Spouting Thomas on The Post-Bourgeois Proletarian

If you imagine late-edition D&D heroes as superheroes by the time they get to high levels, the lack of importance on kingdom building kind of makes sense. In the superhero genre, common weapons wielded by common soldiers tend to be useless, whether it's 1 soldier or 50,000. Even if they could in theory slightly injure the big bad while suffering horrific casualties, in practice the troops would just break and run. So under the circumstances, it's perfectly rational for the fighter to decide he'd rather delve into an ancient ruin to find a better sword than raise an army of 50,000 men, for the same reason Superman doesn't raise an army of 50,000 men to fight Doomsday. Though 5e rules aren't nearly as extreme in this regard as 3e/Pathfinder or 4e. I never tried to run kingdom building or hexcrawls in those systems, but I had a very successful epic 5e campaign with a kingdom-building element, using the rules from AKCS. But also, in the end, the army was on a parallel track, used mostly to counter other armies and hold down objectives under the command of trusted lieutenants so the heroes had their hands free to take on the big bad at his fortress.