This reminds me of Comic Vine roleplays and (before it shut down) Anime Vice. Big shared universe, teams, meeting places, shared roleplaying world, character tiers and so on.
It's good to see this being done elsewhere and while my time is too limited nowadays to engross myself in a huge shared universe the very least more people can experience this through RPGuilds.
As for not letting powerful people ruin the world... this is difficult. Neither AV nor CV really had a hard cap on the powers of characters. Tier systems were made after a few years but nobody was prevented from making characters as powerful as they wanted. So how the hell did we keep this thing intact? One could say we didn't, we always had certain messes and the powerful characters were constantly an issue in terms of fighting balance. Or when you tried to stage a war for the globe while everyone and their sick dog could blow up the planet by accident. So in a sense it was just madness, especially on the AV side. Reboots had to be done a few times. That being said things were stable and usually drama free. Before the invention of tools to keep out unwelcome players or GMs step in when somebody RP-d maliciously or anything similar we had one "weapon", if you can even call that as such: Ignorance. RP-ing is a community and when somebody acts against this or attempts to disrupt it the roleplayers can just isolate that person without much of an effort. Actually, it can be described as a lack of effort. Did X write a post about blowing up New York for no reason?(potentially destroying multiple hero/villain bases as well as killing a number of player characters)
Ignore it. That never happened.
Of course this methodology can be also misused but worked well enough to handle the occasional weirdo who lacked in the roleplaying etiquette. Overusing it was obviously something that should be watched for and be sternly avoided. Since it would also reinforce a negative behavior otherwise frowned upon. So yeah, it kind of worked but not sure if people would wish to resort to this now. As an alternative you can just call the GMs/Mods to check a certain post or posts, give them a reason why you think it's disruptive and then upon their judgement they can just declare that event non-canonical. This could be an RP that got out of hand, a certain action, a post or even just part of the post. It's still good if most power levels are locked away from the playerbase but the very least it gives the GMs a tool that they can push in case of things went out of control.
As for allowing Tier 5s... I think the main reason for this need is perhaps not for the desire to nuke cities or own DBZ-lite characters lording over people. The reason is simply because the way tiers are worded it seems there isn't enough freedom to create a character with supernatural powers. RPGuilds being known for a huge influx of anime based roleplays this could easily be traced to that, I suppose.
- Your overall character
- Each item, ability, or other feature to which a power level might apply.
Low
- 1 (self) – a person; not particularly special; no magic; mundane.
- 2 (local) – exceptionally talented in a particular area, such as gymnastics, sniping, persuasion, hacking, slight-of-hand, extra-sensory projection, sensing magic or minor cantrips, unusual luck.
Ex Sp: detect magic, stabilize, ghost noises, prestidigitation.
Ex Eq: assault rifle, flame thrower, sword and board.
- 3 (regional) – physically or cognitively augmented; able to cast weak spells, although not reliably; skills pushed beyond the limits of mere talent and practice; noteworthy in their field.
Ex Sp: phantom image, cure poison, cure light wounds, glitterdust, obscuring mist, levitation, telepathy.
Ex Eq: missile launcher, attack drone, exoskeleton, x-ray vision.
Medium
- 4 (national) – prominent in their field as someone whose talents defy reason, this is where magic begins to manifest as something beyond mere illusion into something potentially dangerous, mental tasks are almost of a psychic nature, and the expense of technology elevates it beyond the reach of all but a few.
Ex Sp: fireball, resuscitate, invisibility.
Ex Eq: light saber, interplanetary shuttle, brain upload/backup.
- 5 (global) – untouchable by the proletariat, yet still unworthy of worship; few challenge beings of this magnitude. They may have weapons or spells that can level towns and their intrigues shape governments to their will.
High
- 6 (planetary) – this being may as well be a god to those lesser than it, such is its might and knowledge, but its influence is limited by time and space to a handful of worlds.
Ex Sp: true resurrection, meteor shower, tsunami, tornado, matter/energy absorption/manipulation.
Ex Eq: IPBM (interplanetary ballistic missile), terraforming spaceship, colonization ship, fast-as-light travel.
I should note this in advance that barring a couple of posts I never visited the Arena so my understanding of its tier list is not quite comprehensive. I'm generally far less active in RPGuilds than to possibly claim I can comprehensively judge things going on here. Nor I was really active enough in the community to have thoroughly followed the growth of Expanding Horizons. If I were, I'd have been present months ago. With all this I fully acknowledge my understanding could be quite faulty yet at times you might at least bear to listen to the occasional outsider.
So yeah, bear with me.
