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[GoblinCookie]

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Anyhow, Toady has said:

Then the random generation can begin.  We don't want another cheap fantasy universe, we want a cheap fantasy universe generator.  A lot of fiction sounds computer generated anyway.

And while I'm not familiar with every fantasy pantheon out there, I've read up on the Greyhawk pantheon a fair bit and have read through the third edition Deities and Demigods sourcebook, so I think I can say with fair accuracy that "gods have something very close to a mortal personality but not quite" works for the average generic fantasy pantheon. Funny thing that's bugging me, though, is that we never or rarely ever see patron gods of races. I mean, yes, we have race-based pantheons, but never the equivalent of, say, Moradin. Is it just a D&D thing to have deities that consider a certain race in its entirety to be part of its domain?

Why would there be patron gods for races given that the races when the ones that have the gods in the first place?  If you an elf, then being an elf is not notable so there are no gods of being an elf, an elf might have a god of humans, but that god has no actual relationship to actual humans merely humans as they relate to elves. 

[cochramd]

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[Dirst]

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In the sciences, you need to back up controversial claims, or provide a citation to someone(s) who have already done so convincingly enough to get it published somewhere.  Stuff like mythology, being in the humanities, tends to be in books rather than journal articles, but the material all ends up getting crawled into the same databases (good place to start is scholar.google.com).

In general, starting off from well-cited foundations lets you make the argument you were trying to make in the first place, rather than quibbling over details of the foundation.  This is most certainly NOT "forever remaining stupider than they are" and is in fact how science advances.

People are free to challenge cited sources, but there's a (perhaps undeserved) presumption of credibility for a published source.  This is particularly funny when you find out the author cited their own earlier work.

[cochramd]

People are free to challenge cited sources, but there's a (perhaps undeserved) presumption of credibility for a published source.  This is particularly funny when you find out the author cited their own earlier work.

Well, so long as that earlier work is legitimate, whether because it provides evidence or includes citations to legitimate works by others, is that really anything to raise an eyebrow at?

[Dirst]

People are free to challenge cited sources, but there's a (perhaps undeserved) presumption of credibility for a published source.  This is particularly funny when you find out the author cited their own earlier work.

Well, so long as that earlier work is legitimate, whether because it provides evidence or includes citations to legitimate works by others, is that really anything to raise an eyebrow at?

The funny bit is that they are often crapping all over their own earlier work. "It has been noted previously that the sky is blue (Smith, 2004), but this work failed to take into account the time of day.  In the present work, we extend Smith's framework..." Note also the editorial we to sound more official.

[cochramd]

The funny bit is that they are often crapping all over their own earlier work. "It has been noted previously that the sky is blue (Smith, 2004), but this work failed to take into account the time of day.  In the present work, we extend Smith's framework..." Note also the editorial we to sound more official.

Ah. Well, that's just the nature of learning in general, isn't it? Take a master of art, writing, carpentry, engineering, anything really, and have them look at some of their earlier works. Inevitably they'll remark about some mistake or inferior design choice they made because they didn't know then what they know now.

[GoblinCookie]

In the sciences, you need to back up controversial claims, or provide a citation to someone(s) who have already done so convincingly enough to get it published somewhere.  Stuff like mythology, being in the humanities, tends to be in books rather than journal articles, but the material all ends up getting crawled into the same databases (good place to start is scholar.google.com).

In general, starting off from well-cited foundations lets you make the argument you were trying to make in the first place, rather than quibbling over details of the foundation.  This is most certainly NOT "forever remaining stupider than they are" and is in fact how science advances.

People are free to challenge cited sources, but there's a (perhaps undeserved) presumption of credibility for a published source.  This is particularly funny when you find out the author cited their own earlier work.

Not quite Dirst, that is more how a minority of people get very clever and a majority of people get very stupid (but dependant upon the clever people).  That is because both cleverness and stupidity are factors almost completely of social status, this why intelligence correlates so well with social standing, the more powerful/elite you are the more you are forced to come to your own conclusions based upon the facts as opposed to simply deferring to the opinions of somebody who is more powerful than you are; which is what demanding that opinions *about* facts be backed up by professors writing scholarly articles advocating said opinions amounts to.  The objection is essentially "how dare this lowly person who is not a proper professor design to come to conclusions about a subject" that is it is a question of power; the irony is that even if the person to the objection is directed at is stupid he is becoming more intelligent while even if the objector (unless he is the proffessor) is intelligent he is getting stupider, since he has adopted an attitude of low social standing. 

