Blatantly Over-Powered Characters

[BelatedGamer]

We've all been there; someone puts up a CS so blatantly over-powered that it's baffling they assumed no one would call them out on it. What's the most stupidly powerful character you've seen someone put up (without naming names, obviously)?

I'm not talking characters who are just a little too perfect -- I'm talking characters who practically break the setting.

Years ago I started an island survival rp where the characters were survivors of a plane crash. But one guy decided he was a Jason Bourne type action hero and started trying to hand out machine guns to the other players, despite everyone telling him that that didn't fit the setting at all. So he wrote like a page worth of description of him murdering the other players and left; it was surreal.

[Dinh AaronMk]

I've seen some pretty mean offenders in cross-over RPs. I'm talking the sorts of people who decide to play as basically gods in their respective universe.

[Rilla]

A zombie RP. Guy, who was a good friend of mine(ain't seen him in ages), said no one could be what amount into a zombie killing legend. Which was fine. Until he posted his character. And it was that. A zombie killing legend.

Outside of Guild, on MYB, it eventually became the norm for people to really stop developing characters and just come in with super badasses. In one instance, this guy had his top level character come from a weaker one, mid fight, I believe.

[Nevurmore]

I had a thread on another website. I had our characters confronted by demigods that happened to be killing real gods. The guy killed them all.

[AlteredTundra]

@Rilla
About how people don't develop characters anymore(those that do the over-powered character thing), I believe these said characters have been developed over time(like several years of time) and that they just post them in a rp as they are without taking it into account that they might be severely over-powered.

[BelatedGamer]

@Altered Tundra The problem of trying to cram a character you've already made into a setting that doesn't logically support them is an all too common problem, I've found.

[AlteredTundra]

@BelatedGamer A fair point and I definitely agree. There are just some cases that long-developed characters shouldn't be entered into certain RPs.

[darkwolf687]

Way too many to count;

One of the worst was on another site during an elder scrolls rp; 50 kg vampire woman (who didn't burn in sunlight) and who was the most attractive woman in the world, who killed an entire team of trained imperial soldiers with a massive summoned daedric greatsword and didn't even get a scratch Guess who the GM was...

Other examples include an NRP where a players made a god intervene to deus ex machina their way out of a war.

I have some GMODrp examples too. In a fallout roleplay someone powergamed my character and beat him into a pulp (Their character was 16 and had stumbled into our base wounded from bandits, my character was signed on with the NCR and had been saving his life at the expense of our own medical supplies; Their only motivation was to 'rob my gun', :| ) and when I was playing hl2rp as a DvL (for those who don't know, a DvL is a high ranked commander in Civil Protection and is augmented to shit, ie; they are supposed to have fights tilted very much in their favour) in which a malnourished citizen dodged all of my attacks and all the attacks of two other units in cqc, power gamed knocking my stunstick out if my hand, taking my 9mm off me and shooting me in the face all in one action. Unsurprisingly, an admin was called in and took our side rofl. Also in hl2rp, the city got attacked by antlions (being roleplayed by trusted players who we had model swapped) and one of the citizens ran out to the antlion guard and did /me jumps onto the aliens head and kills it *facepalm*

[BelatedGamer]

Way too many to count;

One of the worst was on another site during an elder scrolls rp; 50 kg vampire woman (who didn't burn in sunlight) and who was the most attractive woman in the world, who killed an entire team of trained imperial soldiers with a massive summoned daedric greatsword and didn't even get a scratch Guess who the GM was...

@darkwolf687

That's a shame, considering one of the best features of ES Vampires is the trade-off, like dying in sunlight, that their increased powers come with. What a waste of a character.

I've also had problems with Fallout rp's. It seems like there's always someone who wants to play as an ex-BOS member with tons of equipment the other players would have no chance of getting for quite a while.

