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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8277264" data-attributes="member: 82106">Cosmic Horror can, at times, shade into the realm of 'player victory'. That is, you can achieve some sort of narrow, local, temporary, eviction of the cosmic horror element from the setting. In The Dunwich Horror the protagonists manage to defeat 'Wilbur Whately's Brother' (a powerful Cthulhuoid Monster/human hybrid) by utilizing their knowledge of The Necronomicon, arcane methods, some firearms, and some dynamite (as I recall, I may be a tiny bit dim on some of the details, but they do win). However, the victory certainly has a cost to their mental equilibrium. I don't remember any description of insanity, etc. but they surely don't sleep so well anymore! This is THE BEST CASE though, and Yog-Sothoth is certainly not 'defeated' in any sense whatsoever. Its spawn is destroyed, but there will be others, have been others, and Yog-Sothoth itself is eternal and far beyond any notion of 'killing' or even harming in any way. It probably doesn't even care what happened and doesn't make 'plans' or have 'goals' in any human understandable sense. So, ultimately, all these stories have what you are describing. The characters are never winning, per se. There's no possibility of some level 20 capstone battle with the ultimate big-bad where the PCs wipe out the BBEG and then ride off into the sunset as super heroes. I think that means you CAN, to a degree, create the same sort of win conditions in a 5e adventure that you would in a CoC one, for example. However, the game is not designed to produce a story arc or campaign which is structured this way. PCs in 5e will ALWAYS get stronger. In fact the core message is a sort of version of "what does not destroy you makes you stronger." (sorry [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER], I know I am doing violence to Nietzsche...).</blockquote>

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