What makes a world worth living in (or why we flee the Forgotten Realms)

[Psyren]

I dislike the Wall too, or more accurately I dislike WotC's wishy-washy approach to what being put there actually means. Is it unblinking stasis, a gradual slide to oblivion, a painless soul-recycler, or torment on par with the Hells? Myrkul clearly intended it to be the last one, but he's not in charge anymore, so it should be changed to fit the aesthetics of new management. If it can't be for whatever arbitrary reason, I can understand that not being satisfying, considering that we're talking about gods here who constantly undermine one another and bend if not break the cosmic rules anyway.

One thing I will say though is that people who dislike the Wall should be happy about WotC's Multiverse approach to their official settings. Born in Realmspace and think the Wall is a load of bollocks? Your character can commandeer a Spelljammer or find a portal to Sigil and leave Kelemvor's jurisdiction behind entirely. You can even join up with the Athar and thumb your nose at him and the whole system directly.

[Mechalich]

To be fair, for most people who have only encountered FR's "setting" via a random selection of WotC's adventures (myself among them), the phrase "<author name>'s generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought..." pretty much sums up FR as a setting anyways.

Eh, well, there are some people involved with FR such as Ed Greenwood, its ultimate creator, and Jeff Grubb, the big world-builder at TSR when the basics for most major settings were ironed out, who clearly care. Their decisions weren't necessarily good ones, and they were subject to both corporate whims and exterior authorial interference, but you can look at their stuff and tell that they were trying. Troy Denning is not. He rampages across settings distorting the world-building for the express purpose of tormenting characters in order to try and build personal drama.

The genesis of the Wall of the Faithless is something like: Adon, formerly a priest of Sune, has a crisis of faith during the Time of Troubles and decides the gods suck and he won't worship any of them anymore. This doesn't matter in and of itself because Adon is a distinctly secondary character in the trilogy and only really matters via his relationship to Midnight; Midnight travels to the City of the Dead and discovers the existence of both the Faithless and the False (which I strongly believe prior to this were not a thing in FR) and his horrified and also just happens to know a person who falls into each class; Midnight is later given the chance to ascend to godhood at the conclusion of the Time of Troubles and her exposure to the Faithless and False are part of her personal choice to accept that option. The whole thing exists to support Midnight's justification to reluctantly go through apotheosis and try to 'fix the system from inside.' As such, Troy Denning deliberately broke the metaphysical framework of FR so that he could give a protagonist character a reason to choose to fix it.

How Ed Greenwood managed to work with the guy for many years I will never know.

[Vahnavoi]

@Psyren: Moving from Realms to the wider Great Wheel setting is hardly an improvement. Souls unclaimed by gods go to the afterlife most fitting of their lifetime actions and beliefs; a godless existentialist will go realm of godless existentialists, most likely Limbo, and dissolve into primordial chaos. Plus it doesn't do much to dodge all other horrible fates such demons and eldritch abominations preying on you.

[Psyren]

@Psyren: Moving from Realms to the wider Great Wheel setting is hardly an improvement. Souls unclaimed by gods go to the afterlife most fitting of their lifetime actions and beliefs; a godless existentialist will go realm of godless existentialists, most likely Limbo, and dissolve into primordial chaos. Plus it doesn't do much to dodge all other horrible fates such demons and eldritch abominations preying on you.

Everyone outside FR with no deity = Limbo seems... unfounded.

If we're talking about people who wouldn't be happy with any of the FR deities or the Wall - then dissolving into a matching plane sounds pretty ideal, particularly doing so peacefully as a good or even neutral character might expect. And there being a clear route out of FR for those people, at least to Sigil or Wildspace, seems pretty ideal as a plan B.

[Vahnavoi]

Everyone outside FR with no deity = Limbo seems... unfounded.

Faithlessness isn't quite the same as simply having no deity. Especially for a proposed multiversal traveller who has a good look at the Great Wheel as a whole, hence my specific remark on godless existentialism.

If we're talking about people who wouldn't be happy with any of the FR deities or the Wall - then dissolving into a matching plane sounds pretty ideal, particularly doing so peacefully as a good or even neutral character might expect. And there being a clear route out of FR for those people, at least to Sigil or Wildspace, seems pretty ideal as a plan B.

