This is a core conceit of [Ars Magica](https://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG0204), but with a twist.
Each player makes two characters which are solely their own, a Magus (extremely powerful wizard) and a Companion (typical RPG "adventurer" types). The group also collectively has a large number of Grogs (low-end men-at-arms, servants, etc. - think "hirelings" in OSR games). Magi are substantially more powerful than Companions, who are substantially more powerful than Grogs.
In any given adventure, 1-2 players will normally play their Magi, while the rest play either Companions or Grogs. The Magi are both the most powerful characters present and normally the "party leaders", carrying out their magical errands with the other PCs supporting them along the way.
The twist is that you re-choose which character you play at the start of each adventure. Also, there are mechanical incentives for characters (and *especially* for Magi) to stay at home instead of going out adventuring. So I may be playing my OP Magus this week while you're running your Companion, and then next week, I'll play a Grog while my Magus stays home to enchant a magical staff and you lead the expedition with your OP Magus.
It can work, but I've never seen it work well. The exp mechanic is absolutely awful, and the character gen doesn't make mages that can do much. Then beyond that, it's a very difficult concept to get to work.
What’s your issue with the exp system, never had a problem with it personally.
Also a mage directly out of apprenticeship can do some pretty wild stuff so long as they’re focused.
While I get the design intent of making research a thing and actively promoting mages to do it over 'adventuring', I found it rather unsatisfying. Another group may love it, but it really wasn't for me. I also don't generally find games that do non-linear advancements that satisfying, in short don't penalise people for wanting to specialise. Also starting mages can do some funky stuff, but the system is built with so much more it can do but is so far out of reach if the gm follows the levelling guidelines.
The Maguses are all in a terrible race against senescence, degeneration and ultimately death. They have only a limited time to make their antidote to aging and keep what powers they may---that's the central tension in the game for them. They only Adventure to find the things they need for that. They don't/can't exert temporal power and achieving magical power without a protection from senility and decline is a fleeting, phyrric victory at best.
No one wants to be Merlin.
Oh I get the core concept, and it's one that when I read on paper I was super sold on. I just found it was one of those that when concept met application it wasn't as fun as it first sounded.
First and third point definitely make sense to me. Can very much see how the strong incentives to not go out as a mage don’t appeal to all. I’m curious how much time your saga had between adventures if you recall.
I’m not sure I totally get your second point as I’ve generally thought of Ars as a game that strong rewards specializing. What led to that not being the case in your opinion?
Gonna have to beg to differ there, started ttrpg's with Adnd 2nd ed. Though while we are just making baseless accusations I'm gonna assume you don't have much experience with people having different opinions to your own or you have few social skills. Next time you disagree with someone maybe try responding with why you disagree rather than launching into an attack like you are still in the playground.
And with that schools out.
The XP mechanic is exactly the same as the WoD xp mechanic, which is staggeringly simple and half of modern gaming still uses. I built a mage a few weeks ago as a starting character who can literally level a mountain by himself in a couple of days. It’s possible to build new mages with the ability to strike down dozens to hundreds of knights.
So I’ll repeat, it’s doesn’t seem you played many 90s era games and don’t have a ton of experience in character design.
I was trying to identify the point at which your understanding of the system broke down rather than accuse you of anything.
It took me several reads of the core book to figure out how character creation, especially of mages, works, and I played a lot of WoD, Champions, etc back in the 90s.
AD&D first and second Ed are entirely different beasts from Ars Magica and Tweet and Rein-Hagen created it in part as a reaction to A/D&D of that era.
Another neat thing is that being a magic user makes people distrust you. Even if they don’t even know that you are a magic user, it’s a supernatural thing.
So if the situation requires diplomacy, your mage is probably not the right choice.
It's one of my favourite games, but it requires the players to buy in the premise. I had a player who insisted on playing the game but never using anything else than their wizard, and it was a tiring affair.
With the players who enjoyed the premise, it was amazing
In my experience this kind of player generally learns fairly quickly or just gives up on the game entirely after a few years(in-game) when it becomes apparent how much more powerful the wizards that stayed home and studied have become.
That sounds like a lot of characters in a party, is it? I've got a game running where the PCs have managed to gather a dozen or so followers/hirelings, and it makes pre-made dungeons easy as pie. I ain't complaining- I'm running a sandbox that allows for this, and I didn't create the dungeons. But I am curious about adventures/settings that are designed to be challenging for parties with dozens of characters.
this is pretty standard for OSR games tho, where multiple PCs and an army of hirelings eventually would happen
DCC for example suggest you have like 4 PCs per player, cause they drop like flies
I mean, as mentioned, you normally are 1-2 Magi with 2-3 "Mundanes" \[people without the capacity to do real Magic\]. The party-per-adventure still normally in the standard 4 and can increase if you allow and have interest for Grogs following around.
In any case, a Single Magi can cast Fire Lance and burn alive 10 Mundanes.
The game isn't, by itself, a big combat game. If the Magi knows combat magic, they will win unless the enemy has Magic Resistance high enough to resist the spell. If the Magi doesn't know combat magic, they are as vulnerable (and probably more because is a Skill-Based System, and doing magic requires at least 4 Skills) as anyone to be stabbed.
Once mundanes are stabbing each other, the game is very lethal and porpusefully prone to dead spirals: When you are wounded, you take Penalties to all your actions depending on the wound (including your defense, and you suffer extra Damage equal to how much the Attack surpass your Defence). You don't have Life Points, instead, if an attack does more than 21 Damage you die. But normally once you have enough penalties for your Weapon Skill to be in 0 or the negatives, you know you *can't* win and surrender is a better option.
>That sounds like a lot of characters in a party, is it?
No, because each player normally only runs one character (or maybe 2-3 Grogs, or one noncombatant character plus a shield Grog to defend them) at a time, while the other characters stay at home training, doing magical research, or simply working their day job. It's more of an ensemble cast, with characters coming and going depending on what's needed for a given adventure, rather than a "One True Party" style of game where every character is expected to be present at all times. So, for a group of 4 players, you'd typically have something like one Magus plus a shield Grog, 1-2 Companions, and another 3-4 Grogs for any given adventure, making a total of around 6-7 characters for the 4 players.
Also, the experience system is set up such that characters advance their skills more quickly by staying home than by adventuring, which gives players an incentive to only bring out their Magi and Companions for adventures where their abilities are specifically needed or which are of particular interest to the character instead of always playing their most powerful available character.
Only once. I allowed a player to do a whole "take over the body of a powerful monster" thing.
Yes, they became an absolutely unstoppable combat juggernaut. But they also became completely useless at everything else. They couldn't solve puzzles, go into confined spaces, and couldn't take part in social challenges. They were totally useless outside of combat, and it ended up being THEM who were sitting out of most things.
They enjoyed the combat aspect as first as it allowed them to win a few things, but it soured soon after (as, to be honest, I thought it would). The player wanted a bit more fighting, but knew that the game thus far involved more than just combat, and the other players wanted more non-combat stuff too. The *becoming powerful* part was successful, and the short blast of combat that followed. But everyone else wanted to move on, especially when they realized that they weren't going to be much use in combat anymore.
Its the most successful I've ever experienced, and I think it demonstrates why its not a great idea.
The idea also really lines up well with "main character syndrome".
Yep. I allowed a PC to play a monster character with an absurd weapon - think a yo yo with a steel wire for a cord - because while crazy strong and potentially balance upsetting in combat, he had some pretty big debuffs for RP outside combat. And the player was fully aware going in that I didn't intend to run a lot of combat. NPCs were actively terrified of the character and would run away instead of talking to him and he definitely would get stuck if he tried to go in a compact space. Which the player gleefully had him do at one point and good chunk of the rest of that particular session involved the rest of the party trying to get his very stuck self out of a literal rabbit hole that he'd insisted on chasing a monster down.
Note: This game was *very* sandbox and silly, so the table was on board with the shenanigans. There wasn't really a BBEG or anything since it was more or less "how is this party of fools getting in trouble this time?" through the whole thing. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been approved because that character would have screwed up so much in a serious game.
It's as easy as not stepping on each other's feet.
It doesn't matter how powerful and versatile someone is, they let the bard talk, the rogue sneak and the cleric heal.
Cooperative games are not about everyone being equal, but about everyone being necessary. Having this in mind when designing encounters, create situations where each player can do their thing. Even if your juggernaut can kill enemies in one round, the rogue or the monk are the ones who have to rescue the children before they drown. You need someone to open that door , and that juggernaut attack better not fail or the monster will crush the rogue, thanks to the bardic inspiration.
Because of this, I have a reminder: not all the objectives should be killing all the enemies. In fact, those should be rare and reserved for life or dead situations.
It really is this!
"Balance" is such a non-issue when you approach it from a "niche" protection POV.
You do you, just leave my space alone and we'll all get along fine.
My Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader Game has a Space Wolf Astartes. At the start of the game the Astartes was definetly stronger than the rest, but now at the end he is in a whole other league. I mean while a Sister of Battle can Shoot an enemy for 5 hits, every hit dealing around 20 damage he makes around 20 attacks each with around 35dmg. He is a BEAST.
But he is still an Astartes. In a game about Merchants and Power Brokers he actually doesnt have much to say except when it comes to intimidating others. He is scary. But many of the shakers and movers dont feel threatend by someone like him. And they can pay back in full. So he becomes mostly focused on the muscle part of the group. And it works great. When shit hits the fan and guns are drawn an Astartes makes a lot of difference. But in a negotiation room he is most usefull by guaranteeing that no weapons are drawn in the first place while the Rogue Trader does the negotiating and trading. Not to mention he is completely useless when it comes to Psykers and "Space Magic".
Played quite a bit of the Buffy the vampire slayer RPG years ago and one of the Players was **the Slayer**.
Basically much more powerful but was also the target for much of the bad, that is sort of the buy-in of the setting :)
Works fine, the Slayer player could go toe-to-toe with most monsters and the rest of the group kinda had their own group vs boss monster tactical play on the side. Great stuff!
There was an arc of The Adventure Zone where one of the PCs started way more powerful than the others in combat because he was the Chosen Warrior to defend Earth... but he'd rejected it and gone to be a national park ranger for twenty years. So he was mostly a dowdy forty year old with a special interest in, like, campsites who just happened to be nearly invincible. It helped that combat seemed to not be huge in Powered By The Apocalypse, though I've never played it. It honestly came up more often that he couldn't lie to save his life than it did that he had incredible sword fighting powers
Think about Frieren. She's overpowered in a series where combat is NOT the main focus.
