(08-20-2013, 03:06 PM)Uther Wrote: I'd contest that. There are a handful of super heroes who can take Superman in a fight, and plenty of villains have brought him to his knees. Either way, you have a point about the potential for godmode characters to be interesting, but the examples you gave aren't comparable to the average joe. Superman being the last surviving Kryptonian and Dr. Manhattan being a quantum being. Superman being good at everything compared to a Midlander Hyur makes perfect sense, whereas one Midlander being good at everything compared to every other Midlander makes much less sense. In short, if someone RPs a Kryptonian, he's allowed to be better than the rest of us. If someone RPs a Midlander black mage and then tells me he's also better at using spears than my dragoon, I'm going to take issue with it.But it's the comparison here that's bad, not necessarily the "master of all" aspect. Someone saying they're better than someone else is always going to create tension, regardless of whether or not it's justified.
One can have a character that's good at everything without it being godmoding, but of course saying that they're better than everyone else would be godmoding. In other words, godmoding is bad, in any context. That's as far as it goes, IMO.
Context is important too, of course. FFXIV actually does support "master of all" characters, provided that there is enough investment in the player (and thus, presumably, the character) to do so. What it does not support is one character simply outshining all others for one reason or another (unlike, say, Aion, where the generals have the ability to transform into superpowered raid bosses). There is an upper ceiling, and most characters will hit one at some point within their lives, assuming they don't meet an early demise first.
I personally enjoy writing about supremely overpowered characters and exploring how they interact with a world full of ordinary people, but that's something I do exclusively on my own time within my own established universe, and would be completely inappropriate in the context of an MMORPG where I'm expected to play nice with other players.
