In praise of Heroic power-scale play

[Drakevarg]

If the setting doesn't care and doesn't move, it's one of two things. Either deeply gritty (cf WH40K, where even the most BA folks...can't do a darn thing in the greater scope of things except make life worse) or incoherent. Or, I guess, played for laughs (aka a deconstruction). But I wouldn't call it heroic.

If the status quo can be altered, but really really doesn't like to be and the risks are great, it's somewhere at the border of heroic and gritty.

Because, in the end, these aren't hard-and-fast things. They're...squishy. A bit. The overlap is non-zero. You can (as was explained to me and now I see) have high-power gritty. As long as the setting itself has more "inertia" or maybe force. And you can have really low-power heroic (or mythic).

Solid answers, I'll take it. In the former case, I was actually considering citing Cyberpunk 2077 as an example, since becoming an unstoppable badass is well within your ability but in the end Night City will still be Night City, and V probably won't see 2078. But I wanted to leave it open-ended instead.

I also applaud conceding to the flexibility. It can be tedious when someone tries to put forth a grand unifying theory to fiction and either gets dogmatic about their boxes or vague to the point of uselessness (or some combination thereof).

[Telok]

'cause if they're both "heroic," I feel like the category might be a bit too broad, encompassing anything that doesn't fully line up with Gritty or Mythic.

I'm starting to think most of the thread is hinged on personal definitions of adjectives that aren't very explicitly defined. Full honesty, my personal definitons of gritty/heroic/mythic aren't hard edged defined and they're imprecise & possibly overlapping because they're relative to some or all of style, genre, and system.

Mostly I think when I'm talking about these sorts of things its in respect to how a game (session+system) feels as a player. So Shadowrun felt heroic* while playing a mundane in D&D 5e feels gritty**. Which of course is absolutely opposite how people are trying to define things.

* stompin' insect spirits, blasting toxic shaman, blowing up corp ickyness labs in a way that put the horrid animal-things on the news, making the world a better place with pink mohawks & machine guns, feels like heroes

** duergar city got lava vaped by mind flayers and we couldn't do anything, let loose an ancient vamp warlord and can't catch up (teleports), leaving portals to hell open behind us through negligence, it all doesn't really do anything as bigger organized hero alliances will clean it up and likely eventually squish us for making waves, plus the melee pcs keep getting beat down all the time and can't accomplish much but killing stuff that's trapped in the same room or it sits still for them, does not feel heroic

[Mechalich]

I'm starting to think most of the thread is hinged on personal definitions of adjectives that aren't very explicitly defined. Full honesty, my personal definitons of gritty/heroic/mythic aren't hard edged defined and they're imprecise & possibly overlapping because they're relative to some or all of style, genre, and system.

Mostly I think when I'm talking about these sorts of things its in respect to how a game (session+system) feels as a player. So Shadowrun felt heroic* while playing a mundane in D&D 5e feels gritty**. Which of course is absolutely opposite how people are trying to define things.

Sort of. The problem is that settings generally have to be designed around a certain style of play with regard to the interaction between the power of the characters and the power that society can bring against them (this does presume the setting contains meaningful societies as a relevant thing, which many settings don't and there are only individuals of varying degrees of power). Usually what happens when characters from one type are brought into a setting of a different type the game breaks down.

For example, Mythic characters in a Heroic or Gritty setting just roflstomp everything and it becomes stupid. This is the big problem high level D&D (especially 3.X) has. The power level of the character has exceeded the ability of the setting to constrain. Likewise Gritty characters in a Heroic or Mythic setting has a very strong tendency to become pointless. Sure, it's possible to play as Mortals in Exalted, the rules allow for it, but why? The party could labor for decades only to have some Exalt wander past an undo everything in an afternoon.

[Quertus]

That's the big difference between the three levels--
Gritty can't make lasting changes at all. No matter what, everything will revert to status quo crap after you move away from the area.
Heroic can make lasting changes, but not by pushing buttons. Instead, it comes from being the lever, the fulcrum against which you move the world. And it happens over the course of the campaign.
Mythic can make lasting changes by pushing buttons, in a single "action".

Exactly. That's one of the key differences between gritty and heroic--both deal mostly with personal-scale power. But heroic has things you can curb-stomp. As well as things that can curb-stomp you in a fair fight. Gritty only has the latter.

If the setting doesn't care and doesn't move, it's one of two things. Either deeply gritty (cf WH40K, where even the most BA folks...can't do a darn thing in the greater scope of things except make life worse) or incoherent. Or, I guess, played for laughs (aka a deconstruction). But I wouldn't call it heroic.

If the status quo can be altered, but really really doesn't like to be and the risks are great, it's somewhere at the border of heroic and gritty.

Because, in the end, these aren't hard-and-fast things. They're...squishy. A bit. The overlap is non-zero. You can (as was explained to me and now I see) have high-power gritty. As long as the setting itself has more "inertia" or maybe force. And you can have really low-power heroic (or mythic).

This is much more coherent than your opening post. But I’ve still got a few issues.

First is, no matter how gritty the setting, I expect that a “muggle” in a coma is not something that has any chance of curb stomping the PCs. I expect that, no matter how gritty the setting, there are still things that the PCs can actually curb stomp, from helpless/comatose foes to piñatas to a Potted Plant.

Now, I suppose, in a sufficiently gritty system, those actions might not be automatic successes, meaning that if there was a ticking clock, you might not be able to move the Potted Plant off to the side, and break the piñata hiding the ticking bomb you intend to tie to the coma patient before it explodes. Is that why you believe that “gritty” (defined as unable to make lasting change) must needs also always only have things that could curb stomp the PCs? Because I’m not otherwise seeing how “cannot make lasting change” inherently necessitates that the opposition must always definitionally be able to curb stomp the PCs.

