I've been thinking about the typical long-term D&D (or most TTRPGs) campaign. The term "zero to hero" tends to come up pretty regularly to describe characters going from low level to high level, as the threats they face scale to their levels. So, for instance, the party might start out dealing with small-scale problems. Solving a single murder, for example. Once they take care of that and level up a little, their enemies also scale up. Now it's a serial killer. A dangerous criminal organization. Maybe a villain-with-good-publicity trumps up charges to get one or more of the heroes arrested, so we can have a good old fashioned prison escape. The threats keep escalating. Next they save the whole town from an evil cult or two. They tackle a secret society, an ancient conspiracy. Ultimately they become so powerful that they take on world-ending threat.
So what I'm saying is that the best D&D television show is Riverdale. In this essay I will...