The ability to access facts and the purity of those facts is also a function of power and social standing and the control of the knowledge of facts imparts such power.  Those with power and money can afford to do a great deal of research to arrive at an extensive array of solidly grounded facts on a given subjects, either by funding it directly, having the leisure to do the research personally or levering other bodies that they have influence over to do the research and give them the results.  All 'facts' in history are quite impure, all we can manage to do is dig up documentation or witnesses to past events, but in both cases there are questions of reliability that mean that all facts in history are rooted in the mere opinion of the historian as to reliability of the source.  A powerful historian lends authority to the sources he chooses to cite, whether those sources are authoritive or not and history inherantly cannot get out of this situation without the invention of the time machine.

To return to topic, we cannot know reliably how the 'pagan' religions that proceeded the present religions which destroyed them actually saw their gods nature.  The reason is that our whole understanding of them is filtered through the records of their enemies who destroyed them.  It is also the memory not of how they were when they were strong, presumably overturning the even earlier religions that came before them but when they were weak enough to be overturned themselves.  This leads to two possibilities, they fell because they became weak or they fell because they were weaker than the new religions.  There is clearly such a thing as religious 'strength', because the fall of the pagan religions (except in India) is pretty much a universal historical process that is not refutable, but what is it about a religion that imparts strength to it. 

It would make sense that the characteristics of the pagan religions as they are remembered are the characteristics that render a religion weak while the characteristics of those religions that overturned them are characteristics that render a religion strong.  However it is likely that the memory will accentuate the characteristics *of* weakness, because they are remembered as they were at their weakest and/or because those doing the remembering understand the religion basically as a strawman of itself.  The issue is that those all-conquering religions themselves went into decline and became weak themselves, if they lost the strength they previously had then perhaps the earlier religions did as well?

[cochramd]

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[XXXXYYYY]

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[vjmdhzgr]

And while I'm not familiar with every fantasy pantheon out there, I've read up on the Greyhawk pantheon a fair bit and have read through the third edition Deities and Demigods sourcebook, so I think I can say with fair accuracy that "gods have something very close to a mortal personality but not quite" works for the average generic fantasy pantheon. Funny thing that's bugging me, though, is that we never or rarely ever see patron gods of races. I mean, yes, we have race-based pantheons, but never the equivalent of, say, Moradin. Is it just a D&D thing to have deities that consider a certain race in its entirety to be part of its domain?

Yeah, a decent amount of what GoblinCookie is saying is okay, but I think the quote here is probably the best argument as to how we'd expect the gods to be. Of course, how we want the gods to be is only partly related to the main purpose of this thread, and currently people are veering away from that discussion to insult each other.

[cochramd]

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[SixOfSpades]

This [the 4 elements of Greek alchemy] is not something that just springs up from direct observation, the fire "thing" as observed directly by dwarves is opposed to the water "thing" (along with all the other smothering things).

I agree that the Fire vs. Water, Earth vs. Air oppositions are definitely more open to interpretation & opinion than many, more absolute, oppositions like Gaiety vs. Misery, Food vs. Poison, etc. So I say [again] that the RNG should have differently-weighted odds of certain combinations; Flat-out contradictory domains like Law and Chaos should probably have a 1% chance of being given to the same deity (who assumedly would be interpreted as the god of the Chaos-Order continuum), while those with some grey area could be more in the 5-25% range.

It does not work and never has to have gods simply as souped up mortals.  When gods start to be taken literally as just more powerful human beings then the religion is basically decaying and about to be overthrown by a new religion with a less literal, more metaphorical view of their gods humanity.

I'm not going to trouble myself with the academia nuts running rampant in the handful of recent posts above, but rather take a different tack: The Greek playwrights depicted their gods as vain, debaucherous, jealous, lazy, wrathful, and indignant, for all the same reasons that men would be expected to feel such emotions. Moreover, we find that the tradition of writing gods in this way lasted for hundreds of years, even longer if we include the Romans' wholesale co-opting of the pantheon. This is a far cry from "basically decaying and about to be overthrown". The Norse gods are a similarly flawed and rambunctious lot, and although their sagas are much more difficult to date (Viking bards hardly ever wrote anything down), they do seem to have lasted for a similarly long time.