Speaking of… long ago, in a thread far, far away, someone asked what a D&D Wizard 20 could accomplish in the Warhammer 40k universe. I answered “nothing” (at least so long as they were roleplayed correctly), because one of the conceits of the setting is that (roughly) Belief powers the Warp, and people’s hopelessness caused by the bleak setting powers a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, even as a Wizard 20, Warhammer 40k matches your definition of “gritty” of “can't make lasting changes at all. No matter what, everything will revert to status quo crap after you move away from the area”. Yet that Wizard could curb stomp a lot of things in the Warhammer 40k universe.

Or are these both covered by your more recent admission that “You can (as was explained to me and now I see) have high-power gritty”, and you just haven’t released updated “core concept” blurbs to match your new understanding yet?

[kyoryu]

I'm not sure if you'd call it heroic or gritty or what, but what I like is games where:

A. The heroes are generally competent, at least to an expected level. It's not a comedy of errors. That does not mean hyper-competent. It means that if you're a sword-dude, you know how to use a sword. You might not be the best in the land, there might be people and things tougher than you - maybe a lot. But you know which way the sharp end is. If you're something like a guard, you can defeat the typical robber in combat. You may not be able to defeat a knight - he's got training well beyond yours.

B. The heroes are dealing with things that are at least somewhat bigger than their scope. It's an uphill battle, but not so uphill that you can't imagine them winning.

C. They can win, but aren't guaranteed to win, and success usually comes with some level of sacrifice. They're "heroes" because they choose to make the sacrifice, not because they can casually steamroll everything.

D. Mostly their opponents are on the same "scale". They're dealing with people. Maybe tougher people, or ones with more power, but fundamentally people. They may be in the opposite sides of the power range, but they're still in the power range.

So you could still have a game where you're gods. But maybe you're upstart gods, dealing with the entrenched powers. You could be kids on bikes, dealing with slightly adult problems, or those same adults dealing with a larger scope. Whatever it is you do, you can do it to a reasonable level, and failure is generally because you're doing hard stuff, not because you just drop the ball. You can defeat the problem, but it's gonna take some work, and probably some cleverness.

If you think about it, this describes like 90% of movies. Even with "over-the-top" action movies, the hero is dealing with things that are equally over the top.

[NichG]

I think a useful line between gritty and heroic is, in a heroic story the characters are dealing with difficult things for which failure is possible because they step up - they could have stayed home and been a baker, but they're heroes so they put themselves in danger for the sake of others. Whereas in a gritty story, characters don't have the choice to avoid danger - even doing their utmost to stay out of risky things, their power and agency in the setting is insufficient to actually do so. To the extent that eventually slipping up is nearly inevitable, and the question that is being asked is whether you accomplish some immediate personal goal before that time.

In a gritty story maybe success just means that you personally escape the circumstances that make the world so hostile, or you find a stable enough niche that 'do you survive?' isn't a day to day consideration anymore.

[BRC]

I'm not sure if you'd call it heroic or gritty or what, but what I like is games where:

A. The heroes are generally competent, at least to an expected level. It's not a comedy of errors. That does not mean hyper-competent. It means that if you're a sword-dude, you know how to use a sword. You might not be the best in the land, there might be people and things tougher than you - maybe a lot. But you know which way the sharp end is. If you're something like a guard, you can defeat the typical robber in combat. You may not be able to defeat a knight - he's got training well beyond yours.

B. The heroes are dealing with things that are at least somewhat bigger than their scope. It's an uphill battle, but not so uphill that you can't imagine them winning.

C. They can win, but aren't guaranteed to win, and success usually comes with some level of sacrifice. They're "heroes" because they choose to make the sacrifice, not because they can casually steamroll everything.

D. Mostly their opponents are on the same "scale". They're dealing with people. Maybe tougher people, or ones with more power, but fundamentally people. They may be in the opposite sides of the power range, but they're still in the power range.

So you could still have a game where you're gods. But maybe you're upstart gods, dealing with the entrenched powers. You could be kids on bikes, dealing with slightly adult problems, or those same adults dealing with a larger scope. Whatever it is you do, you can do it to a reasonable level, and failure is generally because you're doing hard stuff, not because you just drop the ball. You can defeat the problem, but it's gonna take some work, and probably some cleverness.

If you think about it, this describes like 90% of movies. Even with "over-the-top" action movies, the hero is dealing with things that are equally over the top.

That's pretty firmly Heroic scale.

Thinking about it, I think most long-running campaigns are going to be Heroic. Gritty kind of requires the regular, and very real, threat of character death, which makes it great for meatgrinder one-shots, but hard to sustain a long campaign. Mythic is more about bouncing character concepts off each other, and the game is almost entierly defined by the character dynamics, which means that a given set of characters will get stale over a longer campaign.

[Pex]

My issue is one of attitude. I won't say it of everyone who likes gritty play, but I often find those who prefer gritty play boast of it to the point of self-righteousness. For D&D in particular they will then blame D&D for not living up to their standards instead of playing a game system purposely designed to suit their style of play. They're also the ones who tend to scream the loudest when things that were obstacles at low level no longer are, which is why they scream about fly or teleport. They have low tolerance level for PC power, so complain about Great Weapon Master and Healing Word.

[NichG]

That's pretty firmly Heroic scale.

Thinking about it, I think most long-running campaigns are going to be Heroic. Gritty kind of requires the regular, and very real, threat of character death, which makes it great for meatgrinder one-shots, but hard to sustain a long campaign. Mythic is more about bouncing character concepts off each other, and the game is almost entierly defined by the character dynamics, which means that a given set of characters will get stale over a longer campaign.

My average campaign length tends to be about 50-70 sessions and I tend to run mythic for the most part (or rather, I tend to run either full mythic or heroic->mythic progression games). I've played in one long-ish gritty game, but for the most part the gritty stuff I've run or played in tends towards 1-3 session durations.

