Hot take: Strongest creatures in the setting shouldn't just be clowned by PCs with no resistance.

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?

You say that, but IIRC there are official DnD statements that gods do not have statblocks because they are too powerful for mortals to even try to fight. They renamed the Tiamat statblock to Aspect of Tiamat for precisely this reason.

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

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.

No one actually plays dnd like that though...

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.

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.

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

Shadowrun: Great Dragons don’t have stats because the players will lose.

DnD tends to be balanced between the levels of 5 through 12. Most modules sit in there.

But I'm not saying anything controversial when I note that 5e CR is a bad way to do encounters.

I feel that this is really 5e and 4e specific. 3.5 is kinda borderline and in my experience 2e and older definitely do feature things that are effectively "if you go in there you die, lmao" types of obstacles and trend more towards a sort of survival-horror tone, where surviving is in itself an accomplishment.

I do feel like sometimes players have a sort of laid back, "we should just win without too much trouble" attitude. Sometimes this manifests as "we take a long rest after every fight". And that's a fine way to play, so long as everyone's on board.

It can be kind of bad when half the group is kick-in-the-door-lol and the DM is expecting more tactical depth.

I think because D&D is many people's first RPG, you'll find a lot of bad habits there as new players rediscover them.

Caine's statblock was perfect. And frankly, there should be more characters (especially named NPCs) who have that block.

Meh, I can make a Swara bastet / Tremere abomination with ranks in Celerity and mage powers and cybernetic arms from that one Pentex supplement who can attack 30 times in Crinos (but that's not a problem cuz I'm Metis with some pointless "story factor" drawback that has no effect on my combat capabilities) with enchanted plasma cannons, doing 300d aggravated before Cain gets his first action.