How to avoid making a character too weak or too powerful?

Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Two big problems with heroes are The Worf Effect, and Invincible Hero.

With one, said hero is hyped up but always loses anyway to show how serious the situation is, with the other, the hero always wins no matter what, and watching his fights becomes kinda boring unless they are a Showy Invincible Hero.

So I was wondering what some good ways are to avert this problems. For the former, I was considering having different characters get beaten under different circumstances rather than having one guy always lose every time, but that's it so far.

So I wanted to her what you guys had in mind.

If you have a Showy Invincible Hero, that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there are two ways you can approach this problem, and both of them are very near and dear to my heart (I have a fondness for these types of protagonists, so it's necessary to keep thinking of ways to make things interesting).

The first is to have your protagonist win the fight, but lose a greater battle, typically a moral one. Example: Shirou vs. Archer. Archer clearly has the advantage in every way and easily has Shirou beat, but the physical violence is taking backseat to a more fundamental battle of ideologies, one which Archer inevitably loses, rendering his victory hollow and meaningless. A second way to do this without appealing to the classic trope of Talking the Monster to Death is to have the hero win in a contest of brute force... only to reveal that the villain was counting on the hero being showy and invincible. Instead of fighting the hero directly, he fought a mental battle behind the scenes and used the hero's small victory to further a larger plan.

Your second option, substantially riskier, is to take the Worm approach, and have your villain go all Skitter on the hero's ass. Play dirty. Use whatever underhanded tricks you can think of to maneuver yourself around your hero's unbeatable brawn instead of just smacking rock A against rock B and waiting to see which one breaks first. Your hero relies on literal fire power? Have him fight someone wearing a fireproof suit, someone made of water, or someone who has the ability to remove fuel from their fire, like a gas or vacuum manipulator. Your hero has super strength? Show them that super strength does in fact equal super recoil. Your hero has iron skin? Resort to chemical warfare. There are a bunch of ways you can do this, and you don't even need to make a villain whose powers are tailor-made to beat the hero's. Just find out what your hero's weaknesses are and exploit them maliciously.

A very in-depth description there! For my part, try to craft your plot so that your hero doesn't rely on the brute force of contrived fortune to avoid an abrupt and sticky end. As long as we're, as in the readers are, feeling that his or her smarts or special skills are the key to survival and also that the fictitious world itself is a sufficiently dangerous place, it will make sense that they get as far as you plan for them to go. To be honest, when I feel that a character meets a contrived end or was never going to lose in the first place, the cause is a simple lack of sufficient explanation why either way.

Try what they did in Superman: The Animated Series.

A simple thing to keep in mind is that the hero always winning does not equate invincible hero.

The key is that victory does not need to be effortless, the hero can win every battle in the story, but as long as it feels pitched and very troublesome for him, he is not invincible.

E.g: If a knight defeats a dragon without breaking a sweat, you could say he's a Invincible Hero. If a knight defeats a dragon after a drawn-out, pitched battle where he's almost killed a dozen times and by the end he's barely able to stand upright with the sheer amountof wound and stress he has endured, he's not an invicible hero.

For one thing, if you don't want a character who is too powerful, don't make them too powerful! To elaborate, don't give a character so much raw power that the other characters can't be a threat (Hao from Shaman King and deified Aizen from Bleach are perfect examples of how this can go horribly wrong) and make sure you understand the implications of a character's power so that their abilities don't end up giving them an unfair advantage later on (like Peter and Sylar from Heroes or the Uchiha from Naruto). If you do have an overly powerful character, try to use them sparingly and only against characters that are major threats (Hiko Seijuro of Rurouni Kenshin is a good example of how to use an overpowered character sparingly and correctly).

edited 12th Apr '14 6:23:16 PM by shiro_okami

For me it's when the character has New Powers as the Plot Demands and verges on Blackhole Sue.

How are the villains or other characters compared to the character in question? It's one thing to outsmart the Big Bad once, but if it keeps happening? Sf Debris points out what made the good Star Trek movies good: the interpay between the Enterprise crew vs. the villains. They would be one step ahead of the heroes.

