Author: Greyson Floyd (Incarnadine)

So how are other GMs going about enforcing limits on their players for how powerful they are?

So how are other GMs going about enforcing limits on their players for how powerful they are?

So how are other GMs going about enforcing limits on their players for how powerful they are? Some of these powers are very open ended, by design of course, but that is giving me some trouble in the game I am running.

Let me start by saying our group has a meta gamer. Every game we play he looks for a very optimal build because that is how he has fun. When we started I pushed heavily that this will be themed around teen super heroes ala Teen Titans, so they would not be wanting to murder people, they would be trying to apprehend people to bring to justice. I also encouraged people to set their own limits on power because it is more fun when those limits get pushed and broken, so our Legacy that can open shadow portals can only do it in shadows he sees (story related, another member of his legacy got trapped going through a portal to a shadow that he knew should have been there but wasn’t), our telekinetic cannot lift anything heavier than 100 pounds at a time, ect. I told them I would not force limits on them since the rules didn’t, but encouraged stuff like this.

So what happens every fight is our Trickster, with Illusion and Emotion control abilities, is invisible, has 500 illusions of himself, evil clowns, or other players active and interacting with the environment because he says his powers do not require him to sustain the illusions after creating them, and he is making all enemies suicidaly depressed. (He also has stupid good luck when rolling dice, so his plans pretty much always work)

What this leads to, especially in our recent session where I had them playing super powered keep away with a ball, is everyone feels so left behind. He has an answer for everything and needed no effort to get there. If I force a nerf on him he will stop having fun, but right now he is the only one that really is.

How are other people avoiding this or dealing with it? Surely there must be people with gravity control that are just turning their enemies into puddles or something else just as OP, how do we avoid that in this system?

What started as an absolute blast of a game to play has become something that I don’t know how to proceed on, or convince most of the group besides this one person to play again.

Our group played our first session last night, and it was fantastic.

Our group played our first session last night, and it was fantastic.

Our group played our first session last night, and it was fantastic. I had done my homework, studied the play test materials, watched the videos on the Kickstarter page, and picked a villain from my old City of Villians days for the team to go up against.

Our group consists of four people, including me, and we decided we will rotate who is GM over time so we each rolled characters. An Outsider that the player ended up writing a 10+ page document (and is still working on) just for the details on the race, and drives a giant flying space squid. A Delinquent with the powers of illusion and emotion control, who instead of getting credit for his heroic actions prefers to remain invisible and use the illusion of a large pulsating crystal to represent him. A Doomed, named Doom, who lives in the basement apartment of an old library desperately trying to find a way to prevent her very life force being burned up to create a gateway to hell, letting loose enough demons to flood the Earth. And me, a Legacy, the third (well, fourth, we don’t talk about #2) Shadow Sentinel, with mastery over darkness and the very shadows themselves.

Our group went around going through their characters and backstory in more detail than I ever expected. We normally play D&D, and our group likes the story but often times ends up focusing more on combat and loot. Here people got fully into character, and painted a picture together of how they had met, how they became friends and the different relationships everyone has. For almost 2 hours that we barely noticed passing.

Finally we start to actually play. Our Delinquent is roaming the streets when, in the middle of broad daylight, stumbles across a bank robbery in process. He sends out a text message to the others, all but Shadow Sentinel quickly arrive (since I am GMing I didnt want to risk stealing the spotlight), and rush in to find…a mime. Completely unarmed, and making the tellers fill up a classic sack with a dollar bill sign on the side. They quickly find out this mime, known as the devious Mime Time, has reality warping powers, able to use “finger guns” as if they were real, create boxes and doors where there were not any, and even mimes throwing a tomato at one of their faces leading to an actual tomato appearing and splattering all over them.

Needless to say, the group is ready for a lot but not mime. They manage to halt the robbery (partly by the alien shapeshifting into something large and using the mime’s fake box as a weapon against him), but he manages to get outside and takes off in an invisible plane before they can apprehend him. I, of course, wanted this guy to come back from time to time.

After this another person in our group backed the kickstarter, and I raised my pledge. I have a feeling we will be playing a lot of this.