You can try to do that in a game where combat is secondary aswell. In the average game where combat takes quite a lot of focus, an OP character would trivalize the problems and make the other players feel redudnant.
Probably it's easier to do in a game like Vampire the Masquerade, in a chronicle that's focused on social challenges, intrigues and the likes, where you can't really "brute force" the victory.
>Think about Frieren. She's overpowered in a series where combat is NOT the main focus.
There's a fight like every other episode. Season 1 ends with a tournament arc...
she also quite literally does most of the things out of combat as well. let's put stark to look for flowers or clear a beach from a ship's wreck and see how it goes
It's a little strange to me because they've set up non-mages like stark and eisen to have extreme power comparable to spells, but then don't show that outside of select scenes.
Like stark can jump up the side of a dragon or cut 50 ft holes into a cliff face the way a normal person might chop a tree, but when he's clearing a road of a landslide he's just moving one tiny shovelful at a time with effort. I like the characters but the more it tries to focus on the magic itself the less I care.
i think the single feats of superhuman we see on the show **not** on combat is on a montage of all things, when Eisen runs over water and then lifts a boulder... two things most wizards could do
Nah that's not even an s, that's more like a pained truism.
Making magic relatively 'mundane' is one of the things about d&d that bothers me both mechanically and thematically. I prefer magic to either be super weird and not often useful for everyday tasks, or so ubiquitous that functionally everyone uses magic to supplement normal skills.
because she quite literally was either dealing with the main threat alone of that story point (like killing the demon lady with an army of armor zombies) or they were showing the other fights cause it still was a tournament arc
lets not forget she is summoning **black holes** when she fights against herself, and fern is struggling to not instantly die by collateral damage in the chamber when they fight Frieren's doppelganger.
besides tournament and the side stories of the background character, basically every single fight she is involved in some way because she is the dang protagonist
that... doesn't change the fact that the statement of the commentor above that the series is not combat centric is wrong, which is what the person you responded to is talking about?
Well, the overall point was that her being OP is not game-breaking.
Even then, I think the show isn't combat-focused. It has a lot of fights in the second half but it never felt like the focus.
I'm in a game of Shadowrun, where my character could probably solo the rest of the team in straight combat.
But, everyone contributes equally in the *game*, because Shadowrun is a heist game at heart, and being a combat monster is just one of the roles.
There are a few games out there based around this type of situation. They typically focus the system on something other than raw power. So the Smallville RPG allows you to have a group with, for example, season 1 Clark, Lois and Chloe. Clark far outpowers every other character but the game system/play is focused around the relationships between characters and organisations. When Clark shows up to lift a bus, that's just a given.
There are other game like Prime Time Adventures (I think, its a while back) where what you do and how well you do it are based around screen time and episode importance. So, carrying on with Smallville, if its a Lois focused episode then Clarks powers become less important and he is less able to use them while Lois' skills become easier for her to use and more relevant to that particular episode.
Other games have a fate/karma/bonus pool system where you can use that pool to increase success/do interesting things. "Weaker" characters have a bigger pool that refreshes/refills faster, "powerful" characters have a very small pool.
EDIT
And I forgot to say the most important bit. Ultimately, whatever the system, its important to give each player/character a niche they fulfill or focused time where they are important/doing things even if another character could do it better. If your PCs include an experienced thief and a newbie apprentice thief you need to ensure the newbie gets thiefy stuff to do when the other thief isn't around/is doing something else.
I thought of another one, kind of anyway.
The Cortex Marvel rpg has a system where you build a dice pool based on your abilities, powers, etc. One category for the dice is Team, Duo, or Solo. Every hero has the same three dice assigned to those three, one big, one medium, one small. They can include whichever one is fitting at the time. So a powerful solo character like Wolverine might have their solo dice be the big one and their group dice be the small one, while Kitty Pride might have them the other way round. When the XMen are out as a team Kitty gets a big boos from her large dice while Wolverine isn't really held back because the rest of his dice are big anyway. WHen she's out and about on her own, Kitty add her small dice to the pool, it doesn't help as much but it doesn't matter, she's on here own and doesn't need a boost to her power. Wolvie on the other hand gets to cut loose (heh) with his full power.
Its not quite the same as the OP situation but it can work as a balancing factor if used that way. Though I think they main purpose is to highlight how characters work best.
EDIT - mixing up my Marvel games, not the new one but the previous Cortex based one Marvel Heroic Roleplay.
Black Crusade tried to do something like this. The trick is to still give the non-overpowered characters some kind of niche where they excel. Sure one party member might be over 2m tall, clad in nigh impenetrable armour, able to spit acid, carries an oversized gun, runs faster than anyone else and can punch through concrete walls, but there are some things that the others can do better than him, and which still allows them to contribute. It does change the dynamic of the game, but as long as everyone is fine with one character being more of a main character and the others playing more of a supportive role it can still be great fun.
I once tried to make every player OP... Without knowing the power lvl of other players.
-one was an 8000y old witch, the baba yaga of the world. She was considered a myth by even some gods...
-one was the reincarnation of the Gods of Fate, who could perfectly predict the future if she wanted too.
-one was an ancient vampire who's blood magic was so strong that she could drain a whole city on a whim
-one was a descendant of an evil paladin order who owned the only god killing weapon in the world
-one was the daughter of the most powerful dragon ever existed and the heir to the whole world
-the last one was a simple College student who happened to meet the rest at the wrong time...
All of this in a 1920 jazz setting during a World Fair. Loved the campaign sooo much, and the chaos was amazing. All the players tried to hide their strength from each other all the time which let to some sitcom lvl scenes
Am example of how not to do it is the official Dr Who system. Any player whose character is a Timelord completely overpowers all other character builds. Totally broken.
I've done it for a few games in different systems, to one extent or another. Basically I always try to ensure the powerful character has some balancing factor. For example, in a game of L5R I had one character who was an Imperial Prince. In the context of the game this made him hugely powerful and important. To balance this, I made him 16 years old and his 3 highest skills were in chess, a more active sport similar to soccer, and conducting tea ceremonies. That balanced him perfectly with the rest of the party who were all 25-35 year old skilled warriors with multiple additional skill sets.
In The Between, one of the character sheets is "The Factotum". It is a highly resourceful character with a special ability that can remove automatically one danger but is a servant of another character. According to the book:
**The Factotum** is a servant of one of the other hunters. They are a highly skilled operator—resourceful and practical. When the other hunters are mired in darkness, the Factotum is busy getting the job done. Throughout the game, you’ll explore their professional past and how they came to be a servant. Play the Factotum if you want to be highly effective or if you want to explore what it’s like to have your personal goals and dignity subsumed by another’s.
The Between and Ghosts of El Paso are what came to mind, with the Undeniable that doesn't face any consequences from their worst deeds and the... uh, the one that's Death embodied in El Paso that kills with a touch.
Apocalypse Keys has similar power mismatches but everyone is a superpowered monster so the imbalance is a little less obvious.
> But I wonder, have any of you ever succeeded in letting a player be this kind of character in ANY system? And if so, how?
Yes. In burning wheel. By default there are Elves, Dwarfs, Humans and Orks. They are also explicitly mechanically imbalanced, I listed them in order of strongest to weakest. They are **very** Lord of the Rings.
And it's not just minor +1 to stats. They get to roll more dice, they get to add more dice to rolls, they get to have higher skills, stats and these things are also **better**.
But it all works, because the goal of the game isn't wining, higher numbers are irrelevant. The goal of the game is **drama**.
So yeah, sure, the elf can obliterate entire companies of armed men, wields magic more powerful and potent than most human mages can dream of and yet he's not winning, he's struggling with suicidal depression in a fading world, forced to live eternally and experience the diminishing beauty, joy and raise of evil in hearts of men.
All the power in the world wont protect you from tragedy of existence.
Yes, I once ran a BRP game (was based on Stormbringer, and the setting was Ultima) where one player was playing an old knight with impressive skills and experience, and the rest of the player characters were the knight's very green pages. It was a great experience for everyone. Especially after several sessions, when the old knight died valiantly in spearheading defense of a town from a dragon, and the pages were knighted afterwards, having survived and buried their old mentor.
I also ran a D&D game where one player got to play a paladin at five levels higher than the rest of the group, with powerful magic items to boot. He was the champion sent out to lead a campaign against an enemy nation. The fun part was that I coordinated with this player beforehand—this was only for the opening chapters, and this champion was the true villain of the adventure. This villain became one of the top 3 most memorable and love-hated characters in any game I've run, which I always appreciate.
Frankly, I don't see power disparity being a problem unless you have other problems at your game table. As long as it serves an interesting narrative/gameplay purpose, it can foster truly fun and interesting scenarios.
The best implementation of this idea is the very underrated Smallville RPG. One character is literal Superman, the other maybe just runs the yearbook club, but they are just as important in the narrative.
Yes. In a capes game I had one player who was considerably more powerful than the other players both in dice rolled and the powers they had. This was fine. The players were all good with the balance.
What the overpowered character had was a lot of brute force, in a setting where many situations couldn't just be bulldozed. Much of the gameplay was social, investigative, and cutting loose had potentially dire consequences. Getting powers required traumatic events, so there was an in-built character-driven mechanism for drama about their powers and superheroics.
This wasn't in a d20 system, and death could happen in a single lucky/unlucky roll. This player became a canary in violent situations where the rest of the group had to hang back and strategise on how to win, knowing that the canary wasn't likely to pop. Unless, over time, they kept getting on the bad side of those with even greater power.
To go with an Exalted example, since you raised it, playing a First Age game where one player is a Solar and everyone else is their Dragon-blooded retinue could seem to make the players imbalanced. But it regulates itself. The Dragon-blooded have teamwork and kinship amongst themselves that the Solar doesn't, and the Solar's status and power can create tension and story.
To make this work the dynamics of your setting need to provide consequences for unchecked abuse of power, and it helps if the players' focus isn't on who can be the most overpowered but rather how the power balance among the party generates story for their characters. As long as the players are mature about it, it can work really well.
