No, it can mean both. But if all you've got is weak areas and no fun/strong areas, you're deliberately gimping a character.

I've also clearly said that super powerful != super fun. However, less powerful does equal less fun, especially to the degrees we're discussing.

I've seen in often enough in many different games. Because the player knows he can deliver powerful speeches, he ignores or outright dumps social skills and instead relies entirely on roleplay. Heck, I just had it happen. It's not that it doesn't fit the concept, it's that it's cheese and cheating.

More often it's a recipe for disaster. Deliberately playing up your weak spots can be fun, but an inability to deliver when needed isn't fun at all. Rincewind doesn't pretend he's actually good at anything but running, so he gets away with it. But to be fair, in SR4.5 terms Rincewind would have an Edge of 12 and a Magic of -200, so he would be utterly helpless at magic but great in the pinch.

On a subjective issue like this one, that's the only right answer. Anything else is just trolling.

Only if failing can not be fun. And to be honest: The best storys consist of the heroes actually failing...
It is quite a good thing in a dystopien setting...

"no fun/strong areas". Not related.

I didn't say you said that, though. You're the one who lied about what you said: 'more powerful means more fun'.

Yes, and that's metagaming and cheating. We agree. It is bad, but it is totally unrelated to this.

Actually, it's the same thing as using stats alone and never roleplaying, just with a mirror to it.

You're pulling a straw man, since I've repeatedly said that super powerful != super fun. More powerful is always more fun, but that was always with the definition of power being the ability to accomplish things, not a fixed number of dice as TJ or you implies. I'm not talking about power in the ability to leap tall buildings, but in the ability to achieve character goals. What's the point of creating a character who can never succeed at anything? Or worse, is overshadowed by everyone he meets?

Yes, they're both bad. We agree. It's just not related to this.

No, I'm not at all. I'm saying what you said. You *just* now said it again. "More powerful is always more fun"; no, not even 'up to, but not, including super'. Power is *not* related to character goals.

Now, again, I never said anything about "can never succeed at anything". Repeatedly the opposite. And the idea that someone who *can* do things, but is 'overshadowed' is *worse* than useless? Sigh.

I dunno, my focus for my Prime Runner Missions character is "cranky old man".

He's ancient, has asthma, is infirm, and is decidedly not a social master. Most of his dice pools are decent but not spectacular.

But he's a blast to play. and no, I don't "cheat" by using roleplay to overcome weak dice pools. Stuff he's bad at, I play him as being bad at. His main strength is being prepared for nearly ANYTHING, and that while difficult to pull off in play, that has nothing to do with stats.

I have yet to play at a table where he was considered useless. Most of the time I get the reaction, "Cool character."




-k

Yeah, our table really appreciates flawed characters, as well. We used to raise it to an art form: one of our best players used to have a character who had killed the entire rest of the team [on purpose] more than once [and covered it up, obviously]. Far from angering the other players, people used to regularly request that he be played. But at our table, you knew that's what you were getting into: absolutely anything might happen. Runs pretty regularly didn't get completed, characters regularly made some horrible error that cost everyone dearly, with their players consciously choosing to make that error because it was in character.

We've mostly got that kind of gonzo roleplaying out of our systems now [most of us, anyway; I never quite have that out of my system], and we play as teams, and we definitely do our best to complete adventures in roughly the way the GM envisions, but the characters people think are the most fun - to play and to play with - still aren't strongly correlated with the most effective characters.* I don't enjoy playing Kaas because he's good at getting the job done, I enjoy him because I love doing Kaas' voice. Other people at the table don't enjoy me playing Lil Buddha because he's effective, they enjoy me playing him because they like seeing the results of making decisions the way he would make decisions, which often is very different from what we personally might find most effective. ["I shoot him in the face." "You shoot...I'm sorry, you don't mean your fixer, do you?" "Yeah. I shoot him in the face. For a little while."]

But the players we play with enjoy a certain type of game; not every player fits at our table because not everyone enjoys the kind of lawless metagame we do. Some people want a pretty straight-up game, where there's a defined party, and everyone's got the same goals, and you go from job to job kicking ass and getting beat up and kicking some more ass. Some people don't like that a lot of our players speak in character: accents and voices seem lame or pretentious to them, or make them feel self-conscious. Those people probably aren't going to fit at our table, and more power to them: we try to find them another local group that they'll fit better with, and they go with our good wishes. What we don't do is tell them they don't understand what fun is, and that they're doing their fun wrong.

*And "most effective character" still doesn't strongly correlate with "has the biggest dice pools."

You are wrong, Cain. Point Blank Wrong. More Powerful does not equal More Fun. Get over yourself... Who is talking about never succeeding at anything? Oh wait, that would be you. You keep saying that, and no one else is. Get it?

It really seems that at this point, you are just trolling for reactions. As smart as you are, I really am having a hard time believing that you do not get it.

Without power, at least as I define it, you're not going to achieve his goals. I mean, what's the point of playing a face if the otaku can do the face job better than you can? Power, to me, is capability. Playing a character without capability-- an incapable character, in other words-- is inherently non-fun. Flawed characters can be fun, as 32 correctly points out; but incapable is not the same thing as flawed.

I don't know what you guys are defining power as, but without the capacity to reach the character's goals, the game isn't going to be much fun. That applies regardless of what game or style of play you're looking at. If you fail every dice roll, what's the point in even having dice? Or any option to succeed at all?

Again, again, *again*: I didn't ever say 'no power'. I never, ever said 'no capability'. I did not say, 'fail every dice roll'.

I said, 'less is fine'. I said, 'fun is not related to power in any way'. I said, 'more power is not more fun'.

A.) The current conversation is off topic.
B.) Generally speaking if you have to restate your point more than twice, nothing productive is going to come of it.
C.) The tone of the current conversation is degenerating toward ToS violations.

Lets move along folks.

So glad this is still going without me.