((no main thread, don't worry. you posted in the right place. however all missions and events are run simultaniously in this thread, along with our OOC chat. so it can be a little confusing. look at the last posted update by Paris to get an example of this, there's stuff from both missions and from the stating area all
in the same post.
as for examples of BAD characters, mine is potentially one, the benefit of him getting powers off her is Irine has been around since game-start, and as a result is one of the stronger characters in the game. on top of that she's actually currently overshot-prone, so his drawback of putting minuses on the ability rolls actually won't do much. he'll probably actually be stronger than her if he can manage to avoid or compensate for some of her more crippling weaknesses, which he probably can if he can copy off of literally anyone else at the same time... if copying off of her doesn't just lock him into a coma. You see, Irine has locked away inside her mind are Things Beyond Mortal Comprehension. She herself isn't actually able to handle what's in there properly, and the inital insertion of said Things into her mind, which was specially engineered to handle it, still forced her into a sleeping/comatose state for an hour when it happened. I'd give Secondus about a 2/6 chance of being put in a coma and never waking up, 1/6 chance of being put into a coma for a couple days or weeks, 2/6 chance of being put into a coma for a couple hours, and only a 1/6 chance of actually getting to USE any of her abilities from copying off of her.
Another example of a strong character with mental problems is Zechariah, the character of DarkArtemisFowl. he's another been-around-since-game-start character, but he has *fun* halucinations of people from his past all the time, and his own powers are directly incompatible with each other, making him self-harm-prone.
there's also less powerful characters that still
could be bad ideas to copyfor example the character of one of our inactive and I'm expecting to never come back players mydjet, who I actually know a bit more about than anyone other than Paris and mydjet himself because I know the player IRL, was an engineer who's entire basis was the more drunk he got, the better he was, and that he's useless sober. This does not actually protect him from the effects of being drunk itself however. so he's prone to doing things like, say, getting absurdly drunk, making a nuclear ballista, and then proceeding to do what an extremely drunk person would DO with a nuclear ballista. Now what happens when you're doing the same stuff... with penalties? wana try a roll with a -8 penalty? the result will be *FUN* I'll tell ya that.
There's also several characters floating around with *berserk modes*. if said character is already in a berzerk mode when you copy off them, and you end up trying to do the same stuff but with penalties... well, your skin probably isn't bulletproof. You *might* end up uncontrollably self-destructing. Oh, and I'm pretty sure at least one person has some kind of charge-up ability that kinda blows themselves up? I think that happened in the seven of diamonds mission? Wasn't watching the details, but yeah, that's a thing. And don't even get me started on Alan, though it looks like he might have just permadied this last turn, so that's a thing.))
and then we get into problems caused by combining highly incompatible characters. for example one of the characters floating around at one point or another (might still be active actually, I'm really not sure, I've been in the Campaign mission for a very long time and I'm not up to date on stuff outside of it) was a dulahan. Now without going into detail about what made this particular undead floating empty set of armor special, lets try making your character patially said dulahan, and partly any normal-ish human. Now we've got a problem, are you alive, undead, or is the mixture result in someone that's just plain old dead? how about the fact that one of the two has a body, and the other has everything BUT a body? the contradictions of combining said dulahan with literally anyone else might just up and kill your character on the spot. what about mixing a fire elemental and an ice elemental? what about a robot and a biological? you see the issues here I trust.))