So.  First, to acknowledge the point: The Dread Powers of Ravenloft are supposed to be, on a mechanical level, more or less the Will of the GM to Enforce Genre.  The fact is that you're going to need a fair amount of emergency patching of the rules to stop some of the rough bits of the D&D rule set from running roughshod over the genre features of gothic horror.  And so, accordingly, if you are trying to fight the Dread Powers, you are probably playing Ravenloft-as-Gothic-Horror wrong.

The beauty of D&D, however, is that each table can play their setting as they see fit, and so the context of this thought experiment is that the actual actions of the Dread Powers of Ravenloft are still consistent with the books and themes of Ravenloft.  However, the players are under absolutely no obligation to play along with those themes, and the PCs themselves have free reign within the bounds of who they are and what they can do to strike back at their arbitrary tormentors.

So! The Dread Power are arbitrarily powerful.  They can mess with even the most powerful magics and resistant artifacts, and gift (or rather inflict) an endless array of dark gifts.  But within the context of Ravenloft, they have limits (or, choose to limit themselves, or, to Planescape up in here, they are who they are because of the limits they've accepted, and PCs forcing them to compromise their vision of the Demiplane and of their place in it is a victory condition.)  The Dread Lords drastically limit magic which provides easy ways to identify hidden enemies and dark magics, and limit the easy removal the effects of evil transformations or curses.  But they don't stop the application of the tools that they do permit, and if you're willing to eat the risks of their gifts and are morally-flexible, then a lot of options are open to you.  Similarly, the Dread Lords don't just kill people who defy them; they exist in a state such that their presence is known, but they only act through maliciously arranged not-coincidences, dark gifts, and moving people to various domains via the mists.  And the dark gifts can be crippling, but they don't change who you are; they only bring the worst aspects of yourself to the fore.

So! What's a group of adventurers to do?

The first option is to simply lean into the realm you are in, and go harder.  The Dread Powers want a realm of terror and horror, and fear and madness.  They need people for that.  A group of adventurers who went all murder-bodhisattva on the Realms would very rapidly fall themselves...but falling does not mean that your story ends, nor does it mean that the Dread Powers can puppet you around.  One way of fighting the powers would be to interrupt the gothic stories of other realms by dropping in, killing all the civilians, using Trap the Soul or similarly powerful magics to ensure the Dread Powers cannot reincarnate them as they do, and repeat every time the Dread Powers happen to leave a realm populated and unguarded.  The dark tale of Strahd definitely becomes a very different tale if Strahd's chance at redemption is closed off forever, not because the forever-reincarnating Tatyana will reject his monstrous nature, but because greater monsters have kidnapped her from the realm solely to frustrate the ones who wish to see Strahd tormented by what he lost, instead of by eternal thirst as he is denied the ability to feed via the simple expedient of spilling the blood he would drink before he can do so.  If you are willing to deal with the bullshit that is the Ravenloft Vistani, then you even have a less-evil version of this, by using Vistani to ferry wayward souls en masse out of a realm, bribing them with mass-Fabricated and enchanted caravans (and threatening them with hordes of not-really-curseable adversaries, if yoiu need a stick to bargain with.)

Another way to fight the dark powers would be to simply take the power of a high-level D&D party, and turn that power on fulfilling the letter of the Dark Lord's curse, while utterly subverting or ignoring the intent.  In the case of Strahd, for instance, an enterprising anti-Power strike force could, if they were willing to spare a few decades, hunt down Tatyana themselves, kill her, spam-scry Barovia for her return, and then get to her young, raising her on a steady diet of corruptive magic, necromancy, and Twilight fanfiction, to ensure that nothing of her previous nature and preferences survives her current upbringing.  Then you present her to Strahd, Strahd vamps her, and the two of them unlive happily ever after, and Strahd now has neither the means, motive, or inclination to pursue anything other than eating random peasants and pointless vampire dickery with his now-eternally-evil bride.

And finally, there is always the Soth option; you can time-capsule yourself and try to arrange to get dug up if someone does manage to pull off a Grand Conjunction.  You can probably pull some hilarious hijinks with Temporal Stasis and Contingency, but there are also lower-level ways to solve the problem.  One potential endgame for such a campaign would be engineering a scenario in which either you are utterly destroyed or you escape, and then rolling the dice; no matter what happens, you will not wake up in Ravenloft afterwards.

I think you could get a really interesting Planescape-y campaign out of this, in which the PCs were powerful enough to face the gothic horrors of Ravenloft on their own terms, but needed to think deeply about what playing along versus choosing a completely different path would mean.  And, of course, if the plans of the PCs started to look like they might work, and they might be able to get themselves ejected from the Demiplane of Dread by making their horrific deeds routine and undramatic...would they really choose to do so?

