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Quertus
2019-04-21, 05:51 PM
What are some things that could be or have been accomplished by individuals through supposedly mundane means? Especially if they can impact the plot of a game, or you thought that they were cool, but you couldn't do them in most RPGs?

"Kill things in one shot" is an interesting one, because, in an RPG context, it is opposed by "survive wounds that would kill a normal man" - at least, if the opposition is playing by the same rules. On a related note, we have all manner of mundane means of disabling foes, from paralyzing nerve strikes, to silencing guards with a strike to the throat (both seen in Serenity) to disabling limbs (uh… the acrobat from Avatar is the first example to spring to mind)

We have the classic, "know most everything about a person or a crime scene at a glance" (Sherlock Holmes). Which reminds me of the generic "know things" (my classic example is knowing the location of a portal to the underworld / another plane) (curiously, such knowledge seems to disproportionally favor old loners and village idiots, and be disproportionately lacking in "whoever's in charge", at least in my experience with RPGs (there's probably a trope for that)).

Then there's "being able to find out things", from research to interrogation to, uh, perception & "sense motive".

I'll also mention, "what's your super power?" "I'm rich." wealth (Batman). But having resources is not the same as actually already having what you need.

So, an example:

Let's say that the dreadful Demodragon is nearly invincible, but is vulnerable to the rare herb dragon's bane. The party can suicidally attempt a head-on confrontation. Or, if someone knows of or can research this vulnerability, they can attempt to acquire some dragon's bane. And that need is obviated by someone saying "already got some - it's not the holy grail".

What other ways can one contribute in a purely mundane fashion? What other cool things can Muggles do?

NichG
2019-04-21, 09:14 PM
Well, the one that generally gets overlooked because of the heroic focus of the games:
organize into societies and establish conventions surrounding behavior, belief, learning, culture, personal interaction, etc. It doesn't even require a particularly exceptional set of muggles.

A hero can kill orcs. A society can determine what sort of relationship orcs and humans as a whole will have, and thus change the world into one in which there is no need for orcs to be killed. It takes decades or centuries though.

Quertus
2019-04-21, 10:21 PM
Well, the one that generally gets overlooked because of the heroic focus of the games:
organize into societies and establish conventions surrounding behavior, belief, learning, culture, personal interaction, etc. It doesn't even require a particularly exceptional set of muggles.

A hero can kill orcs. A society can determine what sort of relationship orcs and humans as a whole will have, and thus change the world into one in which there is no need for orcs to be killed. It takes decades or centuries though.

Wow. And here my example of one of my favorite moments was going to be something simple, like using a failed check get a bonus on the next intimidate check (Riddick).

I think that most games are happily too grimdark for your example, allowing the PCs to do (or at least set into motion) such things, and have them progress through society at a much faster rate.

Mechalich
2019-04-21, 10:23 PM
The tricky part about what those without access to mystic resources can do is that, for most available tasks having magic can make you better at whatever it is you're attempting to do than otherwise. All other things being equal, a magical blacksmith is going to be better than a non-magical blacksmith.

This presents a design challenge to work around. Either you have to isolate magic into specialized fields, so that magic can only do some class of specialized things and can't harmonize with anything else, or you have to present magical mastery as a 'point tax' where the magic user spends tons of time meditating on the meaning of the universe or something and therefore doesn't have the option to learn other skills anywhere near as effectively as those specialists who don't use magic.

A good example of the former case might be faith-based healing paradigms. If you build a character with mystic healing powers that are totally incompatible with actual medical techniques (for example a mystical healing technique based on Shinto purification would be incompatible with medicine because the sick are unclean and the priest can't even talk to them), then learning the magic doesn't provide any overlapping benefits because you're dealing with two systems that don't directly interact.

An example of the latter case is when the means to use magic requires mastery of something mind-numbingly complex that otherwise has no practical application. Something like Kabbalah is a decent example here, since that involves mastering knowledge and mathematics with regard to theological texts that doesn't really have any practical application. Essentially any system where the gateway to magic requires your to get a PhD in Esoteric BS, then you're 10-15 years behind anyone with a PhD in a relevant field when it comes to mastering that, and if continuing education applies, this can proceed throughout life as a major limit.

Either way, it's a matter of defining the capabilities of magic along a narrow basis in order protecting the skills of non-magical persons such that they retain utility.

NichG
2019-04-21, 11:16 PM
I think kings are a good muggle analogue to wizards. Wizards command the forces of the cosmos to do their bidding, kings command the forces of society instead. And in medieval systems of governance, they have pretty strong niche protection - it's much easier to be born into the job than to acquire it through one's actions. Religious leaders could also qualify.

Another factor towards niche protection for these things is that, while competence in magic is presumably individual in many fictional worlds, being very skilled at knowing what to tell people to do rarely makes people do what you tell them to on their own - you need to build and maintain resources outside of yourself such as influence, reputation, favors, and social connections. That requires ongoing effort which would be hard to justify for someone whose power came from the depth of their understanding of the nature of reality.

A wizard-king may have some advantages over other kings, but if they want to retain effectiveness as a king they're likely to be a significantly worse wizard for it (excepting an overly literal interpretation of D&D where they could master magic by killing things with a sword, in which case you might as well be a wizard too in addition to whatever else you've got going on).

Khedrac
2019-04-22, 01:36 AM
Be a "MacGuyver".
Very few games have skill systems that will permit this sort of character to work.

That said, some of the stuff he does in the new TV show reminds me of stories of players who have their characters make nuclear weapons using simple spells because the DM doesn't know enough physics to know to the proposed method doesn't actually work - so perhaps he is an rpg character after all...

Brother Oni
2019-04-22, 02:10 AM
I think that most games are happily too grimdark for your example, allowing the PCs to do (or at least set into motion) such things, and have them progress through society at a much faster rate.

If human society determines that the optimal human/orc relationship is genocide and/or ethnic cleansing of the orcish race, that's plenty grimdark.

In my opinion, the main advantage is being able to disseminate information to large numbers of people. This can take a variety of forms, from spreading a message throughout the land (a D&D wizard is capped by their spell slots), to training people up.

A wizard can train a handful of apprentices at a time, which can take years and often finding these apprentices requires set up (e.g. students turning up at your door, or an annual event/competition where all prospective apprentices enter). With the right organisation, bureaucracy and culture, vast quantities of people can screened and sent off to their appropriate tasks - as an example, the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (~4th-6th Century AD)managed to organise and run an empire of around 51 million people by modern estimates, with a top down bureaucracy which went down to the individual family level.

In addition, all the training can be standardised to be of the best quality that can be offered by the highest performing non-magic user and with sufficient survivors/feedback from the field, that training can be further tuned and optimised; take a look how modern military tactics and strategy have developed in recent years, COIN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-insurgency) especially pre and post Iraq.

While an individual muggle isn't going to be able to perform as well as a hero, there's a lot more of them - sure a hero could kill hundreds of muggles, but when there's thousands of them, the muggles would win by sheer attrition.

Mechalich
2019-04-22, 02:24 AM
While an individual muggle isn't going to be able to perform as well as a hero, there's a lot more of them - sure a hero could kill hundreds of muggles, but when there's thousands of them, the muggles would win by sheer attrition.

Attrition only matters if the power variance remains within certain constraints. To use a blatant example, in Dragonball Z, there is no number of ordinary humans, not thousands, not millions, not billions, that can defeat Goku based on his capabilities in episode one never mind after the various power ups that exponentially increase his power from that point. Piccolo, who's significantly weaker than Goku, literally blows up the moon in one of the first few episodes with a single attack.

The ability of mass combat, even by highly trained professional armies, to matter at all in neutralizing the advantages of the supernaturally powered is highly variable and dependent upon carefully balanced structures. There are many series, even extremely popular ones, where it is violated. In the Wheel of Time, for instance, once Rand learns to Travel he can basically defeat infinite numbers of mooks, though he would have to periodically retreat and recharge while doing so.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-22, 08:11 AM
Anything that's demonstrably doable in reality or has been done in real world's history.

This already a higher bar than a lot of people are allowing "muggles" to pass. For example, even fairly rudimentary science, such as gunpowder, is arbitrarily barred to player characters. Even when it would be plausible, no inventing or engineering is allowed where it goes against status quo or aesthetics of pseudo-medieval fantasy.

On the individual level, we have bunch of out-of-shape city folks trying to brain the limits of high-level athletes, without experience in any kinds of athletics. Combine with pop culture misconceptions, and we get hilarious paradoxes like people not thinking twice about a fighter killing an elephant-sized dragon with a sword, but crying foul about the same fighter running or swimming in armour.

Remember, folks: reality is unrealistic and suspension of disbelief is arbitrary.

In my settings, "muggles" can do a whole lot of honest-to-God magic, because, for example, using a silvered mirror to detect vampires does not depend on the person carrying the mirror having any supernatural traits. The supernatural interaction only exist between the silver and the vampire. Same for a circle of salt to ward off evil spirits, or entering a lucid dream to talk with ghosts.

There are also ways for "muggles" to surpass limits of real-life humans without any magic... such as not being a human to begin with. For example, a version of an "orc" can be imagined and defined as a purely biological, mundane entity, that nonetheless has much greater upper body strength than humans do, just like some really-existing apes.

Beleriphon
2019-04-22, 11:12 AM
Maybe I need more sleep, but remind me: is this high jump, or limbo?

Both. Limbo-jump. Have to jump between two bars set to an arbitrary height.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-22, 11:25 AM
I can't take any discussion that uses the word "muggle" seriously.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-22, 12:28 PM
Maybe I need more sleep, but remind me: is this high jump, or limbo?

Either can work for the metaphor:

If it's high jump, the implication is that "muggles" could clear a higher bar if the rules weren't rigged against them.

If it's limbo, the implication is that muggles could be allowed a higher bar but are arbitrarily forced to pass under a much lower one.

---


I can't take any discussion that uses the word "muggle" seriously.

Meh, there are worse ways to say "non-magic" than borrowing from Harry Potter.

Willie the Duck
2019-04-22, 12:46 PM
I can't take any discussion that uses the word "muggle" seriously.

I have the same problem, but it's our old-fart's burden, not the OP's. The Harry Potter Universe is 22 years old. That makes much of the Herbert, Anderson, Vance, and Howard books EGG used to influence Chainmail and oD&D more contemporaneous to his time than a world without Potter is to ours.


In my settings, "muggles" can do a whole lot of honest-to-God magic, because, for example, using a silvered mirror to detect vampires does not depend on the person carrying the mirror having any supernatural traits. The supernatural interaction only exist between the silver and the vampire. Same for a circle of salt to ward off evil spirits, or entering a lucid dream to talk with ghosts.

That is, often, what the "muggles" often do in genre fiction that the hero (who might be a stranger in a strange land) often do: know stuff. Not just that vampires have trouble with silver (certainly not a universal), but also that guy riding up demanding the hero stand down and explain themselves is legitimate authority or not, or where the temple of _____ is, and how not to start a fight every 3rd encounter on the way there. Most games don't really have a set of codified 'things you know' that could be purchased with character-creation currency, but being the guy who knows how to accomplish all the things the great warriors and powerful wizards might want to do (and without your help spend a bunch of time exerting all their great powers in completely ineffective directions) would be a neat character concept.

Brother Oni
2019-04-22, 12:51 PM
Attrition only matters if the power variance remains within certain constraints. To use a blatant example, in Dragonball Z, there is no number of ordinary humans, not thousands, not millions, not billions, that can defeat Goku based on his capabilities in episode one never mind after the various power ups that exponentially increase his power from that point. Piccolo, who's significantly weaker than Goku, literally blows up the moon in one of the first few episodes with a single attack.

I take your general point that past a certain power level, it's basically pointless, but isn't DBZ an example of how epic level characters tend to break everything?

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-22, 12:53 PM
I have the same problem, but it's our old-fart's burden, not the OP's. The Harry Potter Universe is 22 years old. That makes much of the Herbert, Anderson, Vance, and Howard books EGG used to influence Chainmail and oD&D more contemporaneous to his time than a world without Potter is to ours.


To me, "muggle" has a certain dismissive "doesn't matter to the story" implication.




That is, often, what the "muggles" often do in genre fiction that the hero (who might be a stranger in a strange land) often do: know stuff. Not just that vampires have trouble with silver (certainly not a universal), but also that guy riding up demanding the hero stand down and explain themselves is legitimate authority or not, or where the temple of _____ is, and how not to start a fight every 3rd encounter on the way there. Most games don't really have a set of codified 'things you know' that could be purchased with character-creation currency, but being the guy who knows how to accomplish all the things the great warriors and powerful wizards might want to do (and without your help spend a bunch of time exerting all their great powers in completely ineffective directions) would be a neat character concept.


And then of course that gets made into an archetype or class, and suddenly "niche protection" means that The Warrior, or The Wizard, or whoever, isn't allowed to Know This Stuff, because it's the only thing that makes That Muggle Guy "special".

Rater202
2019-04-22, 01:14 PM
I take your general point that past a certain power level, it's basically pointless, but isn't DBZ an example of how epic level characters tend to break everything?

Kinda.

Though the "no amount of muggles can beat Goku in episode 1" doesn't hold up.

Every being had Ki and a power level, even if it can't be accessed or measured--the average human has PL 5 and Mister Satan has a PL of about 140(per supplements) despite no ability to use his Ki at all.

Ki from multiple beings can be concentrated, resulting in at least additive if not multiplicative power.

Majin Buu was destroyed by a ball of energy that was mostly the ki of normal humans, and ambient energy from grass and trees majorly messed up(but did not kill) Vegeta and Frieza.

A large enough number of muggles would be more than capable of kiling Goku at any point, if they had a way of pooling their energy.

Willie the Duck
2019-04-22, 01:26 PM
And then of course that gets made into an archetype or class, and suddenly "niche protection" means that The Warrior, or The Wizard, or whoever, isn't allowed to Know This Stuff, because it's the only thing that makes That Muggle Guy "special".

Or it costs a certain amount of character creation resources, same as secret society membership or skills, or starting wealth, etc., and warriors and wizards and skill-mongers can each know this stuff, provided they pay for it.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-22, 01:29 PM
I take your general point that past a certain power level, it's basically pointless, but isn't DBZ an example of how epic level characters tend to break everything?

From the viewpoint of the protagonists, Dragon Ball is a story about how hard work and dedication can bypass any limit and triumph over any obstacle.

From the viewpoint of everyone else, it is a cosmic horror story where the fate of the world hinges on actions of idiot heros, negligent gods and evil tyrants who have world-destroying power for no real reason.

If DB was a game, it wouldn't be broken, because the GM can always arbitrarily come up with bigger and badder threats. But it's a good example of how silly the setting starts to look like as a result.

awa
2019-04-22, 03:01 PM
From the viewpoint of the protagonists, Dragon Ball is a story about how hard work and dedication can bypass any limit and triumph over any obstacle.

From the viewpoint of everyone else, it is a cosmic horror story where the fate of the world hinges on actions of idiot heros, negligent gods and evil tyrants who have world-destroying power for no real reason.

If DB was a game, it wouldn't be broken, because the GM can always arbitrarily come up with bigger and badder threats. But it's a good example of how silly the setting starts to look like as a result.

to be fair its not a cosmic horror story because the muggles of dbz are willfully stupid and think mr saten saves the day and cell used smoke and mirrors. Basically what I'm saying is ignorance is bliss and the average person in dbz is very ignorant.

But to that last part yes ,very much a dbz game could function very well because the mechanics are already fairly wish washy and the muggles never mattered. The dm could just say after every level up add a 0 to all your numbers you deal 10 times as much damage but he has 10 times as much life. Everything is effectively the same just you know with bigger numbers.

Mechalich
2019-04-22, 04:26 PM
to be fair its not a cosmic horror story because the muggles of dbz are willfully stupid and think mr saten saves the day and cell used smoke and mirrors. Basically what I'm saying is ignorance is bliss and the average person in dbz is very ignorant.

DBZ isn't cosmic horror because it has a deliberately light presentation and none of its themes are about the lives of the irrelevant masses, they're just a backdrop for the story of the core group. The Fridge Horror is being deliberately and blatantly ignored, and sometimes trolled outright by the author. The problem here is that, when you're talking about game design, because the story doesn't have an ending and because there are a theoretically infinite number of players, all of the horrors you leave in the fridge inevitably creep out and start chewing on your game.

To keep with the DBZ example, at the end of the movie Resurrection F, Freiza, pissed that he's lost to Goku and Vegeta, flips the table and blows up the Earth, killing everyone on it. Now, time gets subsequently re-written, everyone is actually fine, and the scenario gets played for a joke about kill-stealing by Vegeta, because Toriyama is in control here, but in an actual DBZ game, the 'F-you, I blow up the planet,' option is always in play for every member of the party and pretty much all significant NPCs, which is a pretty serious game management problem, because that would be an action that is totally in character for a wide range of types.

awa
2019-04-22, 09:13 PM
while d&d does not do it some games have methods to enforce or encourage following genera rules. This could be used to limit planet busting.

NichG
2019-04-22, 09:20 PM
'Who would win in a fight, X or Y?' isn't really a good question to establish someone's effective power or meaningfulness to the narrative anyhow. I'm going to keep going back to the 'king' example - presidents/monarchs/dictators/leaders of countries in the modern world would never win a one-on-one combat with pretty much any of their trained soldiers, much less a one-on-one combat against a tank or airplane. But at the same time, their forms of agency and power cannot be effectively opposed by a single soldier, tank, or airplane. And bringing in things like creating stable forms of governance, succession, and even martyrdom, even if a leader dies it often doesn't significantly diminish their influence on the world or the persistence of their agenda.

So 'even a million muggles couldn't kill Goku' is already the wrong comparison, because it's accepting a fight on Goku's terms. I might as well say 'Even Goku at his strongest could not write an opera that will be remembered in a thousand years.' - it's not asking about an ability that is relevant to a DBZ character's source of narrative power. By focusing on squad-level combat, you're leaving out the vast majority of forms of agency and power to shape the world.

Marywn
2019-04-22, 09:29 PM
WEll I like to think of this as a simple thing. Heros are only heros if the commonfolk believe it so, and I like to use this quote 'Knights get the glory, Soldiers get things done.'

Mechalich
2019-04-22, 11:11 PM
'Who would win in a fight, X or Y?' isn't really a good question to establish someone's effective power or meaningfulness to the narrative anyhow. I'm going to keep going back to the 'king' example - presidents/monarchs/dictators/leaders of countries in the modern world would never win a one-on-one combat with pretty much any of their trained soldiers, much less a one-on-one combat against a tank or airplane. But at the same time, their forms of agency and power cannot be effectively opposed by a single soldier, tank, or airplane. And bringing in things like creating stable forms of governance, succession, and even martyrdom, even if a leader dies it often doesn't significantly diminish their influence on the world or the persistence of their agenda.

The ability to use magic is a force multiplier to pretty much all leadership-based forms of power though. Divinations make a wizard-king or priest-king a better king than anyone without access to those resources could possibly be. Astral projection, teleportation, or other abilities that let a ruler cut down on travel time also have huge benefits for projecting power that someone stuck in a single castle doesn't have. Magical defenses that prevent assassination make a leader considerably more secure in their power.

So unless the use of magic, or the resources required to learn magic use compromise one's ability to be a good king, then a magic-using king remains superior to one who does not.

NichG
2019-04-23, 12:03 AM
The ability to use magic is a force multiplier to pretty much all leadership-based forms of power though. Divinations make a wizard-king or priest-king a better king than anyone without access to those resources could possibly be. Astral projection, teleportation, or other abilities that let a ruler cut down on travel time also have huge benefits for projecting power that someone stuck in a single castle doesn't have. Magical defenses that prevent assassination make a leader considerably more secure in their power.

So unless the use of magic, or the resources required to learn magic use compromise one's ability to be a good king, then a magic-using king remains superior to one who does not.

They're only a force multiplier to people who don't really know how to delegate. Someone who is focused more on themselves than the people they lead says 'I need to also be a diviner', but a wise leader says 'I need to acquire the services of a diviner'. The problem is overly identifying the individual's body with the extension of their agency. The 'magic' of a ruler is that they have figured out how to escape that constraint, and a skillful ruler takes full advantage of the fact that they have done so. A ruler of middling effectiveness might be thwarted by assassination, but a ruler who has shaped the entirety of society and governance around them can be assassinated and still have their vision carried through by their successors or even just the system they have established.

If you're a king and someone hands you magic for free, that's great - a strict benefit. But if you have to decide between going to five meetings or social events a day in order to grow and maintain your network, versus spending that time researching the rituals of dead civilizations looking for that one in a hundred that corresponds to an actual fragment of usable arcane knowledge, then its not always going to be the case that shirking your kingly duties to pick up some divination will be a good idea. Pick a random peasant who shows a spark of brilliance from poverty while they're young, make them loyal unto death to you, and stick them in the library researching divination while you grow your political influence.

Mechalich
2019-04-23, 12:40 AM
If you're a king and someone hands you magic for free, that's great - a strict benefit. But if you have to decide between going to five meetings or social events a day in order to grow and maintain your network, versus spending that time researching the rituals of dead civilizations looking for that one in a hundred that corresponds to an actual fragment of usable arcane knowledge, then its not always going to be the case that shirking your kingly duties to pick up some divination will be a good idea.

This is a case of "the resources required to learn magic use compromise one's ability to be a good king." The point is, in order for this to be true, you have to build the magic system so that it makes this a true statement. Many systems do not do this. A good example would be any system in which people get powers simply by virtue of being genetically special.


Pick a random peasant who shows a spark of brilliance from poverty while they're young, make them loyal unto death to you, and stick them in the library researching divination while you grow your political influence.

The ability to make a person 'loyal unto death' without the use of supernatural compulsion is vastly overstated in many popular media. In history, it was actually very common for rulers to face assassination plots or outright rebellion from those that believed had every reason to be completely loyal to them. In particular, giving a subordinate crucial responsibilities, especially when it comes to a skill the ruler themselves does not possess, drastically reduces their loyalty and makes them ripe for rebellion.

NichG
2019-04-23, 12:55 AM
This is a case of "the resources required to learn magic use compromise one's ability to be a good king." The point is, in order for this to be true, you have to build the magic system so that it makes this a true statement. Many systems do not do this. A good example would be any system in which people get powers simply by virtue of being genetically special.

Even if you get it from being born with it, and you get being a king from being born with it, the probability of having both (unless magic runs in the noble line) would be less than having one or the other. So in terms of the model of the world or the underlying fiction, there will almost always be fewer wizard-kings than wizards or kings.

Once we talk about game systems, everything flies out the window because the PCs are almost never a representative sample of the world, and the power of a player to create what would have been an impossibly rare coincidence through intentionally building their character a certain way or being able to make metagame decisions is more prominent than either the power held by either king or wizard. It becomes like asking which is more powerful: a dragon, or the DM? No longer really a meaningful statement about anything.


The ability to make a person 'loyal unto death' without the use of supernatural compulsion is vastly overstated in many popular media. In history, it was actually very common for rulers to face assassination plots or outright rebellion from those that believed had every reason to be completely loyal to them. In particular, giving a subordinate crucial responsibilities, especially when it comes to a skill the ruler themselves does not possess, drastically reduces their loyalty and makes them ripe for rebellion.

The way media represents it is certainly an overstatement and an oversimplification, but (trying to be very careful to stay away from any specific real world politics here) the world does contain quite a few fanatically loyal individuals willing to kill or die for an abstract ideal. Those abstract ideals didn't manifest out of nothingness - each corresponds to an endeavor of groups of 'muggles' to change the world. Many past leaders still, decades or centuries after their deaths, have people (even those born after their death) willing to sacrifice or die for them.

It's just that again, media tends to focus on the personal and ego scale of storytelling because it's relatable. 'A wizard zapped his mind with a spell and now he can't disobey' can be understood simply. It's harder to explain in a handful of words why (searching for a politically neutral example here - there are better, but maybe this will do) people are still willing to dedicate their careers to performing the works of Shakespeare. People use words like 'vision' or 'charisma' to talk about this kind of thing, but the D&D model of 'roll Diplomacy against the enslavement DC' doesn't really capture the nuances of it. It's because games are pushed towards bite-sized resolution, so in that moment you have to decide with less than 5 minutes of discussion or thought 'is this going to succeed?'.

You can't whammy another human with 5 minutes of conversation so they'll follow you until death. But you can certainly live with them in a way that sustains their loyalty. It's not fire-and-forget, it's systemic practice.

Mechalich
2019-04-23, 01:32 AM
Even if you get it from being born with it, and you get being a king from being born with it, the probability of having both (unless magic runs in the noble line) would be less than having one or the other. So in terms of the model of the world or the underlying fiction, there will almost always be fewer wizard-kings than wizards or kings.

If the magical ability is heritable, then the first wizard who sets himself up as a king spawns a line of wizard-kings who the 'muggles' can never topple. This is exactly the scenario for the dragon-blooded empire's rule over Creation in Exalted, and while that system and setting is all kinds of messed up, it's quite well justified.

By contrast, if phenomenal supernatural power is distributed randomly, then you get the world of the X-Men, which is to say, chaos that barely avoids blowing apart on a weekly basis due to a mixture of fiat and comic book logic.

NichG
2019-04-23, 01:51 AM
If the magical ability is heritable, then the first wizard who sets himself up as a king spawns a line of wizard-kings who the 'muggles' can never topple. This is exactly the scenario for the dragon-blooded empire's rule over Creation in Exalted, and while that system and setting is all kinds of messed up, it's quite well justified.