For majority of outer planes, the dissolution process isn't particularly more peaceful than being mortared into a wall. I can imagine a godless existentialist preferring the former (out of spite), but I can also imagine them being indifferent to or even proud of being subjected to the latter. "We must imagine Sisyphus happy" and all that jazz.

More importantly, though, you too are working on the underdeveloped notion that a character can be good and Faithless, even after having a good look at the multiverse.

Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship? That's about as plausible as not finding a single nation you'd be willing to pay taxes to - it speaks of particular philosophical commitment, and in the Great Wheel, such philosophical commitment comes with a particular alignment and a particular destination. The most fitting is Chaotic Neutral, hence Limbo.

See, that's the deal with worlds where faith and beliefs influences behaviours and outcomes. You don't actually have a choice of destination unless you're willing to change yourself. In a cosmology filled to the brim with gods? Most changes point away from godlessness.

[Mechalich]

@Psyren: Moving from Realms to the wider Great Wheel setting is hardly an improvement. Souls unclaimed by gods go to the afterlife most fitting of their lifetime actions and beliefs; a godless existentialist will go realm of godless existentialists, most likely Limbo, and dissolve into primordial chaos. Plus it doesn't do much to dodge all other horrible fates such demons and eldritch abominations preying on you.

In the Great Wheel cosmology, godless characters go to the realm most fitting their lifetime actions and morality, their beliefs and philosophical views don't mean squat. The Great Wheel doesn't care one whit about anyone's philosophical views, because it imposes it's own - which are admittedly very confused - on everyone. That is how religious afterlives are usually structured, the gods/cosmic forces decide what happens to the mortals upon death, the mortals don't get to argue about it, they just have to take what the system offers.

Does the system imposed by the Great Wheel or FR's unique cosmology kinda suck? Sure. Eternal torture until the soul dissolves from the burden of endless agony sounds like a pretty awful thing to impose one anyone, even the truly horrible. However, it's pretty par for the course in terms of the kinds of mythologies that D&D uses for inspiration. The real question regarding how horrible the D&D afterlife is revolves around the ratios: what portion of the population of the multiverse is good, neutral, and evil respectively, and D&D has been unbelievably inconsistent on that subject.

[NichG]

More importantly, though, you too are working on the underdeveloped notion that a character can be good and Faithless, even after having a good look at the multiverse.

Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship? That's about as plausible as not finding a single nation you'd be willing to pay taxes to - it speaks of particular philosophical commitment, and in the Great Wheel, such philosophical commitment comes with a particular alignment and a particular destination. The most fitting is Chaotic Neutral, hence Limbo.

Any philosophical position that objects to surrendering moral authority to another versus taking responsibility for your own morality. Bahamut can be a pretty great guy with some good ideas, but if he starts to call for the destruction of an entire prime world for the greater good or something like that, its not an inherently nihilistic position to say 'well in that case I can't promise to keep travelling this road with you'. A position of infinite trust, e.g. faith, can be philosophically objectionable without that philosophy being Chaotic Neutral. Most routes to that kind of point might lean on the Chaotic side, but equally well someone who says 'this is my code, this tells me what is right and wrong, and I will hold to that regardless of the gods or influences around me' would be taking a coherent position and that would of all things be more likely to be LN or LG.

Similarly, any philosophical position that asserts that power is not a particular indicator of truth/morality/etc could naturally object to worship even as a Great Wheel traveller. Again, Bahamut might be a pretty great guy and worth listening to, but worship accepts that 'status as a god' somehow privileges Bahamut's ideas and ethos over, say, an enlightened mortal saying the same sorts of things.

Basically, 'worship' does not have to be a natural reaction to the existence of a hierarchy of powers. Especially when many of those powers are just ascended mortals and when those powers are by and large more like flawed people than ineffable embodiments of cosmic concepts. And the variation of worship that is 'propitiate them and hope they don't look at me' even breaks down as a pragmatic matter when, well, the power level of gods isn't really so unreachable for individuals, and those gods are not inviolable constants of reality but relatively frequently do get deposed, suffer loses of power and agency, etc.

If it would seem weird to worship (not just respect, follow, etc) your favorite Lv20 wizard, it can make just as much sense to hold a position that it would be weird to worship your favorite Great Wheel (or FR) deity.

[Vahnavoi]

@Mechalich: morality is a matter of philosophy, as are all religions. Two basic tenets of alignment, and hence the Great Wheel, are that philosophy informs actions and actions reveal philosophy. All of the specific alignments stand for identifiable moral philosophies and even a superficial look at the outer planes will tell which plane was ripped off from what tradition because game designers didn't even file the serial numbers off.

