Welcome to Gaia! ::

There's a difference between being old school, and just plain old.

Don't prize yourself on crossing the line.

::danceydanceydancey::

You still up for sparrage?

This is actually a lot like Gelmax is. When I developed Gelmax into a planar mage, the AMP was still big in people's heads (mine included), and I put a lot of limiters on Gel's power that come into effect only against other people (a battle between two of my characters is a whole different adventure). Most of his offensive moves take several posts - for example, ripping someone's torso into another plane takes 2-3 posts to make up for the fact it's just about impossible to block. Other than that, and the fact that my characters are a lot more utilitarian than Ertai's, Gelmax and Ertai Vexic are very similar. They can do a lot of the same things, it's just that Ertai doesn't balance his character for fair play with others the way I do, and he focuses on unnecessarily flashy actions and essay-length posts while I prefer style with words (rather than actions) and simple to-the-point posts.

Remove the vastly different OOC differences, and strip all the excess detail out of Ertai's posts, and Ertai's like Gel's misguided little brother. And in fact all that excess detail actually WEAKENS his character. With Gelmax, conversion from energy to mana to magic is pretty much direct and Gel plays conservatively to achieve the desired effects with minimal energy waste. Ertai's got to send energy through two paragraphs before he's even ready to START his attack, and he attacks in an excessive and wasteful way. Additionally, for high-level techniques such as planar stuff, magic is slightly more efficient than psionics due to its wide scope and comparative user-friendliness. What does all this mean? It means that while Ertai often claims his character outpowers everyone else, in reality his character's probably at the low end of the high tier in terms of power output and endurance simply because so much of it's wasted. scream

Oho...but what if you place a character into a setting, such as the O/M, FFA, or this tournament, even, where the story continues almost constantly? It's almost impossible NOT to grow and learn and get stronger if your story continues for multiple years. Will you be godlike? Not necessarily. But you WILL get stronger. As you can see by how I treat my character, I think that that process of growth is an essential part of the fun of the game.

See, Gel, this is why I'm gunning for you too. =3 You understand how concepts of "power" that don't exist IRL actually might work. It'd make our fight mucho fun.

You'd better be in the final four Gel, else I'm going to be disappointed. =/ Or at least the top eight.

O.o *Is highly confused as to why that dude is more threatened by Gel then my pretty much fullproof anti-psionics, magic, etc. character*