In a feudal system, such a ruler is faced with a fairly serious dilemma. Using a fairly efficient hierarchy to administer an area the size of, say, Europe is still going to require a couple thousand people who are given some degree of political authority. So exactly what kind of succession system are you going to use to make this work? If everyone in a position of rule is to also be a wizard-duke or wizard-earl or whatnot, you have the problem that you're breeding up a population of contenders for the throne. And since you're retaining the throne by virtue of individual power rather than by virtue of systemic social structure, all it takes is one of those branch families to give rise to a prodigy and suddenly you've got a growing potential for a war of succession or even a direct coup. The bigger you make your empire, the higher the chance that someone ends up with 'better wizard genes' along the way and throws the entire thing into chaos. Or worse, royal bastards might leak into the general population and suddenly peasants can do magic too.

On the other hand, you could really clamp down and say for example 'only one heir at a time is permitted the gift of magic, all others will be killed at birth, all branch families/etc are mundanes'. This isn't very stable either - after all, if your heir were to die a bit late in your lifespan, your empire (or at least the magic-supported part of it) crumbles within the next generation. You could of course kill all the other heirs when the main one ascends to the throne, but then you're basically telling your line 'this is a game where you try to fake your death or kill your siblings before they ascend' - not really stable either. Not to mention that as a single wizard using your magic to sustain and otherwise suboptimal rule on the basis of personal power, the bigger your empire is the more your talents will be stretched thin.

So while the wizard-king may have local advantages to carve out a small polity and sustain their reign for the remainder of their lifespan in peace, a wizard-king who tries to project their rule to larger organizations of people on the basis of their magic rather than on the basis of their statesmanship is asking for trouble a few generations down the line. Muggles might not be able to topple them actively, depending on the magic system we're talking about, but by the time their great-grandkids roll around then it might not even require an effort.

Now, if we're talking about a magic system that provides easy access to immortality and lets you arbitrarily mess with space and time so that you can personally administer every governmental role in an empire of arbitrary size, then perhaps that's another story. But at that point I'm not sure how you could expect even new wizards to come along without being retroactively deleted from time by the reigning god-wizard - here we've just defined a system that is so stagnant that no one but the founder can possibly ever matter.

Florian
2019-04-23, 02:16 AM
In a feudal system, such a ruler is faced with a fairly serious dilemma.

L5R manages that particular topic quite well.

Brother Oni
2019-04-23, 02:23 AM
You can't whammy another human with 5 minutes of conversation so they'll follow you until death. But you can certainly live with them in a way that sustains their loyalty. It's not fire-and-forget, it's systemic practice.

Another example - loyalty of samurai towards their lords. While it's certainly variable and it's mostly viewed with rose-coloured glasses, the culture was there to instil loyalty, sometimes in a manner that would be completely alien to us today.

As an example, there were enough cases to warrant the prohibition of junshi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junshi), a form of ritual suicide where a samurai followed his lord, due to it being considered a waste of good manpower. The most famous case of junshi are the 47 Ronin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-seven_r%C5%8Dnin).

There's also plenty of cases where troops were fanatically loyal to their commander, for example Caesar's 10th Legion who demanded to be decimated for cowardice after they fled a battle (each individual squad would draws lots - the one who drew the short straw would be beaten to death by his squadmates).

Eldariel
2019-04-23, 04:24 AM
I think the big powers of muggles come down to:

1) Personal. This is where you have your Conan, Achilleus, Hector, Ajax, Siegfried, etc. It generally comes down to perfection of self, one way or another. Where magic is defined as an inner power you can impose upon the world, mundane as its counterpart is the perfection of self to the point that few things, magical or mundane, can meaningfully affect you. On the other hand, magic tends to come with a built-in weakness; effects can be unraveled through mundane means (while obviously magical, Ryougi Shiki [Kara no Kyoukai] is an excellent example of this, called "the bane of magic" precisely because she so excels at unraveling magical effects of any sort). This is kind of a necessity in a world where mundane creatures are expected to fight on par with magical beings; where librarians have to spend their eternity mastering the warp, a marine masters themselves. Physical perfection can of course mean different things: mostly you have the fast hero or the strong hero. A fast one is impossible to pin down, amazing at remaining unnoticed, etc. while a strong one is impossible to affect, an unstoppable juggernaut.

2) Social. This is a big one. A great muggle can be a superb orator or a born leader inspiring nations to surpass themselves or speaking an army to surrender, losing people in the swamps never to return or whatever. The key thing is, not using magic is a massive advantage in this regard, since magic can be detected and knowing something was done with "help" might considerably lessen its effect on people. Here you have your Alexander the Great, your Pyrrhus, your Hannibal, your Caesar, your Nikephoros II, your Hermann Balck. It is possible to make others able to do immense feats with merely words and a certain kind of presence. It's also possible to turn others to your cause, both Alexander the Great and Hannibal are noted for constantly bolstering their ranks with their conquered enemies and Hannibal in particular is one nobody seems to have had anything bad to say about, serving with joy (Alexander had his problems with his close elite macedonians towards the end).

This kind of power can, again, just as easily be turned outwards to talk your way out of an impossible situation, convince armies to lay down and surrender where their victory in combat would be all but assured, be imposing enough that a would-be assassin has second thoughts and becomes your willing servant ratting out his employee even though you never noticed them, etc. In particular this kind of power would seem an appropriate reward for the just and the reliable; servants of evil rulers might be much more willing to jump the ship if they know they won't be unfairly treated or punished and that they'll be protected from retribution.

3) Technology. Obviously, using technology and improving upon technology and developing technology are different things but generally a muggle has more time to spend on their equipment and thus they should be able to make more out of their equipment than someone who spends their time studying forbidden tomes instead. They should also be able to build more efficient mundane tools. These are inevitably overshadowed by magical equipment but certain mundane discoveries can go together with magical ones and create something combining the best sides of both. Note, this obviously includes weapon and combat technology too: there should be no reason you couldn't also play your MacGuyver-sort of character, perhaps an "alchemist" (who is really just a chemist).


Obviously of course you have your Perception and Knowledge-related abilities, which muggles can pull tremendous feats in. They alone don't suffice but they are key parts in enabling muggles to do what they set out to do. They are tools that enable bringing your means to bear, whether it be by noticing a flaw in an illusion, being exceptionally aware of peoples' facial micro expressions, being able to spot weak points in armor or a structure or whatever, being able to figure out how a given contraption works, or any such thing.

Then, the one place where muggles can "invoke magic" without it feeling unmugglelike is crafting or craftsmanship. I don't have a problem with mostly mundane dwarves or humans in Tolkien's works producing weapons capable of cutting a wraith's ties to this world or indestructible armor. Indeed, I find a smith should be superior in crafting than a magician pretty much invariably and I don't necessarily buy that you'd need to be a magician to craft magical objects. Magic can be invoked from the essence of the material itself, or from ambient energies, during the creation of the object.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-23, 08:25 AM
I think the big powers of muggles come down to:

1) Personal. This is where you have your Conan, Achilleus, Hector, Ajax, Siegfried, etc. It generally comes down to perfection of self, one way or another. Where magic is defined as an inner power you can impose upon the world, mundane as its counterpart is the perfection of self to the point that few things, magical or mundane, can meaningfully affect you. On the other hand, magic tends to come with a built-in weakness; effects can be unraveled through mundane means (while obviously magical, Ryougi Shiki [Kara no Kyoukai] is an excellent example of this, called "the bane of magic" precisely because she so excels at unraveling magical effects of any sort). This is kind of a necessity in a world where mundane creatures are expected to fight on par with magical beings; where librarians have to spend their eternity mastering the warp, a marine masters themselves. Physical perfection can of course mean different things: mostly you have the fast hero or the strong hero. A fast one is impossible to pin down, amazing at remaining unnoticed, etc. while a strong one is impossible to affect, an unstoppable juggernaut.


This is one we've been discussing on the most recent "martial vs magic" thread, and really, it blurs the line a lot. "Perfection of the self" to the point of gaining fantastic abilities is, effectively, magic.

Clistenes
2019-04-23, 01:56 PM
I think the big powers of muggles come down to:

1) Personal. This is where you have your Conan, Achilleus, Hector, Ajax, Siegfried, etc. It generally comes down to perfection of self, one way or another. Where magic is defined as an inner power you can impose upon the world, mundane as its counterpart is the perfection of self to the point that few things, magical or mundane, can meaningfully affect you. On the other hand, magic tends to come with a built-in weakness; effects can be unraveled through mundane means (while obviously magical, Ryougi Shiki [Kara no Kyoukai] is an excellent example of this, called "the bane of magic" precisely because she so excels at unraveling magical effects of any sort). This is kind of a necessity in a world where mundane creatures are expected to fight on par with magical beings; where librarians have to spend their eternity mastering the warp, a marine masters themselves. Physical perfection can of course mean different things: mostly you have the fast hero or the strong hero. A fast one is impossible to pin down, amazing at remaining unnoticed, etc. while a strong one is impossible to affect, an unstoppable juggernaut.

Achilles was a demigod with invulnerable skin and armed with god-forged weapons and armor... not really a muggle...

Ajax was the great-grandson of Zeus, and, according to some versions, he had invulnerable skin, just like Achilles.

Siegfried started sorta normal, but he got invulnerable skin too after bathing in dragon's blood, he was able to understand the language of animals, and he owned a ton of magical weapons and tools...

Mechalich
2019-04-23, 04:22 PM
1) Personal. This is where you have your Conan, Achilleus, Hector, Ajax, Siegfried, etc. It generally comes down to perfection of self, one way or another. Where magic is defined as an inner power you can impose upon the world, mundane as its counterpart is the perfection of self to the point that few things, magical or mundane, can meaningfully affect you. On the other hand, magic tends to come with a built-in weakness; effects can be unraveled through mundane means (while obviously magical, Ryougi Shiki [Kara no Kyoukai] is an excellent example of this, called "the bane of magic" precisely because she so excels at unraveling magical effects of any sort). This is kind of a necessity in a world where mundane creatures are expected to fight on par with magical beings; where librarians have to spend their eternity mastering the warp, a marine masters themselves. Physical perfection can of course mean different things: mostly you have the fast hero or the strong hero. A fast one is impossible to pin down, amazing at remaining unnoticed, etc. while a strong one is impossible to affect, an unstoppable juggernaut.


Ryougi Shiki has a magical power: the demon eyes of direct death. That power is highly effective against the abilities of Nasuverse characters who are 'mages' and use a specific kind of magical power. In no way does that make Ryougi Shiki non-magical or 'mundane.'

There are distinct limits on the kind of things human beings can do without supernatural or technological boosts. For instance, no matter how hard you train, you cannot develop bulletproof skin. If you shoot John Wick, he bleeds. If you shoot Aquaman, he doesn't.

Kitten Champion
2019-04-23, 07:27 PM
Honestly the only thing I can think of is rapport with other Muggles and - potentially - a more grounded perspective. In real-world politics it's often a strategy to appeal to the majority with displays of homespun authenticity and whatnot, and similarly in fiction the regular person can garner trust and get people off their guard the way the Superhuman cannot. To use a Dragonball example, the heroes of the story are all semi-hermits who so dwarf humanity in terms of power that it's much easier to relate to and sympathize a merely modestly exceptional person like Hercule Satan. Even if he's kind of a boastful idiot he's still on their level, which, especially in reference to the Harry Potter universe, if you recognize what Wizards can do and the kinds of horror they can casually inflict upon you, the comfort you feel in dealing with someone who abides by the laws of your own logical understanding of universe is reasonable. In the case of DBZ, when Satan makes an appeal for everyone's help in fighting the big bad they're receptive, especially compared to the people who've been spending their lives training out in the middle of nowhere or fighting away on distant alien planets and wield powers that confuse the hell out of 'em.

Then you have someone like Togusa on Ghost in the Shell - at least the anime - where he's the normal, competent police detective in an organization of peerless cyborg special agents. Togusa's valuable because he's not like the others and thus provides a different perspective, both in terms of having no cybernetics and because he's a regular family man who wasn't involved in the murky world of geopolitical shadow conflicts or espionage. This is something generally true in RPGs in my experience - mostly from expectations - it's very easy to get lost in the tangle of the fantastic new abilities your characters wield and forget that mundane things still happen for mundane reasons and can be equally or more important.

Mechalich
2019-04-23, 08:10 PM
Then you have someone like Togusa on Ghost in the Shell - at least the anime - where he's the normal, competent police detective in an organization of peerless cyborg special agents. Togusa's valuable because he's not like the others and thus provides a different perspective, both in terms of having no cybernetics and because he's a regular family man who wasn't involved in the murky world of geopolitical shadow conflicts or espionage. This is something generally true in RPGs in my experience - mostly from expectations - it's very easy to get lost in the tangle of the fantastic new abilities your characters wield and forget that mundane things still happen for mundane reasons and can be equally or more important.

GitS is a pretty good example of a universe with a cap on abilities though. The Major is a full-body cyborg with all kinds of upgrades, she's about as advanced as it gets for a human-sized package in that universe, but there are distinct limits on her capabilities (she rather famously loses to a tank in the OG film). Togusa's perspective therefore retains great value because the agents can't simply manhandle their way through everything society throws at them. There's a key difference between a character who's sufficiently enhanced that it requires an unreasonable amount of mundane resources for society to bring them down (in the various iterations of GTA you can rampage awfully hard, but eventually the military will turn you to paste), and one no amount of mundane resources can bring down.

And, of course, as technology increases, the amount of resources available to mundane society increases dramatically. There's a very good example of how this interaction plays out in The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross in which a completely mystical army around the size of a single modern combined forces corps invades the English countryside around Leeds and ends up being opposed almost entirely by conventional weapons. The resulting interactions get weird, but 21st century weaponry allows for resistance in a way that, for instance, 19th century tech would have completely failed to provide. The more technology you have, the more supernatural power you can allow to compete with it. It's very possible to imagine a character who'd be utterly invincible in 0 CE, only mostly invincible in 1500 CE, and still loses to a tank in 2000 CE.

NichG
2019-04-23, 08:40 PM
Replacing the Major with Saitama from One Punch Man would have, if anything, made Togusa even more critical. Their goal wasn't to beat up all of the corrupt members of the government, it was to expose the conspiracy and remove the suppression of the better cyberbrain sclerosis cure.

Tanarii
2019-04-23, 09:00 PM
To use the classic options, either of:
- build a castle, hire soldiers, and eventually (if you're good) conquer yourself an empire.
- found a guild of like minded shady folks to either murder, steal or possibly sing your way to greatness.

Holy non-muggles get a temple and a small (but free) force of warriors, but they're basically half-muggles in terms of raw power.

Full on non-muggles get either a tower and freedom, or a regular stipend and a ruler's ear. Plus a few apprentices.

Of course, RPGs have evolved a little since then. :smallamused:

Mechalich
2019-04-23, 09:30 PM
Replacing the Major with Saitama from One Punch Man would have, if anything, made Togusa even more critical. Their goal wasn't to beat up all of the corrupt members of the government, it was to expose the conspiracy and remove the suppression of the better cyberbrain sclerosis cure.

Replacing the Major with Saitama means the story falls apart, because the universe now has superman in it and everything has to re-align according to that new reality. A character whose personal powerful overawes that of the collective power of society changes the story to revolve around them - even when it's someone like Saitama who doesn't really have any ideological goals.

NichG
2019-04-23, 10:05 PM
Replacing the Major with Saitama means the story falls apart, because the universe now has superman in it and everything has to re-align according to that new reality. A character whose personal powerful overawes that of the collective power of society changes the story to revolve around them - even when it's someone like Saitama who doesn't really have any ideological goals.

Power is irrelevant without a coherent purpose. The sun is powerful, it's surface conditions would kill any human on Earth even with the best protection our technology can achieve, even at 1AU distance it causes sun burns, skin cancer, etc. Our civilization has not rearranged itself with the goal of destroying the sun just because it is there and has parameters which exceed our capabilities along some axes.

'Because Saitama exists, we must fight him/we must measure our capacities by our ability to compete with him in his area of strength' is an error.

Add Saitama to Ghost in the Shell and basically nothing about civilization changes, because the problems faced by humans in that setting have very little to do with punching out kaiju. Saitama's existence doesn't cure cyberbrain sclerosis; it doesn't answer questions of identity in the face of increasing ambiguity of the form and function of the mind, it doesn't determine the growth pattern of personalities and philosophy of newly formed artificial intelligences; it doesn't remove nepotism, cronyism, or profit motive from government; it doesn't resolve underlying nationalistic vulnerabilities which can be manipulated in order to create a flash movement.

If you believe that the only story to be told once you've added Saitama to GitS is his story, you've missed the point of GitS.

Cazero
2019-04-24, 02:00 AM
To use the classic options, either of:
- build a castle, hire soldiers, and eventually (if you're good) conquer yourself an empire.
- found a guild of like minded shady folks to either murder, steal or possibly sing your way to greatness.
Those sound like feats. Or a "Lord" class. Maybe a PrC, or some sort of class "upgrade" that have an impact on the source of your power like the 4e parangon paths.
If past level 9 Wizards stopped gaining any magical ability and gained weapon proficiencies instead, there would be outrage because changing how the class grows denature it. The same holds true for the martial classes.
If your sense of verisimilitude demands that all-natural Fighters don't grow beyond a certain point, enforce a level limitation on that specific class.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-24, 03:08 AM
If you believe that the only story to be told once you've added Saitama to GitS is his story, you've missed the point of GitS.

You've also missed point of One-Punch Man. Because society doesn't realign itself to deal with Saitama. No matter how many monsters he punches to oblivion, circumstances conspire to make him look like a total nobody.

If Saitama was put in GitS, no-one would realize how powerfull he really is. Ever.

Berenger
2019-04-24, 03:39 AM
Those sound like feats. Or a "Lord" class. Maybe a PrC, or some sort of class "upgrade" that have an impact on the source of your power like the 4e parangon paths.

I don't like the idea of locking social rank and relationships to other people behind feats, sub-systems and prestige classes. Just make the necessary leadership skills class skills for everyone and give out an extra skill point or to per level so that player characters can have a fair shot at gaining followers and nationbuilding if desired.

Brother Oni
2019-04-24, 06:37 AM
GitS is a pretty good example of a universe with a cap on abilities though. The Major is a full-body cyborg with all kinds of upgrades, she's about as advanced as it gets for a human-sized package in that universe, but there are distinct limits on her capabilities (she rather famously loses to a tank in the OG film). Togusa's perspective therefore retains great value because the agents can't simply manhandle their way through everything society throws at them. There's a key difference between a character who's sufficiently enhanced that it requires an unreasonable amount of mundane resources for society to bring them down (in the various iterations of GTA you can rampage awfully hard, but eventually the military will turn you to paste), and one no amount of mundane resources can bring down.

Expanding on Kitten Champion's points, one key thing that's overlooked is the sheer amount of maintenance that Kusanagi and other full body cyborgs require - they're essentially enslaved to PSS9 as they can't exist without the government's infrastructure and resources, not without giving up their cutting edge cyborg bodies.

Togusa is vital to the team, not just because of his skills, knowledge and viewpoint as a former police detective and family man, but because he's also a barely augmented human. The first film has a conversation between Togusa and the Major where they discuss all this, including an interesting point about over-specialisation breeding in weakness.

Cluedrew
2019-04-24, 06:56 AM
What are some things that could be or have been accomplished by individuals through supposedly mundane means? Especially if they can impact the plot of a game, or you thought that they were cool, but you couldn't do them in most RPGs?Land a craft with people in it on the moon and bring them back.

So anything that has been accomplished in real life. The social options are probably the most interesting. I would also like to throw out a note that in a democratic society (one with voting) the muggle might have an actually advantage because they would be more relatable than the one with strange and kind of scary power. This might just be me, but I would have a harder time trusting someone who can modify memories than a normal person. And this is even ignoring the possible opportunity cost of developing magical abilities in the first place.

awa
2019-04-24, 07:20 AM
You've also missed point of One-Punch Man. Because society doesn't realign itself to deal with Saitama. No matter how many monsters he punches to oblivion, circumstances conspire to make him look like a total nobody.

If Saitama was put in GitS, no-one would realize how powerfull he really is. Ever.

one punch man is also a comedy that doesn't follow anything remotely resembling real world logic.
In our world or the ghost in the shell world for that matter they would notice that crater on the moon the mountains getting punched into oblivion and so on. Regardless of what they decided to do about you can bet they would care about it and it would alter their society as they tried to protect themselves from it or have guy start jogging and doing sit ups to replicate it.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-24, 08:39 AM
Expanding on Kitten Champion's points, one key thing that's overlooked is the sheer amount of maintenance that Kusanagi and other full body cyborgs require - they're essentially enslaved to PSS9 as they can't exist without the government's infrastructure and resources, not without giving up their cutting edge cyborg bodies.

Togusa is vital to the team, not just because of his skills, knowledge and viewpoint as a former police detective and family man, but because he's also a barely augmented human. The first film has a conversation between Togusa and the Major where they discuss all this, including an interesting point about over-specialisation breeding in weakness.

Even Togusa has a cyberbrain at the end of the day.

I always thought that a person with no augmentation, no cyber-brain, who can't be hacked, or tracked in some of the ways that hackers and state actors have come to rely on, would be an interesting character in that setting. Someone who can literally just "go dark" from the perspective of all the online activity and move unseen. Make it a point of discussion when the character is using manual interfaces with computers instead of plugging in.

For added fun, make the character's field partner an upgraded AI android from the "admin pool" in SAC. (We see them providing hacking backup, flying the tilt rotors, etc).

Pauly
2019-04-24, 08:55 AM
I think the big powers of muggles come down to:

1) Personal. This is where you have your Conan, Achilleus, Hector, Ajax, Siegfried, etc. It generally comes down to perfection of self, one way or another. Where magic is defined as an inner power you can impose upon the world, mundane as its counterpart is the perfection of self to the point that few things, magical or mundane, can meaningfully affect you. ... .

Conan is the best example cited there. Yes he does perfect his body, but in the original stories by Howard it’s his cunning and willingness to do anything to survive that allows him to defeat wizards and magical critters and overwhelming numbers.

Batman and other pulp era heroes (The Phantom, The Shadow, Mandrake the Magician, Doc Savage etc. and if you want to stretch the definition it can include Alan Quartermaine, the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sherlock Holmes) can defeat super villains, magical enemies and organized gangs more by dint of intelligence and skills more than being trained to the peak of physical conditions. Being at peak physical condition allows them to fast forward through the hired goons, but defeating the BBEG usually depends on them being smarter or wiser.

For Homer, Odysseus is the guy you want, not Achilles or Ajax.

Tanarii
2019-04-24, 08:56 AM
Those sound like feats. Or a "Lord" class. Maybe a PrC, or some sort of class "upgrade" that have an impact on the source of your power like the 4e parangon paths.
Nope. A natural consequence of leveling. Until 3rd edition D&D, the assumption was the ultimate endgame was war gaming, and all your adventuring was about leveling up your heros to buy armies. Unless you were a Thief or Magic-user, in which case you were either pointless or battlefield artillery (respectively).

D&D used to be unapologetic about changing it's nature as you leveled, starting off as dungeon crawling, then hex crawling, then moving into war gaming / dominion ruling, possibly followed by exploring the planes then challenging demon princes / devil lords / avatars of gods (or immortals). Interestingly 5e gives a nod to this with Tiers of Play, but sadly never gives explicit rules for a lot of the stuff.


If past level 9 Wizards stopped gaining any magical ability and gained weapon proficiencies instead, there would be outrage because changing how the class grows denature it. The same holds true for the martial classes.
If your sense of verisimilitude demands that all-natural Fighters don't grow beyond a certain point, enforce a level limitation on that specific class.You've missed the point. AD&D Fighters didn't stop growing. They were the only ones who got the tools necessary to play the high-level game.

Although as noted, Clerics had a little bit of that, with their religion order follower units. But they were half-Fighter / half-Magic-User, so that makes sense.

Thieves were in the same boat as Magic Users. All they got was progression of their individual power to ludicrous levels. Unfortunately, that didn't count for much. But that's not something the majority of people seem to understand. They always get it backwards, thinking that the personal power is the most important, not the least.

Cazero
2019-04-24, 10:18 AM
-snip-
I know all that.
I'm just saying that it was a very stupid way of doing it and proposing simple fixes.


But that's not something the majority of people seem to understand. They always get it backwards, thinking that the personal power is the most important, not the least.
Considering character level directly correlate with personal power in the entirety of play where you're supposed to actualy use the character, that's a more coherent interpretation than the intended one.

Bohandas
2019-04-24, 11:06 AM
I can't take any discussion that uses the word "muggle" seriously.

I agree, even in the Harry Potter novels it sounds aggressively ridiculous, like the kind of word that would be more at home in a Dr.Seuss book.

Kaptin Keen
2019-04-24, 11:18 AM
I allow muggles to do a substantial number of things through alchemy - from bombs (of a sort) over traps and burning blades and arrows to potions. Like, vikings allegedly eating mushrooms to run amok.

In a similar vein, I allow machinery and engineering to be rather very deadly indeed to arrogant PC's. If you disrespect siege artillery, you will likely be rerolling. But it isn't necessarily pointing a ballista at the overconfident mage - traps (again) don't need magic to function, lead or gorgons blood blocks certain spells (meaning more such techniques certainly exist), and so on.

Mass attacks from muggles can and will eliminate high level enemies (because I generally allow only so many magic items, and play at only so high a level).

Also, no reason mundanes cannot have very high skill modifiers.

Brother Oni
2019-04-24, 12:10 PM
I always thought that a person with no augmentation, no cyber-brain, who can't be hacked, or tracked in some of the ways that hackers and state actors have come to rely on, would be an interesting character in that setting. Someone who can literally just "go dark" from the perspective of all the online activity and move unseen. Make it a point of discussion when the character is using manual interfaces with computers instead of plugging in.

For added fun, make the character's field partner an upgraded AI android from the "admin pool" in SAC. (We see them providing hacking backup, flying the tilt rotors, etc).

