D&D 5E 5e: Stat the Lady of Pain...so we can overthrow her

[Mirtek]

EDIT - Also who is Ka the Immortal Dinosaur? They sound amazing but the internet has no record of them!

First thing turning up by searching Ka the Immortal Dinousaur looks about right

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Are there limits, or not?

This is one of the places where I think having a limit is more helpful, more interesting, and more productive than not having a limit. Other areas, I find limits unhelpful, uninteresting, or unproductive.

First thing turning up by searching Ka the Immortal Dinousaur looks about right

Though if you search for the exact phrase in quotes, you get literally nothing whatsoever.

Which means this thread will become the only result you get as soon as Google gets around to indexing it.

 

[Art Waring]

If you give it stats, players will kill it.

 

[RuinousPowers]

Killing gods was one of the best ideas from AD&D. I was very disappointed that they dropped it for 2e.

 

[Seramus]

If I was going to stat her up, it would probably have conditionals like Sol Invictus and his Panoply from Exalted.

 

[Seramus]

Double Post.

 

[Willie the Duck]

EDIT - Also who is Ka the Immortal Dinosaur? They sound amazing but the internet has no record of them!

Ka is an example of a in-universe Big Name(tm) (like Vecna, the various gods/avatars/chosens-of, or the named devils/demons of various AD&D settings), but in this case from the Mystara setting/BECMI Immortals (instead of gods) rules. Unlike most Immortals (who are generally Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings), he is an Ascended dinosaur. Most notably he is a protector of ancient cultures and created the Hollow World setting as a living museum for cultures that would otherwise be extinct. Alongside a few elemental forces-style Immortals who are old enough not to remember ever not being an immortal, he's one of the 'always depicted at the top of the pecking order' beings.

It was a weird time. Across a lot of RPGs, people took a lot of NPCs and setting elements very personally. Like as challenges or insults. I can't claim to be entirely innocent of it (I was pretty mad about Sam Haight), but I was a teenager! And a lot of the other people were in their thirties or later!

I think that's been true of every RPG setting that has official cannon and lore. The late-80s-through-90s was just the heyday of fully fleshed out D&D settings and of course the ever-plot-ful (and emotion-drawing) White Wolf World of Darkness original run. Also when a significant number of gamers first got online and started sharing (and fighting over) their game opinions.

If she doesn't do anything, then where is the fannish fervor for her coming from?

Because there has historically been an illogical, if not downright rabid, hatred of the setting from vocal corners of the D&D fanbase. A hatred that has persisted for almost 30 years now. The vitriol is positively exhausting if you actually like to have fun in the setting.

Probably the same place, but opposite pole from where your hate for her comes from. Look into thy self and find the answer!,

Fundamentally, this all is correct. Every position in nerd-fandom is a piece of territory that must be fought over. Each side will see the other side as having fannish fervor for their position and rabid hatrid for the initial person's view, and each side will view themselves as having been abused (and, given that each side has some persons who will see their own perceived victimhood as an excuse for abuse toward the other side, they are both partially right in this regard). It's not unlike sports team fandom, but it is rather striking that, for all the talk of being a nerd in high school and the abuse the jocks gave, that the people that tend to be the worst to members of nerddom is other nerds peeing around trees. I have a half-formed thread on the subject perpetually in the back of my brain, that I never quite get to writing (in part because it's kind of calling out my own community, which honestly is another example of a nerd being mean to other nerds).

Anyways, it's no different than any other beloved/hated bit of IP lore cannon. Some people love it and think it is great, others revile it and think it is horrible, and a subset of both groups consider the other group having that opinion grounds for enmity.

 

[Emirikol]

D&D ought to be a game of gonzo heroism. Isn't it unmanly that we're told that the Lady of Pain is an unknowable, unstattable, unkillable character?

It seems to me this situation:

1) Stokes the one-upmanship of the designers of the Planescape setting, so they can say "my overgod is better than all the gods of the D&D worlds"
2) Sets an "edgy" postmodern grey nihilism at the center of the 2e multiverse. Luckily Sigil got split off as its own right-sized astral dominion in 4e.
3) Reminds us that we're just fanboys who should bow and scrape to the published settings.

