We should be able to win D&D... by destroying D&D.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Okay, so, you crush the demon lords beneath your heel, you slay the entire pantheon of evil gods, you drain the Negative Energy Plane Shinra-style, and you turned the Lady of Pain and Cain into a pair of cute fuzzy slippers.

That's the mega-ultimate goal of Dungeons and Dragons. And I still find this victory hollow.

You've done the equivalent of making the world's first coconut jelly on a deserted island. You've made things better, no doubt, but you haven't really changed anything in the big picture. Eventually you will either get toppled or you'll be trapped in a never-ending cycle of murder and hate to keep the evil up and comers down. Worse, even if you are as strong as Galactus and Jehova put together, you still can't control the universe. People will still be starving on some distant planet somewhere, maybe even in your own planet.

Enjoy your hollow victory, hero.

Myself? I think the game should go the extra mile. I think the REAL ultimate goal of D&D should be to eliminate magic from the game entirely. Let's face it--phlebtonium and phlebtonium creatures are the guarantee that things will never ever get truly better.

So screw it. We do things Star Trek style. We kill the demiurge at the center of the universe or break the Crystal Dragon Jesus spire. Magic fades from the universe and the universe is suddenly kicked hard in the ass by reality. Mind flayers no longer hunger for brains, derro are no longer magically induced to be insane, and so on.

In its place are the concepts of universe transhumanism and humanist science, which are the ideas that anyone (or everyone) can and should ascend to a higher plane of sapience and science should be used to forever free people forever. Or alternatively, since you have the science and no one else does, you do things Warhamer 40K style and crush the universe under your foot.

At that point you either end the campaign or switch to another gaming system, as you've gone beyond the point D&D can handle.

[Calibron]

...Magic isn't hocus pocus voodoo in D&D, it's predictable, repeatable, and measurable(like, ya know, science). If you somehow destroyed magic, which would be about as bad as destroying one of the four elemental forces on nature on most planes, you would just be permanently, and drastically, reducing the resources available to the new trans-planar society you'd be able to forge if you were that powerful.

[MartinHarper]

...Magic isn't hocus pocus voodoo in D&D, it's predictable, repeatable, and measurable(like, ya know, science).

I consider that an abstraction for the sake of playability.

[RandomCasualty2]

Okay, so, you crush the demon lords beneath your heel, you slay the entire pantheon of evil gods, you drain the Negative Energy Plane Shinra-style, and you turned the Lady of Pain and Cain into a pair of cute fuzzy slippers.

That's the mega-ultimate goal of Dungeons and Dragons. And I still find this victory hollow.

Well I really doubt anyone is going to accomplish all that in a real game unless the DM just gives up, or you're playing ridiculously epic. And hell, if you killed the Lady of Pain, who is entirely statless, then your DM is basically letting you do whatever the hell you want.

The victory was probably pretty hollow because there wasn't any challenge involved.

[JonSetanta]

You need to watch Gurren Lagann.

[K]

Arthur C. Clark coined the phrase that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

That being said, science doesn't raise people up. Science lessens the power of the individual and enslaves the masses.

Now, I'm not a Luddite who wants to crush the machines and give up on antibiotics, but I recognize the fact that because the government has tanks and nukes it means that there never will be another revolution of the people or of the righteous.

Bruce Lee is killed by the near-sighted grandmother with a gun and the police state is more efficient by the operation if technology. http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/0 ... 0252.shtml

[Bigode]

...Magic isn't hocus pocus voodoo in D&D, it's predictable, repeatable, and measurable(like, ya know, science).

I consider that an abstraction for the sake of playability.

The world plays ... the way the world plays. Sure, I know not everything should be exactly equal, but D&D specifically makes spells be possible to find in written form for very specific objectives.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

That being said, science doesn't raise people up. Science lessens the power of the individual and enslaves the masses.

Now, I'm not a Luddite who wants to crush the machines and give up on antibiotics, but I recognize the fact that because the government has tanks and nukes it means that there never will be another revolution of the people or of the righteous.

It can and often does get used that way far, far, far too often but science is the only thing our society has going for it.