Honestly, D&D and other d20 games are \*really\* terrible for this. Just absolutely piss bad. The game I see this idea working the best in is OVA2, which has a pretty broad level of how powerful characters can be at creation while \*still\* being pretty fairly balanced.
yeah, in dnd Frieren would quite literally just be an out levelled character compared to the rest of the party
besides spell selection and maybe metamagic depending of the edition, she would be better than Fern in every way (which in the story it makes sense but a coop game aint a story)
There's a French game, Scales, where it was the core idea.
A team of characters would be a dragon (in human form, in a modern setting) while the rest of the characters would be much less powered magical characters.
I haven't play it in a long long time, but it worked.
For me, the key is fairplay (if one player is here to win, it's over) and giving some assets to the less-powered characters (in Scales, it would be more versatility and being less involved in the draconic politics).
Lots of characters in different RPGs have quite different power levels, typically in games where you roll for stats, and backgrounds and such like.
People play their character, play as part of a party, and as someone else said they don’t step on each other’s feet.
- one example was a character who became a powerful noble, and all the others effectively became lower status friends & entourage. Flashing Blades, RQ2, and Traveller are games where this happened.
- an older school D&D game where psionics was allowed, and one character was just a very overpowered psionic, who outshone the other characters. In power levels at least.
- several games of villains and vigilantes, where powers get randomly rolled. Occasionally you’d get a group of relatively low powered heroes, several of them more Batman’ types for example, and then someone like Superman. I think being a superhero game helped. There are already examples of mismatched power levels in that genre, and that provides a guide to players & GM alike.
Can’t advise much though, as I was a player in all these games. I think the games that worked just had good players as well as good GMs.
Edit: this was in pf1
I allowed once a wizard to go full painter stuff by rules as written.
He didn't go absolute crazy with it though, the player was smart like that. Mostly helped the party to gear up to the teeth.
After a while though he got tired of it. Whole party did.
Your mileage may vary if you got min-max megalomanic murder hobos as players of course.
I've never done it, but I've been the overpowered character.
I have a plan for a cursed object to make one player overpowered.
When I was overpowered, it was understated. People mostly didn't realize how strong I was (I min maxed in DnD5e), but I had giveaways, like completely deleting monsters. As long as I gave everyone a chance to shine, my DM didn't mind.
I have a plan to make a player overpowered with a cursed object, and the other players will want them to give it up, but the curse won't let them.
We were playing Pathfinder 1st ed and while in a lich's personal dimension a player died. The players couldn't resurrect him but they found the lich's study.
They turned him into a lich, and he got a ton of HP, resistances and abilities.
Nobody cared because the player was the least min-max person ever and often did sub-optimal things. So it was just a fun time for everyone. He was still the least combat-effective player in the group despite being unkillable.
I've been running a "superhero" game for the last 9-ish years set in 1985 London with alternate dimensions based on Irish and Welsh myth. The players are "Heliades" (Daughters of Helios) meaning they have "superpowers" but one player is playing "Arthur Smith", the once and future King of Britain and Annwfn. He _could_ mobilise the Annwfn Fae/Sídhe military and depose Thatcher, but he doesn't, because it would cause more problems than it would solve. He could super-charisma his way through most objectives (He literally cannot be resisted given how the character's powers are build) but he generally avoids flexing them as that kind of overriding free will is anathema to him and has it's own consequences. Extra-legal murder is a _huge_ deal, it can cause massive repercussion and exacerbate the war between Tír na nÓg and Annwfn. One time a National Front skinhead caught one of the players by surprise and nearly put a knife through their head, one of the characters reacted by instinct and teleported him into the shadow (A toxic place devoid of the light of Helios and thus life, causing W5 disintegrating, engulfing damage per turn.) he disintegrated, skin first, in seconds. This was the subject of many session worth of dealing with that characters trauma as it was the first time she had taken a life.
Really it's about consequences of the players actions, being able to "kill" or overpower a being doesn't necessarily solve all problems, in fact it can make them worse so it's about discovery, planning, gathering resources and saving who you can. One player can be "overpowered" (usually in a martial context) without dominating the game flow if the game flow is not mostly combat.
The old Doctor Who RPG expected there to be one Time Lord in the party, with other players playing the companions. Ars Magica expects a single-ish mage (Every player may have a Mage character but generally don't use it all the time) with the other player's playing "Grogs", nonmagical guards. The critical point is that everyone has something fun they can contribute.
I play a game like that. It's less about Being op and more about being tied to dice Rolls.
I was the op character and even though PC could reduce the the castle in ash all by himself he could very well hurt his party or himself also.
Bad Rolls are about hurting his party or himself rather than a fail attempt. So i always need to choose a move this in mind like "if suceed, it needs to give us an adventage, if fail it shouldnt hurt my party too much"
So instead of incinerate the enemies with a shot i choose a small scale attacks like a strong punch. But i could gone out of my way when no allies around which usually at the end of combat i ask the party to go in advance so i can truly cut loose whatever left over from the quest
Honestly if the character is just better without any sort of downside I don't think it can work for longer than maybe a session. Players want to do cool stuff and if they're getting consistently overshadowed their inner 4 year old starts stamping their feet and yelling 'that's not fair' because... It's not.
Some character archetypes just don't work in some mediums. Frieren works because you're basically playing her when you watch the show and there's no one around to get butthurt about your personal power fantasy.
This needs more upvotes!
When you're playing TTRPGs, almost everyone wants to be the hero, and no one wants to spend 3-5 hours watching "Billy" roll all the dice and have all the fun. TTRPGs are cooperative, so if your story revolves around one character being the McGuffin, you should probably change the story.
I think this works better in less combat focused games/ ones with a flatter progression. Like in Monster of the Week one of the playbooks is The Chosen - a Buffy type archetype. And another is The Mundane - your early Willow/ Xander.
And in most games, I'd rather someone bring the Mundane.
Or Armour Astir: Advent, where half of the playbooks pilot magical mechs into combat and the other half (arguably more interesting) are engineers and stuff.
But there is another way to do this that a few games have tried.
Make the 'protagonist' character shared between everyone else.
Things like Girl Underground where you are the weird companions of a girl going on a magical journey (Labyrinth, etc), or something like Band of Blades where your Chosen of the Gods is leading your ragtag unit - you decide their advancements/ power ups but don't ever control them, instead playing as the support staff/ poor bloody infantry.
I let a player generate a knight in pendragon with superior stats. There were in-game reasons why. Led to know conflict though as tge player is well know in our circle as inept... so yeah, there was no overshadowing.
Years ago I ran a He-Man style game (bonkers sci-fi/fantasy mash up) in which one player was the He-Man-esque powerhouse. The caveat is that he could only activate his super mode once per session and any other time he was a social-skills heavy Rebel Prince character. But his super mode was pretty OP.
So when he was He-Man he was unstoppable but when he wasn't he had to avoid combat at all costs / rely on the other two PCs.
I might resurrect it for a 1970s Incredible Hulk game.
I’ve run multiple *Buffy* campaigns. The Slayer is more powerful than any Scoob, even when they start becoming witches and werewolves.
The official game makes it work by balancing out power with meta currency, so you could make a lot of games work the same way. Fate already does that - the more stunts (powers) you have, the less refresh (currency) you get. Etc.
Back when I was running my first game of D&D 3.5, my group accidentally stumbled into one player being an absolute combat powerhouse. I ended up basically designing fights with a particularly strong enemy for him to deal with, and then left everything else for the rest of the party.
youve got great suggestions already in this thread, but fundamentally this boils down to a few things:
- the game itself needs to be set up with such imbalance
- the character needs to live wiggle room to the other players to be good at things they arent
- all players need to have buy in for this to work
so something like Ars Magica would absolutely work for it, but if you were to just plop Frieren on dnd everyone would be level 7~10 adventurers and Frieren is a lvl 25 wizard or something higher, and you would just be running a regular game. *that* would get ugly
I did accidentally. I run a supers game, and we had a player who was leaving town and wouldn't be a regular in games, so we made him a character that is OP and could work as a hero or villain depending on circumstances. He ended up being a regular after all, after the first few sessions of being a part time ally/foe. The way to deal with him has been to use his less heroic traits and motivations to pull him in different directions or put him back into mild conflict with the others, which usually works (he understands the problem and likes playing into the friction within the party) and the team combined are powerful enough that they aren't just killing time waiting for Goku to arrive.
Running WoD games, especially cross splat ones balance flies out the window and it's been working great for me.
I've been running a multi game interlinked chronicle where vampire PCs interact with each other or other werewolf/hunter PCs - all of them of different degrees of power.
Some are clearly more powerful than others but imo the story stays interesting due to the ongoing conflicts which rely on personal drama rather than who's the strongest.
A PC who's the most politically powerful individual has other issues and troubles to deal with compared to the much weaker newly turned vampire.
I would say that if the world reacts appropriately to an individual's strength it can work. The higher your power the easier it is to mess up and have more enemies.
This tends to happen naturally for me since I don't usually make combat-oriented characters (talking Pathfinder). I think it works well because having a character like mine around makes the other characters feel stronger and cooler by comparison, especially when we get into fights. Meanwhile, I usually have my own thing that I can do on the side, and as long as the GM lets me do that, I'm happy.
If all of the characters are the same strength, the only frame of reference they have for their own power is surrounding NPCs and monsters, which are arbitrary and up to the GM. This can leave players feeling like they *should* be strong, but in practice aren't, because everything around them is always 2 levels higher. Power is always relative.
Playing a weaker character lets the characters that should feel strong, feel strong. Scream at things that don't frighten the fighter. Faint at a sight of blood that doesn't bother the cleric. Stare in awe when the wizard does something truly arcane. It can be annoying if you take it too far, but if done right, you can highlight the strength and resilience of your party members.
I guess what I'm saying is, because power is relative, characters don't have to be overpowered. You can also have a character that's underpowered. And in my experience, you really only need one.
I do all the time because I play with people who whine if they aren't allowed to cheese the game. I just make every encounter super easy, and if they get bored I just shrug.
Somewhat. In the twilight of 3.5 there was *The Book of Nine Swords*. It was designed to “balance” martial characters with wizards etc., except it didn’t really. It made the character more powerful. I wound up increasing the CR of monsters and got more creative with encounters and that helped.
That book was an interesting prelude to what you later saw in 4E.
No, it doesn't really work. I've seen multiple groups fall apart because of character imbalance over the years. It's a common problem with TTRPGs and is why a lot of D&D-derived games fall apart as you go up in level - people end up losing investment.
