Creating the Uncreatable

Hello Everyone,

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Thorgron. And those of you who do know me, know that I put a lot of time into creating characters that I will never actually use for the site. You see, my creative juices (no that is not sexual) are always flowing and when my mind sits idle I find it drifting to different character ideas. They are usually not thought of specifically for the site as I also do a lot of writing on the side of SHRPG as well as running a few DnD games with my friends. But because I do enjoy the site and playing with its unique stat system I often find myself trying to conform these fledgling characters to the SHRPG stat system. As you can imagine, and as some of you adapting characters for the site have experienced, forcing otherwise unbound powers into a concrete number can be quite difficult. At first glance it often seems downright impossible. But in that impossibility lies a challenge. Can certain "banned" or "unusable" powers be conformed down to stats and numbers without becoming broken while at the same time maintaining their overall flare and fun? THAT my friends is exactly what I'm going to explore in this little thread.

Now before I begin my first power analysis I'd like to set some parameters for how I am going to be working these characters and grids. First of all, none of the grids I'm looking at or creating will be over the starting 30 points. This experiment after all, was ultimately inspired by the trouble new members to the site tend to have with conforming their ideas into the stats. Second, I would like to clarify for all of the staff that I am by no means trying to "circumvent" the system. I am actually a fairly large supporter of it having role played on sites without one where fights become a war of attrition with the victory only going to the most stubborn powerplayer. Third, and somewhat piggybacking off of the last one, I am by no means saying that any of the grids or characters proposed here are approvable. The staff of this site have the ultimate say over what is and isn't exceptable. The banned powers list is there for a VERY good reason. After all none of us want our hard work and long hours of writing undeniably disintigrated by the first omega beam wielding asshole that walks onto the site. Fourth, compromises are going to have to be made in almost every case for these powers. No your matter manipulator may not turn my character into swiss cheese and no your and no your character in control of life force may not put my soul into a rubber duckey. As a side note on the last one, I will be avoiding "permission based" in the way to make these powers as much as possible considering the answer to "can I have my character do -- to you?" is almost always a thundering no. And finally, none of these grids are intended as nor should they be used as templates for characters of your own. Think of them more as guidelines to having a power you want without making us all cringe as you suggest your unbeatable master of all time character.

And with that lets begin with the first character in this series; My Unbeatable Master of All Time Character! That's right, we're talking about time manipulation. I chose this power for the first to explore for two reasons. Number one, at first glance this is a massive and undeniable NO of a power. It ranks up there probably only second to full on reality manipulation when it comes to potential brokenness. And number two, this is a power with some extreme potential for fun roleplaying. With that out of the way lets now take a look at the very good reasons for why Time Manipulation is banned.

For starters, lets say My Unbeatable Master of All Time, we'll call him Mumat, decides he wants to take a trip to the past, we'll say one year ago today. Well, in that single decision, Mumat has just potentially effected more change on the site's lore in a post, than Dr. Necrodium did in an entire arc. In fact, Mumat could change the outcome of said arc because now those events, otherwise sealed in the history of the site, have now been opened to him and this is our first problem with time manipulation, specifically in the reversing of time, influence. With an ability to travel into the past your character would have the ability to alter anything about anyone's character, about any event on the site, you could even prevent the world that the site exists in to have never been formed. As was stated earlier, this tips the otherwise fairly balanced scales of character influence in your favor. You see as the site runs normally, influence is spread almost equally among all of the characters. You, specifically have the most influence over the actions and events of your own character, then the characters that your character threads with, then the characters that others thread with and so on and so forth, decreasing until you get to any individual character's influence over the site which is usually minimal. Gaining a higher influence over the site involves a long and difficult process of threading, plotting and involving yourself in arcs as they come up. Dr. Necrodium was mentioned earlier, a single character who leveled New York and effected his influence over the entire site, effecting each and every character in some way. That took time, that took planning, that took the RPer behind the character gaining the trust of the site and the mods before they would even consider him doing something like that. Now going back to Mumat, allowing him to have more influence than a dedicated member who earned his salt on the site is downright cheating and a good reason alone to ban Time Manipulation. But lets look at another big reason that this power is banned just for kicks and giggles.

