> If you accumulate enough levels in D&D, you can destroy entire armies and tackle literal gods. This is largely an invention of modern D&D, though. This was 1

> If you accumulate enough levels in D&D, you can destroy entire armies and tackle literal gods. This is largely an invention of modern D&D, though. This was 100% not the case in OD&D, or stock AD&D 1E. Splatbooks in 1E added significant power level to characters, particularly after the success of the Dragonlance modules, including some truly ridiculous stuff like the power progression in the H1-H4 books. But before that point you were playing adventurers, not heroes. Even in 2E you could still play more like adventurers, though it was clear the preference for heroic gameplay was the new norm. It wasn't until 3E that the adventuring playstyle was really made impossible. > where the master would tailor a series of increasingly challenging but killable encounters until you got to destroy an epic, ridiculously powered villain at the end of the campaign. The original decade or so of D&D really didn't even have the idea of campaigns ending or building up to an epic showdown with the big bad evil guy. Gygax wrote extensively of campaigns as settings, and the sort of campaigns he (and Arneson) ran wouldn't even allow for this sort of showdown, because they were more like gaming clubs. They had dozens of people playing in the campaign regularly at any given time, often across multiple characters, split into multiple groups, etc. They were big persistent worlds. There would be no way to make a specific showdown or progression like this enjoyable for that sort of group - you could never get all 30-50 people together at once, and even if you could, there's no way to make that manageable for actual play, and you wouldn't want all of the players not involved in the final showdown to feel like their years of play had ultimately missed out on the climax.