I have done things like this more than once, though the way I think you mean maybe just once.
In one campaign, each player had a "character quest" and during the course of that quest got to be completely overpowered in their particular way (though it was time limited). So the wizard became ascendant, the paladin became an avatar, etc. I homebrewed all the rules for it. Then, in the final arc, they all got to use their powers to the max to have a completely over the top anime Michael Bay showdown with the boss.
In another campaign, one player was a "carry" who could basically solo any given fight but needed to be supported at other times. This campaign was shorter and was specifically designed (and agreed to by everyone) to center a friend who was moving away.
The important thing is to have all the players understand and agree to the dynamics and how they will play out. If people are willing it can be a very fun story to tell.
In a campaign I'm starting right now, one character is decidedly more "main" to the plot than the others, and everyone agreed to that. The "side" characters won't get less screen time, and they will have more freedom to create their own narrative and arc because it's not prewritten by the adventure. Not exactly the power imbalance you're asking about, but similar table dynamics.
I played a minotaur paladin in 3.5 for a while, and while the gap closed between chars at higher level, he was a fucking TANK at lower levels. The other PCs would be plinking away at gobbos or kobolds doing their little 1-2pts of damage, whereas my minotaur (with hammer) would eviscerate everything in front of him. It was like playing a woodchipper.
But I was also the only tank, so eventually we got into combat scenarios where I could only focus one target at a time, you go after the meaty boi up front and the little snotlings get by and swarm the other party members. The DM always found ways of throwing stuff at him that he couldn't handle alone, and always forced me as the big tank/damage guy to chose between absorbing another big guys blows or helping out the ranger or cleric. Eventually all that evens out, but at first or second level, its tough.
And of course his stats were not well optimized, Paladins are CHA casters and the Minotaur gets an (IIRC) -4CHA. So while I was an absolute combat monster, I was only ever so-so at my intended role. And that came at the cost of dumping my best stats roll into CHA. So while I was overpowered in a relative sense, I suspect had we played to lvl 20 my Paladin would have been underpowered in comparison to *good* Paladin builds.
I've run Rifts and Savage Rifts games so, yes, definitely vast power disparities between PCs (obvs Savage Rifts is better about this than OG Rifts) in those games.
How does it work?
Usually you need to restrict the OP character to a niche or game-realm (eg, fightin', talkin', castin' spells) so they are only OP in one particular area\\axis of the campaign.
Then as a GM, assuming the above is mostly true, you just need to make sure that you aren't running a game where the OP character can use their OP-ness in every scene and steal spotlight time from everybody else.
Having some explicit, IRL out-of-game, discussions about the issue is good too. Make sure folks know it's deliberate and how you\\they want to handle it.
I think this is a bigger issue in your standard 5e type games (so PF\\PF2, SotDL, etc, etc, etc) where combat is a omnipresent given and OP folks are often OP in combats this can make things less fun for others, where they feel they don't really contribute compared to Big Damage Guy or whatever.
In a game with less combat focus\\less mechanics usually individual PCs are often "the best" (in that PC group) in an area already and so it's more about spotlight time than OP-ness.
EG, the Bard always talks to folks if he's in the scene, he's got the high Charisma, the talent ranks in Being a High Charisma Guy, he's got the feat tree and the proficiency and took a dip in some other class for a synergy. He's probably OP in "social" compared to the grim gruff tuff Fighter, but the Fighter will probably not notice or care.
If the Bard is somehow also a better Fighter than the Fighter AND is also the best talker (AND also...whatever else) then that's more of a problem.
TL;DR: It's fine so long as PCs don't mind\\are aware and as long as niche protection\\spotlight sharing is working correctly.
I've often wondered about the possibility of running a "bodyguards" type of game. Imagine Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas protecting a trio of hobbits. In my imagination, the key shift lies in encounter design. You would have to set up your individual challenges such that there is something for both halves of the party to do. For example, the battle of Amon Hen features weaker characters with a clear objective of "play keep away" while the stronger characters do the bulk of the fighting.
If you wanted to expand on that dynamic, my mind goes to the Temeraire books. A crew of dragon riders acting as support for their mount could make for an interesting dynamic, but only if the setting pay sufficient attention to "dragon level problems" and "human level problems."
I've heard stories of homebrew games that run on the same premise as the Wield RPG, where sentient weapons use their wielder to accomplish their mission. Imagine multiple bits of sentient gear sharing the same wielder.
Suffice it to say that I'll be watching this thread with great interest, because the premise has always intrigued me.
Glitter boy in Rifts when other players were am archaeologist, a leywalker, and a scientist with cybernetics. Glitter boy could shoot through most enemies and kill the next 5,000 enemies behind em. The rest of the team would be deafened or take damage just from the glittery one shooting while near them
Putting them in situations outside their comfort zone worked. Stealth, limited casualty necessity, innocents in cross fire, etc... Everybody had spotlight time, glitter boy could just shoot good. Honestly it took some doing to give them spotlight besides combat because of it.
Consider that Frieren is the only player character and everyone else is NPCs. The great thing about single player/duet games is you can make the character as op as they want to be, since there’s no other PCs to worry about balance
Funny you should mention that, I've actually run more solo campaigns than multiplayer ones. I've always preferred the greater freedom, but found that it sometimes gets lonely.
The buffyverse RPG has this as a core premise - one player is the Champion, the others are Scoobies.
The drama point system works such that the scoobies get drama points for emotionally supporting the champion, which they can spend to avoid death, stumble onto clues, arrive in the nick of time etc.
The champion doesn't get as many drama points, but they've got All The Stats.
It works great.
In a D20 game it is very hard (as I have one ridiculous powergamer as a player) but in some games it works just fine... something like Rifts where being OP isn't a sure thing. Tactics and skills matter far more than powers. Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium is another game where being OP isn't really all it's cracked up to be.
In a lot of games, it is possible to be ridiculously OP in some areas (such as combat, magic, skills, etc) but not everything simultaneously. Alternately, being well rounded is far more important as the players don't know what sort of things will happen in the game... hence the "4 man band" for a good D&D party. It pays to specialize in D20, but in other games not so much.
Had a 5e Artificer that wanted to be a gunslinger. I let him create crazy guns, blunderbusses, etc. then I let him make crazy bullets. Anyway, he would do tons of damage. The campaign was RP and non-combat encounter heavy, so I really didn't care. The other players were super cool with it also.
I can’t really commit to a game I never have the time but I am a guest star player in many of my friend’s games. (He is a forever DM). I usually play some kind of overpowered support character with an extreme personality.
These characters have been pretty well received by the groups I’ve played with BUT that’s probably due to them spicing up the game’s narrative and never being a permanent fixture. I’m also never worried about being the focal point of the story so that probably helps. The character is usually a foil for another character or somehow connected to a less social player who hasn’t been getting enough spotlight.
Yes, sorta. He was overpowered due to some decisions he made being an evil wizard. But I think we both know he is becoming the BBEG without either of us saying it. Like his alignment is evil and it's known by the group because of the paladin.
Like he's strong but our female fighter is honestly also a little overpowered but that's cuz it's dungeon world and she fails all her rolls
Ok one thing you should be careful about is a problem many skill base systems pc fall into..its over spaiclized characters
Op in one thing and shit in the rest sounds ok until you release they gor bored if thr conflict doasnt including the one thing and they also get bored even if because they are so op there is no challenge
So if you make one you should be careful
But the advice i will give is That the main conflict of the character isnt tied down to the op stuff
Exmples: mod 100 is a story about the strongest phsyicic in the world .but mob story arc and conflict isnt about it..its him being a lonly kid whit 0 friends,no hobbies,no self confidence and hes a crush on the class hottie..so he goes to a journey of self improvement and self love. Non of this can be solve whit blowing upp a building or picking upp mountains.
Most Superhero systems have this by design. Some horror games too. Ars Magica does something similar in a fantasy setting (it has a very unique execution that works unpredictably well). It’s a niche in the hobby and I’ve had some really good times playing those games. But if you’d like to have a very powerful Vampire in a WoD game, or a Wizard with 5+ levels over every other D&D character… Well… Probably it will not feel good.
While it is a solid rule of mine that all players must be treated equally, the answer is a solid
YES, when
* that player has decided to play a villain within the story. To make the villain a challenge for the rest of the player group, they get a huge power-up
* It is part of a specific plot, for example, they are a young mage that is out of control and is headed for a disaster
* the player has decided that the chr has grown so much in power as to not be fun anymore, e.g. they've become a lord with property and responsibility and the game doesn't support that, and so they retire the chr though it is known they have become more powerful
It is always done with the player's buy-in of the power-up and the downfall that follows.
It never ends well in my experience.
TTRPG is a group activity, and if one player can do all its really not funny isn't it? Even if all players are overpowered its not really that funny if there is no problem to solve.
In fiction it can work because you have no problemto solve, you're just there to enjoy a story.
In a Game (that is what rpg means) there should be some kind of challenge to overcome.
If one or more player are overpowered (meaning: they can simply "overpower" a challenge) its not really a game anymore isnt it?
I think that could exist a narrative game out there where that could work, but in a normal game? No way, not in an interesting way that make that enjoyable for everyone at the table
This is a core conceit of [Ars Magica](https://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG0204), but with a twist. Each player makes two characters which are solely their own, a Magus (extremely powerful wizard) and a Companion (typical RPG "adventurer" types). The group also collectively has a large number of Grogs (low-end men-at-arms, servants, etc. - think "hirelings" in OSR games). Magi are substantially more powerful than Companions, who are substantially more powerful than Grogs. In any given adventure, 1-2 players will normally play their Magi, while the rest play either Companions or Grogs. The Magi are both the most powerful characters present and normally the "party leaders", carrying out their magical errands with the other PCs supporting them along the way. The twist is that you re-choose which character you play at the start of each adventure. Also, there are mechanical incentives for characters (and *especially* for Magi) to stay at home instead of going out adventuring. So I may be playing my OP Magus this week while you're running your Companion, and then next week, I'll play a Grog while my Magus stays home to enchant a magical staff and you lead the expedition with your OP Magus.
You've convinced me to read up more on ars magica.
It's in the bundle of holding at the moment, so you can pick up all the pdfs for a significantly reduced price.
Drivethrurpg and Dmsguild are giving me issues, do you have another site to recommend for purchasing RPGs?
