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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 8101644" data-attributes="member: 7635">You have a fundamental problem understanding what I'm getting atCore D&D is terrible for running horror. Core, as in the game set to default settings as described in the PHB. The PCs are too powerful, the answers are too easy, and assumptions are built for a game that allows the PCs access to all sorts of stuff that eliminates horror. 5e, out of the box, does horror badly. It does Dark Fantasy well, because a group of vampire hunters going into a haunted castle isn't that much different than a group of adventurers going into a hidden dungeon to slay a dragon. But that's not horror.Its okay though, because D&D doesn't do a LOT of genres well. It sucks at survival games because food and water is trivially easy to find or make. It sucks at Wuxia because only one class gets martial arts. It sucks at sword-and-sorcery because nearly every class has access to easy magic. It sucks at mystery because any good whodunit is solved with a handful of divination spells. D&D wasn't designed to handle those genres either; D&D isn't Generic Fantasy Simulator d20. Now, you can MAKE D&D emulate those tropes better by changing the rules. Dark Sun and Ravenloft are two great examples of that. They do that by removing PC "I win" abilities. I mean, the classic example is Ravenloft removing the Paladin's "detect evil" and giving no compensation for that ability. That is a nerf; it makes the paladin weaker because the paladin MUST be weaker for horror to work. But lets not pretend that the paladin who steps through the Mists from Faerun to Barovia doesn't take a significant neutering to his class functions. By the same token, a cleric in Dark Sun can't create food and water as readily as a cleric in Greyhawk; his ability to do so must be nerfed to make the genre tropes work. So my point stands; without significant overhaul, D&D sucks at horror. You're projecting into that I said. I would prefer you don't try to ascribe motive or guess my preferences. I say this as a long-time Ravenloft DM and one who has run some version of I6 in every edition except 1st and 4th.</blockquote>

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