The only alternative to rise us above a pre-civilization standard of living (which has its own share of problems) is to master the environment through magic. Guess what? Everything you complained about science is made worse with magic. People are afraid of some whacko government or splinter cell blowing up their city with a nuke or some megacorporation making us our bitches for all eternity, but when there are untrackable high level wizards/superhumans running around the risk goes up tenfold.

I mean, there are characters in comics who dedicate themselves to destroying earth. There are characters in comics who can destroy earth or twist it grotesquely out of shape on a whim. Sometimes these categories overlap. The biggest plothole in DC/Marvel comics is explaning why Earth just doesn't disappear in an earth-shattering kaboom no one can stop. And there are even more people out there who just want to kill all blacks/overthrow France/rule your city with zombies, etc.

D&D has this problem but it's much much worse because the planes are literally infinite and killing the BBEG might not even reduce its power. Only characters in this setting don't even have the option of hiding behind some government that can protect them, because government can't. The Red Wizards of Thay can kick the crap out of the entire city and the circle leaders can kick the crap out of the rest of the wizards. They're evil, too. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Every now and then you might get a creature like a Balor or a Titan (if you're lucky) that will lay waste to your city. You might REALLY get unlucky and draw the attention of a family of atropals.

So, faced with this scenario where everything you do can go up in smoke no matter what you do, how in the world can you expect to have a happy ending unless you do something that makes it so that said atropals or elder titans or what the fuck ever can't ghetto stomp your metropolis without you doing anything about it? Unless you advocate mass genocide (impossible, since abominations rise faster than you can kill them), the only way to do it is to take away all of the magic in the universe.


Of course, once you do that, you still have to answer the question of how you're going to feed people and do things that used to be done with magic. That's outside the scope of the game, but the fact is, once you've made it so that the worst the world will ever have to worry about is nuclear war or a stray asteroid, both which can be solved with a proper educational and legacy system, then you've won the game. Either you own all of the nukes in your super jesus robot and the rest of the world are your cavemen bitches or society turns into some Star Trek Marysuetopia.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Well I really doubt anyone is going to accomplish all that in a real game unless the DM just gives up, or you're playing ridiculously epic. And hell, if you killed the Lady of Pain, who is entirely statless, then your DM is basically letting you do whatever the hell you want.

The victory was probably pretty hollow because there wasn't any challenge involved.

I never understood this at all.

Who the fuck cares if you can ghetto stab the Lady of Pain or Cain? They can ghetto stab you through applied phlebtonium in the universe, why can't you return the favor?

People who write up statless monsters because they're afraid the PCs can defeat them are cowardly Mary Sue cocksuckers and should be laughed at rather than being taken seriously; what kind of insecure jagoff pansy would devote space talking about how l33t and unkillable his penis character is? It's like introducing 'nuclear bomb' to a rock-paper-scissors game and then whining that other people can't use nuclear bombs.

Hmm. I think I realized why I hate cosmic horrors so much. Not because of the concept, but the author wank (UNKILLABLE AND MORE POWERFUL THAN SUPER SAIYAN JEHOVAH HURR HURR) that goes with them.

[RandomCasualty2]

People who write up statless monsters because they're afraid the PCs can defeat them are cowardly Mary Sue cocksuckers and should be laughed at rather than being taken seriously; what kind of insecure jagoff pansy would devote space talking about how l33t and unkillable his penis character is? It's like introducing 'nuclear bomb' to a rock-paper-scissors game and then whining that other people can't use nuclear bombs.

To a degree, but statless stuff isn't just for the giant penis, at least not in the case of the Lady of Pain. If anything, it's the opposite where she maintains some degree of order in the city, and prevents Bane or some other evil god from coming in and just cockwhipping everything in sight.

Also, it's totally unnecessary. The gods are (barely) statable and if well played, are beyond the capabilities of any PC, unless you're abusing the rules like a complete munchkin. Now those are gods... the lady of Pain is a level of magnitude above the gods. Which means that any battle that involves the Lady is well out of the range of any battle the PCs would ever get involved in. Given the game is about the PCs and not the Gods against the lady of Pain, it'd be a total waste of space to stat her out. Honestly, I think it's a waste of space to stat out greater gods. PCs just aren't going to beat them anyway and the stats exist solely for DMs who want to materialize some uber NPC to cockwhip the PCs.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Hmm. I think I realized why I hate cosmic horrors so much. Not because of the concept, but the author wank (UNKILLABLE AND MORE POWERFUL THAN SUPER SAIYAN JEHOVAH HURR HURR) that goes with them.

