Overpowered Characters



Players will make characters that are too powerful. This is a fact of life and Game Mastering. In the end the Game Master has two alternative way of dealing with overpowered characters. The first way is to heavily restrict what the players are allowed to create. This involves forcing the players to create their characters in front of you, disallowing legal (though unintentional) holes in the rules that players can and do exploit, and generally playing the heavy GM. The second way involves working with what the players give you. This involves making challenges ever bigger, often arbitrarly creating new ways of attacking the characters in order to find a weakness in the player's carefulling constructed PC/behemoth of destruction, and as a result feeding the general rise of power level of the campaign until everyone has yellow hair that refuses to lay down and throw a 'Spirit Bomb' that could obliterate the planet.

The answer lies is gently using both so that neither causes a problem. A GM's job is to act as a restriction for players. Without the GM to tell the players that something is against the rules or unbalanced, role-playing is nothing more than fantasy wish fulfillment and everyone is rich, beautiful and invulnerable. This is only fun in small doses when alone and feeling depressed. In mixed company for extended periods of time, it is an emabarrassing ordeal that is better left unexperienced. A GM's first job is to enforce the rules, and this can help more than you might think. Many a player will try to slip something past the GM that is not quite legal. They are hoping for that wonderful thing GMs can apply- called 'house rules'. As long as you aren't a pain in the neck, and allow some things through the gate, most players are happy. Letting characters shuffle around attributes in a game system where you are supposed to roll them randomly is often just good manners. Nobody enjoys a game where they are stuck playing characters they don't like because they rolled poorly.

So lay down a certain level of guidelines, and explaining the power level that the campaign is designed to operate within to the players. Doing this will help ensure a certain level of cooperation from the players, because they want to have fun just like you do. After that you enforce those guidelines while allowing anything that exploits those guidelines without becoming truly unbalancing. Remember, as GM you create and kill gods within the game world. Every character has weaknesses, and everyone can be put in a position where they feel threatened.