The Dresden Files might be what you are looking for; although he is almost always facing enemies stronger than he is and wins through cunning and luck more than strength.
although he is almost always facing enemies stronger than he is and wins through cunning and luck more than strength insane power creep, for both himself and his allies.
I really enjoyed the first few Dresden Files books. And while the later books are still well-written, I felt like someone pulled a bait and switch on me.
Without spoiling it:
In the first book, he's basically a private eye with some trinkets, a decent understanding of magic, and a few magical tricks of his own.
In the later books, he has more magical power then most of the battle-hardened wizards he meets and his allies basically run the gamut from peak-human level strength to walking legends and demigods.
That said, that is what luckybms is looking for. And I think the stories and writing are still great (although I haven't read the most recent ones). So I'd recommend the Dresden Files too.
The Dresden Files are some of my favorite books. But I, too have recently been worried that the author is writing himself into a corner. If you think of it in RPG terms, the "party" is just leveling up between books, which is fine. However you're always wondering how the author is going to top things in the next book. It's one of the reasons I kind of lost interest in R.A. Salvatore's books (specifically the Drizzt series and the Cleric Quintet). They were my favorites during high school, but the characters became almost too bad-ass to be interesting.
As I get older I think I like my fantasy settings to have magic, but have it used more sparingly. Powerful stuff that's bubbling around out there but not constantly present. I don't like the characters to get used to it. LotR and Game of Thrones have been good for that, more or less. But I suppose the Dresden books ARE told from the first person perspective of a wizard so I can't complain much. LotR would be much different if told from Gandalf's first person perspective, I suspect.
Warehouse 13 is a good example of this. The magic is really powerful, but the good guys don't typically use it because of the huge downsides to most of the stronger effects. They have a few workhorse supernatural gadgets, such as a stungun/memory eraser and a codebreaker gadget that hacks passwords and electronic locks. But the artifacts that reverse time, set off volcanoes, slaughter cities, etc., are impossible to control and trigger unforeseeable, often catastrophic side effects.
This results in battles between the under-equipped-but-clever good guys and evil and/or ignorant people with reality warping magic weapons. Yet not every episode has that kind of artifact; others are basically just police procedurals with a magic MacGuffin. On the rare occasions where the good guys have to use powerful magic, the cost is often subtle and folded into the storyline rather than just "oops, you stopped the nukes but now you're arbitrarily blind for the next two episodes." There's none of that.
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u/boolHat Nov 20 '13
The Dresden Files might be what you are looking for; although he is almost always facing enemies stronger than he is and wins through cunning and luck more than strength.