The best example is probably Vampire: the Masquerade, where Generation sets a hard cap on your powers. But basically the more involved the game is, the harder the caps are, and the more room you have to play within limits. World of Darkness is a mix of systems, so it's difficult to generalize. This is generally not a thing you can do in World of Darkness games. You might not be able to build the best sniper from the get-go, but you can generally max out at least one skill and buy the best rifle you can at chargen and be an effective sniper. That is a thing you can do in pretty much any edition of the game, as long as you devote enough points to it, and there is an entire character creation mini-game for which builds are most effective at doing that. In Shadowrun, you can start out as a world-class sniper. Caps exist in games like Shadowrun and the various World of Darkness games primarily to act as some sort of control over potential munchkinism and power gaming run amok, and what that encourages is either hitting the caps early through specialization or bypassing them by stacking bonuses. Dragon Kings is a good example of how at higher levels the disparities between threats and classes becomes increasingly obvious and insulting the Epic Level Handbook just doubles-down on the fact that linear advancement falls apart as the bonuses stack up.īut when you go classless and level-less, things get weird. High-level characters are difficult to handle, and become all the more so when you're running a game without discrete levels.