It's weird. I keep hearing about how I'm playing a game that started so epic that it can't be working. While I'm playing a game that's working.
If your heart longs for a smaller story right now with a simpler approach, I get it. The type of story some of you are describing appeals to me also. Start off in a hamlet, learn to be amazed all over again by the sight of an otherworldly elf.
Which is fine. All of that is fine.
Except this isn't that. Which is fine also. This doesn't have to be that. There's a compelling narrative in this story that's pushing the plot forward.
For all the talk about how this *feels* different, it is. DnD has changed over the decades. Massively. I started off playing Ad&d years ago. There were no tieflings. No dragonborn. They didn't even have sorcerers, much less wild magic sorcerers or dragon blood sorcerers with scales.
I loved the Dalelands and Cormyr. I must've read the original box set a thousand times over or more. I imagined the ruins of Myth Drannor with devils crawling through the remnants. And when I think of that, or when I think of the city of Phlan being teleported to a cavern in a plot initiated by Bane... well... plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, the more that changes, the more it's the same thing.
There's nothing wrong with fighting a minotaur at level four. Or fighting a hag at level three. It's the story that counts. The challenge, the choice, the goal, the want and need. All the rest is an arbitrary number, a CR someone made up some time back. Who cares? You only think a Mind Flayer is overpowered because you think a Mind Flayer is overpowered.
Why not live in a world where Mind Flayers are like humans, in that some are tougher and others are weaker? Or, and this is possible also, consider that your character never really beat a Mind Flayer, not one at full strength. Just like your character didn't really defeat an Adamantine Golem. Rather, it happened to be an interesting setting where a giant hammer came down and crushed the creation.
That's not uninteresting. If you were telling a story about a game you were in and that happened, it would be pretty cool. You were at a giant forge, you managed to get the golem under the hammer and wham. It's not that you beat the golem in a fair fight. You were in an interesting circumstance, and you used it to your advantage in a clever way.
Anyway, my point is that it's okay to hunger for a smaller story. And it's also okay to enjoy an epic story. You can even enjoy both if you want. Neither is inherently bad.
