Inspired by frustrating conversation I had. For those curious, that was the statblock of Caine, father of the vampires.
Heroic fantasy vs dark gritty fantasy.
Give me heroic fantasy every time.
Cthulhu kills 1D6 Characters per round
WW also made a guy who was a vampire, mage, werewolf and eventually ashtray, so i wouldn’t put them on a pedestal
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.
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:
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There is no encounter that cannot be cheesed by creative players
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Same creative players will also party wipe by doing stupid things like trying to run on lava
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.
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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.
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.
No one actually plays dnd like that though…
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
Shadowrun: Great Dragons don’t have stats because the players will lose.
Caine’s statblock was perfect. And frankly, there should be more characters (especially named NPCs) who have that block.
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.
Beat the campaign by forcing the DM to explain the logistics of how the monsters find their daily calories
A wizard did it.
This is Pathfinder, kiddo, we don’t play around with silly D&D handwaves: Which wizard, and why?
Your character doesn’t know that information.
“And it was in this moment, when the player opened the book on RECALL KNOWLEDGE rules, that the DM realized, he done fucked up.”
Can’t recall things you never knew.
Succesful Recal Knowledge chack basically amounts to “yes I do know it”.
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
D&D 3.5 characters can scale pretty high
Not on a Superman or Wonder Woman level but I think you could make a strong argument that Wish fixes (or breaks) everything by itself.
My character that got most close to broken was a Master Of Many Forms druid, though I was playing with a group with two well skilled min-maxers who were ridiculous from the outset at level 3
Wish can’t make you great, it can’t do much more than the equivalent of about half a level, you need a broken character design from the start
Of course there’s also support for epic level progression taking you beyond level 20. A druid at level 20 could face an army and win
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.
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.
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.
I mean this meme is built for strawmen that’s what it is
And brother, I brought matches.
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.
It is actually bad game design in the sense that there really isn’t a decent mechanic to escape monsters.
5.0 orcs, for example, had double the speed of the average PC with their dumbass free move action.
The solution is rolling disengage as a series of skill checks (like World of Darkness would…) but then you have to explain how, exactly, a dude in full plate escapes a dragon.
D&D, especially 5e, is just missing broad sections of game stuff so it can “leave it up to the DM”. Other stuff is really underbaked. Degree of success, succeed at a cost, non-violent conflict, ending combat other than totally wiping the other factions…
That can be fine if everyone’s on the same page, but since D&D is the mega popular game you’re likely to be playing with new players, or just randos, and that can lead to tension.
“Have you seen Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?”
Win if you can, lose if you must, but always TPK.
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.
