I write Oskwell as an experienced lancer. A damned good lancer, even, having been training for nearly half his life. Do I mind him losing? Not at all. Am I picky about who he loses to? Not at all. Which is why I use rolls. You may think that something about your character, whether it's how you've written them or how much time you've spent writing them or even something else, makes them "too good" to be beaten by a character you don't think would be able to beat them, but at that point it seems like a problem of your word against another's. When you say "I don't wanna roll-fight because it wouldn't suit how I've written them" you're assuming quite a lot of the other character of the equation.
There's plenty of ways to win a fight. Oskwell isn't so sacred a character that I lose my mind whenever he loses to an amateur lalafell lancer. Osk has lost multiple times to those that could be called less skilled than himself, whether it's through his handicap, prior injuries hindering him, various dirty tactics, outside interference, etc. Rolls don't do anything but determine the outcome and the general tone (a quick, decisive victory vs. a long, drawn-out and hard-fought win, for instance) of the fight, and those are two things that hardly hinder my writing.
In most fiction, it's quite easy to keep powerlevels and who should win what fight because there's one author. In roleplay, there's many authors, and when there's many authors, there's discrepancies. Just look at any long-running comic book for reference. Flash can outrun Death himself and kick the shit out of Superman in a race one day, and get flattened by the likes of Captain Cold and other street-level rogues the next. And this is comics, where a title changes hands every few years. In roleplay, you have a separate author behind every single character, so the best way to go about things is just to dispel the image that you're writing a fantasy epic and think more like you're writing a comic book. The strength of characters should change to encourage good roleplay, instead of roleplay accommodating who players think they should and shouldn't be able to beat and in what way.
There's plenty of ways to win a fight. Oskwell isn't so sacred a character that I lose my mind whenever he loses to an amateur lalafell lancer. Osk has lost multiple times to those that could be called less skilled than himself, whether it's through his handicap, prior injuries hindering him, various dirty tactics, outside interference, etc. Rolls don't do anything but determine the outcome and the general tone (a quick, decisive victory vs. a long, drawn-out and hard-fought win, for instance) of the fight, and those are two things that hardly hinder my writing.
In most fiction, it's quite easy to keep powerlevels and who should win what fight because there's one author. In roleplay, there's many authors, and when there's many authors, there's discrepancies. Just look at any long-running comic book for reference. Flash can outrun Death himself and kick the shit out of Superman in a race one day, and get flattened by the likes of Captain Cold and other street-level rogues the next. And this is comics, where a title changes hands every few years. In roleplay, you have a separate author behind every single character, so the best way to go about things is just to dispel the image that you're writing a fantasy epic and think more like you're writing a comic book. The strength of characters should change to encourage good roleplay, instead of roleplay accommodating who players think they should and shouldn't be able to beat and in what way.
roleplay?
