But how do you think those noobs get there in the first place? The way it's written is, you're making it sound like Noobs shouldn't have the capacity for long and numerous abilities and that they should always start small and it doesn't at all stifle their creative desires at all. It's not like there's a strict ruling against biting off more than you can chew. Lurkers watch the wrhg section everyday and concoct a plethora of abilities in their heads even before they join the site. It's not unusual to see some of them overcompensate and learn the hard way. And at that point they decide if they wanna move on and persevere getting everything right or reroll their character sheet all in one.
Well yes, people do learn from their mistakes, and that's a good thing. But I see people doing the same thing over and over, as if they're learning from copying other people or just laying down all their ideas into one character. When I made my wRHG, I had all these ideas for different characters I could do, and of course, people are going to have all these cool ideas and they'd want to use as many as they could, and it can be hard starting off with something you can easily manage because you just want to pack so much in. But I want to say, start small. Start off with something managable. Something that not only you can enjoy writing, but something that your opponent can also enjoy writing, and something the reader can enjoy reading.
If your character is just jam-packed with stuff, then it can end up a clusterfuck. You probably have an opposing view to this, but personally I think a good story is one where you don't need to do any reading beforehand. If you have a character with a metric ton of stuff, then if I'm reading their story it could appear like they're whipping out a new ability or thing every other paragraph, and It'll just feel messy and overloaded. Or they could use a small selection of their things, which could work depending on how you go about it. And if I were writing against them, then I'd need to constantly check their character page over and over and I'd get bottlenecked into finding ways around their walls of stuff. If I was against a guy who had a wand that could have an answer to pretty much any thing I do, then it's just gonna be tedious. Unless they're like Blender and their character's character is good enough that such things are balanced. (He's a pacifistic dude with humanity conflicts stuck in a murder-suit. Hah!)
Through my ranting in this thread, I hope to not only help those writing the characters, but those writing against them, and those who read the battles after.
People have a right to load their character with whatever they want, but they're in a place where other people have to deal with them too, so it can be a bit selfish to do so.
I say a good char is defined by his deeds and words, not by what he is and what he's made of. Some of the most simple concepts in the history of wRHG are some of the most brilliant. Bond's character can use Words and Letters to attack, for example. It didn't need to fill the slot of "accessories" or "physical enhancement". You can put all the primary/secondary swag in the world and you'd still end up with a crappy premise if you can't write them well. This ties in with my acceptance of a cliche backstory. What newbs need to realize is that Originality is dead and the best way to learn creativity is to Steal Everything. If you have a solid base from which you can copy from, then you can get started knowing what you copy. Then you can make corrections and changes later.
Note that I differentiate between copying and ripping off. In the latter, you have no intention of being unique and just want to copy something just so you can quickly get started and participate for all the wrong reasons.
I made the primary/secondary/physical guidelines so people can focus less on a massive stack of powers and more on the character. It's something easier to manage. If you have a clusterfuck of abilities combined with a simple cliché character then it's just messy. And if you have less stuff to focus on, you have to manage it better.
Sure, the simplest things can be the best. Things that are straight-forward are the easiest to understand, and can be the most fun to master. They can also be used to do a range of things, but such abilities are hard to muster up. One thing I like to suggest is to take a cliché, unoriginal thing and put a spin on it. Say... alternate forms. They are often straight upgrades to the previous character. How about, instead of a complete physical change, your character instead becomes... malleable? Handyman may seem to have forms, but really it's just him using the good ol' multiple arms power.
These are not seperate forms.
How I'd like to deal with these cliché powers is to step back, look at the foundations of them and see if I can mess with them. Originality is hard to muster, and straight-up copying a power is bad practice, but if you copy it and mess with its basics, good stuff can happen. A sword that always returns to its owner? How about a sword that always returns to its sheath upon a command. You can get inventive with that. Super speed? How about instead of the character being fast, they can boost the speed of whatever they touch so long as they touch it. You can get inventive with that. Super strength? How about instead of flat-out strength, anything you hold becomes lighter to you, but heaver to others, so long as you hold it. You can get inventive with that. Cliché, unoriginal powers can be good, and you can turn the simplest of them into viable main abilities, so long as you try to change their foundations.
Yes, but unlike our biological need to defecate or a popular tragic backstory you don't get to make the call of dictating what the wRHG-verse is and contains. You don't get to say that the wRHG is dominated by human characters. It could be filled with as many imaginary inconsistencies as anyone can dream up. In fact, affirming this false claim, you are inadvertently sending a subliminal message to anyone that joins that they are making a character as part of a majorly human advocacy, and thus any human claim should be redundant. It is not.
The wRHG-verse may not be dominated by human characters, but the wRHG character section is. Honestly, a good answer to this kerfuffle would just to have a "Race" thing on each character. You can say your character's race there. If it's human, you can state their personality stuff in the personality section. You can stuff their physical stuff in the physical description setting. If they have stuff like super strength or super reflexes, or a super weakness to certain things, stick them in the ability/weakness sections.
