Blatantly Over-Powered Characters

[Sep]

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.

@Animus

In terms of plot fights, I quite often purposefully make them difficult. If players in one of my roleplays try something dumb and heroic they tend to end up deceased.

[Jig]

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

@Animus

Darn-tootin'. I consider this to be an expression of Sue-ism; the character is explicitly designed to be flawless.

[Animus]

<Snipped quote by Animus>

In terms of plot fights, I quite often purposefully make them difficult. If players in one of my roleplays try something dumb and heroic they tend to end up deceased.

@Sep

Theres a difference between exciting and well thoughout fights and fights where people refuse to lose. I've been in arena roleplays in the old guild and I've seen really good battles. I'm talking about the kind of fights where youR guy lands a clean blow after spotting a mistake their character made and they do stuff like "X saw the hit coming and braced himself, thanks to this, his channeling of his magic spell was uninterrupted. He then intermediately unleashed a fiery explosion in a 20 meter radius so that C couldn't dodge." That sort of metagaming nonsense.

<Snipped quote by Animus>

Darn-tootin'. I consider this to be an expression of Sue-ism; the character is explicitly designed to be flawless.

@Jig

YEAH, THESE PEOPLE MAKE MY BLOOD BOIL.

[Sinerathin]

At least from my experience of GMing, some of the best fights I've had between participants in my RPs has been fights in which people have traded blows rather than gone with the route of channeling Nero of the Matrix and dodge everything.

It's not that I take some sadistic pleasure in reading about cast members beating the living snot out of each other(alright, I do a little), but I've experienced that fights where both end up injured tend to create the best spirit between the RP's participants. At that point, whoever wins is just a minor detail as they're both in the dirt with broken bones and missing teeth anyway :P

In fact, members who partake on such fights tend to later become better friends from what I've found.

[Sep]

<Snipped quote by Sep>

Theres a difference between exciting and well thoughout fights and fights where people refuse to lose. I've been in arena roleplays in the old guild and I've seen really good battles. I'm talking about the kind of fights where youR guy lands a clean blow after spotting a mistake their character made and they do stuff like "X saw the hit coming and braced himself, thanks to this, his channeling of his magic spell was uninterrupted. He then intermediately unleashed a fiery explosion in a 20 meter radius so that C couldn't dodge." That sort of metagaming nonsense.

<Snipped quote by Jig>

YEAH, THESE PEOPLE MAKE MY BLOOD BOIL.

@Animus

Yeah my favourite fight is still one with one of my good Guild mates, we haven't had our PCs fight since then but I just can't find a fight with that level of awesome anymore :P Most people are like "hurrdurrwin"

In the original Jedi Exile on the Old Guild things were fine, then the GuildFall happened. I tried to revive it on the NuGuild and I had badass space Jedi joining (I was willing to let it slide this once though). They all ran off towards the massive clone army who had gunships and fighters and tanks and bigger guns basically.

Safe to say they died.

[Ellri]

Nothing is like having RPs where the player characters can, and will, die. Its not necessarily fun to end up with a total party kill, but if the players are foolish enough to set themselves up for such, then they deserve it.

We're actually wondering how many characters worthy of this thread we'll get when we relaunch our current RP project... Its been in remodeling hiatus for 11 months now...

[Rilla]

I've had someone meta game or whatever two members of an opposing army PAST an entire army, who were facing the enemy army. to make it worst, these two masters of espionage and stealth somehow managed to stand right in a ring of gasoline. the only person to see them was said character, who shot an arrow to ignite the gasoline.

[clericbeast]

Personally, I've never understood the joy in having your character effortlessly triumph over every source of conflict. That ruins the immersion, reduces the tension, and it's honestly just boring to read.

[darkwolf687]

@Ellri Yeah, insanity and mental illnesses are extremely hard to handle correctly because they do have underlying reasons for their actions. Thats why its so silly when people do insanity for insanity's sake, it's not how it really works. Mental illnesses themselves when played by people who have no understanding of how the illness actually works can get stupid as well, including assigning odd properties to illnesses or just merging two together at once :/

Also while I have no idea what the characters actually were, to be fair on the sheets you put through the test, the Mary Sue Litmus test does have some strange things included in it, including things which aren't really Mary Sue traits unless done very badly or the negatives are completely ignored as well as including things which are plot points and again, unless handled really poorly, aren't really sue traits. I suppose the test has a mileage may vary sticker on it for that reason haha

[Ellri]

A lot of points are rather irrelevant when it comes to that test, yes. But its a decent test to verify just how terrible a lot of characters are.

When it comes to RPs in the higher parts of casual and in advanced, you rarely see anyone wanting their character to be a Mary Sue. Thus, when a character is blatantly so, using the test can help them understand that it actually is one.

