The Hero of your Game

The anime doesn't really do her justice -- in the novels, she's not played for laughs quite as often. Anyway, she's not really so bad, but compared to Luke (who is ridiculously overpowered), she looks completely incompetent.

Which brings me to my actual point: Characters who are ridiculously overpowered will make fools out of reasonably-powered characters if a general power level is not established early. If we had gotten to see Cecily and the knights winning against some reasonable opponents beforehand, it would have been more obvious that the demons were horrifically strong. As it was, it just looked like all those knights of Housman were all incompetent mooks.

In an example that is a little more relevant to the discussion of game creation, I played in a tabletop game where the GM thought that it would be a good idea to make the first fight of the game against a duo of overpowered supervillians. (It was supposed to be unwinnable, and provide the motivation to make these guys our main rivals.) There were two mistakes here:

First, because the players didn't have a good grasp of the campaign's actual power level, this caused many of the players to start min-maxing their characters, making the less ridiculous fights the GM put in front of us later continuously less challenging, and the characters generally less fun to play (since the players did nothing but push their speed and attack to the breaking point, and put nothing into new skills or interesting abilities.) The game's fights became nothing but, "Get as many turns as you can, and do as much damage as possible with each hit." This doesn't sound that bad, except that some otherwise less challenging baddies could be immune to this tactic.

Second, we actually managed to scrape by a win, making the whole thing a bad precedent.

The moral of this story: be careful when and how you deviate from the intended power level of your game/setting/whatever! A swordsman who can slice a guy in half with a single blow looks really awesome until he's faced with a dragon with sword-resistant scales.

i think we're all debating about tropes. and i think that's what socrates means here, where tropes are not quite stereotypes, but effective scenarios commonly used. how you use them or how MUCH is completely dependent on the designer. tropes are like a blank puzzle. put them together correctly, and everyone can make different pieces of art. tropes ARE things like flawed characters to that awesome pointless sword you get after you complete the extra dungeon in which you needed that sword the most. look up video game tropes here, i'm sure everyone could benefit from them. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

One common hero type that's not on that list is the hero/heroine strives to attone for some great crime that it either committed or let happen. This is one of my favourite motivations for heroes.

I alternate between liking those because I like to be really good at stuff (who doesn't?) and looking at them with annoyance as self-centered fools.

I believe very strongly in giving characters flaw. It's what makes them interesting, makes them human, no matter how inhuman they can be, but a flaw and a weakness aren't always the same thing. I'm not the most well versed person when it comes to comics, but I do own a few, and from what I've read and seen, Captain America has a crippling flaw that stems from what is also one of his most redeeming qualities. He has such a caring heart, such strong since of right and wrong, that he is very susceptible to depression. In one of the comics I have, when Bucky dies, Cap just gives up. He just stops fighting because he feels it is his fault.

I also wanted to make the point that I think it is good for story progression to show a character either overcoming a flaw, or succumbing to it. To be honest though, I don't like calling them flaws because really, they can be more of a double edged sword.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.