How super can you get while still looking like our world?

[Anymage]

I was reading about The Boys and there was a discussion about countermeasures and counter-countermeasures that could be taken when superheroes were taken into account, and it got me wondering something tangential.

You could have a world where the laws of physics and biology made some people twice as strong and durable as humans on earth, while still looking largely like our own world. Sports might be more intense and some technological aids to muscle power might not be needed if you had low level supers like that, but overall it'd be relatable.

A world where a human shaped being can fly unassisted will need new physics that could be exploited towards other ends. A world where super geniuses can make miraculous technology will also be a world where that technology can be replicated for the common good. A world where supertech and high-end superhumans can tap some mysterious energy supply will look very different from our world and how the bulk of our energy comes from carbon. Add in the ways that society adapts certain protocols to not be completely run over by superheroes, and the world will look very different from ours.

So I'm just curious. Assuming that everybody played everything intelligently and realistically, how much power and what sort of powers could you bring to bear before the world bore little resemblance to our own?

[warty goblin]

Cynically, the cutoff would seem to occur about the point your super-powered person becomes - by whatever means - functionally bulletproof. Or cruise missile proof at the outside. Once you hit that point, you have entities to whom the the state's monopoly of force no longer functionally applies. They get basically a one-person veto on the law applying to them. Given a modicum of intelligence this can easily be leveraged for popular support. History suggests that what follows is not going to be pretty.

[Mechalich]

A world where a human shaped being can fly unassisted will need new physics that could be exploited towards other ends.

This is one of the things you need to avoid, actually, otherwise any 'superpower' gets reverse engineered and you've just created a science fiction story where humans assimilate lost alien technology. Basically you need to contort things such that whatever the explanation behind the superpowers happens to be it's sufficiently advanced, so that it can't be treated like a technology by human science (this also means advanced tech aliens and supers do not mix well).


A world where super geniuses can make miraculous technology will also be a world where that technology can be replicated for the common good.

Or the common evil, yes, but either way, if you allow supers with advanced intelligence then they drive the development of the world above and beyond what conventional supers - god-like entities like Superman excepted - can do to change it. Most common superhero settings elide this, which leads to the TVTrope of 'Reed Richards is useless' regarding how such characters are forbidden from allowing their technology to change the world at all because reasons.


Cynically, the cutoff would seem to occur about the point your super-powered person becomes - by whatever means - functionally bulletproof. Or cruise missile proof at the outside. Once you hit that point, you have entities to whom the the state's monopoly of force no longer functionally applies. They get basically a one-person veto on the law applying to them. Given a modicum of intelligence this can easily be leveraged for popular support. History suggests that what follows is not going to be pretty.

This is getting towards what happens. Essentially the order of the world breaks down if you allow supers with sufficient personal power that it exceeds the institutional power that can be brought to bear against them. It's not something specific like being bulletproof - Netflix-version Luke Cage is bulletproof, but he could easily be captured and restrained with say, a few bulldozers - but there is a sort of soft boundary regarding how much force would be needed to take down a super before they are effectively impossible to restrain.

I'd offer that any character who can defeat a tank platoon - that's four main battle tanks - is probably over the line, simply because it would be difficult to apply more force than that to a single individual. There are some caveats though, supers who have to grow to giant size to leverage their power can project more raw force because more force can be directed against them (this is one of many reasons why dinosaurs aren't actually particularly scary in the modern world), while highly evasive but low durability characters who are vulnerable to sniping or otherwise being taken unawares can also be allowed somewhat more power.

I actually find that Captain America - especially as envisioned in his first MCU film - is probably a good example of how far you can push things, especially without his cheat-tech shield. There's a lot of stuff he can do that other people can't, but he's not winning WW2 by himself and he'd fare considerably worse against modern armies. The movie itself even acknowledges this, when Tommy Lee Jones' General character makes it clear that one super-soldier isn't what he needed from the project and that Cap is arguably more useful as a propaganda piece than a warrior, something that remains true until the presence of Red Skull on the opposite is introduced.

That also leads nicely into the other consideration: you've got to keep the numbers down. Our world currently has 7.8 billion people living on it which means that if you allow supers at a rate of even 1 in 1000000 you're getting thousands of supers (you can reduce this down by making it so that superpowers only manifest in 'adults' since the global population skews young), and large nations would be able to put together tactical supers units as a consequence. So even that's too many. I think you really can't get away with more than a few hundred supers globally, and you have to prevent them from acting in concert somehow.

[Accelerator]

The question is... how early is this?

Stone-age man with the power to throw fireballs and minor pyrokinesis is not anything useful in a world of grenade launchers and flamethrowers, but is a god amongst men ina world of fire-hardened sticks.