A religion based upon literal human-like divinities does not work unless those divinities are actually physically present and possess overwhelming power, but in that case why call it a religion at all?  That is because the presence of a divinity must be 'felt' in a non-literal sense by the believers in order for the effort expended by the worshippers in sustaining the religion to 'turn a profit' as it were.

The Religion arc will surely give us Priests, but it may not be until the Magic arc that those Priests can cast actual spells in relation to one or more spheres in their god's domain. One can certainly argue that these spells would not "profit" the god in terms of spiritual energy unless they were performed before a fairly large audience, but that only seems fair. The deity's physical manifestation itself could be looked on as miraculous, and seems appropriate for the anointing of a new priest. Whether or not the god possesses a human-like personality seems irrelevant.

While women do have the ability to carry a pregnancy to term without male help, they are completely unable to become pregnant themselves.  Since it is the arrival of a male being that brings pregnancy 'into' a woman, it makes sense to represent pregnancy as a male god that enters it's female devotees *as* the pregnancy itself.  As I have pointed out, the matter is indeed 50/50 because a female god of pregnancy can get pregnant making her symbolic *of* pregnancy, nothing really connects her divine pregnancy to that of mortal women.
A . . . female god of pregnancy wins the symbolic war but has less relationship to it's pregnant worshippers than the male god of pregnancy which is able to represent both her relationship to the father that impregnated the woman and the fetus inside the woman at the same time.

As if a female pregnancy goddess couldn't initiate a pregnancy every bit as easily--and making the deity male would raise the question of "if it was the god who got her pregnant, then what exactly did the husband contribute?" Personally, I prefer a goddess who visits every conception to bless the union with a tiny spark of new life broken off of her own unborn fetus. She provides neither sperm nor egg, she merely controls the merging of the two, and protects the fetus during gestation.

[SixOfSpades]

Obvious solution: Sliders at world gen.  Choose whether a world's religions will be Plausible, Strange, or Completely Random.  This way, every player can set it at the level they're most comfortable with for what they want to get out of the game, whether it's logic or a creative exercise or just a bit of hilarity.

Modified suggestion: Advanced worldgen could have two settings, one for the average Pantheon Weirdness, and one for the allowed Deviation from that Weirdness setting. So choosing a mid-range Pantheon Weirdness but a very large Deviation would result in *some* dwarf civs having perfectly "normal" gods, while the neighboring civ's pantheon is batshit-crazy.

[Dirst]

In the sciences, you need to back up controversial claims, or provide a citation to someone(s) who have already done so convincingly enough to get it published somewhere.  Stuff like mythology, being in the humanities, tends to be in books rather than journal articles, but the material all ends up getting crawled into the same databases (good place to start is scholar.google.com).

In general, starting off from well-cited foundations lets you make the argument you were trying to make in the first place, rather than quibbling over details of the foundation.  This is most certainly NOT "forever remaining stupider than they are" and is in fact how science advances.

People are free to challenge cited sources, but there's a (perhaps undeserved) presumption of credibility for a published source.  This is particularly funny when you find out the author cited their own earlier work.

Not quite Dirst, that is more how a minority of people get very clever and a majority of people get very stupid (but dependant upon the clever people).  That is because both cleverness and stupidity are factors almost completely of social status, this why intelligence correlates so well with social standing, the more powerful/elite you are the more you are forced to come to your own conclusions based upon the facts as opposed to simply deferring to the opinions of somebody who is more powerful than you are; which is what demanding that opinions *about* facts be backed up by professors writing scholarly articles advocating said opinions amounts to.  The objection is essentially "how dare this lowly person who is not a proper professor design to come to conclusions about a subject" that is it is a question of power; the irony is that even if the person to the objection is directed at is stupid he is becoming more intelligent while even if the objector (unless he is the proffessor) is intelligent he is getting stupider, since he has adopted an attitude of low social standing. 

The ability to access facts and the purity of those facts is also a function of power and social standing and the control of the knowledge of facts imparts such power.  Those with power and money can afford to do a great deal of research to arrive at an extensive array of solidly grounded facts on a given subjects, either by funding it directly, having the leisure to do the research personally or levering other bodies that they have influence over to do the research and give them the results.  All 'facts' in history are quite impure, all we can manage to do is dig up documentation or witnesses to past events, but in both cases there are questions of reliability that mean that all facts in history are rooted in the mere opinion of the historian as to reliability of the source.  A powerful historian lends authority to the sources he chooses to cite, whether those sources are authoritive or not and history inherantly cannot get out of this situation without the invention of the time machine.

