Then there's the irony of the Religion roll, where if a player fails it, they'll be left in the exact same boat as the OP here, totally in the dark about who a deity is, or what having a worshipper in the party might/could mean.
If you read the discussion with a keen eye, you'd see that that is not what is being suggested. It's probably how Larian would do it, but it's not what's being asked after.
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Do you suppose that some of those players have read the resources outside of the game, especially the ones that want to be up on the lore?
A couple, yes, but frankly, myself and my partners are the most lore-knowledgable people that we play with. Pretty much everyone else at our various game tables knows just what they've learned actively playing the game and immersing in the world as the adventure unfolds - they all came in knowing nothing about the game space or the realms, with only.... three exceptions, I think.
It would be a ridiculous dick move of our DMs to insist that these players "Go and do their research". I'd probably refuse to play at a table with a DM who did that, because I know that I'm not going to be getting an immersive game experience from someone like that. Someone that isn't prepared to spin a world around their players, and paint in the details organically, is not going to really deliver a satisfying game experience unless all you're after is the mechanical side of the game.
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every TT game I've ever sat at wanted to spend as much time as possible actually advancing the story,
Then you have my pity and my condolences... if that's your fun then you're welcome to it, of course, but if you've only ever played with players who wilfully cut out one of the broadest and deepest part of the game, because there's no time for immersion and organic roleplay in their roleplaying game... Well, you're missing out.
You're right, it's not. It's about how a reaction that some players will find perfectly logical being in a dialog, where the OP is acting like it's the only option available. As I said, if they don't have knowledge for a choice to make sense, they should choose a different option. There is information provided that a player can get before they ever have the discussion, that should be enough to let them know if that's appropriate or not. If it's given any other way that's not the narrator spoon feeding it, it won't be adequate, because if they couldn't read the book, and draw an inference of "Good" or "Bad", they won't understand something else they have to read, even if a hyperlink is added to "Shar" in the dialog. It's going to be another case of "Why should I have to have any baseline knowledge, that's the DM's job"...
You can save your pity too. While we were pushing the story forward, context being that we're not spending 2 hours of a 4 hour session explaining basic stuff, like "Evil is bad", we had plenty of tomfoolery fun.