[gbaji]

I'm starting to think most of the thread is hinged on personal definitions of adjectives that aren't very explicitly defined. Full honesty, my personal definitons of gritty/heroic/mythic aren't hard edged defined and they're imprecise & possibly overlapping because they're relative to some or all of style, genre, and system.

Mostly I think when I'm talking about these sorts of things its in respect to how a game (session+system) feels as a player. So Shadowrun felt heroic* while playing a mundane in D&D 5e feels gritty**. Which of course is absolutely opposite how people are trying to define things.

There is value in making a distinction between a "game" (specific scenario or set of scenarios), and a "game system" (actual rules used for play). Any game system can be used to run a scenario that is "gritty". But some game systems will work better for maintaining a longer series of scenarios that remain gritty than others.

So yeah, you can run low level D&D characters through some gritty scenarios. But at a certain point, they level to the point where you have to scale up the threats to the point where they can't logically fit into the game world without being shifted to a more "heroic" level play. You simply can't justify why low level street mooks, or rats, or bats, or spiders are sufficient threats to your characters to maintain a gritty feel, but also haven't completely wiped out the local populace of whatever environment you are in. It's the difference between dealing with threats that are a danger to the environment you are in, and holding them at bay while attempting to maintain that environment (street level "gritty" play) vs marching heroically over to the ruins of an ancient city that was long ago wiped out by something, and dealing with the threat there (very clearly heroic). Anything powerful enough to be a threat to even low-mid level D&D characters will absolutely wipe out or have conquered any "normal" population. That's just a function of how the level system works.

Other game systems (typically skill based instead of level based) are excellent for running sustained gritty campaigns because while you get better at what you do, you never really become "more powerful", not in the way level based systems (and especially D&D do). IMO, it's all about hit points that really make this a big deal. And while there are some systems in non-level based games that simulate this to a degree (some more than others), it's never the same as "I can just take X more damage, and are Y harder to hit/affect every single level" like D&D has.

[BRC]

My issue is one of attitude. I won't say it of everyone who likes gritty play, but I often find those who prefer gritty play boast of it to the point of self-righteousness. For D&D in particular they will then blame D&D for not living up to their standards instead of playing a game system purposely designed to suit their style of play. They're also the ones who tend to scream the loudest when things that were obstacles at low level no longer are, which is why they scream about fly or teleport. They have low tolerance level for PC power, so complain about Great Weapon Master and Healing Word.

I think the attitude is mostly from the idea that "Gritty=Hard and you need to be an ESPECIALLY SKILLED PLAYER to win!" which isn't necessarily the case.

I'd also say that D&D 5e can only really pull off Gritty at low levels, and even then is a pretty bad "Gritty" game. Yeah you can get the feel, but the RNG of the dice are so prominent at low levels that you're mostly just playing Russian roulette and seeing who gets unlucky. There are not that many tools for low-level characters to avoid combat if it's presented, and deadly combats at low levels are usually mostly about luck, there isn't much you can do if you can go down to 2 decent hits from a goblin.

My average campaign length tends to be about 50-70 sessions and I tend to run mythic for the most part (or rather, I tend to run either full mythic or heroic->mythic progression games). I've played in one long-ish gritty game, but for the most part the gritty stuff I've run or played in tends towards 1-3 session durations.

I'm curious what a long-lasting Mythic game looks like. In my mind the fun of a mythic game is to show up and explore the dynamics of your character's powerset, but that will get old, especially since you reshape the setting with your actions, eventually the setting is mostly just The Soup that the PC's created.
Plus, character progression for a mythic game doesn't seem especially interesting to my mind (Doesn't mean I don't believe it can't be done, I just don't have a mental image for what that looks like)

[kyoryu]

So yeah, you can run low level D&D characters through some gritty scenarios. But at a certain point, they level to the point where you have to scale up the threats to the point where they can't logically fit into the game world without being shifted to a more "heroic" level play. You simply can't justify why low level street mooks, or rats, or bats, or spiders are sufficient threats to your characters to maintain a gritty feel, but also haven't completely wiped out the local populace of whatever environment you are in. It's the difference between dealing with threats that are a danger to the environment you are in, and holding them at bay while attempting to maintain that environment (street level "gritty" play) vs marching heroically over to the ruins of an ancient city that was long ago wiped out by something, and dealing with the threat there (very clearly heroic). Anything powerful enough to be a threat to even low-mid level D&D characters will absolutely wipe out or have conquered any "normal" population. That's just a function of how the level system works.

For me, at least, it's not really a matter of absolute power levels - it's more a matter of relative power levels to what you're doing.

What I want in a heroic/gritty game is a very real chance of failure. Sometimes you lose. In a gritty game, that's probably a lot, and in a heroic game, it's frequent. In a superheroic game, not so much.

Like, basically:

Gritty: You're just trying to survive. Actually solving problems is beyond your scope.
Heroic: You can solve problems, but doing so will require sacrifice, and you'll experience setbacks.
Superheroic: Of course you solve problems. You rarely lose.

[NichG]

I'm curious what a long-lasting Mythic game looks like. In my mind the fun of a mythic game is to show up and explore the dynamics of your character's powerset, but that will get old, especially since you reshape the setting with your actions, eventually the setting is mostly just The Soup that the PC's created.
Plus, character progression for a mythic game doesn't seem especially interesting to my mind (Doesn't mean I don't believe it can't be done, I just don't have a mental image for what that looks like)

So the last two campaigns I ran:

Spoiler: Mythclad

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One was something called Mythclad, which was based on a total rewrite of 3.5e that basically had all classes have tiered abilities between 1 and 10 (like spell or maneuver levels), as well as an extra layer of open-ended dramatic editing powers the PCs could choose from by 'being aligned with a particular myth' that got advanced every 5 character levels. Basic campaign conceit was that myths determined reality for this world, rather than vice versa, and everything permanent was being constantly regenerated by progressing through particular story loops. But anyhow, this was a heroic -> mythic progression campaign. It started at Lv3 with 'you all got captured by slavers and taken aboard their airship' with the airship being commandeered by the PCs and some other NPCs that were with them in session 1, after which they got blown off course by the intercession of one of the PC's distant family members 'to help him grow' (said PC was playing a great, great, ..., great grandchild of an ancient dragon, who eventually wanted to use them as a bargaining chip in a political marriage, and had a sort of 'family interference' metagame thing going on). Session 2 had them exploring an island that had the ruins of both an older civilization and an outpost of an imperial government of the setting, and in the ruins they found a 'phrase' that had been under a bunch of antimemetic protections - the phrase jumped into one of the PCs' heads, and basically they made contact with an eldritch being sworn to protect the phrase, and this was basically the start of the campaign-long metaplot. The next several sessions involved un-twisting the story of an island where its story had been perverted by external forces, dealt with a hundred-year-sacrifice-to-the-shark-that-eats-everything local tradition, came upon a city that had been shelled by the empire and agreed to find the ghost of someone killed in the shelling, etc, etc. PCs unlocked their first two mythclad abilities by this point IIRC, which included things like a Gamer-esque 'know what something is, and have the personal comments of the creator of the setting about it', an ability that gave the holder 'automatic recognition as an approved user of any system or technological device', an ability to consume the curses of others and turn them into strengths, an ability to treat the scenery as containing any temporary details one might need in order to do stunts, etc. Not quite atomic action rewrite the setting stuff yet, but getting open-ended.

Around session 12 was the first big mythic moment, where the party was investigating a mine just after getting back to known skies, and found themselves in a race against members of a cult of sorts to access an area in the mine - which they found contained a sort of written record of the myths that established the properties of metals in the setting, negotiated with the guardians, and basically got administrator access to move the anchor-point around (and change the material properties of metals if they wanted). Following that they dealt with an island that appeared to be an artist enclave but everyone was sort of part of a collective hivemind aesthetic ('the song'), which they made a deal with to remove the ability of one of the PCs to be bound by the machinations of others, in exchange for basically carrying the song to another empire in the setting and dropping it on them like a bomb. There were various other things, still probably heroic or high-heroic with only bits and pieces of fully mythic actions, until session 19 or 20, at which they basically figured out how to 'use' the phrases - each of which essentially was a thing that forbade the last copy of itself from leaving existence in the world, and as well each gave lie to one aspect of the world-as-is. At that point the party was in a race to block enemy forces from accessing things that might let them divine the phrases or capturing the NPC and so on. And also the presence of the phrases tended to do things, so the party had to consider and control their consequences to the fabric of reality. The party had a PC with a phrase that let them 'deny aspects of reality which go unobserved' and the party had an NPC ally who had the phrase that let them 'prevent the ratification of the next moment of time', and those things would 'happen' with or without the intention of those characters. So at this point its kind of getting there. By Session 25, one of the PCs basically stormed their home nation and upended its political structure by messing with something that 'gave everyone with shared nationality a feat possessed by the wielder', mostly to tell off their parents for attempting to lock them into an arranged marriage - that was like a third of a session worth of play. Bit by bit...

Around Session 30 they started to deal with multiverse/time stuff, and got a hint that the phrases indicated some greater instability of their reality. By Session 40 they started the 'jungle portal' arc where the PCs basically decided enough with the cult trying to collect the phrases, lets just unmake them pre-emptively. They found that the cult was all about bringing back some sort of abomination that had been created by the royal family which had the only copy of the third phrase and so couldn't be killed or truly banished. There was a bit of a thing here that's a bit complicated to explain but effectively the PCs more or less decided the succession war of one of the big empires in the setting by kidnapping one person, setting a trap for the armies of the other person to essentially collide and distract the armies of the cult, etc, etc. A combination of small actions in some cases, but some of these things were on the basis of a high tier Strategist ability that one PC had to 'know what someone else would do in a situation you envision' that could be spammed. They basically used that to create a sort of perfect storm of bad events for all their enemies they didn't like, so those people would take each-other out off-screen. I think that probably counts as fully mythic scale at that point. They proceeded into a reality tear in the jungle, used a trick to read the third phrase from the mind of the abomination, and used a different mythclad ability to 'eradicate a plague by killing its source' in order to cure that thing's corruption setting-wide in a single action.

This was all well and good except that now they had all three phrases in close proximity, and putting the pieces together they found that the setting as it currently was (supported by story cycles, etc) was basically a lie that had been made real to avert a catastrophe that had occurred in the wider multiverse. Essentially their entire world was a liferaft of denied causality, a bubble that could be 'popped' as long as the three phrases existed within the world, but also where the existence of the three phrases was mandated by the force that supported the world. So this was the turn into full mythic, with subsequent events being things like: negotiating with other survivors from that wider multiverse who wanted to reclaim stuff that had been stolen to give the bubble the concepts it needed to exist - things like 'time' and 'life'; operating in a space without time Sluggy Freelance style, then learning from eldritch beings how to exploit the ambiguity of the concept of simultaneity to not care about timelessness; going through the judgment process of the Egyptian afterlife in order to steal Maat's feather for use in shenanigans and ending up in a debate with her about how opposing conceptual domains should play together without leading to chain cascade failures like the disaster that had happened, while also playing tag with Apophis who ended up dubbing one of the PCs his rival after a sort of stalemate conflict, having one PC magitechnologically rebuild their own mind in such a way that they could spend an unthinkable number of perceptual years collecting every single salvageable fragment of every soul that had been lost in the disaster from all corners of the multiverse, in order to reassemble them as best they could, etc. The campaign concluded on session 57, with the PCs having basically constructed a new 'truth' for what had happened during the disaster using Ma'at's feather to make it stick, cleaned up all of the inconsistencies with that truth remaining in reality by post-hoc resolving them - essentially coming up with an answer to the paradox posed by each of the three phrases - and unlocked their world to the greater multiverse, ending the cycle of story and allowing events to continue.

