Meddling and Capricious

Over the last few years I have been reading quite a lot of books about Greek myth - Stephen Fry's "Mythos", "Heroes", and "Troy" trilogy; Jennifer Saint's "Elektra" and now "Ariadne". One of the things that has become quite apparent in these, but for whatever reason hadn't quite made its mark on me previously, was that the Greek gods are not at all benign (which I knew) but are also very active in the world.

Much of the action in these various stories comes about because one or more of the gods have taken some action, propelling mortals in various ways. When thwarted or insulted the gods proceed to punish mortals in interesting and vicious ways.

But, also: very often, the gods have competing and mutually-exclusive rules, so the mortals in question are just stuck. (For example, in "Elektra" Cassandra finds herself in a position where she has sworn a vow of chastity to Apollo and then finds herself facing sexual advances from Apollo. Whatever she does, she's going to be punished - rebuf him and anger the god; don't and break her vow and anger the god.)

The Greek gods have appeared in D&D in many different iterations, and while D&D has now moved away from including real-world religions it still has a instead the Greek-adjacent mythology in "Mythic Odysseys of Theros". However, for whatever reason D&D has never really incorporated that meddling and capricious nature of the gods in the game. And that despite it being a prime source of adventure motivations. Which all seems like rather an oversight.

That said, maybe it's something they didn't want to incorporate because of fears of DMs using it as license to themselves be meddling and capricious. There's definitely a fine line there. But maybe it's worth looking at again.