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Background: Same community as before -- mostly-freeform online RP in a proto-MMO.

This time, my problem concerns combat in particular. I have received quite a few accusations that my problem-character is overpowered in combat -- commenters usually point at her aggressive ("make your own opportunities and relentlessly fight to kill") combat style as at least part of the reason for this, and it has been suggested to me that this style denies other players agency over their character's behavior -- this occurs because the other side wants to do flashy, cinematic things, but cannot because my character winds up punishing them harshly for it, causing them to resort to "block, block, dodge, block, dodge, take a hit, block, block, dodge, take another hit, ...", which leads to a thoroughly one-sided and unfun fight.

Is this a fundamental issue with the design of my character and how she fights? Or are there stylistic adjustments I am not seeing here?

Community
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Shalvenay
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  • What's actually going on? They probably aren't saying exactly "block, block," etc - and those simplifications won't help us understand your situation. You may also want to include concrete examples of your own behaviour, and not just look for how they can change (hint hint there's someone else whose behaviour is more easily malleable). – doppelgreener Dec 31 '14 at 05:56
  • Details about what they'd like to do would be useful, too. – BESW Dec 31 '14 at 05:57
  • @doppelgreener -- I'm making these simplifications because it would take me quite a bit of time to root out examples and clean them up for presentation here; not that I won't get you some, but don't expect them immediately. – Shalvenay Dec 31 '14 at 06:03
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    At the moment, since you're asking us to solve issues with behaviour that's only loosely summarised, I don't think we have sufficient information to answer this without a lot of assumptions involved - so I'm voting to close as unclear. – doppelgreener Dec 31 '14 at 06:16
  • Do not answer in comments. – Brian Ballsun-Stanton Dec 31 '14 at 15:10

1 Answers1

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Ruthlessly realistic, "gritty" fighting and wuxia (and similarly-cinematic) combat narratives are fundamentally incompatible, as they rely on clashing assumptions about setting and possibility. If your fellow roleplayers want to pull off Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon stunts or improbable swashbuckling flourishes, but you want bloody, brutish, and lethally short life-and-death struggles, you're playing fundamentally different games, and failing each other as RP partners.

You can't balance this in-world — you have to change what you're doing together at the meta level where cooperative roleplaying practices operate. Roleplaying relies on an overtly shared understanding of the world, which includes genre expectations — and this goes double (or treble, or perhaps decuple!) in a freeform game where there is nothing except you and them and your shared imagined space.

Right now you're playing different games, and there is no happy ending down that road. Either entice them to play your game, agree to play their game, or arrive at a compromise together — then play that game together, in harmony.

SevenSidedDie
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