So, does this kind of campaign sound interesting to anyone else? And if so, what specific domains, darklords, and stories would you want to have your high-level party either lean into, or run roughshod over?

Short of deific intervention, there's really no way for PCs to 'fight' the Dark Powers. It's like fighting the DM in a particularly pernicious tabletop game.

Try to lean in, and PCs will rapidly become Darklords with their own domains -- and by domain, I mean prison. You won't be able to wander the domains very long if you become some sort of murderhobo group. You'll find yourselves owners of a brand new castle and an inability to leave the domain.

Subverting the system has more possibilities, especially if you can avoid falling to corruption yourself. Although arranging for Tatyana's newest incarnation to become a complete monster strikes me as not only a massive jump into darkness, but remember that part of Strahd's need is for her innocence.

As demonstrated by Soth, the best way to win the game against the Dark Powers is simply not to play their game at all.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 07, 2021, 04:18:29 PM
Short of deific intervention, there's really no way for PCs to 'fight' the Dark Powers. It's like fighting the DM in a particularly pernicious tabletop game.

...

As demonstrated by Soth, the best way to win the game against the Dark Powers is simply not to play their game at all.

So Soth also shows how to beat the DM?

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 07, 2021, 04:18:29 PM
Short of deific intervention, there's really no way for PCs to 'fight' the Dark Powers. It's like fighting the DM in a particularly pernicious tabletop game.

Try to lean in, and PCs will rapidly become Darklords with their own domains -- and by domain, I mean prison. You won't be able to wander the domains very long if you become some sort of murderhobo group. You'll find yourselves owners of a brand new castle and an inability to leave the domain.

Subverting the system has more possibilities, especially if you can avoid falling to corruption yourself. Although arranging for Tatyana's newest incarnation to become a complete monster strikes me as not only a massive jump into darkness, but remember that part of Strahd's need is for her innocence.

As demonstrated by Soth, the best way to win the game against the Dark Powers is simply not to play their game at all.

Again, from my intro; if you can force the Dread Powers to cheat openly, then you've won; you've broken the illusion that anything that happens in Ravenloft is anything but their will.  It's like forcing them to use a cheat in a video game; the illusion of tension to if their favorite toy will prevail or remain forever mired in evil is broken, and the more badly you force them to cheat, the more likely that they become Other than they are.  (And may well just turn the Demiplane of Dread into a generic hell dimension, but hey, you still won the philosophical argument!

I think you'd need at least one ensured Darklord for the campaign to take off; you need friendly territory, and having one party member 'fall' while still announcing "No, I'm not going to be a complete dickbag to my friends, thanks for asking." is a strong start to things not going as the Dark Powers intend.  If your new domain doesn't have people and you don't want to wait for them to stumble in, you can arrange for Vistani to drop off orphans from other Gothic Horror Events in your domain, and build your population that way.  And once you have either found, bound, or made agents, then you can still spread your will via your proxies.  Ravenloft makes the simple and direct magical ways of doing this a little harder (e.g., it is probably not advisable to spam Simulacram), but options remain, and short of forcing the Dread Powers to quarantine your domain because you're the wrong sort of evil and not entertaining enough, you can still fight their will for the Demiplane while retaining your lordship.

You can also engage in productive petty dickery, of course; you can have your falling hubris be that you will never stop challenging the Dread Powers, and have part of that being that you are a legitimately great monarch, squashing monsters with high-level prejudice and ensuring that your adventurer magics stop any angst-generating plagues or famines in their tracks, while sponsoring education amoung your peasantry to identify the signs of the most common monsters, and posting clearly-marked Vistani caravan lanes, and so forth.  To not be stewing in Byronic horror at your own corrupt nature, but instead to take the dark gifts you have been given and do good for many with them, is another way to fight the Powers.

I will say that I have only read old 2e Strahd in detail, and that Strahd was very Dracula-esque, and definitely seemed intent on both capturing and turning Tatyana, but I also freely concede that given his backstory, him getting exactly what he thinks he wants in terms of a not-quite-blushing vampire bride would probably not lead to any lack of problems.  On the other hand, the natural follow-up to that would be to, for the long-lived party, to instead send in That One Bard, who is abusing Glibness, Mind Blank, and a few other tricks, to attempt to trick Strahd into thinking that the bard is Tatyana, and working instead from there.  The goal of the whole deal is to jam a prybar into the clockwork gears of the Dracula narrative; I'd envision part of the campaign would be the Dread Powers needing to call upon genre-based excuses to stop each individual scheme that the PCs threw at them, with the risk of every edit or new secret revealed opening up yet more avenues of attack for the PCs.

