So, I've been thinking about the relative power levels of our characters lately, and I wanted to pose this question.

Do you think it would be useful to have some sort of idea of who is on what "level," or is it better to keep it sort of nebulous? I mean, it's clear we're not going to be seeing Denner Fabellian or Illarion Vale throwing down with Vasilias or Zhiran, but where does, say, Clade stack up against Rishima? How does Kirsh match up with Lukas Harran, or Asher with Lia Xin?

Or does it matter?

I just thought I'd pose the question.

I was considering this very thing LITERALLY just yesterday.
I've been trying to work things out on a scale of 1 to 10, but I feel bad at estimating what everyone's spectrum should be.

Pretty much the only thing I find unequivocal is that Zhiran and Ellia rank 10 and Gruff ranks 1. I tried to label them as near as I could for virtually every walker.
And then I thought about creating a scale to measure it all by.

There is some drift in things though, because, for example, Rishima, who I would rank at 8 did defeat Zhiran in Shadows. Circumstances play a great part of stories, but there is some variance in who might be able to beat who, regardless of their rank.

I vote we have a tier list, and we put Aloise at the top because she's just too friendly. No one would ever be able to overcome her sheer niceness. It's impossible. Soon, she will fill the multiverse with happiness and contentment, and there will be no more evil.

Soon...

*cough*

This seems like it would be a fun thing to measure out, though.

@Barinellos: Hmm, would a 1-10 system be the easiest? I was thinking more of like an alphabetical tier list, with appropriate tangible comparisons. Like, we could have an "S-Tier" or something, with beings of comparable power level to Nicol Bolas (I'm... not sure we have any of those, so he'd probably be the only one in there.)

The problem with a tier list is that it offers less basic precision than a numerical system capable of showing the full measured spectrum.* For example, you wouldn't be able to put Zhiran or Ellia at S tier, because they were constructed to be absolutes. You'd have to measure them by one tier further than the highest tier. By what they were meant to be, you would have to create an SS tier rank and leave them there, basically alone.

*Of course, the issue with a numerical system is the competition. For example, I kept trying to place Raiker on it, but I didn't want to insult Raven.

There's also, quite frankly, a wrinkle with the entire thing, in that, for example, Raef and Jinsen are incredible warriors, but... how do you measure that against a magical dreadnought? And further, in the case of the Shifter and the Duchess, while they are not Zhiran powerful, I don't think Zhiran could meaningfully defeat them because... their power is both concentrated and decentralized.

Great Minds, clearly.


Yeah, and that's the key thing. Like, honestly, there might be a circumstance, strange and unlikely as it may be, that Gruff could defeat Zhiran. It would just take an extraordinary set of conditions.

And we also have to consider in what way they are powerful. As you have pointed out before, "Maral prepared" is likely a different power level than "Maral surprised." Similarly, the Duchess and the Shifter. They are clearly top-tier players, but it's a subtle game they play. They could, in theory, out-maneuver Zhiran if given the time, but could either one take him straight on?

(On a completely different topic, typing that last paragraph gave me a crazy case of déjà vu.)

Anyway, it might prove an interesting side project, if people think it would be in any way interesting or useful.

So, I would argue against codifying this, for a couple of reasons.

First, in most cases, I think it doesn't make sense to think about multiple discrete power levels. Instead, I think there is a blunter question which is more appropriate: "Is this a competitive fight?" In most cases, I think the answer to that question is self-evident. For example, Syl vs. Gruff is not a competitive fight, whereas, say, Daneera vs. Beryl is probably a competitive fight. I think trying to create gradations beyond that basic one doesn't get us very far, because the answers will be too subjective, and will involve too many variables which can't be known in advance. (Maybe Daneera is a 7 if she's in a place with strong green mana, or maybe she's a 6 if she gets caught off guard, or maybe she's a 5 against a necromancer, etc.)

So I think the relevant question is simply: "Is this a credible fight, or is it obviously lopsided?" Once we go beyond that, I think we're splitting hairs.

Second, I think an exercise like this becomes creatively limiting at some point. We want characters to change and evolve, to have their powers shift over time, to get into scrapes which maybe they can't reasonably be expected to win. I feel like having a numerical table would become prescriptive at some subconscious level. People will shy away from mismatches, or they won't look past the numbers in the table. Now, obviously, this argument could be made against many of the indexing things we do, and I don't mean to imply that we shouldn't try to codify anything. But I think this is one case where it will come with more baggage than its worth, just because of how we're wired to think about these things.

Now, that doesn't solve the problem of "I'm writing a story with a character that isn't mine, how do I know where that character stacks up?" But I think it's less of a problem than it seems. Again, the fight is either competitive, in which case there's no way to answer that question without knowing the specific circumstances of the story, or it isn't competitive, in which case the question is answered already. For cases where it isn't clear, I don't think a table helps us much. I think the only reliable answer is a discussion with the other people who have used that character, or a look at the stories in the Archives.

I hope that makes sense? I just feel like this is that rare case where more information is potentially less.

Sure, and that was my concern, as well. I mean, I can certainly see it from both sides. The danger of locking them into a level is a potentially serious one. I mean, Beryl is a great example. Pre-ascension, she was not all that powerful, working mostly with "small magics" (although admittedly the power was always there, as evidenced by the situation with her mother.) After ascension, she was considerably stronger, and potentially she could become sort of crazy-powerful, especially if at some point in the future she decides to "let go."

