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Message: <blockquote data-quote="embee" data-source="post: 8272497" data-attributes="member: 7026827">The PCs start in a village. Or a town. Or they're en route to a village or town. In this town, there are people. These people may be laborers or tradesfolk or even nobility. They have lives. But they don't have levels. They are, for all practical purposes, Level 0. The PCs are Level 1.Why is this?Because outside of that village or town, there are monsters. There are goblins. There are orcs. There are ankhegs and dragons and bandits and hags and manticores and owlbears and an infinite number of other things that have statblocks. And these things with statblocks will kill the Level 0 folk. And the Level 0 folk know this. So the Level 0 folk stay in the villages and towns. What makes the PCs special?They DON'T stay in the villages and towns. They go out. They adventure. They have a level. And that level - even if it's just one level - let's them have a fighting chance against something with a statblock. If the PCs weren't exceptional, they wouldn't be adventurers. They'd be NPCs and they'd be Level 0.  More often than not, the players know this, even if it's only subconsciously. This piece of meta helps bind D&D together. This is different from the PCs being underdogs. Which is also a trope that binds the game together. The PCs are exceptional. They have names and titles and classes and abilities and scores and modifiers. But that doesn't mean that the encounters are foregone conclusions. The Avengers are exceptional. But when they fight against Thanos, wielding the Infinity Gauntlet and backed up by the forces of evil and destruction, they are underdogs. Both can be true. Which brings us to the how.  How do you have the PCs be exceptional underdogs? In the case of the Avengers (and the Fellowship and the Rebellion and the Justice League), with bosses and mooks and setbacks and a BBEG who seems to always be one step ahead of the good guys. Think of the tropes:The villain who plans to get caught (Loki). The villain who answers to an even bigger bad (Vader). The villain who usurps his former boss (Ronin the Accuser). The villain looking to free an ancient evil (Rasputin from Hellboy). The secret cult of killers that is everywhere that no one else knows about (The League of Shadows, every other person in New York in the John Wick movies). The infinite army that can't be stopped but also can't ever hit the heroes (the Empire). The Tank Lieutenant (Karl from Die Hard). The ever-escalating series of Tank Lieutenants (Lord of the Rings). The evil elite team (the Legion of Doom, HIVE, the Sinister Six, the Black Order).The PCs can go up against any of these. Because they're exceptional, they'll have a chance. Because they're the underdog, failure is an option.</blockquote>

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