(09-03-2013, 02:53 PM)LilMomoshi Wrote: (...)
This allows an even playing field, but also takes into account the progress a character has made in their studies (or respective class/classes). A spell is a spell, a blade is a blade, but the skill you hold with it and the abilities you have at your disposal are based purely on how much time you've put into honing them.
(...)
Is it a little dance, and a delicate balance? Sure. But it allows for a character to grow and progress, and never hold power beyond the scope of others without good reasoning behind it. If my character is powerful, they should have to earn that power. And their awesome little black hat.
Except you are not measuring the character: you are measuring the player's time. That's not a good reason to have your character be more powerful or as powerful as anyone else's. It's just an arbitrary gate placed upon the player.
Consider: what if I can't play more than a few hours per week? What if I dedicate them mostly to roleplay, so my in-game level is pretty low? Or what if I have multiple characters? What if I spend most of my time leveling my warrior, but prefer roleplay with my lalafell eft-hunter? Should I be locked out of playing and exploring certain character concepts because, for whatever reason, I cannot dedicate enough time to gameplay? Should I make them all a wimp until I can get enough time to get to the 'proper' level? Why would I waste time on that if, for example I don't like the class from a gameplay point of view ? Is my character's worth proportional somehow to the ammount of time I've spent running dungeons with him?
If you take into account the character level to measure their power, skill or knowledge, all you are doing is placing an arbitrary gate based on playing time. Not character development time, nor anything else time. Playing time that is directly proportional to the time the player has. You are not measuring the character's power: only the player's commitment with gameplay.
At the end, I think our disagreement comes from what our purpose is when we roleplay. For me, it is about cooperative storytelling. There's no reason why your character's in-game level should be proportional in some way to his in-story skills. If it's about the story, then you can have a character that is powerful during roleplay but level 6 in gameplay. Is it hard to balance? No. No it is not. You make a character that is sensible. You make sure to not use outrageous powers with people who you do not know or that you know to not be okay with those. You use common sense. You communicate. You do all this so that everyone can take a worthy part of a story worth telling. I prefer dealing with OOC arguments than to deal with an artificial and arbitrary barrier that measures the player's time.
Quote:There's a time and a place for the big, draining, high-powered moment, and to me that place is away from an RP situation where having that kind of power, whatever drawbacks you may suffer, tips the scales heavily in your favor.
Certainly using over-the-top spells or skills during random roleplay is a bit distasteful, but I don't agree that the time and place for those high-powered moments are away from roleplay situations. There's plenty of ways in which calling forth a meteor to whack someone in the head could come into play during roleplay.
For example, maybe I'm breaking into his underground inner sanctum and, because the party doesn't have time to get the keys to the door, decide that making a hole in the roof with a meteor is the best way.
Once again, and what I always say: common sense. Don't cast a meteor on someone's head because they looked at you funny in the tavern. Don't cast an highly contagious and deadly version of Virus on that one Roegadyn for calling you a milk-drinker. Basically, you don't do anything outrageously powerful when people (players) you don't know are involved, because you don't know what their threshold for power is.
Once you know those people, or maybe once you join a Free Company or a linkshell, you might find that they are okay. Or not. But for that you have to communicate. And that is, funnily enough, the second thing I always say.
Things that cannot be easily countered (either because of their scale or because of their nature) should require consent. Unless you are organizing an event for your guild/roleplay group: then you probabably have the way free to do all kinds of crazy stuff in the name of fun.
![[Image: DWv3oGi.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/DWv3oGi.jpg)
