PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v played?

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Agent Sorchus
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PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v played?

Post by Agent Sorchus »

Strait and simple, but comes in two flavors and is related to the DnD 5e thread. This is for characters that by the rules of the game (unlike some of my IRL players who try and stretch the game in an obvious way that explicitly doesn't work) where made to be or discovered to be overpowered, but were actually played.

The first flavor is the character that was strait up built to be powerful from the word go. The other is the character that was found to be too powerful on accident during play.

EX 1) I was introduced in the final stages of an epic campaign, one where the majority of players were melee players and had been given even greater than the state of 3.5e rules weapons and abilities since they were epic and free styling a bit. But I was expected to through together a Wizard on short notice. And despite having the lowest level (exactly 20 compared to 30s) I one went with an odd spell list. (by this point the planes were cut off, so no summoning or planar magic, which I usually focused on) The second to final boss was sighted and using the simple spell fabricate and the feat quicken dropped the ceiling on him (by etching the floor away around the pillars holding it up.)

But you expected that right? You expected a wizard build to be overpowered in a CCW focused campaign. Well I expect to see similar responses below so I thought why not go with the obvious.

EX 2) playing a homebrew game in highschool, my character was a birdman archer. Basically archers broke that specific game cause they got all good defenses, unlike most that had at least one bad. Plus when a goon fails there is a chance for a crit fail and the stat that my dodge bonus's were built around was basically always good as a birdman caused so many goons to fall on their own swords. Death all around. The game got a slight rebuild that helped by lowering all stat bonuses to defense and attack so that the randomness of the dice were preserved better, but I still dominated none boss battles. And all this was completely unintentional.

So to the munchkins of the world go ahead and strut your stuff.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Mr Bean »

Standard 3.0 Cleric Zilla with the added benefit of rolling 4d6 for character stats and getting a legit 18,18,16,15,12,12. So I was running 18 WIS/STR by default which I boosted via the stat boost spells so I was running around at level 3 with +12 BAB with an AC of 24 doing ten to nineteen damage a hit stacking bless, aid and protection from spells along with stat boosting spells. In later levels it got crazy with Divine power added on, since I keep laying more and more defenses on top of myself and the DM never threw any sort of anti-magic fields or dispel happy creatures at us.

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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Lord Relvenous »

Scion character built around being a sniper. I put a lot of boon points into my sniper rifle relic, and then found out that there was a max of how good you could make them. However, I was able to create more artifacts to add to it, like a scope that could see through pretty much everything. Then the GM added an ability to it that I could spend my fate points (or whatever those things are called, can't remember) to make my damage Aggravated, at a cost of 1:1.

We decided that was probably a little extreme when the party was "ambushed" by Nidhogg during the Ragnarök storyline and my character accidentally one-shotted him as a reactionary attack (attacking Nidhogg is tantamount to suicide when reasonably run. Instead, you're supposed to convince him to help you). The great thing was I took the shot and starting counting up rolls, and asked my party, "do we want this guy dead?". The GM waved me off and told me to just figure out the damage. After doing the math, I communicated the damage, right about the time the party had gotten the info they needed. The GM's reaction: "Well, forget that conversation ever happened."

Maybe that doesn't quite figure into what you were looking for as it features a GM's unthinking house rule. However, my dexterity was boosted so high that I could have done it with 3 shots. Though Scion is made to be broken...
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by S.L.Acker »

I've mainly been the DM for my group, so my most broken characters have been purely theory craft just to keep me thinking the game in stretches where there wasn't a game going. If anything when I do play my characters they tend to be a bit on the lower end of the scale because I play things I enjoy and not what is over powered.

Thus the closest things I've had to broken in real games were the following.

The first was my template stacked to hell and back beholder. At the end of my monster progression I could think of a great class to play so I started stacking templates to build my floating eye a body. I had wings, claws, a rake attack, and a tail. My feats were based around boosting the saves on my eye stalks and often times the stronger members of the party would flip me so all my eye stalks pointed at the enemy and I'd let loose with everything in one massive damage dump of death.

