Power of classes (Realism vs. Filling unlimited power)

[Nixl]

I have to admit, there is an element of entertainment in a character remaining within limits. One shotting everything does not provide much pleasure for long.

 

Although, one aspect of power that I have never seen an RPG delve into is real world consequences for being "godly." Let's say the character does become ridiculously powerful, would there not be consequences? Consequences in the form of people, merchants, or even factions/countries viewing you as a threat to the world. For instance, what if there was a movement against necromancers or magic in general and by becoming a powerful mage you become a target worth attacking.

 

Often magical or supernatural power in RPGs never carry consequences. In truth, I do not think people would take kindly to someone walking freely through city that can destroy the city on a whim. Although I do not advocate one-hit mechanics, it would be interesting if becoming that "godly" hero had consequences.

Edited January 13, 2013 by Nixl

[Lephys]

I have to admit, there is an element of entertainment in a character remaining within limits. One shotting everything does not provide much pleasure for long.

 

This is absolutely true. That's precisely why the importance is not on how powerful you get, but on how powerful you become relative to the rest of the world. If you become a god, and you're fighting other gods, you're obviously not going to run into the problem of one-shotting them. However, the fact that you'll be one-shotting pretty much everything else is a concern.

 

But, on the other hand, a small child can one-shot a rat with a slingshot. That doesn't mean he's too ridiculously powerful, only that he's ridiculously powerful as compared to a rat.

 

If your character's/party's power range takes you into deity territory, and the story leaves you in the midst of mere-mortal territory, you've pretty much got a problem. But, if the story moves into deity territory (your surroundings consist of deity-level conflicts), then you're still fine. Relativity is key.

[Gavinfoxx]

I mean what - do enemeis have scouters?

 

No, the idea is that they know guys by reputation. "You are the guys that beat that clan of hill giants and cleared the next province over of bandits, and killed that Dragon... we're all going to die, ahhh!"

[Lephys]

No, the idea is that they know guys by reputation. "You are the guys that beat that clan of hill giants and cleared the next province over of bandits, and killed that Dragon... we're all going to die, ahhh!"

 

Mayhaps they have reputation scouters.

 

"Hey Vegeta... what does the scouter say about his past accomplishments?"

 

"... It's over hill giant clans and DRAGON SLAYINNNNNNNNGGGG!!!!!!! *crushes scouter in fist*"

[SlithyTove]

The thing about a Fighter having trouble in 3.5e taking out an army, a monk being better at it, or a spellcasters being worse is... wow. Um, it displays a lack of understanding about d&d 3.5e so profound I don't know where to start.

 

I am shocked, shocked I tell you at your insinuation that I may lack some of the specifics on such a common and worldy important subject as, er, um the specifics of D&D 3.5e rules as it relates to tackling large armies of runts.

 

Out of curiosity I did a search for D&D 3.5 Strategic Flight on google: only 15 from various forums and you were posting on about half of them. That is comedically esoteric. Save that line for something like basic misunderstandings of the scientific method, statistics, or history. *blows rasberry at gavinfoxx*

 

Also.... BG2 (the reference frame) was 2nd edition so 3.5 rules aren't relevant to what was being mentioned.

 

In 2nd ed casty classes had ways out of nasty situations (teleports and things), but staying power issues. FIghtery types had staying power (with some healing of some kind), but remained vaguely grounded in their humanness. They could get run over by cavalry, mass tackled by the pheasants behind them, chained up, and lit on fire until they stopped moving. Or led into a castle courtyard where they drop the gates on both sides and shoot them full of arrows and drop boiling pitch until dead. Or Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court style. etc etc And either that, or XCOM style are my favorite scaling benchmarks.

[SlithyTove]

Not a PE suggestion, but I always wanted to try a game where you had inverse scaling.

 

Say, like you were a lvl 1 Paladin Truthy McPureHeart, and had a lot of zeal but were, effectively, kind of crap at the whole Paladining thing. Then a dying, desperate god sacrifices itself and gives all its remaining power to Truthy who, overnight, becomes a God and pretty much amazing at everything and generally going toe-to-toe with evil dude Gods. But, being mortal, he cant contain all that power and it dissipates making him weaker as the game progresses.

 

Rather than gaining new abilities you have to choose which ones you will lose at each checkpoint. By the end of the game you are back to being a crap paladin and trying desperately to get the final piece done to save the world and the final boss will be some toothless old road-bandit you met before going "looks like you've fallen on hard times there..."

