If the gods of a fantasy world are demonstrably real and regularly empower their faithful to perform miracles...

Or would the god of song, give a shit about military matters at all?

Would a god cease to exist if he stepped too far away from his purpose or sphere?

Ruling is hard and boring. Let the powerhungry, greedy and vain fight for power, it will keep them busy and your divine grace entertained for years to come.

The gods oppose each other, sowing discord among the persons of every city.
This opposition also means that no matter how omnipotent each god is, their power and focus is drained by equally omnipotent rivals and competitors, leaving only a little to parse out freely.
Add to this those people who become disenfranchised with the gods, or have suffered at the hands of one and curse them all.
And those who are blessed tends to congregate together. These people form powerful, centralized places of devotion - but this leaves the fringes less influenced.
And there are many who may not even recognize the power of the gods (unless there are angels and avatars wandering the countryside).

The divine right of Kings.

The Gods favour the King, thats why he is King.

Also why magic users can't easily usurp power from a Gods delegate in a region.

Deicide, complete and absolute, has been and will forever be the Only Answer

I'm not sure how a theocracy logically follows from gods with demonstrable power, in a setting where there are also other types of (equally powerful) power sources besides the divine. I'd imagine that some parts of the world would certainly operate as theocracies, as they have on occasion in real-world history, but I imagine it could be just as likely you'd find a magocracy, or a mundane, ordinary government.

Replace "wizards" with "clerics" and there you go.
Besides, only evil gods would agree to letting their followers have absolute positions of power over large amounts of people, because that would allow corruption to spread among their ranks like a cancer.
Good gods would respect our free will, would help the ones who are really faithful and would have champions with the mission of preventing evil cults from becoming too powerful and maintaining the divine balance on the world if mortals.

>of mortals
Fixd

If people have free will, then why are their alignments?

Why would a wizard WANT to rule? It distracts from researching magic.
Similarly Why would a church WANT to rule when their God mandates the ceaseless hunting of evil?

There are plenty of real world religions that are insanely powerful but not theocracies because they have different values. Similarly there are plenty of scientists, companies, and armies that are arguably the most powerful entity in their respective nation but don't rule because it isn't something they want to pursue.

Low hanging bait, is still bait.

When have alignments ever dictated what a mortal can and can't do? Sounds like you're using them wrong

It's a mechanic that exist for the sake of helping mortals fit a divine spectrum so they can take sides in a divine war and interact with divine beings in an imaginary adventure game.

I use them as categories, a good person will do good things and an evil person bad things.

Why aren't dynasties made of powerful entire bloodlines of sorcerers? They got the charisma, the blue blood, and the power of ancient beings running through their veins.

Well you're using them wrong. It should be "people who do good things ads good and people who do bad things are bad"

I'll give you an example:
You decide you want to rape that little orphan deaf mute girl.
Considering the GM isn't a retard, he won't stop you from doing it because your character is supposed to be lawful good. He'll let you do it but warn you that you god won't like it very much, and then have your god smite you afterwards and make you lose all your divine powers.
It's not a mechanic supposed to rule what a character can or can't do.
It's a mechanic that allows you interact with a divine being and know how your deity will react to your actions.

cont

It's hard to interact with fantastic real gods if the gods don't follow the same moral standards as mortal beings.
With Alignments, you create a medium between the character and the god they worship that fits the black-and-white vision of good vs evil that the setting has.

Well that comes down to weather the person is playing as the character, or as themselves

You dont find good monsters in my world

People in civilised areas are "good"
People in wilderness areas are "neutral"
And monsters in the wilderness are "evil"

This is their default setting and no free-will comes into it.

Because religions are not monolithic. They have factions, infighting and blasphemies. If we're assuming a D&D type game just because they empower the faithful doesn't mean they tell literally everyone what they're thinking all the time.

So people will constantly fight over which way to interpret their god and fracture into sectarian quibbling. It becomes even worse when the 'heretics' also get magic powers from god because you can't even say they're outright wrong.

Also this assumes the weird monotheistic polytheism that D&D has where all the gods are demonstrably real and each have different jobs but you still only worship one. Rather than say pray to the god of travel when you're on the road, the god of the hunt when you hunt and the god of justice when you're in court; a character only usually worships one god at time and if what you need help on isn't that god's purview then fuck off they aren't helping.

Also not all gods have strong institutional churches a la the Catholic church. The god of whispers, secrets and murder doesn't just have a big temple and have ceremonies once a week. Its adherents meet in forgotten places and low down slums under assumed names and disguise. While they certainly reshape politics they aren't an outright theocracy.