[Vahnavoi]

Any philosophical position that objects to surrendering moral authority to another versus taking responsibility for your own morality.

Placing weight on the individual in this manner is Chaotic in the context of the Great Wheel, because the conflict between Law and Chaos is that of large organized groups versus the individual.

Bahamut can be a pretty great guy with some good ideas, but if he starts to call for the destruction of an entire prime world for the greater good or something like that, its not an inherently nihilistic position to say 'well in that case I can't promise to keep travelling this road with you'. A position of infinite trust, e.g. faith, can be philosophically objectionable without that philosophy being Chaotic Neutral.

Non-nihilist positions don't lead to before-the-fact categorical rejection of worship. A non-nihilist will be happy to worship a god to the point where a god actually breaks conduct, and the more gods there are, the likelier it is a given person will find a god who will never break conduct in practice.

Most routes to that kind of point might lean on the Chaotic side, but equally well someone who says 'this is my code, this tells me what is right and wrong, and I will hold to that regardless of the gods or influences around me' would be taking a coherent position and that would of all things be more likely to be LN or LG.

"This is my code and I will stick to it regardless of anyone or anything else!" is fundamentally self-centered and individualistic position and arguing it is Lawful is a corruption of the alignment system. Again, the conflict is between large organized groups and the individual, to even get from "my code" to "Lawful" requires us to define what exactly that code is, and it has to include group interest in a way that would contradict "I will hold to that regardless of anyone or anything else".

Similarly, any philosophical position that asserts that power is not a particular indicator of truth/morality/etc could naturally object to worship even as a Great Wheel traveller. Again, Bahamut might be a pretty great guy and worth listening to, but worship accepts that 'status as a god' somehow privileges Bahamut's ideas and ethos over, say, an enlightened mortal saying the same sorts of things.

Given mortals can become gods, the line in the sand between god and enlightened mortal doesn't matter. Which we can actually see from the original Great Wheel schema, because it has a plane from a philosophy that fits this description and gives it a definite alignment.

Basically, 'worship' does not have to be a natural reaction to the existence of a hierarchy of powers. Especially when many of those powers are just ascended mortals and when those powers are by and large more like flawed people than ineffable embodiments of cosmic concepts. And the variation of worship that is 'propitiate them and hope they don't look at me' even breaks down as a pragmatic matter when, well, the power level of gods isn't really so unreachable for individuals, and those gods are not inviolable constants of reality but relatively frequently do get deposed, suffer loses of power and agency, etc.

If it would seem weird to worship (not just respect, follow, etc) your favorite Lv20 wizard, it can make just as much sense to hold a position that it would be weird to worship your favorite Great Wheel (or FR) deity.

The point of failure for this argument is that for a lot of people worshipping their favorite lv20 wizard would not be weird at all. In fact, we can see all over that worship of flawed and limited things, people included, is quite common for humans.

Which leads us back to the beginning: deciding it is weird and then not doing it speaks of particular commitment and hence particular alignment.

[icefractal]

The point of failure for this argument is that for a lot of people worshipping their favorite lv20 wizard would not be weird at all. In fact, we can see all over that worship of flawed and limited things, people included, is quite common for humans.

Which leads us back to the beginning: deciding it is weird and then not doing it speaks of particular commitment and hence particular alignment.

This seems like an odd take. So if I roll into town as a powerful mage (not like most of the world could discern my exact level), then only people strongly committed to a CN anti-worship philosophy would refuse to worship me, everyone else would be like "all hail Bob the Illusionist, our new god!"?

And if the answer is "they wouldn't because they already worship existing gods", then doesn't that go both ways? If my answer to "why not worship Bahamut?" is "I already worship Fred the dragon summoner", then by your standard I'm not an anti-theist weirdo, I'm just already committed. But I'm pretty sure that in FR, worshiping Fred (a mid-level Sorcerer with rather impressive charisma) would count as being "Faithless".


