost every class, with only a handful of stray high-level characters, none of whom were Clerics (although Bishop Braccio's exact level is never given).

    Well, the gods sure are active in some D&D settings like Dragonlance, Greyhawk Planescape and the Forgotten Realms.
    Mishakal did not descend to the earth to retrieve her own discs, none of the major players in the Greyhawk wars were directly led by a god (nor would it have been a big deal if they were, since Greyhawk is the setting where killing gods is a standard high-level activity), Faerun is threatened by a now apocalypse every weekend and the gods don't do bugger all about any of them, and to the extent gods are important to Planescape it's because players are expected to go their backyard and make a mess, not the other way around. Gods are not active in any of these settings.

    And sure any god can try and ''trick'' followers away from another god...but they still have to do the miracles to make those people their own followers. So why take the effort to do the trick?
    Because they want more followers? And it's pretty hard to get people to sign up for "be an obedient peasant for all your life and when you die you will be damned to Baator to be tortured by devils." Evil gods are heavily incentivized to make sure the commonfolk don't know how the afterlife works (so, for that matter, are Good gods, in settings that adhere to the rules laid out in books like Deities and Demigods, but settings like that are uncommon for exactly that reason).

    It is impossible to say this as a general statement for the dozen or so D&D settings spread over as many as five editions of the game.
    No, it isn't. It's a necessity for the basic setting assumptions of D&D to function. In order for low-level adventures to function, it must necessarily be true that the small towns and villages threatened by their villains do not typically contain a large number of 5th+ level characters who can go and solve the problem for themselves whenever they want. The only way to avoid this is to go out of your way to make a setting where the standard townsperson has class levels and yet for some reason does not go around knocking over level 1 dungeons whenever they become a nuisance, and settings basically never do this. The "innkeeper is secretly a dragon" thing is supposed to be a surprise, not the default.

    True, Sigil is a puny city.
    Do you want to look at Forgotten Realms population statistics?

    Not exactly ''no setting''....The Forgotten Realms of 2E does this exactly. Most folks are usually well above fifth level in a class that are innkeepers or blacksmiths, though the world has weak folks too.
    According to what? Because sourcebooks write about specific blacksmiths and innkeepers who have class levels? That doesn't mean they're typical. Just the opposite, the blacksmith "secretly" being a 9th-level retired adventurer was initially meant to be a surprise, it just got run into the ground to the point where it was no longer surprising, ever. It still wasn't meant to be indicative of a typical townsperson. If the average dude was level 6, the denizens of a level 1 dungeon would be unable to threaten anyone. Low level modules would be completed by random townsfolk long before anyone would bother entrusting them to wandering vagabonds.

    Plenty of Innkeepers are above 15th level too, and a couple are liches, dragons or even gods.
    Are you claiming that the average innkeeper is a lich, dragon, or god?

    Well, we can go by what is printed in the books, not what ''you think''.
    What do you think Factol's Manifesto is, if not a book? You're looking at individual stat blocks and deciding apropos of nothing that they must be perfectly typical. I'm looking at modules and population counts and trying to extrapolate how the world might actually function. Both of these involve going by what is printed in the books, but one of them involves filling in all the blanks with leaps of logic that suit you personally, and the other involves making extrapolations based on the built-in implications of the books themselves, like the fact that anyone ever bothers to hire low-level adventurers to do anything. And who are you quoting with "you think?" That's not a thing that I said.

    It very much is. Even in generic 1E and 2E they did not say much about ''levels in the world'', other then to say, in the spirit of those editions that ''A DM can do whatever they want''.
    In what book is it stated that high-level NPCs are commonplace? Because, again, high-level NPCs being scarce is an inevitability of the low population density given by the books - including in earlier editions - and the fact that especially in earlier editions low level characters are more common than high-level ones. In any given early edition game, how many 1st-level characters are killed before you get one that gets to mid- or high-level? Plus, again, high-level characters cannot be so common as to go and solve low level adventures whenever they become a threat, or else there would be no low level adventures of consequence left for PCs. A scarcity of high-level characters, at least to the point where level 1 threats survive long enough to threaten small towns and villages, is a baked-in assumption of every D&D setting that does not specifically endeavor to be otherwise.

