Hot take: Strongest creatures in the setting shouldn't just be clowned by PCs with no resistance.
Inspired by frustrating conversation I had. For those curious, that was the statblock of Caine, father of the vampires.
The official charactersheet for Caine: https://64.media.tumblr.com/e06763afdbed16a49a0146a2282002a4/tumblr_n6pj41Ch1s1qhuazoo1_540.jpg
I like his weakness :)
Also shouldn't his sire be Lilith, oh no wait he was cursed by God yeah.
Love it
It's also fun in the other direction. Like Exalted has stat blocks for mortals, but the PCs are literally built to fight entities more powerful than gods.
An encounter with a mortal is always just a narration scene even if combat ensues. You can pulverize ten of these guys without breaking a sweat, but do you? What does your choice say about you?
Exalted isn't a game about fighting mortals in quantities less than an army, and there is no threat in doing so. Any tension in the scene is purely about what the characters do with essentially unlimited power. And that can be interesting and tense for some groups and in others it's a thirty second aside on the way to fight timeless terrors.
Exalted literally let's you have your own army of mortals and it functions like an equivalent of grenade in most normal games - something to just throw at the bad guy.
I feel that this is really 5e and 4e specific. 3.5 is kinda borderline and in my experience 2e and older definitely do feature things that are effectively "if you go in there you die, lmao" types of obstacles and trend more towards a sort of survival-horror tone, where surviving is in itself an accomplishment.
BECMI ends with Immortals, so the concept of playing extremely powerful characters has always been around. While I'd imagine the vast majority never played with those rules, the same is true for modern D&D. A vanishingly small number of games actually make it to level 20.
Shadowrun: Great Dragons don’t have stats because the players will lose.
DnD tends to be balanced between the levels of 5 through 12. Most modules sit in there.
But I'm not saying anything controversial when I note that 5e CR is a bad way to do encounters.
You say that, but IIRC there are official DnD statements that gods do not have statblocks because they are too powerful for mortals to even try to fight. They renamed the Tiamat statblock to Aspect of Tiamat for precisely this reason.
When you need to stop your players from trying to fight the Gods.
There's an old Dragon email about a guy needing TSR to print a new "deities and demigods" because his players had already beaten all those from the original.
I do feel like sometimes players have a sort of laid back, "we should just win without too much trouble" attitude. Sometimes this manifests as "we take a long rest after every fight". And that's a fine way to play, so long as everyone's on board.
It can be kind of bad when half the group is kick-in-the-door-lol and the DM is expecting more tactical depth.
I think because D&D is many people's first RPG, you'll find a lot of bad habits there as new players rediscover them.
Caine's statblock was perfect. And frankly, there should be more characters (especially named NPCs) who have that block.
Also WoD:
Player: I’m a mage I’m literally changing reality, I will cure that vampire.
System: vampirism is a curse from God, do you really think you can roll more successes than God?
We used to talk about how to cure Vampires in Mage (awakening, 2e).
The easiest is probably time magic. With Time4, rules as written you can rewrite their history so they never became a vampire. It persists until the spell elapses, but you could make that last a year without too much trouble (assuming time4, gnosis3, a rote skill of 4).
With Time5, the "fuck you" level of Mage, you can use the Unmaking practice and prevent them from being embraced, though that's big hubris and risks butterfly effects at the GM's discretion.
Other approaches I'm less sure about. You could probably do something with Life5 (make a new body), 5 or so points of Death or Spirit to get a new soul (fun fact: in awakening, souls are fungible), and Mind5 to put their mind in the new body. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation.
In oWoD meanwhile there is an entire book with ideas how Mages could fix a vampire and what would be the consequences.
I am not that much a D&D player, but doesn't it a huge power scale meaning that in the lower levels, it's fairly easy to design a you fucking loose encounter. And isn't there The Tarasque who is basically a you fucking loose statblock
I am all for a choose your fight approach where you should definitely not mess with someone bigger/stronger especiully without a plan or a lot of explosives. However, I expect that PC can make it out of an ordinary fight (just make sure it's not a target shooting practice and put 1-2 PC on the ground). Then if the 13th gen newborns vampire want to fight the 5th gen prince, not my problem if they have to burn their character sheet afterwards.
Finally, one of the best rpg out there is 10 candles where you know from scratch that everyone will die
And isn’t there The Tarasque who is basically a you fucking loose statblock
Mostly. They really bungled it in the 2014 statblock. Other editions gave it some combination of ranged attacks, regeneration, a way to cancel flight, and a burrow speed. In 2014, it had none of these. A level 5 Wizard could borrow a Repeating heavy crossbow from an Artificer, repeatedly cast Phantom Steed to stay out of its range, and take it down on its own. Or instead of a wizard, use an Aarakocra from Elemental Evil Player's Companion with 2 levels in Rogue (so it can learn Cunning Action), and it will be able to fly faster than the Tarrasque. Unless you use Chase rules.