Have fun tilting at mountains and yelling at the sea.

[Josh_Kablack]

Also, it's totally unnecessary. The gods are (barely) statable and if well played, are beyond the capabilities of any PC, unless you're abusing the rules like a complete munchkin.

You just called the guy who wrote the Bible; Homer; Richard Wagner; JRR Tolkien, Stan Lee and Frank Frazetta all munchkins.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Also, it's totally unnecessary. The gods are (barely) statable and if well played, are beyond the capabilities of any PC, unless you're abusing the rules like a complete munchkin. Now those are gods... the lady of Pain is a level of magnitude above the gods. Which means that any battle that involves the Lady is well out of the range of any battle the PCs would ever get involved in. Given the game is about the PCs and not the Gods against the lady of Pain, it'd be a total waste of space to stat her out. Honestly, I think it's a waste of space to stat out greater gods. PCs just aren't going to beat them anyway and the stats exist solely for DMs who want to materialize some uber NPC to cockwhip the PCs.

??????

D&D is a game about a continuous cycle of hate-filled advancement. One morning you kill goblin, the next you kill trolls, the next you kill dragons, the next you kill worms that walk, the next you kill gods. Uh, that's the point of the damn game. If your game is about murdering and being murdered by progressively more powerful beings then why wouldn't a player be able to eventually kill gods?

There's no need to put an arbitrary halt to the murder engine of power just because certain people get butthurt that Zeus will one day be clutching the area where his gonads used to be if you keep this cycle up.


Besides, fiction has most of the time sided with the idea that gods are just another speedbump on the road of hate and power. I don't know why people get their panties in a bunch at the mention that the logical 'end' of this cycle would be making Cthulu your sex slave. If you want to make it such that Galactus can stuff your character with infinite potential into his mouth, you'd better give Galactus some stats. Otherwise you're just wanking to your ridiculous Mary Sue penis character and claiming that only you get to own the space mecha in the Cops and Robbers game.

Have fun tilting at mountains and yelling at the sea.

Hey, guess what? There's fiction out there where you get to give mountains and sea the finger if for some reason you want to destroy an inanimate object with your hate and awesome. You don't even have to look very hard.

[MartinHarper]

The world plays ... the way the world plays. Sure, I know not everything should be exactly equal, but D&D specifically makes spells be possible to find in written form for very specific objectives.

I agree d&d magic has an element of predictability: scrolls of charm person never summon an angry hippo. However, I don't think we have to assume that it's as predictable as the rules imply. It's not that every gnome can speak with badgers for precisely one minute, and not a second more or less. Rather, they can speak with badgers for 30-90 seconds, and nobody cares enough to roll percentile dice for the duration.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Magic has a degree of predictability in it insofar that it works according to observable laws and rules.

However, the part where having magic completely wrecks stable society and hope for the future comes into play where the strongest magic--the city-destroying stuff, mind--is for the most part out of the hands of what society can predict or handle.

For an easily relatable example, pick up a superhero comic. Society right now can't control whether some asshole off of the street becomes Magneto or the Incredible Hulk. Society can to some extent stop the next Hitlers and Pol Pots from rising to fore, but stopping the creation of Thor? Bitch, please. Just pray he doesn't decide to flatten your city as a joke.

But at least in superhero comics, society can still send out Sentinels and arm mundane humans with kick-ass superweapons and gain some sembleance of control. Now imagine if you upped the power of the renegades by several orders of magnitude and made society completely ineffectual. Any attempts to harnass magic just ends up in new renegades. The best you can hope for is that they still have some empathy for people who live on the planet.

You thought Warhammer 40K is bleak and depressing? That's nothing compared to what D&D is right now and it's an apocalyptic nightmare we're unable to escape from.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Have fun tilting at mountains and yelling at the sea.

Hey, guess what? There's fiction out there where you get to give mountains and sea the finger if for some reason you want to destroy an inanimate object with your hate and awesome. You don't even have to look very hard.

And because Moses parted the sea and God created life on earth, every fiction should involve some protagonists doing so?

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

And because Moses parted the sea and God created life on earth, every fiction should involve some protagonists doing so?