A weak character needs others to bail him out. Or is The Load. A Boring Invincible Hero either shows up and beats the villain in their glass jaw or is The Ace. Everyone goes on about how cool she is.

People make mistakes. The Anti-Sue and Sympathy Sue miss the point. Because a character has a "tragic backstory" or is the Gonk doesn't make them well rounded. It's how they deal with it. Luke Skywalker wanted adventure and grew into becoming a Jedi. There are still fans who think he's a whinny emo brat. Annikin Skywalker was shown to be an Emo Teen and most of his character traits go under Informed Ability.

So if you had a character who can shoot lazers, is immortal and Nigh Invunerable what to do?

• The character has Blue-and-Orange Morality and can't comprehend that her/his/it's human friends die and becomes a hero to fight crime.
• Avoid Weaksauce Weakness: some major plot point or character moment causes the hero to be Brought Down to Normal.
• Always a Bigger Fish: There is a Big Bad that requires the other characters. Or the hero gets a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and now has to recover.

edited 13th Apr '14 8:41:55 PM by TairaMai

Put your "invincible" hero in a situation where his invincibility (or skills that would otherwise make him invincible) can't help him. Thrognar the Barbarian might be awfully good at beheading Orcs, but what if he has to comfort a grieving widow? Or put up with a bratty child without tearing them limb from limb? Or build a boat, bandage a wound, fill in a tax return or convince someone he's telling the truth? Being able to shrug off an axe to the forehead might be impressive in a fight, but it isn't a terribly useful ability in everyday life. Same goes for any combat-focused ability. Yes, yes, your wizard can fart lightning and call down firestorms - but does he know how to cook his own meals? Manage his finances? Maintain healthy relationships with other human beings?

There's more to a person than their capacity for violence, is what I'm saying. If your character never struggles in a fight, find something else for them to do besides fighting. Or if that's not possible, don't include them at all.

edited 14th Apr '14 11:27:57 AM by Tungsten74

Having a very powerful character is not a detriment to a story, unless they story is simply to small for them.

Let's say you're a Reality Warper. Nothing can really harm you. Bullets bounce off your skin, and a nuclear weapon capable of kill cities will not even singe your hair. You can lift mountains and the laws of physics are guidelines to you. You can hear the singing of every cell, every mitochondria, every molecule and atom and quark in a person, see their entire life story play out just by being near them.

Solving a bank robbery is trivial to you. Natural disasters barely warrant glance.

So you decide to think big. After all, your power is bigger than any little problem.

Let's cure cancer. It's not difficult at all, for you at least. So you fix one. Ten. Twenty. You send power screaming across the world and wipe every vestige of cancer from the planet, restoring those who suffer from it with a thought.

But, did you really solve the problem? After all, you only healed those currently suffering- unless you do this again and again, people will still begin to suffer and die from cancer. So, why not fix the problem at it's source? Why not make it so that people simply can't get cancer, alter their bodies so it becomes an impossibility? While you're bothering, why not just wipe all bodily aliments away? Genetic disorders, diseases, aging- Just strip them away.

How could anyone fault you for doing so? Giving people a chance to be forever young and healthy. Without their consent, of course. Some people would feel violated, or scared- the idea that someone could alter their whole bodies without them being able to stop it.

Even if they didn't, you've just single-handedly made the entire medical industry obsolete. Millions of people- doctors, nurses, scientist, engineers, factory workers, are going to having nothing to do. No one to cure or treat or make things for. Billions of dollars worth of medical equipment will simply sit and gather dust. The economic fallout would be devastating.

Can you fix that? Can you fix the problems fixing that would cause? Every solution may cause more problems than it solves.

Even if you turn the earth into a paradise where no one must suffer, people will still turn against each other. Even preserved from the world, humanity will cause it's own problems.

And what can you do about that? Oh, it'd be so simple to just make people do the right thing. Not with crude force, but by making it impossible to think otherwise. The whole of the human mind is open to you, and easier to mold than clay. You could so easy just make people be moral, to strip greed and hate from consciousness. But then you cease to be a benevolent friend of humanity, and start to be their undying tyrant.

