Inspired by frustrating conversation I had. For those curious, that was the statblock of Caine, father of the vampires.
Cthulhu kills 1D6 Characters per round
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
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.
Caine’s statblock was perfect. And frankly, there should be more characters (especially named NPCs) who have that block.
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.
Shadowrun: Great Dragons don’t have stats because the players will lose.
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.
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.
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.
I mean this meme is built for strawmen that’s what it is
And brother, I brought matches.
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.
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.
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.
WW also made a guy who was a vampire, mage, werewolf and eventually ashtray, so i wouldn’t put them on a pedestal
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.
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.
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.