Completely un-augmented people are actually a plot point in the first series of SAC since The Laughing Man couldn't camouflage himself from them. Unfortunately with the ubiquity of technology, a completely un-augmented person may suffer enough issues during normal day to day life that any advantages would be outweighed by the disadvantages.

Hopefully any upgraded admin pool gynoid (they're all externally female, so android isn't really the correct term) would have upgraded logic processing so they couldn't be broken with a simple logic paradox (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I5dfI4SyLg)...

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-24, 12:19 PM
Completely un-augmented people are actually a plot point in the first series of SAC since The Laughing Man couldn't camouflage himself from them. Unfortunately with the ubiquity of technology, a completely un-augmented person may suffer enough issues during normal day to day life that any advantages would be outweighed by the disadvantages.

Hopefully any upgraded admin pool gynoid (they're all externally female, so android isn't really the correct term) would have upgraded logic processing so they couldn't be broken with a simple logic paradox (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I5dfI4SyLg)...

I tend to treat "android" as generic when I don't stop to think about it, I think my brain is latching on as if it's "anthro" rather than "andro". But yeah, I was thinking of enough of an upgrade/expansion that the "paradox trap" gimmick would be useless.

Beleriphon
2019-04-24, 01:57 PM
Land a craft with people in it on the moon and bring them back.

So anything that has been accomplished in real life. The social options are probably the most interesting. I would also like to throw out a note that in a democratic society (one with voting) the muggle might have an actually advantage because they would be more relatable than the one with strange and kind of scary power. This might just be me, but I would have a harder time trusting someone who can modify memories than a normal person. And this is even ignoring the possible opportunity cost of developing magical abilities in the first place.

Like the entire bit in Incredible Beasts where the wizards decide its good to mind wipe the entire population of New York? And the supposed good guy of the story casually does so to regular people, because hey why not? Nothing says we're trustworthy and albino Johnny Depp is actually the bad guy like mind control. In the end the official wizards and Grindewalde are equally bad, just in in different ways. I can only hope this gets addressed in the third movie, but I'm not expecting much when we get instead get Jude Law and Johnny Depp to shoot green-screened magic at each other.

Eldariel
2019-04-24, 02:26 PM
This is one we've been discussing on the most recent "martial vs magic" thread, and really, it blurs the line a lot. "Perfection of the self" to the point of gaining fantastic abilities is, effectively, magic.

True, but where the line is drawn depends on the settings. It's not implausible that a mundane human in a given settings can reach things that no human on record in our world is capable of. There's a certain limit set by physics, of course, but somebody being able to do something nobody in the history has been able to accomplish shouldn't be much of a problem.


Achilles was a demigod with invulnerable skin and armed with god-forged weapons and armor... not really a muggle...

Ajax was the great-grandson of Zeus, and, according to some versions, he had invulnerable skin, just like Achilles.

Siegfried started sorta normal, but he got invulnerable skin too after bathing in dragon's blood, he was able to understand the language of animals, and he owned a ton of magical weapons and tools...

Sure, but the greatest deeds of Achilleus had little and less to do with his invulnerability (only his death did, ironically). His defeat of Hector, for instance, was simply a feat of arms - being better than the best. He didn't get stabbed and shrug it off, he beat him fair and square.

Same with Ajax. And many other Greek heroes for that matter; while they supposedly have this or that divine lineage, that doesn't actually manifest in the story and their deeds. The only one to really put his divine blood to use is Heracles.


Ryougi Shiki has a magical power: the demon eyes of direct death. That power is highly effective against the abilities of Nasuverse characters who are 'mages' and use a specific kind of magical power. In no way does that make Ryougi Shiki non-magical or 'mundane.'

Obviously, that wasn't my point. My point was that much like Ryougi sees the "death" of magical effects, there should be no reason that this wouldn't apply to magic more broadly and be available for a mundane character to exploit. Cut a magical effect just right and you can end it. Or alternatively, a natural antimagical material much like iron ("cold iron" in D&D terms) wrt. to fae in the Celtic folklore. This way you can instead come from the other direction and make a steel blade something magic is naturally weak to (many games do that to a degree, but mostly with creatures rather than with the magical energy proper, even though interacting with magical energy would be much closer to the folklore origins of the effect).

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-24, 02:53 PM
True, but where the line is drawn depends on the settings. It's not implausible that a mundane human in a given settings can reach things that no human on record in our world is capable of. There's a certain limit set by physics, of course, but somebody being able to do something nobody in the history has been able to accomplish shouldn't be much of a problem.


That's already been covered in the other thread, repeatedly.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23857425#post23857425
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23857448#post23857448
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23858455#post23858455
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23860121#post23860121
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23860140#post23860140
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23860238#post23860238
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23861201#post23861201
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23861315#post23861315
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23861550#post23861550
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23861575#post23861575
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586153-The-Man-Keeping-the-Martial-Down&p=23865524#post23865524

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-24, 03:14 PM
In our world or the ghost in the shell world for that matter they would notice that crater on the moon the mountains getting punched into oblivion and so on.

Saitama, if put in our world or GitS world, would have no reason to ever crack mountaints or alter shape of the moon. All of his impressive feats of destruction exists in reaction to other superpowered folks.

He'd be the guy who occasionally stops a cybernetically augmented robber etc., but everyone would dismiss it as a fluke since he has no training or history that'd justify suspecting he's anything special. His training regimen is a joke and nothing noteworthy even in his own setting. In GitS, anyone would be able to tell that Saitama's fitness routine could not explain his powers & trying to repeat it wouldn't work.

awa
2019-04-24, 03:46 PM
Saitama, if put in our world or GitS world, would have no reason to ever crack mountaints or alter shape of the moon. All of his impressive feats of destruction exists in reaction to other superpowered folks.

He'd be the guy who occasionally stops a cybernetically augmented robber etc., but everyone would dismiss it as a fluke since he has no training or history that'd justify suspecting he's anything special. His training regimen is a joke and nothing noteworthy even in his own setting. In GitS, anyone would be able to tell that Saitama's fitness routine could not explain his powers & trying to repeat it wouldn't work.

its true his training regime is a joke, but the first time he punts a runaway tank into orbit the government if not the world would notice. They aren't dumb enough to see that and think its just a coincidence (like they do in his own world) and that assumes a best case scenario of the character keeping to his original roots and not trying to actually do anything with his power. A non joke character would probably want to do something with their godlike power which would cause the world to take note and then bends the setting around him.

sit ups might not be able to replicate his strength but you can be sure they would try and figure out his secret even within his own setting a few people do that.

Clistenes
2019-04-24, 04:05 PM
Sure, but the greatest deeds of Achilleus had little and less to do with his invulnerability (only his death did, ironically). His defeat of Hector, for instance, was simply a feat of arms - being better than the best. He didn't get stabbed and shrug it off, he beat him fair and square.

Same with Ajax. And many other Greek heroes for that matter; while they supposedly have this or that divine lineage, that doesn't actually manifest in the story and their deeds. The only one to really put his divine blood to use is Heracles.

In the Illiad heroes like Achilles, Ajax and Diomedes throw rocks that "no normal man could even lift" at each other like it is nothing. Achilles sprints (and keeps running at top speed for a long time) wearing heavy bronze armor, and at a point he jumps into a river wearing said heavy armor in order to kill enemy soldiers, and later outruns the river god Scamander until Hephaestous comes to the rescue...

He may not be at Hercules level, but he is explicitly superhuman, in a "heroes were stronger, tougher and faster than any present day man..."

Willie the Duck
2019-04-24, 04:41 PM
I know all that.
I'm just saying that it was a very stupid way of doing it and proposing simple fixes.


Considering character level directly correlate with personal power in the entirety of play where you're supposed to actualy use the character, that's a more coherent interpretation than the intended one.

Both the way 3e+ and oD&D/AD&D did it were completely coherent, reasonable, and well-loved by certain player bases. Complaining that one isn't the other seems odd. Clearly, TSR did not adapt to player tastes changing, and there is an odd in-between era (that I think of as the 2e AD&D and part-of-BECMI classicD&D era, but the exact timeframe is definitely debatable) where there seems to be some incoherent disharmony between the playstyle advertised and the ruleset provided (such that I'm surprised that people embraced D&D during that timeframe, despite myself being one of those people, my own first books being Mentzer Basic in '83).

That said, yes please suggest fixes for how D&D of that era could be fixed for you. Opinions of the stupidity of various ways of doing things are just that, opinions, and I neither have a problem with, nor agree with them.

Cluedrew
2019-04-24, 04:56 PM
He may not be at Hercules level, but he is explicitly superhuman, in a "heroes were stronger, tougher and faster than any present day man..."Although I wouldn't count it for a muggle/everyman character, there are many contexts where I would count "superhuman but not supernatural". That fuzzy line is half the problem as well.

Clistenes
2019-04-24, 05:34 PM
Like the entire bit in Incredible Beasts where the wizards decide its good to mind wipe the entire population of New York? And the supposed good guy of the story casually does so to regular people, because hey why not? Nothing says we're trustworthy and albino Johnny Depp is actually the bad guy like mind control. In the end the official wizards and Grindewalde are equally bad, just in in different ways. I can only hope this gets addressed in the third movie, but I'm not expecting much when we get instead get Jude Law and Johnny Depp to shoot green-screened magic at each other.

As I always say: Don't try to make sense of the Potterverse.

The Harry Potter novels are a wish fulfillment fantasy for children: A boy who hates his horrible family, his life, school and the world suddenly discover that he is a heir of a magical lineage, he has tons of gold, magical powers, he is a popular hero and he is going to go to an amazing magical school with great friends.

The headmaster and most of the teaching staff (safe the "evil" one) shamelessly favor him, he gets to save the day and receive accolades by breaking every school rule.

Every book he starts being hated for something not his fault, and he gets not just to prove his innocence, but to show everybody how great he is and he receives accolades and praise.

Adults are useless, small-minded chauvinists in order to make Harry and friends look good and so the kids have to be the heroes of the day. And Muggles are almost dumb animals, to make Wizards look good by comparison.

As a matter of fact, your wisdom and virtue are dependent on how close you are to Harry Potter: Harry Potter > Harry's closest friends > Harry's other friends > Nice teachers > Other pupils > Other Wizards and Witches > Magical villains > Muggles > The worst villains.

Hell, if you look at the Potterverse closely... what's so great about being an adult Wizard or Witch? At the end of the day, they are just people who use a wand instead of a dishwasher and microwave oven... most adults have dull, boring jobs, live in small, boring, closed communities, many are poor, and when something exciting happens to them, it most often means some disaster or crime is happening... The only real good thing in the Potterverse is that kids get to do magic tricks like changing each other boogers into bats...

The entire universe is built to serve that wish fulfillment story for kids, so it crumbles if you use even a minimal amount of critical thinking... you are not supposed to think about it.

NichG
2019-04-24, 07:37 PM
its true his training regime is a joke, but the first time he punts a runaway tank into orbit the government if not the world would notice. They aren't dumb enough to see that and think its just a coincidence (like they do in his own world) and that assumes a best case scenario of the character keeping to his original roots and not trying to actually do anything with his power. A non joke character would probably want to do something with their godlike power which would cause the world to take note and then bends the setting around him.

sit ups might not be able to replicate his strength but you can be sure they would try and figure out his secret even within his own setting a few people do that.

A few generals stress out, a few scientists get to obsess over a phenomenon they won't really make progress on, and maybe some government gets a really good construction worker on their payroll, but so what? In the end, the actual pressures and stresses on GitS society don't really change just because the news runs a story about someone punching the moon.

Batou accidentally produced free willed AI through his interactions with the Tachikoma tanks, and all it merited was one episode of handwringing and then back to investigating medical conspiracies as usual.

awa
2019-04-24, 08:57 PM
I mean until he decides to intervene in a war. His existence basically makes japan immune to invasive so long as he’s happy with the government and them helpless if he ever decides that there to corrupt and might actually be super villains. Think how that would affect international relations, given his speed and power he might very well be able to stop a nuke that’s a big deal even if the government can’t, say convince him this rouge nation is a super villain that needs to be brought down.

He can also disrupt weather patterns with a punch so goodbye tsunamis or tidal wave if he feels like it as well as he’s an anti-asteroid defense.
His existence challenges everything they understand about physics and theirs the fact that the rule of law only has as much power over him as he feels like giving it. That might fly in one punch man’s world of constant threat and weak government but I get a mild police state vibe from the ghost in the shell universe.

Hes generally a good guy but hes also kinda dumb don't you think someone might try and manipulate him for their own ends? None of that matters in his own universe because its a comedy but if you stick him in a drama universe things spiral out of control rapidly because the settings follow different narrative rules.

edit
and even if he refuses to work with or against the government what if other governments are afraid he will? superpowers don't actually need to use their weapons to change behavior the threat of it can be enough. They might preemptively try and nuke japan to remove the threat or bend over backwards to appease them depending on the political climate.

edit x2
free willed AI while interesting is still hard science fiction saitama breaks physics hard if he were real it would fundamentally change how they view physics. Maybe sit-ups arnt the way to get their but the knowledge that a human can do that well governments would try and get in on it maybe steal some of his dna and try and clone him or study him. Or if he say stops a tsunami start worshiping him.

NichG
2019-04-24, 09:40 PM
I mean until he decides to intervene in a war. His existence basically makes japan immune to invasive so long as he’s happy with the government and them helpless if he ever decides that there to corrupt and might actually be super villains. Think how that would affect international relations, given his speed and power he might very well be able to stop a nuke that’s a big deal even if the government can’t, say convince him this rouge nation is a super villain that needs to be brought down.


He's not really all that relevant to war in the GitS world. In order for war to be politically meaningful, there have to be things which you can expect to obtain through it. 'I can blow up your battleship' isn't meaningful on its own unless those actions are tied to things that actually matter. In the GitS world, the things that actually matter are social structures, information, economic advantage, treaties, new technological innovations, political posts, etc. If e.g. Japan says 'you can't invade us with a standing army' then other polities in that setting say 'Okay fine, invading you isn't really useful to us anyhow, lets move on'. Even without Saitama, Japan isn't getting invaded in that setting, so saying 'okay now you're immune to invasion' is like saying to a restauranteur who is trying to obtain their second Michelin star 'hey, want to be immune to gunfire?'. It's basically not relevant.

If you're a nation negotiating with Japan in the GitS setting, what do you want? Reduction in tariffs or other trade deals, normalization of laws that protect the major interests within your border, information exchange treaties, etc. You might want Japan to import from you rather than a competitor. You might want them to pass legislation that bans ghost dubbing, because it would create a succession crisis or internal religious unrest due to the beliefs of your populace. You might want some criminal extradited, or some citizens returned. You might want open borders, or for Japan to increase security measures policing local radical groups that are spilling over into your own internal politics. In the GitS world, sending soldiers to occupy a foreign country is an inferior way to achieve these ends - a last resort, because even if the war goes perfectly you're stuck administering a foreign territory and populace, not to mention worldwide cooling relations as other countries wonder 'are we next?'.

So you don't send your battleships to fight Saitama. Instead, you just say: "We're going to cut off all our trade deals, send spies to steal all your technological innovations and start making cheap generic versions of them to flood the market with, and start social media campaigns to radicalize your populace. Furthermore, in every political arena you participate in, we're going to stonewall your proposals, and we're also going to suggest that by taking a Saitama-centric stance that even if you claim to be doing it defensively, you're basically hawking on the basis of possessing a WMD and that everyone else should join a coalition against you in order to get you to turn over the illicit materials. Or, you know, before we escalate to all of that you could just negotiate with us about this treaty - surely you must want something that we could add to make this more palatable."

Florian
2019-04-24, 11:48 PM
I mean until he decides to intervene in a war. His existence basically makes japan immune to invasive so long as he’s happy with the government and them helpless if he ever decides that there to corrupt and might actually be super villains. Think how that would affect international relations, given his speed and power he might very well be able to stop a nuke that’s a big deal even if the government can’t, say convince him this rouge nation is a super villain that needs to be brought down.

The cult of superheroes... But no, raw power of any kind is nothing in the modern world. Impressive, yes, frightening, certainly, but you underestimate what modern societies can bring to bear (no, I don't mean firepower) and how effective that is. Consider this: Having a nuclear arsenal and the size and equipment of a modern army or the raw amount of resources a nation has is next to irrelevant to what relevant rank that nation has, if we were to create a list of the most powerful ones. Same when we're talking about internal matters, it´s not necessarily the size and firepower of a police force or internal secret service that matters if wed rank nations on list based on internal stability. Maybe watch GitS:SAC2 again and take a close look at the refugee issue, this time looking beyond the obvious threat of an armed insurgency movement. (Tipp: Compare this to what actually happened in Europe the last 4 years, then consider what chain of events might have lead to a public vote trying to disown one of the largest housing owning companies.)

Mechalich
2019-04-25, 12:15 AM
The cult of superheroes... But no, raw power of any kind is nothing in the modern world. Impressive, yes, frightening, certainly, but you underestimate what modern societies can bring to bear (no, I don't mean firepower) and how effective that is. Consider this: Having a nuclear arsenal and the size and equipment of a modern army or the raw amount of resources a nation has is next to irrelevant to what relevant rank that nation has, if we were to create a list of the most powerful ones. Same when we're talking about internal matters, it´s not necessarily the size and firepower of a police force or internal secret service that matters if wed rank nations on list based on internal stability. Maybe watch GitS:SAC2 again and take a close look at the refugee issue, this time looking beyond the obvious threat of an armed insurgency movement. (Tipp: Compare this to what actually happened in Europe the last 4 years, then consider what chain of events might have lead to a public vote trying to disown one of the largest housing owning companies.)

Saitama is a superman-type character, he's powerful enough that he could punch the ground and break the planet in half. Dropping a character of that level of power into a setting turns that setting into whatever it was before plus Superman, making it now a different setting.

A much more complete and well-realized example of this is found in Watchman, where creation of Dr. Manhattan changes world history. The US wins the Vietnam war because of him, which prevents Watergate and everything followed from ever happening causing a massive cascade that changes the overall thematic focus of the world.

Stories told in one setting and those told in a setting where individuals of phenomenal cosmic power are wandering around are different, even if only in subtle ways.

Florian
2019-04-25, 12:44 AM
And then Adrian played him like a fiddle

Mechalich
2019-04-25, 01:52 AM
And then Adrian played him like a fiddle

Yes, and that's an example of how an extremely powerful character changes a setting. Manipulating a character of phenomenal power represents its own path to ones goals that may allow bypassing various conventional difficulties. There's nothing that says such a character gets to dictate the story, only that their very existence changes its framework. Take the Genie from Aladdin, a character of vast power, but whose resources can only be utilized by others, but the existence of the Genie absolutely warps the dynamics of the region in a way that wouldn't have happened if he wasn't present.

Eldariel
2019-04-25, 02:22 AM
In the Illiad heroes like Achilles, Ajax and Diomedes throw rocks that "no normal man could even lift" at each other like it is nothing. Achilles sprints (and keeps running at top speed for a long time) wearing heavy bronze armor, and at a point he jumps into a river wearing said heavy armor in order to kill enemy soldiers, and later outruns the river god Scamander until Hephaestous comes to the rescue...

He may not be at Hercules level, but he is explicitly superhuman, in a "heroes were stronger, tougher and faster than any present day man..."

None of it is really special enough to be "supernatural". We have people in the modern world who can throw rocks no normal man could even lift for significant distances. Greek heroes may do it with more ease than strongman competitors, but it's certainly not out of the bounds of possibility. Same with sprinting in heavy armor - armor doesn't actually weigh you down as much as you'd think. They're designed for extended skirmishes, long marches and fighting. And running really fast...well, Greek gods are kinda restricted beings that don't move that unbelievably fast so while it's clearly a very impressive feat, Achilleus for all his exploits is more or less just "a peak human in every regard with a bit of extra on top of it". It wouldn't be implausible for someone to replicate some of his feats in reality and in a story, all of those existing in one character (or some characters) is just genetics and training beyond the point what we're able to do now (and the ability to bring more of his body's abilities out; there are plenty of stories of e.g. mothers who have barely trained lifting cars off their children, and we know the standard limit of the body is only about 1/3rd of its full strength since using more would easily lead to internal damage).

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-25, 04:38 AM
Saitama is not Superman.

Superman can fly around with no mask and then go back to living as Clark Kent, because few people believe an entity as awesome as Superman would ever be an average joe.

Saitama can punch the Ocean King in the face before a crowd and then go back to living as a total nobody, because few people believe an entity as lackluster as Saitama would ever be Superman.

When Saitama decided to go Pro, he went through Hero Association's standardized testing. He aced the physical tests... and then nearly flunked the written portion. His overall performance was so underwhelming that he got ranked as one of the lowest heros.

In a setting with giant monsters and other actual superheros to use as benchmarks, in a setting where they are able to recognize Genos and Tatsumaki as S-class heroes... Saitama's real strength does not shine through when actually applying for work.

Furthermore, before going Pro, he was a hobbyist. He hadn't even considered applying for military, Hero Association or the like. The idea that Saitama would consistently use his powers to solve military conflicts or even natural disasters is incoherent.

Saitama being found out by him punching out a tornado is a cute thought, but from what we've seen of him in his own series, only few unlikely survivors who witness his powers firsthand actually find his feats plausible. In GitS, why would anyone take such a dubious eyewitness report at face value, when no-one else has ever demonstrated such powers and it defies all explanationa and all laws of physics?

NichG
2019-04-25, 04:42 AM
Is there any serious reason why Ozymandias would have been unable to come up with a basically equivalent plan without Dr. Manhattan? The comic summaries of Watchmen are a bit disjointed, but it looks like he basically tries to manufacture an alien threat without him first, that gets screwed up somehow, he has the plan involving him which works kinda except Rorshach, and then 7 years later he nukes New York (again? really?). So its not like he's lacking for the ability to manufacture shocking moments of terror for humanity to unite around... Outside of Watchmen, the second season of Code Geass is basically an identical scheme to create a common enemy, but no walking nuclear weapons needed.

The plans are fairly uniformly bad ideas in both settings, but they live or die based on human psychology, not on the availability of the supernatural. Ozymandias using Dr. Manhattan seems more like an act of convenience than anything else.

Knaight
2019-04-25, 04:47 AM
There's not really any reason Ozymandias couldn't have rigged something up without Dr. Manhattan. One of his major goals was to get Dr. Manhattan out of the picture though, which involved a bit more involvement.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-25, 06:49 AM
None of it is really special enough to be "supernatural". We have people in the modern world who can throw rocks no normal man could even lift for significant distances. Greek heroes may do it with more ease than strongman competitors, but it's certainly not out of the bounds of possibility. Same with sprinting in heavy armor - armor doesn't actually weigh you down as much as you'd think. They're designed for extended skirmishes, long marches and fighting. And running really fast...well, Greek gods are kinda restricted beings that don't move that unbelievably fast so while it's clearly a very impressive feat, Achilleus for all his exploits is more or less just "a peak human in every regard with a bit of extra on top of it". It wouldn't be implausible for someone to replicate some of his feats in reality and in a story, all of those existing in one character (or some characters) is just genetics and training beyond the point what we're able to do now (and the ability to bring more of his body's abilities out; there are plenty of stories of e.g. mothers who have barely trained lifting cars off their children, and we know the standard limit of the body is only about 1/3rd of its full strength since using more would easily lead to internal damage).

Part of the problem with these discussions is that it's hard to come up with a word for people who aren't supernatural, who don't have supernatural abilities, that doesn't just lead to another argument.

Use "mundane", and someone will say "there's nothing mundane about Conan!" Use "normal", and people will conflate or confuse that for "average" or "everyday". Etc.

Look at the exchange here... in response to someone describing mythical characters as able to "throw rocks that "no normal man could even lift" at each other like it is nothing", you say "We have people in the modern world who can throw rocks no normal man could even lift for significant distances."

No, actually, we don't -- those people in the modern world are, in the context of this discussion, normal people. In the context of this discussion, we're not talking about feats that push the world record for sprinting or endurance or lifting weights by fractional percentage points, we're talking about feats that blow what's humanly possible (in the real world or in a fictional world like it) out of the water.

Not saying you're saying this, but I've actually seen someone in one of these threads describe Usain Bolt as "superhuman" because he's a fraction of a second faster than the fastest human being a decade before, and therefore "exceeded human maximums". They actually said it because they were trying to make fun of the idea of human maximums and claim that what's really humanly possible is a total unknown, rather than being a matter of edge cases and creeping fractional changes.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-25, 06:50 AM
There's not really any reason Ozymandias couldn't have rigged something up without Dr. Manhattan. One of his major goals was to get Dr. Manhattan out of the picture though, which involved a bit more involvement.

On the other hand, wouldn't that seem to indicate that Dr Manhattan's very presence made it necessary for Ozymandias to shape his plan around that single individual?

NichG
2019-04-25, 07:03 AM
On the other hand, wouldn't that seem to indicate that Dr Manhattan's very presence made it necessary for Ozymandias to shape his plan around that single individual?

Turned out to be pretty unwise though. Leaving him to build a crystal city on Mars would likely have improved his chances of not being caught in classic villain monologue in the end.

That's the problem with getting distracted by the random guy with godlike personal power.

awa
2019-04-25, 07:20 AM
Saitama is not Superman.

Superman can fly around with no mask and then go back to living as Clark Kent, because few people believe an entity as awesome as Superman would ever be an average joe.

Saitama can punch the Ocean King in the face before a crowd and then go back to living as a total nobody, because few people believe an entity as lackluster as Saitama would ever be Superman.

When Saitama decided to go Pro, he went through Hero Association's standardized testing. He aced the physical tests... and then nearly flunked the written portion. His overall performance was so underwhelming that he got ranked as one of the lowest heros.

In a setting with giant monsters and other actual superheros to use as benchmarks, in a setting where they are able to recognize Genos and Tatsumaki as S-class heroes... Saitama's real strength does not shine through when actually applying for work.

