Unpopular D&D Opinions Part 2: Popular To Talk About

[dafrca]

Unpopular Opinion: There comes a time as a GM I just do not care what RAW or RAI or BTB is. I just don't. I care about the story and the fun and the mood at the table. They trump all the "theory crafting" and optimization and word/sentence analysis in the world.

At some point all I want is the encounter to go well, the game to continue, and everyone goes home after the game happy with great stories to tell and memories to relive.

[Tanarii]

Unpopular opinion: either status effects should have no place in a TTRPG, or the idea of Solo "Boss" fights needs to go the way of the dodo. Or in a suitably fantasy world, only humanoids can be hit by status effects and monsters are the solo bosses.

D&D is not a combat simulator and was never meant to be.

Taken out of context this sentence would be a pretty hot take all by itself. 😂

[Anonymouswizard]

Unpopular opinion: either status effects should have no place in a TTRPG, or the idea of Solo "Boss" fights needs to go the way of the dodo. Or in a suitably fantasy world, only humanoids can be hit by status effects and monsters are the solo bosses.

I'll go for the second option. I already hate the trend in CRPGs of SoS spells being ineffective on anything you might want to use it on, I really don't want to see it in tabletop RPGs. Although I'd be happy for instant death effects to be removed or made inherently unsafe.

There is nothing wrong with a climatic fight taking less than three rounds because you successfully landed a disabling spell. It's actually more interesting with disabling as an option rather than limiting the outcomes to 'dead', 'dying', and 'knocked into a three week coma'. Although I'm not sure I've seen a single D&D game where the players tried to knock their enemies out (have in one or two other systems).


As a side note, having most of your rules dedicated to combat makes you a combat based system. It doesn't mean you're unable to run a combatless game in the system, but it does beg the question of why on earth would you. WotC D&D is such a system.

As an extension, you do not need more rules for combat, and can have a fun game where it's boiled down to a single roll. There's nothing wrong with more rules, but they aren't necessary unless combat is going to be a focus of your game.

If a game is about combat I expect combat mechanics. If a game is about social interaction I expect relationship mechanics.

[Quertus]

Not sure how popular or unpopular this is but here I go.

I dislike the Lady of Pain, Asmodeus, Ao, and the Dark Powers. They’re all powerful characters that sit above everyone else and there is no hope of anyone ever being able to take them on. This is a type of character I dislike in general, and though there are very rarely exceptions, these four characters (or entities in the Dark Powers case) are not on that list.

Oh, and one I think is more solidly unpopular: I think PCs should be able to eventually fight and kill gods.

They may be unpopular opinions, but they’re (mostly) ones I share.

As a side note, having most of your rules dedicated to combat makes you a combat based system. It doesn't mean you're unable to run a combatless game in the system, but it does beg the question of why on earth would you. WotC D&D is such a system.

As an extension, you do not need more rules for combat, and can have a fun game where it's boiled down to a single roll. There's nothing wrong with more rules, but they aren't necessary unless combat is going to be a focus of your game.

If a game is about combat I expect combat mechanics. If a game is about social interaction I expect relationship mechanics.

For me, D&D is about roleplaying in the context of exploration, monsters, and combat. Anything else is a bonus.

As a correlated point, any character unsuited to having their personality explored in that context is unsuited to be a D&D character.

[Tanarii]

As a side note, having most of your rules dedicated to combat makes you a combat based system.

I was thinking more along the lines that it's derived from war game rules.

OTOH it's probably fair so say the adaption of the war game rules to heroes weren't really meant to be an individual combat simulator even then.

[Anonymouswizard]

For me, D&D is about roleplaying in the context of exploration, monsters, and combat. Anything else is a bonus.

As a correlated point, any character unsuited to having their personality explored in that context is unsuited to be a D&D character.

Glad to see we're roughly on agreement

I was thinking more along the lines that it's derived from war game rules.

OTOH it's probably fair so say the adaption of the war game rules to heroes weren't really meant to be an individual combat simulator even then.

