Im planning on having my BBEG have total control over all chemical reactions within a certain range...

Im planning on having my BBEG have total control over all chemical reactions within a certain range. Thing is i want to know how i can make this more balanced so he doesnt obliterate my players.

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You can't it's a terrible idea that only seems good because you clearly don't know much about chemistry.

>Control over all chemical reactions
>More balanced so he doesn't obliterate players

Please refer to But really, do you know just how many chemical reactions are going on in your body right now to keep you alive? Now give a outside entity the ability to fuck around with those reactions in any way he wants. Sorry OP, but this idea just wont do

Any time he does anything involving a reaction, he has to pay royalties to the Fine Bros.

portray him as too dumb to use it creatively, should be easy for you

That's brilliant. Good job

You don't need an IQ above 70 to realize that if you just stopped all chemical reactions in front of you pretty much every living thing would stop, die, and lie there perfectly preserved until you decide to turn off the effect.

How about rather than have total control over all chemical reactions in a certain range, he has total awareness of them and can manipulate chamocal reactions that don't involve life? Think pyromancy, oxidizing metals (rusting them), pulling moisture from the air, maybe producing toxic gas (CN vapors?). Having total control of all chemical reactions means he can literally manipulate nearly all body functions and the vast majority of other events that occur in nature.

I think you highly underestimate people's ability to be stupid, take OP for instance

Make him incapable of inflicting variations chemical reactions in anything but a specific asinine way that he insists upon.
It's the proper way of doing these things, you know. It has to be done in full moon's light reflected from two mirrors and then focused through a square magnifying glass whilst there is a black cat tied between your legs. There's no real other way around it in the academeia.

>people's ability to be stupid
see what I mean?

you could make it like firestorm so he has to know the chemicals to be able to do it
Also Id suggest making it so he cant affect living things

>total control over all chemical reactions within a certain range
>make this more balanced so he doesnt obliterate my players

You lost that bet before you even placed it.

He can only control x amount of reactions at a time, and if he stops controlling the reactions in his body he dies

Make the range really damn small, like within 1 yard of him or less small, and he needs to be made of paper.

This is such a stupefyingly OP power, that there's not much you can do to balance it. At least with a really short range you can basically treat it like a "death field." Anyone unfortunate enough to get near him will immediately die.

Op here. Holy shit i should have worded that better. My mistake.

Maybe instead of controlling each and every individual reaction, he controls all reactions of the same type. That way, he can't do anything that would kill anyone outright because it would kill him outright. He would have to find ways to effect his enemies that wouldn't effect him, or learn to sacrifice himself a bit to hurt them.

Does he control the transfer of electrons or the absorption of photons, or his power only at the molecular level?

Anyway, it sounds like he doesn't control kinetic energy, so I'd just shoot him with a mini-ruger 14 from outside his effective range. Unless he's able to have some sort of protective sphere around himself at all times.

Maybe I'd bathe him in microwave radiation from a distance and just cook the fucker. Or I could throw highly reactive materials at him, and hope that some of it gets through.

Se honesto, he sounds like any thinking player could easily one-shot him. Give him the ability to control the transfer of Energy and inertia over a limited range to really make him difficult to take out.

You can balance this by making it take a long time for the change to take effect.

>For example, he wants to break all hydrogen bonds in his vicinity
Have it immediately affect the players skin making it dry out, and slowly become stronger and affect deeper parts of their body and maybe have it work like xrays, where solid objects in the electromagnetic spectrum interfere with his power so their brains are the last to go.

Reality bending powers can be powerful, but you're the GM. You can make up the rules of his powers as you go along. If the players are about to be TPK'd because you rolled too many dice for damage, "suddenly the pain stops, he looks utterly confused, 'what is happening. What did you do to my powers!'"

Make shit up, it's your job. If you're so uncreative that you need Veeky Forums to come up with ideas for you, then maybe you shouldn't be the DM.

Is this A Stand User? Because we had an enemy with a similar, if toned down, variation on this concept. Some weaknesses off the top of my head:

Potency. Maybe the power is extremely bad for the user's own health without holding back somehow.

Range. Basically, the shorter the range the easier this thing is to manage.

Speed. Perhaps this control takes time to engage, or isn't an instant process.

>I want to balance an encounter with a reality bender
Seems like you need a seminar from my good friend, Dr. Alto Clef.
>scp-wiki.net/clef101

Let him have total control over chemical reactions with the caveat that he uses the corresponding chemicals in proper combination to create them.

There, balanced.

he has to preform the inverse of the reaction in front of him to effect things at range. IE if he wanted to boil someone's blood he'd have to freeze some blood in front of him.

That way it also kinda follows the laws of equilibrium (my example was kinda bad, but I'm no chemistry major)

>Hurr durr ya can't balance it, its impossible!

