How important is it to you or your players for characters to feel "overpowered"?

[KYRON45]

All this arguing about the word “hero” is really making me glad I said “overpowered” instead.

Sorry I hijacked your thread.

 

[overgeeked]

I think of a hero as someone who does something selfless and good for others, asking little or nothing in return. The fewer superpowers they have, the more heroic they are.

Yeah, exactly. I’ve tried explaining that to people before but most of them don’t get it.

Superman and Batman are both superheroes. But Batman is more heroic because he’s closer to human baseline.

Likewise, Green Arrow or Robin are even more heroic than Batman because they’re working with even less power and even closer to the human baseline.

What can I say. I like street-level superheroes.

 

[kigmatzomat]

And as a player, you also don’t want a cheap win against a monster that feels like it should be a hard won fight. One of my issues with 5e is that at higher tiers, it becomes very easy to steamroll monsters that should be boss level fights, creating a sort of escalation where you have to really ratchet up the challenge, but also throws you into that quote’s other issue it noted - you can overdo it if you’re not careful as a DM.

The bounded accuracy does mean there is less wiggle room in many situations, making finding the balance quite difficult. In my current game, us PCs are constantly at risk of dying and waxing the bbeg faster than expected.

Last fight two characters were bouncing around 25% hp and eating Heal spells but conversely all the BBEGs mooks had been neutralized by Transmute Rock to Mud so we were avoiding a non-trivial amount of damage from the peanut gallery. The boss fight before that, one PC was down to 10% hp before I True Polymorphed them into a gold dragon, and even then we dumped healing into the PC-dragon so they could keep the BBEG grappled (and then when the bbeg escaped he beat me down to 25% hp in one round).

As it is, our DM is at the point of essentially shrugging ahead of the game and saying "Could be cake, could be death. Guess we'll find out together." And honestly, that's fair. He's not stacking the deck to certainly kill us but he's also not not trying to kill us.

It's a delicate dance and one ai think is worsened by the bounding box. I ran 3e into the mid 20s, and the wider "range box" seemed to make life easier, as the tanks were tankier. I feel a little "not all the way dead yet" is fine at high levels, but the way 5e plays, the non-tanks get ganked tout de suite resulting in a rapid TPK cascade.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, exactly. I’ve tried explaining that to people before but most of them don’t get it.

Superman and Batman are both superheroes. But Batman is more heroic because he’s closer to human baseline.

Likewise, Green Arrow or Robin are even more heroic than Batman because they’re working with even less power and even closer to the human baseline.

What can I say. I like street-level superheroes.

By that definition, most D&D PCs are less heroic than Batman, because most are farther away from the human baseline.

 

[GrimCo]

Hero is often used instead of protagonist.

All PCs are protagonists, but not all PCs are heroes. It highly depends on the type of game one plays.

When it comes to superheroes, let's take Batman. While he does fight his rogues gallery of super villains, he also fights common criminals. If we would translate that to D&D terms, it like level 15 character beating CR1 monsters between fights with CR15 monsters.

And yes, feeling overpowered and curbstomping fights is fun when not overdone. You start as lv 1 Joe Nobody, vanilla human fighter. CR 1/2 Orc is serious threat. Good damage roll can one shot you, crit will definetly one shot you. You fight, survive, get stronger ( more levels). Now you are Joe Somebody, lv 10 human fighter. That orc isn't threat any more. Sure, he can hit you and maybe it will hurt (but not too bad), but you can chop him up in one attack. Hell, you can solo him and couple of his buddies for good measure. Low level toughs that harassed you as low level PC are now getting out of your way.

 

[Aldarc]

Yeah, exactly. I’ve tried explaining that to people before but most of them don’t get it.

Superman and Batman are both superheroes. But Batman is more heroic because he’s closer to human baseline.

Likewise, Green Arrow or Robin are even more heroic than Batman because they’re working with even less power and even closer to the human baseline.

What can I say. I like street-level superheroes.

Superman is more heroic because he chooses to use his godlike powers for good, whereas Batman is just wasting all his money on his hobby as a way to avoid going to therapy.

 

[TwiceBorn2]

As both a player and GM, I despise "overpowered" PCs, at least early in a campaign. Of the six players in the group for which I am currently DMing, only one player feels driven to create what I would consider overpowered superheroes... even when I stated specifically from the start (and brought to his explicit attention) that I was aiming for a lower magic/lower powered, grittier campaign. Ah well... at least he's happy to RP (the group is more RP and investigation-oriented), so long as he feels the campaign is progressing, and his PC's story, too. And overall he's a positive addition and helpful player (knows the rules better than I do without being condescending or rules lawyery), so I can't complain too much.

 

[TiQuinn]

As it is, our DM is at the point of essentially shrugging ahead of the game and saying "Could be cake, could be death. Guess we'll find out together." And honestly, that's fair. He's not stacking the deck to certainly kill us but he's also not not trying to kill us.

God, this was the last few levels of our Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign in a nutshell. Our DM had totally given up on guessing if we were going to survive or not because we were running ahead of the game by two dungeon levels, according to the module’s stated appropriate character level.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That seems to remove the idea of the DM from the situation. Not really what I'm looking for in tabletop.

Not really. Most monsters have too many moving parts and the situation requires too much evaluation for the GM to not be involved. But, bluntly, I don't need to be doing any deep evaluation of what that set of bandits is about to run them in light of their general purposes and level of tactical understanding, and getting into that with every set of opponents seems all downsides (some may require more attention because they are, from lack of a better term, "load bearing" parts of the campaign, but those are normally a fraction of encounters, and even encounters containing them may well have other opponents who are still likely to be functionally on automatic simply because there's no complexity to their purposes).

 

[Thomas Shey]

No more ridiculous than assuming everyone should have only one particular meaning for a word that's gone through at least 4 languages with different meanings in the last 1500 years and then whinging about people having issues withone insisting one's preferred meaning is the only meaning. I've used all of those within the last month or two.

English has very few words without multiple definitions, get used to it, as it's only getting worse with time.

Yeah, its hard not roll your eyes when you see someone getting upset that the definition of a multi-function word they want to use in a discussion (and that supports their position) is not the one other people are willing to. Like it or not, some degree of definition is necessary for any discussion, and if that's tedious to someone, I'd suggest they only get into ones with the like-minded.