Furthermore, before going Pro, he was a hobbyist. He hadn't even considered applying for military, Hero Association or the like. The idea that Saitama would consistently use his powers to solve military conflicts or even natural disasters is incoherent.

Saitama being found out by him punching out a tornado is a cute thought, but from what we've seen of him in his own series, only few unlikely survivors who witness his powers firsthand actually find his feats plausible. In GitS, why would anyone take such a dubious eyewitness report at face value, when no-one else has ever demonstrated such powers and it defies all explanationa and all laws of physics?


That’s my point in his world no one notices because they are deeply dumb/ it’s a comedy, in the ghost in the shell world they would see it, they would recorded it, people would investigate. You think no one would take videos of the tsunami destroying punch? You think no scientists recording weather patterns wouldn't note the change in weather patterns.
Yes its completely unbelievable but they would still investigate to see what had actually destroyed their runaway tank what had actually destroyed that cyborg criminal and they are good at investigating (that’s kind of the whole point) they would find out

Wars are a thing that happens in ghost in the shell universe they have happened in the recent past and they can happen in the future. Why build advance tanks otherwise. the mere existence of satama would affect that because of his overwhelming power.

This of course assumes that the world has no effect on him that the constant corruption, or god forbid get some cyber ware himself and then is hacked never disgusts him.


also Ozymandias is not exactly normal himself you know. I mean he may not be as obviously superhuman but he does literally catch a bullet.

Beleriphon
2019-04-25, 11:37 AM
As I always say: Don't try to make sense of the Potterverse.

The Harry Potter novels are a wish fulfillment fantasy for children: A boy who hates his horrible family, his life, school and the world suddenly discover that he is a heir of a magical lineage, he has tons of gold, magical powers, he is a popular hero and he is going to go to an amazing magical school with great friends.

The headmaster and most of the teaching staff (safe the "evil" one) shamelessly favor him, he gets to save the day and receive accolades by breaking every school rule.

Every book he starts being hated for something not his fault, and he gets not just to prove his innocence, but to show everybody how great he is and he receives accolades and praise.

Adults are useless, small-minded chauvinists in order to make Harry and friends look good and so the kids have to be the heroes of the day. And Muggles are almost dumb animals, to make Wizards look good by comparison.

As a matter of fact, your wisdom and virtue are dependent on how close you are to Harry Potter: Harry Potter > Harry's closest friends > Harry's other friends > Nice teachers > Other pupils > Other Wizards and Witches > Magical villains > Muggles > The worst villains.

Hell, if you look at the Potterverse closely... what's so great about being an adult Wizard or Witch? At the end of the day, they are just people who use a wand instead of a dishwasher and microwave oven... most adults have dull, boring jobs, live in small, boring, closed communities, many are poor, and when something exciting happens to them, it most often means some disaster or crime is happening... The only real good thing in the Potterverse is that kids get to do magic tricks like changing each other boogers into bats...

The entire universe is built to serve that wish fulfillment story for kids, so it crumbles if you use even a minimal amount of critical thinking... you are not supposed to think about it.


I agree on the wish fulfillment bit, the first five novels especially. Incredible Beasts is moving beyond the wish fulfillment into some substantial attempts at world building, which is fine if the objective it to demonstrate that wizards are just as dumb as everybody else. I kind of suspect otherwise, but I'm not the author and I also didn't start reading Potter as a child but rather a cynical anthropology major.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-25, 11:46 AM
I agree on the wish fulfillment bit, the first five novels especially. Incredible Beasts is moving beyond the wish fulfillment into some substantial attempts at world building, which is fine if the objective it to demonstrate that wizards are just as dumb as everybody else. I kind of suspect otherwise, but I'm not the author and I also didn't start reading Potter as a child but rather a cynical anthropology major.

Worldbuilding and shown facts having further consequences is not Rowling's strength as an author... hers is a very fairy-tale approach, with Just So Story explanations for everything. It was actually a refreshing surprise to see the Time Turners show up as "controlled magic" in the ministry as some sort of explanation as to why the young protagonists didn't keep going back to that well, but that was an exception.

Now, as for Fantastic Beasts And Its Sequel... yech. It seems Rowling may be mailing it in to milk the IP.

To anyone reading, DO NOT take worldbuilding lessons from Rowling beyond basic atmospherics.

Beleriphon
2019-04-25, 12:26 PM
Not saying you're saying this, but I've actually seen someone in one of these threads describe Usain Bolt as "superhuman" because he's a fraction of a second faster than the fastest human being a decade before, and therefore "exceeded human maximums". They actually said it because they were trying to make fun of the idea of human maximums and claim that what's really humanly possible is a total unknown, rather than being a matter of edge cases and creeping fractional changes.

The feat that I think most clearly shows superhuman while seeming plausible is the scene at the start of Captain American: The Winter Soldier where Sam Wilson is doing laps around the reflecting pool by the Lincoln Monument, and Cap keeps lapping him at a full sprint. No human can plausibly keep up a full sprint for much longer than 100 meters, never mind going five or six miles all out. Our bodies simply build up to much lactic acid in the muscles and our legs literally can't move. But Captain America doesn't have this problem, and I'm fairly certain nobody would try to claim he's powered by supernatural functions in the same way say Doctor Strange is or Loki are.

In the same vein, Usain Bolt is an example of an exceptionally well trained and gifted athlete, and a lot what he does has to do with gear and training. Stick him in a parka and blue jeans form a standing start instead of on starting blocks and I'm sure he would be breaking any world records.

For mythic Greek heroes in the vein of Achilles or Heracles I'm inclined to give them a supernatural bent, but their feats are accomplished by mundane, but fantastic means. For example Heracles clearing the Augean stables wasn't magic in that Heracles cast a spell. He just use his immense physical strength to dig giant ditches and divert a river. Much the same Achilles was invulnerable, but his fighting prowess was a result of him being a total badass, not because he couldn't be hurt.

For a look at fantastic feats completed by heroes that aren't supernatural in Greek myth the Argonauts are a good place to start.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-25, 12:49 PM
The feat that I think most clearly shows superhuman while seeming plausible is the scene at the start of Captain American: The Winter Soldier where Sam Wilson is doing laps around the reflecting pool by the Lincoln Monument, and Cap keeps lapping him at a full sprint. No human can plausibly keep up a full sprint for much longer than 100 meters, never mind going five or six miles all out. Our bodies simply build up to much lactic acid in the muscles and our legs literally can't move. But Captain America doesn't have this problem, and I'm fairly certain nobody would try to claim he's powered by supernatural functions in the same way say Doctor Strange is or Loki are.

In the same vein, Usain Bolt is an example of an exceptionally well trained and gifted athlete, and a lot what he does has to do with gear and training. Stick him in a parka and blue jeans form a standing start instead of on starting blocks and I'm sure he would be breaking any world records.

For mythic Greek heroes in the vein of Achilles or Heracles I'm inclined to give them a supernatural bent, but their feats are accomplished by mundane, but fantastic means. For example Heracles clearing the Augean stables wasn't magic in that Heracles cast a spell. He just use his immense physical strength to dig giant ditches and divert a river. Much the same Achilles was invulnerable, but his fighting prowess was a result of him being a total badass, not because he couldn't be hurt.

For a look at fantastic feats completed by heroes that aren't supernatural in Greek myth the Argonauts are a good place to start.


Captain America is clearly superhuman, in the context of our hypothetical fantasy RPG he's into the realm of fantastic capability (assuming a setting where humans are like the humans of the real world, etc, etc, all the usual caveats and context apply, for anyone reading and about to stick a but in).

To me, there's little distinction in the context of this discussion between "magic", "supernatural", or "fantastic" -- it's all about some sort of capability that grossly exceeds or circumvents normal human limits. Not slightly, but grossly. (And Cap do sprint laps around the reflecting pool grossly exceeds normal human limits.)

Heracles' immense physical strength IS magic in the context of this discussion, as surely as a Fireball or Wish spell. He diverted an entire river with brute strength and a shovel.

Depending on how it's interpreted from the text, Achilles' fighting prowess can be seen as supernatural, it's right on the border. Perhaps entirely separate from his invulnerability, or perhaps because when you have nothing to fear you can fight in total attack mode.

As for the Argonauts, I'd need to look at the deeds one by one, but, in the context of this thread, if a dead is fantastic, then it is supernatural -- as in "exceeding the natural", where "natural" is the far limit of human capability. Because one of the key elements of nailing down where the caster-martial disconnect happens in a system and/or setting is in establishing what's within human capability, and what clearly is not.

awa
2019-04-25, 12:55 PM
Beleriphon
supernatural is not the deciding factor in being a muggle the hulk is not magic but hes also not a muggle.

That said going back to captain America he fits into the conan/ tarzan threshold of extraordinary normal guy hes superhuman but in a way that does not really break any other rules.

I think people underestimate when talking about exceptional "normal guys" is how physics interact with them. Take the hulk for instance his power is just supposed to be strength but many of his actions creating earth quakes with a stomp and shock-waves with a clap just dont work in real life no matter the strength but they are simply accepted as part the the genre.

Swinging a sword so hard that you cut a building in half from across the street is fairly common in anime but would rarely fly in a western comic no matter how good a swords men/ strong they are.

mythology has some particularly nonsensical use for superstrength and depending on what you are trying to run and how you picture it depends on when you see these stop being cool and start being stupid.

Clistenes
2019-04-25, 01:24 PM
For mythic Greek heroes in the vein of Achilles or Heracles I'm inclined to give them a supernatural bent, but their feats are accomplished by mundane, but fantastic means. For example Heracles clearing the Augean stables wasn't magic in that Heracles cast a spell. He just use his immense physical strength to dig giant ditches and divert a river. Much the same Achilles was invulnerable, but his fighting prowess was a result of him being a total badass, not because he couldn't be hurt.

Hercules takes that to a new level... he once resurrected a woman by punching death so hard it went away... (https://www.ancient.eu/article/731/hercules-and-alcestis-personal-excellence--social-/)

Beleriphon
2019-04-25, 02:02 PM
Is there any serious reason why Ozymandias would have been unable to come up with a basically equivalent plan without Dr. Manhattan? The comic summaries of Watchmen are a bit disjointed, but it looks like he basically tries to manufacture an alien threat without him first, that gets screwed up somehow, he has the plan involving him which works kinda except Rorshach, and then 7 years later he nukes New York (again? really?). So its not like he's lacking for the ability to manufacture shocking moments of terror for humanity to unite around... Outside of Watchmen, the second season of Code Geass is basically an identical scheme to create a common enemy, but no walking nuclear weapons needed.

The plans are fairly uniformly bad ideas in both settings, but they live or die based on human psychology, not on the availability of the supernatural. Ozymandias using Dr. Manhattan seems more like an act of convenience than anything else.

Adrian doesn't need his scheme to work if Dr Manhattan doesn't exist, because the world isn't on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. The USSR is more or less collapsing by the mid-80s, Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power rather than Brezhnev remaining in power. The US wins the Vietnam War rather than losing. The USSR isn't stacking its nuclear arsenal in a bid to defeat the USA who have Dr Manhattan as a weapon. The whole point of Adrian's scheme is that it has to happen because Dr Manhattan exists and has changed the world so fundamentally from the one we know.

NichG
2019-04-25, 08:30 PM
Adrian doesn't need his scheme to work if Dr Manhattan doesn't exist, because the world isn't on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. The USSR is more or less collapsing by the mid-80s, Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power rather than Brezhnev remaining in power. The US wins the Vietnam War rather than losing. The USSR isn't stacking its nuclear arsenal in a bid to defeat the USA who have Dr Manhattan as a weapon. The whole point of Adrian's scheme is that it has to happen because Dr Manhattan exists and has changed the world so fundamentally from the one we know.

Getting a bit close to real world politics, but we've been on the brink of nuclear apocalypse plenty of times without Dr. Manhattan around, and indeed countries have rushed to gain nuclear capabilities or stockpiled nuclear weapons in bids to win an eventual nuclear confrontation. This isn't such a new story, nor does it require such characters to exist. There are myriad historical 'for want of a nail' interventions that would feasibly put us much closer to, or even well past WW3 right now. Adrian's broad concern wouldn't be unfounded in our history, but his solutions would suck in both the fictional world and the real world.

Watchmen is if anything a story about classical strengths in the end being flaws.

TeChameleon
2019-04-25, 08:40 PM
Surprised that no one's brought up the trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MugglesDoItBetter) yet- it's at least tangentially related.

In most narratives, the watchword for the common folk is 'strength in numbers'. Or, to put it another way, 'quantity has a quality all its own'. Generally speaking, there are gonna be a whole bloody lot more of the common folk than the super-types (whether 'super-human', super-natural' or whatever), and humans, no matter how ordinary, are terrifyingly good at figuring out how to kill things.

Even Saitama, for all his game-breaking power, isn't outside the realm of possibility for mundanes to put down; at least, not entirely. It's implied pretty strongly that he still needs to breathe (cf. when he gets blasted to the moon) and he still sleeps, whether he has any actual need to do so or not. Put some decent surveillance on him (as far as I can tell, his travel speeds are still observable), sneak in and remove his CO2 detectors, turn the gas on, and leave. Even if he's totally immune to poison (which is certainly possible, given that this is Saitama), not having any breatheable air in his apartment while he's asleep is gonna do him in.

Muggles also talk to one another- in a modern setting, the level of problem-solving available on any subject that you can get enough people interested is ludicrous. Almost nothing that you can get enough (bored) people looking at will remain any kind of a secret, at least not for very long.

So... what can muggles do? Piss them off enough, or get them curious enough, and there's almost nothing they can't kill, almost no secret they can't discover.

... all of this with the caveat that yeah, there are power levels beyond what mundanes can have any perceptible effect on.

awa
2019-04-25, 08:45 PM
Thats not numbers killing him that is
1) knowing his powers and weaknesses
2) striking first
3) not guaranteed to work
if he knows your coming no number of muggles in the world can even slow him down

TeChameleon
2019-04-25, 09:04 PM
Thats not numbers killing him that is
1) knowing his powers and weaknesses
2) striking first
3) not guaranteed to work
if he knows your coming no number of muggles in the world can even slow him down

Fair enough, but not really my point- it was just an illustration of power-in-numbers as applied to creativity and surveillance, not direct striking power.

Mechalich
2019-04-25, 09:30 PM
Surprised that no one's brought up the trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MugglesDoItBetter) yet- it's at least tangentially related.

In most narratives, the watchword for the common folk is 'strength in numbers'. Or, to put it another way, 'quantity has a quality all its own'. Generally speaking, there are gonna be a whole bloody lot more of the common folk than the super-types (whether 'super-human', super-natural' or whatever), and humans, no matter how ordinary, are terrifyingly good at figuring out how to kill things.

Even Saitama, for all his game-breaking power, isn't outside the realm of possibility for mundanes to put down; at least, not entirely. It's implied pretty strongly that he still needs to breathe (cf. when he gets blasted to the moon) and he still sleeps, whether he has any actual need to do so or not. Put some decent surveillance on him (as far as I can tell, his travel speeds are still observable), sneak in and remove his CO2 detectors, turn the gas on, and leave. Even if he's totally immune to poison (which is certainly possible, given that this is Saitama), not having any breatheable air in his apartment while he's asleep is gonna do him in.

Muggles also talk to one another- in a modern setting, the level of problem-solving available on any subject that you can get enough people interested is ludicrous. Almost nothing that you can get enough (bored) people looking at will remain any kind of a secret, at least not for very long.

So... what can muggles do? Piss them off enough, or get them curious enough, and there's almost nothing they can't kill, almost no secret they can't discover.

... all of this with the caveat that yeah, there are power levels beyond what mundanes can have any perceptible effect on.

Strength in numbers is certainly a thing, but there are limits to how far that goes. In the most basic sense, if we're all fighting with swords, only so many guys can surround a person at once, if your hypothetical superswordsman can't be harmed by that many and never gets tired (or regens fast enough) then no number of people makes a difference. There's a seen in Sword Art Online where this point is made explicitly by having the stupidly over-leveled protagonist Kirito stand there and let some goons hit him for a while but he fails to take any damage because his auto-recovery is higher than their combined DPS output.

Functionally, there's a point at which extreme personal power becomes political power. To quote Petey from Schlock Mercenary: "I am a foreign power." Any being powerful enough to take on say 100000 - 1000000+ of their contemporaries just isn't playing on the individuals only stage anymore, they're a political entity in an individually shaped package. Exactly at what point this happens varies from system to system and setting to setting of course, but it is a thing and settings where such individuals exist are different from settings where they don't. And this is still different from settings where literal invincible gods like Superman (Saitama's a bad example because One Punch Man is a gag comedy, Superman works much better) walk among the masses and could, if they so choose, totally rewrite society wholly according to their own wishes - something Superman has done on numerous occasions in various alternate universes.

NichG
2019-04-25, 10:25 PM
At one point for a game I had to calculate the rate at which an individual godlike entity with supreme but local combat power could kill off people who were trying to avoid it. Lets say it uses 6 second rounds, can teleport with one action, and can kill everything within say a 30ft radius with another action. The Earth has about 25 million square miles of habitable land - that corresponds to about 800 billion instances of the entity's kill zone. There's about 5 million rounds in a year. Assuming people didn't move, and were uniformly distributed over the Earth's surface, the entity would require 320000 years to totally wipe the Earth's habitable regions of life. If instead the entity teleported to people individually and killed them, one person every 12 seconds, then it would take 700 years for it to kill every human alive today - in which time, trillions more humans would be produced.

It cannot be killed by any number of humans, but neither could it out-damage humanity's collective regeneration rate.

In essence, a fight between it and the collective resources of humanity is meaningless - neither side can possibly achieve their goals if they decide to have the goal 'kill the other via brute force'. Could that entity wipe out humanity by being smarter about it? Possibly so - but then, it has more to do with the attribute 'being smart' than the attribute 'being an absolute combat god'.

TeChameleon
2019-04-25, 11:21 PM
Strength in numbers is certainly a thing, but there are limits to how far that goes. *snip*

Which was addressed by my statement that there were power levels beyond what mundanes can have any perceptible effect on. That being said, 'strength in numbers' can be remarkably strong when those numbers start going into the billions.

Also, when raw power starts translating into political/social power by simple virtue of its existence, things start getting very interesting, since, unless a being's desires are simplistic to the point of its sapience being questionable, straight force will not be able to achieve those desires. Er, not sure how well I phrased that... 'can't get everything you want with a fist unless you're rock-stupid'..? Eh, whatever. Point being, once we've got the godlike monsters out of the arena of pure combat, we're back into 'what muggles can do'. For example, Goku might be able to bitchslap worlds out of existence, but he likes to eat, and somebody's gotta grow, prepare, and cook all that food, something he cannot do by himself, no matter how much he flexes, glows, grunts and screams at the landscape. And with that need for other people comes a measure of control over the godlike combat monsters.

TL:DR? Nobody can fight all the time, no matter how godlike they are, and when they're not fighting, there's stuff they're gonna want that they need other people to provide. Once that happens, said 'other people' are going to have a certain amount of say in what the super-fighters do or do not do.

awa
2019-04-25, 11:45 PM
but that particular entity is being wildly inefficient, you don't need to be clever just dont go out of your way to be stupid. Most of the time humans live in cities with a lot of people very close together so no need to kill them 1 at a time. If it teleports into a foot ball stadium and activates its power its just killed dozens of people in one shot and likely killed hundreds more through panic. Teleport into a plane and do that you have killed every one on the plane and anyone the plane lands on. Jump into government buildings and wipe out the leadership panic spreads. It doesnt even need to do these things on purpose random luck will get most of these things eventually. Bare minimum force multipliers like starting fires can devastate cities, farms, forests, and oil fields if their is an entity ready to interfere with emergency work. Tons of dead bodies also spread disease and with the devastation to governments there will be no effective system for dealing with these.

Human society collapses rapidly, millions starve as industry collapses and war start over limited resources and just the fractious nature of humans. Humans need a lot of things to survive and their are a lot of problems that will rapidly erupt if we are forced to abandon the cities and hide in the technically habitable wilderness.

I mean its unlikely such a creature would manage to exterminate all of the humans but if a few terrified primitives hiding in a jungle, disease infested scrabbling for bare minimum survival is all that's left its clear who won the conflict.

TeChameleon
yheah but do what i say or i will hurt you and your family and if you still wont i will find someone who will is a very compelling argument, its worked for tyrants through out history and those were mere men you could in theory fight.

evil goku wants a five star dinner he can rob a bank and buy it, or he can simply threaten to hurt the cook if he does not comply. (hes also a bad example cause he is both a farmer a hunter and a fishermen able to prepare his own food)

NichG
2019-04-26, 12:20 AM
but that particular entity is being wildly inefficient, you don't need to be clever just dont go out of your way to be stupid. Most of the time humans live in cities with a lot of people very close together so no need to kill them 1 at a time. If it teleports into a foot ball stadium and activates its power its just killed dozens of people in one shot and likely killed hundreds more through panic. Teleport into a plane and do that you have killed every one on the plane and anyone the plane lands on. Jump into government buildings and wipe out the leadership panic spreads. It doesnt even need to do these things on purpose random luck will get most of these things eventually.

The point about running the numbers is exactly that 'random luck will get most of these things eventually' is false. That's a perceptual bias - because we as humans have a very clear perception of particular things that are important to our lives, we assume by default that those things will feature almost immediately in any other event of significance that occurs. When someone talks about missile threats or terrorism, its natural that we first imagine the things that would most strongly influence us. But in reality, those points make up an extremely small portion of the whole of human civilization. If there are, for example, 100 world leaders whose deaths alone would cause a significant disaster, the entity will on average take about ten years of killing someone every 12 seconds before it ends up finding even one.

In order to break-even with humanity's growth rate, the entity would need to basically sustain access to regions of population density of 1 person per ~100ft^2. Tokyo, for example, is 6000 people per km^2 - that's about 0.1 people per 100ft^2. The highest population density city in the world is Manilla, at about 41000 people per km^2 - which is still below break-even. Of course you think of football stadiums and planes and so on, but those are a vanishingly small portion of human timelines - they're salient moments of a human's life where they experience a high density, but they're not representative of how people are actually distributed.

You mention that the extensive deaths would create a load on the system that humanity can't bear, but humanity's death rate is 55 million people a year - more than this entity would be killing by a factor of 20.

The point of this example is to show how some automatic assumptions we hold about the importance of things are way out of whack. The discussion in this thread over the last page or so has been about how the mere existence of superman would totally warp the world around him. But this example shows that, no, the mere existence of supreme force isn't enough for it to have an effect. It's the willful direction of force - acting smart - which determines the impact, much more so than the existence of the potential for force itself.

And that's why arguments like 'well, Saitama could take over the world' or 'well, Superman could take over the world' aren't really a discussion about their power sets - it's a discussion about their psychology, as well as their ability to comprehend the structures of the world in a sufficient way as to sustain control. Those attributes are being taken as given in order to lionize the importance of the powers, but those attributes are actually quite significant in distinguishing between muggles which have a large impact on human civilization and those who don't - they're not something to be taken for granted. And in most cases, those power sets are simply a convenience to make stories fit within the kinds of time-scales associated with most storytelling. Superman, with the knowledge and comprehension and desire to use his powers to effectively conquer the world, could still conquer the world without his powers - it would just take decades rather than months. And Lex Luthor as his primary antagonist demonstrates that exactly.

Florian
2019-04-26, 12:31 AM
Most of the time humans live in cities with a lot of people very close together so no need to kill them 1 at a time.

Not true. Smaller nations have less need to concentrate the infrastructure, so the ratio of city dweller to country dweller is different, at times with a 10:1 ratio in favor of the country dwellers.

Consider this: Germany is the second most densely populated country, but none of the major cities, not even the capital city, manages to sport a population that comes close to London or Paris (not even together), let's not start comparing them to U.S. cities. It´s similar in Austria, Switzerland, Poland and so on. The difference in infrastructure also means completely decentralized industrial centers, power and water supplies and so on. Same reason that nuclear weapons are seen as more or less threatening by different nations.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-26, 12:48 AM
And that's why I repeatedly make the point that you can't just ignore Saitama's comedic qualities if you put him in another setting.

If someone takes a picture of him punching a tsunami? It's infinitely more plausible in a setting like GitS that such a picture is faked, compared to there being a random guy with indefinite strength.

Someone notices an anomaly in the weather patterns? Why would they jump to this non-descript guy being the explanation? Saitama doesn't consistently go around changing the weather and there is no consistency between his feats when he does so!

Someone directly witnessing him? It's more plausible for them to question their senses than accept what's happening at face value. If that's dumb, then I have news for you: being dumb in this particular way is normal for humans. We are fairly good at stubbornly holding to our worldviews even in face of contradicting evidence.

Someone notices he one-punches a cyborg? They aren't going to extrapolate world-threatening force from that, because it is impossible to do that within constraints of realistic physics. It is a MASSIVE leap of logic from "this guy beat a cyborg" to even "this guy could survive an artillery shell to the face". We already know this from his own story. He was put through standardized testing. It came out as a false negative, because Saitama doesn't consistently demonstrate his upper level of strenght, he does not and cannot explain his strength in any plausible way and he utterly lacks most other qualities you would expect from a true Superman. When he is not one-punching monsters, he's the guy who worries about Saturday evening sales, overwaters his cactus, fails at videogames and cannot catch a single mosquito. It didn't even occur to him to compete in a martial arts tournament before someone else specifically pushed him to doing it.

Rater202
2019-04-26, 01:02 AM
saitama didn't set a false negative.

It's noted during the physical testing that he set records(implicitly by a wide margin) in every category.