The interesting part to me is that, as far as I can tell, the game became more about combat the further it got from it's wargame roots. Although admittedly I've never seen 0e. But the point of early D&D as written was the exploration, not the combat.

It hit it's peak at 4e, and then 5e basically shuffled a few things back to how 3.X did them, and suddenly I'm supposed to pretend it has rules for other things now. Oh, and it added on some token mechanics poorly copied from other RPGs because narrative games were relatively big at the time.

But yeah, what modern D&D is used for is not what the original game was designed for. A party would consist of what, like 8 Fighters, a Wizard or two, and maybe a couple of Clerics? A bigger team with a lot more 'infantry' than any modern group I've been in. Now the assumption seems to be 'if you're not a magician you're not cool'.

[Milodiah]

Not to mention that the assumptions of "magic does the heavy lifting" implicit in the meta and thus baked into most encounters is somewhat incompatible with the assumption that "the vast majority of people do not have access to magic".

We're expected to believe that a village of hundreds might only have a single Cleric in it, and that hiring a wizard to cast a spell for you has a bunch of laid-out stipulations in the DMG that say you're unlikely to find a caster of X level in a settlement of size Y, but also accept that in pretty much any encounter against a group of humanoids, at least one of them is going to be a caster. Goblins, bandits, whatever they are, there's usually someone with spellcasting there, especially with higher level encounters since fighting against dudes armed PURELY with swords, spears, and bows gets easier. Maybe one out of ten, maybe one out of five, maybe even one out of three. And though the former assumption tends to vary from setting to setting, and also from table to table, its generally supposed to be true-ish. So either 90% of the people with magic powers slip off into the woods/mountains/sewers/slums/dungeons/whatever to become Bad Guys, or the worldbuilding and encounter building have some cognitive dissonance going.

I'm giving the party composition a pass just because "adventurers" are supposed to be special, and the "profession" attracts people with a wide variety of skillsets but particularly the magically capable. But it just doesn't really vibe with me when nonplayer groups have wildly varying compositions, like the city watch might all be Fighters/Warriors/whatever, but then the criminals are clerics of trickster gods, rogues, fighters, sorcerers, etc. etc. It just feels like bad writing to me.

[icefractal]

Not to mention that the assumptions of "magic does the heavy lifting" implicit in the meta and thus baked into most encounters is somewhat incompatible with the assumption that "the vast majority of people do not have access to magic".

That's true, and fact that higher-level encounters often have mid-level people as just random goons create a lot of weirdness in terms of the setting making sense.

Personally, I go with "casters aren't all that rare (they're still a minority, but a significant one), high-level people are rare". So for 3.x, something like:
L1-4: Common, most people fall into this category
L5-8: Uncommon, think like doctors, pro-sports players, scientific experts, etc. You wouldn't have trouble finding one in your city, and you might end up knowing one or several by coincidence, but they're not most people.
L9-12: Rare, may be celebrities. You might have to travel to find the one you're looking for. At this point you may or may not be able to hire one if you're just offering money - some would still take that offer but others are already in positions of authority or comfortably established with no need for mercenary work.
L13-16: Legendary, world famous. There's a notably finite number of these in the whole world, and you may have to do some serious searching if you want to find someone with a particular specialty. Not someone you can just hire, and even getting a meeting with one might require you to have some fame/reputation of your own.
L17-20: Mythic. Not everyone even believes it's possible for people this powerful to exist. Like, even the head of an arcane university may have never personally seen a 9th level spell cast, only read old accounts of it happening. At a given time, someone of a given class in this range may or may not exist. For example, there might currently be an 18th level Druid in the world, but no 17th+ level Cleric.

This does change things from the "default" D&D-ish setting, in that low-level magic is widespread and even fairly rare higher-level magic isn't usually factored into the world building, but it still produces a world that's reasonably coherent.

Also it means that if you have mid-high level PCs, ordinary guards/soldiers/bandits/etc aren't going to be a threat in fair combat, and even elite strike teams or high-priced assassins sent after them will probably be operating at a disadvantage level-wise. To me, that's a feature not a bug, but YMMV.

