Davies wrote: ↑Wed Oct 25, 2017 11:45 pm
I found that it was no harder to deal with Zalman's magic than it was to deal with Zane's telepathy or Donnie's kinetic energy manipulation, mostly because the players didn't want their characters to be omnipotent either. It may have helped that it was a campaign more about personalities than powers.
A part of the reason I chose telepathy was that I'd seen somebody going into great detail about how you could never have a good game with a telepath in it because they would "ruin the game".
I made my character in an attempt to prove that wrong. And wound up using my Telepathy for mind reading so infrequently that the GM had to actually remind me that my telepath could, in fact, read minds.
Whoops. ;~)
In my opinion any character can ruin a game with their choices.
With magic as a concept it can be hard because there is this mindset that magic can do anything and that all magicians can do anything. And sometimes that can be the fun part of the character, being able to make the impossible possible.
Really at the end of the day I think moderation is important. Yes, you can read every mind you come across to get all of the information. But should you?
Yes, you can magic every problem that comes your way, but should you?
One of the problems we ran into early on was that one player had high ranks in quickness and nobody really understood how the power worked. In the end most of the players just stopped rolling for things because the one guy would take 20 and usually beat everybody else's checks by a wide margin. Which might be why some of the characters in this listing have a really high skill or two, so that they'd still be relevant.
Niche protection is always a nice thing to have if you can manage it, though not entirely necessary to a good game. But it's a nice mindset to start people off in. This is the Strong Girl. She's the strongest and does the strong stuff. This is the speedster. He does the speedster stuff.
This is the jerkface, he will never roll above a five on any diplomacy check ever. *Glares at the dice*
I think if I was going to run a game and I saw a magic user character I might talk to them about having their magic focused on a theme. This tends to narrow the scope of their powers a little bit, which can help temper the "I can do anything" mindset.
And sometimes just talking to the players to let them know about concerns can help too.