There's a global threat even the mightiest armies of the realm cannot defeat

Level caps are an actual thing.

I'd much rather talk about elves.

>There's a global threat even the mightiest elven armies of the elven realm cannot defeat
>But four plucky elves can

Wow that's easy. I just pretend the second part is true so my players become invested in the campaign.

Then when they get TPKed and complain, I tell them 'just as planned'.

There is a literal age barrier. People above the age of 16 cannot pass it.

I don't

The world is big and plenty shit going on, the PCs are just also doing some of that shit and a subset of that shit is important and they're the only ones in it deep enough to be able to do anything about it. Everyone else is off doing something else or just oblivious.

The threat is sex starved orcs.

PC's would be the equivalent of a SF team. Basically, they're a scalpel to an army's hammer.

>The armies of good do not realize that they are going to get fucking shat on
>Only the Seer of Time has seen that it will happen, because it is written in the annals of time (which ends about 14 days after the forces of good are defeated)
>The Seer's only hope are four plucky youths with attitude, who for reason unknown cannot be percieved in the time stream.
>It's now up to them to become the linchpin in...something for saving the world.

First off, I rarely do the "global threat that even the mightiest of armies cannot defeat". IT's often stupid and hackneyed, and it closes things. If the characters win, where do they go from there? Save the ENTIRE UNIVERSE from an EVEN BIGGER threat? Keep the scope small and you often keep things more interesting.

If I DID do it that way, I would make it so that it's not a question of being the strongest or the most magically powerful or whatever, but of them having the right trick in the right place at the right time to exploit some critical flaw.

The mightiest armies of the realm are doing everything they can to contain what they can all over the realm while the plucky teenagers move against the core of the threat. There may even be a detachment that takes the teenagers as close to this core as they can so that they can tackle the threat at full strength.

We play wargames all the time so there's little issue in this. We just command and form armies.

>wargames where PCs are basically Hero units.
>it's not even necessarily their actions that "win" the war
>they still play their part and may be rewarded as anyone else if they survive
Why does it have to be so hard to find games like this?

>Why does it have to be so hard to find games like this?
Because for some reason (probably lack of need, as publishing endless variations of the dungeon crawl formula rakes in loads emone) nobody has created proper rules for that. The only rulesets I can think of are the rules GURPS has and two variant rulesets for 5e (which are rather cookie cutter and meant as some sort of minigame rather than the basis of an entire campaign not that it stopped me from trying).

>There's a global threat even the mightiest armies of the realm cannot defeat
>But four plucky teenagers can

Is that global threat a severe lack of deep fried goods? That's why teenagers exist!

DELET

Sounds like you need to scale down your story. A simple repel the goblin invasion and investigate their hideout campaign can be just as fun and challenging as a enter the astral plane and slay the primordial darkess that has slipped through the veil campaign

PCs are chosen champion of the Good Gods, while the global threat is led by the chosen champion of the Evil Gods.
People around here seems to hate black-and-white morality and I don't mind some moral ambiguity in the characters but ultimately I like my settings to be noblebright where the mortal are not doomed from the start or the Gods are just a bunch of powerful assholes.

Because unlike in real life, manpower isn't everything in RPGs where one guy with 100000gold worth of gear is stronger than a 100 guys with 1000 gold worth of gear, etc. Quality will trump quantity almost every time.

Also how many campaigns deal with truly global threats?

>Attempt to dissect chosen one, extract the favor and implant it into more worthy individual were not successful

Are you a Wizard?

You have been chosen by God to defeat the threat. Which means that you have God's favor. Which, like in the old stories of the Bible, pretty much turns you into an unstoppable badass.

Cheese man, every hero always wins by cheese

The global threat has power over the armies. Only a ragtag group of heroes can work discreetly enough to defeat the evil.