[Milodiah]

The main reason I feel so strongly about that kind of thing is that the longest-running campaign of D&D 3.5 that I ever ran had the players move through the lower levels as members of the city watch of a large city, so there was a lot more spotlight on the normal day-to-day of urban living in a magical world than there ordinarily is in a typical D&D game. Plus there was obviously a lot more focus on the operation of a city watch in such a place.

There was a large focus on the recruitment of anyone with cantrips, because the primary mode of communication across distance was through a standardized handbook of Dancing Lights. There were designated patterns and colors to create a fantasy semaphore, able to convey concepts such as "healer needed", "suspect in custody", "officer down", "civil disturbance" etc etc, with false messages being countered by frequent changes and a unique "authorization" pattern before major communications.

Say you're suddenly dealing with incorporeal undead, something your average patrolman is certainly not equipped to deal with. You throw up the signal for that, a communications officer in one of the observation towers spots it, notes its location, and sends that information along to a special "ghostbusters" contingent of the watch that's three dudes specifically geared and trained for that, who are on loan from the city's temple of Pelor. The attached wizard, whose primary job is to memorize the layout of the city and sit around with scrolls of Teleport, pops himself and those three guys over to that location. Obviously such things are for worst case scenarios, since the casting of a fifth level spell (even if it's just off a scroll) is not a small expenditure of resources, but you can count on a quick reaction force on site at speeds that would make the LAPD or NYPD green with envy in the event of a true emergency.

I made heavy use of the third party sourcebook Crime & Punishment, with comparatively low level spells like Testimony of the Broken Window- a first level Cleric spell that lets the caster have a quick glimpse into the last few seconds of a dead person's life. Obviously it's a running joke that DMs better keep in mind whether or not the party's got access to Speak With Dead (or worse, Raise Dead/Resurrection) before doing a murder mystery, but it's not like the city watch has enough casters of that caliber on hand to expend that sort of resources every time a random peasant turns up floating facedown in the river. But you can bet they can scare up a first level cleric of St. Cuthbert or something for each dead body. Same with Discern Next of Kin, and a dozen other spells. In fact, it became a point of contention as to whether or not the various spells like Zone of Truth were legally admissible, since (as far as I can tell anyway) there's no obvious signs of whether or not someone made their saving throw, and thus it could produce false negatives.

It's just a lot of fun to me to explore the "mundane" details of a fantastical world, a la Terry Pratchett, because I feel it adds so much more depth and verisimilitude that in turn helps with immersion and makes the setting more memorable.


Also, yeah, I definitely keep the "meanings" of levels in mind. I don't buy that any functioning adult member of society is level one (I usually say that you hit level two in your teenage years, and most adults are level three while competent but otherwise average ones are level four), at the same time people with double digit levels are remarkable individuals. It does somewhat interfere with the general threat level of the "starter" monsters, but honestly I treat those more as varmints and pests than as life threats, though of course the capabilities of third commoners (who do not have d4 hit dice in my opinion) are not that of third level PC classes. I fleshed out a few more NPC classes for the average person, since imo the PC classes are supposed to represent people a cut above the norm like Fighter vs. Warrior, and its less a matter of level than a matter of what class you are. Just because the thug sticking you up is fourth level, does not make him a fourth level Rogue. He's a fourth level Crook, which is the slightly nerfed version that parallels Warrior vs Fighter. He's got the experience, it's just not the same quality of experience.

So far I've only established one twentieth-level character in the setting's recent history, but he engaged in the typical level 20 arcane castermadness so much that it took a coalition of all the nations on the western side of the continent to stop him and his armies. The highest stat block I've ever made for a "normal person" is level thirteen, and he was a leading specialist in the field of abjuration magic.

[BRC]

I think part of the bias is that low-level spellcasters are harder to make interesting, either as Antagonists or NPCs.

Like, once somebody has access to 3rd level spells, villains are throwing Fireball, which is an encounter-shaping spell, or Counterspell. Meanwhile, NPC Wizards become capable of casting spells like Sending, Tounges, Fly, ect.

