(10-07-2014, 03:40 PM)FreelanceWizard Wrote: I guess I'm the outlier here in that I see the world of the player characters as more of a mid-power "superheroic" setting, similar to a low Essence Exalted game or the more down to earth issues of Ultimates. Note that I say "the world of the player characters;" the PCs are a tiny subset of Eorzeans. Most Eorzeans are just average people living average fantasy lives in a setting where magic is relatively commonplace (how else do you explain those ceiling fans, huh?I'm with you 100%. ESPECIALLY on the point of player characters being the extraordinary .1% of the population.). Those with combat skills are a subset of that, adventurers are a subset of that, competent adventurers are a subset of that, and you can go further if you want to subdivide based on access to Jobs, possession of the Echo, and so on. Yes, the vast majority of people are "grunts," as are the vast majority of adventurers; however, the player characters are the exceptional members of society -- the Company of Heroes sorts who can face down Primals, explore the depths of Allagan ruins, and go around generally being Big Damn Heroes.
However, just because the PCs are Heroic doesn't mean that they don't face significant challenges. It takes 8 highly skilled adventurers to take on a single high-ranking Garlean commander and 24 to challenge the beings within the Crystal Tower. There's always someone or something more powerful. Characters can be powerful without being unimaginably Advent Children or Super Saiyan powerful. They can (and should!) have weaknesses, mental issues, and an underlying construct to explain why they can do what they do.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with playing a character that's less powerful, but I don't think there's anything wrong with being powerful in the XIV setting. In fact, there's a lot of fun that can be had in exploring the implications of that power. How do you handle mundane issues like paying your rent or going out to dinner (or, Twelve forbid, trying to figure out how to split a check)? How do you best apply -- or don't apply -- that power? What's a real threat to you when you have magical healing, and shouldn't fates worse than death terrify you more?
The only problem with that is the fact that NPCs have no agency of their own and thus end up falling to the wayside, to the point where we run into a lot more player characters than we do NPCs, which skews our perspective of events. Regardless, I would say that it is entirely reasonable for every PC to be assumed to be the competent 1/3 of the adventurer class that is itself a minority of the population. We're the special ones. That's kind of the point.
There's plenty of interesting things you can do even with really overpowered characters. That power alone cannot solve every problem, and indeed, as mentioned, there are plenty of things out there that are still more powerful. That's just the nature of Eorzea as a setting.
I think the End of an Era video pretty well encapsulates what all of this is about. The party of adventurers in the cinematic are representations of us, with all that entails. In it, you see a man throw another man several man-lengths away with a single axe swing. That's Eorzea for you. That's the power of Aether. You can certainly play someone more normal and/or less powerful, but I don't really see the point unless that's a major conceit for the character (as in, the character is centered around their helplessness and potential for growth). It seems pretty clear to me that the lore supports the much more super-heroic style rather than the more grounded LOTR style.
