Things I have learned in 4 decades of DMing:

1. There is no encounter that cannot be cheesed by creative players

2. Same creative players will also party wipe by doing stupid things like trying to run on lava

It’s basically impossible to accurately scale encounters beyond astrology and good wishes. I’ve seen a party of 6th levels get wiped by seven starving goblins in a tower.

Old. Funny but repeated too often. I don’t like DnD but even if they once gave stats to Cthulhu, I wouldn’t name a game to be better. Why one? On which criteria?

Also: I like World of Darkness. I have Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changelin, and many add ons. But let’s be honest (and troll a bit): Vampire the Masquerade is just a simulation of puberty. The system, when it was released, was awesome but it is way to crunchy for today’s standards.

If one should bash DnD, then do it with style with modern games: Blades in the Dark, Fate, Dungeon World, Ironsworn,… whatever from this century.

Not on a Superman or Wonder Woman level but I think you could make a strong argument that Wish fixes (or breaks) everything by itself.

My character that got most close to broken was a Master Of Many Forms druid, though I was playing with a group with two well skilled min-maxers who were ridiculous from the outset at level 3

Wish can’t make you great, it can’t do much more than the equivalent of about half a level, you need a broken character design from the start

Of course there’s also support for epic level progression taking you beyond level 20. A druid at level 20 could face an army and win

When you need to stop your players from trying to fight the Gods.

Also WoD:

Player: I’m a mage I’m literally changing reality, I will cure that vampire.

System: vampirism is a curse from God, do you really think you can roll more successes than God?

We used to talk about how to cure Vampires in Mage (awakening, 2e).

The easiest is probably time magic. With Time4, rules as written you can rewrite their history so they never became a vampire. It persists until the spell elapses, but you could make that last a year without too much trouble (assuming time4, gnosis3, a rote skill of 4).

With Time5, the “fuck you” level of Mage, you can use the Unmaking practice and prevent them from being embraced, though that’s big hubris and risks butterfly effects at the GM’s discretion.

Other approaches I’m less sure about. You could probably do something with Life5 (make a new body), 5 or so points of Death or Spirit to get a new soul (fun fact: in awakening, souls are fungible), and Mind5 to put their mind in the new body. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation.

D&D, especially 5e, is just missing broad sections of game stuff so it can “leave it up to the DM”. Other stuff is really underbaked. Degree of success, succeed at a cost, non-violent conflict, ending combat other than totally wiping the other factions…

That can be fine if everyone’s on the same page, but since D&D is the mega popular game you’re likely to be playing with new players, or just randos, and that can lead to tension.

In oWoD meanwhile there is an entire book with ideas how Mages could fix a vampire and what would be the consequences.

Even in Heroic Fantasy the enemies should be challenging, while in D&D (not even 5e, 3.5 had this issue too), it’s basically inevitable that high enough PCs will rollstomp everything, laughing all the way.

There’s an old Dragon email about a guy needing TSR to print a new “deities and demigods” because his players had already beaten all those from the original.

WW also made a guy who was a vampire, mage, werewolf and eventually ashtray, so i wouldn’t put them on a pedestal

And then he either got murdered by PCs or Metuzalah or exploded from Paradox, before turnign into ashtray.

Before my group got bored with D&D and we decided to give it a break and switch to Mage, it got to a level I was prepping to have the this level 13 party fight Vecna and Zariel at once, just to make it at least a little hard.

Your character doesn’t know that information.

Pre-firearm plate armor was pretty lightweight, lots of videos of people running and rolling and climbing in it. Is D&D supposed to only be like jousting armor where you can’t move? I’ve never been clear on this and I’m more willing to look like a twerp about it on here than with a DM in person

“And it was in this moment, when the player opened the book on RECALL KNOWLEDGE rules, that the DM realized, he done fucked up.”

Can’t recall things you never knew.

Succesful Recal Knowledge chack basically amounts to “yes I do know it”.