GM Limitations

Even balanced high-powered PCs
can wreak havoc on your adventure or
game world if you aren’t ready for
them! Here are a few ways to prepare
for a high-powered game:
Know the heroes’ abilities. There is
a lot of information on the character
sheet of a powerful PC. If you are not
familiar with all of it, the game can
grind to a halt when the player invokes
a rarely used ability. Even worse, a for-
gotten ability can lay waste to your
careful plans!
Know the rules. The more abilities
the heroes have, the greater the
number of special rules that will
see use during the game. Do your
reading before the game begins. This
keeps things moving and prevents
players who like to abuse high-pow-
ered abilities from ruining the game
for everyone.
Fit the challenges to the heroes.
Read through your campaign notes
with the PCs’ character sheets in hand.
This simple procedure will often alert
you to foes, mysteries, and dangers
that will not challenge the heroes’ abil-
ities, and gives you an opportunity to
patch these holes before the players
drive trucks through them.
“Psychic, though? That sounds like something
out of science fiction.”
“We live on a spaceship, dear.”
– Wash and Zoe, Firefly
Present a variety of challenges. Make
sure the heroes cannot meet every
challenge with Guns-20 or Fast-Talk-
25. Run the game in such a way that
single-focus characters have to rely on
their friends for help. At the same
time, be sure that a few success rolls
involve sufficiently large penalties that
jack-of-all-trades characters have to
defer to the true experts in the group.
Know the stakes. Campaign power
level doesn’t just determine the heroes’
abilities and the scale of the threats
they face – it sets an upper limit on
any imbalance between the two.
Challenges that are merely amusingly
weak or annoyingly tough in a low-
powered game might become boring
or lethal when scaled up to a higher-
powered one. Be ready to think on
your feet! If the heroes are chewing up
the opposition so easily that the play-
ers are yawning, have tougher rein-
forcements show up; if they are get-
ting mauled, give them a lucky break.
Be flexible. Powerful PCs can do
more, which makes it tricky to second-
guess them. Again, you must think on
your feet. Don’t penalize your players
when they finesse your plot with their
abilities . . . but when they use their
powers as blunt instruments to knock
holes in the plot, be ready to come up
with creative countermeasures that
look like you planned them all along.