Usually they have the right combination of means & motivation. Like a key to a Macguffin that is a family heirloom, or library access to where the ancient lorebook was stashed by the Archmage before he disappeared. Or perhaps they are the last Scion of an old & honorable but destitute house desperate to take that suicide mission to make their family relevant again

so much this

Why is not "they are that good" a valid justification?, if you suspension of disbelief can't take that you shouldn't have world saving plots.

Heavens forbid, I am man of science!

no one else has class levels

>>There's a global threat even the mightiest armies of the realm cannot defeat
>>But four plucky teenagers can
>How do you justify this in your setting?

Replace the global threat with a subversion of powers that be. One of the best campaigns I played was almost a comedy of errors. Through escalating adversity a small team of adventurers humbled themselves from nobodies to murder hobo leaders of a small plot of their world. That the civilian population was dupes who followed us via the new status quo. The DM even had other adventurers come to us for work.

My campaign is just the right people in the right place at the right time.
Of course depending on how they fare, you could also see it as the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They ARE the ones who inadvertently uncovered the sphere of creation for the Lich in the first place.

>By cosmic law, whenever unopposed evil arises a Kamen Rider is born from the same seed to challenge it.
I loved this justification.

Simple, your party isn't the only one that can solve the problem, they are just the first ones to try. Or maybe not even, who knows!

This. The party is the suicide squad that happened to survive

How so? Just saying 'the only people strong enough to do it are PCs' seems absurd to me. Really limits what kind of NPCs you can include. Is that what you're referring to, the concept of 'only PCs have class levels'?

Because people don't want to play battles that last for many hours. Mass combat has never been done well in an rpg.

King or his advisor are evil.
Only PCs know about the threat.
They are the chosen ones.
Armies are too busy with keeping the hordes of evil at bay.

>SF team
Emphasis on 'special'.

Who says they have to survive?

...

>There's a global threat even the mightiest armies of the world cannot defeat
>But two plucky midgets and a recovering meth addict can

>recovering

Fully grown adults can't fit into the air vents of the mighty fortress.

Adventuring parties provide a bit of plausible deniability, generate less paperwork when things inevitably go wrong, handle their own logistics and aren't generally bound by the laws and conventions expected of the soldiery.

Why not just have an entire army out of plucky teenagers and adventurers?

>There's a global threat even the mightiest armies of the realm cannot defeat
>But four plucky teenagers can
Just because Tolkien did it doesn't mean everybody has to do it.

...

The 7 Macguffins are spread across the various kingdoms, and you know the Elves aren't going to let a human general and his army into their domain, and vice versa.

So you send the teenagers in on student visas. You recruit them, from every kingdom/race/background at the big universities and then have their handler send them out to perform the missions.

The old man at the tavern who showed them the map is actually the Iron Kingdom's spymaster.

I don't justify shit. My players know what they're getting into when they ask for me to DM.

>How do you justify this in your seting?
the threat is unknown to the wider world and there is no time to warn everyone
the mightiest armies of the realm are busy fighting each-other, corrupted or weakened by something like a plague
removing the threat requires the scalpel precision of a small party, not the broadsword attack of

*a large army

>. If the characters win, where do they go from there?

The game can just end there.

Or you can have the players consolidate their position, if say they now have control of part of the kingdom.( What happens after Aragorn takes over Middle Earth)

If you're designing the game right your threats should be escalating especially in D&D.

>Thing threatens the home village
>Thing threatens the county
>Thing threatens the country
>Thing threatens the world
>Thing threatens the planes of existence themselves.

>the heroes are there to become murderers

>Demon queen
>queen

Party is all part of an ancient bloodline that consumes the life force and souls of individuals they kill, strengthening them unknowingly. This is the in setting explanation for why certain people (players) seem to gain experience and abilities so quickly, while some guy that trained 20 years to become a blade master or the like may only be level 7.

So plucky teenagers have to slay the evil bad guy because normal people just don’t have the gusto.

>when your group of four level 1 characters effectively beats down 12 bandits in their first real encounter

Look at those three idiots!