His final score was low becuase he completly and utterly flunked the written test.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-26, 01:18 AM
Depends on what kind of supernatural creature your talking about.

something like, zombies, orcs and goblins? they'd be extinct to normal humans with normal intelligence. so would most vampires, werewolves might last longer but they'd die sooner or later. anything with regeneration but with weakness to fire, dead, anything with known weaknesses or lack of proper use of weaponry and organization are dead. fae weak to iron? dead. if there is a known easily used nonmagic method to kill them, humans will use it and things will die until they are gone.

it gets harder in the case of things like giants or dragons. thing is, we're kind of like mice to these things, and guess what mice are still around, but if if we catch a mice they're dead, or in some cases a pet. if they existed, we'd be rats living in the walls of their homes, they wouldn't be able to kill us all because they'd have other things to do, but we wouldn't be able to kill them directly, because since when has a mouse ever killed a human directly? the best individual communities would hope for is not bothering them too much so they don't call their human exterminators to use some method of killing us or hiding so that they don't swoop down and grab us for a snack, if we get tech advanced enough, possibly engineering a giant/dragon disease to infect them with and watch them die in droves while hoping they don't have giant doctors.

another case is low level supermen, as in worlds where their powers don't destroy cities. often these guys are highly variable in what they can do, their individual magic and abilities so varied and unique that the general strategy is to basically kill them with greater numbers or send so many people at them that one of them figures out the tactic need to kill them and executes it from sheer inevitability ala monkeys on typewriters. this applies to low level wizardry as well.

mid level supermen (people who can destroy cities) are basically walking nukes. for these, the strategy of open combat is no longer viable, as they can hold any city they are in hostage and thus kill millions of people if they are aware and given time to respond, thus assassination is the tactic you must use, and kill them before they can do a single thing. hope that poison or slitting their throat in their sleep works! or your screwed.

planet level supermen (people who can destroy planets) are basically mid level supermen but worse. with these guys you have to make sure you don't cause any trouble while on the same planet as them before killing them, or they can respond faster than you to anything, they can sense disturbances across the globe, you better hope you can catch this living god while they are asleep and kill them without using normal methods, because if you can't, you screwed in so many ways, and if you can't well, your just going to have live with the threat of destruction based one guys whim hanging over your head.

anything beyond that is basically academic. evil Goku can destroy your entire universe in an instant, so all normal humans are basically ants to easily squash. worse, they could decide to destroy the entire universe for reasons completely unrelated to you happening on the other side of the universe that you have no say in or knowledge of and could never really respond in time to prevent. Evil Goku levels of supernatural creature is something normal humans pray to appease once a day then move on with their day and if today is the end of the world, whelp you did your best, it was a good run for existence.

basically,normal humanity can probably kill a lot of things near its level of power, but past a certain threshold its more likely the best chance of survival is not killing it, but learning to live with it, or under it, because the alternative is too horrible.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-26, 03:13 AM
saitama didn't set a false negative.

It's noted during the physical testing that he set records(implicitly by a wide margin) in every category.

His final score was low becuase he completly and utterly flunked the written test.
1) I already pointed this out.

2) He did get a false negative when you consider that he is stronger than the other S-class heroes and the Hero Association correctly ranked Genos as an S-Rank. Pri-Pri-Prisoner makes an even better comparison point, because he essentially has the same powers as Saitama, just weaker.

If Hero Association can recognize Pri-Pri-Prisoner as S-level but cannot recognize Saitama as such, then they failed to extrapolate Saitama's true level of strength from his test results.

Florian
2019-04-26, 04:29 AM
@Lord Raziere:

You're falling not the trap that NichG pointed out: You look at it from a purely individual perspective.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-26, 05:04 AM
@Lord Raziere:

You're falling not the trap that NichG pointed out: You look at it from a purely individual perspective.

I'm not.

Dead races:
weaknesses are shared, armies develop strategies and refine them to perfection, while every monster are bound by certain kinds of stupidity and behaviors that make them predictable. their power as a species simply doesn't outweigh their weaknesses, especially when humans already drive real world animals to extinction that are stronger than them. I could have no trouble seeing entire societies of people getting so good at killing these things that hunting supernatural creatures would be for sport, in evolution, versatility beats niche every time.

Giant races:
if we're living in a world where these exist, evolution is vastly different enough that its more likely that the humans in this world are just incredibly small and the giants and dragons are just big to the humans there. and as a society, do mouses dominate over us? no. they hide, they cower, they run, maybe humans could organize, but so can the giants. and so in a world where those giants exist, we wouldn't have the evolutionary opportunity to become dominant in the first place. humans would be the mice of that world, they'd consider it completely normal to be living in the margins of the giants society that vastly out powers them.

lower superhumans:
you cannot generalize what their powers are, while it is an advantage to these X-men like people in that it allows for a wide variety of small tactics and unpredictability, warfare is not built on individual strength but on a greater strategy and united work, organization, communication. their varied powers makes it hard for them to come up with united long term widespread strategies, greater numbers and enough bullets will kill these people one way or another

Mid to high superhumans:
at this point, your not dealing with war anymore, your dealing with nuclear politics. sure the entire world can decide this or that, but this one guy is effectively a nation all on their own because they can single-handedly nuke this or that, open warfare against this person is stupid, it actively is endangering the lives of not just everyone you love, but every single being within a hundred mile radius at BEST. how many cities are willing to lose to kill this one person? and thats assuming there is ONLY ONE OF THESE. if there are more, that complicates the situation, makes it more dangerous and it doesn't really matter if there are 1 or 1000 of these, your treading lightly around them regardless.

Evil Goku:
At this point whether its the individual level or not is meaningless. you only need one of these to endanger literally everything that exists. if there is more, screw everything I guess. society is at the mercy of this individual not snapping their fingers to end everything. does it matter if there is two? No, your screwed regardless of which one snaps first.

there is not a bit of considering the individual level here at all. I'm being purely general. considering the individual involves making an individual with certain preferences, scenarios, story, in a certain situation with certain background with a certain goal and so on. I have not even begun considering the individual.

awa
2019-04-26, 07:07 AM
And that's why I repeatedly make the point that you can't just ignore Saitama's comedic qualities if you put him in another setting.

If someone takes a picture of him punching a tsunami? It's infinitely more plausible in a setting like GitS that such a picture is faked, compared to there being a random guy with indefinite strength.

Someone notices an anomaly in the weather patterns? Why would they jump to this non-descript guy being the explanation? Saitama doesn't consistently go around changing the weather and there is no consistency between his feats when he does so!

Someone directly witnessing him? It's more plausible for them to question their senses than accept what's happening at face value. If that's dumb, then I have news for you: being dumb in this particular way is normal for humans. We are fairly good at stubbornly holding to our worldviews even in face of contradicting evidence.

Someone notices he one-punches a cyborg? They aren't going to extrapolate world-threatening force from that, because it is impossible to do that within constraints of realistic physics. It is a MASSIVE leap of logic from "this guy beat a cyborg" to even "this guy could survive an artillery shell to the face". We already know this from his own story. He was put through standardized testing. It came out as a false negative, because Saitama doesn't consistently demonstrate his upper level of strenght, he does not and cannot explain his strength in any plausible way and he utterly lacks most other qualities you would expect from a true Superman. When he is not one-punching monsters, he's the guy who worries about Saturday evening sales, overwaters his cactus, fails at videogames and cannot catch a single mosquito. It didn't even occur to him to compete in a martial arts tournament before someone else specifically pushed him to doing it.

Maybe initially but when scientists try and find out what happened to that tsunami they are going to have data and it will eventually push them in the right direction particularly in a setting like ghost in the shell where they will likely have millions of cameras watching a tsunami even if they dont all see the punch directly.

yes if the monster is completely mindless just a simple animal randomly bouncing around it wont be very effective but if it has human level intellect even a dumb human its kill count will be utterly massive if it stick to large gatherings and planes. And people panic look what happens when a plane goes down what happens when every plane goes down? look what happens after a mass shooting what if a much larger kill happens every hour? Panic is a massive force multiplier, if it makes any effort say by starting fires in oil refiners he can probably destroy every refiner on earth in a week. Wipe out the oil supply you wipe out the food supply of industrial nation then their population collapses. Are industrial system requires a lot of thing to function this monster if it is sapient can figure it out to even if it takes it longer then it took me.

What happens if it makes the decision to kill any world leader/ government official it sees on tv just pops in and kills it them, this would cripple most governments who then are unable to provide the disaster relief services.

Terror, starvation, terrorism against target crippled nation states these would kill vast swaths of the population

Cluedrew
2019-04-26, 07:44 AM
To NichG: I love your last couple of posts in this thread. I have nothing else to say at this time.

Rater202
2019-04-26, 09:39 AM
1) I already pointed this out.

2) He did get a false negative when you consider that he is stronger than the other S-class heroes and the Hero Association correctly ranked Genos as an S-Rank. Pri-Pri-Prisoner makes an even better comparison point, because he essentially has the same powers as Saitama, just weaker.

If Hero Association can recognize Pri-Pri-Prisoner as S-level but cannot recognize Saitama as such, then they failed to extrapolate Saitama's true level of strength from his test results.

Rank in the Heroes' Association seems to based not just on actual power but intellect(otherwise why have a written test) ability to game the system, and how popular/marketable you are.

It doesn't matter how much stronger than everyone else Saitama is, he flunked the written test, shows no interest in playing politics, and he's just a bald guy in a goofy suit so in-universe he's not very marketable. Combine this with how nobody knows about all of the major threats he took out early on...

And even then, he's allowed to sit in on S-Rank Hero meetings specifically because he's only not S-Rank on technicallities.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-26, 10:07 AM
Saitama is allowed in those meetings because several S-class heroes become his best palls, not because his powers are accurately known to the association. Furthermore, we know for fact that several S-class heroes were given rank based on merit or perceived merit alone, without ever taking the test (King is the obvious example, because if they had adequately tested him, he wouldn't be a hero) . Which again highlights how, if they'd correctly extrapolated his strength, he wouldn't be a low rank.

All of those others things I already noted & discussed about.

Rater202
2019-04-26, 10:24 AM
Saitama is allowed in those meetings because several S-class heroes become his best palls, not because his powers are accurately known to the association. Furthermore, we know for fact that several S-class heroes were given rank based on merit or perceived merit alone, without ever taking the test (King is the obvious example, because if they had adequately tested him, he wouldn't be a hero) . Which again highlights how, if they'd correctly extrapolated his strength, he wouldn't be a low rank.

All of those others things I already noted & discussed about.

In the very first meeting Saitama sat in on, it was said by the old martial arts guy that he was there becuase he was only not an S-Rank on technicalities and that based on his skills he'd be there sooner rather than later.

TeChameleon
2019-04-26, 11:42 PM
In the very first meeting Saitama sat in on, it was said by the old martial arts guy that he was there becuase he was only not an S-Rank on technicalities and that based on his skills he'd be there sooner rather than later.

True, but Silver Fang's opinion was in the minority- he had gauged Saitama's strength as being S-rank-level even at that point, although he still underestimated him considerably. Saitama mostly just tagged along with Genos (seemingly out of nothing more than curiousity), and nobody seemed to care that much, at least not enough to fuss at Genos about it. I suspect it's (the?) The Doctor principle- act like you belong somewhere with sufficient confidence, and often enough people will go along with it without even necessarily worrying about it that much.

And even if the 'pop up and everything in the vicinity dies' monster under discussion was highly intelligent, the odds are that it would, at most, cause a significant restructuring of human society, but nothing beyond that- certainly not an extinction event. And frankly, if it got problematic enough, odds are good that someone would just up and nuke the thing, populated area or not.

Florian
2019-04-27, 03:56 AM
What happens if it makes the decision to kill any world leader/ government official it sees on tv just pops in and kills it them, this would cripple most governments who then are unable to provide the disaster relief services.

Nothing would happen. That is, unless we're talking about very old democracies with outdated internal structures or nations rules by a centralized regime/autocracy.

Normally, a government is split into three very distinct branches that are kept separate by design. The typical division is into three branches: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary (for example, the trias politica model). In case were talking about a federation, we also have a horizontal separation in power beyond that.

As democracies are geared towards an election circle of both, their legislature and executive branch, they put institutions in place, mostly in the form of administration and bureaucracies, that are empowered to keep a nation up and running on the last state of laws and (executive) orders they were given. That is doubly true for federations, where we have the same system on the federal as well as on the member state level going (in my country, the levels are (EU >) federation > member state > county > community).

"Outdated internal structures" can mean two things in this case. Either there is a massive overlap between the legislative and executive branch, for example, when ministers appointed by the president (or other leader of the executive) are part of the parliament/direct leaders of the administration, or when the whole thing is set up in such a way, that, as part of internal checks and balances, the administration cannot act without getting a budget from parliament and direct orders from the executive.

Broadly speaking (you know, forum rules), quite a lot of second wave democracies were implemented in such a way that they can seamless switch between three modes: Parliamentary, presidency and administrative run, with the local equivalent of the supreme court being in charge of the switching, as an independent unit.

Some might understand this as a kind of "deep state", but I'm pretty glad to live in a nation where the institutions have a high level of autonomy and the administration can always switch into high gear when needed. Something like providing disaster relief services just happens and gets funded on an automatism (we are rather embarrassed when politicians of any branch show up on the scene and try to claim the effort as their own), or having a detachment of our military stationed in the capital with standing orders to preserve the constitution, even against the will of the people, when someone tries to turn us into an autocracy.

Closing remark on this, before I get more coffee, take a shower and get ready to work, you'll notice that I'm talking indirectly about the difference between the situation of just having replaced the king/queen with a democratically elected replacement (parliaments are actually pre-democracy... tho), in contrast to more modern systems and institutions. One can more or less say that the world didn't really notice that Germany was without an actual government for nearly a year or that Italy regularly goes without a government half of each year, but we would notice a break down when France has no president.

Consider this in the wider topic of this discussion (RE: One Punch Man, Dr. Manhattan, any given president and so on) and you will find huge differences when it comes to accumulation and use of power, with systems set up to be more centralized not being prone to personal power in any case.

Bohandas
2019-04-27, 08:11 AM
yes if the monster is completely mindless just a simple animal randomly bouncing around it wont be very effective but if it has human level intellect even a dumb human its kill count will be utterly massive if it stick to large gatherings and planes. And people panic look what happens when a plane goes down what happens when every plane goes down? look what happens after a mass shooting what if a much larger kill happens every hour?

It loses its novelty and becomes the new normal?

Beleriphon
2019-04-27, 05:01 PM
Getting a bit close to real world politics, but we've been on the brink of nuclear apocalypse plenty of times without Dr. Manhattan around, and indeed countries have rushed to gain nuclear capabilities or stockpiled nuclear weapons in bids to win an eventual nuclear confrontation. This isn't such a new story, nor does it require such characters to exist. There are myriad historical 'for want of a nail' interventions that would feasibly put us much closer to, or even well past WW3 right now. Adrian's broad concern wouldn't be unfounded in our history, but his solutions would suck in both the fictional world and the real world.

Watchmen is if anything a story about classical strengths in the end being flaws.

Whilst admittedly true, the issue with The Watchmen is that the Black Frigate comic in a comic is supposed to be a parallel story to Adrian, and the people are ultimately dumb and that's why Dr Manhattan just leaves at the end of the story, but also agrees to go along with Adrian's scheme. Never mind the whole thing being a deconstruction of superheroes as a genre, despite Alan Moore being a bit... loopy... he's a great story teller.

On Muggles. Can we agree and just say they're normal people, and effectively inconsequential to the story being told? They're unnamed police officer #37 in a Batman story. Batman is probably a muggle compared to Superman, but at the same time Batman very much not a normal person in any story he appears in. The closest characters that actually matter to the stories that might qualify in DC are Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and Alfred.

If about what can muggles compared to the non-muggle? According to the lady that coined the phrase, nothing. A whole brigade of SAS apparently can't defeat a half dozen wizards in Harry Potter, despite the muggle Prime Minister being aware of the fact that Voldemort is actively committing a terrorist attack on British citizens, at a school no less. Even if you some how think wizards are separate political entity from the British polity I kind of feel like the PM of the UK might, just offer to help. Why don't they? Because muggles are pointless and laughable, that's why they have such a stupid name.

King of Nowhere
2019-04-27, 05:47 PM
Muggles can perfect skills above any magical user, because magic users still have to spend time training in their abilities and muggles don't.
This is not really supported in most systems; that's why i made the specialized expert class, linked in my signature; to create a mechanic to support this fact.
"But wizards can magik themselves to be better"
Ok, but if those same buff spells are used on the muggle, the muggle will get even better.

It's not a competition. An engineer and a chemist will not try to kill each other to prove their way is best. They will use the expertise of both to make a chemical factory that none of them could make alone.

In my campaign muggles and magicians work together for greatest effects. The best weapons are made by muggles with their superior expertise, and then enchanted. Divination has limitations, mundane spying too; great espionage organizations will use both.
War Golems are equipped with cannons. Traps often employ antimagic fields and mundane explosive: suppress high magic defences, and a big enough explosion can bring down anyone.
The armies studied a cannon that can be disassembled and stored in a bag of holding so that a small squad can teleport with it outside range of detection magic, set some sort of illusion screen while they deploy the cannon, and shower death on the enemies.

In the end, the distinction between magic and mundane is somewhat artificial. Magic is just another tool.

That's if we discuss how muggle ways can compete with magic.
If we discuss how low level people can deal with high level people, it's an entirely different question.
One thing that was not explored is the existance of a middle ground. It's rare that you just have the god wizard. Where you have it, you often have wizards of lesser skills. Where you have superman, you also have batman and captain america.
Basically, you have those lesser superpowered beings who are strong enough to defeat the big bad even where the regular goons are not. Those lesser super, in turn, cannot just ignore the common people. So they are likely to live with the society and symphatize with them when conflict comes

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-27, 09:37 PM
Whilst admittedly true, the issue with The Watchmen is that the Black Frigate comic in a comic is supposed to be a parallel story to Adrian, and the people are ultimately dumb and that's why Dr Manhattan just leaves at the end of the story, but also agrees to go along with Adrian's scheme. Never mind the whole thing being a deconstruction of superheroes as a genre, despite Alan Moore being a bit... loopy... he's a great story teller.

On Muggles. Can we agree and just say they're normal people, and effectively inconsequential to the story being told? They're unnamed police officer #37 in a Batman story. Batman is probably a muggle compared to Superman, but at the same time Batman very much not a normal person in any story he appears in. The closest characters that actually matter to the stories that might qualify in DC are Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and Alfred.

If about what can muggles compared to the non-muggle? According to the lady that coined the phrase, nothing. A whole brigade of SAS apparently can't defeat a half dozen wizards in Harry Potter, despite the muggle Prime Minister being aware of the fact that Voldemort is actively committing a terrorist attack on British citizens, at a school no less. Even if you some how think wizards are separate political entity from the British polity I kind of feel like the PM of the UK might, just offer to help. Why don't they? Because muggles are pointless and laughable, that's why they have such a stupid name.

The funny thing is, given Voldy's monumental arrogance and utter disdain for anything muggle... I doubt he even understands the sort of threat that a skilled sniper with a large rifle over half a mile away actually would pose... it's not like he goes around with a "deflect bullets" spell on at all times.

Mechalich
2019-04-27, 11:00 PM
One thing I'm not seeing in the various considerations about how technology can compensate for superpowers is that, while this is to some extent true depending on the powers in question, it really only matters in situations like Marvel or DC where superheroes aren't a thing until around WWII. The ability of technology, and overwhelming numbers, to compensate for superhuman abilities decreases rapidly as you turn back the clock, because both technological capabilities and total numbers decrease rapidly. Even as recently as 1900 the global population was only 1.6 billion, less than a fourth of the current total, and there were no forms of powered flight.

The amount of power needed to 'ignore the common people' drops further and further as you go back in time. The martial exploits of someone like Lu Bu become much less ridiculous when you consider that he had better weapons, better armor, and was raised on a superior diet than 99.9% of the people he was fighting. When you're in personally fitted bronze plate and your foes are wearing linen wraps, you're going to mess people up.

So if your supers have always been there, it's much more difficult to imagine them ever losing their hold on power unless you specifically create a device to allow for this.

Take LotR for example. In that world Elves are just better than humans. It's not exactly quantified, but they are. And the elves proceed to rule the world and humans exist mostly in the shadow of their grandeur for thousands upon thousands of years. The only reason the humans actually become dominant is that the elves have a crappy birthrate, keep getting bored and leaving the world to go live in Heaven, and aren't sufficiently cold blooded to correct the demographic problem by the sword (and because Morgoth won't let them do that).

The baseline scenario for having a two tier world between one group of empowered persons - whether its wizards, monsters, mutants, sapient robots, or aliens, is one group either exterminating or enslaving the other forever. if you want it to be something else you need to create a reason why this is so. There's a nice xkcd (https://xkcd.com/1613/) illustrating this particular framework.

TeChameleon
2019-04-28, 12:41 AM
It occurs to me that in most story frameworks, muggles are there as the backdrop to the story; for whatever reason, those that qualify as 'muggles' are the millions-to-one majority in that universe. A lot of the time (not always, of course), they serve the same function that the ocean does in a good sea story; the vast, uncaring backdrop that could crush the main characters, and indeed the majority of the plot, in an instant if approached the wrong way. Oh, sure, the average antagonist could probably murder them in the thousands or more, but if they drew the full weight of society's attention, then, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but *squish*.

And in cases where the antagonistic super is beyond the possibility of societal retribution, well, that's when we get things like the World of Ruin from Final Fantasy VI- a post-apocalyptic hellscape ruled by a deranged demigod.

Florian
2019-04-28, 01:13 AM
@Mechalich:

I think you vastly underestimate on what kind of power scale baseline humanity can function. Only if we talk about the fact that "magic"/"supernatural" is expressly outside of "physics" and can't be accessed or replicated in any way, your statement holds true.

@TeChamelion:

In a story, "magic" is the explanation to succeed and prevail against the odds. The Alex Verus novels by one of our board members are build upon that (good read, can only recommend B. Jacka..). In contrast, the 12 Palaces series of novels feature more or less the opposite, a regular guy going against the opposite.

NichG
2019-04-28, 03:33 AM
There's a bit of a difference between 'muggles as setting elements that an author has decided are less relevant' and the sense of the word as used in the original question of this thread, which was more about mundane versus magical methods of accomplishing things. Of course, if we go so far as to talk about entities in a fictional setting which the author has specifically decided not to tell stories about, then those elements can never be relevant in that setting. So we have Watchmen where figures like Rorschach, the Comedian, Ozymandias, etc are always at the center of events which change the world as opposed to, say, a widespread grassroots protest movement or the full force of a foreign government. In Harry Potter, muggles aren't relevant specifically because it's not a story about muggles, and yet at the same time it's a story written by an author, who makes a conscious choice as to the subject matter.

But that's very different than the sense of the word used to divide supernatural elements of a setting (or character) from elements that have direct real world correspondences (the so-called mundane elements). A wizard who is very wise has both supernatural elements (their magic) and natural elements (their wisdom). The killbot example I gave was to create a case in which something only had its supernatural advantages, but all natural advantages were removed - a counterfactual, in order to see whether the factor determining its impact had more to do with the powers themselves, or the way in which they were intelligently applied. In the end, if the killbot has to understand humanity and modern society well enough to for example target oil refineries, then for me at least that story is more about the strategy of dismantling society by attacking the oil than it is a story about how this guy can kill things within 30ft. At that point uou could replace the killbot with a terrorist organization or a foreign military and you wouldn't lose anything from the meaningful bits of the story.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-28, 08:42 AM
The baseline scenario for having a two tier world between one group of empowered persons - whether its wizards, monsters, mutants, sapient robots, or aliens, is one group either exterminating or enslaving the other forever. if you want it to be something else you need to create a reason why this is so. There's a nice xkcd illustrating this particular framework.

Those two aren't baselines - they are two possible endpoints based on specific (implicit) assumptions of the motives of respective parties and the assumption that the conflict has already run its course.

To give a real-life comparison: humans dominate over wolves now. (Having "enslaved" the majority of them by domesticating them and turning them into dogs and threatening the wild populations with extinction/extermination. ) However, in the history of humans as a species, things have been this way for just a fraction of time (H. Sapiens Sapiens is estimated to have speciated 350,000 years ago, while wolves were domesticated 14,000 and 6,400 years ago.) and we have no idea if things will remain like this "forever".

You can apply this to most low to midlevel "non-muggles". You can have very long timespans of co-existence where neither party has any ability or even reason for enslaving or exterminating the other.

Hytheter
2019-04-28, 08:48 AM
For example, Goku might be able to bitchslap worlds out of existence, but he likes to eat, and somebody's gotta grow, prepare, and cook all that food, something he cannot do by himself, no matter how much he flexes, glows, grunts and screams at the landscape. And with that need for other people comes a measure of control over the godlike combat monsters.

Maybe not a great example. As a child Goku survived alone on a mountain for years and he later became a competent farmer.

Clistenes
2019-04-28, 08:58 AM
The funny thing is, given Voldy's monumental arrogance and utter disdain for anything muggle... I doubt he even understands the sort of threat that a skilled sniper with a large rifle over half a mile away actually would pose... it's not like he goes around with a "deflect bullets" spell on at all times.

Wizards are surprisingly squishy in the Potterverse... like, a punch to the mouth, or grabbing their wand before they speak, or shooting at them would easily take them down...

They do have defensive spells that could make them bulletproof, but very few bother to learn them... hell, Harry had to learn basic defensive spells on his own, and his foes never use them...

The main reason behind Wizard superiority is that muggles can't know who is a Wizard with a wand in their pocket, and they can even make themselves invisible and erase nemories, so muggles don't even know they have a rival to beat...

If Wizards were smarter and more disciplined then yes, they could beat muggles easily even if a fair fight, but Harry Potter's Wizards are a bunch of lazy, ignorant, chauvinist hicks who can't be bothered to learn basic defensive spells during a magical war...

