Inspired by frustrating conversation I had. For those curious, that was the statblock of Caine, father of the vampires.
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.
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.
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
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.