[NuttsnBolts]

I remember a space RP where people got the choice to create a race for their character. Similar to how people in a fantasy may be able to choose elf, troll, etc. Anyways this RP started alright with some pretty colorful characters but the problems started to arise when certain people started interacting.

One person in particular created a feminist, Nazi race that instigated fights, and attempted to take over the plot of the story. The problem with it all was that we were that far into the RP that booting her out would essentially break the storyline.

It wasn't necessarily overpowered when you look at the charactersheet, but the problem was that there were so many loopholes that were utilised that it became overpowered without realising.

[BelatedGamer]

@NuttsnBolts "Facist Amazon's" is a cool idea though. What kind of loopholes are you talking about, general metagaming or what?

[vancexentan]

I've seen plenty but the one that keeps coming back to mind is a seven year old kid with a rinnegan who somehow blocked a genjutsu that was sound based, a kunai barrage, and a ninjutsu all at the same time without having all of his powers. Nothing else comes to my mind but I've seen my fair share of them. In all honesty characters who start off uber strong disgust me unless the roleplay has a reason for it in plot or the roleplay is meant for those sorts of characters. Even my strongest characters have weaknesses. Take Paul Lyons from my gundam roleplay. He's a coordinator (enhanced physical capabilities as he was genetically born that way as are all coordinators) and has unlocked newtype powers (ramping up his abilities even FURTHER). However he is in all relatively mid tier suits if that. He also deeply relies on his powers to get by using them as a crutch and without them he'd be a serviceable pilot at best. The only time I ever use a stronger character is if I'm in a roleplay where a weaker set of monsters aren't as good as they need to be in a fight or whatever the case may be. I also have a deep rooted caution of new players that join my roleplays because there are a lot of people out there who want to be that one guy who's the strongest in a fight out of the entire group and in my opinion no one should be that guy at the start of the roleplay. Maybe later if the situation calls for it but having that defacto one guy to run to is something is about to hit the fan and it also detracts from other players characters.

But hey this is just my opinion on the matter.

[MelonHead]

Played a nation RP once where one person had a race of people who could lift 100 tonnes on average.

I noped out pretty fast when everyone came down on me for (somewhat snidely) commenting that was the equivalent of being able to throw Boeing's around willy nilly.

[NuttsnBolts]

@NuttsnBolts "Facist Amazon's" is a cool idea though. What kind of loopholes are you talking about, general metagaming or what?

@BelatedGamer

Metagaming... to a degree yes. She said that her character was the leader of a technological race. Sounds like a fair sort of character, but the scene played out like this:

Character 'A' and Overpowered Female 'B' met up to make a deal.
Character 'C' happened to be spying on the deal and attempted to steal the item being traded.
Fight broke out where the three were involved. 'A' attempted to escape and 'C' was captured.
A fleet of ships were sent out and captured 'A'
'A' and 'C' were thrown into inescapable prisons.
'B' being a race leader declared war on the races of 'A' and 'C' (humans)

So as you can see, the character she created wasn't necessarily overpowered, but because she was some 'leader her excuse was that she had an army of thousands that she could control, which she never mentioned in her character sheet.

Oh and this all happened in about 6 posts...

Ah, and I remembered just then. Because the item being traded was a source of power, she obsorbed that power and turned into a godlike character. (Won't explain it too much as it would take forever to explain, but you get the gist)

[Keyguyperson]

There was this one RP where everyone had system-sized starships, so thing got pretty insane. Then one guy posts an app, gets accepted, and brings in galaxy-sized starships in. Which weren't even mentioned in the app. Needless to say, it was an immediate ban.

[Nevurmore]

Is losing that bad though? I find it fun if it fits the story and helps develop my character.

@Animus

My character has lost pretty much every single fight against other people, even the legitimate ones. It's part of how he developed into a maniacal dark knight; he always needed more power because people kept metagaming against him. :D

[Mixtape Ghost N]

The simple reasoning behind these OP characters is what I like to call "protagonist syndrome" in which everyone strives to be the main character of the Roleplay rather than collaborate to create an interesting story. Most people reason that their character would make a better "protagonist" if they were stronger than the rest of the cast, and won all the fights for them.

Needless to say, this needs to be nipped in the bud soon as possible.

[VATROU]

I haven't seen any Over-Powered characters in a legitimate setting, I say legitimate setting because there is one RP I was in that's entire premise was a bad parody of bad Roleplaying. It was called the League of Overpowered Gentlemen that took place in the Elder Scrolls series. And yes, we had Gods, God Killers, the Emperor of Skyrim with Tod Howard as a Villain. Oh and Frank Sinatra joined the cast as a NPC and Cobra Commander piloted a Mech suit trying to kill us.

It was stupid fun. The writing was horrid and we Metagamed everyone and controlled each other's characters.

[AlteredTundra]

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.

@Jig

Just don't believe in him and the god will fade eventually. :P