>Because wizards that get too salty, end up with a foot of steel sticking out of their chest. Or a dagger in their back.
And you don't think people would shank a whiny prophet saying he's the son of god and you all need to stop having royal buttsex parties?

>Why would a wizard WANT to rule? It distracts from researching magic.
Depends on the wizard? (Or are you being an autistic nitpicker who specifically means D&D wizards and isn't using it as a general term for "Male magic user)

Because I'm sure plenty of dudes with magic powers are either

A. Power hungry and see magic as a way to bend people to their will

B. Seek the wealth and resources gained by being the leader of a nation

or

C. Think that they'd be a good ruler and don't like the current one.

Because maybe some populations in such a world aren't too keen to the idea of depending on some sort of sky daddy to fulfill all their requests or grant their powers? It could largely be a thing of independence; a desire for the mortal races to prove they are masters of their own fates.

Just like in the real world. Some people would gladly spend their entire lives mooching off their parents and getting an allowance, while others would rather make their own futures and not be shackled to the rules of the ruler who owns the domain they live in.

IRL theocracies derive their power from precisely the absence of gods' direct, visible intervention in worldly affairs. The role of the priest-king is representing the national god and interpreting their will, something unnecessary in a world with active gods who make their wills known.

That's a limitation that you're imposing in your world. And a boring one at that.

I don't get what that has to do with the discussion, though.
Are the people in cities good because if they don't walk the line, they're immediately struck by a bolt of divine energy?

The alignment is not supposed to make your character physically incapable of acting in any other way. Its supposed to make the players aware of what they can do to make their gods happy and what they should avoid doing if they don't want to anger their gods and suffer the consequences.

As far as D&D goes, usually they do keep priests of Law gods around in the courts and bureaucracy, but retain a mortal figurehead so as to not suppress the faithful of other gods.
It'd kinda suck if you were a devout of, say, a Chaotic Good goddess of love and passion but living in a nation expressly serving the Lawful Good god who she's a rival of. It would divide the countries by faith, and then the material plane becomes an extension of the Outer Planes: a continuous place of tension and power disputes even among allies in an attempt to maximize personal divinities, and making war on their enemies. The material would be a mirror of the immaterial and lose a great deal of meaning.
The gods don't want to supersede the mortals that way, so they don't. Thus, theocracies are generally for evil gods who don't care about the welfare of their faithful.

I like to keep things simple, if adventurers have been fighting monsters, they dont want to be on their guard when they return to civilisation.

People in towns who provide services should be good, their reputation and the chance of an angry barbarian returning their bad acts with interest demands this.

People in wilderness can be indifferent to others, they will probably never meet them again and must concentrate on their individual survival.

Obviously a character is a free agent, but the environment they are in will dictate their actions more than a deity.

What exactly constitutes a monster, then? Are bandits who practice cannibalism in the woods monsters?

This, and also fiction is rife with kings who, despite the gods being very much tangible in their settings, actively despise them or worship alternative, less-tangible gods the old fashioned way.

Like, let's take the Bible, and assume that it's true within the context of it's own events. Even though Yahweh is legitimately nuking whole cities and winning his chosen people wars, there are still heathen kings worshiping false gods and persecuting his chosen people, and even the Jews of the old testament seem to routinely stop giving a fuck about god (See: Judges, which is nothing but god repeatedly punishing them every time their faith lapses.)

The deity reacts to their actions and not dictate it.

That's like saying that you lose your free will when you marry someone because the fact that your wife wouldn't like you having sex with other woman makes you magically incapable of even thinking about doing that.

What happens instead is that you make a vow and decide to have no sex with other woman because you know your wife would be extremely sad if you did it.

Worshiping a god in a fantasy setting like D&D is like that.

Imagine a omnipresent hot wife that would divorce you, cut your dick off and destroy your financial life if you broke your vows, gave in to your sexual urges and betrayed her.
But if you treat her well and make her happy she would give you free money, help you with good advice and have sex with you every time you asked for it.

Clearly you've never experienced the excellence of an LG BBEG.

>Imagine a omnipresent hot wife
Wouldnt she know you were going to cheat on her before you did it?

If a god required as many followers as possible to maintain its power level, wouldnt it allow some leeway?

>Imagine a omnipresent hot wife that would divorce you, cut your dick off and destroy your financial life if you broke your vows, gave in to your sexual urges and betrayed her.
So, a woman?

>But if you treat her well and make her happy she would give you free money, help you with good advice and have sex with you every time you asked for it.
So, a man?