    This is not how the Realms afterlife works.
    Faiths and Avatars disagrees.

  12. - Top - End - #42
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    In present-day D&D, the only petitioners that are specifically mindless are lemures. Manes are almost mindless, but most of the other planes have petitioners with perfectly normal intelligence.
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  13. - Top - End - #43
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    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    In present-day D&D, the only petitioners that are specifically mindless are lemures. Manes are almost mindless, but most of the other planes have petitioners with perfectly normal intelligence.
    It's not that petitioners are mindless, but rather that they're memory- and growth-less. So depending on what one values as the essence of their self, becoming a petitioner is a form of partial oblivion.

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    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    And it's pretty hard to get people to sign up for "be an obedient peasant for all your life and when you die you will be damned to Baator to be tortured by devils." Evil gods are heavily incentivized to make sure the commonfolk don't know how the afterlife works (so, for that matter, are Good gods, in settings that adhere to the rules laid out in books like Deities and Demigods, but settings like that are uncommon for exactly that reason).
    Alternately, evil people think that they're somehow exceptional. Just like how criminal gangs have lots of people signing up expecting that they'll make it to the top with all the attendant riches and glory, when in reality the vast majority wind up in prison or dead. All you need is the potential for one soul out of countless billions to eventually claw their way up to archfiend status, and you'll find evil people who are sure that they'll be that one. It's a selective sales pitch and it counts on people being bad at math, but is not out of line with setting cosmology.

    According to what? Because sourcebooks write about specific blacksmiths and innkeepers who have class levels? That doesn't mean they're typical. Just the opposite, the blacksmith "secretly" being a 9th-level retired adventurer was initially meant to be a surprise, it just got run into the ground to the point where it was no longer surprising, ever. It still wasn't meant to be indicative of a typical townsperson. If the average dude was level 6, the denizens of a level 1 dungeon would be unable to threaten anyone. Low level modules would be completed by random townsfolk long before anyone would bother entrusting them to wandering vagabonds.
    Sourcebooks kept saying that magic items were rare and wondrous. Published adventures had +1 weapons dropping all over the place. Which one do we take as canon?

    It's a problem that goes back to early in the hobby. You need the setting to be a place where there's room for adventurers to go adventuring, but you also need there to be people in town powerful enough that the adventurers can't just beat up the questgiver for the rewards and possibly the shopkeeper for everything he has in stock as well. These two issues work at cross purposes, and D&D has a long history of resolving that by just not thinking about it at all.

    Besides which, what's to be gained by either having the few experts lie, or there being some antivaxxer level "truther" campaign? As I keep saying, good gods have little to lose from telling the truth. If good people knew that their prayers had a concrete impact on increasing the power of the forces of good, most of them would do it freely. Even if there were no personal benefit attached. (That's kind of Good's shtick.) Evil gods offer power in this world and the promises of a better position in the next, even if the reality isn't quite as rosy. Even neutrals, assuming a rule of "go to your god's domain if you have one, somewhere general on your alignment's plane if you don't", would probably prefer to wind up on a domain matching their passions rather than just some random spot on the plane. So who benefits enough from lying to make it worth their while?