It's fucking Dungeons and Dragons. If some flesh colossus is uglying up your land or you're pissed off that the tarrasque is making a mess of things, instead of cowering in the corner and acting out a story where you FYGHT 2 SURVYVE THE HOPELESS DARKNYSS, you should be able to take a couple of months off, gain some kickass abilities, then fucking punch those bitches in the face so hard they turn into canned goods.

Cuz' it's fucking Dungeons and Dragons. Other characters in the game get to destroy monsters (and cool landmarks), why shouldn't you?

[SphereOfFeetMan]

...you still can't control the universe. People will still be starving on some distant planet somewhere, maybe even in your own planet.

Enjoy your hollow victory, hero.

So, your opinion is that unless you are literally omnipotent, accomplishments in the game are meaningless.
...
Very few people agree with this.

So screw it. We do things Star Trek style. We kill the demiurge at the center of the universe or break the Crystal Dragon Jesus spire. Magic fades from the universe and the universe is suddenly kicked hard in the ass by reality. Mind flayers no longer hunger for brains, derro are no longer magically induced to be insane, and so on.

In its place are the concepts of universe transhumanism and humanist science, which are the ideas that anyone (or everyone) can and should ascend to a higher plane of sapience and science should be used to forever free people forever.

In most every way that matters magic = science. They both create means to gain dominance over others. There isn't an intrinsic inevitability in one or the other for any moral awakening.

Or alternatively, since you have the science and no one else does, you do things Warhamer 40K style and crush the universe under your foot.

...and you are back to Dnd.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

So, your opinion is that unless you are literally omnipotent, accomplishments in the game are meaningless.
...
Very few people agree with this.

It is meaningless if there are other omnipotent people out there who hate what you stand for and try to protect are still out there.

Imagine how Lord of the Rings would've ended if instead Sauron being the Big Bad Evil Guy, there was an Eviller and Bigger Bad with stronger armies out there... and war was predicted in the next two years.

That's the reality of D&D.

In most every way that matters magic = science. They both create means to gain dominance over others. There isn't an intrinsic inevitability in one or the other for any moral awakening.

No, there isn't, things could end up like Warhammer 40K where science is the death sentence for humanity and decency.

But it's a requirement. What the hell else is going to save the teeming billions? Magic? Fuck that, magic got us into this situation in the first place and has the same problems superhero settings have (see above).

...and you are back to Dnd.

That's supposed to be the Evil Wins ending of D&D, where in fighting monsters you become a monster yourself. Otherwise known as the CNN Ending.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

It is meaningless if there are other omnipotent people out there who hate what you stand for and try to protect are still out there.

Imagine how Lord of the Rings would've ended if instead Sauron being the Big Bad Evil Guy, there was an Eviller and Bigger Bad with stronger armies out there... and war was predicted in the next two years.

That's the reality of D&D.

That's only the reality of Dnd because of the encounter/xp system. If you make one change in the xp rules, the entire problem disappears.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

That's only the reality of Dnd because of the encounter/xp system. If you make one change in the xp rules, the entire problem disappears.

The encounter/experience system doesn't have anything to do with the fact that you're in a universe that will always be shitty no matter how much power you gain.

[Manxome]

You're not actually complaining about magic, you're complaining about there being an endless supply of villains appropriate to any level you care to be playing at.

Of course, this endless supply of villains is intentional, because people want to have villains handy to go on adventures against. They just happen to be justified by magic because it's a high magic setting and that's a convenient way to justify them.

But magic--at least in this context--is shorthand for "imaginary physics." Magic is just how things work. Saying you should eliminate the magic in the setting is like saying that you should eliminate physics; it's not a question of whether it exists, it's simply a question of how it works.

Now, most people write settings with the intent that you can go on adventures within the setting more or less indefinitely; they set things up to justify the ongoing existence of the PCs and whatever set of things they fight so that after you save the day today, you can go on a new adventure next week.

If you want to win, not the adventure, but the setting, sure, go ahead. You can push the magic button that turns off the monster generators. But that's an atypical approach, and there's no particular reason that it would have anything to do with "eliminating" magic from the setting.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

That's only the reality of Dnd because of the encounter/xp system. If you make one change in the xp rules, the entire problem disappears.

The encounter/experience system doesn't have anything to do with the fact that you're in a universe that will always be shitty no matter how much power you gain.

