I was reading a little about death and religion in 4th Ed. and a thought occured to me. Most people in our world, I will assume, are religious; and I’m not a religious expert by any means, so I will stick to what I sort of know, being a catholic. Now, people who are believers and practice religion in their daily lives have faith in that one day they will be called up to heaven by God, they will be judged based on their actions, and they will be assigned a final resting place, either in Heaven or Hell.
I would say that this faith (and fear) in the afterlife is what drives religious people to be good people.
But there is no such thing in D&D.
There are a multitude of gods, but none carry the power that the Judeo-Christian God of Earth does, they are more like Roman or Greek gods.
So what keeps the D&D populace in check. Fear of judgement by who? All souls go to the Shadowfell, from there, most end up who-knows-where.
There are no pearly gates.
From “Worlds and Monsters”:
When a mortal dies, its soul first travels to the Shadowfel!.
Most souls depart the Shadowfell very quickly, either called to
service by some deity or passing to a place beyond the cosmos.
The mystery ofdeath is that most souls don’t have an afterlife
in a god’s Dominion-they seem to go somewhere beyond the
knowledge of even the gods (and maybe dead gods go to the
same place). Once it has moved on in this way, a soul can’t be
called back to the mortal world.
Religion in D&D isn’t promising the people much, except a good harvest or something like that… It seems the role of religion in our world, and in a fantasy world are two different roles.
www. Newbie DM .com 
Chris
February 7, 2009
I saw something once to the effect that souls in D&D-world go to the Outer Plane best suited to their alignment and temperament. Given that you can actually visit the various Heavens and Hells of the D&D cosmology you can *see with your own eyes* the spiritual consequences of your actions.
Now, most people will be encouraged by this to keep their noses clean, play nice with the others, and thus enjoy an eternity of bliss and harmony. Others (particularly those already on the path to darkness) will think “Who wants to be a Manes. I want to store up some credit with the Lords Below.”
It’s a very Norse cosmology in some respects. Act in a way that pleases your patron gods (be they good or evil) and you earn a higher place at the table in their personal Valhalla. Displease them, and they’ll consign you to either a boring shadowy afterlife, or to being tormented for the lulz by devils, demons and the like.
There’s very little place for leaps of faith or unearned grace though. Very pagan, and not what most modern people are familiar with.
Swordgleam
February 7, 2009
I’ve always assumed that D&D gods reward their favored servants by taking them to their own realms in the afterlife. So it’s not that being good matters – it’s that being something matters. If you’re very successful at being evil, you just might end up ruling a palace in one of the hells. So pretty much what Chris said.
wickedmurph
February 7, 2009
You’re right about it not really promoting “good”behavior in the way that Christianity ostensibly does. Instead, this cosmology would promote ethical behavior. With a wide and sometimes very disturbing array of ethical outlooks available to the discerning shopper – er, worshipper.
But it also assumes that the average person really Knows that this is the case – admittedly, with Raise Dead rituals kicking around, there is likely a more comprehensive knowledge of the afterlife available, but only the educated (rare), interested or truly faithful (to whatever) are going to really have a good understanding of how the afterlife works.
Most people would still follow the gods of their fathers, or land, or village, just like people have always done.
Tommi
February 9, 2009
Real life also works fairly well with many people not fearing otherworldly judgement, so I see little reason to assume a fantasy world somehow would not.
newbiedm
February 9, 2009
It’s just surprising to me that there isn’t afterlife judgement in D&D. It may have to do with the fact that the gods in D&D aren’t like the omnipotent christian god of earth… The one they imply exists (Ao?) stays behind the scenes….
Hammer
February 12, 2009
“I would say that this faith (and fear) in the afterlife is what drives religious people to be good people. ”
Morality can’t be boiled down to the good book though. Atheists don’t just go around being ‘evil’ because they have no divine retribution at the end of the day.
Likewise, in D&D et al, there are various factors keeping PCs good: the moral high ground, the possibility of assention to god-hood, reputation, those pesky city guards etc.
Ofc, this is assuming you play a good character all the time.
Nariah
February 17, 2009
Don’t overlook that it was FEAR that gave Chrisitanity a great deal of power throughout the middle ages — do this good thing now, or you will SUFFER FOREVER… Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Personally, I’m Catholic but can’t believe in a god who puts a gun to my head and says “love me, or else”. This kind of “crazy talk” drives my more devout parents nuts.
I disbelieve in the 4e alignment system and thus their planar descriptions. That is to say, I prefer the way that things were set up in AD&D/version 1 — planes personifying Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos at the corners with Neutrality in the middle. This way one’s actions or moral standing might not be entirely lawful good or chaotic evil — it’s ok for there to be shades of gray in-between. Many dm’s and players don’t use alignment for much anyway — why, to punish characters for changing their minds or behaving badly? Actually, that’s what makes a great myth — the Greeks got that part right.