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    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    You're looking for level nine, not level two. Every major D&D setting assumes that each level you advance puts you in a more and more exclusive club. If there are a hundred people in town who are level 3, then there are significantly fewer who are level 4. Absolute numbers vary based on what your starting population is, but Sigil is a puny city. The 2e Factol's Manifesto puts its population at well under a million. If 60% - roughly the entire adult population - have class levels, and 10% of them are specifically Clerics, your total Cleric population for all gods in Sigil, one of the largest cities in the setting, is 30,000. The majority of those will be low level. Sigil, being Sigil, can sustain a population of Clerics high enough that probably most gods have someone of at least ninth level lying around, but scale that down to medieval London and you have a starting population of 100,000, 60,000 adults, likely less than half of them have class levels in the first place - sure, there's lots of level 2 Rogue pickpockets and in a high magic setting the scholars all have levels in Wizard, but no setting has ever suggested that innkeepers are usually level 6 Rangers and blacksmiths typically have levels in Fighter. If having levels in Fighter or Wizard or whatever were the norm amongst random city dwellers - in any edition - then there would be more than two orcs in a dungeon with forty who were on par with a level 1 character as individuals, unless there is some reason why the monster races have a drastically lower incidence of class levels and yet still somehow manage to pose a threat to the good guys. Which means in non-Sigil cities where normal people live, you can expect the total number of characters with any class levels at all to be in the neighborhood of 10,000 being generous, it's unlikely more than 1,000 of them are Clerics (especially since you'd expect classes like Rogue and Fighter to be more common than things like Wizard and Cleric), and since higher level characters are more rare than lower level ones and we need at least level 9 before anyone has mojo that can confirm the existence of a deity, a city the size of London, England's capital, is likely to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.6 appropriately leveled Clerics. If that city has even one, then that one Cleric has a total monopoly on direct verification of the afterlife for a radius of a hundred miles or more.
    According to the rules in the DMG 3.5, any city of 12 001 inhabitants or more will have at least three 10th level clerics, whose level could go up to 15th level (1d6+9 x3). Any city of more than 5 000 will have a good chance of having one or two 9th level clerics (1d6+6 x2). Even a town of more than 2 000 has a 16.66% chances of having one 9th level cleric (1d6+3 x1).

    Any city of 25 000 inhabitants or more will have four clerics of at least 13th level, which gives us 8x 12th, 16x 11th, 32x 10th, 64x 9th for a total of 124 clerics able to cast 5th level spells at the very least (that is, assuming that you roll a 1 on the level generator of the four highest level cleric NPCs).

    Now, I don't know about other editions or specific settings, but generic D&D 3.5 has a lot of high level NPCs pretty much everywhere.
    Last edited by MrSandman; 2018-07-08 at 09:44 AM.

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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    How many FR cities can you name with 9th-level Clerics to more than one god besides Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, and other massively influential metropolitan trade hubs? Phlan capped out at around 6th to 8th level for almost every class, with only a handful of stray high-level characters, none of whom were Clerics (although Bishop Braccio's exact level is never given).
    How many? A lot. Remember, The Forgotten Realms is D&D most detailed setting of all time. As I said, just about every city has at least five or so temples, and each temple has characters of all levels, some high and some low.

    Phlan has no clerics? Phlan? What are you going by some wacky video game version of the city? Did you miss the Temple of Tyr there? Tarl Desanea is a 15th level cleric of Tyr.


    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    Mishakal did not descend to the earth to retrieve her own discs, none of the major players in the Greyhawk wars were directly led by a god (nor would it have been a big deal if they were, since Greyhawk is the setting where killing gods is a standard high-level activity), Faerun is threatened by a now apocalypse every weekend and the gods don't do bugger all about any of them, and to the extent gods are important to Planescape it's because players are expected to go their backyard and make a mess, not the other way around. Gods are not active in any of these settings.
    A lot of the Dragonlance gods did ''descend to the earth'' though. I don't know much about Greyhawk, but Izu was in that war and was a god, right? And, well, you know the gods cause the apocalypes in Faerun, right?

    I guess if you don't count ''doing things and taking actions'' as as ''being active'', then sure, no gods ever do anything...except when they do things and take actions, of course.


    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    Because they want more followers? And it's pretty hard to get people to sign up for "be an obedient peasant for all your life and when you die you will be damned to Baator to be tortured by devils." Evil gods are heavily incentivized to make sure the commonfolk don't know how the afterlife works (so, for that matter, are Good gods, in settings that adhere to the rules laid out in books like Deities and Demigods, but settings like that are uncommon for exactly that reason).
    Except that is NOT how the D&D afterlife works. The D&D afterlife is ''be true to your alignment'' and ''follow a god''. There is no ''one true path', there are many roads to the afterlife.