I mean heck, that (the ambiguity between "real gods", "powerful beings", and "frauds using illusions" for most people in a D&D world) is a reason to be against worshiping gods without any philosophy beyond "I don't wanna get scammed again" -
Priest: "You should join the following of Bahamut, who watches over us all!"
Bob: "No way, I'm not losing all my money to one of these cults again."
Priest: "It's not a cult, Bahamut is an all-powerful god who's actively protecting us all the time."
Bob: "Yeah, that's what the Followers of the Great Sphinx said, and after they'd scammed me out of my horse and all my gold, they skipped town. I heard the leader was imprisoned for fraud a few months ago."
Priest: "Yes, but that was a false god, Bahamut is a true god."
Bob: "And do you have a way to prove that? That I'd believe, given that I know people can make all kinds of illusions with magic, and I have no way to tell if they're real or fake."

[Vahnavoi]

This seems like an odd take. So if I roll into town as a powerful mage (not like most of the world could discern my exact level), then only people strongly committed to a CN anti-worship philosophy would refuse to worship me, everyone else would be like "all hail Bob the Illusionist, our new god!"?

You can replace "powerful mage" with something far more mundane, such a rock star, and you will still see sizable fraction of people engage in worship.

And if the answer is "they wouldn't because they already worship existing gods", then doesn't that go both ways? If my answer to "why not worship Bahamut?" is "I already worship Fred the dragon summoner", then by your standard I'm not an anti-theist weirdo, I'm just already committed. But I'm pretty sure that in FR, worshiping Fred (a mid-level Sorcerer with rather impressive charisma) would count as being "Faithless".

Both in Realmspace and the larger Great Wheel cosmology I'm actually talking about at the moment, Fred has a genuine shot at becoming a god and claiming you as a petitioner. Nothing weird about it in the context of these settings. If Fred is unsuccesful, then you might end up in the Wall in the Realms. I'm not sure, I don't know if this exact scenario has come up. I do know non-gods are occasionally worshipped as gods in Realmspace, but the examples I know don't generalize (for example, infernal patrons claiming souls of those they deceived). In the larger Great Wheel, we can look at what Fred actually stands for to determine alignment of both Fred and his followers.

I mean heck, that (the ambiguity between "real gods", "powerful beings", and "frauds using illusions" for most people in a D&D world) is a reason to be against worshiping gods without any philosophy beyond "I don't wanna get scammed again" -
Priest: "You should join the following of Bahamut, who watches over us all!"
Bob: "No way, I'm not losing all my money to one of these cults again."
Priest: "It's not a cult, Bahamut is an all-powerful god who's actively protecting us all the time."
Bob: "Yeah, that's what the Followers of the Great Sphinx said, and after they'd scammed me out of my horse and all my gold, they skipped town. I heard the leader was imprisoned for fraud a few months ago."
Priest: "Yes, but that was a false god, Bahamut is a true god."
Bob: "And do you have a way to prove that? That I'd believe, given that I know people can make all kinds of illusions with magic, and I have no way to tell if they're real or fake."

Only if you're approaching this from a particular mindset. And that's really the crux of this: you, NichG and several others come to this with the mindset that people choose to worship an entity because it is a god. When the actual causality in both Realms and the Great Wheel goes that people choose to worship what they value and in doing so elevate those entities to divinity. Fred the Rock Star will be worshipped as an idol and a hero for being an overall awesome dude long before the question of their godhood comes up.

Sure, a person can be burned by having placed their faith in the wrong thing, and become distrusting as a result. That is a far cry from principled godlessness; such a person may well find a new deity more worth their trust, and as the number of gods grows, so does the likelihood of finding such a new deity.

[Thane of Fife]

But I'm pretty sure that in FR, worshiping Fred (a mid-level Sorcerer with rather impressive charisma) would count as being "Faithless".

I don't think you would. Neither Elminster's Forgotten Realms nor the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (even pre- Wall of the Faithless removal) really has much to say about patron deities, and I'd say that both imply that you don't count as Faithless for not having one. You have to go out of your way to oppose or disregard the gods to count. I think the patron deity requirement thing is no longer canon at this point.

[Anymage]

One thing I will say though is that people who dislike the Wall should be happy about WotC's Multiverse approach to their official settings. Born in Realmspace and think the Wall is a load of bollocks? Your character can commandeer a Spelljammer or find a portal to Sigil and leave Kelemvor's jurisdiction behind entirely. You can even join up with the Athar and thumb your nose at him and the whole system directly.

