Why do you say that? (The part about it dying a long time ago.) Why would it have died?
A: It would have lost most if not all semblances of organization, coherency, and quality
B: Prioritization would be messed up
C: This sounds redundant, but without planning, long term plans could not happen. So the devs wouldn't even know what they're shooting for.
I'm not saying that occasional impulse decisions can't happen, but not with regard to important settings details. Smaller things like interface tweaks maybe, but those are things that would be continuously refined anyways.
As for the natures of gods, it would definitely be cool having a bunch of variety. A couple old but mighty gods that don't get into things much, some young arrogant impulsive ones that are always fooling around (hey, sounds familiar!), some sneaky ones, some that aren't so much gods as extremely powerful mortals, like Superman, myself, and the Ellimist. Some could be manifestations of a group consciousness (it only "exists" when people believe in it, because it doesn't exist at all, but the force of their aligned beliefs dictates reality). Then there could be distorted visions of gods, like in reality when older gods morph and combine over time to create new gods. And of course, there would be the completely imaginary gods with huge followings, that are either purely imaginary or the result of a tight-knit group's efforts to control the masses.
And of course the range of abilities they'd posses are going to be vastly different. Some near omnipotent, other's just have the ability to pull Ulber's out of a thimble. Some might only have abilities in certain locations or at certain times, or only against people who believe in them.
It would add more variety if you wouldn't know instantly that some facts about gods are true. One could be suprised learning the truth about some gods and see that different gods can be completly different. To a deegre that person would wonder that religion or god word is still valid for certain dieties.
Definitely. We should get brief summaries of what the general public believes so that we know what to start with, but nothing should be stated in absolutes. We could all be in Matrix inside a Matrix hosted on servers on the back of a giant turtle swimming in spilled milk on a table in a kitchen inside King Friday's castle. But that's something we'd have to find out ourselves. I think it would be pretty interesting to find out that the settings were all a scam, and that Talad and Laanx are really the fictional creation of the gods' equivalent of a grad student doing a research project on mortal religion. Such knowledge would only be the result of extremely long periods of questing and endless hours of work, so that few if any would realize the truth. Those few could try to spill the beans if they wanted, but nobody would believe them. Unless they got lucky and started a cult following, which is what the rest would see it as.
Okay, enough randomness out of me for tonight.