    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    No, it isn't. It's a necessity for the basic setting assumptions of D&D to function. In order for low-level adventures to function, it must necessarily be true that the small towns and villages threatened by their villains do not typically contain a large number of 5th+ level characters who can go and solve the problem for themselves whenever they want. The only way to avoid this is to go out of your way to make a setting where the standard townsperson has class levels and yet for some reason does not go around knocking over level 1 dungeons whenever they become a nuisance, and settings basically never do this. The "innkeeper is secretly a dragon" thing is supposed to be a surprise, not the default.
    Not true. This is the modern Eberron way of looking at D&D: The whole world must be zero level wimps so the PC's can feel special.

    Again, some settings like The Forgotten Realms, Planescape and Spelljammer are FULL of high powered, high level characters and things like dragon innkeepers.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    Do you want to look at Forgotten Realms population statistics?
    From 2E sure, once you get into 3E you get the modern ''E'' idea to make everything small and wimpy.


    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    According to what? Because sourcebooks write about specific blacksmiths and innkeepers who have class levels? That doesn't mean they're typical. Just the opposite, the blacksmith "secretly" being a 9th-level retired adventurer was initially meant to be a surprise, it just got run into the ground to the point where it was no longer surprising, ever. It still wasn't meant to be indicative of a typical townsperson. If the average dude was level 6, the denizens of a level 1 dungeon would be unable to threaten anyone. Low level modules would be completed by random townsfolk long before anyone would bother entrusting them to wandering vagabonds.
    Well, sure, according to lots of soursebooks. But again, guess you can look at a whole pile of soursebooks with high level people like innkeepers and say ''oh, just as there are tons of them, that does not mean they are typical."

    I think your ''version'' of D&D is just your own personal tastes, and not what is found in the rules.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    Are you claiming that the average innkeeper is a lich, dragon, or god?
    I'm saying they exist and are at least uncommon. I'm saying the average innkeeper is around 5th level.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    What do you think Factol's Manifesto is, if not a book? You're looking at individual stat blocks and deciding apropos of nothing that they must be perfectly typical. I'm looking at modules and population counts and trying to extrapolate how the world might actually function. Both of these involve going by what is printed in the books, but one of them involves filling in all the blanks with leaps of logic that suit you personally, and the other involves making extrapolations based on the built-in implications of the books themselves, like the fact that anyone ever bothers to hire low-level adventurers to do anything. And who are you quoting with "you think?" That's not a thing that I said.
    I'm not filling in anything. The books say X. You the one who is running around saying ''oh, what that book says is wrong or does not make sense".

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    In what book is it stated that high-level NPCs are commonplace? Because, again, high-level NPCs being scarce is an inevitability of the low population density given by the books - including in earlier editions - and the fact that especially in earlier editions low level characters are more common than high-level ones. In any given early edition game, how many 1st-level characters are killed before you get one that gets to mid- or high-level? Plus, again, high-level characters cannot be so common as to go and solve low level adventures whenever they become a threat, or else there would be no low level adventures of consequence left for PCs. A scarcity of high-level characters, at least to the point where level 1 threats survive long enough to threaten small towns and villages, is a baked-in assumption of every D&D setting that does not specifically endeavor to be otherwise.
    No ''book'' states that high level NPCs are common place, like a 3E ''rule''. But lots of settings do have lots of commonplace high level NPCs.

    Sure, low level people are more common then high level ones....but that does not mean their are no high level ones. The whole ''oh in all the land their is only one arch wizard, Zombut the 6th level one" is a 3E thing, and worse, an Eberron setting thing.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChamHasNoRoom View Post
    Faiths and Avatars disagrees.
    It does? What page? My copy does not mention what happens to a petitioner...

