Do you always need to save the world

[gamerprinter]

Maybe I should rephrase this to be in a class/level model like D&D. The reason is everything scales up. It doesn't work for the progression of these games to have small threats all the time. Now, in a non class/level game where there isn't a meta-level scaling built in, then it one could avoid the pressure to scale up the threats.

As an example, the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) is a cursed and haunted land. What caused it to become a doomed place happened 700 years ago, and involved some unknown evil god and a divine curse. It doesn't matter if the PCs are epic levels, nothing they can do can remove this doomed status - they cannot save the world, no matter what they do.

Its kind of like Ravenloft, while an adventuring party can successfully kill a domain ruler and save that domain, possibly, there is no way they are ever going to make Ravenloft, not Ravenloft.

So all adventures is about little victories in a dark world, where there is no hope to fully end of the dark world status. Since the setting uses Pathfinder rules, the stakes do scale with the adventurers levels, but despite that, saving the world is not one of the options.