Florian
2019-04-28, 09:09 AM
Right. Carrying a cane rod is useless, because they might get used to them. A solid 4by4 is the preferable answer to deal with "Wizards".

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 09:15 AM
Wizards are surprisingly squishy in the Potterverse... like, a punch to the mouth, or grabbing their wand before they speak, or shooting at the would easily take them down...

They do have defensive spells that could make them bulletproof, but very few bother to learn them... hell, Harry had to learn basic defensive spells on his own, and his foes never use them...

The main reason behind Wizard superiority is that muggles can't know who is a Wizard with a wand in their pocket, and they can even make themselves invisible and erase nemories, so muggles don't even know they have a rival to beat...

If Wizards were smarter and more disciplined then yes, they could beat muggles easily even if a fair fight, but Harry Potter's Wizards are a bunch of lazy, ignorant, chauvinist hicks who can't be bothered to learn basic defensive spells during a magical war...

Yeap. Numbers and technology and the right approach by muggles would see the wizards in a world of hurt in that setting, if it came to it.

(Even Rowling implicitly says this with the backstory for the wizards in the US and why they have such strict control on contact with muggles.)

(Just because I think the worldbuilding is haphazard and the stories in the new movies are third-rate doesn't mean I haven't looked into them.)

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-28, 09:38 AM
In the case of Harry Potter, the smartest adult wizards could dodge the muggle society indefinitely if they wanted to.

However, their long-term continuity is reliant on existence of muggles, half-bloods and muggle-borns, because without those the wizarding world goes crazy due to isolationism and inbreeding.

Or, well... crazier.

One can only imagine the horror of a fullblown witchhunt conducted with full benefit of modern technology and targeted towards magical children.

Rater202
2019-04-28, 11:23 AM
Wizards in Harry Potter are not squishy.

The most popular sport in the Wizarding world involves flying hundreds of feet in the air at dozens of miles an hour while two magical cannonballs are trying to smash your head in--and two players on each team have the explicit job of redirecting said balls to players on the other team.

And there's no safety gear. The movies made that up.

In one Book, Harry gets his skull cracked open by one of said canon balls and... They don't even put him back together with magic, they just bandage his head and he's made a full recovering within a few days.

The movies significantly toned things down but even then Ron got brutalized by a Giant Chess Piece and recovered from it faster than Harry recovering from exhaustion.

(also, the 'punch in the mouth' thing I'm assuming refers to Hermione punching out Malfoy... The movies made that up. In the books, she slapped him and it was the embarrassment that took him out, not Hermione punching him unconscious. The movies wank Hermione a bit. You know they give a lot of Ron's best moments in the books to Herione for some reason?)

Clistenes
2019-04-28, 11:48 AM
Wizards in Harry Potter are not squishy.

The most popular sport in the Wizarding world involves flying hundreds of feet in the air at dozens of miles an hour while two magical cannonballs are trying to smash your head in--and two players on each team have the explicit job of redirecting said balls to players on the other team.

And there's no safety gear. The movies made that up.

In one Book, Harry gets his skull cracked open by one of said canon balls and... They don't even put him back together with magic, they just bandage his head and he's made a full recovering within a few days.

The movies significantly toned things down but even then Ron got brutalized by a Giant Chess Piece and recovered from it faster than Harry recovering from exhaustion.

(also, the 'punch in the mouth' thing I'm assuming refers to Hermione punching out Malfoy... The movies made that up. In the books, she slapped him and it was the embarrassment that took him out, not Hermione punching him unconscious. The movies wank Hermione a bit. You know they give a lot of Ron's best moments in the books to Herione for some reason?)

Wizards in the Potterverse are as fragile as muggles unless they use defensive spells... which they don't ever do, for some reason...

The reason they play those crazy sports without proper protection isn't that they are able to soak a lot of damage... they are just that insane (also, wish fulfillment fantasy... Quiddish isn't a reasonable sport, but kids like it...).

As for the punch to the mouth, 99% of Wizards need to speak in order to cast spells, so it's a way to disrupt them, same as taking their wand away..

Wizards CAN learn to cast spell silently and wandlessly... but they are too lazy to do so, at least the British ones...

Rater202
2019-04-28, 12:21 PM
Wizards in the Potterverse are as fragile as muggles unless they use defensive spells... which they don't ever do, for some reason...

Demonstrably not the case.

Cannonballs to the head are treated as no big deal.

As I previously cited, in the 6th book, Harry gets his skull fractured by one, suffers no brain damage, and they didn't even use magic to fix him. They just wrapped his head in bandages and he was fine in just a few days.

That's hard proof that they're more durable than non-magical people.

They don't use defensive spells becuase they dont need to.

Florian
2019-04-28, 12:27 PM
We´re talking about a book series for children there. I don't think it would fit the concept by going too deep into realism there.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 12:39 PM
We´re talking about a book series for children there. I don't think it would fit the concept by going too deep into realism there.

Healing moves at the speed of plot in those books, there's nothing useful to be drawn from it.

(Plus the "cannonballs" aren't really moving at anything like the speed of a cannonball, or the players who are supposed to redirect them couldn't... :smallbiggrin: )

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-28, 12:47 PM
Healing moves at the speed of plot in those books, there's nothing useful to be drawn from it.

(Plus the "cannonballs" aren't really moving at anything like the speed of a cannonball, or the players who are supposed to redirect them couldn't... :smallbiggrin: )

And I don't remember any mention that they're real cannonballs. They're cannonball sized, but I doubt they're that heavy or solid.

On the other hand, the writer isn't much for consistent worldbuilding, so...the answer is probably purple penguins. Because that makes an equal amount of sense.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 12:57 PM
And I don't remember any mention that they're real cannonballs. They're cannonball sized, but I doubt they're that heavy or solid.

On the other hand, the writer isn't much for consistent worldbuilding, so...the answer is probably purple penguins. Because that makes an equal amount of sense.

They're evidently made of iron and the size of a BIG cannonball or so (I had to look that up), but no word on if they're sold or hollow.

Florian
2019-04-28, 01:56 PM
They're evidently made of iron and the size of a BIG cannonball or so (I had to look that up), but no word on if they're sold or hollow.

They are evidently made up to showcase what "wizards" can do without any further second thoughts. So why bother?

Clistenes
2019-04-28, 02:19 PM
That's hard proof that they're more durable than non-magical people.

Look, neither Rowling nor any character in-universe has ever said that wizards are tougher than muggles, despite the Potterverse being chock full of racist wizard supremacists who would love to claim so...

Harry doesn't need magical healing for a cracked skull for the same reason unicorn hair is more expensive than wands, wizards don't bother to learn protective spells against magical attacks during a magical war, and Voldemort makes Nagini into a horcrux instead of making a grain of sand his first horcrux and throwing it into the ocean... because the Harry Potter books are for children and Rowling doesn't care that much for worldbuilding or plot consistency...


They don't use defensive spells becuase they dont need to.

Lots of wizards and witches are killed or wounded in the books... They are burnt, imploded, cut, mindwiped... etc. They do need protection against magical and mundane attacks... they are just too lazy or dumb to bother learning to cast a Shield Charm, and it is even explocitly acknowledge in the books...

Beleriphon
2019-04-28, 02:47 PM
Harry doesn't need magical healing for a cracked skull for the same reason unicorn hair is more expensive than wands, wizards don't bother to learn protective spells against magical attacks during a magical war, and Voldemort makes Nagini into a horcrux instead of making a grain of sand his first horcrux and throwing it into the ocean... because the Harry Potter books are for children and Rowling doesn't care that much for worldbuilding or plot consistency...

Eh, as Max pointed out the world-building in Harry Potter is a dumpster fire. One full of old tires and thousands of pounds of dog excrement.

On the muggle/non-muggle divide I'm not sure as a group we're entirely on point about what counts.

So I'll pose some questions:


Is Batman a muggle?
Is Captain America a muggle?
Is Blue Beetle a muggle?
Is Venom a muggle?
Is Conan a muggle?
Is John Carpenter (of Mars) a muggle?
Is Perseus (the ancient Greek one) a muggle?
Is Jason (of the Argonauts) a muggle?
Is Batgirl a muggle?
Is Atalanta a muggle?


I think these are all character that have incredible abilities, but are largely mundane in origin. Or at least what counts as "realistic" for their own worlds. Clearly Batman is impossible, but in the comics he's just an exceptionally well trained human with the intellect of a genius.

Florian
2019-04-28, 02:50 PM
It´s a bit like we are talking about an abstraction and then someone starts taking the abstraction for serious...

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 02:55 PM
It´s a bit like we are talking about an abstraction and then someone starts taking the abstraction for serious...

Maybe with the thread starting out using the world "muggle" to describe those without any fantastic abilities -- with strong connection to the setting we ended up talking about, AND the ugly caricature painted by Rowling's books of most people who have no magic as useless fussing scrabling little nothings at best, or actively nasty beasts at worst -- the conversation was destined to end up here.

Beleriphon
2019-04-28, 03:04 PM
It´s a bit like we are talking about an abstraction and then someone starts taking the abstraction for serious...

Maybe, but its fun. Also, its helpful for a game to have a baseline for what counts a extraordinary but possible versus beyond the pale of "possible".


Maybe with the thread starting out using the world "muggle" to describe those without any fantastic abilities --with strong connection to the setting we ended up talking about, AND the ugly caricature painted by Rowling's book of most people who have no magic as useless fussing scrabling little nothings at best, or actively nasty beasts at worst -- the conversation was destined to end up here.

As Max notes, Harry Potter's world doesn't have a kind things to say about non-wizards. I mean the Dursley's are painted as nearly as bad as Voldemort. The Dursleys are jerks (possibly even justifiably given what they know about Harry's parents), Voldemort is a genocidal lunatic.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 03:26 PM
Eh, as Max pointed out the world-building in Harry Potter is a dumpster fire. One full of old tires and thousands of pounds of dog excrement.

On the muggle/non-muggle divide I'm not sure as a group we're entirely on point about what counts.

So I'll pose some questions:


Is Batman a muggle?
Is Captain America a muggle?
Is Blue Beetle a muggle?
Is Venom a muggle?
Is Conan a muggle?
Is John Carpenter (of Mars) a muggle?
Is Perseus (the ancient Greek one) a muggle?
Is Jason (of the Argonauts) a muggle?
Is Batgirl a muggle?
Is Atalanta a muggle?


I think these are all character that have incredible abilities, but are largely mundane in origin. Or at least what counts as "realistic" for their own worlds. Clearly Batman is impossible, but in the comics he's just an exceptionally well trained human with the intellect of a genius.

First, technology muddles who is a muggle, and adds questions like "is this actual/feasible technology, or highly speculative technology, or magic dressed up in technobabble?" and "does this tech only exist because the character its associated with has superhuman intellect as her 'magic'?"

Second, going down the list...

If the world of DC is supposed to be largely like ours, and the people there largely like here, then Batman has reached superhuman levels of competence, especially when all his competences are taken as a whole.
Captain America is not.
Blue Beetle himself is, the armor probably is not.
Venom is not.
Conan is or is not, depending on the depiction.
JC of Mars is not.
Perseus is a demi-god, and therefor not (son of Zeus)
Jason is a demi-god, and therefor not (grandson of Hermes, on his mother's side).
Batgirl probably is, depending on the depiction... computers appear to just work by spooky voodoo in DC comics (and most media) so even as Oracle she's not really superhuman
Atalanta blurs the line, with the fantastic upbringing perhaps being a source of fantastic capability, but then again not way off the human scale.

Talakeal
2019-04-28, 03:39 PM
Eh, as Max pointed out the world-building in Harry Potter is a dumpster fire. One full of old tires and thousands of pounds of dog excrement.

On the muggle/non-muggle divide I'm not sure as a group we're entirely on point about what counts.

So I'll pose some questions:


Is Batman a muggle?
Is Captain America a muggle?
Is Blue Beetle a muggle?
Is Venom a muggle?
Is Conan a muggle?
Is John Carpenter (of Mars) a muggle?
Is Perseus (the ancient Greek one) a muggle?
Is Jason (of the Argonauts) a muggle?
Is Batgirl a muggle?
Is Atalanta a muggle?


I think these are all character that have incredible abilities, but are largely mundane in origin. Or at least what counts as "realistic" for their own worlds. Clearly Batman is impossible, but in the comics he's just an exceptionally well trained human with the intellect of a genius.

Yes to all, except maybe Venom. The line between super powers and equipment is kind of blurred by alien symbiotes.

Clistenes
2019-04-28, 03:55 PM
Yes to all, except maybe Venom. The line between super powers and equipment is kind of blurred by alien symbiotes.

I am willing as accept Batman as a peak muggle, but Captain America has superhuman abilities: He has superhuman stamina, to begin with; his body is superhumanly efficient at removing lactic acid, which allows him to maintain for hours a level of physical exertion that would wear a non-super human down in a matter of minutes...

As for Perseus, he is a half-god, and demigods were stronger and tougher than other humans (the Homeric “took a rock in his hand which two men of today's could not lift, and he threw it at..." that happens repeatedly in the Illiad...).

Morty
2019-04-28, 04:32 PM
Maybe with the thread starting out using the world "muggle" to describe those without any fantastic abilities -- with strong connection to the setting we ended up talking about, AND the ugly caricature painted by Rowling's books of most people who have no magic as useless fussing scrabling little nothings at best, or actively nasty beasts at worst -- the conversation was destined to end up here.

Yeah, the fact that Muggles in Harry Potter are mostly caricatures so that the readers feel superior while they imagine themselves as wizards makes me leery of using the word.

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-28, 04:35 PM
On the muggle/non-muggle divide I'm not sure as a group we're entirely on point about what counts.

A "muggle" is someone with no supernatural or extranormal abilities to set them apart from other members of their own species. Obviously, the baseline varies based on setting, otherwise, why even ask the title question? The greatest moving of goalposts depends on one simple question: are there non-supernatural non-humans with superhuman abilities? To give a real-life example: apes have different skeletal structure and musculature than humans, so a gorilla or chimpanzee can be much stronger than a human. So in a realistic game, if a player wanted to play a gorilla, they would be able to do some things a human could not, and another player playing a human would be able to do some things a gorilla could not.

So now, to your list. I removed a few characters I do not know off the top of my head:




Is Batman a muggle?
Is Captain America a muggle?
Is Venom a muggle?
Is Conan a muggle?
Is John Carpenter (of Mars) a muggle?
Is Perseus (the ancient Greek one) a muggle?
Is Jason (of the Argonauts) a muggle?
Is Batgirl a muggle?



1) Technically, yes. In actual portrayal, no. Batman is supposed to be just a peak human, but so many feats are laid at his feet that this becomes implausible even in his own setting.
2) No. The super soldier serum may not be supernatural, but it is clearly an extranormal edge, esp. given the contrivances in replicating it and its effects.
3) No. Venom's powers come from a symbiote & the symbiote's powers aren't normal even for one of its own kind.
4) Maybe. He's supposed to embody vigor of barbarian man as opposed to decadent men of civilization. He's the strongest there is, but nothing I remember points to supernatural or extranormal origin of his strength.
5) No. He sort of starts as one, but by the time he's mastered astral projection and become immortal, he's way beyond normal humans.
6) No. Demigod. (Bastard son of Zeus. )
7) No. Demigod. (Great-grandson of Hermes.)
8) Technically, yes. In actual portrayal, no. Same reasons as Batman.

You might've as well asked "Is Clark Kent a muggle?" Afterall, his powers are not a result of magic, but rather, being from a different planet with higher gravity (etc.). Plus we know other Kryptonians could develop similar abilities if put in similar conditions (lower gravity world with a yellow sun). But even taking that into account, it quickly becomes obvious Clark is portrayed as extranormal even compared to other Kryptonians, and definitely is so if compared to humans of Earth.

So no, he's not a "muggle".

Pretty much no superhero is. With exception of some really lame ones. Rorschach from Watchmen is a muggle, but he's also a filthy hobo who kicks harmless goofballs down elevator shafts. His greatest feat is maiming some police officers trying to arrest him.

Xuc Xac
2019-04-28, 05:56 PM
The reason they play those crazy sports without proper protection isn't that they are able to soak a lot of damage... they are just that insane (also, wish fulfillment fantasy... Quiddish isn't a reasonable sport, but kids like it...).


Quiddich, like everything else in the series, exists to make Harry Potter look good and doesn't make any sense through any other lens. It's a team sport (so Harry can get all the social benefits of being part of the team), but it is won singlehandedly by one particular player (so Harry gets all of the glory when his team wins).

Talakeal
2019-04-28, 06:24 PM
I am willing as accept Batman as a peak muggle, but Captain America has superhuman abilities: He has superhuman stamina, to begin with; his body is superhumanly efficient at removing lactic acid, which allows him to maintain for hours a level of physical exertion that would wear a non-super human down in a matter of minutes...

As for Perseus, he is a half-god, and demigods were stronger and tougher than other humans (the Homeric “took a rock in his hand which two men of today's could not lift, and he threw it at..." that happens repeatedly in the Illiad...).

It depends on the interpretation. Cap. Is frequently called out in the comics and peak human, and I have never seen Perseus depicted as doing anything blatantly impossible.

But then again, the whole issue is mostly one of aesthetics rather than precise definitions.

Out of curiosity, while we are on the topic of lactic acid, is Dean Karnazes a muggle?

Beleriphon
2019-04-28, 07:43 PM
First, technology muddles who is a muggle, and adds questions like "is this actual/feasible technology, or highly speculative technology, or magic dressed up in technobabble?" and "does this tech only exist because the character its associated with has superhuman intellect as her 'magic'?"

Which I think brings us back to the idea that the characters that are "muggles" are secondary to the story/setting as a whole. Lois Lane is a muggle, Kal-El of Krytpon is not (he's not even the least muggle-ish character in DC which is funny); Jim Gordon is a muggle, Batman and the rest of the Bat-family are not; Billy Batson's foster parents are muggles, the Marvel Family (what is DC calling them these days) are not, beyond being explicitly powered by magic; Jane Foster (prior to being Lady Thor) is a muggle, Thor is not.

In essence to be a muggle, I think a character needs to be 1) "normal" in so far as we would consider them normal, or at least plausibly existing 2) not even approaching being the main character of the story/setting.

Almost by default that means no RPG characters are muggles since they fail condition two: they are the stars of the story we're telling as a group.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 07:53 PM
Which I think brings us back to the idea that the characters that are "muggles" are secondary to the story/setting as a whole. Lois Lane is a muggle, Kal-El of Krytpon is not (he's not even the least muggle-ish character in DC which is funny); Jim Gordon is a muggle, Batman and the rest of the Bat-family are not; Billy Batson's foster parents are muggles, the Marvel Family (what is DC calling them these days) are not, beyond being explicitly powered by magic; Jane Foster (prior to being Lady Thor) is a muggle, Thor is not.

In essence to be a muggle, I think a character needs to be 1) "normal" in so far as we would consider them normal, or at least plausibly existing 2) not even approaching being the main character of the story/setting.

Almost by default that means no RPG characters are muggles since they fail condition two: they are the stars of the story we're telling as a group.

I consider "is this character a protagonist" or similar measures to be too narrative-focused, and lacking in objectivity as a metric.

Consider that by such a standard, the main characters in a Hunters Hunted campaign (oWoD product about humans and near-humans hunting supernaturals in that setting) would usually be the "muggles" in a Vampire or Werewolf campaign. Nothing about the characters themselves changes, it's just subjective perspective that changes.

Florian
2019-04-28, 08:42 PM
Funny.

In WW2, there was one crew of a Tiger tank that managed to singlehandedly blast a British army detachment to smithereens, have their tank break down, escape on foot, get a new tank and repeat the same feat the next day.

Same war, a group of under-age airforce trainees used their equipment to bring a fully fledged invasion to a halt and stall any progress.

I had the misfortune to sign up to be trained as a combat medic and then actually going to war, a thing that my nation wasn't supposed to do, but in regards to this topic, it gave me a lot of insight about the highs and lows humanity as a whole can reach.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 08:53 PM
Funny.

In WW2, there was one crew of a Tiger tank that managed to singlehandedly blast a British army detachment to smithereens, have their tank break down, escape on foot, get a new tank and repeat the same feat the next day.

Same war, a group of under-age airforce trainees used their equipment to bring a fully fledged invasion to a halt and stall any progress.

I had the misfortune to sign up to be trained as a combat medic and then actually going to war, a thing that my nation wasn't supposed to do, but in regards to this topic, it gave me a lot of insight about the highs and lows humanity as a whole can reach.

Hopefully you won't take it as a slight against anyone if I express doubt that they were reliably pulling of feats on the scale of Batman or Perseus or Captain America.

TeChameleon
2019-04-28, 09:12 PM
Maybe not a great example. As a child Goku survived alone on a mountain for years and he later became a competent farmer.

*shrug*

He's also been portrayed as having a fondness for eating other people's cooking, so the basic point still stands.

And I dunno- I think there's an element of danger to muggles as well as them being story-irrelevant, at least in stories where the power levels don't render them completely impotent. There's a reason for the various masquerades and whatnot- because it'd most likely wind up in a species-ending war for the non-muggles otherwise.

Florian
2019-04-28, 09:31 PM
Hopefully you won't take it as a slight against anyone if I express doubt that they were reliably pulling of feats on the scale of Batman or Perseus or Captain America.

In context of this discussion, I actually do. The hight that a regular human can reach with the right tech, training and experience can be astonishing and way beyond the reach of others, seeming supernatural.

A good friend of mine works as a cleaner for the local transit authority. He manages to clean 400 meters of train in under 5 minutes without breaking into a sweat, every 10 minutes. Something your regular housewife balks against.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 09:47 PM
In context of this discussion, I actually do. The hight that a regular human can reach with the right tech, training and experience can be astonishing and way beyond the reach of others, seeming supernatural.

A good friend of mine works as a cleaner for the local transit authority. He manages to clean 400 meters of train in under 5 minutes without breaking into a sweat, every 10 minutes. Something your regular housewife balks against.

Now I have to wonder how many meters of train Batman could clean in under 5 minutes.

Rater202
2019-04-28, 09:51 PM
With Captain America they're actually underselling peak human potential by a bit.

He's supposed to be genetically and physiologically perfect(in the sense that he doesn't have flaws in his body structures of genetic code that could hamper his health or his potential)--his only actual "power" is that he's clinically immortal--he doesn't age and can't get sick.

Everything else--his intellect, his strength, his speed, his ability to learn--is th result of peak human physical and mental attributes combined with each other or with every kind of training that Army had back in 1940.

He's only special in the sense that the average person can only be the best at one or two of those things and only with a life devoted to training.

But some of Cap's feats have actually been beaten out by IRL people--Cap can bench 1000 pounds exactly, while the IRL world record for bench is 1075, for example.

(Note: I'm talking specifically about Main Comics Cap. MCU, power wise, is a composite of Main Comics Cap and Ultimate Cap, who had superhuman strength, toughness, and reflexes. So nobody cite something from the movies at me.)

Mechalich
2019-04-28, 10:02 PM
Funny.

In WW2, there was one crew of a Tiger tank that managed to singlehandedly blast a British army detachment to smithereens, have their tank break down, escape on foot, get a new tank and repeat the same feat the next day.

Same war, a group of under-age airforce trainees used their equipment to bring a fully fledged invasion to a halt and stall any progress.

I had the misfortune to sign up to be trained as a combat medic and then actually going to war, a thing that my nation wasn't supposed to do, but in regards to this topic, it gave me a lot of insight about the highs and lows humanity as a whole can reach.

Unusual events happen, and the larger the number of total events, the more likely it will become that a truly unusual event occurs.

In a normal distribution, ~70% of all outcomes lie within 1 standard distribution of the mean. About 95% lie within 2 standard deviations of the mean, about ~99.7% lie within 3 standard deviations of the mean, but you can go further. Something 4 standard deviations from the mean has a roughly 1 in 15,000 chance of occurring, 5 standard deviations a 1 in 1,750,000 chance, and 6 standard deviations a 1 in 500,000,000 chance. Extreme outliers in events, and people, exist, and the more people you have the more likely they are to exist. In a global population of 200 million you probably don't have anyone 6 sigma from the mean on any trait, but with 7 billion you almost certainly do.

A character like Batman is fantastical not because any single feat he accomplishes is absurd, each one generally simply represents peak performance for a human in a given skill or field, but because his mastery of so many of them means that he has a series of non-correlated traits that are somehow all shifted so far to the edge of the bell curve that the mathematical probability of that ever happening becomes ridiculous. Setting a new world record in an event at the Olympics isn't impossible, just really hard and something only a handful of people alive at any given time can actually hope to do, setting a world record in every event at the Olympics is fantastical.

Likewise, performing high-risk feats at the height of human ability consistently without letup is also fantastical. Batman's phenomenal consistency, his ability to perform feats over and over again in Gotham without having a random event - like a random bullet richochet or bad fall - take him down is quite fantastical indeed. In the narrative of course this is the power of plot armor and while some games do provide such a mechanic (ex. Fate points) such narrative abilities are both fantastical - because they are completely divorced from any simulationist principle - and are generally shared between all characters whether mundane or mystical.

Overall, traits tend to edge into the fantastical around 8-9 sigma out from the mean. For example, male height has a mean of 5'10" and an sd of 4, someone 9 sigma out would be 8'10", very close to the actual observed height of Robert Waldow at 8'11" the tallest man to ever live. A character that combines multiple traits 8-9 sigma from the mean is clearly fantastical, especially as extreme levels of many traits like height, overall strength, and speed are in opposition to each other given human biomechanics.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 10:24 PM
Unusual events happen, and the larger the number of total events, the more likely it will become that a truly unusual event occurs.

