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Edited by Chinkronomicon: 10/5/2015 7:58:31 PMI'm still apprehensive to the idea. I'm not trying to say it's completely horrible either, I just want to voice my opinion as an individual speaking their mind. To me, RoB is much more than the common "revolves around certain theme or setting" that has some plots and other such things on the side. Throughout my time here, I've come to see RoB as one massive story that progresses, regardless of power level. If you look at something like Ch. 2 with Jay first gaining the Chaos powers and Sarris-Sanguine wrecking everyone and everything, I noticed that even though Sarris would be considered "overpowered" and "god modding" in most RPs, he's powerful for the sake of the story. Even when Jay and Sarris squared off with the latter wielding the Blood Reaper, he triumphed to progress plot. The reason I'm bringing this up is because I've been noticing a trend as of late. I'm going to call it now and I don't care if I get shit for it, but here goes: there seems to be no difference between "power for the sake of story" and "power for the sake of having the biggest stick." While yes, stuff like the Draconis and Venom Kirov-class battle cruisers (the railgun ones that are now gone) do exist, both have played a significant role in the events of RoB. The former is akin to the Bloodwrath, and is there to remind you that superior firepower exists and you should now to it. VINC ships can be accused of being OP (because let's not beat around the bush, everyone sided against us in arguments regarding the matter), they were still only restricted to water. Not only that, but the District 9 incident (while originally a huge fault on all of us due to lack of communication) became a plausible serendipity and canon event in RoB that strained relations between character and went to show, "power isn't always the best when used in such ways." Now going onto characters, there's a reason someone doesn't just say "Hey, I'm gonna go kill the Summoner now. No biggie." It's because not only is he essential to the story, but he is canonically as powerful- if not more -as his brother, Sarris-Sanguine. Hell, when the Summoner killed Phoenix I haven't even intended for it to happen, but I accepted it because of the simple fact that the Summoner is canonically more powerful than most of the characters of RoB. My point? I think the tier system will encourage exactly what I don't want to happen, the "powerful for the sake of having the bigger stick" mentality. If people see that there are clear-cut ways to define your character by strength and power alone, that would only cause more arguments and debates, bringing the never-before seen problem of RoB to life: God Modding. Why hasn't it been brought up before? Simple. Because power was used for story, as mentioned before. (Yesterday at the time of writing) On Oct. 4, Alonfé and I were having a debate on who would win in a fight, Phoenix or Alonfé. While most would see this as a dick measuring contest, I actually quite enjoy these little debates that have become rather ritualistic between us. But that's not my point. My point is that whilst there is a certain factor in which Phoenix has the advantage due to his "anti-magic" abilities, the debate still continued due to both him and I finding other ways to outsmart each other. Moving on from "story power," this goes in like with combat RP, but in a much different way than the common times. True tactics and research going into such things, using factors like canonical lore and actual science as variables to gain an advantage over the other. Yes, the fact of Phoenix being a Black Pariah- theoretically capable of killing the Emperor -still remained, the actual fun argument of theorizing and planning around that was more than just bringing an Ex Machina out of the air. Self-gifting in ways that modify your arsenal are fine, but I've noticed that people are equating themselves or becoming Primarchs by mere whim at this point. Bringing me to my next point. We're basing most of this categorization off of simple 40k, not reaching outwards and beyond that. But wasn't that what made RoB special at a time? Its basis in lore, but diversity in content and character? Characters that aren't steeped in Warhammer lore like Blackjack, Wilson, Felix, Python, Jaeger and original Jay (pre-Tzeentch, but even now he isn't a bloody Primarch in name) will have to find loopholes in this system. However, this could be easily remedied by just removing the titles of the different Tiers (because you are forced to directly correlate to Warhammer rather than a simple organization system). Returning to my point about clearly defined power, it seems that I'm going to have to take a sample from regular combat RP. Clearly defined power levels muddles the line between outsmarting and planning around, favouring tactics like "well I'm an overall 5 and you're a 3 so I'm better" rather than "I'm gonna make an attempt to actually outsmart you, not beat you with pure firepower. In conclusion (because nowadays in RoB, I know most people won't read ALL of this) I think that the Tier systems would resemble to much of a caste. Characters' strengths and abilities should be diverse, not based off of being as powerful as a god. Supreme power shouldn't be "self-gifted" and only be bestowed/used for the sake of progressing the story. I would prefer if it was used mostly for organization purposes, but I think that it'll just get out of hand if used at all.