BECMI ends with Immortals, so the concept of playing extremely powerful characters has always been around. While I’d imagine the vast majority never played with those rules, the same is true for modern D&D. A vanishingly small number of games actually make it to level 20.

The Pathfinder game i play can be brutal. The party has learned to just nope the fuck out if something looks sketchy. The dm told us at the beginning that the world was “real” and we’re just thrown in it, so nothing is level adjusted.

It’s also fun in the other direction. Like Exalted has stat blocks for mortals, but the PCs are literally built to fight entities more powerful than gods.

An encounter with a mortal is always just a narration scene even if combat ensues. You can pulverize ten of these guys without breaking a sweat, but do you? What does your choice say about you?

Exalted isn’t a game about fighting mortals in quantities less than an army, and there is no threat in doing so. Any tension in the scene is purely about what the characters do with essentially unlimited power. And that can be interesting and tense for some groups and in others it’s a thirty second aside on the way to fight timeless terrors.

Exalted literally let’s you have your own army of mortals and it functions like an equivalent of grenade in most normal games - something to just throw at the bad guy.

The dog on the left is such a strawman lol. Those who would say such a thing are few and far between. I know plenty of DMs and players who think the PCs’ combat encounters should be challenging and even lethal.

May be few and far between but I can vouch for it; I had a party like that whom I hated DMing or playing with in their games. Myself though I am as you said someone who prefers the challenge; both exist in large numbers.

The number of times my cleric/sorcerer has had to revivify the rest of his party…

If you ain’t dying, you ain’t trying.

It is actually bad game design in the sense that there really isn’t a decent mechanic to escape monsters.

5.0 orcs, for example, had double the speed of the average PC with their dumbass free move action.

The solution is rolling disengage as a series of skill checks (like World of Darkness would…) but then you have to explain how, exactly, a dude in full plate escapes a dragon.

Beat the campaign by forcing the DM to explain the logistics of how the monsters find their daily calories

Okay you still die

It’s never the real god, just a physical avatar. There’s still a lot of Batman vs Superman narrative horseshit in the idea though

“Oh you surprised the guy who moves faster than most speedsters and can hear and see everything around him. Sure, okay, then he leaves and throws an asteroid he found within half a second from orbit before you’re done blinking”

DnD avatars don’t really scale that hard but neither do PCs so all of those fights revolve around the avatar being stupid or using a McGuffin

This is very game dependent. Right now I’m in a pretty brutal one where everyone is branded by the goddess of mind control and we have miniboss encounters with our own former PCs who’ve been turned into grotesque monsters - but I’ve also played in games where the PCs were newcomers to Olympus and more or less ended up recreating the first few God of War games.

Cthulhu kills 1D6 Characters per round

I am not that much a D&D player, but doesn’t it a huge power scale meaning that in the lower levels, it’s fairly easy to design a you fucking loose encounter. And isn’t there The Tarasque who is basically a you fucking loose statblock

I am all for a choose your fight approach where you should definitely not mess with someone bigger/stronger especiully without a plan or a lot of explosives. However, I expect that PC can make it out of an ordinary fight (just make sure it’s not a target shooting practice and put 1-2 PC on the ground). Then if the 13th gen newborns vampire want to fight the 5th gen prince, not my problem if they have to burn their character sheet afterwards.

Finally, one of the best rpg out there is 10 candles where you know from scratch that everyone will die

The official charactersheet for Caine: https://64.media.tumblr.com/e06763afdbed16a49a0146a2282002a4/tumblr_n6pj41Ch1s1qhuazoo1_540.jpg

To be fair, starting at around level 13 it becomes more challenging to, well, challenge a party without having dragons and shit everywhere. You can almost not build encounters with “normal” enemies anymore.

I mean this meme is built for strawmen that’s what it is

And isn’t there The Tarasque who is basically a you fucking loose statblock

Mostly. They really bungled it in the 2014 statblock. Other editions gave it some combination of ranged attacks, regeneration, a way to cancel flight, and a burrow speed. In 2014, it had none of these. A level 5 Wizard could borrow a Repeating heavy crossbow from an Artificer, repeatedly cast Phantom Steed to stay out of its range, and take it down on its own. Or instead of a wizard, use an Aarakocra from Elemental Evil Player’s Companion with 2 levels in Rogue (so it can learn Cunning Action), and it will be able to fly faster than the Tarrasque. Unless you use Chase rules.

In 2024, they have a ranged attack and a burrow speed, and they’re significantly faster. It’s hard to just attack from a safe distance and they can always just head underground. But if you can get 150 feet in the air, you’re at an impasse where neither can hurt the other. And a high-level party has a lot of crazy tools at their disposal.

The problem isn’t enemies that are too hard or too easy. The problem is the GM not knowing ahead of time which it will be.

I like his weakness

Also shouldn’t his sire be Lilith, oh no wait he was cursed by God yeah.