I’m using my old-school views on alignment as a way to teach my daughter about life as I see it — not everything may be what it seems at first, and it is rare for good deeds go unpunished 😉 She’s 9 and seems to enjoy the fact her party has captured the greedy dwarf Malcolm Angus who was selling weapons to good guys and bad guys, because at the end of the day, all he cared about was getting rich. The paladin and cleric couldn’t detect evil because Malcolm isn’t evil — he’s just a greedy jerk. Since my daughter loves the adventure and discovery part as much as the combat action, it’s the in-between grays that make the story interesting, and spark her imagination as she tries to unlock the clues her pesky DM has left about in the world.
I’ve played in campaigns where the gods were nowhere to be seen. So I’m not surprised that it’s frustrating the heck out of Brian’s archetypical halfling rogue that Nariah my Eladrin Ranger keeps tithing to Avandra, but heck, with the good luck she’s had (making saves on 2 point-blank black dragon acid breaths), she figure the goddess deserves some of my treasure. Of course he’s always trying to scoop up the coins she leaves behind, but one day, I expect he may run into some BAD LUCK.
HermitDave
February 17, 2009
I am not sure why 4E took this take on the afterlife. OK, so they toss the souls into The Shadowfell for an amount of time, allowing for friends & family to resurrect, reincarnate or whatever but sooner or later they either “pass on.” Or they don’t.
To quote the Manual of the Planes, “When most mortals die, their spirits linger in the Shadowfell for a time, and then pass on to the infinite. However, some mortal spirits are claimed (or damned) by the deities they served in life.”
So, I guess the question is, “In your game, do people KNOW this?” Do they know that no matter how they acted in life, it most likely won’t matter? As long as they don’t really pay attention to the gods, will they just end up as wandering souls in the Shadowfell? Man, even its not The Nine Hells, its a gloomy afterlife. I, for one, would find a God that would best fit my personality and be the best follower I could be so that god would claim me after I die.
WaxandFeathers
May 7, 2009
“I would say that this faith (and fear) in the afterlife is what drives religious people to be good people.”
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting, but your implication seems to be that fear of godly retribution / punishment in the afterlife is the _only_ thing that can make people act morally. As an atheist, I find this viewpoint somewhat disturbing.
I would argue that almost all people, religious or not, fundamentally want to be good people / do good things. Religion can help facilitate this by suggesting how to be a good person, and offering extra incentives, but I don’t know of anyone for whom a lack of belief in an afterlife means they think they can do whatever they want.
As for non-divine incentives:
I’d say the biggest thing is simply a desire to be a good person, as defined by your society. I guess if you wanted to go deeper you could say that people are generally rewarded by society for being nice to each other – “good” people are considered more trustworthy, and often have more friends / can get favours more easily, which offsets any potential gain from doing bad things.
But that’s still looking at it from a personal gain/loss point of view, and I think it goes deeper than that: humans are, both currently and historically, social animals. For a society to survive, its people have to innately want to not be jerks to each other, regardless of personal gain. The whole society does better when people aren’t stabbing each other in the back (literally or metaphorically) and everyone is rewarded as a whole.
Taellosse
January 7, 2010
I’m something like a year late to this conversation, but I thought I’d chime in anyway.
I would like to point out that the concept of a rewarding/punishing afterlife, a la Christianity, is by no means universal to all actual religions. Some faiths have an afterlife that encourages “moral” behavior (for whatever values of “moral” that faith espouses), but others mostly don’t. Judaism, for example, has no concept of hell. The ancient Greeks and Romans figured everyone went to Tartarus regardless of what sort of person they were in life (though a select few of the most exceptional got to spend their time in the heaven-like Elysian Fields–but that wasn’t for generally good people, just for really spectacularly wonderful people, so most couldn’t expect it). Hindus believe in reincarnation–what you come back as is dictated by your moral choices, with perceived inferior life forms being punishments and perceived superior ones being rewards–but the emphasis in Hinduism is not on right vs. wrong so much as gradual perfection over many lifetimes. Buddhism takes this view even further, by including the concept of enlightenment as the highest goal of any soul, which makes one that achieves it greater than a god.
Then, of course, there’s atheists (I’m pretty close to one myself, though I generally call myself agnostic since I’m not dogmatic about it), who don’t believe in any sort of afterlife at all. Most of them still don’t behave in an amoral fashion (which should be distinguished from IMmoral–an amoral person might steal food if he was hungry, an immoral one does it for amusement).
And then there are those that use religion to justify immoral acts. There’s no shortage of them, and they aren’t restricted to any one faith. It’s been done throughout recorded history and persist to this day. And probably will continue to happen for as long as immoral acts and religion co-exist in the universe.
Morality, in a broad sense, transcends any particular religious convictions–most people prefer to avoid inflicting deliberate harm on other people, whether that harm is physical, emotional, or environmental. A subset of people are either driven to do harm or lack the environmental conditioning/genetic predisposition that makes others avoid it. Humans are wired to explain their actions with all sorts of justifications (nobody is a bad guy in their own mind), and religion provides a lot of good ones for moral (and immoral) behavior. But at bottom, religious belief is rarely the real reason people do things.