The potential up-side I see is to help us self-regulate our character's power levels. I mean, I think we're doing a pretty decent job currently, but there's always that little impulse to create a super-character, and maybe seeing that, oh, we have 9 of those already (I picked that number at random) might help dissuade that impulse.

Ultimately, though, I mostly just wanted to pose the question.

I tried to make a Rubrick, but it was really awkward and didn't take into account that some characters have kryptonite and/or are cripplingly overspecialized and can be bested by much weaker characters if "type matched". I think any Rubrick is going to hit that

I once tried a rating system that had three factors, each ranging from 0 (incapable) to 10 (Godlike): Physical Power, Magical Power, and Political Power, for a total sum of 0-30 (though neither end was hit, the results of the aggregate did range from 1-29 for the characters tested against). Within the same sum, characters with a better physical/magical ranking would more likely win a fight, those with a high political ranking would win a war. It worked pretty well, but I'm not sure it would be best here.



Perhaps we need to define a Moh's-style scale instead, where certain characters are defined for each number 1-10 and others are rated against them?

In the interests of full disclosure, my baggage with this sort of question is that I used to do military analysis and conflict modelling. And one of the principles I always used to emphasize to the undergrads was: You're not trying to predict a specific outcome, or even a specific range of outcomes, because you don't have as much information as you think you do. Just because you can look up the WEI/WUV-III adjusted ADE values of an Iraqi T-72 tank division and compare them to the ADE values of an American M1 Abrams tank division doesn't mean you can just put the numbers into your calculator and figure out how many tanks will be left on each side at the end of the battle. The numbers will deceive you. In the case of this specific example, WEI/WUV-III valued the T-72 and the M1 as roughly equivalent. But, in the Persian Gulf War, no T-72 scored a recorded kill on an M1. It turns out that training, and munitions, and command-and-control are also very important. You can't predict outcomes with the kind of specificity that a table of numbers implies.

"Is this a competitive fight or not?" was always the mindset I was encouraging people to adopt. To cite another example, I could not predict the specific outcome of a North Korean land assault against the DMZ with any level of specificity. What I can tell you is that, based on what I know about DPRK and ROK capabilities, it is not a competitive fight. I would expect ROK defenses to hold under all but exceptional circumstances. But trying to predict specific casualty totals, for example, is a mug's game.

So I think a very coarse scale, like high/medium/low power could potentially be informative. But once we're in to 10-point scales, I think we're creating a false impression of precision.

You might be right I do think we might want a five grade scale though, rather than just medium/low/high, with categories for subhuman or deific capabilities

I do think you're right about the ultimate takeaway from any power level analysis: we just want to know if something is competitive, or if it's a lopsided match.

Homer Simpson: "Stay back! I have powers! Ah, Political Powers!"

I think the climax of To Call the World to Heel is a good example of the kind of case that makes power level rankings difficult. (uh spoiler warning for TCTWTH I guess.) Vasilias is probably more powerful than Raleris, and Raleris is probably more powerful than Kirsh, based just on the range of spells they know and the mana they can call upon.

However, Raleris beat Vasilias because his talent with counterspells allowed him to stall Vasilias long enough for the sheer quantities of mana surging through two borrowed bodies caused Lasale to literally burn out.

And then ultimately he lost because Vasilias had one last trick up his sleeve in the form, basically, of a sac to add BBB ability.

Laying it out like that seems like it's much less a function of power levels and more one of...

well...

good deckbuilding.

So maybe it makes more sense to ask: for the decks these characters are playing with, do they have enough mana sources? What spells are they using? What turn do their combos go off? Stuff like that.

I thiiink maybe something along those lines does a better job of expressing whether or not these are competitive fights.

That became a competitive fight because Vasilias was running a five color combo deck and Raleris was running monoblue permission, so even though Vasilias had a huge number of high powered, broken cards, the ultimate combo was janky as hell and Raleris was able to stall it. And even when it went off, it didn't do what it was meant to, resulting in Raleris arguably winning the match because Vasilias has spent all his life and resources trying to get this janky five color combo to work.

...Also writing it all up like that is ridiculously amusing to me and I kind of want to go through some of the other matchups we've seen between 'walkers and consider them in these terms. I mean, I already think in very card-driven terms when I'm using magic in my stories so it was pretty easy for me to translate it back into card terms.

I'd be interested in seeing the fight between Kahr and Daneera this way, although admittedly, there wasn't a ton of magic actually shown there...

Which, again, gets into the difficulty of trying to quantify these things.

To take a similar example, if we're talking raw magical power levels, Jackie DeCoeur is about as low as you'll find in the M:EM, whereas Malzeth is a pretty terrifying sangromancer. However, it turns out that you can sidestep that disparity somewhat by just walking up to someone and shooting them without warning.

Mental Note: Make card for Jakkard summer set called "Shoot First, Ask Questions Later. Maybe."

There are different dimensions of "power," and they matter in different contexts.

Sounds like a split card to me.

Shoot First
Instant


Target creature gets +1/+0 and first strike until end of turn. Creatures which block or are blocked by that creature lose first strike until end of turn.

I wasn't expecting to see you here.

//

Ask Questions
Instant


Untap target creature you control. If that creature deals combat damage this turn, it gains ": Draw two cards, then discard a card" until end of turn.

I know.

Fuse (You may cast one or both halves of this card from your hand.)

I have four decks for various characters of mine.
I ponder if people can work out what they are.

Hmm.

I'd guess, but it might be cheating. I think you've specifically told me about at least one.

Yes. Yes I have.

Wasn't it Raef, Cara, Zhiran, and Alessa?

I think that's what I remember anyway.