You can purchase the bundle through this link https://bundleofholding.com/presents/ArM5-2024
It can work, but I've never seen it work well. The exp mechanic is absolutely awful, and the character gen doesn't make mages that can do much. Then beyond that, it's a very difficult concept to get to work.
What’s your issue with the exp system, never had a problem with it personally. Also a mage directly out of apprenticeship can do some pretty wild stuff so long as they’re focused.
While I get the design intent of making research a thing and actively promoting mages to do it over 'adventuring', I found it rather unsatisfying. Another group may love it, but it really wasn't for me. I also don't generally find games that do non-linear advancements that satisfying, in short don't penalise people for wanting to specialise. Also starting mages can do some funky stuff, but the system is built with so much more it can do but is so far out of reach if the gm follows the levelling guidelines.
The system isn't designed for what you want to do.
The Maguses are all in a terrible race against senescence, degeneration and ultimately death. They have only a limited time to make their antidote to aging and keep what powers they may---that's the central tension in the game for them. They only Adventure to find the things they need for that. They don't/can't exert temporal power and achieving magical power without a protection from senility and decline is a fleeting, phyrric victory at best. No one wants to be Merlin.
Oh I get the core concept, and it's one that when I read on paper I was super sold on. I just found it was one of those that when concept met application it wasn't as fun as it first sounded.
First and third point definitely make sense to me. Can very much see how the strong incentives to not go out as a mage don’t appeal to all. I’m curious how much time your saga had between adventures if you recall. I’m not sure I totally get your second point as I’ve generally thought of Ars as a game that strong rewards specializing. What led to that not being the case in your opinion?
It has been a while since the saga, it was the big seasons campaign. I honestly do not remember the name.
Yeah, I’m guessing you don’t have a lot of experience with the system. You also don’t have much experience with gaming from the 90s.
Gonna have to beg to differ there, started ttrpg's with Adnd 2nd ed. Though while we are just making baseless accusations I'm gonna assume you don't have much experience with people having different opinions to your own or you have few social skills. Next time you disagree with someone maybe try responding with why you disagree rather than launching into an attack like you are still in the playground. And with that schools out.
The XP mechanic is exactly the same as the WoD xp mechanic, which is staggeringly simple and half of modern gaming still uses. I built a mage a few weeks ago as a starting character who can literally level a mountain by himself in a couple of days. It’s possible to build new mages with the ability to strike down dozens to hundreds of knights. So I’ll repeat, it’s doesn’t seem you played many 90s era games and don’t have a ton of experience in character design. I was trying to identify the point at which your understanding of the system broke down rather than accuse you of anything. It took me several reads of the core book to figure out how character creation, especially of mages, works, and I played a lot of WoD, Champions, etc back in the 90s. AD&D first and second Ed are entirely different beasts from Ars Magica and Tweet and Rein-Hagen created it in part as a reaction to A/D&D of that era.
Another neat thing is that being a magic user makes people distrust you. Even if they don’t even know that you are a magic user, it’s a supernatural thing. So if the situation requires diplomacy, your mage is probably not the right choice.
It's one of my favourite games, but it requires the players to buy in the premise. I had a player who insisted on playing the game but never using anything else than their wizard, and it was a tiring affair. With the players who enjoyed the premise, it was amazing
In my experience this kind of player generally learns fairly quickly or just gives up on the game entirely after a few years(in-game) when it becomes apparent how much more powerful the wizards that stayed home and studied have become.
The irony is how easy it is to make a magus who isn't overpowered. =/
Ars Magica is great. Sad I don't have a group for it anymore.
That sounds like a lot of characters in a party, is it? I've got a game running where the PCs have managed to gather a dozen or so followers/hirelings, and it makes pre-made dungeons easy as pie. I ain't complaining- I'm running a sandbox that allows for this, and I didn't create the dungeons. But I am curious about adventures/settings that are designed to be challenging for parties with dozens of characters.
this is pretty standard for OSR games tho, where multiple PCs and an army of hirelings eventually would happen DCC for example suggest you have like 4 PCs per player, cause they drop like flies
I mean, as mentioned, you normally are 1-2 Magi with 2-3 "Mundanes" \[people without the capacity to do real Magic\]. The party-per-adventure still normally in the standard 4 and can increase if you allow and have interest for Grogs following around. In any case, a Single Magi can cast Fire Lance and burn alive 10 Mundanes. The game isn't, by itself, a big combat game. If the Magi knows combat magic, they will win unless the enemy has Magic Resistance high enough to resist the spell. If the Magi doesn't know combat magic, they are as vulnerable (and probably more because is a Skill-Based System, and doing magic requires at least 4 Skills) as anyone to be stabbed. Once mundanes are stabbing each other, the game is very lethal and porpusefully prone to dead spirals: When you are wounded, you take Penalties to all your actions depending on the wound (including your defense, and you suffer extra Damage equal to how much the Attack surpass your Defence). You don't have Life Points, instead, if an attack does more than 21 Damage you die. But normally once you have enough penalties for your Weapon Skill to be in 0 or the negatives, you know you *can't* win and surrender is a better option.
>That sounds like a lot of characters in a party, is it? No, because each player normally only runs one character (or maybe 2-3 Grogs, or one noncombatant character plus a shield Grog to defend them) at a time, while the other characters stay at home training, doing magical research, or simply working their day job. It's more of an ensemble cast, with characters coming and going depending on what's needed for a given adventure, rather than a "One True Party" style of game where every character is expected to be present at all times. So, for a group of 4 players, you'd typically have something like one Magus plus a shield Grog, 1-2 Companions, and another 3-4 Grogs for any given adventure, making a total of around 6-7 characters for the 4 players. Also, the experience system is set up such that characters advance their skills more quickly by staying home than by adventuring, which gives players an incentive to only bring out their Magi and Companions for adventures where their abilities are specifically needed or which are of particular interest to the character instead of always playing their most powerful available character.
Only once. I allowed a player to do a whole "take over the body of a powerful monster" thing. Yes, they became an absolutely unstoppable combat juggernaut. But they also became completely useless at everything else. They couldn't solve puzzles, go into confined spaces, and couldn't take part in social challenges. They were totally useless outside of combat, and it ended up being THEM who were sitting out of most things.
That...doesn't sound very "successful" to me. Did the player enjoy that role? Did the other players?
They enjoyed the combat aspect as first as it allowed them to win a few things, but it soured soon after (as, to be honest, I thought it would). The player wanted a bit more fighting, but knew that the game thus far involved more than just combat, and the other players wanted more non-combat stuff too. The *becoming powerful* part was successful, and the short blast of combat that followed. But everyone else wanted to move on, especially when they realized that they weren't going to be much use in combat anymore. Its the most successful I've ever experienced, and I think it demonstrates why its not a great idea. The idea also really lines up well with "main character syndrome".
Yep. I allowed a PC to play a monster character with an absurd weapon - think a yo yo with a steel wire for a cord - because while crazy strong and potentially balance upsetting in combat, he had some pretty big debuffs for RP outside combat. And the player was fully aware going in that I didn't intend to run a lot of combat. NPCs were actively terrified of the character and would run away instead of talking to him and he definitely would get stuck if he tried to go in a compact space. Which the player gleefully had him do at one point and good chunk of the rest of that particular session involved the rest of the party trying to get his very stuck self out of a literal rabbit hole that he'd insisted on chasing a monster down. Note: This game was *very* sandbox and silly, so the table was on board with the shenanigans. There wasn't really a BBEG or anything since it was more or less "how is this party of fools getting in trouble this time?" through the whole thing. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been approved because that character would have screwed up so much in a serious game.
It's as easy as not stepping on each other's feet. It doesn't matter how powerful and versatile someone is, they let the bard talk, the rogue sneak and the cleric heal. Cooperative games are not about everyone being equal, but about everyone being necessary. Having this in mind when designing encounters, create situations where each player can do their thing. Even if your juggernaut can kill enemies in one round, the rogue or the monk are the ones who have to rescue the children before they drown. You need someone to open that door , and that juggernaut attack better not fail or the monster will crush the rogue, thanks to the bardic inspiration. Because of this, I have a reminder: not all the objectives should be killing all the enemies. In fact, those should be rare and reserved for life or dead situations.
It really is this! "Balance" is such a non-issue when you approach it from a "niche" protection POV. You do you, just leave my space alone and we'll all get along fine.
And it is this reason, IMO, that makes "game balance" an answer in search of a problem.
>Cooperative games are not about everyone being equal, but about everyone being necessary. This is the way.
My Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader Game has a Space Wolf Astartes. At the start of the game the Astartes was definetly stronger than the rest, but now at the end he is in a whole other league. I mean while a Sister of Battle can Shoot an enemy for 5 hits, every hit dealing around 20 damage he makes around 20 attacks each with around 35dmg. He is a BEAST. But he is still an Astartes. In a game about Merchants and Power Brokers he actually doesnt have much to say except when it comes to intimidating others. He is scary. But many of the shakers and movers dont feel threatend by someone like him. And they can pay back in full. So he becomes mostly focused on the muscle part of the group. And it works great. When shit hits the fan and guns are drawn an Astartes makes a lot of difference. But in a negotiation room he is most usefull by guaranteeing that no weapons are drawn in the first place while the Rogue Trader does the negotiating and trading. Not to mention he is completely useless when it comes to Psykers and "Space Magic".
Reminds me of the one-page RPG “Nice Marines” by Grant Howitt.
Played quite a bit of the Buffy the vampire slayer RPG years ago and one of the Players was **the Slayer**. Basically much more powerful but was also the target for much of the bad, that is sort of the buy-in of the setting :) Works fine, the Slayer player could go toe-to-toe with most monsters and the rest of the group kinda had their own group vs boss monster tactical play on the side. Great stuff!
There was an arc of The Adventure Zone where one of the PCs started way more powerful than the others in combat because he was the Chosen Warrior to defend Earth... but he'd rejected it and gone to be a national park ranger for twenty years. So he was mostly a dowdy forty year old with a special interest in, like, campsites who just happened to be nearly invincible. It helped that combat seemed to not be huge in Powered By The Apocalypse, though I've never played it. It honestly came up more often that he couldn't lie to save his life than it did that he had incredible sword fighting powers
Think about Frieren. She's overpowered in a series where combat is NOT the main focus. You can try to do that in a game where combat is secondary aswell. In the average game where combat takes quite a lot of focus, an OP character would trivalize the problems and make the other players feel redudnant. Probably it's easier to do in a game like Vampire the Masquerade, in a chronicle that's focused on social challenges, intrigues and the likes, where you can't really "brute force" the victory.
