Originally Posted by
Segev
One of the most powerful characters I ever played was a shadow monk. Through relatively little use of class features, he wound up favor-trading with the fair folk and getting enmeshed in enough of their politics that he had fey vassals, fed one archfey to another by accepting an invitation to a banquet, and using the spoils of that to send an ancient dragon-queen and two of the three archfey of war-as-slaughter to the depths of space where they froze to death. That last was done to help enthrone the dragon-queen's sister, who paid our mercenary company expecting military aid, not a decapitation strike.
By the end of the campaign, he was quite likely on the way to becoming an archfey in his own right, given the holdings and narratives he was developing.
And that was just my character. We all had all sorts of soft power and political pull, and all gained through our deeds and roleplay. We never could have been so potent if we had just built the PCs at level 9, which is, I think, where we ended that campaign. (We started at third level.)