[TrashMan]

While you do have a point in some of what you've said, I have to say that a fantasy world involving souls that act as power sources for superhuman (relative to the capabilities of humans in reality) abilities in which you really don't get very powerful would be pretty bland. Sure, 10 low-level bandits might be able to take on your level 30 party, but everyone would have to be pretty powerful at that point, still. Not to mention dragons and other mythical beasts... You either don't have them in the game (again, bland fantasy) or you do and the player's party must be able to match them in "power," eventually.

 

Which is part of the reason I didn't like the "soul" power idea.

I don't want to be "powerfull" in that broken sense.

 

How you portray power can differ.

For arguments sake - let's say that you don't get a single HP per level. You don't get various stat increases, no bonuses to attack, defense or wathever.

 

The only thing you get is skills/feats (and an attribute point or two, but their impact would overall be minimal since you'd only get 4-5 during the game... so while attribute points can influence stats, there wont' be any huge changes)

In other words, characters become more flexible.

They get more tactical options insted of more damage/DPS.

They don't really strike that much harder at lvl 20 then they do at lvl1 (discounting better weapons, but their scaling would be toned down too)

 

 

But if your whole, 6-person party still had trouble with 10 level 1 foes (wolves, maybe?), then if they got to a dragon, it'd be instant-lose.

 

Yes, it should. You do not engage a dragon in a direct fight anymore than you attack an Abrams tank with your bare hands.

Huge, powerfull monsters should require preparation and tactics, not raw power.

Dragons have lost all of their allure to me, given how overused and how easily killable and uninteligent they are.

 

As Spoony said - an intelligent dragon would never land - it would roast you from the sky, chase you down and kill you. So you have to trick/trap/ambush it.

 

 

Are you saying the game has to forcibly limit it to a mere 10-or-so at a time? The rest just stand around whilst you fight?

 

Not necessarily. 2-1 odds when high level should be doable. 3-1 would be pushing it. So a party of 6 could take on 10-20 low level enemies.

 

And what exactly is the problem with fighing fewer enemies? Or having NPC allies to even the numbers?

 

 

See, you have to consider more than what would be a nice power/capability comparison in a single, hypothetical fight.

 

I am. Qunatity has a quality of it's own. Being outnumbered/outflanked SHOULD ruin you day.

[ReyVagabond]

Aweosme that you find that fun and you like a low level fatacy game, i personaly i dont want that.

i want a more High fantacy. in the Seting. not per se in the game.

 

But i do want like in the third expantion to be able to kill a god! yeah. i want to do that, and not in the D&D terms where you suck i want the Dragon Ball terms of i can destroy planets now, who hoo, yeah childish i know im 30 but still thats what i want.

 

Again not in PE but in the future.

as for Gameplay I do not want level up at all, i want a perk system where you at rest or camp you chose a skill, like Swordfighting, then whe you go out to adventure you gain swordfighting expirience and when you reach sertain XP you gain Swordfingtin perks. and so on with everything.

or that at each level up you gain a fixed amout starts depending on the class.

 

Also i want a Stamina baced GAME, Stamina is EVERYTHING, you have small life and a couple of hits kill you, but the dodge block change are huge and all actions consume stamina, ataking defending(beeing ataked), using special abilities or spells. and you despite the big defence and the low hit rate a if you run out of stamina you can be hit because you cant defend yourself anymore. (aka ten level 1 can beat a level 10, because the exaut his stamina till he is sand bad, of course by that time most lickly only 2 could be alive with enogh stamina to do the killing blow)

 

but looks like that will not hapend, but its ok.

[ReyVagabond]

BTW, my martian arts intructor like to practice 1 vs group fights, and in hand to hand combat he kicks my ass and my class asses, its not so much as we have to atack all at the same time its more spycological than that, once you see your buddy geting hit and droping like a sand bag in the flor you cant help it and you doubt and you dont attack.

 

I say in any setting where you can kill a man with one blow, or just take it out of the fight in one blow, a hier level character should be able to take out many lower level guys.

For example the old Samurai stories about guys killing 100 mans in one fight by moving and fighting in corridors where most of the fights were 2 vs 1 or 1 vs 1. Or even 300 movie style, its all about strategy.

 

Its all about you are not normal you are the main character of the story, its not some one else is not your childhood friend, its you. you are special belive it or not, by a motive you dont know or you do, its the same. you the main character at the end of the game no one can beat you! plain and simple. you are undefeated. so you are a freak, you are a god, nations should not fear you and should want you to be their weapon. and so on.