Two very different things. An already existing planehopper can think that realmspace is crummy, and a reader can draw their own conclusions. (The latter especially given the setting's own inconsistent treatment of it. Mechalich's mention of Midnight is the first I've heard in any Wall topic of someone inside the setting acknowledging how crap it is. Most of what I'd heard involved the Myrkulite version and either active or tacit support.) Meanwhile I'd consider it bad form to sign up for someone else's FR game only to bring a character whose sole goal was to leave the setting, and I'd be very annoyed as a DM if someone brought a character to my game whose primary drive was to avoid the main setting and plots I'd been preparing for.

Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship? That's about as plausible as not finding a single nation you'd be willing to pay taxes to - it speaks of particular philosophical commitment, and in the Great Wheel, such philosophical commitment comes with a particular alignment and a particular destination. The most fitting is Chaotic Neutral, hence Limbo.

See, that's the deal with worlds where faith and beliefs influences behaviours and outcomes. You don't actually have a choice of destination unless you're willing to change yourself. In a cosmology filled to the brim with gods? Most changes point away from godlessness.

On the one hand, agreed that the Athar are kind of a dumb position to build one's whole personality around and very reflective of the time period that Planescape came out in. Even if one takes the view that gods are just big outsiders and not in principle that different from powerful wizards, people in the real world absolutely invest time and money into causes they consider important. Characters would be silly not to devote prayer when those prayers very clearly empower divine beings devoted to causes they find important. If there's a flaw in that system, it would be pantheism where the worshipper wants to praise multiple gods they consider worthy instead of only focusing on one.

On the other hand, all of that does hinge on finding divine beings worth worshiping. (Or charities worth donating to, or other analogous organizations worth belonging to.) I can think Chanteau is pretty cool and everything, but if I find out that she asked Kelemvor to keep the Myrkulite Wall instead of changing or removing it that would sour my respect for her. That wouldn't impact my view of gods in general or my ability to respect a god like Pelor without such a black mark on their record, just the ones in the setting. Although it would suck if I were in a setting where even the supposedly good gods never gave so much as a negative comment about an evil artifact existing because said artifact happened to be personally convenient to them.

[KorvinStarmast]

The Wall of the Faithless can be a coherent element of a setting, but if you were a multiversal traveller it'd definitely mark a setting as 'caution: this is a really bad place to die'.

Is there a good place to die?

People really, really seem to make factual errors about the Wall of the Faithless.
Considering Troy Denning's generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought into the cosmology of the Realms was made when the Wall of the Faithless was created.

Well, he did OK in Dark Sun, but that world was grim, chaotic, and massively different than FR. (To say that it could not have used a few tweaks to the world building would be wrong).

To be fair, for most people who have only encountered FR's "setting" via a random selection of WotC's adventures (myself among them), the phrase "<author name>'s generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought..." pretty much sums up FR as a setting anyways.

Yes. A mess.

Eh, well, there are some people involved with FR such as Ed Greenwood, its ultimate creator, and Jeff Grubb, the big world-builder at TSR when the basics for most major settings were ironed out, who clearly care. Their decisions weren't necessarily good ones, and they were subject to both corporate whims and exterior authorial interference, but you can look at their stuff and tell that they were trying. Troy Denning is not. He rampages across settings distorting the world-building for the express purpose of tormenting characters in order to try and build personal drama.

Hmm, did he write any Dragonlance books?

@Mechalich: morality is a matter of philosophy, as are all religions. Two basic tenets of alignment, and hence the Great Wheel, are that philosophy informs actions and actions reveal philosophy. All of the specific alignments stand for identifiable moral philosophies and even a superficial look at the outer planes will tell which plane was ripped off from what tradition because game designers didn't even file the serial numbers off.

I'd put this in my sig, but it's a bit too large. +1

Placing weight on the individual in this manner is Chaotic in the context of the Great Wheel, because the conflict between Law and Chaos is that of large organized groups versus the individual.

Which WotC has not bothered to carry forward, nor explain in sufficient detail.

"This is my code and I will stick to it regardless of anyone or anything else!" is fundamentally self-centered and individualistic position and arguing it is Lawful is a corruption of the alignment system.

It's all about me is certainly Chaotic, so it makes for a nice option for a Chaotic Paladin in D&D5e: that is the one who takes the Oath of Vengeance.

Again, the conflict is between large organized groups and the individual, to even get from "my code" to "Lawful" requires us to define what exactly that code is, and it has to include group interest in a way that would contradict "I will hold to that regardless of anyone or anything else".

