Power nerfing for Altria is... going to be an undertaking.

For context, Altria is a tabletop OC of mine who was created as part of a test campaign GM'd by the lead developer for the new edition of the game we were playing. A lot of the rules were really rough around the edges and he encouraged us to find the points where the system breaks so he'd know how to fix them.

Mechanically, Altria had a simple premise: how many actions could she take in a single round.

This quickly spiraled out of control when she could start taking, say, six total actions (three major, three minor) in a single round without expending too many of her resources.

Then I figured out there wasn't a clause in one of the power subsystems that prevented stacking of the same power in a single turn, and started using some of the points for that to reach damage multipliers of obscene levels.

By level six, which is when the campaign ended after six months, she could easily pump out 1000 damage a round without even expending all of her resources and oneshot the final boss. She is, on both a mechanical level and a diegetic level, absurdly powerful.

there's a reason why 'one attack action per round' is a hard rule in valor's mechanical design

For reference, this is a ruleset that's a hack of 5e that's supposed to only be moderately above 5e "powerlevels."

sounds like it didn't work

Yeah. I even took the gunblade weapon for her, which is really gimmicky as a combo weapon because you have to reload it.

There's a reason why it was a test campaign, we were told to find the holes in the systems and we did it.

The thing is, two of her powers are, like. Very thematically relevant to her character and I want to keep them. The rest can ultimately go out the window, I just need to figure out a way to adapt them down to reasonable levels.

The first one is possibility manipulation, which is... a bit hard to explain, but I'll do my best. The first application is "condensing" all possibilities that an action with a single result can take to reach that result to a single point. For example, if she swings at someone with her sword and condenses the possibilities, it'll have the simultaneous impact

Of all the paths the sword could've taken.

She can also "refract" possibilities, which means manifesting some or all possibilities for an action or object at once. For example, if she's fighting someone, she could refract herself across multiple possibilities to attack from multiple angles that she could have attacked from, although each attack will have "normal" or less impact.

She can also "swap" possibilities, changing the one manifested possibility into another. She normally uses this to flashstep around by changing positions to a place she could've been rather than refracting that particular possibility into existence, but she can also change the path of a bullet.

I'm putting this all in combat terms because this was a tabletop game and was kinda heavy on the combat, but also because it has a limitation. When you're fighting somebody, you're operating in a large part on instinct, and things could swing in many different directions at any moment to the point where some of it really does come down to...

Randomness.

However, when in less high-key, stressful situations where she's more deliberately making decisions, the options are a lot more limited.

The other major thing is that, due to Aspect shenanigans and the narrative rules the universe ran on, she became the embodiment of all possible legends of King Arthur.

She did this by boiling down two major archetypes she was aping (the cowboy and the samurai) to the general "knight errant," then using her psionics and narrative to condense all possible legendary swords she could've wielded because that's where her story was going into the idea of a single sword that arguably embodies the concept of legendary sword:

Excalibur.

After superimposing herself onto that legend, she used it for a lot of bullshit (most prominent being using Excalibur to cut the physical embodiment of deterministic time looping in half and carving out "Avalon," a place where no violence exists, in its place so she could talk things out with her GF/the big bad,

and recreating the legend of Arthur slaying Mordred at Camlann to OHKO what would've otherwise been a very tough boss then immediately shifting out of that incarnation of Arthur so she'd escape getting killed) and it's... naturally a power that requires a lot of player input and cooperation, but it's key to the way she exists at this point.

Something I'm 100% dropping in its entirety is her god tier powers since those aren't quite as crucial to her character, although I might keep the angel wings for sheer cool value.

What I'm probably going to end up doing is a) putting a hard cap on how many possibilities she can refract or condense at a single time (she did this to shadow clone jutsu a LOT of herself during the two-round final boss fight) and have it take more of a physical toll on her and limiting her arthuriana shapeshifting to just being able to switch...

...between her human and troll forms at will and keep the "she bleeds words instead of blood" thing, since that carries the essence of what changed her without any significant actually worrying powers.

(This also means I can use Saber as a PB since that's one of her preferred forms since she's trans and really hates switching to a guy version of King Arthur.)

If the mods allow power regains, I'll probably use that to give her Excalibur since it's a whole heap of bullshit and her having it right off from the start feels bad to me