Should the player char be able to become more powerful than the most powerful NPCs?

Depends on the scope of the game. If you're aiming for realism, no. I agree that it shouldn't be easy though. More importantly, depending on what you're fighting, you should not be able to arrive at that point merely by grinding. If you're going to be fighting gods or high rank demons the game should require you to progress beyond the mundane (perhaps by becoming a god yourself) before you stand a chance against them.

No.

I've always been an advocate of much flatter character progression anyway.
First, the most powerful playable race NPCs should be at the very least as powerful as player can get with similarly optimized build (possibly much more, because player, for example, probably won't get to become a millennium old wizard who uses pocket plane as his socks drawer).

Second, there are going to be creatures, constructs and other things in a properly built world that massively outclass any playable race character regardless of their level.

In an ideal combat system, even few thugs in back alley should be a serious challenge, unless PC is a 99- level master of close combat or has awesome gear. Not like in AoD, though. Extremes are bad.

Skyrim and other games with level- scalling are from the ideal as far as it's possible.

It should be doable if your progression toward that point feels believable and earned.

My general rule is to allow the player to reach a level comparable to that of most powerful characters in the game. There's very little point in having super hard enemies that require unrealistic grinding (as seen with JRPG bonus bosses) and there's absolutely no point in letting the player, through normal play, reach a level that removes all challenge from combat. Once the player is capable of destroying the most powerful enemies in the game then the game should be almost over.

Of course, it's hard to handle in open world games as there is a huge variance in the amount of hours that are put in to killing things and gaining experience. I think the games that handle it best are probably ones with strict level caps that you reach at some point during the game. D&D games are the best example. Playing thoroughly allows you to hit the level cap sooner (in terms of the campaign), but you'll always be going into the toughest end game battles with the full challenge.

So you are saying even thugs in the back alley should be difficult, but then list a game where that is true and say...no not like that?

I believe it should happen at some point during the course of the game if your character is the main protagonist of the story, otherwise no.

In a game like Skyrim, well, you're Dovahkiin, Dragonborn, FUS RO DAH! My point is, you're not a mere adventurer, even though you start off as just any random npc you come across with. The whole problem is when should this shift in the balance of the game become relevant.

If in Skyrim you became this godly creature very late in the game (say, level > 60) and, even so, it required special or unique gear to get to this point, it would be actually pretty good. This is another thing that is wrong with Skyrim: it lacks unique gear. Currently, the most powerful gear available is the one you can craft/enchant yourself, and this is ultimately wrong. In a game with so much background lore, it would be much more believable to hunt for ancient, powerful relics from ages ago. Still, even if such items were somehow made available, the quests that lead you to acquire such gear should be difficult and lengthy enough to make you want to go after it.

Now, regarding games where you're nobody important or someone that relies on a big party to get things done, it makes absolutely no sense to make you become more powerful than anyone else and, in fact, it would make the game way to boring in my opinion.

In the previously mentioned case, your party or companions or assets or whatever, combined, should become a force to be reckoned with. No single character should be much stronger than the others, as to keep things realistic.

My favorite character in Skyrim is a pure archer that relies on stealth. The first iteration of this character reached level 39, and after getting stealth really high, I became almost invisible. The game then got way too boring for me to continue.

A few weeks ago, however, I decided to re-roll my character, fixing a few misplaced perk points, while increasing difficulty up to Master and installing a few mods that would make mistakes as a pure archer a little less forgiving, like this one: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/2700. So far things seem a bit more interesting.

Ideally, no. The game should already be over before you get to that point.

Really depends on the game and how it's presented thematically, but I vote "yes, why not?"

Especially in a setting that has crazy magic stuff, why should the toughest NPC in the game be the maximum attainable power? And why shouldn't the player be able to reach a higher point than said NPC?

"Elminster this, Elminster that. Give me two thousand years and a pointy hat and I'll kick his arse!"

I think AoD is an exceptional case. Even 1v1 was a challenge in AoD. Few random thugs in AoD aren't a serious challenge, they're death sentence- unless PC is armored like a german tank. AoD on easy difficulty level, maybe (considering it's now on normal, and opposed to A-wesome difficulty).
Or maybe AoD is just a great example of what I wrote and I just didn't grind enough? Then you propably know the shit better.

There should always be a challenge somewhere in the game. If that challenge is optional content, i.e. lich and dragons in BGs, revenants or whatever in DA:O etc, I'm okay with it. As long as there's something.