>Wouldnt she know you were going to cheat on her before you did it?
Predicting the future in D&D is extremely vague and never absolute (the most precise future divination is limited to exactly 6 seconds ahead of the present, and the further from now you get, the more vague it becomes. Going further than a day in advance usually leaves even gods with general impressions along the lines of "X is likely, if I have seen correctly"/"Y is certain without unforeseen intervention"), so no. Even the gods of fate and time cannot account for the specter of chance, which pervades all level of reality.

Well it's probable that most societies arising in such conditions would have religious elements in positions of power, but a theocracy does not immediately and logically follow from this.

It may be that kings rise through warfare or politics who are not the empowered faithful, and have no desire to be subordinate to them. In that case, while he might have advisors and such drawn from these individuals, the government would still be a generic monarchy. Let us say for example that a city worships multiple deities, and part of the bargain for their coexistence is that the leadership must be drawn from a party who is not entirely in the pocket of any one of them. So the leader must be a secular individual, but the city itself is not rejecting divinity, it acknowledges it entirely.

Or what if you DO have a society that rejects divinity. Is that so implausible in a world in which gods are very visibly real and active agents? It would be impossible for a group to be slighted by some contrivance of divine politics and thus reject them altogether. Not atheist in the sense that they reject the existence of the gods, but rather view them as enemies. I mean it's certainly possible for such a thing to occur, though you'd expect some rival of the offending deities to try and scoop them up to their side.

You could discuss how a certain action could be considered both good and evil at the same time depending on your point of view and your beliefs.

The purpose of the alignment mechanic in D&D is to categorize that action as either good or bad for the sole purpose of dictating how the god you worship will react to it.

Followers can always repent. That's the only leeway.

So if someone changes alignment to worship another god, what can the ex-god(who is no longer worshipped) do?

Depends on what you did, how committed your god felt towards you and what kind of god you worshiped.

A lawful god may have a list of forbidden actions that makes absolutely no sense to you ( like the old testament hebrew god ) and simply stop helping you ( you lose your divine powers ) and wait for you to repent if you do a minor transgression. If you break your vows, betray your faith or do some other serious stuff, your lawful god might not only strip you from your powers but also severely punish you for what you did ( putting some kind of curse on you or sending some divine being to kick your ass ).

A chaotic gods don't have any such rules and are largely unpredictable, they might punish you excessively even for little transgressions or might just lose interest and forget you if you just stop acting in a chaotic manner, making you lose all your powers until you start doing stuff to get your god's attention again.

It all depends on your DM, though. DMs often just roleplay your god's reactions on the spot and don't follow any set of rules besides liking/disliking specific stuff, especially if its a homebrewed deity ( which is often the case ). In those cases you can consider the DM to be the actual god your character worship.

A lot of em find middle ground, look at Warhammer.

In a cultures relationship with its gods it is about getting the best return on the investment. The more power it has over the rules of the culture the more it will uses that power. If your culture believe that believe that gods wishes for them are truly in their best interests (as in not a greater good that weights their needs against other cultures) then they may go for a theocracy. Keep in mind what is being judged is not the personal character of the deity. If they are of a realpolitik mindset a evil deity makes a lot more sense than a good deity.

The next issue is that does turning to a theocracy create a issue of one or more gods in the area being subbed. That is a very big issue. It likely is easier to just have a king or something deal with each church ( and their gods) in turn. Play the demands of the gods against each other.

because the scholars and philosophers of the god-sculpted world have grown to question the the gods themselves, pondering if gods exist that one worships, who exists beyond the gods.

Then that leads me to think lots of extremists would turn to worshipping chaos itself or some other pure/entropic force

Depends on setting

Usually the answer is "it's really hard to get magic"

Because there are other powers in those worlds too, like Arcane magic, demonic influences, monsters like vampires or dragons that might hold power in an area, and even, if we're talking D&D, allegedly nonmagical warriors with ridiculous amounts of endurance and stamina that can set themselves up as Warlords. There's lots of sources for power in these worlds that are even if not as powerful, potentially more immediate and invested in the physical world than the Gods.

Good point, I would guess that most gods don't care to directly conquer that world.

If they did you bet you sweet ass it would look something like the world from the Dominions series.

'Gods' in the sense of DnD aren't always divine it seems. A lot of them are just really powerful beings. Not always a creator of some type.

>It would divide the countries by faith, and then the material plane becomes an extension of the Outer Planes: a continuous place of tension and power disputes even among allies in an attempt to maximize personal divinities, and making war on their enemies
That doesn't sound like a bad idea for a setting though. You'd need a really good set of gods to get people interested in the world though.