The other campaign...

Spoiler: Limit Break

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I don't have as detailed notes at a session-by-session level, but the premise of this campaign was a system in which superheroes and supervillains would have absolute control over a particular theme or concept of power, but did not necessarily realize or understand the extent of their control. Basically you could always create a new 'level 0 power' on the fly, and as long as no one else with powers opposed the action of that power, it basically does what you say it does. You do however have to purchase 'modalities' which are sort of broad ways in which powers can manifest into moves - things like 'create' or 'transmute' or 'know'. So characters grew by expanding their modality list, or by investing in moves to bring them up above the 0-dice point so they could be used in successful contest with other power-wielders. The other gimmick of the system is that at any time, you can give yourself as much XP as you want, but you take a corresponding amount of 'dissonance' - which increases the probability that if you roll dice, something goes wrong, up to and including your power separating from you as an omnipotent NPC that wants to destroy everything that could emotionally impact you. So in principle, at any point, any power-wielder can go nuclear and become as powerful as they understand how to express.

Session 1 involved one of the PCs sort of incidentally adding an expanding physics bubble to the world that 'it is a law of the world that I do not speak untruths', but which in turn sort of had the effect of 'whatever I say will be true, or else' when un-opposed.

The campaign progressed from a 'fleeing people who want to kidnap us for our powers' caravan plotline across post-apocalyptic Europe to things like starting a medicine company using the Alchemy + Invention powerset of one of the PCs, dealing with humanity's collective subconscious and the various egregores manifested from it, retroactively rewriting the holy book and all copies of it that had been made of a pop-up religion that was preaching extermination of the powered, dealing with a group of kid geniuses who had made contact with an entity from the far future of an alternate timeline by listening to radio static in very specific ways, rewriting the nature of powers to allow them to work according to the Law of Contagion and then using that to assassinate a living idea using material from its alternate-timeline self (and thereby removing the ability of humans to mistrust one-another), creating a school for powered children including one student who was actually someone's power broken free of their control, taking control of the process by which people gained powers and making it less destructive, creating and populating an afterlife including a celestial bureaucracy sort of spirit world - all made from applications of one PC's power, participating in conceptual warfare against a multiversal corporation whose essence was the idea of 'co-option of purpose', etc, etc.

I think it was also around 50 or 60 sessions...

Current campaign is Limit Break - Villains. The players had to make a sort of four-arc plan for apotheosis as part of character gen. One character for example has the first arc being 'take down a public figure in the city we're in', second arc 'take down the leading politicians of our city', third arc is 'create a revolutionary organization that independently of their own actions takes down existing rule in places', and fourth arc is 'render it impossible for hypocritical leaders to reign in the world anywhere, ever and forever' Another PC has first arc 'get a costume and take over a news program to broadcast an episode of a villain show', and fourth arc 'none will be able to look away, none can avoid it - all will watch my work'

[Mechalich]

For me, at least, it's not really a matter of absolute power levels - it's more a matter of relative power levels to what you're doing.

What I want in a heroic/gritty game is a very real chance of failure. Sometimes you lose. In a gritty game, that's probably a lot, and in a heroic game, it's frequent. In a superheroic game, not so much.

Like, basically:

Gritty: You're just trying to survive. Actually solving problems is beyond your scope.
Heroic: You can solve problems, but doing so will require sacrifice, and you'll experience setbacks.
Superheroic: Of course you solve problems. You rarely lose.

It's still possible to solve problems in gritty play, the issue is that the party operates in a small pond and society as a whole is fully capable of erasing said pond entirely, often entirely without malice, and erasing the impact of all the PCs have accomplished and their failures at a stroke.

For example, consider a 'street level' game largely confined to a single slow district in a city. The PCs could do all sorts of great things in that slum, fight crime, pursue redevelopment, reform local politicians, etc. and yet the major could, at the end of the campaign, sign a bill bulldozing the whole district that the PCs could do absolutely nothing to stop.

That's the thing about gritty, if some societal change or historical development overrides the PCs ongoing efforts there's nothing they can do about it. In heroic play they can do something about it, though it may be really hard. In mythic play this can't happen because society has to take it's cues from the mythic entities not the other way around.

[Pauly]

That's pretty firmly Heroic scale.

Thinking about it, I think most long-running campaigns are going to be Heroic. Gritty kind of requires the regular, and very real, threat of character death, which makes it great for meatgrinder one-shots, but hard to sustain a long campaign. Mythic is more about bouncing character concepts off each other, and the game is almost entierly defined by the character dynamics, which means that a given set of characters will get stale over a longer campaign.

Having played a couple of long running ‘gritty’ campaigns it isn’t hard to sustain a ‘gritty’ campaign. The players just have to be careful and be fully aware of the lethality of their surroundings. As a GM the challenge is to make sure that the players have plenty of options other than ‘kick the door down and start spraying lead and pray there aren’t too many bad guys’.

I’m mostly happy with “the players aren’t going to change the world” as a way to define gritty -v- heroic, but I don’t think it is a compete definition by itself. There are some genres which are firmly heroic, but the players aren’t going to alter the world in a meaningful way - Three Musketeer style swashbuckling campaigns for example. On the other hand Cthulhu campaigns may be about end of the world events but can be firmly gritty in play.

[False God]

In a general sense, I would agree that "heroic" is my ideal level of play. Neither so dangerous that the players lock up due to fear that any action could kill them, no so high-powered that a flick of their pinky-finger can raze continents.
Somewhere around "Danger can be reasonably found anywhere, but the PCs are also dangerous."

[Duff]

It seems to me like this is partly a product of the scale of the campaign and the scale or the character's actions.
If the action is all zoomed in really close to the PCs, but the world is zoomed way out, you're playing gritty. If the scene of everything affected by the PCs is a shot showing the whole country or the world, you're mythic.
Maybe a good benchmark is "How common are events that you need to endure vs events you need to resolve." or "How often does the GM describe to the players an Out of context problem?"