Now, you certainly CAN have spellcasters without 3rd level spells, but it requires more thought (like Milodiah put into it in their campaign) from both perspectives.

An enemy blaster wizard at that level isn't much more interesting an opponent than a simple ranged fighter, so unless they're a named NPC or otherwise significant, it's easier to just use another bandit with a crossbow or something. The only real damage spell I can think of that isn't just another attack is, like, Burning Hands. Also, at low levels everybody is squishy enough that enemy casters either get targeted first and usually die, or if they get their spells off, the damage spike might take out a few low-level PC's.

You can certainly HAVE an interesting low-level enemy spellcaster, using spells like Grease and Web or Fog Cloud or even Silent Image to change the nature of the fight, but, once again, that requires more planning for a DM with a million things think about, vs just another source of damage.

Similarly, as NPCs, you can have interesting low-level spellcasters who can work with the PC's, but it requires some more work. At 3rd level you get spells that can do things which the PC's can't otherwise do (Like communicate instantly across the world with Sending), so it's easy to say "What can this Wizard do for the party. Oh, he can cast Sending for them" or the like.

Earlier than that, you have to put some more thought into what a Journeyman wizard can do for the story/ in the world. It's certainly doable, but it takes more work, especially since the spell list is so tilted towards Combat spells, what a wizard who isn't a professional violence-doer does all day requires a bit more thought.

It's certainly doable, a 1st level wizard who can cast Comprehend Languages can probably get good work as a translator. Unseen Servant is ritual-castable to produce a workforce for menial tasks (So long as the work area is no bigger than 60 feet at a time). But in both cases that's work that could be done without magic, so you have to start deliberately trying to incorporate Magic into your setting to imagine a wizard doing such things, instead of just defaulting to a mundane translator or work crew.

[Milodiah]

Earlier than that, you have to put some more thought into what a Journeyman wizard can do for the story/ in the world. It's certainly doable, but it takes more work, especially since the spell list is so tilted towards Combat spells, what a wizard who isn't a professional violence-doer does all day is harder to work with.

I did a lot of work towards creating spells that were utilitarian in nature, and I'm very unhappy that I ended up losing them from a hard drive failure. There was an entire set of spells that dealt with agriculture, a popular dwarven spell which you cast on metal objects while you were working them that basically tempered them instantaneously, without having to worry about quenching them in water, timing the quenching just right, etc etc. A lot of it just translated into bonuses to skill checks, but it was a lot of fun to come up with them.

Plus the discount item sellers with bootleg things, the Wand of N Visibility. He leads you to believe it's what you think it is without actually saying it makes it so people can't see you, and when you use it, all it does is brightly highlight all printed instances of the letter N in your line of sight. It's just a 0-level spell, so if he can trick some wizard who dumped Wisdom into believing it's a wand of a second level spell, he's set for weeks. It's not false advertising, either, because all he said was that it was a wand of N visibility and you just jumped to conclusions on your own. Also, tanglefoot bags with paragraph-long disclaimers of the sort of things that get said really fast at the end of commercials. For external use only, seek immediate neutralize poison spell if product gets in eyes, this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any diseases, etc. etc.

[BRC]

I did a lot of work towards creating spells that were utilitarian in nature, and I'm very unhappy that I ended up losing them from a hard drive failure. There was an entire set of spells that dealt with agriculture, a popular dwarven spell which you cast on metal objects while you were working them that basically tempered them instantaneously, without having to worry about quenching them in water, timing the quenching just right, etc etc. A lot of it just translated into bonuses to skill checks, but it was a lot of fun to come up with them.

One fun thing to do is look at existing spell lists and push them a little to the left to create modified, civilian versions. For example, in my current setting the local Mad Scientist University (Explicitly NOT a school of Magic. There are plenty of fine magic schools out there, this place has four colleges: Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Ethics) trains it's Surgeons to cast spells like Mage Hand, a modified version of Prestidigitation (Stripped down and focused on the "Clean an object", to the point that it can be used to sterilize surfaces and instruments), and Dancing Lights (Much easier than doing surgery by torchlight).