Today, Mumat has entered a fight with his eternal rival Bland Opponent Boy or Bob. Bob is a worthy opponent with a very high fight skill and the strength to dish out some serious damage. Mumat unfortunately does not have the highest of fight skills or durability so if Bob gets in close, which is likely, Mumat's a goner. But today, Mumat has a secret weapon up his sleeve to beat Bob for sure. Just as Bob comes running at Mumat to deliver a potentially fatal blow, Mumat uses his newfound ability which he calls Timefreeez! All time around him stops, frozen in place. That includes Bob who is now suspended in mid air with a snarl on his face and his fist cocked back to kill Mumat. But Mumat is no longer there. He is free to roam around the frozen time space as he pleases. Staring at the frozen Bob, he decides that he has grown tired of their fights together, pulls a knife from his pocket and slits Bob's throat before unfreezing time from a safe distance away. Poor Bob hits the ground, confused and terrified as he drowns in his own blood. Mumat is victorious once again! So, did that fight sound comically bad and completely one sided to anyone else? If it didn't, you may need to find yourself another RP site my friend. But hopefully your still with us and see just how broken time powers can become. However, we can't just say "time powers are broken" and move on, lets look at why. After all we are trying to at some point make a fair character with this power set. At the start of the fight Mumat uses his Timefreeez! ability to dodge Bob's attack. As we did not set a definitive fight skill for either Bob or Mumat and Bob's attack was pretty well telegraphed, Mumat being able to dodge the blow with his ability is not inherently broken. There are characters across the site who can phase, teleport, put up barriers run and the like to avoid damage. Looking further into the fight however, we see the problem with this ability. After dodging Bob's attack, Mumat was able to deliver a killing blow to Bob without Bob ever having a chance to defend himself as he was frozen in time. Again we are not factoring in the strength of Mumat's attack or Bob's durability in this scenario but the problem still stands. With one ability Mumat was able to do three things; auto-dodge, auto-hit and instant-kill another PC which are all big red flags when it comes to RPing. All of these things were possible because Mumat's Timefreeez allowed him to entirely bypass the stat system. Specifically his enemy's Fighting Skill. At the beginning of the fight we stated that Bob had a very high fighting skill, one that probably passed the threshold of three points when compared to Mumat's. But because of the time freeze ability that was irrelevant. Even if Bob had a 10 FS and Mumat had a 0, he still could have done what he did to Bob. Again this is a VERY good reason to ban this power, especially since Mumat took his good ol' time before actually deciding to strike the killing blow. There are a few other reasons that can be sited for why time manipulation is banned, predicting a future that a character could not actually predict, the potential for paradoxes, etc. but the two presented provide some of the most trouble. So now that we've torn Mumat down and told him that he's broken, unusable, stupid and made him cry, it's time to fix him up and make him into a fully functional character!

This is where I find most people, myself included at times find it hard to conform their abilities to the system. "I want time manipulation" you say. "No" justifiably say the mods, "that's a banned power". This is because just saying that you have "time manipulation" opens up the whole can of worms that we've now spent two long paragraphs explaining away So instead of going to your corner and moping that a mod yelled at you, back up, take a breath and think about what it is that a time manipulator does. What abilities are they granted because they can manipulate time? Often, its the case that a power is banned because aspects of it create problems, just like we've already explained, but there are pieces that function like other abilities that can be salvaged and compromised (I told you it would come to this for most of these powers) on your end to give you your "-- Manipulation" character. Take Mumat's Timefreeez for example. In his fight with Bob he was able to use it stop time, move to a different location to avoid an attack then restart time. To everyone except Mumat, that ability looks exactly like teleportation. He started in one place, moved while time was frozen, and ended in another place, appearing to have never actually moved. Now all we have to do is eliminate his ability to auto-hit/instant-kill while Timefreeez! is active and this is a perfectly reasonable teleportation power with some cool mechanics behind it. This is where the explanations behind your powers become very relevant, but it has to be you that explains them so that the mods understand that you know how the system works and how NOT to abuse it. So since Mumat is my character, here is how I explain away his ability to auto-hit/instant-kill.