A mid level D&D wizard leading a small island is mythic if the whole campaign is tightly focused on that Island. The god you face down live in the island's volcano. You talk to it, or fight it and it doesn't blow up the island. You fight the forest fire.
OTOH, the representatives of a whole medieval level world are operating at gritty level if they're trying to save their planet in the context of a campaign where the setting is a significant fraction of the galaxy. When the orcs come, you're hiding the population in caves. When the inquisition come, you jump though the hoops to prove to them that the planet shouldn't be glassed.
Though in these extreme cases, the player will know the setting and that will influence the feel.

And I agree that a lot of games only do one well. I think that's a style thing. A lot of games include the scale in their "pitch" and that commits them to keeping to that scale.

[kyoryu]

It seems to me like this is partly a product of the scale of the campaign and the scale or the character's actions.
If the action is all zoomed in really close to the PCs, but the world is zoomed way out, you're playing gritty. If the scene of everything affected by the PCs is a shot showing the whole country or the world, you're mythic.
Maybe a good benchmark is "How common are events that you need to endure vs events you need to resolve." or "How often does the GM describe to the players an Out of context problem?"

A mid level D&D wizard leading a small island is mythic if the whole campaign is tightly focused on that Island. The god you face down live in the island's volcano. You talk to it, or fight it and it doesn't blow up the island. You fight the forest fire.
OTOH, the representatives of a whole medieval level world are operating at gritty level if they're trying to save their planet in the context of a campaign where the setting is a significant fraction of the galaxy. When the orcs come, you're hiding the population in caves. When the inquisition come, you jump though the hoops to prove to them that the planet shouldn't be glassed.
Though in these extreme cases, the player will know the setting and that will influence the feel.

And I agree that a lot of games only do one well. I think that's a style thing. A lot of games include the scale in their "pitch" and that commits them to keeping to that scale.

I think that's a good set of things to look at.

I also think how often the players are reasonably expected to fail is another. Note that I'm not including how severe that failure is.

[King of Nowhere]

Perhaps the biggest was my contention that high level d&d runs towards gritty if you don't have casters & other big magic or provided plot coupons. But I think that's more disagreement about degree. I don't consider 200hp and killing 3.75 cr 1/8 kobolds a round a qualifier for "heroic" or changing anything large scale when 50 of those kobolds with poop smeared rusty knives is a lethal threat to a party of fighters. To me those PCs are still firmly in the "gritty" zone, even if they can hit up the convenient planar portal to the themed mini-dungeon of "named demon fight tailored to be threat level appropriate". Now someone charismatic leading a revolution might be a different story, but that's basically independent of d&d type class and level concepts.

you underestimate how much of a difference "keep fighting, but better" makes. at level 1 your party can take a group of 5 kobolds with some small risk. 50 kobolds are suicide.
at high level, assuming they somehow don't have access to healing magic or resurrection or teleport away in case of need, say they can kill 500 with relative impunity. that's not "the same, on a bigger scale". that's something that can change the world. because you are basically an army, and an army is something that can change the world on the large scale.
first of all, eve though in theory 600 kobolds may kill you, it won't happen; people rarely fight to the death. those kobolds on the front line won't charge against certain death because after the first 500 of them died, maybe you will be weakened enough that the rest may stand a chance. those kobolds in the front line, as soon as they realize they have no chance, they will flee. So you can basically disperse an army all by yourself.
but even putting that aside, by being an army you have leverage power. the king may not like you, but you being able to knock down the door of the castle, kill all the guards and kill the king means the king can't dismiss you. even if you have no diplomacy and a permanent charisma drain, you can still get more political concessions out of the king than you could get as a first level diplomancer, because what you can bring to the bargaining table matters a lot more than how well you talk.

and so you end at heroic level, or possibly even mythic, despite lacking any kind of skill besides "kills stuff really well". and that works even if the society can potentially kill you, which is your qualfier for gritty. sure, that kobold army maybe will manage to kill you after all. but do you take the risk? do you accept the inevitable casualties? wouldn't you rather have this powerful dude on your side? it's world-changing by its pure bargaining power.

[gbaji]

And on the flip side of the coin, that ShadowRun street gang that was a big threat to your characters when they were just starting out, are still a threat if given just slightly better gear/weapons, and employing slightly better tactics a couple of years of play time later. The equivalent in D&D will *never* be a threat to a mid level party, no matter how much gear you give them, or how great their tactics are. The only way you make them a threat is by increasing their level. And once you do that, you've leveled them out of anything that would reasonably be hanging out causing trouble for "normal people". You somewhat automatically level up into a heroic level, just by sheer economics of scale/power.

[KorvinStarmast]

Blades in the Dark feels like it wants to be gritty most of the time, but our campaign is only a few sessions old and we have not yet leveled up the crew.

[NichG]

I mean, that actually tells you one way to run gritty D&D - have the game take place in a setting where the illithids, ancient dragons, yugoloths, or whomever won and wiped out or enslaved 99% of the other species. And the PCs start as Lv1 standard races. Even if you gain ten levels, that at best brings you up to 'could actually win a fight against a citizen'.

If levels are insurmountable and you're level 10 in a world run by level 20s, that's going to be gritty.