They don't bother teaching them any spells beyond that unless the student want to seek out further arcane knowledge, they're training Surgeons, not Wizards, and those spells are excellent tools for a surgeon to have.

[KorvinStarmast]

Not sure how popular or unpopular this is but here I go.

I dislike the Lady of Pain, Asmodeus, Ao, and the Dark Powers.

I have mixed feelings about that, but they seem to me to be a response to the "I can kill a god LOL" attitude that was attempted to be addressed in Gods Demigods and Heroes, but it was not successfully countered and they compounded the error with the AD&D 1e book Deities and Demigods. Players are gonna go as far as the DM and the game give them enough rope.

So it goes.

Here is how I treat Ao and The Lady of Pain: they are like gravity is to us here on Earth. It's one of them laws you can fight, but the law will win.

Asmodeus: he's been given far too much power in the FR, and there are issues with him going back to AD&D 1e that I'll not waste any time on. He's a different version of the same problem, but if you DM him well as the mastermind working through powerful minions it can make for some fun play.

The Dark Powers: Ravenloft is its own setting, and its own thing. My coping approach is "a dark hole sucks really hard - so do the Great Powers." Ravenloft is not to everyone's taste. True since it showed up in 1e days.

I think PCs should be able to eventually fight and kill gods.

I abhor that approach, but I realize that this is a matter of taste. You can take down an avatar, or a demigod (ascended heror/demigod) but an actual deity is beyond the PCs wheewithal to destroy. (And FWIW, making Vecna into a deity was a lore screw up of colossal proportions IMO).

Plus: Ao = DM. Even the 'in world' deities answer to someone. The DM has the final word.

FWIW: best D&D deity is Crom. No, he has no stats, he's Crom.

[Bohandas]

The Lady of Pain doesn;t come off as all that invincible anyway. Merely the kind of thing that you'd have to pull some kind of Hogfather shenanigans to get rid of.

[Gurgeh]

Ao's a colossal jerkface and a wonderful summation of why Forgotten Realms is an awful setting. Being a capital-G God on top of that just makes it worse.

[RandomPeasant]

If you're going to have a character in the setting who can screw with the players directly (rather than merely having followers that do so) that character needs to be someone the players can eventually aspire to stab. To do otherwise is antithetical to the ethos of D&D, and usually ends up with every "bad DM" red flag firing.

[Telok]

I think it depends on the setting/part of the setting.

Are the/these gods essential forces of nature, required to exist in the setting, and intended to be generally remote or unapproachable? Then no stats & unkillable are fine. I did a cosmology once where the gods were planes of existance and the people in the material world just interpreted where/how those planes touched the material world as deities. Killing those gods would have required remaking portions of reality.

Now if your gods are just big monsters & powerful ex-adventurers who got their status by offing the previous set of gods... Yeah, go nuts with the gank-o-matic, they probably deserve it.

LoP & Sigil is in the first category, LoP or something that fills a similar function is required for the Sigil setting to work like the writers intended because of the nature of D&D gods in D&D settings. FR is firmly in the second category & Ao is just a bad patch job after the writers screwed up too much.

[NichG]

Hm...

As far as 'aspire to stab', part of me feels like there's a double standard about what should viably remove a non-player thing from a setting permanently, versus what can viably remove a player character from a setting permanently. Lowering a 20th level PC's hitpoints to -10 may kill them, but realistically in D&D with spells that can restore someone just by name alone even if they've been atomized, that 20th level PC may well be unkillable (so long as anyone of a similar power level seriously wants them to keep existing) without the use of fairly complicated means. Yet it sort of feels like if you actually managed to have a big throw down with Nerull or whomever and lowered them to -11hp, it'd be stealing the PCs' win if a few moments later one of that deity's allies waved their hand, used Alter Reality (or just a True Resurrection, or even just setting a servitor to cast a True Resurrection), and brought them back totally unharmed. And where that would happen without fail unless the PCs literally slew every allied deity simultaneously and all of their minions capable of pulling off True Resurrection (or found some particular 'technical kill' method that got around deity immunities to polymorph and death effects...).