[Lephys]

Which is part of the reason I didn't like the "soul" power idea.

I don't want to be "powerfull" in that broken sense.

 

How you portray power can differ.

For arguments sake - let's say that you don't get a single HP per level. You don't get various stat increases, no bonuses to attack, defense or wathever.

 

Power is just one factor within the borders of "capability." I'm perfectly with you on the "We don't need to gain 3,000 dmg and 10,000 HP to be better" notion. But, going with what ReyVagaBond said about his martial arts instructor, people who train (and get first-hand experience from fighting) THAT much with their weapon/style are going to become profoundly better at both effectively attacking AND decreasing the effectiveness of others' attacks. That's not even taking into account that some people have a talent for it (the way their brain works just processes the fast-paced factors within combat better than others and flows from move to move, allowing them to develop their fighting prowess more than twice as quickly as many others.) So, it's not unheard of or ridiculous for a handful of people to take on 3 times their numbers in melee combat. Like you said, though, more than that, and you're starting to push it. Or, if you're surrounded by 18 crossbowmen, you're probably not going to somehow dodge everything. Your party might be able to take them down, but it's gonna be close and difficult. Of course, I don't think, within the level-rating system, that those crossbowmen would be rated THAT much lower than you. If they were a bunch of scared peasants who'd never really used crossbows beyond fending off wolves from their farmland or something, I think you'd make pretty easy work of them (they'd be much more prone to miss and use tactics that didn't come close to matching your own.)

 

Yes, it should. You do not engage a dragon in a direct fight anymore than you attack an Abrams tank with your bare hands.

Huge, powerfull monsters should require preparation and tactics, not raw power.

Dragons have lost all of their allure to me, given how overused and how easily killable and uninteligent they are.

 

What if you encounter a dragon already in an enclosed space? You aren't necessarily ONLY going to be mindlessly charging a flying dragon. Also, you should either be able to take it on, or you shouldn't. At some point, your team of 6 should be able to take on a foe like that. No one said "directly because they do so much damage." Tactics and capability, again, are not mutually exclusive. You should be powerful enough to be able to damage the dragon, if you use the right tactics, not powerful enough to easily kill it. You're very right that dragons have become pansified in a great many other RPGs. They should be a very big deal.

 

Also, I know you don't like the whole soul power thing, but all I was getting at with that is that, with soul power, you should be at least as "powerful" and capable as a real-life human in a medieval setting could be, PLUS some amount of power/capability from your soul power. I didn't mean we should be able to throw boulders or single-handedly cleave mountains in twain simply because we have souls. In other words, obviously the extra power from your soul should be intelligently limited in scope. But, if you've got a Wizard who can't do much more than a swordsman can (against the standard of human physiological capabilities with weapons and such), you've again got a bland fantasy, fictional world.

 

You can't just set a really low ceiling and call it a day. It's based on how the rest of the world's designed. The "too much" limitation is set by context, not some absolute number. It's quite relative. I just think that, if they do it right, you might end up with a party with a greater sense of power than you had expected and still quite enjoy the game.

 

And what exactly is the problem with fighing fewer enemies? Or having NPC allies to even the numbers?

 

Nothing. I only meant there's a bit of a problem with having to only fight small groups of fewer enemies, and always only winning because you have a horde of your own (of allies). I'm not saying that the existence of allies in big fights or smaller groups of foes at a time, anywhere in the game, are inherently bad. Which is again why I stress the importance of design context. The number of enemies we should be able to take on at once to not feel like there's a power imbalance can change depending on other factors, so it's one of those limits that we can't really make a very accurate educated guess about until we have more solid info about other aspects of the game.

 

I acknowledge that you are concerned about unnecessary character power, but I urge you to keep an open mind until we know more, and to just discuss possibilities with hypothetical situations, rather than to decide what one tiny detail would proabably ruin the game for you and what wouldn't.

[SlithyTove]

Also, I know you don't like the whole soul power thing, but all I was getting at with that is that, with soul power, you should be at least as "powerful" and capable as a real-life human in a medieval setting could be,

 

And I think people sometimes underestimate just how *good* real people can end up being. Absolute dominance is rare, but it happens.

 

Tesshu claimed to have killed over 100 trained swordsmen unaided in his lifetime, sometimes with odds as bad as 10 to 1. It would be easy to write off as braggadocio, but given the time and place in history that he lived, it's not only plausible, but probable.