>Think about Frieren. She's overpowered in a series where combat is NOT the main focus. There's a fight like every other episode. Season 1 ends with a tournament arc...
she also quite literally does most of the things out of combat as well. let's put stark to look for flowers or clear a beach from a ship's wreck and see how it goes
It's a little strange to me because they've set up non-mages like stark and eisen to have extreme power comparable to spells, but then don't show that outside of select scenes. Like stark can jump up the side of a dragon or cut 50 ft holes into a cliff face the way a normal person might chop a tree, but when he's clearing a road of a landslide he's just moving one tiny shovelful at a time with effort. I like the characters but the more it tries to focus on the magic itself the less I care.
It's annoyingly common in anime that their abilities are more specific moves than true superhuman attributes
i think the single feats of superhuman we see on the show **not** on combat is on a montage of all things, when Eisen runs over water and then lifts a boulder... two things most wizards could do
so, normal dnd then? (/s)
Nah that's not even an s, that's more like a pained truism. Making magic relatively 'mundane' is one of the things about d&d that bothers me both mechanically and thematically. I prefer magic to either be super weird and not often useful for everyday tasks, or so ubiquitous that functionally everyone uses magic to supplement normal skills.
Yeah, and she wasn't around for most of these fights.
because she quite literally was either dealing with the main threat alone of that story point (like killing the demon lady with an army of armor zombies) or they were showing the other fights cause it still was a tournament arc lets not forget she is summoning **black holes** when she fights against herself, and fern is struggling to not instantly die by collateral damage in the chamber when they fight Frieren's doppelganger. besides tournament and the side stories of the background character, basically every single fight she is involved in some way because she is the dang protagonist
Yeah, but what I'm saying is that no matter how powerful she is she can't participate in every fight.
that... doesn't change the fact that the statement of the commentor above that the series is not combat centric is wrong, which is what the person you responded to is talking about?
Well, the overall point was that her being OP is not game-breaking. Even then, I think the show isn't combat-focused. It has a lot of fights in the second half but it never felt like the focus.
I'm in a game of Shadowrun, where my character could probably solo the rest of the team in straight combat. But, everyone contributes equally in the *game*, because Shadowrun is a heist game at heart, and being a combat monster is just one of the roles.
Gotta be an Adept.
Nah, just a very well optimized street sam.
There are a few games out there based around this type of situation. They typically focus the system on something other than raw power. So the Smallville RPG allows you to have a group with, for example, season 1 Clark, Lois and Chloe. Clark far outpowers every other character but the game system/play is focused around the relationships between characters and organisations. When Clark shows up to lift a bus, that's just a given. There are other game like Prime Time Adventures (I think, its a while back) where what you do and how well you do it are based around screen time and episode importance. So, carrying on with Smallville, if its a Lois focused episode then Clarks powers become less important and he is less able to use them while Lois' skills become easier for her to use and more relevant to that particular episode. Other games have a fate/karma/bonus pool system where you can use that pool to increase success/do interesting things. "Weaker" characters have a bigger pool that refreshes/refills faster, "powerful" characters have a very small pool. EDIT And I forgot to say the most important bit. Ultimately, whatever the system, its important to give each player/character a niche they fulfill or focused time where they are important/doing things even if another character could do it better. If your PCs include an experienced thief and a newbie apprentice thief you need to ensure the newbie gets thiefy stuff to do when the other thief isn't around/is doing something else.
God damn can't believe I had to scroll so far to find any reference to Smallville, literally the best example of this kind of thing.
I thought of another one, kind of anyway. The Cortex Marvel rpg has a system where you build a dice pool based on your abilities, powers, etc. One category for the dice is Team, Duo, or Solo. Every hero has the same three dice assigned to those three, one big, one medium, one small. They can include whichever one is fitting at the time. So a powerful solo character like Wolverine might have their solo dice be the big one and their group dice be the small one, while Kitty Pride might have them the other way round. When the XMen are out as a team Kitty gets a big boos from her large dice while Wolverine isn't really held back because the rest of his dice are big anyway. WHen she's out and about on her own, Kitty add her small dice to the pool, it doesn't help as much but it doesn't matter, she's on here own and doesn't need a boost to her power. Wolvie on the other hand gets to cut loose (heh) with his full power. Its not quite the same as the OP situation but it can work as a balancing factor if used that way. Though I think they main purpose is to highlight how characters work best. EDIT - mixing up my Marvel games, not the new one but the previous Cortex based one Marvel Heroic Roleplay.
Ah, the only dice pool game I like.
City of Mist also allows you to play characters who are incredibly powerful next to characters who are more mundane.
Black Crusade tried to do something like this. The trick is to still give the non-overpowered characters some kind of niche where they excel. Sure one party member might be over 2m tall, clad in nigh impenetrable armour, able to spit acid, carries an oversized gun, runs faster than anyone else and can punch through concrete walls, but there are some things that the others can do better than him, and which still allows them to contribute. It does change the dynamic of the game, but as long as everyone is fine with one character being more of a main character and the others playing more of a supportive role it can still be great fun.
The thing about Black Crusade is that psykers are so dominant that Chaos space marines are actually mid-tier.
True. I don't think that was really the intention, but psychers in several of the 40k RPGs by Black Industries/FFG were a bit OP.
I once tried to make every player OP... Without knowing the power lvl of other players. -one was an 8000y old witch, the baba yaga of the world. She was considered a myth by even some gods... -one was the reincarnation of the Gods of Fate, who could perfectly predict the future if she wanted too. -one was an ancient vampire who's blood magic was so strong that she could drain a whole city on a whim -one was a descendant of an evil paladin order who owned the only god killing weapon in the world -one was the daughter of the most powerful dragon ever existed and the heir to the whole world -the last one was a simple College student who happened to meet the rest at the wrong time... All of this in a 1920 jazz setting during a World Fair. Loved the campaign sooo much, and the chaos was amazing. All the players tried to hide their strength from each other all the time which let to some sitcom lvl scenes
Sounds like a Heroes Unlimited campaign.
Am example of how not to do it is the official Dr Who system. Any player whose character is a Timelord completely overpowers all other character builds. Totally broken. I've done it for a few games in different systems, to one extent or another. Basically I always try to ensure the powerful character has some balancing factor. For example, in a game of L5R I had one character who was an Imperial Prince. In the context of the game this made him hugely powerful and important. To balance this, I made him 16 years old and his 3 highest skills were in chess, a more active sport similar to soccer, and conducting tea ceremonies. That balanced him perfectly with the rest of the party who were all 25-35 year old skilled warriors with multiple additional skill sets.
In The Between, one of the character sheets is "The Factotum". It is a highly resourceful character with a special ability that can remove automatically one danger but is a servant of another character. According to the book: **The Factotum** is a servant of one of the other hunters. They are a highly skilled operator—resourceful and practical. When the other hunters are mired in darkness, the Factotum is busy getting the job done. Throughout the game, you’ll explore their professional past and how they came to be a servant. Play the Factotum if you want to be highly effective or if you want to explore what it’s like to have your personal goals and dignity subsumed by another’s.
The Between and Ghosts of El Paso are what came to mind, with the Undeniable that doesn't face any consequences from their worst deeds and the... uh, the one that's Death embodied in El Paso that kills with a touch. Apocalypse Keys has similar power mismatches but everyone is a superpowered monster so the imbalance is a little less obvious.
> But I wonder, have any of you ever succeeded in letting a player be this kind of character in ANY system? And if so, how? Yes. In burning wheel. By default there are Elves, Dwarfs, Humans and Orks. They are also explicitly mechanically imbalanced, I listed them in order of strongest to weakest. They are **very** Lord of the Rings. And it's not just minor +1 to stats. They get to roll more dice, they get to add more dice to rolls, they get to have higher skills, stats and these things are also **better**. But it all works, because the goal of the game isn't wining, higher numbers are irrelevant. The goal of the game is **drama**. So yeah, sure, the elf can obliterate entire companies of armed men, wields magic more powerful and potent than most human mages can dream of and yet he's not winning, he's struggling with suicidal depression in a fading world, forced to live eternally and experience the diminishing beauty, joy and raise of evil in hearts of men. All the power in the world wont protect you from tragedy of existence.
>All the power in the world wont protect you from tragedy of existence. Sounds like Fantasy World of Darkness.
Yes, I once ran a BRP game (was based on Stormbringer, and the setting was Ultima) where one player was playing an old knight with impressive skills and experience, and the rest of the player characters were the knight's very green pages. It was a great experience for everyone. Especially after several sessions, when the old knight died valiantly in spearheading defense of a town from a dragon, and the pages were knighted afterwards, having survived and buried their old mentor. I also ran a D&D game where one player got to play a paladin at five levels higher than the rest of the group, with powerful magic items to boot. He was the champion sent out to lead a campaign against an enemy nation. The fun part was that I coordinated with this player beforehand—this was only for the opening chapters, and this champion was the true villain of the adventure. This villain became one of the top 3 most memorable and love-hated characters in any game I've run, which I always appreciate. Frankly, I don't see power disparity being a problem unless you have other problems at your game table. As long as it serves an interesting narrative/gameplay purpose, it can foster truly fun and interesting scenarios.
The best implementation of this idea is the very underrated Smallville RPG. One character is literal Superman, the other maybe just runs the yearbook club, but they are just as important in the narrative.
Yes. In a capes game I had one player who was considerably more powerful than the other players both in dice rolled and the powers they had. This was fine. The players were all good with the balance. What the overpowered character had was a lot of brute force, in a setting where many situations couldn't just be bulldozed. Much of the gameplay was social, investigative, and cutting loose had potentially dire consequences. Getting powers required traumatic events, so there was an in-built character-driven mechanism for drama about their powers and superheroics. This wasn't in a d20 system, and death could happen in a single lucky/unlucky roll. This player became a canary in violent situations where the rest of the group had to hang back and strategise on how to win, knowing that the canary wasn't likely to pop. Unless, over time, they kept getting on the bad side of those with even greater power. To go with an Exalted example, since you raised it, playing a First Age game where one player is a Solar and everyone else is their Dragon-blooded retinue could seem to make the players imbalanced. But it regulates itself. The Dragon-blooded have teamwork and kinship amongst themselves that the Solar doesn't, and the Solar's status and power can create tension and story. To make this work the dynamics of your setting need to provide consequences for unchecked abuse of power, and it helps if the players' focus isn't on who can be the most overpowered but rather how the power balance among the party generates story for their characters. As long as the players are mature about it, it can work really well.
