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<blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 8000714" data-attributes="member: 6683613">I identified the fundamental point of miscommunication. Anything I wrote in response to your discussions of Chesterton and Lovecraft and McEwan would have been repeated variations on the theme of &quot;Not all stories have to have beatable dragons but some do&quot;. But if you like:Neil Gaiman and G. K. Chesterton are right because they identify a particular genre of story, the fairy tale, in which the objective is to slay the dragon (more or less). Very few people would call The Call of Cthulhu or Atonement &quot;fairy tales&quot;; they are different kinds of stories with very different purposes. The OP's player is wrong in arguing (apparently; I always hesitate to criticize secondhand positions) that dragons should not be beatable for reasons of plausibility. D&amp;D is designed first and foremost to be a fairy tale simulator, so beatable dragons should at the very least be allowed in the narrative possibilities. A DM can always throw an ancient red dragon at a level 5 party if they want to create a Cthulhuesque experience, but if the Monster Manual flat-out said &quot;PCs can't kill dragons because that's stupid&quot;, as this player (reportedly) wants, the game would fail to meet a key design goal of enabling that particular genre of story identified by Chesterton and Gaiman.Or in other words: not all stories have to have beatable dragons but some do.I don't disagree with that. Nothing I wrote indicates that I disagree with that. We are on the same page here, so let's not fight about it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="TheCosmicKid, post: 8000714, member: 6683613"] I identified the fundamental point of miscommunication. Anything I wrote in response to your discussions of Chesterton and Lovecraft and McEwan would have been repeated variations on the theme of "Not all stories have to have beatable dragons but some do". But if you like: Neil Gaiman and G. K. Chesterton are right because they identify a particular genre of story, the fairy tale, in which the objective is to slay the dragon (more or less). Very few people would call [I]The Call of Cthulhu[/I] or [I]Atonement[/I] "fairy tales"; they are different kinds of stories with very different purposes. The OP's player is wrong in arguing (apparently; I always hesitate to criticize secondhand positions) that dragons should not be beatable for reasons of plausibility. D&D is designed first and foremost to be a fairy tale simulator, so beatable dragons should at the very least be [I]allowed[/I] in the narrative possibilities. A DM can always throw an ancient red dragon at a level 5 party if they want to create a Cthulhuesque experience, but if the Monster Manual flat-out said "PCs can't kill dragons because that's stupid", as this player (reportedly) wants, the game would fail to meet a key design goal of enabling that particular genre of story identified by Chesterton and Gaiman. Or in other words: not all stories have to have beatable dragons but some do. I don't disagree with that. Nothing I wrote indicates that I disagree with that. We are on the same page here, so let's not fight about it. [/QUOTE]

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