 

Or someone like Jelly Bryce who was effectively superhuman with firearms of any kind. Every tall tale told about him usually ended up being a fact once people started digging.

 

Sir Richard Francis Burton would be a shoe-in for a high level bard or some-such.

 

People can be pretty amazing on their own. Add a little soul-power...

[TrashMan]

Aweosme that you find that fun and you like a low level fatacy game, i personaly i dont want that.

i want a more High fantacy. in the Seting. not per se in the game.

 

Practicly every RPG out there has huge power levels and you end up decimating armies.

 

I'm sick and tired of it.

I want a setting/world I can get lost in. You want an escapist fantasy that strokes ones ego.

 

I realise you and I want different things and in the end one of us will be dissapointed, because you can't have both.

 

 

But i do want like in the third expantion to be able to kill a god! yeah. i want to do that, and not in the D&D terms where you suck i want the Dragon Ball terms of i can destroy planets now, who hoo, yeah childish i know im 30 but still thats what i want.

 

If there is one thing that can make me not want to buy PE and forget it ever existed, it would be PE turning into Dragonball.

[TrashMan]

For example the old Samurai stories about guys killing 100 mans in one fight by moving and fighting in corridors where most of the fights were 2 vs 1 or 1 vs 1. Or even 300 movie style, its all about strategy.

 

Stories.

Skill, luck nad numbers determine the outcome of any fight. And while you may have skill, luck and numbers won't be always with you.

 

 

Its all about you are not normal you are the main character of the story, its not some one else is not your childhood friend, its you. you are special belive it or not, by a motive you dont know or you do, its the same. you the main character at the end of the game no one can beat you! plain and simple. you are undefeated. so you are a freak, you are a god, nations should not fear you and should want you to be their weapon. and so on.

 

I don't want to be a special snowflake.

Leave the ego-stroking for kiddies with short attention spans and low self-esteem.

 

So no. There is no word in a dictionary sufficient to illustrate how much agaisnt this I am.

[ReyVagabond]

its grate that we disagree, but what can i say like the old BG2-TOB style where i start small and end up with a big epic story like that.

 

i know its ego stroking, but in a game you are special you cant help it, its the magic of reloading, because you are the main character of the story, you have the heros luck per se, you cant loose a RPG (i have jet to see a RPG where loosing is part of the story, or it counts your looses for later gameplay story evets in a meeningful way), every time you loose you reload or you start again so for the game story you are undefeated, you are that guy in tales of old you are Mishamoto Musashi the traveling Swordsman that by the end of his life was the best in the world. you are Percival seaching for the grial. but enogh of this.

 

 

So gameplay wise i dont get much what you want, you want to feel normal and have a good story that puts you in the wrong plase at the worng time, but and always surviving favorable odds, if there is a group of badints robing a place i will never enter their emcampnets because there way to many of them? or you want to beat something more chalenging like a Dragon, feat that only a few can say had acomplished, even if the dragon you kill you kill it with a dragon slaying balista weapon, you still survived the odds of geting killed facing a dragon.

that alone makes you special, you like it or not, like saying you won a olimpic medal and the say well im not special, i have done what every other person could have done. Its not per se beeing the child of a god or beeing a snowflake but you as the main character are special because at the end of the day you survived and everithing else well didnt, Even if its not about fighting you still robed that Artifact that no one else could.

 

Of back on the question about gameplay, what do you want, all the fights should be small scale, where 2 vs1 is ok but not much than that, where i cant ever be ambushed because we know you dont survive ambushes, usless you are snowflake.

 

 

So Gameplay wise how do you want to be?

Edited January 15, 2013 by ReyVagabond

[Lephys]

So no. There is no word in a dictionary sufficient to illustrate how much agaisnt this I am.

 

Man... all that typing I did, and none of it got even any attention, haha.

 

Look, here's all I'm saying. I think there's a discrepancy in the discussion. You're thinking that you're "against" this, and myself and some others are "for" it. But what is "it"? Being powerful? An ant is powerful. It's just not very powerful compared to humans, or dragons. So, obviously, the only constructive way to look at this topic is "Let's try to find the range of power that is the most acceptable." We might find out what's not powerful enough (like, perhaps, the inability to ever take on any more than 6 combatants at once -- one for each of your party members), and where exactly is TOO powerful for the game's own good.

