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.