    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    It's a selective sales pitch and it counts on people being bad at math, but is not out of line with setting cosmology.
    Just about all criminals think ''they won't ever get caught'', for example.

  17. - Top - End - #47
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    For a comparison: it only took about 1 climate scientist in 20 to turn global warming from "completely settled" to "controversial" in the public imagination. Here 1 cleric in 3 is evil: "hear the lie Big Celestia doesn't want you to know about" is an easy sale.
    Last edited by Chauncymancer; 2018-07-08 at 02:38 PM.

  19. - Top - End - #49
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chauncymancer View Post
    For a comparison: it only took about 1 climate scientist in 20 to turn global warming from "completely settled" to "controversial" in the public imagination. Here 1 cleric in 3 is evil: "hear the lie Big Celestia doesn't want you to know about" is an easy sale.
    Especially if that message is convenient for the listeners. People love to be told they're fine and don't have to work--people (in general) are lazy.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chauncymancer View Post
    For a comparison: it only took about 1 climate scientist in 20 to turn global warming from "completely settled" to "controversial" in the public imagination. Here 1 cleric in 3 is evil: "hear the lie Big Celestia doesn't want you to know about" is an easy sale.
    Out of curiosity, what lie are the evil clerics telling?

    If it's that you don't need to pledge yourself to a god in a cosmos where not pledging yourself to a god can really screw up your afterlife, those evil deities are turning off potential converts to their cause as well. Since worshipers tend to empower their deities in the setting, that's shooting themselves directly in the foot.

    If it's that you do need to pledge yourself to a deity in a setting where you don't, I again don't see how that won't just cause even more people to flock to the worship of good, or at least neutral, deities. Again, not a big win for team evil.

  21. - Top - End - #51
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    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    If it's that you don't need to pledge yourself to a god in a cosmos where not pledging yourself to a god can really screw up your afterlife, those evil deities are turning off potential converts to their cause as well. Since worshipers tend to empower their deities in the setting, that's shooting themselves directly in the foot.

    If it's that you do need to pledge yourself to a deity in a setting where you don't, I again don't see how that won't just cause even more people to flock to the worship of good, or at least neutral, deities. Again, not a big win for team evil.
    The only place where you need to pledge yourself to a god is the Forgotten Realms, and it's got problems.

    Core D&D only has your behavior determining the state of your soul (including casting spells with alignment descriptors).

    Eberron has a mysterious afterlife with mysterious divinity whereby nobody knows if the gods are even real.

    The "need to pledge yourself" is not a thing in most of D&D, just that one place.

  22. - Top - End - #52

    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chauncymancer View Post
    For a comparison: it only took about 1 climate scientist in 20 to turn global warming from "completely settled" to "controversial" in the public imagination. Here 1 cleric in 3 is evil: "hear the lie Big Celestia doesn't want you to know about" is an easy sale.
    Well....''completely settled'' is a bit of a stretch. Bit more like some folks said ''ok, this is how it is, NOW everyone must agree to our New World Order"....

    ...And anyone with even a tiny brain said, ''Nope" .

  23. - Top - End - #53
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    Quote Originally Posted by War_lord View Post
    It's not a threat, because gods don't decide an evil person goes to the Hells, it's a fact of the workings of the Multiverse. Succu/Incubi and Night Hags wouldn't bother to corrupt souls before consuming them unless there was a tangible effect of evil upon the soul.
    There's also the fact that each deity's realm seems to have a bunch of that deity's own worshippers as petitioners, rather than randomly assigned petitioners of the correct alignment. And death gods like Hades seem able to grab every follower of their entire pantheon except for those who merited special attention from a different deity. This suggests that deities can suspend the rule that souls go to the plane of their alignment for their own worshippers, and at least some of them can do it for followers of a different god in the same pantheon.

    Telling an evil person that if they repent they'll end up on an upper plane is uncertain; they may or may not be able to fully change in the time they have left. But if a gods says, "worship me and I'll save you from the Abyss," that's probably something that the they can guarantee.
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  24. - Top - End - #54
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nifft View Post
    The only place where you need to pledge yourself to a god is the Forgotten Realms, and it's got problems.

