How do you deal with power creep in your campaigns?

I don't understand the question. As in, characters getting stronger? That's part of pretty much all systems. People generally get better at things they keep doing.

>In D&D (5e) a level 10 fighter can survive falling from orbit.
That's bullshit and you know it.

Stronger than they should for their level, like level, either from giving them too much loot, or because they have more system mastery than you.

Well, in 3.x it's absolutely true. Even Valeros, the shittiest pregen character ever produced, at level 12 is capable of falling from orbit (20d6 max falling damage, and up to 16 rounds in total vacuum holding breath), picking himself up, and pinning a rhinoceros to the ground before beating it to death with his bare hands.

Even in casterfinder, by midlevels no class is truly mundane anymore.

With proper system choice.

Also, I'm morbidly curious as to what that book is.

STOP PLAYING D&D

amazon.com/Legend-10-Elemental-Masters/dp/0615348130

If you're too autistic to "retire" a piece of paper, then don't complain about power creep.

This looks like Mutants & Masterminds the novel. My morbid curiosity will probably drive me to read this eventually.

I've seen that cover before...

Give up fighting it, embrace the autism and start homebrewing a suggsverse RPG.

What the fuck am I reading?

Here's quick rundown on his magic system

ulillillia.us/features/elements.html

...

Uli's weaponized autism

I want that motherfucker to play dwarf fortress

Is this some sort of fanfiction?

With the procedural descriptions and everything it is right up his alley. There really is a kind of charm to a lot of these video game elements.

It's a setting. His setting.

I fucking love that he gives RGB codes for every color.

Too violent for him. Thats his reason for avoiding it.

It's absolutely like the game was made for him though

>or because they have more system mastery than you
If someone's doing shit in bad faith, as if they're trying to pull a fast one on the rest of the group, then ask them to stop. If they don't stop, ask them to leave.
If it's more a "he happens to just be more efficient than the rest of the group" situation, then you should have talked to the players about their builds. At char-gen and each level up, you should have a good idea of what's happening with every player character. Not even necessarily for balance's sake, but to make sure everyone has a chance to do something interesting in a session-to-session basis, and so you have an idea of what each player wants out of the game for their character.

Loot is obviously more troublesome: the trick is to not overcompensate and mitigate just a portion of what it adds, moreso over time. Let them feel powerful for an encounter or two before it matters less, and they'll remember those moments of glory rather than the fact that they reached an equilibrium.
If the problem is one guy got too-rad shit, have the rest of them get some sort of interesting item/boon as well, and let those have their place in the spotlight before everything gets adjusted to a new normal.

That's saddening. No endings, or closure? No running into them as an NPC, or hearing tales of them?
Gonna be honest, that sort of thing is entirely the reason why I play RPGs.

I embrace it.

My setting is already customized to be high power, and after some point, I barely use the monster statblocks, which are balanced around the players being low-op. Pick the thematic abilities, upscale their stats, add some class levels, optimize their feats and skill distributions, and voila.

>piece of paper
Autistic rollplayer detected.

Well, I call him Kyle instead of "Power Creep" and he mostly behaves himself. Maybe if you used his real name he wouldn't be such an asshole to you.

Checks and balances like people's courts and so forth. Have pissy little level 4 Aristocrats and Magistrates start fining the PC's and demanding they respond in particular ways to certain things.

All of that is surmountable enough, but it's an interesting new form of challenge, especially to PC's concerned mostly with stabbing monsters.

Course if they're dicks, or punished by being made to look like dicks, they won't have any friends and won't be invited to any cool parties.

The thing is once someone has a sunsword and full dragon plate they want to have a bit of power fantasy. This doesn't apply to all.
I made my group aware the boss and his lt have dragonplate/swords of sharpness etc. They're imagine how awesome it would be to put in on their characters. They dont know it's all cursed.... yet.

Kill characters, end the campaign eventually, give less powerful rewards, play in a system where powerful player characters doesn't fuck up the game, etc

>Have pissy little level 4 Aristocrats and Magistrates start fining the PC's and demanding they respond in particular ways to certain things.

And now the PCs have taken over the kingdom

If I had a dime for every autist I've seen that doesn't understand the concept of chekhov's gun or was way too specific in dictating scenery.
This guy sounds like hell to have a campaign with.

More powerful enemies.
Quests which don't revolve around raw combat power - have them take care of a noble's spoiled little girl for a day, she's far more terrifying than any dragon.
Up the scale, threat and stakes accordingly and roll with the powerful characters. They'll save/take over/destroy the city, then the continent, then the world, then all the planes of existence, then the fucking omni-dimensional cosmic whale.

Barring suffocation, it's possible for a real human to survive a fall from orbit as well. Once you hit terminal velocity, it doesn't really matter if you fall 100 meters or 100.000.

Make encounters lethal.

If the PCs are powerful enough to end the story, then the story is necessarily over.

If the PCs got there too fast, that's not exactly "creep" and you should have seen it coming.

3.5 has poisoned people's minds into blindly following RAW. Did you know that the "dead" condition doesn't actually stop you from taking actions? :^)

Yes, I'm glad you've truly caught on to why people dislike DnD.

Generally by throwing increasingly dangerous situations at them. One of the funnest parts of investing yourself in a character is to see how far they can go. When they go from exiles struggling to survive a few nights to battling dragons over the capitol city it makes them happy.

Oh look, another "high level martials are normal humans" faggot.

Get out.

Around level 10 is when characters stop being mortal men and start being demigods.

>You can't change that without really mucking around in the system

Yes, as a GM I can say he splatters like an overripe melon when he hits the ground. Sucks to be you, 3eeaboo.

So he can wrestle an elephant but not fall from a great height?

>So he can wrestle an elephant
Maybe if he has Str 18 plus, otherwise he's doing jack shit.

Which is pretty common at that level range.

This is true. Power creep usually happens when the DM fucks up and gives the party too much power.

>Oh look, another "high level martials are normal humans" faggot.
>The dude just said that a level 10 martial can survive falling from orbit

At what level would you change your views of martial from "dude who is good at fighting" to "demigod that can benchpress mountains"?

It doesn't flip quite that fast.

Never because it never happens? I've never seen the abilities that people keep talking about that supposedly give fighters such abilities.

It's not hard. Mundane resources like coins, equipment, and material components hit a 'cap' in what bonuses or benefits they can possibly give to an adventurer. Monsters are powerful badasses and friendly NPCs are terrible at dealing with them (hence needing adventurers in the first place) so you can't just hire fifty soldiers and throw them at your problems.

Spellcasters have a hard cap on the number of spells they know, just like martial characters with their combat maneuvers, so they never have all the tools they could even need. Spells almost never overlap with mundane actions, e.g. Invisibility and Knock, and when they do mundane characters have other advantages that come with the skill so they maintain a competitive edge. Magic items draw from your life-force, reducing your 'mana' to equip passive ones or use expendable ones.

Stats like Hit Points are based more on attributes than anything abstract like level, so it's like Dark Souls where if you start with 100 HP you might end the game with 400 HP. Damage scales likewise, and both accuracy and defence values scale pretty slowly, which leads to characters getting significantly stronger by high levels without making low-level monsters a reasonable threat in huge numbers.

Level 15-17 is when that flip happens. If they can't do such things, they are not on the level of other characters, and are thus not actually level 15+.

When he goes on a quest to get those powers

>Power creep
>bad

I unironically want a campign where the players start as peasants and eventually move their way up to becoming omnipotent beings who create and destroy entire realities and multiverses to battle other even more omnipotent-omnipotent beings.