User blog:BandicootBro/How to give your character proper weaknesses.

"My character is a planet buster! They're so strong that they can beat hyper sonic and nazo combined without getting hit!" ...Nobody likes this kind of character... NOBODY! I'm BandicootBro and I'm here to learn ya how to balance our character!

We'll use my guy Graphene the Echidna as an example.

There are 3 types of weaknesses I could think of at the moment. Just because your character has a lot of weaknesses doesn't make them weak. IT makes them more balanced and if our character possesses physical, elemental, and material abilities, then it's best to have a weakness for each.

Physical Weaknesses
These are weaknesses that have to do with you characters physical abilities. Not like a downgrade but more of a way their supernatural strengths can be crippled by events that can occur often. For example, My character Graphene is completely blind but uses his seismic sense to see and feel where he and everything around him is. However his precise reflexes and insane reaction time seem a little overpowered. To fix this I decided to make his bending completely reliant on his hands as well as make his seismic sense completely reliant on his feet. If his fingers are covered he cannot bend the earth, sand or any of his other elemental abilities, and if his feet are covered he can't sense as well which is why he goes barefoot.

Material Weaknesses
These material weaknesses are for balancing out the capabilities of a character's weapon. Graphene has an amulet of lightning that he created. This amulet gives him the ability to control when and where lightning will strike during a storm. The intense speed and power of a lightning bolt is much too overwhelming so let's balance it out. Graphene's lightning amulet doesn't give the power exclusively to him, anyone who wears it will gain the ability. Not only that but the amulet is very easy to steal and easy to malfunction. One bad hit and that's all it takes to make the amulet stop working until Graphene can repair it.

Elemental Weaknesses
These elemental weaknesses have to do with things that hinder abilities that don't have to do with the character's body. Such as light beams, elemental abilities, telekinesis, etc. These should be sort of a "Superman and Kryptonite" weakness. In my fictions, the Master Emerald doubles as a portal to the spirit world that only the master of Water, Earth, Fire, and Air can pass through. Any bender that isn't the Avatar who comes within 100 feet of the emerald will have their bending taken away until they get far enough away from the emerald.

Conclusion
Weaknesses do not in any way, make your characters weak. If anything it proves them to be stronger because of what they can overcome despite having these obstacles in their way. Hope this taught you how to properly balance your characters so they can still be strong without being unfair.