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

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

  • It's the deciding factor

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Extremely important

    Votes: 3 3.2%
  • Important

    Votes: 5 5.3%
  • Somewhat important

    Votes: 13 13.7%
  • Neutral

    Votes: 11 11.6%
  • Somewhat unimportant

    Votes: 12 12.6%
  • Unimportant

    Votes: 14 14.7%
  • Extremely unimportant

    Votes: 14 14.7%
  • It plays no role whatsoever

    Votes: 23 24.2%


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Either way and all between, I think that players want their characters to feel competent.
Agreed. My default assumption is that my character is competent in the things associated with the archetype - e.g. I expect a barbarian to be good at fighting and strength-related feats, a ranger to be good at tracking, hunting and archery, etc.
I'm fine if there's a bit of a ramp up phase - e.g. I don't expect a DCC level 0 character to be very competent - but I don't want that to last "forever".
That being said, I'm personally not a big fan of the steep power curve in D&D, and steamrolling through enemies - be it through the general design or hyper optimization is also not a thing I enjoy too much.
 


Either way and all between, I think that players want their characters to feel competent.

I will argue against this. Sorta. Kinda.

I don't want my characters to be incompetent. But I don't want a low level character to feel complete, either. If my character is supposed to eventually be a great wizard, I don't want them to feel like a fully competent wizard at 3rd, 8th, or 14th level. I want them to feel like a novice, apprentice, or scholar. Competent to a certain point, but also definitely incompetent in certain regards.
 
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I voted “Neutral”.

After playing most of the conventional archetypes, these days I’m less concerned about “overpowered” vs “underpowered”, and more with “is this a character I want to play”, with their relative power being a side effect.

This has resulted in fallen angels, glass cannons, situational supermen, average joes, bizarro protagonists, eternal second bananas, ticking time bombs, heroes done the hard way, and so forth, in addition to PCs following bog-standard tropes.
 

I will argue against this. Sorta. Kinda.

I don't want my characters to be incompetent. But I don't want a low level character to feel complete, either. If my character is supposed to eventually be a great wizard, I don't want them to feel like a fully competent wizard at 3rd, 8th, or 14th level. I want them to feel like a novice, apprentice, or scholar. Competent to a certain point, but also definitely incompetent compared to others.
That's something like me and I put down "somewhat important". It's basically feeling good at key skills but not a dominator.
 
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My favourite character is a elderly gnome alchemist specifically because he is physically weak and hides from combat. Nonetheless he is a competent - he gets lots of utility outside combat and can also help with an incendiary grenade or a tanglefoot bag.

So yes I want my characters to be competent at what they do, but that doesnt necessarily mean theyre overpowered
 



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