Inspired by frustrating conversation I had. For those curious, that was the statblock of Caine, father of the vampires.
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.
Shadowrun: Great Dragons don’t have stats because the players will lose.
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
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.
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?
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.
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…
