(03-09-2015, 02:14 PM)OverlordOutpost Wrote:(03-09-2015, 02:09 PM)Imo Wrote: Fun fact: I've never met someone who played a high power character and was a snob about it, going "play high power or UR DOIN IT RONG and are a bad RPer".You haven't seen two high powers getting into a screaming match about why one guy's shield piercing magic drill can't piercing the other guy's heavens shield. Â "My drill will pierce the heavens!" Â "Nuh uh, my heavens are powered by antispirals." Â "Your antispirals can't stand up to my spirals!" Â "Well, I have a special spiral dampening field!"
But low power? Quite often.
That's the difference between being an arrogant roleplayer, and simply a bad roleplayer. Snobs are the former, e-peen waving powergamers are the latter.
Though I've seen a few examples of reverse e-peen waving, where people try to beat each other by claiming their character is the least powerful. That usually happens on forums, though, and not in the game.
Sidenote, since you mentioned tabletop RPGs: I've been playing those for roughly 15 years now, and there were games with all kinds of power levels; in some we were ordinary children with no combat training, in others wandering adventurers, in some we were mecha pilots controlling giant robots, in others a team of superheroes who protected Earth from giant monsters. And some of the best roleplaying I had actually happened in those high-power games, while many of the low-power games were just dungeon crawls where people didn't roleplay much because they were too busy trying to stay alive.
Another term from tabletop RPGs is Stormwind Fallacy, which I think is very relevant here. It claims that having an optimized character doesn't automatically mean you're bad at roleplaying, and vice versa, being a roleplayer doesn't mean you can't play an optimized character - and anyone who thinks otherwise is committing the fallacy. Optimization is not really a thing that exists in MMO RP, but replace "optimized" with "high power" and there you go. I've seen way too many people commit the Stormwind Fallacy.
(03-09-2015, 02:57 PM)Mercurias Wrote: It's just really hard to be high-powered and know when your character needs to step back and give other characters a chance to do something important. No story is worth hearing if you know the hero is always going to win.
I don't think it's that hard, if you keep it in mind. It's a bit like parenthood - if you're worried will you be a good parent, that means you probably will, because it means you're thinking about the baby, not about yourself. And, similarily, if you're worried your character might be too powerful, then you're probably fine, because it means you're thinking about the other players, not about yourself. Eventually, like with lots of roleplaying, it boils down to "don't be a spotlight stealing jerk".
Also, 99% of the time when personal character power matters, it's combat. And when roleplaying a battle, I go with the assumption that unless a character is explicitly bad at combat, then they're going to be effective - and thus, everyone has a chance to shine. If you play your character as powerful enough to destroy a small enemy army with a single attack, then you're breaking the lore because neither the PC nor any of the NPC allies are ever shown to be able to do that, in game mechanics or cutscenes.
That's fighting against NPCs, at least. It's slightly different when it's PC vs PC combat. But like I described a few pages ago, I'm really not a fan of that.