In a normal distribution, ~70% of all outcomes lie within 1 standard distribution of the mean. About 95% lie within 2 standard deviations of the mean, about ~99.7% lie within 3 standard deviations of the mean, but you can go further. Something 4 standard deviations from the mean has a roughly 1 in 15,000 chance of occurring, 5 standard deviations a 1 in 1,750,000 chance, and 6 standard deviations a 1 in 500,000,000 chance. Extreme outliers in events, and people, exist, and the more people you have the more likely they are to exist. In a global population of 200 million you probably don't have anyone 6 sigma from the mean on any trait, but with 7 billion you almost certainly do.

A character like Batman is fantastical not because any single feat he accomplishes is absurd, each one generally simply represents peak performance for a human in a given skill or field, but because his mastery of so many of them means that he has a series of non-correlated traits that are somehow all shifted so far to the edge of the bell curve that the mathematical probability of that ever happening becomes ridiculous. Setting a new world record in an event at the Olympics isn't impossible, just really hard and something only a handful of people alive at any given time can actually hope to do, setting a world record in every event at the Olympics is fantastical.

Likewise, performing high-risk feats at the height of human ability consistently without letup is also fantastical. Batman's phenomenal consistency, his ability to perform feats over and over again in Gotham without having a random event - like a random bullet richochet or bad fall - take him down is quite fantastical indeed. In the narrative of course this is the power of plot armor and while some games do provide such a mechanic (ex. Fate points) such narrative abilities are both fantastical - because they are completely divorced from any simulationist principle - and are generally shared between all characters whether mundane or mystical.

Overall, traits tend to edge into the fantastical around 8-9 sigma out from the mean. For example, male height has a mean of 5'10" and an sd of 4, someone 9 sigma out would be 8'10", very close to the actual observed height of Robert Waldow at 8'11" the tallest man to ever live. A character that combines multiple traits 8-9 sigma from the mean is clearly fantastical, especially as extreme levels of many traits like height, overall strength, and speed are in opposition to each other given human biomechanics.

Thank you for detailing that -- it's one of those things I've internalized and then let the details slip.

First, as you say, if someone is at that far far edge in several ways, they're fantastic.

Second, this is what I'm referring to when I saw "if a setting and system insist that someone who can jump 30+ feet and lift multiple tons and sprint all day is within normal human capability, then it's also established that in that world, the average human is far stronger and faster and resilient than in our world" -- because the range of the possible for "normal humans" has been shifted by that change in the extremes. The extremes don't move without the rest of the distribution moving, and if the distribution hasn't moved, then the new extremes are just as fantastic as spellcasting.

Pauly
2019-04-28, 10:33 PM
First, technology muddles who is a muggle, and adds questions like "is this actual/feasible technology, or highly speculative technology, or magic dressed up in technobabble?" and "does this tech only exist because the character its associated with has superhuman intellect as her 'magic'?"

Second, going down the list...

If the world of DC is supposed to be largely like ours, and the people there largely like here, then Batman has reached superhuman levels of competence, especially when all his competences are taken as a whole.
Captain America is not.
Blue Beetle himself is, the armor probably is not.
Venom is not.
Conan is or is not, depending on the depiction.
JC of Mars is not.
Perseus is a demi-god, and therefor not (son of Zeus)
Jason is a demi-god, and therefor not (grandson of Hermes, on his mother's side).
Batgirl probably is, depending on the depiction... computers appear to just work by spooky voodoo in DC comics (and most media) so even as Oracle she's not really superhuman
Atalanta blurs the line, with the fantastic upbringing perhaps being a source of fantastic capability, but then again not way off the human scale.


Most of the examples quoted there come from the era of pulp heroes (roughly 1890 to 1940). Starting with characters like Aan Quartermaine and Sherlock Holmes. Moving through Conan, Tarzan and John Carter. Then into the Shadow, Doc Savage and the phantom and finally to Batman/Captain America. Arguably James Bond also belongs on that list as the last great pulp hero.

Essentially this hero archetype is human, but operates at the edge of reality. They are have a combination of physical and mental talents that real people don’t have. They have mastered more skills than is humanly possible to learn. They are never taken out by a random bullet or an assassin shooting them in the back. They recover from injury incredibly quickly (because if Batman was a normal man he’d spend 3/4ths of each comic lying in a hospital bed). It’s no single one thing they do that’s superhuman. It’s the combination of abilities/skills that takes them to the very border of what humans could possibly do.

Superheroes, including demigods, possess abilities beyond that. Even if the powers come from technology such as Ironman or the Green Lantern the technology they use is beyond what is possible when you do the math. James Bond uses what we’d call a GPS in Goldfinger, about 30 or 40 years before they were possible. But when the original audiences watched it they could accept it as a reasonable extrapolation of what the military was trying to invent.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-28, 11:49 PM
Most of the examples quoted there come from the era of pulp heroes (roughly 1890 to 1940). Starting with characters like Aan Quartermaine and Sherlock Holmes. Moving through Conan, Tarzan and John Carter. Then into the Shadow, Doc Savage and the phantom and finally to Batman/Captain America. Arguably James Bond also belongs on that list as the last great pulp hero.

Essentially this hero archetype is human, but operates at the edge of reality. They are have a combination of physical and mental talents that real people don’t have. They have mastered more skills than is humanly possible to learn. They are never taken out by a random bullet or an assassin shooting them in the back. They recover from injury incredibly quickly (because if Batman was a normal man he’d spend 3/4ths of each comic lying in a hospital bed). It’s no single one thing they do that’s superhuman. It’s the combination of abilities/skills that takes them to the very border of what humans could possibly do.

Superheroes, including demigods, possess abilities beyond that. Even if the powers come from technology such as Ironman or the Green Lantern the technology they use is beyond what is possible when you do the math. James Bond uses what we’d call a GPS in Goldfinger, about 30 or 40 years before they were possible. But when the original audiences watched it they could accept it as a reasonable extrapolation of what the military was trying to invent.

So where do you put those "pulp heroes" in the context of a fantasy-genre game in a typical fantasy RPG setting?

(I consider technology a different "axis" than the others being discussed, at least in terms of worldbuilding and what it lets otherwise "normal human" character accomplish, apart from "magic" / "fantastic abilities".)

Frozen_Feet
2019-04-29, 12:56 AM
There are three common modes:

1) the pulp hero is who you play. You are meant to be Conan and the game's arc and thematics are meant to create something resembling Conan's stories. (F. Ex.)
2) the pulp hero is who you become after learning ropes of the game. You start as a more realistic character and if you play them right, they will eventually develop into the pulp hero.
3) the pulp hero is the inspiration for the game, but for some bizarre reason it conspires to keep you from actually reaching this ideal.

For example, D&D is sold to people as 1), the rules are geared towards 2) and fanboyism makes it fall towards 3). In AD&D days, Conan specifically suffered from 3), with his semi-official statblock being all kinds of ridiculous. The message was clear: Conan was too awesome to be captured by the normal rules and beyond the league of most players to actually play.

Mechalich
2019-04-29, 01:20 AM
So where do you put those "pulp heroes" in the context of a fantasy-genre game in a typical fantasy RPG setting?

Most pulp heroes - and this would include the lead in the average modern 'action' movie, including for instance pretty much any character ever played by Jason Statham - represent characters cranked just to the edge of human capability and then granted a form of narrative metacurrency to allow them to bypass the natural consequences of their exploits by bypassing the law of averages. For example, the Honest Trailer guys once got a doctor to calculate that Jon McClane would go through ~5 lives in the course of the initial Die Hard movie. If you were playing FATE, you could mechanically represent this by the player burning through a rather substantial pile of fate points to mitigate the damage taken by various actions. Essentially such characters rely on creating a series of impossible coincidences, things that could happen but would be impossibly unlikely, rather than performing feats that are outright impossible on their face. Mage: the Ascension actually tried to codify this idea with it's insistence on Coincidental vs. Vulgar magic, but it collapses when put out on a table to actually adjudicate.

Some settings of this nature accept this sort of thing as active convention, acknowledging that their worlds aren't real and represent a sort of stylized reality that is in itself a sort of urban fantasy without any obvious supernatural elements. The best recent example is probably the John Wick franchise. There's no one thing clearly impossible in that setting, but it's also very much not supposed to be our world.

As far as having a narrative metacurrency goes on the mundane vs. magical divide though, it depends on whether everyone has it or not. If everyone has access to that ability, then the world is different then our own and people are capable of more than normally would because the rules of reality conform to a particular set of conventions that are sometimes capable of overriding the everyday laws of physics. If only the PCs and perhaps major antagonists have this ability though, then you've simply established that your heroes are all special and have access to a power suite that ordinary people don't have, even if it's a fairly modest one. This is particularly true in game versus in narrative. Batman has infinite fate points, but your character has a number attached to their pool.


(I consider technology a different "axis" than the others being discussed, at least in terms of worldbuilding and what it lets otherwise "normal human" character accomplish, apart from "magic" / "fantastic abilities".)

Technology is best though of as a force multiplier, in that it takes existing outputs and multipliers them by some value (for relatively simple technologies, like bicycle wheels, this is something that can be calculated directly). This value might be relatively small in the case of primitive technologies like swords or horses, or so massive it can only be shown on a logarithmic scale like cell phones or jet aircraft.

From a world-building perspective this works the same way when you have some alternate version of technology in a setting like magitech or steampunk but, and this is important, only if you hold to consistent rules about what that technology can do as opposed to embracing the Clarke-ian approach (and sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). The later is much, much more common than the former and even works that purport to support scientific and technological themes like Girl Genius or Star Trek are wildly inconsistent about their technologies and treat them basically as magic. Strict alternative tech or future tech systems are very rare, in part because the research necessary to build one is a truly mammoth undertaking.

Brother Oni
2019-04-29, 06:37 AM
But some of Cap's feats have actually been beaten out by IRL people--Cap can bench 1000 pounds exactly, while the IRL world record for bench is 1075, for example.

Except the Cap is a lot smaller than those guys that can bench 1,000 lbs (unless Rob Liefeld is the artist) and a lot more mobile (none of those guys are running sub 3hr marathons).

While his individual feats are impressive but not superhumanly impossible, it's the combination of all the feats together that makes him unique, if not superhuman.

For example, a 105mm howitzer is a decently sized big gun, but comparatively small on the MBT scale (120 mm is the NATO standard) and tiny on the WW2 battleship scale (the Iowa class had 406 mm main guns). Attach it to an aircraft however and it becomes an entirely different beast (AC-130E and later models).

Kitten Champion
2019-04-29, 06:55 AM
Even if you took Captain America as a Charles Atlas type - albeit with performance enhancing drugs - the fact that he's barely aged after nearly a century puts him into the realm of those long-lived D&D races.

Willie the Duck
2019-04-29, 06:59 AM
So where do you put those "pulp heroes" in the context of a fantasy-genre game in a typical fantasy RPG setting?

I think they are what you might want a typical RPG 'fighter' or 'rogue' to be able to be -- characters that can excel in-narrative/in-game, despite not being able to natively* do anything 'magical.' Truly emulating pulp heroes in an RPG is hard though, because if you followed the genre conventions 100%, you basically should just take away dice from that character -- if the outcome is in any way in doubt, they will succeed at it. It is only when there is no way (one cannot leap that far, there is no way into the temple without the plot coupon, knockout gas 'no human could resist') that such a hero ever fails.
*magic items, like tech, muddy the water a bit

Talakeal
2019-04-29, 07:24 AM
Even if you took Captain America as a Charles Atlas type - albeit with performance enhancing drugs - the fact that he's barely aged after nearly a century puts him into the realm of those long-lived D&D races.

He was frozen in ice for the majority of that. Which doesn't really make sense either, but that is comic book science for you.

Unless you are just pointing out that comics operate on a sliding timescale, which is just a conceit of the medium and doesn't have anything to do with anyone's powers.

Cluedrew
2019-04-29, 08:31 AM
Why is having a superhuman muggle a contradiction? But the definition as I understand it muggles can still be superhuman as long as they are not supernatural. So Captain is definitely in because even if all of his abilities are superhuman, there is nothing supernatural about that. The ability to use your arm to apply force isn't supernatural no matter how strong you are. Until you start picking up building instead of tearing out walls, buildings don't work like that no matter how strong you are.

I understand extending the definition of supernatural to cover crazy cyber tech. Although not magical (yes; sufficiently advanced technology) it also changes how the body works is some pretty significant ways.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-29, 08:46 AM
Most pulp heroes - and this would include the lead in the average modern 'action' movie, including for instance pretty much any character ever played by Jason Statham - represent characters cranked just to the edge of human capability and then granted a form of narrative metacurrency to allow them to bypass the natural consequences of their exploits by bypassing the law of averages. For example, the Honest Trailer guys once got a doctor to calculate that Jon McClane would go through ~5 lives in the course of the initial Die Hard movie. If you were playing FATE, you could mechanically represent this by the player burning through a rather substantial pile of fate points to mitigate the damage taken by various actions. Essentially such characters rely on creating a series of impossible coincidences, things that could happen but would be impossibly unlikely, rather than performing feats that are outright impossible on their face. Mage: the Ascension actually tried to codify this idea with it's insistence on Coincidental vs. Vulgar magic, but it collapses when put out on a table to actually adjudicate.

Some settings of this nature accept this sort of thing as active convention, acknowledging that their worlds aren't real and represent a sort of stylized reality that is in itself a sort of urban fantasy without any obvious supernatural elements. The best recent example is probably the John Wick franchise. There's no one thing clearly impossible in that setting, but it's also very much not supposed to be our world.

As far as having a narrative metacurrency goes on the mundane vs. magical divide though, it depends on whether everyone has it or not. If everyone has access to that ability, then the world is different then our own and people are capable of more than normally would because the rules of reality conform to a particular set of conventions that are sometimes capable of overriding the everyday laws of physics. If only the PCs and perhaps major antagonists have this ability though, then you've simply established that your heroes are all special and have access to a power suite that ordinary people don't have, even if it's a fairly modest one. This is particularly true in game versus in narrative. Batman has infinite fate points, but your character has a number attached to their pool.


Whereas I take a very dim view of narrative specialness. A character is either generally capable of the sorts of things they're shown doing... or they're not. Few things in a work of fiction will poison it with a sense of contrivance more quickly and easily than a string of coincidences, especially the impossible kind... and frankly a string of coincidences, is usually bad storytelling unless it's being done deliberately and for a specific purpose.

For me, "metacurrency" doesn't pass muster as a narrative-enabling mechanic, but rather on the fact that it sucks for the player when their PC randomly fails at something they should be capable of, and those failures tend to hold up the game, so here's a way to avoid the randomly moment of suck.




Technology is best though of as a force multiplier, in that it takes existing outputs and multipliers them by some value (for relatively simple technologies, like bicycle wheels, this is something that can be calculated directly). This value might be relatively small in the case of primitive technologies like swords or horses, or so massive it can only be shown on a logarithmic scale like cell phones or jet aircraft.

From a world-building perspective this works the same way when you have some alternate version of technology in a setting like magitech or steampunk but, and this is important, only if you hold to consistent rules about what that technology can do as opposed to embracing the Clarke-ian approach (and sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). The later is much, much more common than the former and even works that purport to support scientific and technological themes like Girl Genius or Star Trek are wildly inconsistent about their technologies and treat them basically as magic. Strict alternative tech or future tech systems are very rare, in part because the research necessary to build one is a truly mammoth undertaking.


Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. :smallbiggrin:

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-29, 08:49 AM
Why is having a superhuman muggle a contradiction? But the definition as I understand it muggles can still be superhuman as long as they are not supernatural. So Captain is definitely in because even if all of his abilities are superhuman, there is nothing supernatural about that. The ability to use your arm to apply force isn't supernatural no matter how strong you are. Until you start picking up building instead of tearing out walls, buildings don't work like that no matter how strong you are.


As far as I'm concerned, for the purposes of this discussion regarding a fantasy setting, there is no difference between "superhuman" and "supernatural". If your character can lift 10 times what the strongest normal person can lift in that setting, then your character is supernatural.




Except the Cap is a lot smaller than those guys that can bench 1,000 lbs (unless Rob Liefeld is the artist) and a lot more mobile (none of those guys are running sub 3hr marathons).

While his individual feats are impressive but not superhumanly impossible, it's the combination of all the feats together that makes him unique, if not superhuman.


Agreed.

It's not superhuman to lift as much as the strongest human.

It is superhuman to be able to lift that much, and do it repeatedly, and run a marathon at the world record time, and match the world record free dive, and...

Rater202
2019-04-29, 09:10 AM
Except the Cap is a lot smaller than those guys that can bench 1,000 lbs (unless Rob Liefeld is the artist) and a lot more mobile (none of those guys are running sub 3hr marathons).

While his individual feats are impressive but not superhumanly impossible, it's the combination of all the feats together that makes him unique, if not superhuman.

For example, a 105mm howitzer is a decently sized big gun, but comparatively small on the MBT scale (120 mm is the NATO standard) and tiny on the WW2 battleship scale (the Iowa class had 406 mm main guns). Attach it to an aircraft however and it becomes an entirely different beast (AC-130E and later models).Yes. I do belive I pointed that out.

However, and this is the actual point I was trying to make, each of Cap's individual feats is supposed to be the same as that which a peak human being could perform.

The fact that an IRL person can sustainably bench more than Cap indicates that MArvel is underselling peak human potential by a small bit.

It doesn't matter that real people who bench that much can't sprint a marathon or swim the english channel. The point is that in some small way, peak human potential is graeater than Mavel comics depicts it.
He was frozen in ice for the majority of that. Which doesn't really make sense either, but that is comic book science for you.

Unless you are just pointing out that comics operate on a sliding timescale, which is just a conceit of the medium and doesn't have anything to do with anyone's powers.

Actually, this is false. DC reboots every decade or so, so there's little to no sliding scale there.

Marvel's Sliding Scale is actually a known phenomenon in-universe: Reed Richards has commented on it and it's implied that a few other people have noticed as well. The fact that it doesn't seem to aplly to people and events equally hasn't been acknowledged yet, but the fact that it's strongest with major superheroes has been.

Reed's going theory is that some high-level cosmic being wants there to be as many heroes alive as possible for an unknown reason so is freezing them when they're in or around their prime.

As an aside, the comics progressed in real time until the late 60s. The sliding Scale timeline started around the time Franklin Richards was born, and Franklin Richards, the most powerful mutant in the universe... For one, he's a Nigh Omnipotent reality warper who creates universes for fun, for two of everyone in the Marvel Universe he's the one who ages the slowest(It's even lampshaded a couple of times that thinking about his age is weird.)

The implication is that Franklin is responsible for it. Which makes sense--Marvel comics progressed at least two years, possible 3, in the time between the end of Secret Wars ending and the Richards returning from the Multiversal adventure, but as soon as they're back it's compressed down to one year

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-29, 09:22 AM
Yes. I do belive I pointed that out.

However, and this is the actual point I was trying to make, each of Cap's individual feats is supposed to be the same as that which a peak human being could perform.

The fact that an IRL person can sustainably bench more than Cap indicates that MArvel is underselling peak human potential by a small bit.

It doesn't matter that real people who bench that much can't sprint a marathon or swim the english channel. The point is that in some small way, peak human potential is graeater than Mavel comics depicts it.


The margin is so slim that it's entirely accounted for by the tiny progressions of world records after Marvel publishes something, rounding errors, and adherence to old gaming systems that listed numbers, it's an entirely a non-issue.

Pauly
2019-04-29, 09:36 AM
So where do you put those "pulp heroes" in the context of a fantasy-genre game in a typical fantasy RPG setting?

(I consider technology a different "axis" than the others being discussed, at least in terms of worldbuilding and what it lets otherwise "normal human" character accomplish, apart from "magic" / "fantastic abilities".)

Well the typical RPG doesn’t cater for this type of hero that well because people want to have magic user PCs. In the “pulp hero” world the main character(s) aren’t magical. Even the Shadow, who has the power to cloak men’s minds, is said to have learned this as a skill from the Mysterious Orient and that other humans are capable of learning this skill too.

In the “pulp hero” world magic, if present, is done either by the BBEG or by some form of helper. A hired minion in D&D terms not a proper PC. There are some exceptions, but usually all the core repeating characters in the story are non-magical.

If you want to play this character you either need a set of rules specifically written for Conan type adventures. Or you use a superhero game, but limit the PCs and villains powers to the lower end of the scale. (Eg able to jump onto the roof of a one story house could be possible, but not flight). If I went the superhero route I would also explicitly set the game in the 1920s or 1930s to stop the PCs trying to build iron man suits or bat-computers. If you’ve seen Darkman or the Rocketeer you can see how technology enhanced heroes have much stricter limits on the abilities of technology than modern setting heroes like Ironman.

Talakeal
2019-04-29, 09:46 AM
Yes. I do belive I pointed that out.

However, and this is the actual point I was trying to make, each of Cap's individual feats is supposed to be the same as that which a peak human being could perform.

The fact that an IRL person can sustainably bench more than Cap indicates that MArvel is underselling peak human potential by a small bit.

It doesn't matter that real people who bench that much can't sprint a marathon or swim the english channel. The point is that in some small way, peak human potential is graeater than Mavel comics depicts it.

Actually, this is false. DC reboots every decade or so, so there's little to no sliding scale there.

Marvel's Sliding Scale is actually a known phenomenon in-universe: Reed Richards has commented on it and it's implied that a few other people have noticed as well. The fact that it doesn't seem to aplly to people and events equally hasn't been acknowledged yet, but the fact that it's strongest with major superheroes has been.

Reed's going theory is that some high-level cosmic being wants there to be as many heroes alive as possible for an unknown reason so is freezing them when they're in or around their prime.

As an aside, the comics progressed in real time until the late 60s. The sliding Scale timeline started around the time Franklin Richards was born, and Franklin Richards, the most powerful mutant in the universe... For one, he's a Nigh Omnipotent reality warper who creates universes for fun, for two of everyone in the Marvel Universe he's the one who ages the slowest(It's even lampshaded a couple of times that thinking about his age is weird.)

The implication is that Franklin is responsible for it. Which makes sense--Marvel comics progressed at least two years, possible 3, in the time between the end of Secret Wars ending and the Richards returning from the Multiversal adventure, but as soon as they're back it's compressed down to one year

Care to explain how Calvin remained six from 1985-1995 or how Garfield has been alive for over forty years while you are at it?

AMFV
2019-04-29, 10:15 AM
But some of Cap's feats have actually been beaten out by IRL people--Cap can bench 1000 pounds exactly, while the IRL world record for bench is 1075, for example.

Caps' Bench was probably raw though and the world record for that is less than 800 lbs. (Or was last I checked)

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-29, 11:20 AM
Caps' Bench was probably raw though and the world record for that is less than 800 lbs. (Or was last I checked)

I had to look up the difference, and yeah, I'm betting Cap's numbers are supposed to be raw.

https://barbend.com/raw-vs-equipped-powerlifting/

Florian
2019-04-29, 04:12 PM
Whereas I take a very dim view of narrative specialness. A character is either generally capable of the sorts of things they're shown doing... or they're not. Few things in a work of fiction will poison it with a sense of contrivance more quickly and easily than a string of coincidences, especially the impossible kind... and frankly a string of coincidences, is usually bad storytelling unless it's being done deliberately and for a specific purpose.

For me, "metacurrency" doesn't pass muster as a narrative-enabling mechanic, but rather on the fact that it sucks for the player when their PC randomly fails at something they should be capable of, and those failures tend to hold up the game, so here's a way to avoid the randomly moment of suck.

Hm... Hm.....

The way I see it, were have a general dysfunction here, which stems from conflicting goals. The possibility of failure/death/loss (and so on) is important to give success/survival/victory a meaning by adding the necessary scope to it. On the other hand, we want to experience things like bringing a story to a conclusion, seeing an established goal fulfilled, experience character growth and so on. So on one side, we want to include a "fail state/game over state" for the emotional factor, on the other side, we want to negate said "fail state/game over state" because the intellectual factor tells us that it will get in the way of us having fun. I think that a meta currency of any kind is a necessary compromise, unless a table is willing to have the gm roll in secret and possibly fudge rolls.

Bohandas
2019-04-29, 11:01 PM
Well the typical RPG doesn’t cater for this type of hero that well because people want to have magic user PCs. In the “pulp hero” world the main character(s) aren’t magical. Even the Shadow, who has the power to cloak men’s minds, is said to have learned this as a skill from the Mysterious Orient and that other humans are capable of learning this skill too.

How is that different from a wizard

Mechalich
2019-04-29, 11:50 PM
Hm... Hm.....

The way I see it, were have a general dysfunction here, which stems from conflicting goals. The possibility of failure/death/loss (and so on) is important to give success/survival/victory a meaning by adding the necessary scope to it. On the other hand, we want to experience things like bringing a story to a conclusion, seeing an established goal fulfilled, experience character growth and so on. So on one side, we want to include a "fail state/game over state" for the emotional factor, on the other side, we want to negate said "fail state/game over state" because the intellectual factor tells us that it will get in the way of us having fun. I think that a meta currency of any kind is a necessary compromise, unless a table is willing to have the gm roll in secret and possibly fudge rolls.

I think it depends, in part, on the sort of story the game is attempting to emulate as well. It is generally accepted that in heroic tales of daring and adventure the heroes will occasionally get out of some mess or other that they really shouldn't have any reasonable way to escape. In such stories a metagame currency makes perfect sense. At the same time, in stories intended to provide gritty realism where no one is safe, this won't happen and a metagame currency is a bad idea.

In general tabletop gaming leans dramatically towards the former approach rather than the later. Most settings are light-hearted and embrace heroism and even those that aren't like Warhammer or WoD are rarely played with the kind of brutal grimness that would tolerate character death at realistic levels. Moreover, even in grim settings most games are played at a very low level of immersion and the average player is fully willing to embrace having a modest pile of 'get out of death free' points (or whatever form they ultimately take) and will largely ignore the hit to verisimilitude that results. This shouldn't be surprising, because not only does character death get in the way of storytelling, creating new characters is time-consuming and annoying to many players and also often fails to achieve much of anything in terms of changing the party or the story (especially in a game with strict party roles like D&D, where if the wizard gets killed the wizard's player is likely to roll up...another wizard).

