What’s the downside to your character’s superpower?
I saw this Cyanide & Happiness cartoon and thought it was a great lesson for us roleplayers (and all writers everywhere actually). Characters without limitations are just boring (see our article about God-man and all our articles about god-modding).
Even the strongest and most interesting characters have their limitations. Indiana Jones has a crippling fear of snakes, Kryptonite makes Superman weak, The Hound from Game of Thrones is scared of Fire etc. These limitations make the character more realistic, and can lead to more interesting plot developments.
I was quite glad to see this week that there’s a new game on OngoingWorlds called “Heroic” (click here to see the game’s homepage & description) which has the tagline “Even heroes have flaws”. The game (according to the description) focusses on people with superpowers, but these characters aren’t heroes or role-models, they’re flawed people.
Plus, character limitations can make for really funny circumstances. Tell us about your character’s limitations/fears etc below, and how it’s affected your stories.
