NERF Herding

Recently I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on Amazon and came across the early 3rd season episode featuring an immortal entity going by the name of Kevin Uxbridge.  Which always reminds me of the old Star Trek Customizable Card Game from the 90s.  The Kevin Uxbridge card you could use in that game was really powerful, allowing you to destroy an Event card or an Artifact being used as an Event.  Which for the game was important because Events let you do important stuff.

The card was so powerful that then they had to create another card to nullify it.  The same was true for the Amanda Rogers card that let you destroy an Interrupt (except apparently Kevin Uxbridge).  The Q2 card (named after a member of the Q Continuum shown in the episode where the John DeLancie Q loses his powers) nullifies both Kevin Uxbridge & Amanda Rogers because those cards were both too powerful.

The 2020 version of this is a lot easier than issuing a whole new card.  In the Empires & Puzzles game I play on my phone, each month there's a special character you can potentially get.  Last year I got one called Telluria that had a lot of awesome powers:  attack, healing, and little minions that would attack the other team and soak up some hit points on defense.  The problem is people complained she was too powerful.  So in an update they dialed back some of her stats.  Not really a lot; it was barely perceptible to me at least.  The term for this that people use is NERF-ing.  As in the spongy balls and darts and stuff.  The idea being that they wanted to make her less dangerous and more soft and spongy.

I'm sure there are other cases of this happening in that game and other games.  It's a lot easier than it was for the old Star Trek CCG because you don't have to issue a card; you can just use an update patch to "fix" the problem.  Maybe Magic the Gathering or other similar games had that problem, or maybe not.

The point is that sometimes you don't realize a character or whatever is too strong or doing too much damage until you're already using it.  In comics this happens a lot with characters like Superman or the Hulk, where sometimes they can throw planets around like bowling balls and other times it's hard for them to bend a gun barrel.  It depends on what the writers need.  Really "Kryptonite" was invented on the radio show as a way to "NERF" Superman because otherwise it was too hard to make things challenging.

The obvious writing lesson is that you have to be careful in making characters or scenarios too powerful or too perfect or else you might have to go back and "NERF" them later.