In Your Opinion, What is the Best Tier For Characters to be at Narratively?

[IDK3465]

Now, we all should (hopefully) agree that when writing for fictional characters, bigger doesn't mean better, if anything, it often means worse.
The stronger and more busted your characters get, the larger the stakes need to be to accommodate them. Want your planet-level dude to struggle against something on their own? throw 'em against an asteroid the size of Jupiter! Wan't your multiverse dude to put their back into something for once? You need a thing that can actually threaten the multiverse! Need to give your ultra reality-warping concept smurf an actual challenge? Make someone who can nullify that shit somehow! Ectetera, etcetera.
You can see the problem, right? The further we go along, the harder the stakes, the bigger the feats, the more stuff. It's just... not sustainable

So, it's for this reason that most good writers who don't want their work to end up being some boring power fantasy nonsense intentionally limit how strong their characters are, so that the stakes remain consistently high, and the audience stays consistently invested. There are a few cases where an ultra-powerful protagonist can work, like Superman or Saitama, but generally, most writers stick to the limiter strategy to avoid lessening the impact of the plot and characters.

Now that my preamble is out of the way, I propose a question to you all: where is your favorite place in the power curve to see/put characters at? I'm not talking about this from a powerscaling perspective, I'm talking about a pure writing and narrative perspective.
How strong do you like your characters to be?

Personally, I always tend to prefer characters who are at mid-tier 9 to lower-tier 8, Subsonic to Hypersonic speed, and have some unique and fun hax, but nothing earth-shattering, like your basic dura neg stuffs, nothing crazy. In short, I prefer street-tiers, they're just more interesting to me as characters compared to their country-nuking, reality-warping brethren, there's just more tangible stakes with a low tier yk?

 

[Vzearr]

Tier 9

 

[StarShooter80]

It really depends on the type of story it is. If it's one not reliant on powerscaling for its narrative at all then literally just tier 10, maybe higher tiers with vehicles or fire arms but apart from that there's no need for these guys to break apart walls let alone anything higher.

Now for a super hero series or shonen I'd definitely go for tier 9 to 8s, these characters are meant to show superhuman levels of strength so they should be able to accomplish breaking apart walls or leveling rooms, and the stronger characters should be able to break down even larger structures, to show theirs even stronger beings in the story than we could've though of before.

I'd only go for higher tiers like 7 to 5 for spectacles entirely, and only through very temporary moments like a one-use transformation or more, but I wouldn't like it as a norm for how it makes the story feel less grounded.

 

[IDK3465]

It really depends on the type of story it is. If it's one not reliant on powerscaling for its narrative at all then literally just tier 10, maybe higher tiers with vehicles or fire arms but apart from that there's no need for these guys to break apart walls let alone anything higher.

Now for a super hero series or shonen I'd definitely go for tier 9 to 8s, these characters are meant to show superhuman levels of strength so they should be able to accomplish breaking apart walls or leveling rooms, and the stronger characters should be able to break down even larger structures, to show theirs even stronger beings in the story than we could've though of before.

I'd only go for higher tiers like 7 to 5 for spectacles entirely, and only through very temporary moments like a one-use transformation or more, but I wouldn't like it as a norm for how it makes the story feel less grounded.

Yeah, this is pretty much my take as well, although I was mainly thinking about more action-focused media when making this thread. Obviously, your gripping character-driven mystery novel doesn't need anything more than 9-C for the story to be great, but that's kinda obvious when it comes to the genre.

 

[StarShooter80]

Obviously, your gripping character-driven mystery novel doesn't need anything more than 9-C for the story to be great

Hell nah House should be a solar system buster

 

[Randomuser3412]

I don't think there's a single "best" tier, obviously... but 9-A seems to be a bit of a sweet spot for a lot of characters.

 

[IDK3465]

Bump

 

[YmTheSuper]

Depends on the series, if we are talking about a combat heavy series with superpowered characters that isn't aiming to have constant power escalation or large scale spectacle then I think low tier 8/high tier 9 is the sweet spot.

If the series is aiming to create large scale spectacle then I think tier 6 is the best tier to create visually impressive large scale attacks/fights. I don't know about others but mountain/island/country scale attacks look more impressive for me than simply a planet or a star getting destroyed, part of that is that they tend to be more detailed and harder to create/draw.

 

[EnderLord8]

Depends on the series, if we are talking about a combat heavy series with superpowered characters that isn't aiming to have constant power escalation or large scale spectacle then I think low tier 8/high tier 9 is the sweet spot.

If the series is aiming to create large scale spectacle then I think tier 6 is the best tier to create visually impressive large scale attacks/fights. I don't know about others but mountain/island/country scale attacks look more impressive for me than simply a planet or a star getting destroyed, part of that is that they tend to be more detailed and harder to create/draw.

I must agree that the most visually entertaining grand feats are tier 6; the best visually entertaining ones I've ever seen are tier High 6-A.




A horror story with a creature immune to bullets should be around 9-B;

A story with superhuman characters? Make them at least 9-B. If they have superpowers, ideally they'd be around 9-A to High 8-C, with the grand feats being 8-A;

Does the story have giant monsters? Aim for a 7-B for scale, like nuclear weapons;

A space war fiction story? A 5-B weapon might be the peak.

 

[Kazuma_kuwabara]

Everyone at tier 1-A at minimun

 

[IDK3465]

Bump ig

 

[Steve1775]

A bullet hell games should be atleast Tier 8 - Tier 7, since they destroy stuff at a daily basis, I'd expect them to be that strong

 

[MaskedDragon908]

Now, we all should (hopefully) agree that when writing for fictional characters, bigger doesn't mean better, if anything, it often means worse.
The stronger and more busted your characters get, the larger the stakes need to be to accommodate them.