But the WotC dev team does not grasp that, apparently.

World building needs to fit the purpose of the campaign and the campaign's creator. To answer the OP's title question (and not the random sound bytes in the text of that post) a world worth living in for a TTRPG (not for any other media or game!) is one worth exploring (so it needs some unknowns and a sense of wonder and discovery here and there), it needs to have conflict to resolve, and it needs to be worth either saving (generally good parties) or exploiting (generally evil parties) or growing in (any kind of party). It also needs to feel "real enough" to the players (verisimilitude) that they most of their assumptions about real life (with exceptions being codified by the game/campaign) fit well enough to not create dissonance.

[NichG]

Placing weight on the individual in this manner is Chaotic in the context of the Great Wheel, because the conflict between Law and Chaos is that of large organized groups versus the individual.

Non-nihilist positions don't lead to before-the-fact categorical rejection of worship. A non-nihilist will be happy to worship a god to the point where a god actually breaks conduct, and the more gods there are, the likelier it is a given person will find a god who will never break conduct in practice.

"This is my code and I will stick to it regardless of anyone or anything else!" is fundamentally self-centered and individualistic position and arguing it is Lawful is a corruption of the alignment system. Again, the conflict is between large organized groups and the individual, to even get from "my code" to "Lawful" requires us to define what exactly that code is, and it has to include group interest in a way that would contradict "I will hold to that regardless of anyone or anything else".

Given mortals can become gods, the line in the sand between god and enlightened mortal doesn't matter. Which we can actually see from the original Great Wheel schema, because it has a plane from a philosophy that fits this description and gives it a definite alignment.

The point of failure for this argument is that for a lot of people worshipping their favorite lv20 wizard would not be weird at all. In fact, we can see all over that worship of flawed and limited things, people included, is quite common for humans.

You can have a philosophy that centers the good of the collective, without being a hierarchical deontology where you take moral orders from a single source above you. A utilitarian perspective or consequentialist perspective centering the good of all for example can still make it the responsibility of the one taking that respective to ensure that they make correct choices.

Which leads us back to the beginning: deciding it is weird and then not doing it speaks of particular commitment and hence particular alignment.

...

You can replace "powerful mage" with something far more mundane, such a rock star, and you will still see sizable fraction of people engage in worship.

I don't think you have to be a radical individualist to decide that 'do what Elvis would do' isn't the end-all be-all of moral philosophy. It's not that far to go to conclude that maybe statements of the form 'do what X would do' where X is a particular other singular entity are a pretty limited language to explore moral philosophy with. Lots of people do approach morality this way, sure. There are practical and cultural reasons for that to be the case. But 'having been caused to be this way by the dynamics of large groups' is not the same thing as 'valuing the concerns of large groups first', and it wouldn't be such a strange thing to break down and reconstruct your beliefs upon becoming widely traveled and discovering that there are other large groups that both believe different things in detail from you, but which have structural commonalities in those beliefs.

I don't think it would be so strange for a strongly collectivist, pro-social character to start to say 'okay, there's bits of Pelorite worship and bits of Bahamut worship and bits of Chauntea worship that happen to agree with each-other and look the same, but Pelor has this crusade against the undead, Bahamut this whole dragon focus, and Chauntea is focused on the pastoral - maybe what I actually believe most strongly isn't any of them in their entirety, but is actually the underlying reason for the bits they agree about?'. I would not immediately jump to the conclusion that that character would be a rugged individualist caring about personal freedom over all, just that they had cause to sit down and think more deeply about morality due to the breadth of societies they visit and coexist with compared to the average faux-medieval person who never leaves the culture that they grew up in.

Only if you're approaching this from a particular mindset. And that's really the crux of this: you, NichG and several others come to this with the mindset that people choose to worship an entity because it is a god. When the actual causality in both Realms and the Great Wheel goes that people choose to worship what they value and in doing so elevate those entities to divinity. Fred the Rock Star will be worshipped as an idol and a hero for being an overall awesome dude long before the question of their godhood comes up.

I'm approaching it from the mindset that 'worshipping' is not the philosophical default way to think about values, even if its the most common way that people have historically thought about values. Choosing to relate to things via worship is a particular narrow stance. It can be both a common stance and a narrow stance - the narrowness is in relation to the space of other coherent possibilities, whether those approaches are currently popular or not.

