I guess I don't get the objections over the NPCs like Elminster and Drizzt overshadowing the PCs. (And Drizzt isn't really known outside the Sword Coast. I remember Jarlaxle going east and trying ro pretend to be Drizzt and just getting funny looks).
I would actually be surprised if a world didn’t have famous adventurers of higher level than me. That doesn't take away from my story and the people and places I save.
Does Harry Potter feel overshadowed because Dumbledore is around? Is the role of Frodo and Sam somehow lessened because Gandalf and Aragorn exist? Does Daredevil or Batman decide not to put on the rights tonight because, really, Thor and Superman are around to take care of it?
Are we not allowed to write in these universes because "Harry Potter will take care of it?"
Plenty of people have managed to write greay stories and adventures in various IP universes. I play in plenty of Star Wars games. The universe is a big place, and heroes can't be everywhere at once. Others have to step up.
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Well, yes and no and maybe.
Let us take for a moment the Marvel and DC movies. For example, Suicide Squad. A magic witch lady destroys a city, levels military installations, and is literally pronouncing the end of the world for... A week? I mean they have time to grab the squad, fly them in and have almost a day long trek through the city.
Where were Flash and Batman? Both are fast enough to have made it to the scene (I think superman is pretending to be dead at this point? I'm not sure I skipped that movie because friends told me it wasn't worth it). Did they just decide "Well, surely someone else will take care of that. I'm too busy punching jewel thieves to bother with an end of the world event"
You can watch and enjoy the movie, but eventually that thought creeps in, and then it becomes a problem because until I hear otherwise, the reason is that it didn't fit the story and so we kind of just brushed it under the rug.
Similar thing with Avengers. I had no problems with Avengers when it came out, but now the universe has expanded to include a problem. Why didn't any of the sorcerers fight to save New York? One of the seals that protects reality is in New York, it might be important that that isn't destroyed by an alien invasion or a nuke.
Turning this to DnD there are two additional problems.
1) Much like the Flash but even worse, time and distance do not stop powerful wizards from getting to the scene. They need six seconds and a location and they are there. Information gathering would seem to be an issue, but if the gods are already sending signs and portents then they could do the same to the 20th level wizard as they could to the crazy old priest that the party knows.
2) If it is a world or reality ending event, and there is enough lead time, why aren't they there? If the answer is "They were doing something else" then what a lot of players end up hearing is "They were dealing with a more important problem than what you were dealing with". Which lowers how impressive your feats just were.
And that lead time part is the key. If you are the only people on the scene when the bomber you've been chasing says "By the way did I mention my crazy lover is a nuclear physicist?" and the situation goes from "people are going to die" to "everyone is going to die" then it makes sense the big guns aren't going to be able to arrive on the scene before it is resolved.
But it also makes sense for the heroes to call upon those that are more powerful than them when the bad stuff starts happening. In one of our games, I as a player told a survivor of a demon attack to go and tell the city guard and the churches that we were on the trail of a possible Major Demon summoned into the region and that as a military officer I was calling in for back up. We were like level 4 or 5 at the time. It made perfect sense for us to call for reinforcements (Which didn't come because the stupid fool told them "monster attack" costing us the lives of a PC and three of the four guards who actually did show up... stupid NPC) because a powerful demon wandering the countryside is "majorly bad news" and we were not powerful enough to reliably stop it. In fact, we ran from it, because we could not hurt it. I'm still not clear what happened to it after our warlock exploded.
So, when we find that a lost and forgotten god has been summoned to this realm and is literally tearing reality apart. We aren't going to take chances. We call in everyone we can who can feasibly do something about this. Which brings us back around to the problem. Once you get to a certain scale of threat, or a threat that falls within a specific area guarded by a powerful NPC (If I'm in MArvel's New York there is literally a dozen different superheros who should be getting involved with Godzilla stomping Brooklyn) then these NPCs logically need to come out, and they can be so powerful that it becomes them solving the problem, because solving these problems is what they are meant to do.
That makes no sense. Stories are only written about Elminster and Drizzt because they did things. They get written about the PCs for the same reason. Elminster and Drizzt have nothing to do with the stories written about the PCs. The PCs stories will be even greater and more renowned.
Will they though?
I have two games where I'm a player. One is on hiatus at level 8. Other than the demon mentioned above.... we killed a giant. My character found a lost little girl.
Most of our other adventures involve going to a place where no realizes something bad is going on, killing everything there and me trying to convince the party to head back to our base, where we are mercenaries, so we can get paying jobs that will improve our rep.
How do we know where to go if no one knows things are going on? One time, it was horrific nightmares a PC had. The other times people showed up to kill us for seemingly no reason, and we followed the bread crumbs back to the guy who wanted us dead.
The other game is actually far worse, and we're almost level 15. We've literally changed the landscape of the world, but we never tell anybody because we're running off to the next thing. We'll dive in this tomb, grab this brain in a jar, kill some ancient bad stuff, and move on. Generally, no one is any wiser. We closed a long open portal to Hell, and the only reason anyone is even aware the portal existed is because my character told people it was safe to go back into the forest... and they had no idea there was any danger in the first place. Because the forest spirit which demanded our help (in a "your friends head will explode if you don't come" sort of way) kept everyone away from the portal and the devils corralled in, so no one knew it existed.
Call it DMing style if you like, this is two separate DMs. Maybe, within the world, some people will eventually start learning our names, but the common people already know who the great heroes are. And we aren't it, because to the public eye, we've done nothing.