McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Handicapping your characters.

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hatshep2:
Great post, Breandan! I am more of the empathize-with-the-flawed when I write but I really appreciate both styles and find stories with amazingly superhuman heroes a wonderful escape sometimes.  ;)

Snowleopard:
I like characters that can grow.  If there's no growth - you haven't really gone anywhere in the story.
I read one book years ago - mercifully forgot the name and the author.  But the story took a year and at the end - you had the same types of characters but with different people in the positions so only the names had changed.  I considered it a rip off - hence the forgetting.

Enjorous:
I'm a fan of handicapping characters with a baseball bat...

wait...that's not handicapping that's hobbling. My bad :P

MoSeS:
I think handicapping characters that get too powerful too fast is pretty common practice.
Even characters that are semi-powerful need handicapping sometimes, it's just puts the odds against them and creates some intense drama.

Harry's burnt hand for example handicapped him a little.

In the show Heroes it happened big time because Sylar and Peter were getting way too powerful, so both were stripped down, but I think in Peter's case it may have been a little overkill.

I can probably think of a few more if I tried, but needless to say, handicapping isn't a bad solution, as opposed to making more powerful enemies. I find that if you make a too powerful enemy that it would be harder to trump him later.

For instance in Superman in my mind Doomsday was the end all most powerful nemesis, but of course later they came up with stronger foes but to me he was the one that mattered most.

In Supernatural, I am skeptical about there being a worse enemy than Lucifer, but he didn't really do all that much himself so it's do-able.

And furthermore, in many series there tends to be the "Outsiders" which go above and beyond the powers of good and evil that are the current top dawgs.

Quantus:
In general I tend toward the world imposing natural handicaps vs personal ones.  This, however, is more due to my long RPG background and personal need for system balance, and well as my aptitude for world-building which far outweighs my somewhat stilted ability with character development.  That being said one thing that has worked for me somewhat it to take the uber-awesome character, and make that the character at the end, then think on what it would to get there.  Its basically coming at it from the other direction.  You think about situation where the character might manage to overcome certain things, and the limitations that lead there will often naturally fall out.   Dont know if that's helpful, or even makes much sense, but it works for me. 

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