Willie the Duck
Hero
Is it a bug that superman is vulnerable to kryptonite? That stuff just shuts him right down! Yet half of his stories involve kryptonite because having weaknesses, even extreme ones, makes things interesting.
Firstly, I don't think anything has to be 'a bug,' but there are better and worse approaches, and things that do or don't cause issues. Regardless, I think these two points highlight my preference. For me, the 'depowers Superman' variety of Kryptonite helps the DC storytelling as is a good way to let other characters save the day. The 'kills Superman' variety hurts the DC storytelling because then there needs to be a convoluted way to save Superman each time his weakness is utilized. Translated to a game, that runs the same issue: do you want said PC to die (or the party have to drop everything to save them, etc.) whenever it comes up? At low levels in the old days, having your character summarily die was often less restricting than some other limiter like a curse or level drain because it just means you get to roll up a new one. At high-levels and modern D&D and other high-investment games where character creation takes a long time, losing a character simply to _______ showing up can have a 'cheap way to lose a character' feeling. I know in some other games like GURPS we often ruled out killing vulnerabilities simply because they ended up being weapons you give to the GM that they then don't feel like they can fire. That's why I prefer 5e's vulnerabilities to 3e's, in that they are rarely 'save-or-die,' so much as 'save or be relatively ineffective this fight.'First time I played D&D (3.?), I wrote a 2 page Backstory, rolled initiative, rolled a save, and died. It wasn't fun and I didn't play again until 4e.
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