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

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Though I do have to point out there are whole families of games where the gap between less and more skilled opponents never gets to where that isn't true. The Basic Roleplaying family of games is like that, and once you pull the 800 pound gorilla of D&D out of the equation, they're hardly unpopular systems.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Though I do have to point out there are whole families of games where the gap between less and more skilled opponents never gets to where that isn't true. The Basic Roleplaying family of games is like that, and once you pull the 800 pound gorilla of D&D out of the equation, they're hardly unpopular systems.

Except you never, ever can pull D&D out of any discussion involving RPGs. It's always there, looming over everything, the overwhelming gravitational singularity of the majority.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Except you never, ever can pull D&D out of any discussion involving RPGs. It's always there, looming over everything, the overwhelming gravitational singularity of the majority.

To some extent that's true enough its almost a tautology, but unless one's position is the defining element of D&D's success is that it produces extremely strong gaps in PC/opponent hazard at some point, I still think showing people outside of it are sometimes quite willing to take some serious risk (I mean, as an another example, for all the fact its Bennie system is a tool for substituting it doesn't do variable hit points, Savage Worlds has a baked in risk with every hit that you can exceed the ability of that tool to deal with it; its pretty low probability, but its always there); if they aren't, they just play a game where its accepted that PC death is off the table barring special cases (and there are absolutely games that do that, including probably most superhero games).

 

[Micah Sweet]

To some extent that's true enough its almost a tautology, but unless one's position is the defining element of D&D's success is that it produces extremely strong gaps in PC/opponent hazard at some point, I still think showing people outside of it are sometimes quite willing to take some serious risk (I mean, as an another example, for all the fact its Bennie system is a tool for substituting it doesn't do variable hit points, Savage Worlds has a baked in risk with every hit that you can exceed the ability of that tool to deal with it; its pretty low probability, but its always there); if they aren't, they just play a game where its accepted that PC death is off the table barring special cases (and there are absolutely games that do that, including probably most superhero games).

Superhero games are the only ones where I'm fine with random death being off the table, because I feel genre conventions matter more there than in any other RPG.

 

[TiQuinn]

Superhero games are the only ones where I'm fine with random death being off the table, because I feel genre conventions matter more there than in any other RPG.

Were Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser ever in danger of a random death? In most fantasy, even the heroes that die - their deaths are hardly ever random.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Were Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser ever in danger of a random death? In most fantasy, even the heroes that die - their deaths are hardly ever random.

Stories are not games. A story is to me one way a game could have happened. In a game I want the possibility of random death to be as real (within the logic of the setting and circumstances) as it could be in real life. You can't really do this in a superhero game without destroying the genre, so there I make an exception.

 

[dragoner]

I definitely don't want the characters to feel powerless though, even if I voted it is unimportant that they feel powerful. They should be capable.

 

[TiQuinn]

Stories are not games. A story is to me one way a game could have happened. In a game I want the possibility of random death to be as real (within the logic of the setting and circumstances) as it could be in real life. You can't really do this in a superhero game without destroying the genre, so there I make an exception.

But they are still defined by the conventions of the genres and D&D - at least the older editions - have always maintained that their inspiration were Leiber, Howard, Moorcock, etc.

 

[Wolfpack48]

But they are still defined by the conventions of the genres and D&D - at least the older editions - have always maintained that their inspiration were Leiber, Howard, Moorcock, etc.

I suppose it really comes down to whether the campaign is trying to produce that book protagonist feel. Playing The One Ring, Stormbringer or Lhankmar or Thieves World, the GM would need to decide whether the PCs are in Elric’s realm, or whether they’d are lesser or secondary personages in that universe.

 

[TiQuinn]

I suppose it really comes down to whether the campaign is trying to produce that book protagonist feel. Playing The One Ring, Stormbringer or Lhankmar or Thieves World, the GM would need to decide whether the PCs are in Elric’s realm, or whether they’d are lesser or secondary personages in that universe.

To bring it back to superheroes though, it’s like saying “You’re not Superman…you’re Jimmy Olsen.”