Well, lifting weight without any mechanical aid (e.g. a lever of some kind) is the best measurement of strength, but the bench press isn't the right tool. If you wanted to really gauge someone's overall strength, you'd have them deadlift; it utilizes the most muscle groups of any lift and, mechanically speaking, an athlete should be able to deadlift more than they squat or bench. At my best as a powerlifter, my deadlift max was 200+ lb pounds heavier than my bench because bench press only uses a few muscle groups.
If someone wants to accurately describe their character's physical power/strength, they should use "lifting from the ground" as the means of measurement. It's also going to be the most common form of strength used in a fight anyways, because almost all fighting utilizes things like hip drive and the posterior-chain, which are essential to squatting and dead-lifting.
That being said, using bench press as a means of measurement isn't the issue. The issue with that example is that the person who came up with it didn't know enough to realize that benching 300 lb =/= running 60 mph. I bench pressed 405 lb for two reps when I powerlifted, but I don't know anyone alive who can run 60 mph. Bit of a difference. That's what I mean though; lot of systems are vague or just.. not put together particularly well.
I think a lot of people have that issue because most tier lists are kind of vague. I remember one from AL that equated bench pressing 300 lb with running 60 mph, which is absurd. Running 60 mph makes you more than twice as fast as Usain Bolt, bench pressing 300 is something that tens or even hundreds of thousands of strength athletes have accomplished. I made one several years ago that I repost on occasion for people to use, although I never got around to really refining it.
Dual-Scaling System
The primary difference between this scaling and other scales is that others rely on a numerical value each time you move up or down in scale, and so the scales only apply in one way; magnitude of power. The idea with this system is to account for two things: Power, and realism. This allows players to more accurately determine what level they want to play at by having two separate scales that interact with one another.
In regards to the power scale, each level can effectively be further codified into "high" or "low" - "high mild" or "low mild", "low advanced" or "high advanced" to give more flexibility to the tiers when further classification is needed.
Realism Scale
Realistic
Realistic is exactly what the name implies - as parallel to the real world as possible, in terms of physics, physiology, and the like. Minimal bends in the rules of physics, accurately portrayed humans, so on and so forth.
Semi-Realistic
Semi-realistic straddles the line between purely realistic, and wholly unrealistic levels of combat. Combat will still roughly follow the real world, but the common addition of powers can more easily "bend" the rules. For example: the Shoryuken. A person can jump, spin, and punch all at the same time - not that it would necessarily be viable. But with a "nudge" of powers into the somewhat unrealistic, it can become a viable technique. A character could use powers to become stronger than normal, faster than normal, or the like, but without breaking the rules wholesale. Purely hand to hand or weapons combat would still by and large be somewhat along the lines of "movie realism", but with supernatural powers (if allowed), this can mean looser rules than in Realistic.
Unrealistic
At the level of unrealistic combat, the rules of physics are loose, at best. A character could run up the side of a building indefinitely, dodge bullets, perform astounding acrobatics in mid-combat, or otherwise do things simply beyond the ken of realistic or even semi-realistic combat. Unrealistic is more common at higher power levels, because of the fantastic levels of physical abilities that many characters possess. Punching through a solid granite block, slicing through an enormous redwood tree with a single sword swipe, punching the ground hard enough to create an enormous crater - all examples of unrealistic combat.
Power Scale No Powers
Like Realistic, this is straight forward: a character has no powers, no supernatural abilities. They are more or less a human, albeit perhaps of Olympic level ability in terms of physicality. It can also be assumed that magical weapons or armor would also be banned, as they can give spell-like abilities.
Mild Powers
Mild Powers is the next step up, and is harder to classify because you can take a higher or lower approach in terms of acceptable abilities. Characters can run the gamut from humans with powers (Naruto, Avatar, Street Fighter, D&D) to lesser demonic, angelic, or otherwise supernatural beings. At this level, a gun is fairly powerful, and might be barred from use. Essentially, a character will be balanced to have a few strong areas, and a few weak areas, as their powers and equipment are not sufficient enough to cover every possible situation or potentiality.
An example of a lower "mild powers" character could be Kyo Kusanagi, from King of Fighters. He is a hand to hand fighter without weapons or armor, but is at the peak of human physicality (and sometimes exceeds it), while he also has a fairly expansive "fire elemental" powerset which is close to mid range, and would (in roleplay) probably have a charge system reliant on chi or magical energy. Ryu from Street Fighter might also be an example. An example of a higher level "mild powers" would be if you took Kyo Kusanagi, and either expanded his powerset, gave him some mild magical items such as armor or weapons to expand his versatility, gave him a second powerset, or simply made him physically empowered beyond human limits as a permanent passive ability.
High Powers
High powers can be defined by characters who are usually physically beyond the ken of human ability by quite a considerable margin (dodging bullets, hurling cars, etc) while also having considerable supernatural abilities. An example of this might be a super hero: A character with impossibly advanced physical abilities, super powers, and possibly some serious equipment. A lower end example might be Wolverwine: Adamantium skeleton, the ability to regenerate from practically anything, while being supernaturally powerful and potent in physical combat. He is on the lower end because, while he's exceptionally hard to keep down, he's also restricted to melee. At the higher end of the spectrum, you have characters who can destroy an building with a couple of preps, or even an entire city block.