The other character was more recent and was nothing special as far as crazy races and such go. It was just a Goliath Cleric using a Goliath Hammer, I was building towards permabuffs, but I mainly picked AoE buffs that effected the entire party. The DM caused me to drop out because coming in I told him I wanted to play team first and myself and the other experienced player were going to try and deal as little real damage as possible. This changed at the first encounter when we tried to stop short of an obvious ambush and were ridden into it on a rail. We demolished a CR3 encounter when we took the kids gloves off and with a combination of smart play and good builds we just started picking that game apart.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Agent Sorchus »

I'm mainly looking at what people have actually done as legitimate power-gaming in real play, and for those times that people have found that they have unintentionally broken a game. Too much has been made of the theoretical munchkin builds, and too much ideas of optimization or unintentional power-gaming and I honestly have only seen these sorts of things when the GM allows a stupid house rule (like in D20 SWars were the armor can have a higher DR than the person wearing it, until our GM gave the mandalorian equal protection to the thickness of the plate, which was more of a function of the suits hp then it's hardness.)

That is the many idea of the thread anyway, though it is also just fun to share our stories of the most ridiculous stuff.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by weemadando »

Galandir, one half of Alamir and Galandir, almighty and powerful elllllllvesssss (reference to this) in WHFRP.

I was a High Elf Woodsman who progressed through a bunch of classes and was aiming to be a White Lion. The other was a High Elf who was effectively becoming a Shadow Warrior.

By the time we placed them into retirement we both could literally NOT MISS called shots with bows unless we rolled a critical fail/auto fail and it was pretty much the same in melee.
This thread back in 05 wrote:Alamir and Galandir gained such a reputation in the old world that the City Guards of places like Marienburg refused to go near any situation they were involved in. They were true Elves - sociapathic towards the lesser lifeforms of man - Alamir moreso - he'd knife to death a person at a bar for just trying to talk to him. Galandir usually needed a reason, but not much of one. Together their total "innocent" human bodycount (from barfights and people trying to collect on bounties) was well into the thousands. We were also capable of out-shooting [insert name of GWs Robin Hood rip-off] and probably would have out-shot a movie Legolas... And then the GM made us put them away...
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Erik von Nein »

I once made a telepath psion in a D&D 3.5 game. It was a silly, nonsense game, but I still ended up with a character with a response to most problems. Nothing big so far, fairly standard stuff. One of the other players, upon discovering a portal that lead to the city everyone was living in, decided to create a giant stone phallus for ... reasons? Anyway, the thing was made of several tons of stone and was roughly a mile above the city. When it broke off and fell to earth I managed to break its decent with a few walls of ectoplasm. The DM, for reasons unknown, decided to roll a percentile die to see how much of the city's roughly 300,000 population would worship him, and came up with 98%. Unbeknownst to my character he had attained godhood. And then we made it to Earth (yeah, don't ask) and ended up with more people there worshipping him. So, he attained divine rank whatever's the highest and we decided to call it a game there.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by DoomSquid »

In Aberrant, I made a character with density decrease 5 and permanence. She was completely invulnerable to everything except psychic attacks (being completely intangible unless she chose not to be), which nothing in the campaign had, and she also had the greatest damage output. She was eventually surpassed in that respect by one of the other characters, who was a Terat and could thus horribly abuse taint and chrysalis to pump up quantum powers, but she remained hilariously overpowered in combat throughout the campaign, to the point we were using her as a decoy for orbital particle cannon strikes. There's something very wrong when your brainhacked character (anybody who thinks Mega-Social characters are weak is insane) can pretty much effortlessly solo the whole of the rest of the party but for a lucky roll by the psion.

The downside was, she was horribly vulnerable to the aforementioned domination and M-Soc attacks, and her taint was through the roof. Plants withered and died or mutated into horrible man-eating monsters just because she walked past.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by DarkSilver »

Mage the Ascension (oWoD) Order of Hermes Mage who got to Master Rank in Forces and Time.

He was a powerhouse when he could go Vulgar, and damn tricky to pull off coincidental magick with him. Still, one of the most overpowered I've ever played. The downside to him being as powerful as he was, was the entire lack of understanding of the Entropy Sphere for him. He literally couldn't learn Entropy (he had the Sphere Inept flaw). Made playing him tricky at times when he couldn't "bump the odds" in his favor in a more subtle way...
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by RIPP_n_WIPE »

Good: Cleric with a feat that basically made him a radiant servant of pelor...at level 3...in an undead campaign.

Bad: Warforged souleater. At the end of the game there was an army of wights running around trashing the campaign world, all created by my character.

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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Alan Bolte »

For a 4e oneshot, I made a level 3 Seeker who threw an enchanted greatsword. It wasn't game breaking, but it's far more damage per round than a controller is supposed to be doing at that level.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Sinewmire »

In iron heroes, my Executioner (rogue variant) at level 3, using the Bravo trait (basically a feat) and the Razorfiend feat had 3 attacks each dealing 3d6 sneak attack damage. Coupled with Weapon Finesse and a huge dexterity that's potentially 9d6 + 4d4 + (strength x 3) damage a round. It does rely on positioning, admittedly.

