(No Spoilers please. Use spoiler tags if necessary.)

Hi, I've just joined today and this is my first post in the forum.

One thing I've always disliked about classic D&D world is that gods are unrestricted in their physical involvement with the mortal world(for ex, killing anyone for fun), and only being restrained by artificial "the absolute" being AO. This ruins all the mood because you know your main character can be easily killed by an evil god's whim but the said god is unable to do it because there is some contrived higher-power that prevents him from doing anything.

So I was wondering how much Aedra or Daedra can affect the mortal world.

When you do Daedric quests and read corresponding books, you can see that Daedric princes do not directly throw down a lightening to kill mortals who went against their wishes, but rather use indirect means(employing a champion, cursing an item the prince owns and passing it to the defier, and etc) to deal with them.

This raises some questions:

1. Why are they being restriced from directly engaging in the mortal affair? Is it due to the Akatosh's firewall(so to speak)?

2. If that's the case, does that mean Aedras can affect the mortal world directly? If a good Aedra turns evil or decides to kill evil beings, can they do it? If Akatosh's power is preventing daedras from invading the mortal world, then Aedra themselves should be able to influence the mortal world.

3. What about Azura? How was she able to curse an entire race if aforementioned restrictions exist?

4. What about some gods demostrating physical powers when PC interact with them in shrines? For ex, one of them lifts PC up in the air for an audience. If they can do that, why can't they just kill mortals they hate by tossing them up in the sky?

These questions always bugged me as a player. Does anyone know answers to these questions?

you can search it at UESPWiki i am too lazy too reply

But not too lazy to add an extra post to your total eh

There is some speculation that the Letters from a Friend in Skyrim come from either Talos (ie. Ysmir Wulfharth) or Kyne. I like to think it so.

Not much. The Nine Divines gave up a ton of their power (although they can occasionally appear before people and manipulate events), and the Daedra have limited influence on Nirn because of various pacts and the Dragonfires.

The Aedra are dead, in the sense that they put much of themselves in Creation and are bound by it, and can only manifest on Nirn through dreams and visions of their followers or by manifestation of an avatar. Their power over Creation itself is absolute in a diffuse kind of way as they literally are the laws of nature. Their power in a specific way is rather limited, people have free will and lightning bolts don't just strike out of the sky to smite the unbeliever. The Aedra have no influence outside of Creation.

The Daedra are omnipotent in their own Daedric realms, which are an extention of themselves. Their realms of Oblivion surround Creation. On Nirn itself their influence is limited by several safeguards and pacts. They cannot physically manifest on Nirn nor directly affect anything on it. Their influence is limited to manifesting themselves in the minds of worshippers at places of worship, where the barrier between worlds is weakest.

For both groups their powerbase is in fact their followers, who exact their will and who provide them the worship that grants them power.

Azura collects mortal souls for the same reason as any other Daedra, she just figures you catch more flies with honey.

"So the Daedra Lords created the Daedric Realms, and all the ranks of Lesser Daedra, great and small. And, for the most part, the Daedra Lords were well pleased with this arrangement, for they always had worshippers and servants and playthings close to hand. But, at the same time, they sometimes looked with envy upon the Mortal Realms, for though mortals were foul and feeble and contemptible, their passions and ambitions were also far more surprising and entertaining than the antics of the Lesser Daedra. Thus do the Daedra Lords court and seduce certain amusing specimens of the Mortal Races, especially the passionate and powerful. It gives the Daedra Lords special pleasure to steal away from Shezarr and the Aedra the greatest and most ambitious mortals. 'Not only are you fools to mutilate yourselves,' gloat the Daedra Lords, 'But you cannot even keep the best pieces, which prefer the glory and power of the Daedra Lords to the feeble vulgarity of the mush-minded Aedra.'"

-http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Monomyth.

So the answers to your questions are:

1- Yes, exactly. And several other mechanisms such as the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:White_Gold_Tower (of reality) and the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:2920,_The_Last_Year_of_the_First_Era.

2- Only through followers. An avatar can be quite limited and have no more power than a http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Wulf, but foci of worship can alter that.

3- It is quite possible Azura only hastened a natural process and then called it a curse. Elves change rather quickly in TES and the main driving force for that seems to be culture. See the huge difference between Snow Elves and Falmer for instance, or Altmer and Bosmer.

4- Places of worship are places of power and giving attention to a Daedra is dangerous. Meridia could have done nothing to you if you had just kept walking on.

They're likely from 1 of the Greybeards or dictated to 1 by old Paarth as only they can hear the whispers of word walls and it doesn't make sense why a divine would write a letter and have a basic courier deliver it.

back OT, I don't think gods are limited in what they can do, I just think they prefer to sit back and watch their pawns play their silly little chess game