A fellow player has become to overpowered and i need help

[Mad4it_Anan]

A fellow player specializes only in combat. ONLY, he has a bland boring backstory and hasnt tried to flesh out his character and him interesting. His character is a jedi padawan that wields a double bladed lightsaber and has a soak of 8, brawn of 6 and defense one.

The gm has to throw more 2 nemesis at him to even challenge him, he almost one shotted an adversary 2 nemesis last session.

My character is a slightly force sensitive diplomat quartermaster that has a brawn of 2 and a total soak of 3. Im a talker, not a fighter my character has an actively ongoing story as well. My blaster has damage of 5 with pierce 2 and accurate 1 and i still dont do damage…

Is there any armor or abilities you all reccomend? Im trying some basic force powers like misdirect to see if that helps me keep alive in combat.

[P-47Thunderbolt]

This is quite a dilemma you’ve encountered.

I’m currently GMing a very high-XP, combat-heavy game, and I have one character in particular that is extraordinarily powerful to the point of one-shotting nemeses and substantial rivals, putting her well above the other characters, even though they are quite competent combatants themselves.

As a GM, I balance by using lots of smaller enemies so she can’t take out as many in one hit, or by giving enemies counters to her abilities.

That doesn’t help you much as a player though, so let’s start with that.

Have you talked to this player about your concerns? What about the GM, or the other players? Do they share your concerns? One ideal solution from a social standpoint would be if you could work out how to improve the narrative aspects of the other PC, and tone down the min-maxing/overpoweredness. Whether that’s rolling up a new character or simply rebuilding this one will depend. This is just an ideal, however, and only works under ideal circumstances. If the others are not on board, or the player resists those kinds of requests, it is a difficult thing to press without hurt feelings.

As for what you can do, perhaps as a Diplomat your goal should be to personally avoid combat as much as possible. You aren’t a fighter, and your skills and weapons bear that out. Invest in talents like Don’t Shoot! from Charmer, Consider Your Options from Republic Representative, or Diplomatic Immunity from Senator that make it harder to target you, and take Force powers like Misdirect or perhaps Alter to protect yourself and others.

You can also take something like Heal/Harm, which would allow you to serve a valuable role in keeping friendlies alive during or after combat (and it’s a good story hook for a Diplomat, like for an aid mission or the like).

There isn’t much you can do to make yourself a contributing combatant, so I would recommend accepting that and putting an emphasis on your character specifically not being a fighter.

Now, you talk as if this character is a particular outlier among the entire party, so I’ll take your word on that. Consider if you didn’t have him around, what’s your power level when compared to the rest of the party? If you’re close, then maybe he’s the problem. If you’re still very outclassed, then you probably need to emphasize being a non-combatant anyway.

If combat is so much of the game that you think you wouldn’t get a chance to do much if you are mostly just hiding while the bolts are flying, then consider if you built the wrong character for the game. If you think not, consider asking the GM for more non-combat encounters. If the GM is primarily providing combat, the other player may think he has simply built a character to fit the game.

But the bottom line is to talk to the rest of your table and find out if they have the same concerns. I would recommend doing this privately on an individual basis first so you don’t put anyone on the hot seat. It’s very uncomfortable to show up to a game and out of the blue have an argument about if you built your character wrong, or be called to take sides in such an argument (and it might make you look like the “bad guy”). Check to make sure that it isn’t just a problem for you before talking to the other player.

[Mad4it_Anan]

I plan to talk to them about it and i just last session bought misdirect lol

[k7e9]

We have a similar thing in our group, I’m a Technician with a blaster and in our group we have a Wookiee with a custom built bowcaster, heavy armour and and high characteristics and skills when in combat. Most of his talents that are combat focused as well.

He can do 3 times my damage, easy. But there are plenty of of other oppurtunites for my character to shine, while slicing computers, using mechanincs to get our landspeeder to work so we can flee the scene, constructing equipment, using medicine to patch our Wookiee up after a fight, modifying our ship or even building a small snubfighter for our pilot etc.

And our pilot has only Brawn 1 and a light armour, so also not a combat character. But he has a lot of charm and shines in social encouters and often does the talking when we need it, and obviously he handles most of our flying and trading. We also have a Gotal that’s good at stealth, deception, skulduggery, streetwise and similar skills.

In most combat encounters our GM uses a mix of minions, rivals and sometimes nemesis enemies. So even if he does doubble or tripple of my damage, I can still kill som minions, or take down a rival together with our pilot. If us “weaker” characters wouldn’e take care of the minions or a rival, then our Wookiee, even as tough as he is, would probably take a lot more damage and possibly be knocked unconcious or die. So it could be that your GM needs to use a mix of enemies when designing combat encouters.

In combat we rely on the Wookiee to take care of the difficult enemies, that’s his focus and where he shines. But we also have sessions where there’s litteraly no combat, only social, slicing, stealth and similar encouters and at those times he has low skills and very few talents that are useful, so at those time he relies on the other characters.

I guess one question is, do you have to compare your damage to his? I personally don’t care that the Wookiee can do 2-3-4 times my damage, he cannot build something, succeed at a hard medicine check or slice a computer if his life depended on it (and it has), but I can. And he cannot charm the imperial officer into letting us go as our Pilot can. And he cannot sneak into a compound and steal some intel, but our Gotal can.

If your game is not only focused on combat there should be a lot of encounters where you will probably do far better than the combat focused character in the group.