Now, it is possible to avoid metagame currency and use the video-game style approach of just having save points, but this is usually considerably more immersion breaking unless the setting is altered to reflect this. One of the reasons for the explosion of 'isekai' type series in Japan is that it allows the author to take advantage of the convenience of video game mechanics in storytelling without compromising verisimilitude because the world is a game.

Pauly
2019-04-30, 06:37 AM
How is that different from a wizard

Because in the original books/radio show it is treated as a form of hypnotism and is explicitly non-magical. Subjects with strong will and/or training in hypnosis were able to resist the effects. Although in later iterations of the character there was some magic-like mysticism. But any long running character with multiple authors and formats will get a little weirdness.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-30, 08:19 AM
Technology is best though of as a force multiplier, in that it takes existing outputs and multipliers them by some value (for relatively simple technologies, like bicycle wheels, this is something that can be calculated directly). This value might be relatively small in the case of primitive technologies like swords or horses, or so massive it can only be shown on a logarithmic scale like cell phones or jet aircraft.

From a world-building perspective this works the same way when you have some alternate version of technology in a setting like magitech or steampunk but, and this is important, only if you hold to consistent rules about what that technology can do as opposed to embracing the Clarke-ian approach (and sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). The later is much, much more common than the former and even works that purport to support scientific and technological themes like Girl Genius or Star Trek are wildly inconsistent about their technologies and treat them basically as magic. Strict alternative tech or future tech systems are very rare, in part because the research necessary to build one is a truly mammoth undertaking.


Something I forgot to mention earlier on the technology aside.

There are different levels of how technology is treated. There's the strict level that requires a ton of research, and there's the Star Trek total bullcrap level that just makes stuff up and drops it.

Not directed at you at all, but it does seem like there are those who want to assert that if you aren't doing the first, you must be doing the second.

But there's a level in between that's really speculative and doesn't go quite so deep into the "how", but that does treat consistency and continuity very seriously and doesn't do throwaway solutions to the problem of the week.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-30, 08:24 AM
Because in the original books/radio show it is treated as a form of hypnotism and is explicitly non-magical. Subjects with strong will and/or training in hypnosis were able to resist the effects. Although in later iterations of the character there was some magic-like mysticism. But any long running character with multiple authors and formats will get a little weirdness.

Magic is as magic does.

Bohandas
2019-04-30, 08:17 PM
Hm... Hm.....

The way I see it, were have a general dysfunction here, which stems from conflicting goals. The possibility of failure/death/loss (and so on) is important to give success/survival/victory a meaning by adding the necessary scope to it. On the other hand, we want to experience things like bringing a story to a conclusion, seeing an established goal fulfilled, experience character growth and so on. So on one side, we want to include a "fail state/game over state" for the emotional factor, on the other side, we want to negate said "fail state/game over state" because the intellectual factor tells us that it will get in the way of us having fun.

I think the solution here is to borrow from videogames (and the anime Excel Saga) and reset to the beginnib of the fight if someone gets killed

Pauly
2019-04-30, 08:23 PM
Magic is as magic does.

Dead shot can make shots that are impossible given the accuracy of the firearms he has to work with. Yet in the DC world he is super skilled not super powered.

If you want to treat being super skilled as magical even when the creator explicitly says its mundane and non-magical then I suppose that’s your prerogative.

Another example from the era is Mandrake the Magician. Who uses the-hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye illusions and hypnosis to make people think he is actually magical.

You might as well say Bruce Willis is magical in Die Hard because he can dodge bullets faster than is humanly possible.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-30, 08:30 PM
Dead shot can make shots that are impossible given the accuracy of the firearms he has to work with. Yet in the DC world he is super skilled not super powered.

If you want to treat being super skilled as magical even when the creator explicitly says its mundane and non-magical then I suppose that’s your prerogative.


As noted repeatedly, IMO, "magical" for the purpose of this thread is any ability that is blatantly exceeds the normal capabilities of people within the setting, or that is otherwise fantastic.

Grossly exceeding the physical limits of the firearms you're working with is a "superpower" in the context of where to draw that line -- if for no other reason than trying to untangle the paradox created by those who insist they want their "totally not magical fighting guy" to be a match all the way up to level 20 (or similar in other systems) for the superpower-scale magic of D&D spellcasters.




Another example from the era is Mandrake the Magician. Who uses the-hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye illusions and hypnosis to make people think he is actually magical.


"Hollywood hypnosis" is far into the realm of the fantastic.




You might as well say Bruce Willis is magical in Die Hard because he can dodge bullets faster than is humanly possible.


I don't recall him dodging any bullets. I do recall a lot of magical cover (seriously, the things Hollywood thinks will stop a bullet...)

Beleriphon
2019-04-30, 09:18 PM
But there's a level in between that's really speculative and doesn't go quite so deep into the "how", but that does treat consistency and continuity very seriously and doesn't do throwaway solutions to the problem of the week.

Which is where a game like Mass Effect falls. The underlying physics of Element Zero and the "mass effect" are total BS, but they are treated consistently as if they were real, and some of the other things relating to space travel are handled at least passingly realistically (ie. how ships are "cloaked" in space for example).

Florian
2019-05-01, 07:03 AM
Magic is as magic does.

No.

Max you're basically the counter-point to the Homo Economicus that is proposed by various economic models. You know, everyone functions at a 100% all the time and everyone acquires enough knowledge to permanently make informed decisions.

There is nothing wrong with expanding the sphere of physics to include stuff that we now consider to be "magical". That is, unless you're realistic about it and also include the fact that most people will never reach that sphere.

Very, very few of us reach certain heights (or even a functional breath in a field), so it shouldn't be an issue of acknowledging something is possible and accepting that a rare person reached that height - unless you straight out say that you cannot envision that.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-01, 07:15 AM
No.

Max you're basically the counter-point to the Homo Economicus that is proposed by various economic models. You know, everyone functions at a 100% all the time and everyone acquires enough knowledge to permanently make informed decisions.

There is nothing wrong with expanding the sphere of physics to include stuff that we now consider to be "magical". That is, unless you're realistic about it and also include the fact that most people will never reach that sphere.

Very, very few of us reach certain heights (or even a functional breath in a field), so it shouldn't be an issue of acknowledging something is possible and accepting that a rare person reached that height - unless you straight out say that you cannot envision that.


As laid out earlier, distributions of capability don't work that way. If you move one end of the range, you move the other end. You can't just toss in people who exceed the far high end by orders of magnitude, or casually do the impossible, without moving the ends or changing what's possible, and still have a coherent setting -- and most superhero-genre comic books don't exactly have a coherent setting, I think we can agree.

And as we learn more about the human body, we see more of the hard limits of human capability -- just based on training and nutrition and the like, without artificial help, no human being will ever "double" or "half" the current world records in the various running, lifting, etc events. (There's a study that suggests a hypothetical limit of about 1.5 times faster for sprinting than the current record, but it's looking at the limits backwards so even that is dubious.)

King of Nowhere
2019-05-01, 08:00 PM
As laid out earlier, distributions of capability don't work that way. If you move one end of the range, you move the other end. You can't just toss in people who exceed the far high end by orders of magnitude, or casually do the impossible, without moving the ends or changing what's possible, and still have a coherent setting

Actually, you can widen your distribution.

let's take for example human height, because somebody already gave us figures. So average is 175 cm, standard deviation is 10 cm, so you have 67% of people between 165 and 185, and 95% between 155 and 195, and so on. chances of someone being over 250 cm is one in several billions, and i fact only a handful of people are recorded there.
And you cannot have a men 4 meters high in that ddistribution.

But if you widen your distribution, say your standard deviation is now 20 cm. So in this new distribution 67% of the population would be between 155 and 195. 2,5% of the population would be above 215 And you can get someone 4 meters high at the end of the curve.

So, you can have a coherent setting by postulating that human variability is much greater than it actually is.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-01, 08:25 PM
Actually, you can widen your distribution.

let's take for example human height, because somebody already gave us figures. So average is 175 cm, standard deviation is 10 cm, so you have 67% of people between 165 and 185, and 95% between 155 and 195, and so on. chances of someone being over 250 cm is one in several billions, and i fact only a handful of people are recorded there.
And you cannot have a men 4 meters high in that ddistribution.

But if you widen your distribution, say your standard deviation is now 20 cm. So in this new distribution 67% of the population would be between 155 and 195. 2,5% of the population would be above 215 And you can get someone 4 meters high at the end of the curve.

So, you can have a coherent setting by postulating that human variability is much greater than it actually is.

And yet where do we ever actually see that happen with people?

Florian
2019-05-01, 08:31 PM
As laid out earlier, distributions of capability don't work that way. If you move one end of the range, you move the other end. You can't just toss in people who exceed the far high end by orders of magnitude, or casually do the impossible, without moving the ends or changing what's possible, and still have a coherent setting -- and most superhero-genre comic books don't exactly have a coherent setting, I think we can agree.

Nope. We can't agree there as it seems.

Beleriphon
2019-05-01, 08:39 PM
And yet where do we ever actually see that happen with people?

Never, but the point is that you can change the expectations of the setting and get the results you want. So in essence what is happening is that by widening our deviation we're rolling guys like Batman into the realm of possible, if extremely unlikely results, rather than blatantly impossible. In essence DC and Marvel have a wider deviation than the real world does in terms of what constitutes humanly possible.

That doesn't necessarily answer anything about the original question though.

So why don't we try to come up with some things muggle must be to get a better handle on it (I like lists, so sue me). Rather than specifics some general principles.



Must be "normal" within the confines of their own setting
Must generally have little individual ability to affect the world

NichG
2019-05-01, 09:56 PM
What would be the reason to specify that a muggle must be normal and have little individual influence? Even in HP, the Prime Minister was still a muggle, but 'being Prime Minister of a country' is a 6 sigma attribute, and confers significant influence.

Kitten Champion
2019-05-02, 12:57 AM
Too much of this comes down to context, though I'm sticking to this within the realm of role-playing games.

A Muggle in the Marvel Universe can matter quite a bit - even ignoring high spec ones that are Superheroes-of-a-kind like the Punisher or those who can operate near their level like a Nick Fury - Muggles influence characters directly as the extended cast in most books and thus have elaborate significance in the world at large. People like Uncle Ben, Aunt May, Gwen Stacy, and J. Jonah Jameson shape Peter Parker's life as much or more than the super-villains he fights. Muggles also have indirect control over the wider meta-narrative. For instance in Marvel's Civil War Event, this is a case of a mundane form of power - the American legislative branch - interpreting the public will as they saw it into a series of sweeping laws that undermined the Superhero vigilante culture and reshaped how or how not these Heroes can operate. This ultimately leading to the titular conflict of the Events, and effecting quite a lot of the focal characters' lives in some fashion. In many ways, narratively-speaking, fighting with Galactus is easier for Heroes than dealing with Congress, as punching and stuff doesn't generally help there.

The question here is though, if I were to pick up the Marvel RPG and roll a character could I play a mundane person and still have some kind of meaningful presence in a game that I would enjoy? To which I would say, yes. I'd still need a relevant role to that setting of course, but I could play a normal cop working with the local heroes on something and keeping it on the down low, or a daring reporter investigating the Kingpin to my own peril, maybe I could be the girl or guy best friend to that teenage superhero who learns about their secret identity and winds up over their head in trying to help them. If that doesn't float my boat I could roll up an Agent of SHIELD - maybe even an AIM or Hydra Agent if I wanted to go that route - if not go to the final end of that chain of thought and roll a Hawkeye-style Avenger-level hero of my own.

With Harry Potter, a Muggle is virtually irrelevant to the narrative. Yes, occasionally the Dursleys exists as limited antagonists, though their relevance evaporates to merely being the cue for the reader that a summer has past and we're beginning another adventure in the Wizarding World where things really matter. None have narrative value beyond that, have any characterization, or are even named. That changes in Fantastic Beasts, but that's awful and deeply confusing so I'm ignoring it. This isn't a case though of Magic being the defining characteristic of what matters, it's that Muggles have no active role in the main setting of Harry Potter and the dividing line between the two is simply nigh-impenetrable given the only Muggles allowed to know Wizards even exists are Muggle-born parents and... we don't get any insight into them at all beyond a few passing lines by Hermione. Still, there are Squibs in Harry Potter who don't have any of the Power but are actors in the Wizarding World nonetheless - albeit of a more limited nature - and people who aren't supposed to use magic and mostly don't like Hagrid.

So, I wouldn't play a Muggle in a Harry Potter RPG, it would be akin to playing an average person on Earth in a Star Trek game. While you might have some personal relationship with the Heroes, you're still only going to come up once in a blue moon and no one cares when all the interesting parts of the setting are out there in space. You could, to extend the simile, play a civilian aboard a Star Fleet vessel with whatever idea you have as to how you'd contribute to the plot. Within the context of Harry Potter that could be the Hagrid-kind of character, who's savvy about the world and has a role in it that doesn't necessitate wand-waving and fake Latin. It's probably not a preferred path admittedly, there's no real Harry Potter RPG to see how it would go, but I think it would still be interesting. Still, Harry Potter is a setting for Wizards and Witches, and Muggles exists more to shape the physical and ethical borders of it than intrude upon it.

Then you have kind of the middle-ground between Harry Potter and Marvel, with something like Dresden. Where being a Muggle who discovers the supernatural world is not a bar to adventure, you can choose to be relevant to the setting and stop being a Muggle (narratively-speaking) so long as you're willing to look into the supernatural world and participate in it in some fashion. Dresden's Chicago is still Chicago, you just need a different kind of wisdom to see the magical elements, and a relatively mundane person savvy on the ins-and-outs of the universe can find creative ways to shape it. Perhaps with less firepower than a Harry Dresden, but still, you can be there and not be squared. While you won't be part of passing any Magical Registration Act through your local Congressperson or whatever like the MU, the hidden nature of the setting lets you and may require you to act yourself in the face of its often dangerous weirdness.

So, what can Muggles do? Well, in the context of role-playing games, quite a bit that's narratively valuable if not in a pure punch-someone-into-the-moon manner. So long as the system you're using isn't leading you directly and inexorably towards making a Special of its own devising. Whatever you could theoretically accomplish as a normal person in an Exalted game probably isn't going to be as cool as the player with the Exalted PC, which is why the game and its mechanics is framed around them as it is.

Frozen_Feet
2019-05-02, 03:31 AM
So why don't we try to come up with some things muggle must be to get a better handle on it (I like lists, so sue me). Rather than specifics some general principles.


Must be "normal" within the confines of their own setting
Must generally have little individual ability to affect the world


Already ahead of you. Underlines for emphasis:


A "muggle" is someone with no supernatural or extranormal abilities to set them apart from other members of their own species. Obviously, the baseline varies based on setting, otherwise, why even ask the title question? The greatest moving of goalposts depends on one simple question: are there non-supernatural non-humans with superhuman abilities? To give a real-life example: apes have different skeletal structure and musculature than humans, so a gorilla or chimpanzee can be much stronger than a human. So in a realistic game, if a player wanted to play a gorilla, they would be able to do some things a human could not, and another player playing a human would be able to do some things a gorilla could not.

[...]

{In response to questions like "Is Batman/Achilles/Captain America/etc. a muggle}

You might've as well asked "Is Clark Kent a muggle?" Afterall, his powers are not a result of magic, but rather, being from a different planet with higher gravity (etc.). Plus we know other Kryptonians could develop similar abilities if put in similar conditions (lower gravity world with a yellow sun). But even taking that into account, it quickly becomes obvious Clark is portrayed as extranormal even compared to other Kryptonians, and definitely is so if compared to humans of Earth.

So no, he's not a "muggle".

Pretty much no superhero is. With exception of some really lame ones. Rorschach from Watchmen is a muggle, but he's also a filthy hobo who kicks harmless goofballs down elevator shafts. His greatest feat is maiming some police officers trying to arrest him.

Rater202
2019-05-02, 01:50 PM
Nit-Pick on the above post regarding Muggles in Marvel: Nick Fury's not a Muggle--In the main universe he's got the Infinity Serum(Basically a watered down Elixir of Life, makes you young, harder to kill, and heal better but wears off after a couple of decades and then your real age catches up to you unless you get another dose) he gained the power of The Watcher shortly after it wore off.

Ultimate Nick(The one that MCU Nick is based on--Nick Fury being a black guy who looked like Samuel L Jackson was one of the things that separated Ultimate from Main) is a prototype Super Soldier--they tested the SSS on him and then used his blood and test data to perfect it for use on Ultimate Cap.

Nick Fury Junior, Main Nick's inexplicably black son, is a Muggle... Assuming he's not actually Ultimate Nick relocated to the main universe with his memories and those of the people around him altered to think he was always there as happened to Miles Morales and Jimmy Hudson. I'm honestly not sure if that's the case or not.

Beleriphon
2019-05-02, 07:08 PM
What would be the reason to specify that a muggle must be normal and have little individual influence? Even in HP, the Prime Minister was still a muggle, but 'being Prime Minister of a country' is a 6 sigma attribute, and confers significant influence.

And yet does squat all to stop a dozen wizards. One of the coneits of HP is that muggles are useless, even if they shouldn't be in context. I seriously doubt Voldemort can with stand a cruise missile or 105mm HE tank round to the face, or a .50 cal bullet to the back of the head.

NichG
2019-05-02, 11:35 PM
And yet does squat all to stop a dozen wizards. One of the coneits of HP is that muggles are useless, even if they shouldn't be in context. I seriously doubt Voldemort can with stand a cruise missile or 105mm HE tank round to the face, or a .50 cal bullet to the back of the head.

This isn't really the point though. If we're using the term 'muggle' to mean 'not a magic user' then that's one thing, but saying that a muggle by definition must be statistically ordinary becomes far more restrictive.

In terms of HP, let's face it - almost everyone is useless, that's why it's constantly up to bunch of kids to save the day. But if we were to say 'everyone who isn't Harry, Ron, Hermione, or Voldemort is a muggle' that would clearly be a misuse of the term. All dogs are mortal but not all mortals are dogs.

Frozen_Feet
2019-05-03, 12:28 AM
Yeeeeaaaah, narrative weight has zero things to do with being a muggle. Player characters are at minimum viewpoint characters whether they are or do anything special at all. You can easily have a slice-of-life game where the only wizard in town is a lazy bum and the muggles do everything worth of mention. Been there, done that.

Bohandas
2019-05-04, 11:34 AM
"Hollywood hypnosis" is far into the realm of the fantastic.

Agreed. Definitely magic.

Florian
2019-05-05, 05:58 AM
As noted repeatedly, IMO, "magical" for the purpose of this thread is any ability that is blatantly exceeds the normal capabilities of people within the setting, or that is otherwise fantastic.

Grossly exceeding the physical limits of the firearms you're working with is a "superpower" in the context of where to draw that line -- if for no other reason than trying to untangle the paradox created by those who insist they want their "totally not magical fighting guy" to be a match all the way up to level 20 (or similar in other systems) for the superpower-scale magic of D&D spellcasters.

I still think that it comes down to world building and implementation.

As I´ve already mentioned it, I'll use Max Frei/Echo as an example.

The world of Echo has a physical "heart of magic" that pumps out a steady stream of "magic" along a pattern of ley lines. In D&D lingo, the up flow is positive energy, the back flow is negative energy, the byproduct is a field that either radiates arcane magic or sucks arcane magic in.

The world of Echo differentiates between "theoretical magic" and "practical magic".

"Practical magic" means that one understands how physics interacts with these two fields and how to work with these expanded physics (What to do with excess arcane magic or how to feed in enough arcane magic). The standard example here are the cooking skills of a chef. As we are not talking about piling one layer atop the other layer, as in a "mundane" chef has a skill range of 1-10, a "magical" chef has a skill range of 11-20, but rather a parallel progression that interacts, between the actual skill at cooking and the skill at magic and where this interaction will lead to, the point you are making is circumvented. For example, the world of Echo doesn't have any source of caffeine, but it´s standard practice for everyone to drink coffee because everyone learns how create that particular effect, making coffee both magical and quite mundane.

"Theoretical Magic" is an entirely different beast altogether with two very different meanings. The common meaning is based on the interaction of the psyche, not physics, with one of the fields. What you learn cannot be unlearned and that knowledge alters a person. The requirements to dig deep into the power to kill/heal requires a deep acceptance of and commitment to, to either kill or heal. Standard example here are healers in Echo. To dig deeper into healing magic requires a certain mindset, digging deep enough will enforce that mindset even further, up to the point that a competent healer will have no chance but to heal, because that has now become his base nature, in a sense overwriting "free will".

The uncommon meaning of the term is expressed in the "Arcane Orders". Those are using the scientific method, but backwards. They try and succeed at provoking high-level effects from the fields, but then research the how and why to get there. In D&D lingo, that would be the "Order of the Fireball", that managed to discover this particular spell but don't have a clue of how and why it works.

Checks and balances:
1: We have the standard modeling of skills. It´s rare to find a 3 stars chef and also rare to find a prodigy surgeon, couple that with learning to be the equivalent of a 3 stars mage at the same time. While the peak is high, it´s also not very populated.
2: The costs involved. If you understand the feedback loop, you'll think hard about engaging in it unless your base nature is already in sync.
3: Magic is a limited resource. In D&D lingo, the heart pumps out the equivalent of 1 million byproduct Power Points in positive energy each day and receives back the equivalent of 1 million byproduct Power Points in negative energy to recycle. Once usage of byproduct power exceeds that point, the "river" starts to dry up and the world will die.

Clistenes
2019-05-05, 07:09 AM
I still think that it comes down to world building and implementation.

As I´ve already mentioned it, I'll use Max Frei/Echo as an example.

The world of Echo has a physical "heart of magic" that pumps out a steady stream of "magic" along a pattern of ley lines. In D&D lingo, the up flow is positive energy, the back flow is negative energy, the byproduct is a field that either radiates arcane magic or sucks arcane magic in.

The world of Echo differentiates between "theoretical magic" and "practical magic".

"Practical magic" means that one understands how physics interacts with these two fields and how to work with these expanded physics (What to do with excess arcane magic or how to feed in enough arcane magic). The standard example here are the cooking skills of a chef. As we are not talking about piling one layer atop the other layer, as in a "mundane" chef has a skill range of 1-10, a "magical" chef has a skill range of 11-20, but rather a parallel progression that interacts, between the actual skill at cooking and the skill at magic and where this interaction will lead to, the point you are making is circumvented. For example, the world of Echo doesn't have any source of caffeine, but it´s standard practice for everyone to drink coffee because everyone learns how create that particular effect, making coffee both magical and quite mundane.

"Theoretical Magic" is an entirely different beast altogether with two very different meanings. The common meaning is based on the interaction of the psyche, not physics, with one of the fields. What you learn cannot be unlearned and that knowledge alters a person. The requirements to dig deep into the power to kill/heal requires a deep acceptance of and commitment to, to either kill or heal. Standard example here are healers in Echo. To dig deeper into healing magic requires a certain mindset, digging deep enough will enforce that mindset even further, up to the point that a competent healer will have no chance but to heal, because that has now become his base nature, in a sense overwriting "free will".

The uncommon meaning of the term is expressed in the "Arcane Orders". Those are using the scientific method, but backwards. They try and succeed at provoking high-level effects from the fields, but then research the how and why to get there. In D&D lingo, that would be the "Order of the Fireball", that managed to discover this particular spell but don't have a clue of how and why it works.

Checks and balances:
1: We have the standard modeling of skills. It´s rare to find a 3 stars chef and also rare to find a prodigy surgeon, couple that with learning to be the equivalent of a 3 stars mage at the same time. While the peak is high, it´s also not very populated.
2: The costs involved. If you understand the feedback loop, you'll think hard about engaging in it unless your base nature is already in sync.
3: Magic is a limited resource. In D&D lingo, the heart pumps out the equivalent of 1 million byproduct Power Points in positive energy each day and receives back the equivalent of 1 million byproduct Power Points in negative energy to recycle. Once usage of byproduct power exceeds that point, the "river" starts to dry up and the world will die.

In the setting I have been working (but never used in actual play, since I am still trying to decide what system fits it better), magic is pretty much like that... plenty of shamans, priest-mages, warlocks and similar have developed all kind of theoretical explanations of how magic works, usually resorting to gods or spirits, but the sage-philosophers who actually try to study and understand magic using logic have come to the conclusion that nobody has any clue about what magic really is...

In their own words: "We believe that, when we do magic, we subconsciously use a part of ourselves that we can't perceive with our senses and that we aren't even consciously aware of in order to manipulate some forces of nature that are unknown to us and that we can't perceive in any way in order to achieve an effect on the shared consensus universe we can perceive and become aware of using our senses and study with our logic.

It is impossible, for the most part, to apply the experimental method in order to study magic, since we can't perceive the subject of the experiment, which we aren't even aware of it, nor of the tools we use to influence it, or of the conditions we could alter in order to try to obtain different results...

At most we can modify the rituals we use, but since we can't perceive the connection between the ritual and the effect, the most we can achieve is to log what modifications prevent the desired effect from happening. Any attempt to predict the outcome of a modified ritual has failed miserably... most of the time, a modified ritual keeps working as before, or just stops working, very rarely producing an altered effect that could help us track the link between cause and effect... and we still haven't a clue about what are the factors that make a ritual stop working...

At the present time we are like animals, able to learn from experience that a given action consistently produces a certain effect, but without any knowledge of the why or how..."

ExplodingRat
2019-05-07, 11:55 PM
I suppose cheating death is one of them. One of my fellow party members kept rolling nat 20s on his death saves, which we house ruled that meant he got back up with 1 HP. He wouldn't stop rolling them. Infinite luck = infinite immortality, until someone just disintegrates him I guess.