[awa]

you underestimate how much of a difference "keep fighting, but better" makes. at level 1 your party can take a group of 5 kobolds with some small risk. 50 kobolds are suicide.
at high level, assuming they somehow don't have access to healing magic or resurrection or teleport away in case of need, say they can kill 500 with relative impunity. that's not "the same, on a bigger scale". that's something that can change the world. because you are basically an army, and an army is something that can change the world on the large scale.
first of all, eve though in theory 600 kobolds may kill you, it won't happen; people rarely fight to the death. those kobolds on the front line won't charge against certain death because after the first 500 of them died, maybe you will be weakened enough that the rest may stand a chance. those kobolds in the front line, as soon as they realize they have no chance, they will flee. So you can basically disperse an army all by yourself.
but even putting that aside, by being an army you have leverage power. the king may not like you, but you being able to knock down the door of the castle, kill all the guards and kill the king means the king can't dismiss you. even if you have no diplomacy and a permanent charisma drain, you can still get more political concessions out of the king than you could get as a first level diplomancer, because what you can bring to the bargaining table matters a lot more than how well you talk.

and so you end at heroic level, or possibly even mythic, despite lacking any kind of skill besides "kills stuff really well". and that works even if the society can potentially kill you, which is your qualfier for gritty. sure, that kobold army maybe will manage to kill you after all. but do you take the risk? do you accept the inevitable casualties? wouldn't you rather have this powerful dude on your side? it's world-changing by its pure bargaining power.

I mean in theory in but in practice not necessarily I have played games both in person and on computers where the wold kinda levels up with you so that you never really get ahead. I recall one particularly annoying example where our pc encountered a 5th level+ pick pocket, and were supposed to feel bad for the urchin with magic items "just stealing to feed themselves" we were unimpressed with this logic. Just because it is bad world building does not change that it can happen. Because while rarely so blatantly it definitely does.

[King of Nowhere]

I recall one particularly annoying example where our pc encountered a 5th level+ pick pocket, and were supposed to feel bad for the urchin with magic items "just stealing to feed themselves" we were unimpressed with this logic. Just because it is bad world building does not change that it can happen. Because while rarely so blatantly it definitely does.

it reminds me of a game where we had a guy with a vow of poverty, and we often jokes that he would make charity by giving his loot to the poor as it is. "i'm hungry, please a coin" "here, good man, take this +2 full plate armor".
perhaps that urchin was the result of such an encounter.

but seriously, if i have to gain level just so that the world scales with me so I will do exactly the same thing with bigger numbers, I'd rather just not gain levels. I abandoned videogames over this

I mean, that actually tells you one way to run gritty D&D - have the game take place in a setting where the illithids, ancient dragons, yugoloths, or whomever won and wiped out or enslaved 99% of the other species. And the PCs start as Lv1 standard races. Even if you gain ten levels, that at best brings you up to 'could actually win a fight against a citizen'.

If levels are insurmountable and you're level 10 in a world run by level 20s, that's going to be gritty.

hey, I like that idea. could make for a cool setting.

[awa]

it reminds me of a game where we had a guy with a vow of poverty, and we often jokes that he would make charity by giving his loot to the poor as it is. "i'm hungry, please a coin" "here, good man, take this +2 full plate armor".
perhaps that urchin was the result of such an encounter.

but seriously, if i have to gain level just so that the world scales with me so I will do exactly the same thing with bigger numbers, I'd rather just not gain levels. I abandoned videogames over this



.

Ironically the one good thing about that dm was he allowed us to spend vow of poverty money helping people rather than nebulously tossing it into charity. It turns out you can brute force a lot of problems with that kinda gold. I mostly recall using the cash to buy teleports for refuges. On the other hand they were both useless, annoying and a constant problem.

[RandomPeasant]

What I want in a heroic/gritty game is a very real chance of failure. Sometimes you lose. In a gritty game, that's probably a lot, and in a heroic game, it's frequent. In a superheroic game, not so much.

That's largely orthogonal to the question of power level, though. You can have real chances of failure even at very high levels of power. The Avengers (at least, ones like Doctor Strange or Thor) are more powerful than most people who talk about "gritty" games want D&D characters to be. But they lose at the end of Infinity War, and they lose hard. And, sure, we all knew that would get rolled back in Endgame, but the superheroic setting still produced a story where people lost. If you look at Elseworlds-type stuff that's of more limited scope, you can find even more direct examples. And you can have stories about characters who are not very powerful but still never face any real stakes.

It's still possible to solve problems in gritty play, the issue is that the party operates in a small pond and society as a whole is fully capable of erasing said pond entirely, often entirely without malice, and erasing the impact of all the PCs have accomplished and their failures at a stroke.

But "society as a whole" is also playing in that same "gritty" setting. In the terms people tend to use, that mayor is very much playing a "gritty" game, just one that happens to get more of its DNA from Factorio or Sim City than D&D. The real difference is whether the party is able to effect change within the paradigm of D&D, where actions are primarily personal. Making the game "gritty" or "heroic" doesn't stop you from making sweeping changes. It just means that the mechanisms by which those changes are made are divorced from the core gameplay loop. Ironically, in the effort to create a more coherent game by limiting power levels, you've actually broken the "game" part of the game.

I’m mostly happy with “the players aren’t going to change the world” as a way to define gritty -v- heroic, but I don’t think it is a compete definition by itself.

Honestly, I don't think it's a very good definition at all. Whether a story involves the world changing is mostly orthogonal to how powerful the participants are. "And then they lived happily ever after and did political reforms you're not interested in hearing about because this is an action movie" is a resolution to plenty of action movies. But so is "and then they all kind of sat around until the next action movie premise showed up". The distinction between "gritty" and not is less about whether the power to change the world exists, and more about whether that power is personal or institutional.

[Ignimortis]

In games governed by numbers, such as most TTRPGs, enough numbers will still shift the scale. If you take a D&D level 20 Champion Fighter and put them in a world where they can only be hit on a roll of 20, each hit does 1 damage, and every enemy has 1 HP, with very powerful ones having maybe 5 damage per hit and 10 HP, they are still mythic. They can enforce their will through sheer violence, and no amount of opposition will ever stop them.

If you take the same character and put them in a game where everything has hundreds of HP, hits on a 5+ and deals 50 HP per hit? Instant grittiness, because taking on more than one enemy is likely to kill you in very short time.

So while mythic and gritty are not exactly only "heroic with more/less numbers", they can be.