And the follow-up correlary to the Soth method (do literally nothing until the Dread Powers expel you out of sheer boredom) is the mentioned time capsule methods.  But I do think that if you would hit on that method, then "Let's export that logic to deny the Dread Powers their toys, and their entire supporting casts if it gets that far." would probably be a faster plan, and one more likely to work if the PCs were not themselves already straight-immortal.  But built into the premise of the game is that it's a game; that the Dread Powers will be trying to respond in a manner which preserves their character and the desired character of their realm while seeming dark, mysterious, and not boringly arbitrary, and that the PCs will be working as best they can to peer beyond the curtain of Mist and reveal the Great and Powerful Oz, and the PCs checking out entirely (or the Dread Powers letting them trash Ravenloft and live forever in newly-created Random Generic Setting With Weird Mist And Reincarnation Rules) would both not be in spirit of the campaign.

Quote from: robertliguori on June 07, 2021, 05:49:35 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 07, 2021, 04:18:29 PM
Short of deific intervention, there's really no way for PCs to 'fight' the Dark Powers. It's like fighting the DM in a particularly pernicious tabletop game.

Try to lean in, and PCs will rapidly become Darklords with their own domains -- and by domain, I mean prison. You won't be able to wander the domains very long if you become some sort of murderhobo group. You'll find yourselves owners of a brand new castle and an inability to leave the domain.

Subverting the system has more possibilities, especially if you can avoid falling to corruption yourself. Although arranging for Tatyana's newest incarnation to become a complete monster strikes me as not only a massive jump into darkness, but remember that part of Strahd's need is for her innocence.

As demonstrated by Soth, the best way to win the game against the Dark Powers is simply not to play their game at all.

Again, from my intro; if you can force the Dread Powers to cheat openly, then you've won; you've broken the illusion that anything that happens in Ravenloft is anything but their will.  It's like forcing them to use a cheat in a video game; the illusion of tension to if their favorite toy will prevail or remain forever mired in evil is broken, and the more badly you force them to cheat, the more likely that they become Other than they are.  (And may well just turn the Demiplane of Dread into a generic hell dimension, but hey, you still won the philosophical argument!

I think you'd need at least one ensured Darklord for the campaign to take off; you need friendly territory, and having one party member 'fall' while still announcing "No, I'm not going to be a complete dickbag to my friends, thanks for asking." is a strong start to things not going as the Dark Powers intend.  If your new domain doesn't have people and you don't want to wait for them to stumble in, you can arrange for Vistani to drop off orphans from other Gothic Horror Events in your domain, and build your population that way.  And once you have either found, bound, or made agents, then you can still spread your will via your proxies.  Ravenloft makes the simple and direct magical ways of doing this a little harder (e.g., it is probably not advisable to spam Simulacram), but options remain, and short of forcing the Dread Powers to quarantine your domain because you're the wrong sort of evil and not entertaining enough, you can still fight their will for the Demiplane while retaining your lordship.

You can also engage in productive petty dickery, of course; you can have your falling hubris be that you will never stop challenging the Dread Powers, and have part of that being that you are a legitimately great monarch, squashing monsters with high-level prejudice and ensuring that your adventurer magics stop any angst-generating plagues or famines in their tracks, while sponsoring education amoung your peasantry to identify the signs of the most common monsters, and posting clearly-marked Vistani caravan lanes, and so forth.  To not be stewing in Byronic horror at your own corrupt nature, but instead to take the dark gifts you have been given and do good for many with them, is another way to fight the Powers.

I will say that I have only read old 2e Strahd in detail, and that Strahd was very Dracula-esque, and definitely seemed intent on both capturing and turning Tatyana, but I also freely concede that given his backstory, him getting exactly what he thinks he wants in terms of a not-quite-blushing vampire bride would probably not lead to any lack of problems.  On the other hand, the natural follow-up to that would be to, for the long-lived party, to instead send in That One Bard, who is abusing Glibness, Mind Blank, and a few other tricks, to attempt to trick Strahd into thinking that the bard is Tatyana, and working instead from there.  The goal of the whole deal is to jam a prybar into the clockwork gears of the Dracula narrative; I'd envision part of the campaign would be the Dread Powers needing to call upon genre-based excuses to stop each individual scheme that the PCs threw at them, with the risk of every edit or new secret revealed opening up yet more avenues of attack for the PCs.