If a GM abstains from high PO or TO shenanigans, are individual high level PCs actually something that an NPC could actually 'aspire to stab' as a means of resolution? Or has that already moved to a broader set of ablative resources than just whatever HP the PC carries around (e.g. resources to pay for resurrections, connections with others willing to rez them, 'life insurance' contracts, etc) which aren't so overtly mechanics-bound?

[KorvinStarmast]

Ao's a colossal jerkface and a wonderful summation of why Forgotten Realms is an awful setting.

Actually, with or without Ao FR is a mess since it can't decide what it is.

Being a capital-G God on top of that just makes it worse.

Hardly.
Given that Ao is, in play, basically the DM...they make it better since you actually have a game.

[icefractal]

Yet it sort of feels like if you actually managed to have a big throw down with Nerull or whomever and lowered them to -11hp, it'd be stealing the PCs' win if a few moments later one of that deity's allies waved their hand, used Alter Reality (or just a True Resurrection, or even just setting a servitor to cast a True Resurrection), and brought them back totally unharmed.

IMO, while not everyone in the setting has to be operating at the PC's level, I think the gods at least should be. So just as high-level PCs aren't easy to keep dead, neither are gods - even less so most likely.

Usually when people talk about killing a god, it's by some McGuffin, like stabbing them with the godslaying knife, or temporarily waking up Pandorym, or going to the origin realm and metaphysically removing their domain from existence, or whatnot. And those methods can just be final because the point is even attaining them and they're in custom rules territory anyway.

But to just remove a god through sheer personal effort? I dig it, it should be possible, but it shouldn't be easy either, certainly not easier than removing a moderately-paranoid high-level caster (which is pretty difficult!). Seems like it would take a sustained campaign, killing or suborning their strongest allies, dispersing their followers, finding and removing all their hidden fallbacks, and defeating them whenever they show up to stop you. Probably something that takes years at least, and then maintaining some surveillance against a delayed comeback.

That said, depending on the nature of divine power, even non-lethally defeating them in a formal challenge might weaken them considerably or remove their godhood.

[Gurgeh]

Why would anyone choose to DM a game where that role is already taken? Players hate GMPCs for good reason, and Ao is there to well, actually anyone who wants to invoke Rule Zero and do things their own way.

Consider the Wall of the Faithless. What if your players consider it deeply wrong, a case of staggering injustice baked into the very fabric of the universe? Maybe you'd like to run a campaign that sets out to right this cosmic injustice? Well tough titties, Ao says it's here to stay and there is no power in existence that can deny him. You can't overturn even his slightest whim without overturning every part of his setting, no matter how petty, poorly-written, or spiteful it may be.

[NichG]

That said, depending on the nature of divine power, even non-lethally defeating them in a formal challenge might weaken them considerably or remove their godhood.

This is the sort of thing that feels like the double standard kicking in... It makes divine power significantly more fragile than other kinds of power which anyone/everyone in the setting has access to by virtue of being able to have levels, whereas a lot of the sort of ideas around divinity and godhood have to do more with persisting beyond mortal limits - immortality, unchangingness, etc. I'm calling it a double standard but maybe its more like a tension between considerations. From a game point of view, its a better game if this kind of thing is possible, but from a setting point of view it really cheapens divinity if it'd literally be a downgrade in many ways for those approaching the sorts of levels that deities have...

It's reasonable to want to aim at toppling gods or to have that be a viable course of progression, but the way that the game establishes one particular mode of success-in-conflict (sub-minute long tactical encounters) means that the sort of thing that would make divinity feel like a big deal is also really hard to plan about unless it's mediated more by fiat than by the mechanics.

I guess the thing one would want rather than just 'stats' would be that there should be some sort of established, plannable ways by which deities could be deposed which can be derived from smaller pieces the system provides. And on top of that, the difficulty of obtaining those pieces and executing the plan successfully should be obvious enough upon looking at the system (rather than requiring informed attributes from the GM) to establish divinity as worthy of the word, but still approachable.