What I see here is that we have two ranks of normal, one for the realistic and other for the fictional "badass normal". That's fair, people shouldn't be forced into powering up their characters just to fit the norm for the tier. Things get weird when the third and fourth tiers come up. In theory Tier-3 allows you to use augmented and supernatural abilities but then the description of the fourth tier comes and states any magic which can be no longer explained away just as an illusion is T4. An as the ceiling T5 specifies capability to destroy towns which likely invokes the "walking nuke" trope. So you mixed anything from D&D's magic missile spell to anything sorts of Lina Inverse's Dragonslayer into one tier. That's what I see as an issue. This leads to a dichotomy where one GM thinks T4 is any guy with magic attacks thus if somebody is stronger than the generic conception of that is already T5. This is restrictive to any kind of powered characters sufficiently "interesting". Also blocks the idea of having an influential person with a squad of powered characters as NPCs. The other end is that a GM interprets T4 just as I defined, basically the type mentioned above is T4 but so is a kind of character who'd be way out of the other's league. Think of a guy who can run faster than a speeding jet, is tougher than a tank and can crash the World Trade Center with his strongest attack. IMO this is the kind of powered character who would be called "national level", a kind of threat an entire nation's military might struggle against. I don't think such a character would be unreasonable in Expanded Horizons but well, see my paragraph above.
Before I get into details I wish to tell two things. First, both AV and CV had (the latter might still do have) "tier caps" for specific roleplays. So when you had an event the organizer could determine what character tiers are allowed to participate. Also we had a sorts of OOC most of the time for both meta discussions and for sign-ups. Generally only players who have previously signed up for an event can join. Mid-game sign-ups were usually allowed, though. Second, aside from the above explained "tier gap" the other issue I have is that the tier list singles out specific abilities when these often are just as dependent on the character tier as anything. Say, fireball in D&D is effectively an artillery spell with huge AoE. World of Warcraft? Single target attack spell. Another random fantasy setting may have it as a nuke or a multi-hit ability. Or matter manipulation. There are plenty low tier matter manipulators. Do you think Alchemists like Edward Elric is a planet-wide threat? Also I am pretty sure you meant this in the context of character speeds rather than anything else but "fast-as-light-travel" and "faster-than-light-travel" are vague enough that people could think it means spacecraft. Bye-bye plots involving alien visitors or last survivors of X planet.
As I said the way it's worded is restrictive beyond its probably intended purpose.
Now back to the tier gap or at least what I perceive as such. I know, you made this circa 4 months ago. Changing things now could be quite a mess. Also keep in mind that I am just a random user who just happened to RP a lot. I have no authority and neither intend to have such. I'm merely posting a suggestion which you may or may not consider. You might as well ignore it if you want. I merely thought I could waste a few hours of my life to help you. Nothing more, nothing less. So, I perceive a sorts of mess with T3-5 here. How to solve that? Of course by introducing new tiers. The way I see it most of the "interesting" characters are currently sitting at a mandatory Tier 4. Which is a mess,IMO. I wish to spread this to several tiers to reflect the difference. At the same time I wouldn't wish to force dozens of people to rewrite their tier lists. So yeah, it isn't easy. I go back to the usual feature of half tiers to solve that.
Tier 3 - As explained. Augmented, barely powered characters.
Tier 3.5 - Beginning of the "interesting" (read, supernaturally powered anime character-like) tiers.
Tier 4 - As described, living artillery, tank or similar (basically their capabilities can be roughly equated to a combat vehicle)
Tier 5 - Low-tier flying brick which has the combination of say a jet fighter, a tank and a bomber. Alternatively excelling in one category. Say, TV Flash from Season 1 barring the more high end feats or a walking brick of a character who can shrug off anti-tank weapons with ease.
Tier 6 - Higher tier, an intermediate between a T5 and the walking nuke level which will be T7. This is likely not allowed by player haracters.
Tier 7 - Previously was T5 but now made more definite.
T8 and onwards - follows from T6. Technically you could split those tiers up, too. But for what purpose? Only GM characters are allowed to be like these and they are so beyond the PCs the difference doesn't matter in general.
This is the relatively simple suggestion I have. I know it's vague as hell but I'm short on time so this is the most I can provide for now. If you are even vaguely interested I'll be glad to share more details once my time allows it. And yes, it ironically results in "allowing Tier 5" but only because the scope of T4 got expanded. With just the addition of those two tiers I think you can handle most variety issues and also help hosts to determine the "power level" of player characters more correctly.
Again, I am assuredly talking from a limited experience with Expanded Horizons so I mostly used a quick research and my pool of experience in other roleplaying communities. Hope this would be of a bit of assistance to you.
If not... well, I wasted 2 hours of my life on worse things.