[darkwolf687]

Yeah. There are people out who will just deck characters out in super gear and then if you object either say that as its all on the backstory it should be accepted and just argue off that or claim you are strangling their creative freedom :/ I have seen people apply to TES rp's with their Nerevarine or Dragonborn taken straight from the games before >.< The worst example I've seen of a character being way too scaled up relative to the power of the other players from a fallout rp was an Ex BOS NCR Officer (Makes a lot of sense, right? Lol) who had an AM rifle and power armour. He also had command of a team of veterans. The other players were almost all wanderers with small arms and one NCR corporal, I've know idea why he thought he'd be accepted but he got really angry when he wasn't :/

[Ellri]

One of the worst examples we've come across was a guy in a star wars RP. The RP was limited to Jedi/Sith, and the guy apparently had a Mandalorian Sith who walked around in Mandalorian Armor. Suffice to say, the character wasn't permitted to post IC.
Even before that, there was a rule in place "No mandalorians" or "No bounty-hunters". Can't remember which one ('twas old guild and updated many times afterwards, so any copy of that is now lost)

Another example from the same RP was sometime after the RP had filled its quota of Sith. One of the Jedi players turned to the dark side simply by being in the proximity of some Sith. And then he actually expected the Sith to trust him.

[Sep]

Super powered RP. Player created a character who could change their mass to any degree, becoming super armoured, super strong, shoot projectiles made out of bones and grow to the size of giants and retain their strength.

Claimed they wouldn't use it because their character was too young to understand it properly (All characters in the RP haven't had their powers for long, but none so blatantly powerful).

I pointed out that if the powers weren't going to be used there was no point having them... after some back and forth they're no longer taking part.

[BelatedGamer]

@Sep Oh god, there should be a list of character "flaws" that shouldn't be permitted as legitimate flaws. Too-young, inexperienced, and anti-social are three of the biggest ones.

[Sep]

@Sep Oh god, there should be a list of character "flaws" that shouldn't be permitted as legitimate flaws. Too-young, inexperienced, and anti-social are three of the biggest ones.

@BelatedGamer

It depends how it's done. I mean inexperienced is a tricky one to do. As the point in a roleplay is to have characters grow and develop, if you're inexperienced you need to make sure that you don't develop too quickly and you also need weaknesses to augment that one weakness.

Which is why in my RP people have to write up flaws for both their characters and their powers.

[Jig]

In my very first RP (where everybody was a Sue-tastic smarmy pile of dreadful), my character literally went toe-to-toe with a physical incarnation of an omnipotent, omniscient god.

[BelatedGamer]

@Sep Fair enough; it's just very easy to say your character is inexperienced and then completely ignore it.

@Jig That actually sounds kind of fun, in a goofy sort of way.

[darkwolf687]

My favourite is when people use insane as a character flaw, but it never leads to them failing or having problems, instead its just an excuse to act weird around people and do silly things with no negative consequences :/

[Sep]

@Sep Fair enough; it's just very easy to say your character is inexperienced and then completely ignore it.

@Jig That actually sounds kind of fun, in a goofy sort of way.

@BelatedGamer

Which is why I use their history or knowledge of them to judge it. It's not something I do myself or let other people do freely.

[Ellri]

Insane is very hard to play "right". Its easy to take care of the bit about sometimes being nonsensical, but more often than not, the acts of the insane aren't nonsensical. They're entirely justified. In their own minds, that is. While its no doubt fun to play the vampire that slaps his or her prince with a fish, that same vampire, presuming he or she is insane, is more likely to kill someone for wearing a blue shirt than to slap someone with a fish.

The best playing of insane results in true chaos for everyone. And of course the level of insanity varies greatly. Some of the insane have no self control at all. Others are simply a bit... off-kilter.

we've found it interesting to run the worst character concepts we get thrown at us as a GM through the universal Mary Sue litmus test. Its unfortunately rather common for them to fail it. Miserably.

[Animus]

Sometimes I feel people should lose fights if it fits or if its for the benefit of the story.

I'd have had roleplays where my character fought with another and they'd use metagaming nonsense and the fight would drag on and on. They'd predict the attacks and dodge everything. So I always choose the lose option. Is losing that bad though? I find it fun if it fits the story and helps develop my character. I just find it annoying that other people insist on winning all the time.

Battle posts almost end up in the sequence like 1. X shoots attack, 2. C predicts attack and counterattacks, 3. X knew a counterattack would be coming and has laid a trap for it, 4. C instantly spots the trap and avoids it, blablabla.

Some people outright refuse to do anything stupid, have their characters make mistakes or lose fights.