Character balance

How do you keep your characters feeling balanced and not overpowered?

I tend to use the emotions/intelligence/strength system where a character who's good at two things has to be bad at the third. For example, my character Irfa is incredibly intelligent and strong, so he's very out of touch with his emotions. My character Elowan relies heavily on emotions and is very strong, so she's not smart.

Obviously, this is a little oversimplified, but I find that it works decently well. I just kinda wanted to know what y'all use.

To be honest, I usually make a character first and then use this later to make sure they'll have flaws and weaknesses to use during the story.

Yeah, I try to find the balance between that and my system. Like, Elowan's really impulsive (a blessing and a curse), which is both a sign of her being in tune with her emotions and not taking the time to think through her actions.

makes sense

Yeah, connecting big strengths and weaknesses is kind of fun because it makes for really interesting characters. Ru is a people pleaser and likes making everyone happy but because of this he can't stand up to physical confrontation or say no to anyone

lol, I guess you're right

I've seen Pride and Prejudice about a thousand times. My mom's lowkey obsessed with it. I don't remember a lot about it tho, just some of the characters and a couple of random scenes.

Nice! From what I remember it was pretty good. I've actually been thinking about rewatching it because I was way too hyper as a kid to appreciate it.

Yeah, most old books are pretty hard for me to read because they're so, like, dense. I tried reading Dracula for school and it just hurt my brain.

I've been wondering if I should read Les Mis! It seems so long, and I never really knew if it was worth the read. is it?

I mean, I basically do the same thing with my good at 2, bad at 1 rule. I figured if they were always bad at something, they were never going to be too perfect

Thank you for making this post :D

When I come's to weakness, I try to think what would logically be hindering them from being overpowered. For Example…

My Character Jin-Wook-Shin, has the ability to glitch in out of focus, allowing him to teleport sort distances somewhat, even through walls! He also has the ability to destroy/hack electronics with his hardwired glove, but it's draw-back is that he need's the gloves in order to hack something. With his glitch ability, it only work's efficiently if he angry, other times he'll decide to teleport forward but might end up teleporting him to the right.

IDK.

No problem! I really struggle with this, so I wanted to see how other people did it. Giving characters who have powers limitations is a pretty good way to keep them from going nuts. Honestly, I don't limit my character's powers too much because most of the time the powers have their limits baked into them.

Like, I have a character named Hollyn who has a bunch of tattoos, and she can turn those tattoos into physical objects (Knives, bandages, shields, etc) BUT she only has so much ink on her body, so she's working with a limited reservoir right off the bat.

I think of it in terms of what is interesting for a reader. Overpowered and super caring characters can be really fun like One punch man or mob psycho you just need to convey the right emotions for people to enjoy them. You soon forget about whether they are overpowered and start thinking about whether people are enjoying the story. It's the same with RP, what kind of character would you like to interact with? Generally, most people would hold the same opinion. Think less about OP and more about what serves the story and the readers.