Overpowered characters in LARP

Salaris Lightblade - local poster-boy for overpowered characters

It’s one of the biggest issues in ongoing campaign LARPs. Tina talks about it in her article on choosing a LARP. Old characters with god-like superpowers that dominate the battlefield with their devastating abilities, leaving the newbies feeling worthless and sidelined.

So first off, I should define the problem. Why is it a problem when some characters have superpowers and others don’t? Haven’t the players earned their superpowers with their longevity and their contributions to the game and whatever else they have done to earn the points they have used to buy up those powers? Sure. I’m not contesting that the player has done something to earn what they have. However - LARP is a social game played by a group of friends. And if I’m a Level 1 Squire of Newbness and my buddy is a Level 212 Dread Lord of Greater Destruction, then we can’t effectively play together, other than having a nice chat in the tavern. We can’t stand side by side on the battlefield and face down a horde of ogres together, because we’ll either be fighting things that can destroy me by sneezing or that my buddy can mutilate with flick of his wrist.

And with the way many game systems are designed, that buddy and me will NEVER be able to effectively play together, unless he takes 5 years off of playing that character, waiting for me to catch up, which is a completely unreasonable expectation.

This is not a player issue. It is a system issue. If you build a system where players are capable of obtaining superpowers, they will. Players should not be condemned for such behavior and called powergamers or metagamers when they wield powers fairly as designed by the rules. They should not be criticized for their lack of roleplaying skill or for their interest in developing their character mechanically. But they should be able to play in a rules system that does everything in its power to prevent players from becoming so overpowered that they cannot effectively play side by side with new characters without making the newbs feel totally useless.

There are 3 ways to deal with this issue that I can see - give nobody superpowers, give everybody superpowers, or give players superpowers briefly and cyclically.

Give nobody superpowers
As you design the system, you can let people pick up a lot of skills, but make it so that any given one of them is not overpowering. How? Very few abilities should ever affect more than one target at a time. Abilities that affect more targets than that are often overpowered. Some games allow for effects to be delivered as a spray - a handful of packets thrown at the same time that could maybe hit 2-3 targets. Or perhaps an ability gives you 3 packets to throw in a row. Also, the cap for how many incoming attacks you can shrug off should be relatively low - being able to ignore more than 10 hits/spells/whatever is something that only NPC big bad guys should be able to do. Another way to limit overpowered skills is to avoid “dodge or die” abilities - abilities that, once delivered, require you to either expend an avoidance skill or be taken out of the fight. Note that even abilities like Sleep or equivalents like Sap can be “dodge or die” if their duration is too long. See my previous article on designing ability durations for LARP for more information on that.

Give everybody superpowers
If you want to have big badass powers in your game, ask yourself the question - what is it about attending 20 or 40 events that makes a character inherently deserving to wield those powers? If they aren’t too overpowered for an ancient character to wield, what makes them too powerful to be used by a newbie? Perhaps you can limit the powers in other ways besides XP cost. Make the player sacrifice valuable resources to use them. Make characters perform rituals for all high powered abilities. Give them to everyone, but each only gets one or two and never more. Put them in artifacts that are not bound to the character and can be stolen, traded, etc. Check out the Darkon rules for a really good way to handle artifacts, but note that it works best in a high PvP environment. Or, don’t limit the abilities at all. Let everyone run around throwing effects that can target dozens of people at a time. And if that doesn’t work out well, again ask yourself why anyone should have abilities that aren’t good for everyone to have.

Give superpowers briefly and cyclically
Arguably the best solution I’ve seen is used by the local game Dying Kingdoms. They set forth a retirement cap up front - 100 points. You don’t have to retire at exactly that number, but you have to start your final story arc and finish it before 125 points. It takes about 40ish points to master a power source - an element of magic or a combat school or a leveled skill - so a character will be able to explore two of these in depth. It takes about 3-4 years of consistent attendance (about 10 games a year at 2 to 5 points each) to finish a character. And the key lies in the retirement. Once you hit the top of the point range, you are a mover and shaker on the world scene. Characters at that range can become major political figures, including kings or emperors. They can take over or found guilds or fighting schools. They can even become major villains. They become a central focus of the game for an event or two. And then they fade away into the background. Leaders are still leaders, but their important leadership decisions are no longer the center of focus in the game. They may show up occasionally as NPCs to give some PCs a mission or harass them with their villainy, but it is the other PCs that are the heroes now. And upon retiring a character, the player starts over again with a new character. As a retirement benefit, they get a small bonus - usually they get to play a race or culture or magic school that is not usually available to starting characters - often something that they learned about during the course of playing their last character. This design not only creates reasonable limits to the amount of superpowers being thrown in the game and gives everyone a chance to be at the top of the heap, it also gives characters a reasonable story arc that includes a climax and denouement, something generally lacking in campaign LARPs.