    Core D&D only has your behavior determining the state of your soul (including casting spells with alignment descriptors).

    Eberron has a mysterious afterlife with mysterious divinity whereby nobody knows if the gods are even real.

    The "need to pledge yourself" is not a thing in most of D&D, just that one place.
    I get that.

    It's just that people are saying "well, evil clerics can lie". I want to know what they think the clerics are lying about, and what their gods would get out of it.

  25. - Top - End - #55
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    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    I get that.

    It's just that people are saying "well, evil clerics can lie". I want to know what they think the clerics are lying about, and what their gods would get out of it.
    An easy lie would be "you're good enough how you are. No need to worship a stuffy, self-righteous god and toe his line. You can worship this more exciting, less demanding god and as long as you're good enough, you'll get the good afterlife."

    With this, they get more worshipers for their evil god (as long as they're not cartoonishly evil) and more people not trying too hard to be good. Being truly good, according to most cosmologies, is hard work. Being evil (or at least neutralish) is easy. So you mix a bit of truth (that you don't need to worship a particular god to get the good afterlife) with a bit of a lie (that they can just go along doing whatever they feel is good and not really worry about being "too good" and still get there). It takes away the safety rails that good gods provide, increasing the amount of people that will fall into serious error.
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    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
    An easy lie would be "you're good enough how you are. No need to worship a stuffy, self-righteous god and toe his line. You can worship this more exciting, less demanding god and as long as you're good enough, you'll get the good afterlife."
    But this is not lying about the afterlife or how it works.

    A god can trick or tempt a follower of a god away from that god to the other god...but there is no lies here.

  27. - Top - End - #57
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    No. They don't. There are dozens of churches, multiple sects for the larger ones, and myriad cults all pushing their own narratives on what The AfterlifeTM is supposed to be and the "proof" available is sparse and gated behind being a moderately powerful caster / highly capable adventurer to know those places actually exist at all and a search through an "infinite" space for the soul of -somebody- you once knew to confirm that it's actually the afterlife and not just a very exotic locale.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    I get that.

    It's just that people are saying "well, evil clerics can lie". I want to know what they think the clerics are lying about, and what their gods would get out of it.
    * The greatest good for the most people is accomplished automatically by the market through the efficient allocation of capital. That means greed is good, and you don't need to worry about the consequences of your actions -- the market will handle all that for you, more efficiently than you could.

    * There is no morality, just power. The thing they call "good" is just the current status quo which keeps them in power. You deserve better than these lies which enslave you. Try this one weird trick which they don't want you to know.

    * Those people who claim to be good murdered your ancestors. You can't let the sacrifice your ancestors made be for nothing. Revenge is just setting things right, and righting a wrong isn't wrong.

    * There's no prize for second place in a war, so you're justified in taking any measures, no matter how horrible, to ensure yourself victory. After all, you're just protecting the people you care about. The enemy would surely do the same thing you're doing if they were clever enough and had the opportunity.

    * Asmodeus will build a wall and make the orcs pay for it.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Darth Ultron View Post
    Not true. This is the modern Eberron way of looking at D&D: The whole world must be zero level wimps so the PC's can feel special.
    Going by this statement, I'm pretty sure you've never played in, or read sourcebooks regarding the demographics of, Eberron in particular or 3e in general. Or if you have, then the DM had modified the setting beyond recognition.

    It's a pretty unfair characterization, in two ways. Firstly, Eberron is not at all full of zero-level wimps, it just has a higher proportion of NPC classes so you run into more adepts/magewrights/warriors/experts than clerics/wizards/fighters/rogues on average, and there's a dearth of politically-active and well-known NPCs at high levels so most monarchs, Dragonmarked House leaders, etc. are in the level 8-12 range instead of 16-20, but there are plenty of high level monsters and NPCs in the setting. There are articles on the WotC site talking about making PC-classed NPCs and high-level NPCs rarer than in the standard rules, but they're talking about randomly-generated NPCs; you can have plenty of PC-classed and high-level NPCs Eberron, they're just expected to be named, powerful, and influential figures rather than "Joe Bob, the 12th-level wizard with no backstory I just rolled up."