Sort of like your list of things to do to displace a deity - rather than 'these seem like things which entwine with stories of deities, so maybe try these things?' you'd want a system where the power of a divinity can be calculated from things like the number of direct followers, the importance of their domain in people's day to day lives, the existence of competing belief systems or other challengers to holding the domain, etc, which a player could systematically say without GM oversight 'if we can do X, then we can take their place', but also 'if we can't do Y, we can't possibly kill them permanently'

[Vahnavoi]

Turning a game of D&D into Shin Megami Tensei is trivial, just put stats for your gods within parameters of what player characters can achieve and presto, you're done! You don't need to buy into the hype or use inflated stats WotC is trying to sell you, high character level already gives characters plenty of power, so just use the basic rules for gods and their avatars. What counts as "divine" is a moving target anyway in fantasy and fundamentally arbitrary, in the same way as what counts as "magic".

I actually like the Wall of Faithless, in rough concept if not exact details. It feels like real mythology, and evidently is as divisive as real mythology.

[Bohandas]

Why would anyone choose to DM a game where that role is already taken? Players hate GMPCs for good reason, and Ao is there to well, actually anyone who wants to invoke Rule Zero and do things their own way.

Consider the Wall of the Faithless. What if your players consider it deeply wrong, a case of staggering injustice baked into the very fabric of the universe? Maybe you'd like to run a campaign that sets out to right this cosmic injustice? Well tough titties, Ao says it's here to stay and there is no power in existence that can deny him. You can't overturn even his slightest whim without overturning every part of his setting, no matter how petty, poorly-written, or spiteful it may be.

His setting is only one small corner of the multiverse. (Unless you're playing 3e)

[NichG]

Turning a game of D&D into Shin Megami Tensei is trivial, just put stats for your gods within parameters of what player characters can achieve and presto, you're done! You don't need to buy into the hype or use inflated stats WotC is trying to sell you, high character level already gives characters plenty of power, so just use the basic rules for gods and their avatars. What counts as "divine" is a moving target anyway in fantasy and fundamentally arbitrary, in the same way as what counts as "magic".

The meta experience of SMT (e.g. the PCs can be raised and save scum fights until they win, enemies are one and done) would be the same kind of double standard though...

Now, if you had a setting where death was annihilation or an irreversible and unavoidable straight shot to reincarnation, so that you don't have mortals with a revolving door afterlife and dead-means-dead deities, that might work. If all death is perma-death, then 'get a god to -10hp and you can call yourself a god-killer' seems less dissonant.

[Vahnavoi]

Playing D&D with roguelike rules is even more trivial than playing it with Shin Megami Tensei rules. Or, you can just embrace the insanity and make a point of there being no such thing as lasting victory. You stab the Grim Reaper in the face today, guess what, you'll be dealing with him again tomorrow, or whenever it happens that you die. Opting for godhood means playing cosmic capture-the-flag with the usual suspects again and again. So on and so forth.

[Glorthindel]

Consider the Wall of the Faithless. What if your players consider it deeply wrong, a case of staggering injustice baked into the very fabric of the universe? Maybe you'd like to run a campaign that sets out to right this cosmic injustice? Well tough titties, Ao says it's here to stay and there is no power in existence that can deny him. You can't overturn even his slightest whim without overturning every part of his setting, no matter how petty, poorly-written, or spiteful it may be.

On the subject of unpopular opinions;

I think people sometimes get unfairly wound up about the Wall of the Faithless. I get from a 'modern person looking in' it looks like a spiteful middle finger at atheists, but that isn't what it is, because that world does have (very visible) gods.

Its just a cosmic trash compactor. Souls have got to go somewhere, and the ones that just linger around because they have nowhere else to go would start to clutter up the place if left to just sit there, and soon enough, no-one would be able to find their followers for all the random souls getting in the way. Then you've ended up with Dollurrh, and no-one wants Dollurrh. So, they gotta go somewhere. Its not spiteful, its not a petty revenge by the gods, its just tidying up.

[Quertus]

Hm...