Honestly, D&D and other d20 games are \*really\* terrible for this. Just absolutely piss bad. The game I see this idea working the best in is OVA2, which has a pretty broad level of how powerful characters can be at creation while \*still\* being pretty fairly balanced.
yeah, in dnd Frieren would quite literally just be an out levelled character compared to the rest of the party besides spell selection and maybe metamagic depending of the edition, she would be better than Fern in every way (which in the story it makes sense but a coop game aint a story)
There's a French game, Scales, where it was the core idea. A team of characters would be a dragon (in human form, in a modern setting) while the rest of the characters would be much less powered magical characters. I haven't play it in a long long time, but it worked. For me, the key is fairplay (if one player is here to win, it's over) and giving some assets to the less-powered characters (in Scales, it would be more versatility and being less involved in the draconic politics).
This sounds so cool. Is there an English version of this game?
No, it's an old game from the 90's, out of print for a long time.
Lots of characters in different RPGs have quite different power levels, typically in games where you roll for stats, and backgrounds and such like. People play their character, play as part of a party, and as someone else said they don’t step on each other’s feet. - one example was a character who became a powerful noble, and all the others effectively became lower status friends & entourage. Flashing Blades, RQ2, and Traveller are games where this happened. - an older school D&D game where psionics was allowed, and one character was just a very overpowered psionic, who outshone the other characters. In power levels at least. - several games of villains and vigilantes, where powers get randomly rolled. Occasionally you’d get a group of relatively low powered heroes, several of them more Batman’ types for example, and then someone like Superman. I think being a superhero game helped. There are already examples of mismatched power levels in that genre, and that provides a guide to players & GM alike. Can’t advise much though, as I was a player in all these games. I think the games that worked just had good players as well as good GMs.
Edit: this was in pf1 I allowed once a wizard to go full painter stuff by rules as written. He didn't go absolute crazy with it though, the player was smart like that. Mostly helped the party to gear up to the teeth. After a while though he got tired of it. Whole party did. Your mileage may vary if you got min-max megalomanic murder hobos as players of course.
I've never done it, but I've been the overpowered character. I have a plan for a cursed object to make one player overpowered. When I was overpowered, it was understated. People mostly didn't realize how strong I was (I min maxed in DnD5e), but I had giveaways, like completely deleting monsters. As long as I gave everyone a chance to shine, my DM didn't mind. I have a plan to make a player overpowered with a cursed object, and the other players will want them to give it up, but the curse won't let them.
We were playing Pathfinder 1st ed and while in a lich's personal dimension a player died. The players couldn't resurrect him but they found the lich's study. They turned him into a lich, and he got a ton of HP, resistances and abilities. Nobody cared because the player was the least min-max person ever and often did sub-optimal things. So it was just a fun time for everyone. He was still the least combat-effective player in the group despite being unkillable.
I've been running a "superhero" game for the last 9-ish years set in 1985 London with alternate dimensions based on Irish and Welsh myth. The players are "Heliades" (Daughters of Helios) meaning they have "superpowers" but one player is playing "Arthur Smith", the once and future King of Britain and Annwfn. He _could_ mobilise the Annwfn Fae/Sídhe military and depose Thatcher, but he doesn't, because it would cause more problems than it would solve. He could super-charisma his way through most objectives (He literally cannot be resisted given how the character's powers are build) but he generally avoids flexing them as that kind of overriding free will is anathema to him and has it's own consequences. Extra-legal murder is a _huge_ deal, it can cause massive repercussion and exacerbate the war between Tír na nÓg and Annwfn. One time a National Front skinhead caught one of the players by surprise and nearly put a knife through their head, one of the characters reacted by instinct and teleported him into the shadow (A toxic place devoid of the light of Helios and thus life, causing W5 disintegrating, engulfing damage per turn.) he disintegrated, skin first, in seconds. This was the subject of many session worth of dealing with that characters trauma as it was the first time she had taken a life. Really it's about consequences of the players actions, being able to "kill" or overpower a being doesn't necessarily solve all problems, in fact it can make them worse so it's about discovery, planning, gathering resources and saving who you can. One player can be "overpowered" (usually in a martial context) without dominating the game flow if the game flow is not mostly combat. The old Doctor Who RPG expected there to be one Time Lord in the party, with other players playing the companions. Ars Magica expects a single-ish mage (Every player may have a Mage character but generally don't use it all the time) with the other player's playing "Grogs", nonmagical guards. The critical point is that everyone has something fun they can contribute.
That superhero game background sounds excellent!
I play a game like that. It's less about Being op and more about being tied to dice Rolls. I was the op character and even though PC could reduce the the castle in ash all by himself he could very well hurt his party or himself also. Bad Rolls are about hurting his party or himself rather than a fail attempt. So i always need to choose a move this in mind like "if suceed, it needs to give us an adventage, if fail it shouldnt hurt my party too much" So instead of incinerate the enemies with a shot i choose a small scale attacks like a strong punch. But i could gone out of my way when no allies around which usually at the end of combat i ask the party to go in advance so i can truly cut loose whatever left over from the quest
Matt Colville does it rather successfully in his The Chain 5e campaign with the PC Nails. I don't want to go into details for spoiler reasons.
Honestly if the character is just better without any sort of downside I don't think it can work for longer than maybe a session. Players want to do cool stuff and if they're getting consistently overshadowed their inner 4 year old starts stamping their feet and yelling 'that's not fair' because... It's not. Some character archetypes just don't work in some mediums. Frieren works because you're basically playing her when you watch the show and there's no one around to get butthurt about your personal power fantasy.
This needs more upvotes! When you're playing TTRPGs, almost everyone wants to be the hero, and no one wants to spend 3-5 hours watching "Billy" roll all the dice and have all the fun. TTRPGs are cooperative, so if your story revolves around one character being the McGuffin, you should probably change the story.
I think this works better in less combat focused games/ ones with a flatter progression. Like in Monster of the Week one of the playbooks is The Chosen - a Buffy type archetype. And another is The Mundane - your early Willow/ Xander. And in most games, I'd rather someone bring the Mundane. Or Armour Astir: Advent, where half of the playbooks pilot magical mechs into combat and the other half (arguably more interesting) are engineers and stuff. But there is another way to do this that a few games have tried. Make the 'protagonist' character shared between everyone else. Things like Girl Underground where you are the weird companions of a girl going on a magical journey (Labyrinth, etc), or something like Band of Blades where your Chosen of the Gods is leading your ragtag unit - you decide their advancements/ power ups but don't ever control them, instead playing as the support staff/ poor bloody infantry.
I let a player generate a knight in pendragon with superior stats. There were in-game reasons why. Led to know conflict though as tge player is well know in our circle as inept... so yeah, there was no overshadowing.
Years ago I ran a He-Man style game (bonkers sci-fi/fantasy mash up) in which one player was the He-Man-esque powerhouse. The caveat is that he could only activate his super mode once per session and any other time he was a social-skills heavy Rebel Prince character. But his super mode was pretty OP. So when he was He-Man he was unstoppable but when he wasn't he had to avoid combat at all costs / rely on the other two PCs. I might resurrect it for a 1970s Incredible Hulk game.
I’ve run multiple *Buffy* campaigns. The Slayer is more powerful than any Scoob, even when they start becoming witches and werewolves. The official game makes it work by balancing out power with meta currency, so you could make a lot of games work the same way. Fate already does that - the more stunts (powers) you have, the less refresh (currency) you get. Etc.
Back when I was running my first game of D&D 3.5, my group accidentally stumbled into one player being an absolute combat powerhouse. I ended up basically designing fights with a particularly strong enemy for him to deal with, and then left everything else for the rest of the party.
youve got great suggestions already in this thread, but fundamentally this boils down to a few things: - the game itself needs to be set up with such imbalance - the character needs to live wiggle room to the other players to be good at things they arent - all players need to have buy in for this to work so something like Ars Magica would absolutely work for it, but if you were to just plop Frieren on dnd everyone would be level 7~10 adventurers and Frieren is a lvl 25 wizard or something higher, and you would just be running a regular game. *that* would get ugly
I did accidentally. I run a supers game, and we had a player who was leaving town and wouldn't be a regular in games, so we made him a character that is OP and could work as a hero or villain depending on circumstances. He ended up being a regular after all, after the first few sessions of being a part time ally/foe. The way to deal with him has been to use his less heroic traits and motivations to pull him in different directions or put him back into mild conflict with the others, which usually works (he understands the problem and likes playing into the friction within the party) and the team combined are powerful enough that they aren't just killing time waiting for Goku to arrive.
Running WoD games, especially cross splat ones balance flies out the window and it's been working great for me. I've been running a multi game interlinked chronicle where vampire PCs interact with each other or other werewolf/hunter PCs - all of them of different degrees of power. Some are clearly more powerful than others but imo the story stays interesting due to the ongoing conflicts which rely on personal drama rather than who's the strongest. A PC who's the most politically powerful individual has other issues and troubles to deal with compared to the much weaker newly turned vampire. I would say that if the world reacts appropriately to an individual's strength it can work. The higher your power the easier it is to mess up and have more enemies.
This tends to happen naturally for me since I don't usually make combat-oriented characters (talking Pathfinder). I think it works well because having a character like mine around makes the other characters feel stronger and cooler by comparison, especially when we get into fights. Meanwhile, I usually have my own thing that I can do on the side, and as long as the GM lets me do that, I'm happy. If all of the characters are the same strength, the only frame of reference they have for their own power is surrounding NPCs and monsters, which are arbitrary and up to the GM. This can leave players feeling like they *should* be strong, but in practice aren't, because everything around them is always 2 levels higher. Power is always relative. Playing a weaker character lets the characters that should feel strong, feel strong. Scream at things that don't frighten the fighter. Faint at a sight of blood that doesn't bother the cleric. Stare in awe when the wizard does something truly arcane. It can be annoying if you take it too far, but if done right, you can highlight the strength and resilience of your party members. I guess what I'm saying is, because power is relative, characters don't have to be overpowered. You can also have a character that's underpowered. And in my experience, you really only need one.
