In praise of Heroic power-scale play

[RandomPeasant]

How about a dystopian hell-hole with small enclaves trying to survive millions of those 1 hp, 1 dmg, only hit on a 20... I dunno, call them demon-rats or something. Mr. Fighter, by dint of D&D being pretty well screw job on all base warriors, can rule one tiny enclave and personally battle & die from being swarmed by demon-rats while struggling to get enough of a meager harvest in that only old poeople & small children die of hunger this winter. Mythic?

I think that's getting too caught up on the specifics of the numbers and missing the broader point. Suppose we have a 3.5 Fighter, who simply cannot be damaged by low level characters, because he has DR from various sources that is larger than the amount of damage low-level opponents are capable of dealing (or that we're playing some version of the game where a natural 20 isn't an auto-hit and he has an AC of 35 or something). That guy can just walk around killing everybody. And he can do so forever.

actually powerful immortal D&D creatures in the monster manual being on cosmic cleanup duty.

But that's just admitting that you are in a Mythic setting, you're just not allowing the PCs to be mythic.

Generally if the game lacks any sort of reputation or social bearing/status rules & effects I find that most non-DM players who are long term mainly 3e & later D&D, will only un-hobo if the DM actively pushes something in the setting that does it.

Honestly, I don't find that all too surprising. Of course people will follow their incentives. If there's no social status to be gained, people won't do anything to gain social status.

If we take Warhammer 40k, the game that literally invented the term ‘grimdark’ as an example. PCs in 40k can be some of the most overpowered and extreme characters in all of gaming. Yet if a world is burned to ashes and every soul consumed by demons, in 40k that’s a pretty quiet Thursday. You have to be changing the fate of sectors involving hundreds of worlds before you even get to the footnotes of the daily briefings.

It doesn’t matter if you’re playing a veteran space marine captain in full terminator armor or a guardsman with a lasgun, the world is gritty.

It goes both ways though. In 40k, you can save the world. You can take a world that is full of demons daemons and orcs orks and clean it up and install democracy and improve standards of living and reignite the light of science and end the persecution of mutants. And that's a Mythic victory if you do it in a D&D campaign. It's just that you can run a campaign where you do that every day for a hundred years and still not have fixed even half of the worlds in the Imperium. That doesn't lessen those accomplishments, it just means that 40k exists at a scale that breaks people's brains. The Imperium has been decaying for longer than writing has existed in the real world. It will continue decaying for even longer before things come to a head.