Imagine finding out Orks killed your parents at level 10, long after that favored enemy bonus will be useful.

“Other than forming a pact with a malicious entity from the Outer Realms? I think trying to light the Inn’s hearth with a fireball might qualify!”

You need to pretend you live in a democracy or the administrators will take away the illusion.

He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.

That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.

For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.

You can go to a good print shop and get yourself an entire stack of Black Lotus proxies for a few bucks. It is the most heavily counterfeited card in the series

DM 1: “We’re going to have a magical just-so adventure and everything will be on rails! I’ve got a bunch of art I’m going to show you and I expect everyone to do voices and play in whatever vague medieval fantasy pastiche passes for In Character. I want everyone to have a good time, but also cry when my NPC gives a twenty minute monologue. This game is my entire personality.”

DM 2: “Here’s a stack of character sheets. I found a dungeon in a magazine called The Infinite Rectal Immolator that looks cool as hell. You have a 25 point buy and three magic weapons of less than 15k gp each. Just ordered a stack of pizzas and a five gallon jug of Mountain Dew. Let’s see who makes it through. If we get bored, I’ve also got the new Halo game on XBox.”

I do enjoy these as bits, but has anyone actually tried to play this? It doesn’t look like there’s much RP in this G.

The Vancian magic system hasn’t changed that much even from 1e. That said, settings do change the meta narrative behind magic regularly. Faerun loves to make Mystra and the Weave big elements of their metaplot.

I could see elves forced to relearn magic every time Mystra dies or gets kidnapped or goes on vacation or whatever.

Like, you were a wizard 100 years ago, but then spells were super different and way less powerful, so now you get to relearn the newer better spells and casting techniques.

That’s an interesting (and very Frieren-esque) bit of world building. But it does run contrary to the generic D&D settings/multi-verse, where the same set of spells have existed for centuries and across a multitude of worlds.

“When I was your age, you needed to know 9th level spells to cast fireball” is a cute crotchety one-liner. But it’s not going to make any sense when you find a 2,000 year old spellbook with Fireball at the appropriate 3rd level slot. The DM would have to do a whole mess of retconning of an existing setting / pre-written material to make it work.

I imagine it’d be like learning to programming 50 years ago and then starting again now

As someone who did learn programming roughly 40 years ago, there are definitely differences. But an if-statement is still and if-statement and a function is still a function. The libraries and syntax can change, but the basic commands are still fundamentally the same.

I would note that modern programming-as-analog-to-magic would be more akin to everyone having a magic wand in their back pocket to do a set assortment of 3rd level spells per day which they don’t even really need to think about other than the command word. Meanwhile, you’ve got this ancient elf flipping through a spellbook and spending an hour every morning re-memorizing a boutique list of spells nobody has thought to make a wand for in half a century.

Also a very interesting spin on a D&D-esque setting. But hugely divergent from printed materials.

Both Frieren and Serie would be extremely offended at the mere suggestion that they might possibly ever forget anything

Series, definitely. But Frieren struggles to remember old things all the time.

Kinda-sorta the premise of the anime Frieren.

I like to think Elves go on an adventure at around age 70-90, get really super cool, take 100 years off, and then completely forget all their amazing skills because they’ve been learning the language of bees or doing sequoia trimming as a hobby for the last century.

Would be a cute fluffy class feature to just assign the very old elf an exceptionally difficult but totally useless skill at near-master level, to help explain why the Legendary Warrior of Old is now swinging for the minor leagues.

Ah, thanks.

And without a burrow speed, and without a ranged attack, and without an ability that lets it ground all flying enemies.

Giving the Tarrasque a burrow speed goes a long way towards improving it, I agree. The hurl boulder ability of giants wouldn’t hurt either, although there’s really nothing stopping a Tarrasque from hurling rocks with a standard BAB.

I wouldn’t mind giving the Tarrasque a breath weapon, either. It works for Godzilla.

But these are incidental improvements. Just ambushing players in a cave will go a long way towards negating it’s deficiencies, even at high levels.

you can deal limitless damage just by dropping sufficiently many 100 pound boulders

Catapults are popular for a reason. But there’s still some issue of ammo and opportunity. You’re really banking on your target just hanging out at the optimal firing range.

A 9th level druid (any druid) flies 40ft in the air and upcasts one of their summon animals spells to summon 8 giant owls, then makes them fall prone.