I'm not going to say the converse argument that 'well if someone chooses worship, they're automatically going to Mechanus!' because I think the space is broad enough that the choice of approach to values doesn't have to correlate at all with selfish/selfless and group/individual axes.

[Psyren]

More importantly, though, you too are working on the underdeveloped notion that a character can be good and Faithless, even after having a good look at the multiverse.

Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship?

Literally any good (or neutral for that matter) person disillusioned with FR's afterlife or the ineffectiveness of the good gods at preventing evil could fall into that bucket. To say they would all invariably end up in Limbo if they somehow got out of Realmspace is just odd.

Two very different things. An already existing planehopper can think that realmspace is crummy, and a reader can draw their own conclusions. (The latter especially given the setting's own inconsistent treatment of it. Mechalich's mention of Midnight is the first I've heard in any Wall topic of someone inside the setting acknowledging how crap it is. Most of what I'd heard involved the Myrkulite version and either active or tacit support.) Meanwhile I'd consider it bad form to sign up for someone else's FR game only to bring a character whose sole goal was to leave the setting, and I'd be very annoyed as a DM if someone brought a character to my game whose primary drive was to avoid the main setting and plots I'd been preparing for.

"I want to leave FR eventually" does not mean "I want to avoid your plots." Striking out across the multiverse is as valid a long-term goal / retirement plan for a high-level character as any other, and does not have to happen during the events of your campaign/story at all.

[Kish]

I don't think you would. Neither Elminster's Forgotten Realms nor the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (even pre- Wall of the Faithless removal) really has much to say about patron deities, and I'd say that both imply that you don't count as Faithless for not having one.

If you choose Ao as your patron deity you explicitly do count as Faithless, so no, I'm pretty sure worshiping anything that isn't an actual god means you count as Faithless...

I think the patron deity requirement thing is no longer canon at this point.

...if that concept still exists.

Hopefully, it does not (though, alas, the developers have not yet explicitly said anything to that effect). Which brings us right back to where we were before gatorized and Vahnavoi decided to explain to most other people in this thread how wrong we are to object to the Wall of the Faithless.

[Mechalich]

If you choose Ao as your patron deity you explicitly do count as Faithless, so no, I'm pretty sure worshiping anything that isn't an actual god means you count as Faithless...

Eh, Ao is kind of a jerk, and choosing to worship him means being both sufficiently well-informed to recognize that he exists - which applies to maybe 0.01% of the Realms, most of whom are high-level mages or priests who already have patron deities that they like - and trying to game the system by bypassing the deities entirely. This is rather like screaming 'I want to speak to your manager's manager!' without talking to the actual manager first and is something almost guaranteed to piss that person off (I have seen this happen a couple of times, it never goes well for the complainant). Of course Ao flips the metaphysical bird to people who pull that stunt.

The actual deities of the Realms are supposed to come down awfully hard on people who aren't deities but who are claiming to be, since such cults both cast doubt into the system, make the gods look bad, and deprive them of belief (importantly, the gods require belief not worship, they can feed off the hatred of mortals just fine). FR, as we might expect, is inconsistent about this, because various authors want to have weird cult stories or to have power demons impersonate deities and so forth, but this really should not be a thing in FR or most other D&D settings. The proper response to someone, even a high-level wizard, walking into a town square and proclaiming 'I am the messenger of the New God X!' ought to be an instant smiting by Helm, but, well, yeah, that's apparently too much to expect.

[Lord Torath]

The whole thing was created by Troy Denning for the novel Waterdeep in 1989 as a way to hold a threat over the character of Adon for daring to doubt the gods. Considering Troy Denning's generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought into the cosmology of the Realms was made when the Wall of the Faithless was created.

Well, he did OK in Dark Sun, but that world was grim, chaotic, and massively different than FR. (To say that it could not have used a few tweaks to the world building would be wrong).

He started out okay. Then he turned around and ruined the setting with the metaplot, having his NPCs knock off most of the BBEGs of the setting, leaving nothing for PCs to do. Okay, not nothing, but nothing on the scale of what Rikus and Co. did.

[KorvinStarmast]

He started out okay. Then he turned around and ruined the setting with the metaplot, having his NPCs knock off most of the BBEGs of the setting, leaving nothing for PCs to do. Okay, not nothing, but nothing on the scale of what Rikus and Co. did.

A fair criticism.