And the follow-up correlary to the Soth method (do literally nothing until the Dread Powers expel you out of sheer boredom) is the mentioned time capsule methods.  But I do think that if you would hit on that method, then "Let's export that logic to deny the Dread Powers their toys, and their entire supporting casts if it gets that far." would probably be a faster plan, and one more likely to work if the PCs were not themselves already straight-immortal.  But built into the premise of the game is that it's a game; that the Dread Powers will be trying to respond in a manner which preserves their character and the desired character of their realm while seeming dark, mysterious, and not boringly arbitrary, and that the PCs will be working as best they can to peer beyond the curtain of Mist and reveal the Great and Powerful Oz, and the PCs checking out entirely (or the Dread Powers letting them trash Ravenloft and live forever in newly-created Random Generic Setting With Weird Mist And Reincarnation Rules) would both not be in spirit of the campaign.

I dunno. The way the Dark Powers are written is basically 'unless you walk a careful path, we get to screw you'.

They don't care that you catch them cheating. They own the game. It's their board. There's no moral or ethical victory there. 'Oh, you caught us cheating? Cool. Whatcha gonna do about it?'.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 07, 2021, 06:18:14 PM

I dunno. The way the Dark Powers are written is basically 'unless you walk a careful path, we get to screw you'.

They don't care that you catch them cheating. They own the game. It's their board. There's no moral or ethical victory there. 'Oh, you caught us cheating? Cool. Whatcha gonna do about it?'.

I mean, that's the thing.  They can screw you anyway. 

Most kinds of D&D pretend to at least the idea of justice.  If your soul is damned to one of the hells, it's because of how you were aligned in life, or at least because some asshole with a lot of magical power went out of their way to make it so, and even then, there is hope in Hell.  Evil is not all-powerful, just because it has you in its clutches right now.

But this is explicitly not true in Ravenloft.  You did nothing wrong in being sucked into Ravenloft, and most likely were intended solely to be a bit-character red-shirt in one of the Dread Powers' favorite dramas, and your reward for outliving the experience you were not intended to survive is that you get to do it again, and again, and again.

The Dread Powers are the ones making the rules.  They can decide that Being Named Steve requires power checks and bend their universe to make it so, just like they took a bunch of other morally-neutral acts like crafting golems and attached arbitrary consequences to them. 

And you can put your head down and play along with their passion plays, yes, and doing so is probably the closest thing to survival behavior that exists in Ravenloft, yes.  But who cares? You're a gods-damned adventurer, and just because these cutesy assholes think that having an unusually divinely-morphic plane makes them hot shit doesn't mean you buy into their bullshit, any more than you buy into your illusionist buddy's claims to semi-omnipotence.

You can play their game, adhere to the behavior they want to see out of you, and eventually fail and die, or just live long enough in the accursed realms to die anyway...or you can spit in their eyes, and go down swinging at the thing they are willing to expend effort to create and defend; their stories.  If they're going to screw you over anyway, why not? They can punish you arbitrarily, but they could do that anyway.

And if it looks like you actually can manage to start having an effect, whether it's summary Darklordship or quick misty physics revisions around you...then do you stop and look at what you've done to this point, and what winning would actually mean?  If you take your paladin from Fallen to Evil to Darklord to Abused His Darklord Gifts to Make The Terrains Around His Completely Unlivable to Horribly Psychologically Tortured Neighboring Darklords Through Proxies That They Start Losing Territory to True Dark Lord status, until the Dread Powers have had enough of your bullshit and kick you out of Ravenloft...have you won? Have you really won?

Again, the assumption is that the Darklords are agents, and that while their power is vast, they want things to happen a particular way, and that they want choice and chance to be part of that, because Ravenloft is a game system and not purely a setting for novels.  And thus, if you can push them to a level of bullshit action that a hypothetical non-meta player of Ravenloft would announce "OK, we've crossed the line from Gothic Horror to Arbitrary Nonsense, I'm out, who wants to play my M&M2E hack of Exalted instead?", then you can hurt them, by taking their game away, at least on the level that they apparently want it.

A normal Ravenloft game needs players who can make characters who come into the realm, meet it on its own terms, and are willing to engage with its themes, and a GM willing to use the Dread Powers to keep things on track if, e.g., some smart-arse wizard works out that you can bypass Strahd's choking mist with Animated Object carriages and uses that to bug out with several crucial NPCs before Strahd can close his borders properly.  This Ravenloft game would require instead characters who, for one reason or another, cannot or will not engage with the themes of Ravenloft, and will use their adventurer's toolkits to fight against those themes in the face of ever-escalating but unable to cross certain lines Dread Power cheatery, and the open question of how far the characters let their quest take them.