All Powerful Characters -- General

So, there is a certain degree of fun to making characters be very very very strong.

But the problem is, they tend to make the story very very very boring.

So, out of curiosity, I was wondering how y'all handled it?

Or do you just nerf them?

edited 1st Aug '11 10:05:36 AM by MrAHR

My characters are almost universally normal people who are no one special and bear no special or pre-ordained significance to the world at large. No Chosen Ones, no Messiahs. It feels more real to me that way, and that kind of historicity is something I want to capture in my writing.

I have a character who is, fundamentally, the strongest single being in the world. conflict is handled in several ways:

• Numbers two and three jump him at the same time.
• He's ground down after a long fight with a battalion's worth of infantry and tanks, after which numbers two and three jump him.
• He's losing sight of his goal in life, which is causing him problems when he fights, and his opponents try to exacerbate that.
• His opponents target his far more vulnerable companions to distract him.

On your third bulletpoint- let me get this straight. Gant is having a mid-life crisis and so he can't fight?

Emotional problems can be very detrimental to fighting abilities.

He's doubting whether or not he's in the right, and if the world might be better off if he just let himself be killed; he's always wondered if his brand of "personal law" is superior to "social law". It's not helped by the fact that he's the Villain Protagonist to a Knight Templar antagonist, who happens to be his protege.

My character Nostromo is pretty much the most powerful man on Earth, but being The McCoy his desire to ensure the safety of everyone usually stops him from using the full limitations of his power. Being a King, he also considers just what his actions could do to his Kingdom, thus he only ever appears in flashbacks (when he was younger and at his most powerful) and in dire moments.

I like exceedingly powerful antagonists — a Humanoid Abomination Big Bad, an Eldritch Abomination Bigger Bad, and a Transhuman Hidden Agenda Villain, for instance — whose weaknesses are psychological in nature. It makes it more satisfying when they fall to mere mortals, Badass Normals at best, armed with only wits and (with some exceptions) a desire to do what is right. And, yes, I confess, letting those antagonists raise some serious mayhem beforehand is kinda fun.

edited 1st Aug '11 10:22:52 AM by KillerClowns

I tend to make them baddies (which makes them all the more fun to shut down) or people who are of completely irrelevant morality.

My favorite is the guy who knows the past present and future, and just serves to reinforce the time stream.

Everyone hates the bastard. Good guys, bad guys. Everyone.

edited 1st Aug '11 10:50:22 AM by MrAHR

So, Vinicio Acquati. Born the useless weakling of his family, got turned into a nigh-indestructible creepy-ass Reality Warping Humanoid Abomination/Physical God of a man thanks to an alien virus. Yeah. The powers that the virus granted him made him want to share the satisfaction of power and invincibility with the weak through highly advanced gene splicing.

I try to keep him under control by placing him in situations that his powers can't solve. Manipulating people out of the government and dealing with The Mafia, for instance. I also focus more on his personality and myriad of idiosyncrasies and Noodle Incidents (they really pile up during 3,000 years of life) than his powers. That's usually more fun than having him curb stomp enemies.

Hmm... in my setting, mages who actually know exactly what they're doing can do pretty much whatever they want with physical reality. The rule of thumb is that if one is able to throw a fireball, he is also able to throw two fireballs twice that size at the same time. Their only weakness is that they are as vulnerable to physical attacks as everyone. Of course, they can make weapons melt or disappear with a thought, but a knife in the back when they're not expecting it is how most mages are killed. They are able to change their appearance, though, so it's hard to take one by surprise. And of course, they can make themselves immortal as far as age is concerned.

Most mages know almost nothing about their craft, however, which means throwing fireballs is beyond their wildest dreams. They're still extremely dangerous and feared, and most of them hide their identities, disguising themselves whenever they appear in public.

That brings the number of super-powerful characters down to three. Two are villains (or kind of) and one is a... neutral force, mostly.

• The neutral (most powerful mage known!) one lives fittingly in the capital of a country, and, well, does whatever he wants based on his whims. Basically he lives a comfortable life and occasionally helps people if he feels like it. He famously killed nine assassins with a gesture once, and few people have dared to investigate his identity since then. He's very smug, but doesn't really do much. He could be a great help to his country just by creating rain where it's needed, but he doesn't bother. His power isn't a problem because he doesn't care, essentially.
• The second most powerful mage (unknown to the world) is an Anti-Villain\Antihero (or whatever) that travels around murdering mages (and other people), for the greater good, basically. He is pursued by the protagonist, who, understanding how the mage thinks, is able to follow him around and in most cases take advantage of his murders and makes a profit. This villain doesn't break the plot because his main goal is to kill the other villain...
• Who is, in a way, magic itself. This villain is the most powerful being in the universe, and I've no idea how her\his powers don't break the plot, because I don't know what will happen in the end yet. But the usual weaknesses of mages (can be taken by surprise) do not apply to her\him. So the world is kind of screwed. Meh.