Immortal-level PCs ought to be able to eventually supplant any god, demon, pantheon, and overgod in every D&D world. And eventually rule any and all planets, planes, and multiverses as their personal dominion.

I was raised on Mystara, where we had official rules for becoming an Overgod:

Step 1: advance to 36th level
Step 2: ascend to Immortality
Step 3: advance to 36th level in the Immortal Class (total character level = 72)
Step 4: renounce Immortality and be reborn as a 1st-level mortal character
Step 5: repeat steps 1, 2, and 3, having adventured through 144 character levels.
Step 6: voila! my character becomes an Old One.

So. For 5e I'll be looking for stats for the Lady of Pain, the Dark Powers of Ravenloft, the Old Ones of the Mystara Multiverse, the High God of Krynn, and Lord Ao.

When our adventuring party reaches 144th level, we'll be knockin on their door.

Is anyone with me?

Dont wait so long and just use the 1e deities n demigods.

Lolth only has 66hps afterall.

Before that 66hps gets anyone's undies on a bunch let's not forget the stupidly obscene power creep in DnD over the years that just makes for endlessly boring ass combats above 10th level (even that far?).

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Don't get me started on Paradox.

The late 80's and 90's style of design and writing as so hamfisted it was practically honeybaked.

/shrug. Different strokes and all. If your first impulse on reading a setting is to immediately upend it and smash what makes it work, I'd say the setting isn't for you. But that doesn't make the conceits upon which it runs inherently bad writing (though there are plenty that are, I just disagree on this particular one). See also water creation spells not working in Darksun.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think that's been true of every RPG setting that has official cannon and lore. The late-80s-through-90s was just the heyday of fully fleshed out D&D settings and of course the ever-plot-ful (and emotion-drawing) White Wolf World of Darkness original run. Also when a significant number of gamers first got online and started sharing (and fighting over) their game opinions.

I think the main change has maybe been the abandonment of metaplots, which were a constant in the '90s. World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Dark Sun (thanks to Troy Denning/The Prism Pentad), Planescape (sadly, thanks to Monte Cook) and many others had metaplots, and these often dragged the characters people got mad about into the spotlight and often shoved the PCs out of the spotlight.

I do think more people are able to talk a bit more intelligently about the writing and why stuff is a bad idea beyond "it makes me mad!!!", at least now, but on the flipside, a lot of inarticulate people start ranting about "woke" and so on, often when it doesn't even make sense.

Different strokes and all. If your first impulse on reading a setting is to immediately upend it and smash what makes it work, I'd say the setting isn't for you.

The trouble is, in the very late '80s and '90s, it was about 50/50 as to whether stuff was just specific to a setting, to achieve a real goal, or just was hamfisted and clumsy. WW's own writers have discussed this. Justin Achilli for example said they had a continual and he felt unsuccessful battle with the people writing the campaign books/adventures to prevent them just turning into stories about NPCs where the PCs were involved more as witnesses than protagonists.

I do get what you're saying. My reaction to Castle Falkenstein was exactly as you describe "I want to burn this place and these entitled aristocratic jerk-offs to the ground" (something the game was not at all set up to allow, and that it was clear hadn't been expected). I was 16 or 17 though. As I got older I realized that it was essentially two issues:

1) The setting was "not for me" as you suggest.

2) The setting doesn't actually make sense (this is an issue with several RTG games) - the designers expect you to play PCs with a narrow set of goals and behaviours, which I'm sure were true to the playtesters, but don't actually flow naturally from the setting, and if you make a PC who does flow naturally from the setting, there's a very good chance they won't fit with the game.

In the end that's just another reason to not play it, of course. Cyberpunk 2020 and Cybergeneration, if "played as intended" (which they rarely were) had similar issues, as did SLA Industries (for example), though I note the recent edition of SLA makes a lot more sense, ironically and horrifyingly the world has kind of caught up with where it was already.

With the LoP, she's obviously needed to make the setting work, and they went extremely far out of their way to make it hard for people to take her personally, by depersonalizing her, making her into a faceless, nameless inhuman entity who doesn't intervene in day-to-day affairs, so that was the opposite of a screw-up. Nonetheless a lot of people had a weird adversarial attitude to her, which again to me, is like getting mad with a piece of street furniture.