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

[Maxperson]

If you give it stats, players will kill it.

If you give it stats, players will try to kill it.

 

[Seramus]

I absolutely loved Ascension, including consensual reality and how paradox worked. I do acknowledge it was a hot mess of freestyle magic compared to the more rigorous abacus counting approach of Awakening. But the overall concepts were delightful.

 

[LordEntrails]

Isn't it unmanly

That's as far as I got. Unintentional or not, but yea, I just got that far and asked myself, is the rest of this post also toxic masculinity?

 

[Stormonu]

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

That's news to me, considering 2E's Deities & Demigods, Faith & Avatars, Powers & Pantheons, Die Vecna Die!, 3E's Age of Worms et al. And at least the 3E versions of those deity books and as recent as Rime of the Frostmaiden.

 

[RuinousPowers]

That's news to me, considering 2E's Deities & Demigods, Faith & Avatars, Powers & Pantheons, Die Vecna Die!, 3E's Age of Worms et al. And at least the 3E versions of those deity books and as recent as Rime of the Frostmaiden.

You can't kill the deities in those books. Since 2e you can only kill their avatars.

 

[Blue Orange]

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.

If you give it stats, people will kill it.

If you don't give it stats, people will come up with their own stats so they can kill it.

 

[Mad_Jack]

And you're just assuming she's a god. The real power might come from Sigil itself and she only controls it. She might be Sigil's slave. She might be a front for a league of gods. She might be the force of the multiverse personified. She might a god level avatar of someone or something unimaginably more powerful. She might be a level one commoner who just found some amazing blade shaped artifacts. She might be the DM. She might be Pain, the way there is an antropomorphized Death.

She's actually just an avatar of Betty White. (Either that, or she's a 40-yr-old guy named Dave on the internet.)

 

[Vaalingrade]

/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.

See, that's the deal and why I know it's bad writing:

The titular Masquerade of Vampire: the Masquerade is fine. There's a reason it's in place in-universe that makes sense and also incentivizes the player character to play ball.

Paradox is just an arbitrary punishment there to act as sad duct tape for the plot holes the writers couldn't be assed to actually close up. Just a sharp stick to poke the players with if they get out of line.

This just gets worse when you make that loadbearing concept into a person and then make the world treat them like the ultimate badass who gets to tell you what you can and can't do with no recourse, no slapping them in their smug faces, now throwing them down and reveling in their ruin, not even flipping them off and calling them a few choice names -- the world just says 'no, you lose and they win forever, lol'.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This just gets worse when you make that loadbearing concept into a person and then make the world treat them like the ultimate badass who gets to tell you what you can and can't do with no recourse, no slapping them in their smug faces, now throwing them down and reveling in their ruin, not even flipping them off and calling them a few choice names -- the world just says 'no, you lose and they win forever, lol'.

Again this is profound point-missing.

The idea that the LoP is "smug" or even has a "smug face" to slap is absolutely wrong. Revelling in her ruin would be like revelling in the ruin of a bench (not that that stops some people but it's pretty wild stuff).

You've decided to ignore the actual lore in favour of getting super-mad with what is close to an inanimate object or force of nature.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I really want to find all these benches and parking barriers that can throw people into extra-dimensional spaces and rule planes in defiance of the gods themselves.

And 'force of nature' is one of those phrases I associate with people talking about how Batman can beat God if he had time to prepare.