The encounter/xp system defines how often new bad things roll around the corner. In Dnd 3.x rules, nation-destroying entities emerge every few months. You could easily change the xp system so that a nation-destroying entity emerges every few hundred or thousand years. Its just a question of how chaotic or static your setting is.

Then you get back to LotR. Or even the real world. In the real world, there are tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, famine, war, disease, etc. Or are you saying that all struggle in a real world game setting is meaningless?

[RandomCasualty2]

D&D is a game about a continuous cycle of hate-filled advancement. One morning you kill goblin, the next you kill trolls, the next you kill dragons, the next you kill worms that walk, the next you kill gods. Uh, that's the point of the damn game. If your game is about murdering and being murdered by progressively more powerful beings then why wouldn't a player be able to eventually kill gods?

There's no need to put an arbitrary halt to the murder engine of power just because certain people get butthurt that Zeus will one day be clutching the area where his gonads used to be if you keep this cycle up.

In D&D, yeah there is. Because the power of gods borders pretty much just on arbitrarium. In Deities and demigods there's that ability hand of death or whatever that pretty much can kill any creature of lesser divine rank instantly. That means that basically unless your DM was nice enough to hand you divine rank (which you can't get normally under the rules), then you flat out lose. Seriously, the god could be sitting halfway across the universe and just snap his fingers and you die. You have no chance unless the DM supplies you with the necessary arbitrarium to win that fight.

So at that point, why bother stating shit out? The only way you win is if the DM lets you, so who gives a fuck what the stats on it were?

Even if by some miracle that didn't happen, Greater gods are always going to beat you in initiative, and you're going to get buttraped by their massive stats. Unless you're playing pun pun and just being a complete munchkin with the rules, you will not win against a greater god unless the DM is just rolling over and playing dead.

[K]

I mean, there are characters in comics who dedicate themselves to destroying earth. There are characters in comics who can destroy earth or twist it grotesquely out of shape on a whim. Sometimes these categories overlap. The biggest plothole in DC/Marvel comics is explaning why Earth just doesn't disappear in an earth-shattering kaboom no one can stop. And there are even more people out there who just want to kill all blacks/overthrow France/rule your city with zombies, etc.

That's one of the reasons I only read The Authority. They don't fight people and let them escape, or try to imprison the baddies or something....they kill people[/b], often with extreme prejudice.

At the end of the day, comics only have a small amount of creativity that needs to be recycled over and over, so there is a reason why the Authority only gets out maybe six issues a year.

D&D has this problem but it's much much worse because the planes are literally infinite and killing the BBEG might not even reduce its power. Only characters in this setting don't even have the option of hiding behind some government that can protect them, because government can't. The Red Wizards of Thay can kick the crap out of the entire city and the circle leaders can kick the crap out of the rest of the wizards. They're evil, too. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Every now and then you might get a creature like a Balor or a Titan (if you're lucky) that will lay waste to your city. You might REALLY get unlucky and draw the attention of a family of atropals.

Right, but there are also archangels and gods of good or at least "don't kill my followers" and other high level characters.

DnD has one essential conceit: the PCs are heroes. This does not means that they are the only heroes, or even the biggest heroes in the setting. Their stories have value not because they were the only one's who could beat down a challenge, but because they were the one's who actually did it.

Even if you are the most powerful thing in the setting, there is no reason why you should "win". I mean, even in real life there is no point where you can stop fighting. Terrorists get nuclear weapons, so we need to fight that. Hackers fvck people's finances, so we need to fight that. Civil liberties have been gong downhill since the 70s, so we need to fight that.

Heck, unless you pick fruit for a living or pump gas even your job requires you to learn more and keep trying your best. An essential rule of life is that you have to always keep trying, so there is no reason why DnD land has to be any different.

Even at the end of Scorpion King, when the Rock asks the super hot sorceress about the future of his kingdom, she tells him that his rule will be peaceful and prosperous, but says that nothing lasts forever.

At the end of the day, magic is just individual power that follows some sort of scale. Considering that tech like nuclear or viral weapons don't follow a scale and the technology of WW2 cost an estimated 72 million lives, I'd stick with magic any day. At least magic requires years of dedication to learn; nuclear weapons only require the will to kill.