I mean, I think the generic DM response to that is going to boil down to “The owls won’t behave that way”. Its for the same reason DMs blanche at the “Summon a whale 40 ft off the ground” technique (and why rulebooks started adding conditions about where and how things could be summoned, period).

at the end of the day you could also just do this with large rocks

The magic bag full of boulders is a classic munchkin weapon, but it does require some degree of preparation and isn’t the same level of mechanically out-of-the-box function as kamikaze owls. Even then, a general DM adjudication to these kinds of techniques would be to limit the damage to an equivalent spell effect. So a 3rd level Shrink Item will let you do (level)d6 damage from a hurled boulder. And you can only practically fling one of these a round.

That allows people to be creative to a degree (dropping a boulder down a mountainside will have different consequences than lobbing a fireball, and everyone can lean into that) without exploiting the mathematical discrepancies of fall damage versus every other kind of damage.

so a party with overland flight could attack it pretty much with impunity

That’s true of anything without a fly speed, assuming you’re doing all your adventures on a flat plain during the daytime in perfect weather. But the game changes slightly when you’re spelunking through the Underdark, racing through a forest of redwoods, or caught by surprise in the middle of a hurricane.

The drama of D&D is in the circumstances. You’re not supposed to have every fight in ideal conditions with a week of downtime to prepare. If you’re summiting a mountain during a blizzard and one of the Tarrasque’s meaty fists pops out of a cave wall to try and snag someone, or you’ve accidentally woken this thing up from beneath an ancient tomb full of restless wraiths, that’s a very different encounter than squaring off against this lumbering titan as it casually stomps its way across empty desert.

http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/2015/04/salt-in-wounds-overview-origin.html?m=1

A campaign setting about a LE township whose economy is predicated on harvesting the perpetually regenerating form of the Tarrasque. The town is divided into districts based on the massive magical spears that have pinned the creature to the soil. And there’s a ton of intrigue surrounding the various political families that are charged with maintaining - and periodically adjusting - those magical spears in order to keep the beast constrained, as well as the different religious, arcane, and druidic factions who have wildly different takes on if/how this process is to continue.

A very cool setpiece and one of the more exciting ways to describe how industrious adventurers might deal with this kind of creature.

3.5 was edition I played the most. It was a reason why I quit RPGs for nearly a decade

I’ve heard this line so many times, from virtually every game system. The system you know the best is always the worst. The system you’re least familiar with looks genius by comparison.

I remmember how amogn actual 3.5 players Tarrasque was the biggest joke. It was always brought up as definite proof designers have no idea how to make good monster. It was laughably easy to beat.

As I understand it, the Tarrasque isn’t intended to be a direct threat to the players so much as a civilization-wide threat that players have to deal with. If you’re just running heads-up against the creature, there’s a wide basket of indirect effects and clever builds that can kill or disable it. And when Wish/Miracle are on your spell list it isn’t an existential threat to a 17+ level party.

But all of that presumes you’re coming into contact with a Tarrasque as a known quantity. You’re not stumbling on the Tarrasque unexpectedly or dealing with it as the muscle attached to a more magically or socially savvy antagonist. You’re not fighting in any bizarre circumstances or unusual conditions. It’s not the Tarrasque that’s easy, it’s the fact that you’re on a message board with a pre-defined set of circumstances and a standard level appropriate set of resources to pull from that makes things easy.

I honestly don’t know if everyone claiming 3.5 Tarrasque is such a horrifying monster

An unanticipated introduction to a Tarrasque, particularly one encountered in unfavorable circumstances, can quickly end in a TPK. Players down on spells, caught napping, managing some secondary hindering conditions, or in an enclosed space (the meanest improvement I’ve seen a DM give to a Tarrasque was simply assigning it a burrow speed) don’t have the luxuries of time and distance to prepare themselves. And that’s what makes it scary.

But, again, you can say that about any of the Animal/Beast class of monsters. The humble house cat can one-shot a first level wizard if it gets initiative and rolls well. But the wizard wins with a single volley of magic missiles. The Kraken is a trivial encounter if your players can sit up on an 80’ tall cliff and fire arrows at it until it drops. Its significantly harder to deal with when it is demolishing the boat under your feet 600 miles off the shore.

Part of the DM’s job is to set the stage for high drama. “You see the big baddy waltzing up to you, take ten rounds to prepare” doesn’t get you that.

You need a certain market saturation before a ban becomes useful. If very few people are using the service, there’s little incentive to invest time/energy in a block.

I suspect the recent wave of riots in the wake of the election is driving the urgency.

Ah you think racism is your ally? You merely took levels in racism. Elves were born in it, molded by it. They didn’t see stop using slurs until the Third Age, by then it was nothing to them but Woke!