 

So, if what we're saying is, in your opinion, too powerful (which, I'll agree that Dragonball would be bad. Dragonball doesn't even make any sense within its own universe... planets can be destroyed instantly at ~9,000 power, and later on it takes someone with like 4 million power about 30 minutes to destroy one?), then please provide more constructive insight as to what wouldn't be too powerful, but would still not be a minimal amount of power.

 

Obviously different posters are providing different examples of relative levels of power for our characters to have, so, like I said, we should probably use each example as a reference point for determining where "reasonable" should be.

 

Here's a good starting place, using the dragon example we've already both discussed a bit. Do you think that a group of 6 simply being capable of taking on a believably powerful dragon (not it being easy at all for them, just possible) would automatically be too powerful? If so, why? We can work our way up or down from there.

[TrashMan]

I mean what - do enemeis have scouters?

 

No, the idea is that they know guys by reputation. "You are the guys that beat that clan of hill giants and cleared the next province over of bandits, and killed that Dragon... we're all going to die, ahhh!"

 

 

And how do they know who you are in the first place?

 

I don't recall Twitter and Facebook in the middle ages, nor a realistic depiction of your face being plastered everywhere.

[TrashMan]

its grate that we disagree, but what can i say like the old BG2-TOB style where i start small and end up with a big epic story like that.

 

i know its ego stroking, but in a game you are special you cant help it, its the magic of reloading, because you are the main character of the story, you have the heros luck per se, you cant loose a RPG (i have jet to see a RPG where loosing is part of the story, or it counts your looses for later gameplay story evets in a meeningful way), every time you loose you reload or you start again so for the game story you are undefeated, you are that guy in tales of old you are Mishamoto Musashi the traveling Swordsman that by the end of his life was the best in the world. you are Percival seaching for the grial. but enogh of this.

 

So?

Yes, you are undefeated (unless the developers add in unwinnable encounters), but do you really need anyting else than the pwoer of savel/load?

What's the point of being Superman and get new amazing powers whenever? It's boring.

 

A normal guy securing a victory trough blood and sweat and cunning is a bajjilion times more interesting than a demigod pimpslapping people around.

 

So not really "special". Lucky? Skilled. Yes.

[TrashMan]

Look, here's all I'm saying. I think there's a discrepancy in the discussion. You're thinking that you're "against" this, and myself and some others are "for" it. But what is "it"? Being powerful? An ant is powerful. It's just not very powerful compared to humans, or dragons. So, obviously, the only constructive way to look at this topic is "Let's try to find the range of power that is the most acceptable." We might find out what's not powerful enough (like, perhaps, the inability to ever take on any more than 6 combatants at once -- one for each of your party members), and where exactly is TOO powerful for the game's own good.

 

 

I'm talkign about PERSONAL power.

 

Take LOTR movies as an example. Think Aragorn.

Norman human being with normal human physical limiations.

No lifting 10 tons or swinging super-sized swords. No punching dragons.

 

For other types of power - like political power - that's something that would be interesting to see.

 

RPG's and fantasy games are often so fixated on personal power and bigger NUMBERS instead of depth.

 

Kinda an interesting train of thought. For a game ot be interesting, do you even need ever increasign power? Think Sam Fisher - he's no more durable or stronger at the end of hte game than he is at the begining.

HE becomes more "skilled" as the player becomes more skilled (playing smart) and as he gets new gadgets that increase his options.

[Jobby]

BG2 endgame is acceptable, TOB however felt incredibly overpowered, i haven't voted as there's no reference for "normal" but to summarize I'd rather defeat a dragon with clever tactics rather than sheer power.

[Lephys]

 

Look, here's all I'm saying. I think there's a discrepancy in the discussion. You're thinking that you're "against" this, and myself and some others are "for" it. But what is "it"? Being powerful? An ant is powerful. It's just not very powerful compared to humans, or dragons. So, obviously, the only constructive way to look at this topic is "Let's try to find the range of power that is the most acceptable." We might find out what's not powerful enough (like, perhaps, the inability to ever take on any more than 6 combatants at once -- one for each of your party members), and where exactly is TOO powerful for the game's own good.

 

I'm talkign about PERSONAL power.

 

Take LOTR movies as an example. Think Aragorn.

Norman human being with normal human physical limiations.

No lifting 10 tons or swinging super-sized swords. No punching dragons.

 

For other types of power - like political power - that's something that would be interesting to see.

 

RPG's and fantasy games are often so fixated on personal power and bigger NUMBERS instead of depth.

 

I'm honestly not even sure how I was talking about anything besides personal power... (except maybe party power, which is just a grouping of the respective powers of multiple persons.)