[NichG]

In games governed by numbers, such as most TTRPGs, enough numbers will still shift the scale. If you take a D&D level 20 Champion Fighter and put them in a world where they can only be hit on a roll of 20, each hit does 1 damage, and every enemy has 1 HP, with very powerful ones having maybe 5 damage per hit and 10 HP, they are still mythic. They can enforce their will through sheer violence, and no amount of opposition will ever stop them.

If you take the same character and put them in a game where everything has hundreds of HP, hits on a 5+ and deals 50 HP per hit? Instant grittiness, because taking on more than one enemy is likely to kill you in very short time.

So while mythic and gritty are not exactly only "heroic with more/less numbers", they can be.

Heroic sure. Mythic... I don't necessarily agree. It would depend on the structure of the world having hierarchies where an efficient kill could implement a macro change. If you don't have that, well, big numbers are big. To some extent they don't really need to be stopped, just avoided (and the specific numbers you gave, ~5000 soldiers with longbows kills that character in one round). There's also a metagame factor - if the DM actually requires them to play out their actions round by round rather than just handwaving away 'yeah, you can totally kill that army, lets move on', then due to the sheer time it would take to actually wipe out an army of 10k soldiers for example, it just wouldn't happen. You could write mythic fiction about that character, but you can't necessarily force the actual game being played into mythic stance just by virtue of numbers if those numbers don't come with an accompanying change in the scale of resolution.

[Telok]

In games governed by numbers, such as most TTRPGs, enough numbers will still shift the scale. If you take a D&D level 20 Champion Fighter and put them in a world where they can only be hit on a roll of 20, each hit does 1 damage, and every enemy has 1 HP, with very powerful ones having maybe 5 damage per hit and 10 HP, they are still mythic. They can enforce their will through sheer violence, and no amount of opposition will ever stop them.

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 mean, even cutting the rats into "level appropriate" sport fights with short rests after each (since its 5e D&D what with "champion fighter") said hero, even four such grand warriors, can't change the world. When the game system's heroic capability caps out at "hit with sword", "has many hit points", and "usually makes run/jump/swim/climb rolls", then it's pretty much all setting details & plot coupons defining if you're a grub eating survivalist or some world shaping power broker.

Like I said, I'm in a 5e D&D game where the tone & feel is decidedly gritty despite the party being 14th level, all flying, all with swim speed/water breathing. Biggest thing we can do is cause or prevent a war that might affect ten cities on the smallest and most sparsely populated of three continents. Win or lose, in a hundred years it'll be an entry in a history book and nothing really changes because of D&D faux medieval stasis and actually powerful immortal D&D creatures in the monster manual being on cosmic cleanup duty. Heck, we can't even gin up an army of our own or talk to kings because we're just no-reputation homeless murderers decked out in magic items.

[Ignimortis]

Heroic sure. Mythic... I don't necessarily agree. It would depend on the structure of the world having hierarchies where an efficient kill could implement a macro change. If you don't have that, well, big numbers are big. To some extent they don't really need to be stopped, just avoided (and the specific numbers you gave, ~5000 soldiers with longbows kills that character in one round). There's also a metagame factor - if the DM actually requires them to play out their actions round by round rather than just handwaving away 'yeah, you can totally kill that army, lets move on', then due to the sheer time it would take to actually wipe out an army of 10k soldiers for example, it just wouldn't happen. You could write mythic fiction about that character, but you can't necessarily force the actual game being played into mythic stance just by virtue of numbers if those numbers don't come with an accompanying change in the scale of resolution.

Of course, the world-building matters more than numbers, but sometimes numbers are enough to shift the mood. My first version of that post was less abstract: dropping the Fighter into Conan's world would let them become a powerful warrior-king in short order, and would have legends told about his combat prowess a thousand years later, while dropping them into Exalted would maybe amount to them being a heroic mortal, still small fry whenever actual Exalts are involved.

But consider, for a moment, that you take that same Fighter and also give them +150 to all statistics (ability scores, saves, AC, skill ranks...) and an unfatiguing movement speed of 30 km per round, while retaining the same general resolution metrics...darn, it's 5e, ability check numbers don't matter. Alright, let's take a 3.5 level 20 Fighter instead and give them that. They are now, probably, dunking on most Solar Exalted through sheer numbers and the ability to be anywhere in a matter of minutes.

You can inflate numbers further until it hits Superman levels of awareness (can hear/see things for miles). Eventually, just having numbers approaching infinity will make you able to resolve any problem as long as high checks are allowed to have fantastic effects unbound by hard facts of reality (i.e. a +1000 Craft (cooking) check producing more food than was technically possible with the ingredients you had).

In short, as long as the base rules are permissive enough about results, just saying "more numbers!" can shift the scale anyway. But quite often those numbers are far beyond what the game would allow you to get.

When the game system's heroic capability caps out at "hit with sword", "has many hit points", and "usually makes run/jump/swim/climb rolls", then it's pretty much all setting details & plot coupons defining if you're a grub eating survivalist or some world shaping power broker.

Like I said, I'm in a 5e D&D game where the tone & feel is decidedly gritty despite the party being 14th level, all flying, all with swim speed/water breathing. Biggest thing we can do is cause or prevent a war that might affect ten cities on the smallest and most sparsely populated of three continents. Win or lose, in a hundred years it'll be an entry in a history book and nothing really changes because of D&D faux medieval stasis and actually powerful immortal D&D creatures in the monster manual being on cosmic cleanup duty. Heck, we can't even gin up an army of our own or talk to kings because we're just no-reputation homeless murderers decked out in magic items.

I think that's a general issue of D&D-likes that only gets circumvented by powerful magic (sometimes) or not at all. Since 5e is very heavy on DM-may-I, it gets even more noticeable, but let's just say that more definite designs do not avoid that either - I've been in enough games, both D&D-like and not, to know that if the GM wants you to be murderhobos with no agency beyond going somewhere and killing something, they will do so. It's just that other games can maybe probably sometimes have tools for you to try and break the mold.