"Mumat stops his own personal timeline along with the timelines of any object he is in singular possession of (organisms in contact with him will still freeze as will objects that someone else is also holding), stopping everything in its exact point in space at the moment he uses the ability. Because of this frozen state, matter to Mumat takes on different properties (but causes no actual change or harm to anything around him). Solids become completely inert and unmovable, nothing can harm them or disrupt them in any way, liquids become the same, feeling as solid as concrete to Mumat while in this state. Gases however function more like liquids, parting in front of and reconforming behind him so that he may pass through the air (this does not however allow Mumat to "swim" through the air, he must still move over solid surfaces). Because of these changed functions of matter while Mumat is locked in a Timefreeez! he cannot breathe so long as the ability is active, limiting the length of time to however long he can hold his breath. Should Mumat pass out while using this ability, time resumes as usual. (2 ABI Teleportation, 1 post duration, 2 post cooldown)"

This description is necessary to clarify the exact parameters of the ability, otherwise we would be able to do what Mumat did in his first fight and that would never get approved. But here we have a perfectly good teleporation ability with a description that still allows us use of "time" as a mechanic. It is completely harmless to anything and everything caught in the field (except for Mumat himself since it restricts his breathing) and now gives us some extra interesting choices to work with other than just "I was here, now I'm here". Also note that the ability cost for the ability, the duration that it can be used and the number of posts it takes before it can be used again are included in the description. This is just as important, again so that the mods reviewing this app know what you are talking about and won't be trying to spam this ability every post. But, now out of thirty points we've still got 28 so lets see what other aspects of time manipulation we can apply to this character.

It's important to note that the concept of your character should dictate the way you allocate your points. It makes no sense for an eighty year old man to be walking around with 8 strength if his power set is based around having x-ray vision. Likewise I'm envisioning Mumat as an otherwise regular kid. He doesn't really work out but he's no couch potato either. Because of this we'll put most of his physical stats at a very average human 2. That puts our current grid at;

Occult: 2
Strength: 2
Speed: 2
Durability: 2
Ability: 2 (Timefreeez!)
Fighting Skill: 2

Leaving us a total of 17 points to play around with for his ability. I should mention now before I continue that none of the grids being made here will be built for optimal combat performance. We are looking for a way to get as close to the full realization of an ability as possible, not to win very fight. After the point here is make a character to roleplay as, not training a fighting cock (like the chicken). With that said lets cook up some more abilities for Mumat. We already have the ability to freeze time for a brief moment, but what about the ability to slow it. This can't be done in the conventional sense of slowing down time for everyone else but if we speed it up fr ourselves that could work just fine. To do that we'll add two 6 point stat boosting abilites. "Stat boosting abilities?" you might ask. Yes, stat boosting abilities, and here's how its going to work. We'll lump both 6's under one ability and call it time slow, stipulating that both have to activate at the same time. Six of those points will go into Speed and the other six will go into fighting skill. But why fighting skill? The higher your fighting skill rises, the faster you can react to things but its never stipulated how that works so you can add in your own fluff for how the fighting skill functions. For most, it acts as a reflexive mechanism, the body is so well trained that it reacts to attacks and incoming threats seemingly on its own without any thought from the person. But Mumat is no trained combatant, so instead this ability will function as a slowed time perception and since time is relative, if he is seeing things slower and moving faster than those around him, he has essentially slowed down time. This ability is far more straightforward so I won't include the description. However, I will set a maximum duration of two posts with a two post cooldown and stipulate that if Slow-Time (the name of this new ability) is active when Timefreeez is activated, Slow-Time immediately goes on cooldown. After all, you can't slow frozen time any more than it already is. With that addition, now Mumat's grid looks like this;