As far as 'aspire to stab', part of me feels like there's a double standard about what should viably remove a non-player thing from a setting permanently, versus what can viably remove a player character from a setting permanently. Lowering a 20th level PC's hitpoints to -10 may kill them, but realistically in D&D with spells that can restore someone just by name alone even if they've been atomized, that 20th level PC may well be unkillable (so long as anyone of a similar power level seriously wants them to keep existing) without the use of fairly complicated means. Yet it sort of feels like if you actually managed to have a big throw down with Nerull or whomever and lowered them to -11hp, it'd be stealing the PCs' win if a few moments later one of that deity's allies waved their hand, used Alter Reality (or just a True Resurrection, or even just setting a servitor to cast a True Resurrection), and brought them back totally unharmed. And where that would happen without fail unless the PCs literally slew every allied deity simultaneously and all of their minions capable of pulling off True Resurrection (or found some particular 'technical kill' method that got around deity immunities to polymorph and death effects...).

If a GM abstains from high PO or TO shenanigans, are individual high level PCs actually something that an NPC could actually 'aspire to stab' as a means of resolution? Or has that already moved to a broader set of ablative resources than just whatever HP the PC carries around (e.g. resources to pay for resurrections, connections with others willing to rez them, 'life insurance' contracts, etc) which aren't so overtly mechanics-bound?

Having never had a PC resurrected, I'm all about the gods staying dead when I kill them.

Also, I'm a fan of, "becoming a deity is a downgrade (and the gods know it)".

Consider the Wall of the Faithless. What if your players consider it deeply wrong, a case of staggering injustice baked into the very fabric of the universe? Maybe you'd like to run a campaign that sets out to right this cosmic injustice? Well tough titties, Ao says it's here to stay and there is no power in existence that can deny him. You can't overturn even his slightest whim without overturning every part of his setting, no matter how petty, poorly-written, or spiteful it may be.

Thankfully, 5e appears to be more powerful than AO.

On the subject of unpopular opinions;

I think people sometimes get unfairly wound up about the Wall of the Faithless. I get from a 'modern person looking in' it looks like a spiteful middle finger at atheists, but that isn't what it is, because that world does have (very visible) gods.

Its just a cosmic trash compactor. Souls have got to go somewhere, and the ones that just linger around because they have nowhere else to go would start to clutter up the place if left to just sit there, and soon enough, no-one would be able to find their followers for all the random souls getting in the way. Then you've ended up with Dollurrh, and no-one wants Dollurrh. So, they gotta go somewhere. Its not spiteful, its not a petty revenge by the gods, its just tidying up.

By default, the souls go to whichever outer plane matches their *alignment*. The only reason that there's any problem in the first place is because they're being rerouted.

Worse, it's not just the mentally ill (those who cannot believe the obvious evidence of the reality that they live in - and note that there's devils there, actively trying to perform conversations, even after death) who get stuck in the Wall of Shame. It's both the "Faithless" and the "False".

The wall is a cosmic horror that makes Cthulhu lose sanity points, and 5e is better off without it.

[Anonymouswizard]

Aren't most of the planes infinite? Kelemvor could roll a die for every unclaimed soul, send them to a random point on that randomly determined plane, and he probably doesn't strand a single one in another god's personal holdings.

Yes, if we have active divinities we want to avoid Dollurrh, but the Wall punishes the indecisive and unexceptional needlessly. It's not required, I believe the gods had other systems before it, and when Kelemvor stopped using the blasted thing the main issue is that he good gods apparently did so little that the only reason (good) people followed them was to get into a decent afterlife.

Dollurrh, for all it's issues, is just a natural part of the setting. It's not a good afterlife, but at least it wasn't inflicted to punish those who didn't pray at the correct times of day (or whatever the deity's actual requirements were).

[vasilidor]

Most of the older settings have transformed into bad turds due to the real life beliefs of some of the people who have worked on them. Forgotten realms is one of those turds and so is dragonlance.
If you strip out what was added over the years and go back to the bare basics and make up the rest yourself you will likely come up with something better, if you don't want to just make up everything whole cloth.