>>43251971The former way is pretty interesting, but it's difficult to pull off. For example, why would a lawful good deity not smite everything evil and chaotic he possibly could? How could a person remain in the clergy if, even by following the deity's commandments to the letter, said person had become a twisted, neurotic CE? What would prevent evil deities from assaulting the human world with endless loads of demonic horrors?
I don't like the idea that the deities are fully "abstract" either, though. Divine power's gotta come from somewhere.
I favor doing one of two things:
Either taking a middle ground whereby deities aren't actually omnipotent or nearly, or they recognize that even diametrically aligned (or otherwise directly oppositional) people have a role to play in making the world go 'round. Not something like that idiotic "MUST ENFORE NUTRALATY" thing D&D's creators keep slipping into the alignment descriptions, but more a philosophy of "without any evil, people won't recognize the importance of their good deeds; without strife, people won't grow stronger and better themselves; and killing all the baddies just produces a pile of dead people."
The other possibility is to make deities so powerful and so abstract as to defy rational explanation. The God of Law isn't just some colossal beardy guy holding a scroll fifty feet from end to end with a law for everything written on it; it's some kind of fractal essence that infuses everything and rarely chooses to communicate with anything in the material world at all, not because it's not interested in people or the world, but because it doesn't operate in a way that makes sense to living things whose perception is constrained by the senses.
