First, players can be divided in 3 groups. This is an exhaustive classification if you only reply yes/no to the questions "do you care about the official lore of the FR ?" and "are you knowledgeable in that lore ?".
- (1) Players who don't care about the lore. Whether they are knowledgeable or not.
- (2) Players who are expert in Forgotten Realms lore and care about it.
- (3) Players who are not expert in FR lore but who nevertheless care about making something lore-compatible.
Players in the first group may want to create a Half-Orc who is a Storm domain Cleric of Hanali Celanil as well as being a cruel and bloody murderer. I think they should be allowed to do that. Who cares what they do in their game ?
Players in the second group are perfectly capable of creating a lore-compatible character without being hand-held.
The game should help players in the third group by providing information and suggestions.
What's the goal ? Helping players in the 3rd group while not taking away the freedom of players in the 1st and 2nd group.
Second, let's see how Larian could go about using hard locks.
- (a) No lock. Every combination is possible.
- (b) Maximally-strict locks. Only the canonical combinations are possible. The PHB lists the domains for each deity. Also, make racial gods/pantheons exclusive to their race. Etc.
- (c) In-between. Go through all combination, judge which ones makes sense, and allow or lock combinations accordingly.
Note : it's not just domain-deity combinations. The male Gnome Trickery Cleric of Lolth isn't exactly proper. A combination is a sex-race-domain-deity combination.
If Larian chooses (b), it locks out a number of combinations that could completely make sense in terms of lore and roleplay. I would have mentioned the Life Cleric of Tempus who's a battlefield medic but Blotter has done so already. Also, playing an Elf who worships the Gnomish deity Baervan would not be possible, despite the famous Aerie from BG2 having precisely that combination. Why should Larian lock away these examples ?
They could go for (c). That would be more work. They would still end up locking away some combinations, otherwise it would be (a). Eventually,
some of the very many players of the game will almost-certainly come up with a combination and backstory that makes a lot of sense lore-wise and roleplay-wise, but is locked out, because the very few people in charge of ruling what's ok and what's not at one point in time didn't foresee that this combination could make sense.
Remains option (a) : no locks. This is the only one not restricting the possibilities of people in the 2nd group and the 1st. But then, how to help players in the 3rd group ?
Some suggestions
- In the description for each deity, the text could mention the domain associated with that deity, as well as the typical sexes and races these deities usually grant favours to.
- Similarly to the system used in the Character Appearance tab, for the choice of eye, skin and hair colours, there could be a limited list of lore-compatible deities that match your sex-race-domain choices. But players could actively decide to click on "Show All" to access the full list. So they would know that, if they pick something else, they go unconventional.
Conclusion ?
Hard-locking some combinations is not a good solution. It unnecessarily restricts the options of the 2nd group and 1st group of players. There are other ways to help players of the 3rd group.