So what do you do? You can't be the perfect savior of the world that people want, that people 'expect' of someone of your power. Will you break under the responsibility, and turn on people like a rabid dog? Will your power corrupt you and turn you to using people as toys? Will you simply reject humanity and hide away in your own little bubble of the universe, or flee into the reaches of space?

Sounds like an interesting story to tell, and a cool one to read.

edited 14th Apr '14 11:43:29 AM by Matues

Here's another idea:

Okay so the character is so awesome that physical violence isn't an option and they have teh magics and stuff.

What if the Big Bad plays politics? He/She/It charms away allies and friends. "Oh that is just a rumor" other characters say. The Mouth of Sauron lays on the good PR and some now side with the villian. The Big Bad might even move around not doing any overt evil, just out and about.

Either the hero(ine) shows off and gets a What the Hell, Hero?, stands by and does nothing until the Big Bad has taken over or has to use skills other than Stock Superpowers.

edited 14th Apr '14 5:14:21 PM by TairaMai

If you are unsure of how powerful you want to make a character, don't put them in situations where they have to go all out. That way you can always have them more powerful if you decide you want them to be.

On the worfier side of the power gap, there are a few ways to work with it. Bare minimum-ones would be Curb-Stomp Cushion and Worf Had the Flu: both serve to downplay it. Or have the defeat based on some factor more than "this other guy is much stronger," such as a type weakness (Fire guy vs a water god, guess who wins?) or a tactical error on the hero's part ("Juggernaut just one-hit Wolverine!" "Well that's easy to fix, stay out of punching range.") Likewise if the hero comes back to win in the end but in a method other than the fight which got him owned in the first place. Such as bribery. The simplest way of course is simply not to use the trope at all.

Best way may be to plot a good waste around it! Use it to show how tough the bad guy is, AND to enhance character development. The agony of defeat will tell us much about the character in how they react to it. Maybe your hero's kind of a fool, and these beasting are helping them realise that the're more to life than charging in headfirst. Or perhaps it helps them, come to terms with being a failure hero.

edited 24th Apr '14 3:29:37 AM by doorhandle

I really like the Yu Yu Hakusho approach on making characters too weak/powerful (at least, for the first seasons). Every battle relies on strategy and tactics, and overpowered characters can get owned by a weaker character if he's clever enough.

Alternatively, you can make your characters excel in certain areas while ultimately sucking in others which tend to hinder them. Like a long ranged fighter that becomes useless in close combat fights, or a squishy Fragile Speedster.

It also depends on how you handle the fights. It isn't as simple as "stronger and faster char beats weaker and slower char". For example, maybe the "weaker and slower character" is very good at defending himself, and thus employs a tactic on which he tires his opponent out to generate an advantage before striking back.

You can make the character part alien but so little of it that he barely qualifies as super strong to where he only has super strength but not super defense. Glass Cannon. This way he'll have to accommodate his lack of magnificent defense with decent fighting skills/technique or just genuine wit.

Another thought: if it feels like your character has way too many skills/talents/superpowers, consider splitting some of them off into separate, allied characters. Not only is this much more plausible than a single, hyper-competent character, it opens up a host of possibilities for interesting character interactions, and potential for conflicts between allies.

Nobody will complain about a group containing a ranger, a rogue, a scholar, a wizard and a barbarian, if they're all different people with different histories, areas of expertise and outlooks on life.

There is a midpoint between glass jaw and wacked out comic book "No-Sell" invincible.

Have the villains avoid something, a region of space, a castle, a forest, a character. Something about the thing they are avoiding is deadly to them. But make it "realistic": One of the problems with Star Trek's Borg was the tubes. Pull one and they are "down like an old car" to quote Paramount's Michale Okuda. It's something they tried to avoid but ended up using as a plot device.

As Red Letter Media pointed out, a hero should have an arc where he/she/it has a believable transition:

• The wimp who's running from the Big Bad and might just want to be left alone.

• Something happens that makes the hero care and provides a means to fight the big bad.

• Training from Hell to level up the hero. Mooks and Elite Mooks are fought.

• The hero's journey ends with a battle with the Big Bad and then the resolution.