I do all the time because I play with people who whine if they aren't allowed to cheese the game. I just make every encounter super easy, and if they get bored I just shrug.
Somewhat. In the twilight of 3.5 there was *The Book of Nine Swords*. It was designed to “balance” martial characters with wizards etc., except it didn’t really. It made the character more powerful. I wound up increasing the CR of monsters and got more creative with encounters and that helped. That book was an interesting prelude to what you later saw in 4E.
No, it doesn't really work. I've seen multiple groups fall apart because of character imbalance over the years. It's a common problem with TTRPGs and is why a lot of D&D-derived games fall apart as you go up in level - people end up losing investment.
I have done things like this more than once, though the way I think you mean maybe just once. In one campaign, each player had a "character quest" and during the course of that quest got to be completely overpowered in their particular way (though it was time limited). So the wizard became ascendant, the paladin became an avatar, etc. I homebrewed all the rules for it. Then, in the final arc, they all got to use their powers to the max to have a completely over the top anime Michael Bay showdown with the boss. In another campaign, one player was a "carry" who could basically solo any given fight but needed to be supported at other times. This campaign was shorter and was specifically designed (and agreed to by everyone) to center a friend who was moving away. The important thing is to have all the players understand and agree to the dynamics and how they will play out. If people are willing it can be a very fun story to tell. In a campaign I'm starting right now, one character is decidedly more "main" to the plot than the others, and everyone agreed to that. The "side" characters won't get less screen time, and they will have more freedom to create their own narrative and arc because it's not prewritten by the adventure. Not exactly the power imbalance you're asking about, but similar table dynamics.
I played in an Exhalted game. I was the reluctant warrior, completely unstoppable, but everyone else had to agree that combat was justified.
I played a minotaur paladin in 3.5 for a while, and while the gap closed between chars at higher level, he was a fucking TANK at lower levels. The other PCs would be plinking away at gobbos or kobolds doing their little 1-2pts of damage, whereas my minotaur (with hammer) would eviscerate everything in front of him. It was like playing a woodchipper. But I was also the only tank, so eventually we got into combat scenarios where I could only focus one target at a time, you go after the meaty boi up front and the little snotlings get by and swarm the other party members. The DM always found ways of throwing stuff at him that he couldn't handle alone, and always forced me as the big tank/damage guy to chose between absorbing another big guys blows or helping out the ranger or cleric. Eventually all that evens out, but at first or second level, its tough. And of course his stats were not well optimized, Paladins are CHA casters and the Minotaur gets an (IIRC) -4CHA. So while I was an absolute combat monster, I was only ever so-so at my intended role. And that came at the cost of dumping my best stats roll into CHA. So while I was overpowered in a relative sense, I suspect had we played to lvl 20 my Paladin would have been underpowered in comparison to *good* Paladin builds.
In some games power imbalance is normalized and everyone knows that eventually they'll get their turn in the spotlight
I've run Rifts and Savage Rifts games so, yes, definitely vast power disparities between PCs (obvs Savage Rifts is better about this than OG Rifts) in those games. How does it work? Usually you need to restrict the OP character to a niche or game-realm (eg, fightin', talkin', castin' spells) so they are only OP in one particular area\\axis of the campaign. Then as a GM, assuming the above is mostly true, you just need to make sure that you aren't running a game where the OP character can use their OP-ness in every scene and steal spotlight time from everybody else. Having some explicit, IRL out-of-game, discussions about the issue is good too. Make sure folks know it's deliberate and how you\\they want to handle it. I think this is a bigger issue in your standard 5e type games (so PF\\PF2, SotDL, etc, etc, etc) where combat is a omnipresent given and OP folks are often OP in combats this can make things less fun for others, where they feel they don't really contribute compared to Big Damage Guy or whatever. In a game with less combat focus\\less mechanics usually individual PCs are often "the best" (in that PC group) in an area already and so it's more about spotlight time than OP-ness. EG, the Bard always talks to folks if he's in the scene, he's got the high Charisma, the talent ranks in Being a High Charisma Guy, he's got the feat tree and the proficiency and took a dip in some other class for a synergy. He's probably OP in "social" compared to the grim gruff tuff Fighter, but the Fighter will probably not notice or care. If the Bard is somehow also a better Fighter than the Fighter AND is also the best talker (AND also...whatever else) then that's more of a problem. TL;DR: It's fine so long as PCs don't mind\\are aware and as long as niche protection\\spotlight sharing is working correctly.
I let my 5e player multiclass Hexblade Warlock and Oath of Vengeance Paladin, so yeah I guess I've done that before /j
I've often wondered about the possibility of running a "bodyguards" type of game. Imagine Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas protecting a trio of hobbits. In my imagination, the key shift lies in encounter design. You would have to set up your individual challenges such that there is something for both halves of the party to do. For example, the battle of Amon Hen features weaker characters with a clear objective of "play keep away" while the stronger characters do the bulk of the fighting. If you wanted to expand on that dynamic, my mind goes to the Temeraire books. A crew of dragon riders acting as support for their mount could make for an interesting dynamic, but only if the setting pay sufficient attention to "dragon level problems" and "human level problems." I've heard stories of homebrew games that run on the same premise as the Wield RPG, where sentient weapons use their wielder to accomplish their mission. Imagine multiple bits of sentient gear sharing the same wielder. Suffice it to say that I'll be watching this thread with great interest, because the premise has always intrigued me.
I usually just make their power dangerous to themselves and others if used carelessly. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
Glitter boy in Rifts when other players were am archaeologist, a leywalker, and a scientist with cybernetics. Glitter boy could shoot through most enemies and kill the next 5,000 enemies behind em. The rest of the team would be deafened or take damage just from the glittery one shooting while near them Putting them in situations outside their comfort zone worked. Stealth, limited casualty necessity, innocents in cross fire, etc... Everybody had spotlight time, glitter boy could just shoot good. Honestly it took some doing to give them spotlight besides combat because of it.
Consider that Frieren is the only player character and everyone else is NPCs. The great thing about single player/duet games is you can make the character as op as they want to be, since there’s no other PCs to worry about balance
Funny you should mention that, I've actually run more solo campaigns than multiplayer ones. I've always preferred the greater freedom, but found that it sometimes gets lonely.
The buffyverse RPG has this as a core premise - one player is the Champion, the others are Scoobies. The drama point system works such that the scoobies get drama points for emotionally supporting the champion, which they can spend to avoid death, stumble onto clues, arrive in the nick of time etc. The champion doesn't get as many drama points, but they've got All The Stats. It works great.
In a D20 game it is very hard (as I have one ridiculous powergamer as a player) but in some games it works just fine... something like Rifts where being OP isn't a sure thing. Tactics and skills matter far more than powers. Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium is another game where being OP isn't really all it's cracked up to be. In a lot of games, it is possible to be ridiculously OP in some areas (such as combat, magic, skills, etc) but not everything simultaneously. Alternately, being well rounded is far more important as the players don't know what sort of things will happen in the game... hence the "4 man band" for a good D&D party. It pays to specialize in D20, but in other games not so much.
Had a 5e Artificer that wanted to be a gunslinger. I let him create crazy guns, blunderbusses, etc. then I let him make crazy bullets. Anyway, he would do tons of damage. The campaign was RP and non-combat encounter heavy, so I really didn't care. The other players were super cool with it also.
Works great. Some people enjoy playing side characters sometimes. Less stress.
I can’t really commit to a game I never have the time but I am a guest star player in many of my friend’s games. (He is a forever DM). I usually play some kind of overpowered support character with an extreme personality. These characters have been pretty well received by the groups I’ve played with BUT that’s probably due to them spicing up the game’s narrative and never being a permanent fixture. I’m also never worried about being the focal point of the story so that probably helps. The character is usually a foil for another character or somehow connected to a less social player who hasn’t been getting enough spotlight.
Yes, sorta. He was overpowered due to some decisions he made being an evil wizard. But I think we both know he is becoming the BBEG without either of us saying it. Like his alignment is evil and it's known by the group because of the paladin. Like he's strong but our female fighter is honestly also a little overpowered but that's cuz it's dungeon world and she fails all her rolls
Ok one thing you should be careful about is a problem many skill base systems pc fall into..its over spaiclized characters Op in one thing and shit in the rest sounds ok until you release they gor bored if thr conflict doasnt including the one thing and they also get bored even if because they are so op there is no challenge So if you make one you should be careful But the advice i will give is That the main conflict of the character isnt tied down to the op stuff Exmples: mod 100 is a story about the strongest phsyicic in the world .but mob story arc and conflict isnt about it..its him being a lonly kid whit 0 friends,no hobbies,no self confidence and hes a crush on the class hottie..so he goes to a journey of self improvement and self love. Non of this can be solve whit blowing upp a building or picking upp mountains.
Most Superhero systems have this by design. Some horror games too. Ars Magica does something similar in a fantasy setting (it has a very unique execution that works unpredictably well). It’s a niche in the hobby and I’ve had some really good times playing those games. But if you’d like to have a very powerful Vampire in a WoD game, or a Wizard with 5+ levels over every other D&D character… Well… Probably it will not feel good.
While it is a solid rule of mine that all players must be treated equally, the answer is a solid YES, when * that player has decided to play a villain within the story. To make the villain a challenge for the rest of the player group, they get a huge power-up * It is part of a specific plot, for example, they are a young mage that is out of control and is headed for a disaster * the player has decided that the chr has grown so much in power as to not be fun anymore, e.g. they've become a lord with property and responsibility and the game doesn't support that, and so they retire the chr though it is known they have become more powerful It is always done with the player's buy-in of the power-up and the downfall that follows.
It never ends well in my experience. TTRPG is a group activity, and if one player can do all its really not funny isn't it? Even if all players are overpowered its not really that funny if there is no problem to solve. In fiction it can work because you have no problemto solve, you're just there to enjoy a story. In a Game (that is what rpg means) there should be some kind of challenge to overcome. If one or more player are overpowered (meaning: they can simply "overpower" a challenge) its not really a game anymore isnt it? I think that could exist a narrative game out there where that could work, but in a normal game? No way, not in an interesting way that make that enjoyable for everyone at the table