The most overpowered characters I've come accross have been the Space Marines in Deathwatch, and as a GM I had difficulty finding things that would be genuinely dangerous without one-shotting them. Admittedly, that was not helped by the size and composition of the group. The worst example was the Flesh Tearers (used blood angels) Assault Marine when I let him take a Breaching Augur from Deathwatch: Rites of Battle. The Breaching Augur is a huge drill used to tear through sealed bulkheads in boarding actions.

Deathwatch uses D10 for damage, and Righteous Fury (criticals) are generated by rolling 10 on this dice. The extra dice rolled can cause further Righteous Fury. Not a problem in earlier books as few weapons have more than 1D10 + whatever damage. Not so much in Deathwatch. A Blood Angel space marine can, once per combat, crit on a 9 or 10 instead of just a 10, and the breaching augur - already dealing high damage - does an additional amount of horrific damage on a crit.
My player had about 4 attacks per round, rolled an extra dice of damage thanks to a Talent, could re-roll one die damage thanks to the Tearing weapon quality so effectively had 4d10 + STR damage. This meant he was almost guaranteed a crit per attack (1 in 4 chance per d10, 4 d10 rolled) and these additional damage dice rolled (another 4) can generate further criticals, and this was on a not very advanced weapon.
He'd roll to hit (almost a certainty with All Out Attack, Frenzy etc. etc.) then spend a long, long time rolling dice for damage, then Righteous Fury, and kep rolling until he miraculously failed to roll another crit. He was talking about having two of them, each mounted on bionic arms when I banned the bastard thing from my game.
I still don't understand who the hell playtested that Augur, and to this day "Righteous Fury" is pronounced with a sort of dispirited sigh.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Serafina »

The Deathwatch Errata contains optional weapon statistics. Those are a bit weaker and balance specialist weapons in comparison to the Bolter, along with fixing the RF problem.
Breaching Augurs and Bulkhead Shears are much more balanced if you simply treat them as two-handed weapons (and if you still allow them to be mounted on mechandrites, using them in combat simply prohibits using other weapons in the same turn).

My most overpowered character i actually played was an Ascension-level Inquisitor in Dark Heresy. Using precognition and enhancing psionic powers turned her into a melee monster - basically a Jedi, except in power armor, a sword that burns peoples souls, laying down fire with a storm bolter and teleporting around. She utterly broke every combat encounter until she was recently re-designed using the Black Crusade rules, now she's just our strongest melee character.
Luckily the campaign rarely focused on straight combat, and when combat mattered it was mostly utterly easy for everyone (intentionally so) or very large-scale so that everyone could contribute no matter how strong an individual character was.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Broken »

DarkSilver wrote:Mage the Ascension (oWoD) Order of Hermes Mage who got to Master Rank in Forces and Time.

He was a powerhouse when he could go Vulgar, and damn tricky to pull off coincidental magick with him. Still, one of the most overpowered I've ever played. The downside to him being as powerful as he was, was the entire lack of understanding of the Entropy Sphere for him. He literally couldn't learn Entropy (he had the Sphere Inept flaw). Made playing him tricky at times when he couldn't "bump the odds" in his favor in a more subtle way...
Yeah, my overpowered (compared to others around him) character was also an oWoD Master Rank Order of Hermes mage. What really made him too powerful for the company he kept was that our GM and group was running a high-powered Vampire game (generation 5 or 6 for many characters, iirc) when I joined the group and we just got the Mage rulebook, so he wanted to shake things up a bit. Since we were running with very powerful, politically potent, combat monster vampires, he decided he wanted an "ambassador" from the Mage world to take an interest and my character was the result, a Forces 5 Master rank mage in a campaign with basically no paradox since most of the other characters were vampires already. I was the one reading the Mage book and I repeatedly told the GM that the rules didn't mesh well and Mages were really, really powerful. He had me roll up the character anyway.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Solauren »

45th level GELSALT Spellcaster

Column A: Wizard 20, Archmage 5, Sorcerer 20
Column B: Cleric 20, Psion 20, Archmind 5
With a bunch of those 'cross-class powers' feats. His speciality was summoning stuff, then absorbing it for power, before beating the tar out of you.