In 2024, they have a ranged attack and a burrow speed, and they're significantly faster. It's hard to just attack from a safe distance and they can always just head underground. But if you can get 150 feet in the air, you're at an impasse where neither can hurt the other. And a high-level party has a lot of crazy tools at their disposal.
The problem isn't enemies that are too hard or too easy. The problem is the GM not knowing ahead of time which it will be.
Things I have learned in 4 decades of DMing:
It's basically impossible to accurately scale encounters beyond astrology and good wishes. I've seen a party of 6th levels get wiped by seven starving goblins in a tower.
The Pathfinder game i play can be brutal. The party has learned to just nope the fuck out if something looks sketchy. The dm told us at the beginning that the world was "real" and we're just thrown in it, so nothing is level adjusted.
I feel like this is one of those "make sure people are on the same page before you start running the rpg". I've had players react very badly to their characters being maimed and stuff (a fairly normal Dark Heresy event), but I've also had some players want a severe tacticool experience. And some people want cozy vibes with some dice rolling.
D&D does suffer from a lot of system/setting baggage as well as the expectation that the system works as well from level 1 to 20+.
I want to play shadowrun again, for all its flaws
This is very game dependent. Right now I'm in a pretty brutal one where everyone is branded by the goddess of mind control and we have miniboss encounters with our own former PCs who've been turned into grotesque monsters - but I've also played in games where the PCs were newcomers to Olympus and more or less ended up recreating the first few God of War games.
Cthulhu kills 1D6 Characters per round
No one actually plays dnd like that though...
Meh, I can make a Swara bastet / Tremere abomination with ranks in Celerity and mage powers and cybernetic arms from that one Pentex supplement who can attack 30 times in Crinos (but that's not a problem cuz I'm Metis with some pointless "story factor" drawback that has no effect on my combat capabilities) with enchanted plasma cannons, doing 300d aggravated before Cain gets his first action.
Okay you still die
Caine congratulates you on making him laugh before killing you.
Heroic fantasy vs dark gritty fantasy.
Give me heroic fantasy every time.
Even in Heroic Fantasy the enemies should be challenging, while in D&D (not even 5e, 3.5 had this issue too), it's basically inevitable that high enough PCs will rollstomp everything, laughing all the way.
Depends on the level of the PC, and/or if they can come up with a really good reason why a bunch of weak mortals could feasibly defeat a literal god. If the plan is clever enough, fuck the rules and stats. The point is to have fun.
It's never the real god, just a physical avatar. There's still a lot of Batman vs Superman narrative horseshit in the idea though
"Oh you surprised the guy who moves faster than most speedsters and can hear and see everything around him. Sure, okay, then he leaves and throws an asteroid he found within half a second from orbit before you're done blinking"
DnD avatars don't really scale that hard but neither do PCs so all of those fights revolve around the avatar being stupid or using a McGuffin
Old. Funny but repeated too often. I don't like DnD but even if they once gave stats to Cthulhu, I wouldn't name a game to be better. Why one? On which criteria?
Also: I like World of Darkness. I have Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changelin, and many add ons. But let's be honest (and troll a bit): Vampire the Masquerade is just a simulation of puberty. The system, when it was released, was awesome but it is way to crunchy for today's standards.
If one should bash DnD, then do it with style with modern games: Blades in the Dark, Fate, Dungeon World, Ironsworn,... whatever from this century.
WW also made a guy who was a vampire, mage, werewolf and eventually ashtray, so i wouldn't put them on a pedestal
And then he either got murdered by PCs or Metuzalah or exploded from Paradox, before turnign into ashtray.
The dog on the left is such a strawman lol. Those who would say such a thing are few and far between. I know plenty of DMs and players who think the PCs' combat encounters should be challenging and even lethal.
The number of times my cleric/sorcerer has had to revivify the rest of his party…
If you ain't dying, you ain't trying.
I mean this meme is built for strawmen that’s what it is
And brother, I brought matches.
May be few and far between but I can vouch for it; I had a party like that whom I hated DMing or playing with in their games. Myself though I am as you said someone who prefers the challenge; both exist in large numbers.
Yep had a player like that. Would also be upset if he couldn't do literally anything he wanted.
To be fair, starting at around level 13 it becomes more challenging to, well, challenge a party without having dragons and shit everywhere. You can almost not build encounters with "normal" enemies anymore.
Before my group got bored with D&D and we decided to give it a break and switch to Mage, it got to a level I was prepping to have the this level 13 party fight Vecna and Zariel at once, just to make it at least a little hard.