Advanced Powers Because it's been a while since I've played at this level, the description may be somewhat lacking: Essentially, a character at this level is potent enough to pretty much drop an entire city without too much effort. Think lower scale DBZ: Nappa, for example.
Full Powers
At this level, a character can demolish a planet. Giant monstrosities, cosmic beings, so on and so forth are applicable at this level. Powers can be quite extensive, and a character may have several powersets. Freeza, Cell, and the like might fit in at this level.
Power Character
At this level, a character is able to affect things on a universal or galactic level. Hurling galaxies at each other, creating black holes, creating or destroying planes of existence, planar psionics, so on and so forth. At this level, characters will very likely bend or break the rules of physics to their whim the manipulation of time and space is not wholly uncommon. Characters are likely to have god-like powers, and psuedo-science can be common, such as the application of string theory.
It needs to be edited and rewritten, but there's the raw base of the scale.
I've made dozens of characters over the year, but I only played one consistently from late 2007 on. I usually make characters because I fhink of an interesting idea or concept that I want to put down on paper and fiddle with, but then I never play the character. It's just an exercise in balancing, I think.
And there's nothing wrong with any particular level of character power. People play what they want, and I've found that different communities have different preferences. When I first started roleplaying, there was an enormous trend in my community for very high powered characters, but then the trend reversed in the other direction and now the fighting community there is almost entirely centered around mild powers. To be fair, that focus also stems from the fact that we fixate a lot on tournaments, and mild powers is easier to balance for competitive play when you're trying to grade/review anywhere between 30 and 100 profiles.
My main character can scale up pretty high, but I do like playing the powered brawler archetype. He's at the same level as, say, Daredevil or another sort of "street level" hero. Some metahuman powers, but nothing so awe-inspiring that someone couldn't crack him across the teeth with a baseball bat and end the fight. The story behind his metahuman powers does allow him to go right up to the other end of the scale though, or anywhere in-between.
The most basic systems are a charge and a resource-pool system.
A charge system would be that you generate a charge or "prep" in a single post. Any given ability costs X or Y preps/charges. Expend charges, use abilities. Depending on the ruleset for the community, you may or may not be able to fight while generating a "charge", but in my experience, it's considered acceptable to generate a "charge" as long as you aren't using an ability that spends charges or taking damage, and you're actively acknowledging in your post that your character is doing something to generate said charge (via ki, magic, technology or what have you).
A resource-pool system would be something like a "mana pool" for a spellcaster. I'll use that example, just to stay consistent. They start the match with 20/20 mana points. Each of their spells costs X or Y mana points, which depletes their pool until they reach 0 and cannot use any more abilities. This system also tends to have a use-per-day or a cooldown system attached so that someone can't just spam the same ability every post. They may or may not regenerate a small number of points per "passive" post when they aren't actively using abilities.
That being said, your character comes first. Develop the system to fit the character, not the other way around.
Well, there isn't just one single fighting community. Never has been. It's always been groups of varying sizes, each on their individual sites, often unaware of one another.
The community I played in - and still hang around - is still fairly populous. It's de-centralized though, we only come out of the woodworks for tournaments. Our community ran an annual team tournament with sixty-four participants, and we'd often get as many as 100 or more people trying to enter with their friends. The group was never static; people came and went, but we always had at least thirty-two people for our 1v1 tournaments and usually sixty-four. You could probably tap somewhere between 150-200 fighters if you really went searching for them.
On the other hand, other communities are remnants of chat-rooms and only have ten or fifteen people. A lot of these communities do dwindle over time, simply because they don't draw in new faces. That happened somewhat with my home community. We had the old guard from 2006-2008, then the new guard (including myself) stepped in at 2008 and began running tournaments. Around 2011/2012 we became too busy with RL and there wasn't a "third wave" to replace us.
I think the reason RPGuild's arena community is so small is that it doesn't have much traction with the rest of the site. I mean, there's 60,000+ users - if even half of those are active accounts, you'd think there'd be more fighters.
Yeah, I read it as "I don't necessarily want to bring in people from off-site" not "I don't want to bring in people from off-site because they're BADDIES."
Although @Enki could probably be forgiven for that interpretation because, from a cursory glance at the last few pages, he's one of those aforementioned off-site players.
Though I'm not particularly inclined to bring in people from other sites, I'd be willing to join a group if one needs more members.
Considering the anemic condition of the fighting community on RPGuild, an infusion of fresh faces is probably warranted. You can only fight the same people so many times; without new players, things will stagnate. A group of ten or twenty people isn't especially sustainable in this particular context.
I've always promoted cross-community interaction. I used to site-hop all the time; that's how I came to the old RPGuild a few years ago. Laying down lines of communication between various communities and sites allows you to draw on a much larger potential pool of participants. Insularity is fairly harmful to any arena/fighting community in the long run.
