Okay I’m not going to do this now but I think maybe one of the reasons that it’s a good way to explore faith is that it removes the question of “is God/are the gods real?” Which is absolutely a valid question but I think often takes up a lot of the time in conversations about faith and can often just end up with people saying “yes” “no” “I don’t know” and “I don’t care” at each other until we’re all tired.
But in many fantasy TTRPGs, the gods are objectively real, so the questions become “if gods are real, are they good?” (or “what makes a good god?”) and “why would one worship a god?” and “what is worship, anyways?” and “what are the struggles of following a god even when one knows they’re real?”
And those (and many others) are also very good questions! Questions about which both non-religious and religious people can have lots of thoughts and feelings — but both groups often lack space to talk about them, or else struggle to find a voice for their thoughts, because talking about faith directly can be really hard, personal, and messy. But storytelling — exploring those themes through metaphor and characters one step removed from us, with made-up gods — makes it a bit easier, I think.
So you can explore questions that aren’t typical theological discussions, and you can do so in a way that feels a lot more comfortable for some people. And that’s why you can get people using TTRPGs to express their anger at the gods and at religious systems, or else to understand what sorts of expressions of faith are meaningful to them. And that’s amazing and also just super neat!
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