[quote=@The Harbinger of Ferocity]
I personally am for smacking down power creep where it raises its head. Of course we are investing tremendous trust in one another already, but even trusted persons can and do prove unreliable. I believe the main issue with it is, is that when one starts to do it, many others like to follow suit. While this is only natural, you see it in most free form styled roleplays where each successive character in any sort of combat or potential player conflict game exists, it is not in our collective best interest. This is why I am saying we should utterly eschew that and leave it squarely in the realm of non-player character territory, mainly because it takes the power from one set of hands and lays all members' on it.

A player might have a collective set of non-player characters they assume and associate with for their play style, but that being [i]their[/i] character to the point they benefit from the usual graces? It reduces that level. Call me skeptical, as my experience has taught me to trust no one in any semblance even close to that of actual trust, so dividing and eliminating potential issue is for the best. I simply do not think under any circumstances players should be anything close to mid tier importance on average and perhaps one, maybe two, edge that way.
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That outlook unnecessarily constrains the scope of the story, especially since there is no GM to supply the perspective of such important individuals. This project on its own already requires a great deal of implicit trust in other posts; if you are not even going to trust them to write for more 'powerful/influential/wealthy' individuals as a matter of principle, you may as well just rebrand the RP into Slum Wars. Permitting for such characters to exist as NPCs that anyone can use is also unnecessarily restrictive; I do not know about you but I personally will simply never write for such a character since I did not have a hand in their creation and I will never know anything about the crucial aspects of their being necessary to write for them with high-fidelity, especially as other posters write for them as well. It creates conflicts and uncertainty. Such NPCs can exist of course, but to completely prohibit the existence of 'powerful' (however you define it) poster-exclusive characters is simply counter-productive.

Think of it from a narrative perspective of well. In the [i]Neuromancer[/i] setting, both the trash and the most powerful individuals in the setting co-mingle to an extent, and even the Megacorportions, with nigh-unlimited power, are forced to [i]rely on[/i] rather than combat the less powerful and influential characters in the setting for various reasons. The world has grown too complex and vast to be suppressed and run like a corporate farm.

And while the *temptation* to respond to power-gaming with more power-gaming always exists, that usually, again, exists under the purview of a GM-Review environment where posters can poke and prod at the GM's specific, personal boundaries to see what they can get away with. Here, that should not be an issue since if even [i]one[/i] of us has a problem with something, they can raise it and present the full reasoning and logic behind their viewpoint on the matter with the expectation that the claim will be taken seriously. The appropriate response to power-gaming is not to break the setting further, but to [i]correct the error[/i].

So I must, again, respectfully disagree. Posters should be permitted to create character and organizations at any and every level of power, influence, wealth, and expertise. The setting itself and communal oversight by peers is sufficient deterrence, in my opinion, to preempt and oust most instances of power and metagaming.