-Make it not work on living things
-Make it take time to do
-Make it require certain reagents for specific reactions
-Make him lack creativity
-Make him only have a set number of chemical conversions he can perform
-Make him only have a set number of conversions he can perform per day or per scene
-Make his powers have a horrific side-effect such as injuring or deforming him when used.
-Make him psychologically disposed against using his powers due to past trauma
-Make using his powers inflict excruciating pain upon a loved one he has stored in suspended animation.
-Make using his powers risk his immortal soul.
-Make his powers require sacrificing people or animals to perform.
-Make his powers depend on interactions with fickle gods and spirits, and thus subject to frequent failure or backfire
-Make his powers work on a 14th century understanding of chemical and alchemical reactions instead of a ridiculously OP modern one.
-Make him have a strong moral compass or sense of honor that limits how he uses his powers
-Make him blind and deaf, meaning he can only use his powers in slow, ritual fashions and has to rely on mooks for more obvious violence

Seriously Veeky Forums get off your fucking asses, this is not that hard.

He cannot brake the law of conservation of energy. So every time he meddles, the energy flow must be balanced somewhere, somehow.
To stop mega epic chain rections resulting from this meddling he might have a "void space" or "null zone" of some sort, but that zone can only contain so much energy/negative energy at a time before imploding all of relativity and therefore Mr ICanFuckWithStuff is still limited in his interactions.
Although that could be used as some of his motivations for fucking with shit, say he gets carried away in a battle and realises "oh fuck, to much energy stored in my thingy better realease over not-Nagasaki" or "better steal some negative energy from somewhere to balance that shit"

Make him anti spiral in a world full of drills.

The range doesn't extend beyond his own body.

Have him be able to control all chemical reactions within his own body. Generate poison, hypercharge his muscles or brain or hearing.

give the players a massive clockwork car with a spear on it and drive it at him

>control over ALL chemical reactions
>doesn't affect living things
yeah it's totally possible to make it balanced as long as you don't actually follow the description in the OP

he OP what if you made him a level 0 shoemaker NPC with no chemical powers
then he definitely wouldn't be OP

the moral compass shit would work i guess except it would also obviously stop him from being the badguy villain

>Someone mentions a vague suggestion for a villain, asks you to balance it
>Balance it necessarily means weakening it, putting a limit on it, making it less expansive than the original description.

Autism. Together we can find a cure.

Severely underrated post

The first thing I thought when thinking about how to balance it was not allowing him to affect living things too. But that's still a pretty major change to the original power, so I'd say that other user's point still stands.

Overall though I honestly think it's a shit premise that will either rely on you playing your villain as an utter incompetent, which I personally hate, or nerfing his ability into the ground, which doesn't really seem to be in the spirit of what you're trying to do.

Everything you described falls into three categories
1. Gimp the guy so hard that he's completely useless
2. Do something either super easy to get around or just plain pointless, solving nothing
or 3. Just make shit up because continuity is hard
Fighting someone who has powers that affect reality however they wish is not cool or interesting, and never will be cool or interesting. Watching the fight can be fun, but being apart of one big stall just so the storyteller can write you out of this jam using the magic of handwaving is retarded, and annoying. People aren't taking the time to try and "balance" this encounter because it's just bad storytelling.

Yes except that's wrong and you're a faggot.

Foiled by the anonymous shitposter once again. Oh how I rue the day I scorned you and your scathing wit.

Well you are. You're basically saying that any degree of reality warping is necessarily bad story telling, when the difference between a super power, or even a mundane ability for that matter, and reality warping is purely a matter of degree.k

You're basically saying that any attempt to limit, define, categorize, and otherwise weaken a vague ability necessarily is 'completely useless' or 'too powerful and thus bad storytelling', while it is first of all not the case that high power levels ruin storytelling, and second of all you are constructing a false dichotomy.

I summarized the above point as "You're a wrong faggot whose a faggot and wrong" because brevity is the soul of wit, much like smallness is the soul of your dick.

>You're basically saying that any degree of reality warping is necessarily bad story telling
>any degree
I remember when I said those exact words, and not something dumb like "someone who has powers that affect reality however they wish."
Then again, it could be worse. You could just miss my point entirely and go on some unrelated rant abou-
>You're basically saying that any attempt to limit, define, categorize, and otherwise weaken a vague ability necessarily is 'completely useless' or 'too powerful and thus bad storytelling', while it is first of all not the case that high power levels ruin storytelling, and second of all you are constructing a false dichotomy.
Oh.
Whoops.

>The ability to control chemical reactions, as limited by certain rules, limitations, or weaknesses is the ability to affect reality however you wish

Does your ass ever get jealous of all the shit that comes out of your mouth?

>the ability to control chemical reactions, as limited by either shit that makes the ability useless as all hell, shit that doesn't fucking matter anyway, or shit that is just the storyteller making shit up
Back to square one, I see. Surely more insults and insinuations about my manhood will solve this dilemma!

I sure am glad that all limitations for a particular super power fall within your three arbitrarily defined categories! Its not like they could be genuine, interesting limitations that makes an otherwise overbearing ability fit into the power level of a particular setting!

Also you have a small penis.

>Also I'd suggest making it so he cant affect living things
What is the difference between a chemical reaction produced by a living being and one that's not?