I usually don't run into most of these problems that often.Most of my chartacters tend to be strong in certain areas,but have weaknesses in others.For an example:

• Assassinblade- She is futuristic cyborg,who fights with alot of blades.Needless to say,her strenght is subpar and her speed is high as well.Though she also is able to use psychic powers,her weaknesses?She can't swim.She's too heavy.She can hold her breath,but she needs to breathe air just like everyone else.Another weakness is,she can't fight against magic.Her Psychic powers can form a sheild,but at most she can't deflect curses.Also,she is more of a speed character then a strength character,which is to say she is more of Spiderman's level of strenght then Super Man Or The Incredible Hulk.Meaning that she can be bulldozed in a face to face fight with such beings if they really hit her.To sum it up her best strengths or her wits and her durability.

Jinx: She was made to be the "Perfect Traditional Mage".She has Super-Speed,and her magic attacks or very powerful.She is good at fighting with weapons,likes knives,and metal cards,or being a Combat Pragmatist in general.Her weakness?She isn't good at hand to hand fighting.She also as strong as a normal human can be,which means that she can't fight hand to hand with them,because she'd die taking a powerful blow from them,or be severely hurt.The only reason she fights them is because she's insane and she likes to fight peroid.

I hope no one read that as "period period."

Shield.

While the heroine of my story and her partner-in-buisiness aren't particuarly strong for the world they inhabit (being a normal human girl and a guy with a cartoon-style bomb for a head, respectively). Sure, Madeline has a super-competent jackass side, and there exist performance-enhancing drugs that temporarily turn the consumer into a lightning bruiser, but these pale in comparison to various branches of the upper crust, who obtained their positions through various means.

For example,

• the youngest of the Elite uses a stop sign as a sword that can slow down time around him.
• A man with a giant 8-ball for a head can manipulate the probability of an event occurring within a 15-foot radius.
• And that cute, cuddly, cat-thing with a dog's nose and floppy elephant ears that just so happens to be locked in a cage in a hidden room in the basement of an abandoned research laboratory scheduled for demolition? It's an Eldritch Abomination mash-up of several hundred different species, including humans, and is functionally immortal due to the rate of its cell division in response to injury to any of its cells. EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM. Shooting it in the head is like shooting a bullet into a pond.

edited 1st Aug '11 12:23:18 PM by Winglerfish

I did it when I was deconstructing the concept—Flying Brick—and so, I simply took away the specialness. Yes, the main character was the most badass superhero in the galaxy. Barely. There were half a million more, all fighting the same wars, alongside the same soldiers, dying the same pointless, painful deaths, and you know what, he doesn't mean a damn thing. I also scaled villain threat accordingly. I think it came out alright, but, that's not really up to me so much as it is up to the reader, so, I don't know for sure.

Sounds a tad depressive.

I made a godess of Fan Fichon.

edited 1st Aug '11 12:20:59 PM by RandomChaos

Deconstruction, remember?

I don't see the connection? Things that are depressing are not always a deconstruction. Things that are deconstructed are not always depressing.

To me, deconstruction is forcing the audience to challenge their own view of something.

Standard superhero: gets powers, has a secret identity, Status Quo Is God, saves the day, the end.

Standard Space Opera: Black-and-White Morality, good guys on one side, bad guys on other side, precursors are either a non-issue—which means their stuff helps the good guys or is the villains' superweapon—or evil.

My version: supers get powers, take over the world—Utopia Justifies the Means—wage war for Gray-and-Gray Morality, precursors are behind everything, and supers come out as morally questionable guardians of an ideal that isn't even a universally-acceptable thing. The end.

Depressing isn't required, sure, but you can't say it doesn't help.

The Seer put it this way: "Ripping open the time stream...for one such as I, is a small task."

He is tied down by how he cannot act outside his own neutrality, but that will not stop him from construing and interpreting orders from either side he "helps" in very nasty ways.

edited 1st Aug '11 2:12:42 PM by NickTheSwing

The main problem with world-beater characters is — where do you go from here? People learn from adversity, not from constant success. If there are no challenges, your protagonist won't be interesting. You can make your villain more powerful, but that just gives you two uninteresting characters instead of one.

My stories tend to be about ordinary people who get into slightly extraordinary situations. Leave your characters plenty of room to grow, and you leave yourself plenty of room to develop them. If they get something, they should give up something, or find that there are drawbacks to their new abilities.

If you think your characters are too powerful, find a way to scale them back. Almost anything you do to make their lives harder will result in a better story.

Every story is different. Superman can still have interesting stories, even though he is VERY powerful.

It's simple. Put your all-powerful character into new situations, or situations that he can't use his powers to get out of.

For instance, my own character, Vince, has problems concerning the Sicilian Mafia, because he wronged them a long time ago. The Mafia uses its contacts to tarnish his reputation and make it hard for him to negotiate deals. I could have Vince use his Reality Warping powers to blow up The Mafia, but he still can't fix his reputation.

edited 1st Aug '11 2:30:07 PM by CrystalGlacia

Or, just don't make him the main character.

My all powerful character doesn't even want to help the heroes fight. A bit like a Trickster God, I suppose.