If they're not human, or are only partially human, then you can state that in the Race thing and note differences wherever they need to be noted. Human claims are not redundant. They just put them in the wrong place.
A human isn't a single, definitive being since they have variations within a scope. But, when it comes to non-human chars, we think of an average human within that scope. Since we are humans, we are the species that we would compare any humanoid non-human characters to.
And I agree with you on this. I already said so. But you treat Human Weakness as a black and white eventuality. That if any user states that, they've automatically dug a hole for themselves.
I've already explained what Sacred meant between the lines and you still don't get it? Forget Molecular Manipulation for a second; Sacred basically said his character can HEAL. By asserting Human Weakness, he means to imply that he's not Regeneratively OP like Majin Buu, but that his healing has consequences or that he is vulnerable and the healing is not instant. It's not Molecular Magic; he can't just regrow limbs and be done with it. There are such things as fatigue, frayed nerves, and blood loss that can play into factor as he is rebuilding his arm. Not to mention, the complexity and time it takes to rebuild an entire limb while under duress. To a keen writer, that's what he'll use to beat the character with. And even if Sacred himself doesn't think that's the case, when the polls come around, readers are more likely to vote on the realistic observer rather than the OP flashiness.
Character pages aren't made to be subtle. Between the lines? Leave that for the stories. And he ought to mention the limits of the healing ability. Lizards can heal whole limbs. It's still healing. Sure, they're not humans, but a super healing power isn't a human thing. His human bones may break and his human arms may be torn off, but without mention to the limits of these powers, then what does that matter? What's the extent to how he can heal? And how much does he have to concentrate to do it?
"Forget Molecular Manipulation for a second." I can't, since healing is part of that. You can't seperate a possibility of the power from the power and expect me to treat it as something completely different. There are millions of molecules in simple life forms, and his power affects all of them. From that I assume that it's more of a "point and click" sort of thing, rather than having to focus on all the millions of tiny things at once. If he doesn't need to care about individual molecules, I doubt he'd need to care about stuff like frayed nerves. Blood loss is a real issue, but that is a thing true to all humans.
You play Fallout 4 or Dungeons and Dragons? You know that Strength (STR) and Endurance (END) are two different things right? Like Wisdom and Intelligence, they belong to the same category of stats but affect different things. Sacred is saying his character has a low STR which means he can't lift heavy stuff physically, but having high END means that he can run around a stadium track and not feel tired. It implies that while he doesn't have the muscle to deflect pain, he can at least take alot of blows before feeling fatigued---of which the experience will be painful. It also says that Sacred has enough energy to use his Molecular Manipulation despite his wiry build. Muscle Strength IS NOT Cardio Strength.
I don't play either of them, but I get it. Also wouldn't endurance be how much he can deal with being tired, instead of how much he can deal until he is tired? It's not stamina.
Endurance would be more of dealing with pain, but you're right. It goes well with the healing thing. (But still, it shouldn't be in weaknesses.)
Furthermore, while he states that there's nothing that can bypass his power, but he doesn't state that there's nothing also that cannot bypass his power. You're overtheorizing and looking way too much into it.
Uh. You might need to reword that. I reread that a few times and still don't get what you mean.
Your mentality of having a character not fit a certain mold stems from attempts to have an ideal character, instead of assuming that OP-ness is not allowed and abilities can instead be tailored and shaped. I'm not saying Sacred's Power Description is perfect. It does need a bit tweaking. But it doesn't need to fit an "ideal mode". A nerf here and a further explanation there should suffice. And justification for the dreaded HM which as I've explained he's already done.
My version of an ideal character is one that I can easily grasp, where I can easily understand it so that I can get straight to using it in all sorts of fun situations. One that is fun for the writer to write, the opponent to write and the reader to read.
I feel like this is selfish of me, though. I'm thinking of the sort of character that I, personally, would like to read and write against. This could differ per person. Those who write these characters that are- in my view- badly designed and organised, could enjoy reading and writing against other characters that are the same quality as their own. But I can only peddle my own viewpoint in this thread. It's valuable to get the viewpoints of others in here too.
And yeah, wanting this of a character is pretty hypocritical considering my own one, but mine's more of a personal challenge rather than for a general battle. Handy's all about character improvement. (I am pretty self-conscious about how my character is, though.)
It's alright. That's what this thread is for right? Discussion and debate. While I find it despicable that you would impose standards on character creation schemes that have no standards save for No-OP, I'm still open to the fact that you and I can understand our thought processes on the situation and hopefully you can add and refine your own knowledgebase seeing as nobody has contested you up until recently.
Also, I was not originally arguing that Sacred should not change his character, but that your attempt to whine and bitch about Human Weakness just rubs the wrong way and I sincerely hope you don't do this to every noob that comes in this sub-section.
And I thank you much for contesting me. Really. I can be a stubborn, self-righteous bastard that people enable and I do need someone like you to better myself.
