Intervention by deities

So I've been browsing through the AD&D DMG, and I must say I'm really impressed with it so far. "1e" has the reputation of being overly complex, arcane and difficult to understand, but I've not found it any more complex than 2e was, say. The "rules" section of the book (and that includes all sorts of guidance and examples, not just hard rules) only encompasses 119 pages - the rest being magic item descriptions and various random tables.

Anyway, I'll probably write here about anything I read that particularly grabs my attention. One such thing was the presence of the following two sentences, amidst the section on INTERVENTION BY DEITIES:

Serving some deity is an integral part of AD&D. ...the accumulation of hit points and the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws of characters represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces.

That's something that's never occurred to me before! And I don't think most people play that way, nowadays at least. (I'm not sure how many people would have taken those sentences literally back in the day, either.) But taking those sentences literally is a really interesting proposition, I think. What if every character, not just clerics and paladins, were required to choose a patron deity, and that that patronage is required in order to advance past 5th or so level. Like, normal people can advance up to a certain degree, but it requires the patronage of a deity to attain the abilities of higher level characters. That sounds like a pretty interesting premise for a campaign to me!