It worked until he was put into a Dead Magic zone, and the 6th level Kobold Monk beat the tar out of him.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by DarkSilver »

Broken wrote:
DarkSilver wrote:Mage the Ascension (oWoD) Order of Hermes Mage who got to Master Rank in Forces and Time.

He was a powerhouse when he could go Vulgar, and damn tricky to pull off coincidental magick with him. Still, one of the most overpowered I've ever played. The downside to him being as powerful as he was, was the entire lack of understanding of the Entropy Sphere for him. He literally couldn't learn Entropy (he had the Sphere Inept flaw). Made playing him tricky at times when he couldn't "bump the odds" in his favor in a more subtle way...
Yeah, my overpowered (compared to others around him) character was also an oWoD Master Rank Order of Hermes mage. What really made him too powerful for the company he kept was that our GM and group was running a high-powered Vampire game (generation 5 or 6 for many characters, iirc) when I joined the group and we just got the Mage rulebook, so he wanted to shake things up a bit. Since we were running with very powerful, politically potent, combat monster vampires, he decided he wanted an "ambassador" from the Mage world to take an interest and my character was the result, a Forces 5 Master rank mage in a campaign with basically no paradox since most of the other characters were vampires already. I was the one reading the Mage book and I repeatedly told the GM that the rules didn't mesh well and Mages were really, really powerful. He had me roll up the character anyway.
Oh gods...he let you play a Master Rank Hermetic with Forces 5 in a group of Vampires.......

how long before you burned those damn Massassa into piles of loose ash?

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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Bedlam »

DarkSilver wrote:
Broken wrote:
DarkSilver wrote:Mage the Ascension (oWoD) Order of Hermes Mage who got to Master Rank in Forces and Time.

He was a powerhouse when he could go Vulgar, and damn tricky to pull off coincidental magick with him. Still, one of the most overpowered I've ever played. The downside to him being as powerful as he was, was the entire lack of understanding of the Entropy Sphere for him. He literally couldn't learn Entropy (he had the Sphere Inept flaw). Made playing him tricky at times when he couldn't "bump the odds" in his favor in a more subtle way...
Yeah, my overpowered (compared to others around him) character was also an oWoD Master Rank Order of Hermes mage. What really made him too powerful for the company he kept was that our GM and group was running a high-powered Vampire game (generation 5 or 6 for many characters, iirc) when I joined the group and we just got the Mage rulebook, so he wanted to shake things up a bit. Since we were running with very powerful, politically potent, combat monster vampires, he decided he wanted an "ambassador" from the Mage world to take an interest and my character was the result, a Forces 5 Master rank mage in a campaign with basically no paradox since most of the other characters were vampires already. I was the one reading the Mage book and I repeatedly told the GM that the rules didn't mesh well and Mages were really, really powerful. He had me roll up the character anyway.


Oh gods...he let you play a Master Rank Hermetic with Forces 5 in a group of Vampires.......

how long before you burned those damn Massassa into piles of loose ash?

Get yourself some correspondence and you can be frying Vampires in Britain while sunning yourself in Australia.

:lol:
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by Ryushikaze »

Back in 3.0, I played a Monk.

Splatbooks were allowed, as were certain rules fudging for allowances, like not requiring specific faction allegiances, since they didn't exist in universe.

Said Monk was prestiged a Sacred Fist. So he had his Wisdom to Attack and Damage, in addition to his AC. Thanks to another Rokugan class, he got his wisdom to attack and damage a second time. At the first level of that class.
He also was set up to take care of 3.0's Broken crit rules, so he was critting on about a quarter of all his hits, thanks to the thundering property from faerun and a prestige class that increased his base crit range.
He had roundabout kick, so each time he crit, he got another attack at the same attack bonus.

You see where this is going.

He tended to Hurricane Kick pinball boss characters half to death.

Said character also had a stupidly high will save, and so avoided a DC 60 Nail to the Sky in the campaign's final encounter (at low epic levels), which made the final boss- and the DM- just sigh and give up.

Under the 3.5 and Pathfinder rulesets, this character was translated into a literal god character capable capable of doing even more damage. His damage output can be measured in Tarrasques KOed in a round.

I also have a Bow Twink Character, but he's not as massively overpowererd as the god character. He has some good tricks, though, and might find work as a Demigod in a campaign once his current campaign is over.
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Re: PnP_RPG:What is the most overpowered character you'v pla

Post by xthetenth »

Not mine, but I have to put up with him so I'll post him.

Rogue Trader Techpriest who tests tech use on a 118 when he gets to use foresight. The system uses d100 rolls for chrissakes.
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