Occult: 2
Strength: 2
Speed: 2
Durability: 2
Ability: 2 (Timefreeez!) 6,6 (Slow-Time)
Fighting Skill: 2

So far so good and with 6 points left to spend Mumat statistically looks a lot like a less powerful version of your typical speedster. But he still needs a little bit of work before he's really ready to be functional. His with his rather low durability, Mumat is not going to be able to do very much with his abilities should the need ever arise. Since durability also determines stamina he's on the rather low end of the spectrum. But that can be fixed with some time flavored cleverness. Why would a time wizard be able to take a decent hit? It's a good question to ask, and one that could give us some added things to play around with in the character. Perhaps Mumat is in a constant state of temporal flux meaning that part of every attack thrown at him gets dissipated somewhere else into the time stream. It's a fancy way of saying he can take a harder hit, but as long as the stat is over four we can call it a power and that's just what we're gonna do by adding three more points to his durability. But only saying that this is what happens without having it show up in the character in any way is boring and loses that time flavor that we've weaved into the rest of the character. So in the description for his now total of five durability, we'll say that Mumat never appears as the same age, constantly aging and rejuvenating while maintaining his relative size. We'll set the bottom limit at 16 since that's the soft limit on the youth of a character. This we can explain as the age when Mumat got his powers. With that in place let's take another look at Mumat's current grid.

Occult: 2
Strength: 2
Speed: 2
Durability: 5
Ability: 2 (Timefreeez!) 6,6 (Slow-Time)
Fighting Skill: 2

This guy is starting to look like legit character, one that I'd be excited to play too. But we still have three points left to spend on him and we're gonna use them to make the most broken part about time manipulation completely permissible; time reversal. Okay so we can't actually give Mumat the ability to travel back in time, we've pretty clearly discussed that that's a gigantic no no. What we can do, is give Mumat the ability to reverse his own personal time as flavor for a healing ability. With that three its a rather minor heal but it gives us the chance to once more add some cool flavor to the character. Instead of repairing his wounds through science or a healing factor, Mumat can concentrate to slowly reverse the time on a part of his body that been injured, slowly but surely repairing the wound. As an added bonus, we can add as an RP mechanic to this ability that if Mumat should ever die, this ability will kick in and eventually revert him back to a time before the fatal injury. It's fun its interesting and best of all it fits perfectly in with our theme. And now that our entire 30 points are spent, lets see the final grid!

Occult: 2
Strength: 2
Speed: 2
Durability: 5
Ability: 2 (Timefreeez!) 6,6 (Slow-Time) 3 (Time Reversal Healing)
Fighting Skill: 2

Beautiful isn't it? You definitely can't say that Mumat is going to win every fight he gets in but then again he's no slouch either and best of all we've got our time manipulation character with no problems whatsoever. Without any fluff he has a teleport, moderate durability, a stat booster and a healing ability all four of which are perfectly acceptable on this system. The fluff for each dictate them as "time" abilities but at their core they work and all four provide for some fun interaction with other people's characters. I'm Thorgron and that's all for this little exercise in Creating the Uncreatable. Hope you've enjoyed it!

I feel like I should just note this for any beginner seeing this...

  Time reversal healing (3 Ability Regeneration) will do you no good unless it's out of combat. It could be maximized by putting more points into it when you level up. Regeneration in combat doesn't generally become useful until about 6 points. (Give or take a point)

 Otherwise this is a beautiful display of creativity to establish having a power without letting it be broken or unfair.

  Compliments for putting this together as well as you did.

Wow, this is super awesome. After helping out The Steel Magnum earlier i got to thinking about banned powers and how they can be worked into the system. I am super glad you made this guide and I think this is something all new users should read

Needs to be stickied

I'm more than a little sad this is no longer applicable