Now that my preamble is out of the way, I propose a question to you all: where is your favorite place in the power curve to see/put characters at? I'm not talking about this from a powerscaling perspective, I'm talking about a pure writing and narrative perspective.
How strong do you like your characters to be?

Personally, I always tend to prefer characters who are at mid-tier 9 to lower-tier 8, Subsonic to Hypersonic speed, and have some unique and fun hax, but nothing earth-shattering, like your basic dura neg stuffs, nothing crazy. In short, I prefer street-tiers, they're just more interesting to me as characters compared to their country-nuking, reality-warping brethren, there's just more tangible stakes with a low tier yk?

Masked has suffered this pain with some of their favorite series.
The ever-growing stakes are the bane of most long-lasting series, and some authors just aren't cut out for it.

Masked was going to go on a long-winded rant about this, but there are so many different ways to tell a story that Masked can't cover.
In their opinion, it simply depends on what kind of world you want your story to take place in.
How dangerous is this world? How much damage can it take? What are the repercussions of having powerful beings within it?
There a lot of series that just don't care about the ramifications of having High Universe and Massively FTL+ characters within it.

All this to say: Tier 9 to Tier 7, and Subsonic to Massively Hypersonic.
Tier 10 characters can be interesting, but the characters tend to be more fragile, which generally lowers their interest in such a series.
Tier 9 is interesting simply because characters can survive long falls and break through walls, which gives fights more directions to go in.
Tier 8 and 7 is where you start pushing the limits of The Real World™. They're strong enough that normal people will go "Wow, big explosion cool. Character strong", but not to the point where they completely remove the stakes of the series.

Masked will fully admit that the speeds listed probably don't work for settings that use a lot of guns, unless someone whips out the railguns and particle cannons.
They grew up admiring the visual of dodging lightning, and it's stuck with them.

 

[CatLover313]

Since everyone’s talking about AP (I do believe around High tier 9 - Low Tier 7 is the best), I feel like more “grounded speeds” give me more enjoyment for when I want to engross myself in a story. Subsonic to MAYBE low end supersonic speeds usually don’t have too big of an issues. I feel like when characters are calc’d to massive speeds but there’s a bunch of questionable anti-feats in the story is when I really feel out of touch.

 

[IDK3465]

Since everyone’s talking about AP (I do believe around High tier 9 - Low Tier 7 is the best), I feel like more “grounded speeds” give me more enjoyment for when I want to engross myself in a story. Subsonic to MAYBE low end supersonic speeds usually don’t have too big of an issues. I feel like when characters are calc’d to massive speeds but there’s a bunch of questionable anti-feats in the story is when I really feel out of touch.

I feel pretty much the same way, though I’m mostly ok with bullet timing, as if you can already tank bullets no problem, it doesn’t ruin the story for me if you can dodge them too. However, the moment characters start blocking lightning or running in-tandem with light rays is the moment I kinda tap out, especially when it ain’t consistent with other showings (which it tends to do unfortunately)

 

[Ghengiroo115]

My personal preference is having tier 8-ish characters for the most part with some really powerful tier 6+ top tiers. Lower power levels are easier to write around, but making the uber busted characters more self-contained is a decent way to get around it.

 

[DavidTPPM]

I think for a verse that involves cosmic events and beings there isn't really any "ideal" spot. Verses like Naruto or Bleach could easily be tier 8 or tier 2 as long as the power level doesn't directly contradict the story and it'd be perfectly fine.

For more grounded verses that involve characters with little if any superpowers and often use real world weaponry I'd say tier 9 is obviously the best spot. Maybe tier 8 for the top tiers but anything further than that kinda trivializes regular people and makes the threat seem lower.

But even that is very context specific. I'd say The Boys is a more grounded verse and yet they go far past baseline tier 8 and make regular weapons mostly useless. And yet it doesn't diminish the story at all because it uses this high power level of the supes.

 

[Dodecatrihan]

Unknown as a result of the story being too abstract and ambiguous to say anything definitive about, of course.

 

[IDK3465]

bump

 

[AppleMaker]

Here's my top 5 favorite tiers:
1. Town level - for some reason this is one of my favorite tiers narratively. It's not as major as a City to depersonalize the place and characters/people who live there, and not as insignificant as Building level. This tier have the most potential for a trope like "Hero protects his beloved hometown and people from anything that could threat them, since he was born and raised here and have strong ties with this place and people"
2. Solar-Multi Solar System - this is mostly good for some cracked cosmic action, however it feels much intense and more meaningful than just Moon-Palnetary tiers. It's good for raising the stakes, when Character tries to save not only his own planet and race, but many others that he probably didn't even met/knew in person, but he still feels some empathy for them and tries to keep them alive
3. Small Building Level - I have a few favorite characters in that tier, unfortunately on VSBW there aren't many characters of that tier with some interesting hax. Imo it's just a better version of Wall level, but it doesn't make characters feel inconsistent (for example, if 9-A characters punches table out of rage and only table is broken - it feels like some mundane thing, while if 8-C does that - it feels like some form of anti-feat, since he's capable of much more destructive power output, especially when his emotions get to his head)
4. Low Multiversal - Multiversal - very similar reasoning as for Solar-Multi Solar System tiers, but this tier opens some potential for Timelines, AU's, Crossovers and Time Travel shenanigans, however imo most of the time those things aren't done justice and look weird, unquantifiable or insignificant visually
5. Street Level - very good for grounded stories and horrors, that somewhat extends physical capabilities of humans. Basically they can feel realistic and believable, but at the same time they could do such things as snapping necks, breaking bones or straight up decapitating someone much weaker. This tier is the last, since I'm not really a fan of such genres, but I can't deny how much it fits for storytelling