    Secondly, don't blame the level treadmill of 4e and compressed level range of 5e on Eberron; Eberron no more inspired that aspects of those editions due to its level range than Greyhawk gods being core in 3e meant Greyhawk inspired the 3e mechanics, and if anything FR being the default setting in 5e should make for more of a gap between high and low levels, not less.

    No ''book'' states that high level NPCs are common place, like a 3E ''rule''. But lots of settings do have lots of commonplace high level NPCs.

    Sure, low level people are more common then high level ones....but that does not mean their are no high level ones. The whole ''oh in all the land their is only one arch wizard, Zombut the 6th level one" is a 3E thing, and worse, an Eberron setting thing.
    Eberron didn't come out until 2004, almost a year after the 3.5 DMG came out, so it didn't influence 3e at all, but rather was influenced by it. And what the 3.5 DMG has to say about the subject of archwizards is that the average Metropolis of 25,001 people or more has 4 14th-level wizards, 8 7th-level wizards, 16 3rd-level wizards, and 32 1st-level wizards; the Epic Level Handbook bumps that up to 4 18th-level wizards, 8 9th-level wizards, 16 4th-level wizards, 32 2nd-level wizards, and 64 1st-level wizards, and adds a Planar Metropolis level for cities of 100,000 people or more that has 6 22nd-level wizards, 12 11th-level wizards, 24 5th-level wizards, 48 2nd-level wizards, and 96 1st-level wizards.

    And that's just on average (it's a 1d4+X roll, so metropolis wizards range from 13th to 16th level by the DMG, for instance), and the same level range determination holds for all the other PC classes. Now, certainly, most settings don't follow those guidelines exactly, either because they're older settings with grandfathered-in level demographics or DMs want to tweak them for their campaigns. But the idea that 3e says anything close to "6th-level wizards are powerful and special" is ridiculous.

    Where exactly did you get the idea that 3e makes high-level characters exceptionally rare?
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    Default Re: Do Most People Understand How the D&D Afterlife Works?

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    It's a pretty unfair characterization, in two ways. Eberron
    One of the big selling points of Eberron was that it is the anti- Forgotten Realms. The setting has no gods, no high magic and few high level NPCs. Oh, and it's cool Steampunk...with no steam.

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    Eberron didn't come out until 2004, almost a year after the 3.5 DMG came out, so it didn't influence 3e at all, but rather was influenced by it.

    Where exactly did you get the idea that 3e makes high-level characters exceptionally rare?
    What I meant was that Eberron rode the wave of ''make D&D low level" and was the cap stone. Part of the general design of 3E, along with ''removing most of the penalties for power" and ''removing the unfair things" was ''re making D&D low level".

    A Lot of the 2E settings were full of powerful magic and NPCs. One of 3E's big goals was to nerf that. It's the same sad story: Billy was gonna play D&D, but he read a book that had a high level character in it....a character far more powerful then his second level gnome. So Billy, figuring that all the powerful high level NPCs would just ''save the world'' before his second level gnome could even put his boots on, just decided to not play D&D as it was ''no fun". And then he complained to the D&D company ''I can't play the game, as everytime I do (in my mind) a high level NPC saves the world, before my character can do anything!" The vast majority of players did not have Billys problem, but they went ahead and listened to the Billys of the world anyway.

    So enter 3E, and eventually Eberron, the perfect game and setting for Billy. "help, help" would cry the game and setting(in Billy's mind) "There is a Giant Rat attacking the farmers barn! And the game/setting has no high level NPCs to save the day! Billy! We need your second level gnome to save the day!" Then Billy can finally play D&D, and have his second level gnome 'zap pew pew' that giant rat with a color spray spell.

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