McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Handicapping your characters.

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hatshep2:
In mine, several of my main characters are really tough thanks to some pseudo-magical swords. The swords, although they aren't technically sentient, have sort of "instincts" and a wreckless mind of their own that leads the characters to take too many chances and lose control. So the characters have the potential to be insanely powerful but the swords provide a natural check to that because if the characters rely on the swords too much could end up killing innocents or getting killed themselves by letting their guard down. So they can be epically tough...until something bad happens. Which means they can never displaying their epic toughness to their utmost, making them awesomely cool but not too powerful in actuality.

Thrythlind:
my main character in Bystander is going to be mainly a guile hero, she'll eventually learn some fighting skill, but she's never going to be the top fighter in the world.  If I were writing in the Marvel universe, her raw strength and speed would make her a good fighter (both fluctuate and the strength can get to some insane levels), but that's Marvel.  Super strength people have been creeping around long enough in my world setting that most martial arts styles know very well how to compensate even for obscene levels of superhuman strength.

No, the series bad ass is her bodyguard, Genevive Robles, former Sergeant of the North American Military Alliance tactical security service. aka Tlazolteotl

Robles power: she comes from a long line of career soldiers, law enforcement and mercenaries

and a number of them have been perfectly "normal" (if you can't the action hero/comic book level of skills they reach) human beings that have been pretty much the baddest badasses in their general area....

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
I just like writing about totally normal people without special powers other than smarts and decency and whatever they have actually trained for/learned how to do (in a plausible "anyone could do that" sort of way), dropped into unusual circumstances.  (For situation-dependent values of "totally normal"; it seems plausible to me, frex, that someone in a world a millennium in the future will no more have to worry about many contemporary illnesses than the average Westerner today has to worry about scurvy or leprosy.)

I find characters who start off More Special/Powerful Than Anyone Else kind of inherently a turn-off.

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