As with most decisions I make, this one is based on Jordan Mechner's Karateka. The point at which you go from 2nd toughest character in the game to first should be the end of the game. And that's human opponents. Giants and dragons should always remain majestic and terrible, mostly because the group fights in Skyrim with NPC allies are a blast. And whilst it sucks when a giant clubs me into the stratosphere it's very funny when I see him do it to another guy.

The player character is always more powerful. Usually this is achieved with speed instead of raw hit points or strength. Sometimes via the reload button.

I don't think the PC should ever become as powerful as the ancient behemoths he comes across - it destroys the mystique of these beasts or ageless wizards, unless the PC is (as usual) also an ancient demi-God who has lost his memory or something. But ideally the PC should win some other way - using artefacts or trickery or something other than naked power. Morrowind did it just about right... you could get strong enough to beat Dagoth Ur one-on-one, but he wasn't defeated, in fact he kept mocking you, because he was smarter than you an immortal. Unless you had brought the goods to the fight you couldn't win.

Embarassing example here, but I hated the fact that my party got strong enough to beat Sephiroth in FF7, even after he'd become a God-thing. I would rather have lost and then had an unexplained intervention from a deus ex machina "spirit of nature" or something like that which "corrected the balance" and destroyed him. If it's a storyfag game and the antagonist has been built up as the ultimate evil in the universe then don't let my shepherd boy or whatever literally beat him up.

Divayth Fyr should've been nigh unbeatable too unless you actually spent as much time in the game world studying magic as he had.

I would prefer an RPG without level progression, just letting me roll a character/party and play with it, without constantly decreasing the difficulty.

Depends on the setting, but mostly it's problematic if the power level in general changes too much throughout the game. If it's done via level scaling, it's just pointless. And if the areas scale too heavily in contrast to each other, that just straightjackets the progression to be boringly linear, and makes balancing between too easy and too hard difficult.

Let's take the example of the latest RPG I played, the new Avernum remake. When you gain a level you get +5 HP, +5 SP, +1 preallocated attribute, +1 to whatever attribute you like, and 2 skill points which you can allocate. It seems to me that bloating the HP, SP, and attributes this way, it just makes the otherwise very free-roaming game world quite restricted in where you can go, just based on if you have enough levels (->hp) to not get one-shot killed. If you'd remove the fixed raises to HP/SP/attributes, and lower the damage output of high-level enemies to compensate, the game would be much more enjoyable. There'd still be a feeling of progression as you get more skill points and better equipment, but you wouldn't hit this brick wall as easily.
Too much power growth not only forces you to proceed through the games areas in a pretty linear fashion, and also if you skip a dungeon and return to it later, it'll be a boring piece of cake.

People would then accuse the game of being grindy, happens all the time with JRPGs (even those that can be easily finished at a low level). If you can become obscenely powerful, it is assumed you should become obscenely powerful. Better to cut it out completely, or at least force the player to devise some creative ways to beat the most powerful creatures (plaque + lord british).

Say what you will but KotOR was one of my first RPGs and when I found out the level cap was 20 at first I was annoyed, then I liked it.

The human element makes it so that by games end you should be only just weaker than the endgame encounters. Keep it a challenge to the very end.

Sir, there's no character advancement in Karateka. You're the same guy with the same abilities and stats from the beginning of the game. You were *ALWAYS* apparently the toughest character in the game...if you win.

And even if you don't, I argue that whatsherface was always tougher, since she can kill you in one shot. Makes you wonder how whossname managed to kidnap and keep her in the first place.

Those you love always hurt you the most.

As for char advancement, I got my ass handed to me by a fucking bird. After much pummelling of generic guards I promptly tore that hench-falcon into a mess of feathers. On stats, didn't your hitpoints increase a little? It's been a while since I played that. Decades. My point was that at the start of the game you're a match for the lowest level guards but you improve to be the most powerful (but true, through skill not stats).

This is probably why it's for the best that I was designed to be incapable of love.

Nope. In fact, the exact opposite occurs: The number of health tickies you have decreases in general while the number of health tickies the enemy has increases. This doesn't so much reflect anyone gaining or losing health, as it is that hitpoints in Karateka are relative. And the hardest fight in the game is the one in which your opponent has the least relative health.

Ahh, negative levelling. Like it.

Sorry about your love life.

No, it's fine. I prefer it better that way, perhaps because I am also incapable of missing it. From what I hear from you normals, the inclusion of emotion in your mating rituals just makes things more complicated and unpleasant. The wife prefers the fact that I am a robot, anyway.