First, no one said the world is fair.

Second, even if only certain people have access to detailed scientific knowledge, nothing you said impeaches the fact that they still know more than you do and the most efficient way to advance knowledge is to "stand on the shoulders of giants."  This is an inescapable consequence of limited human capacity and the gains of specialization, and as such it is not restricted to science.  Artists today benefit from the knowledge of artists before them, farmers today benefit from the knowledge of farmers before them, etc.

Third, there is pedagogical value in letting a student "reinvent the wheel" but there isn't any value to be gained from being intentionally ignorant of what has gone before you.  Even if you think the current framework is wrong, it's still much easier to build a better one if you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current one.

To return to topic, we cannot know reliably how the 'pagan' religions that proceeded the present religions which destroyed them actually saw their gods nature.  The reason is that our whole understanding of them is filtered through the records of their enemies who destroyed them.  It is also the memory not of how they were when they were strong, presumably overturning the even earlier religions that came before them but when they were weak enough to be overturned themselves.  This leads to two possibilities, they fell because they became weak or they fell because they were weaker than the new religions.  There is clearly such a thing as religious 'strength', because the fall of the pagan religions (except in India) is pretty much a universal historical process that is not refutable, but what is it about a religion that imparts strength to it. 

It would make sense that the characteristics of the pagan religions as they are remembered are the characteristics that render a religion weak while the characteristics of those religions that overturned them are characteristics that render a religion strong.  However it is likely that the memory will accentuate the characteristics *of* weakness, because they are remembered as they were at their weakest and/or because those doing the remembering understand the religion basically as a strawman of itself.  The issue is that those all-conquering religions themselves went into decline and became weak themselves, if they lost the strength they previously had then perhaps the earlier religions did as well?

This is a much better argument that simply asserting that human-like gods make a religion weak.  And a similar view had been popular in anthropology, that there was some natural life cycle to a civilization's spirituality from shamanism to polytheism to monotheism to rationality.  It made sense on the surface, but later scholars showed that the dominance of religions has a lot more to do with political power than the inherent rightness of one set of beliefs.  In particular, Christianity is chuck full of co-opted pagan symbols and festivals to transition the masses into believing a system that did a better job of justifying the king's power.  Note that demonstrating the causality of power -> religion instead of the reverse required knowing the prior framework very very well.

History is hard for precisely the reasons you cited, namely that history is written by the victors.  Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists need to sift through a lot of noise to try to get to the "ground truth."  It's also a human endeavor, which means it is subject to errors, prejudices, fads, politics, etc. but it does advance.  This is relevant for game design because a really awesome world generator would be one that keeps the metaphysics distinct from the explanations of those metaphysics, allowing evolution over time.  The apparent metaphysics in a region could be subject to local influences, leading to incompatible beliefs in different parts of the world... which is much more interesting than people simply following different gods that happen to be rivals.

[cochramd]

This is relevant for game design because a really awesome world generator would be one that keeps the metaphysics distinct from the explanations of those metaphysics, allowing evolution over time.  The apparent metaphysics in a region could be subject to local influences, leading to incompatible beliefs in different parts of the world... which is much more interesting than people simply following different gods that happen to be rivals.

Should not, though, the presence of rival gods reduce those incompatibilities, by number and/or by significance? Or alternatively, would not the thresholds of what constitutes a heretic and what incompatibilities are worth shedding blood over be changed? The entire Catholic/Protestant split, if I recall my course on post-Medieval European history correctly, breaks down to the Catholics thinking that the Bible meant whatever the priests said it did while the Protestants believed that everyone should read the Bible and take their own interpretation from it, and the matter of the Pope (plus some other stuff, but as I recall every difference had its roots in either the authority of the scripture or the authority of the Pope). The split occurred in a time where there was no threat to the dominance of Christianity over Europe, and several bloodbaths ensued before Catholics and Protestants learned to co-exist peacefully. If Judaism or Islam had been in any sort of position to gain major influence in Europe, I very much doubt Christians would've been able to afford killing each other over a po-tay-to po-tah-to difference like this and think that they would've instead jumped to a phase of reconciliation.