Well.FrankTrollman wrote:The existence of the Atonement spell is pretty fucked up because the Christian concept of Atonement on which it is based is all fucked up
Okay, so lots of Protestants could give a fuck about Good Works, but the Catholics recognize them as necessary for Salvation.
The rite of Confession is actually called the Sacrament of Penance and genuinely necessitates that you do something to sustain your absolution. Over many centuries, and in part due to cynical reasons, penance has become far more trivial and personal and the great likelihood is that you'll leave the Confession box assigned to chant a certain number of Hail Marys, but classically you were under the obligation to go forth and do good deeds, give alms, and try to restore the injuries you inflicted on your neighbors. If you step into the confessional today and tell the priest that you murdered a man and that his body is buried in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance he's going to demand you surrender yourself to the police and give up the location of the body as a condition of your absolution.
This is as good a theology for a game as it is for the Catholics. You're never really out with Christ or Pelor if you don't want to be, and your supernatural privileges will not be stripped from you for mere error. If you fuck up really badly, though, you're going to be obliged to fulfill certain tasks. In real life this is an inconvenience, but in D&D, it's a sidequest, baby.
The problems that strike me about Atonement in D&D is the misnomer with respects to Evil religions, that it's a fucking fifth-level spell and thus the strict privilege of higher level characters, that it's wildly discretionary, and that the caster (not the sinner) is the one who shoulders the significant costs of the spell.
Really, "Communion" should be a ritual that a level 1 NPC can do. If you're a lay member of the congregation then he assigns ordinary tasks in the form of some generic on-aesthetic works, but if you're a powerful convert or have supernatural powers as a grant from your religion (sidenote: clerics are a dumb class; this should be a single domain and class skill that you got from a feat) then somebody discharges their highest level spell-slot to power a Divination effect where confessor and priest are both visited with with a revelation as to how they'll serve penance. Might just be a compulsion to mutilate a housecat for the glory of Satan, but if the DM is mad at you for murdering the self-insert that he was going to use to deliver a bunch of exposition, or if your character's background is that he's lived a long life of NotTeamWhoever and he's trying to convert, or if this is an NPC that you've talked into switching sides and need a mechanism to parole him, then the confessor gets hit with far more specific and arbitrary directives that sends them where they need to be for the campaign to continue.
If, as a confessor, you don't do that shit, then that religion stops providing your Domain, the priest who performed the sacrament will know it and have you censured, and the DM can have a filler session where you fight the inquisitors that came to hold you accountable. Or if you're the priest, then you'll know where the heretic is and YOU can go hold him accountable.
But all of this is STILL hedged to coming up with particular philosophies or religions to hold you accountable to instead of "Chaotic Neutral," so I have nothing to say in defense of alignment in the context of this post.