 

LOTR is an excellent example. Not of the progression of power, but of the exaggeration of human skill (much like many Japanese themes in legends and stories and anime).

 

You can say Aragorn was no more powerful than any other person, yet he possessed greater stamina and pain-ignorance than pretty much every single soldier around him. Sure, his sword strokes were things anyone could perform, with enough skill, but he had the power to dodge more attacks and execute more precision kills than anyone else on the battlefield (who wasn't also a main character with a slightly exaggerated power) for 17-times longer than anyone else.

 

Also, look at Gandalf. He was quite powerful, but still completely mortal and vulnerable as a withered old man. He COULD burst forth a shockwave that knocks down 100 foes, but he was then extremely weakened. He could heal, to an extent, but that also had its limitations and its taxation upon his magical "stamina," for lack of a better word, and he couldn't reattach 13 chopped-up pieces of a person and bring them back to life, or regenerate the other half of a smashed-in brain.

 

Which is exactly what I mean by, no matter what manner of power and factors you're dealing with (magic, soul-powers, etc.), it doesn't have to get ridiculous. The best fantasy fiction is the stuff that makes you say "Hmm... even though this completely made-up power and force exists, I feel as though I could relate to those who are wielding it, and the world still feels as balanced as reality."

 

You can subtly implement fictional amounts of power. It's not a binary switch between perfect reality emulation and DragonBall Z.

 

I wouldn't say you're wrong when you say some RPGs are too fixated on bigger numbers of personal power and not enough on depth, but that doesn't make fictional individual power and depth mutually exclusive things.

 

I mean, is magic an automatic no-no for you? (I'm sincerely wondering.)

[TrashMan]

No.

 

Since when is magic so simple to just up numbers? Well, in some games, maybe.

If anything magic gives a lot of options, a lot of utility, without necessarily being overpowered.

 

 

What I basicly don't want to see if the following:

- You start with 100 HP and end up with 10000 HP (bosses have a bajillion HP)

- You start with a 10DPS claymore and end up with a 10000 dps dagger

 

and similar...

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

No.

 

Since when is magic so simple to just up numbers? Well, in some games, maybe.

If anything magic gives a lot of options, a lot of utility, without necessarily being overpowered.

 

 

What I basicly don't want to see if the following:

- You start with 100 HP and end up with 10000 HP (bosses have a bajillion HP)

- You start with a 10DPS claymore and end up with a 10000 dps dagger

 

and similar...

So you don't want explosive power growth?

[Lephys]

No.

 

Since when is magic so simple to just up numbers? Well, in some games, maybe.

If anything magic gives a lot of options, a lot of utility, without necessarily being overpowered.

 

 

What I basicly don't want to see if the following:

- You start with 100 HP and end up with 10000 HP (bosses have a bajillion HP)

- You start with a 10DPS claymore and end up with a 10000 dps dagger

 

and similar...

 

That's perfectly fine. I never said magic = just upping numbers. I don't want that either. I'm just saying reasonable power limitations (that are, like you expertly put it, an expansion of utility, option, and capability rather than a sheer addition to potency) and powers/abilities beyond what's 100% a 1:1 match to real life aren't mutually exclusive.

 

That might mean some things basically laugh at sword blades but fall to a swathe of arcane power, but that's how things work. Doesn't make things have to be ridiculous. But we also don't have to focus on a game in which everything requires only a nick to an artery, and it's just eventually going to die no matter what, so we can strategically run away now. So, with the abstraction of numerical representation for the sake of the needs of RPG mechanics (and video game coding), and the addition of factors like magic, you're simply GOING to have stuff that's more "powerful," in SOME aspect or another, than plain old regular reality.

 

The useful point is, don't let it get ridiculous. That's what we can distill from all this. Not "don't have soul powers," or "make sure no one's more powerful than a real person." It just needs to all be balanced, based ONLY on the needs of the system, and never on the "need" for Hollywood, flashy, explosive entertainment.

 

You can still have awesome, interesting magic/soul-power mechanics and aesthetics without having characters destroy mountains and dragons by pointing at them.

Edited January 27, 2013 by Lephys

[Failion]

Why does this game even need dragons? How about giant wererats instead of dragons that command waves of rodents that can nibble your party to pieces. Not many people played interplays Sacrifice but I thought that level of power was cool and acceptable. You can summon volcanoes a top of players and all kinds of stuff. 

Edited January 28, 2013 by Failion

[TrashMan]

Yeah, dragons are overused.....