How early is this, and just who gets the powers? If supers can, in the package of a lone human being, be slightly more durable than a tank and be just as fast as a car, all in the package of a human being, with the offensive capability of a missile launcher, then there's probably going to be a dozen or so revolutions as hated dictators find themselves blown to bits by angry revolutionaries, as bullets bounce off their skin.

Most of the world isn't like the US. People may complain, but using strength of arms to get your own rule and power is pretty much procedure in other parts of the world.

[Rodin]

That also leads nicely into the other consideration: you've got to keep the numbers down. Our world currently has 7.8 billion people living on it which means that if you allow supers at a rate of even 1 in 1000000 you're getting thousands of supers (you can reduce this down by making it so that superpowers only manifest in 'adults' since the global population skews young), and large nations would be able to put together tactical supers units as a consequence. So even that's too many. I think you really can't get away with more than a few hundred supers globally, and you have to prevent them from acting in concert somehow.

This is why I don't have much of a problem with The Boys. As far as we've seen, Supes are an American phenomenon*. They're also on that "1 in a million" scale, putting the absolute number of Supes at less than a 1000 in the entire population. Add power level into that and the number of threatening Supes drops even further. Lamplighter doesn't do anything a flamethrower couldn't reproduce, and The Deep would get his ass kicked by the Coast Guard never mind the actual Navy. Those are former members of the top hero team that exists - most are like the blind dude and the archer guy. Peak human, but not anything that requires extra security to deal with.

Protecting against a Supe attack would be like walking around in a heat suit in case the air around you spontaneously combusts. The odds of it happening are really low and you're much more likely to get hit by a bus.

The only problem comes from the ludicrously powerful types like Homelander and Stormfront. They're the sort of threat that you would design special countermeasures against. Of course, just because we haven't seen countermeasures doesn't mean they don't exist.


Since Vought distributed it only in America as far as I can tell. Now that Homelander has distributed it worldwide it's going to become a global problem, and the world would have to change to deal with it. There hasn't been time for that in the narrative so far.

[TeChameleon]

*shrug*

If you look even a hair below the surface, high-power settings like the DC Universe only resemble our world on a very superficial level. You have eldritch horrors lurking below the ocean (and Aquaman down there kicking their asses so hard that they blow out their eardrums when they fart), alien invasions happening so often that I'm amazed that they aren't included in the Metropolis weather report, every second glowing thing you touch will cause you to sprout superpowers (seriously, I once tried mentally listing the various items of power from the DCU- not even counting permanent power-granting stuff like cyborgization or the Quantum Field or Speed Force or whatever- and there were more than I could comfortably keep track of. Power Rings, Cosmic Rods, and Miraclo, oh my!), magic is real, as are I'm not sure how many mutually contradictory religions all at the same time, somehow...

And yet it all somehow comes in a package that more-or-less resembles the modern world. Sometimes, it just happens 'because the narrative said so'.

... although I don't think realism and intensely depressing psycho-supers is necessarily one and the same :smallconfused:

[Vahnavoi]

You have to consider motivations of these supermen: you can have absurdly powerful individuals who won't really change anything in the society, if they're the kind to bugger off to outer space at first opportunity. In fact, when and where supermen have interest in preserving the status quo, there's a tipping point where the more power they have, the more stable society will be.

Also remember: "our world" is inherently a moving target and chaotic in its own right. It's hard enough to say for sure how "our world" will be in 20 years in absence of any supermen. It's not possible to make accurate hypotheticals without state-of-the-art understanding of how the world is now.

[Mechalich]

You have to consider motivations of these supermen: you can have absurdly powerful individuals who won't really change anything in the society, if they're the kind to bugger off to outer space at first opportunity. In fact, when and where supermen have interest in preserving the status quo, there's a tipping point where the more power they have, the more stable society will be.

The overwhelming majority of people, if you suddenly gave them superpowers in 2020, would attempt to leverage them to make vast amounts of money. There's obviously various ways to do that, especially given variable powers, but that's going to be the number one goal (in fact there would probably be a very large number of people who, if suddenly manifesting superpowers, would try to find a way to sell those powers off directly). Behind that would be those who tried to use their powers to advance strongly held ideological goals, political, religious, etc., whether through persuasion, violence, or simply the power of celebrity. Probably a fairly distant third would be those people who tried to use their powers to produce some sort of grand scientific or artistic achievement. And of course there would be those people who either already were, or who broke down as a result of acquiring powers, and responded with some kind of super-power enhanced severe mental illness.


Also remember: "our world" is inherently a moving target and chaotic in its own right. It's hard enough to say for sure how "our world" will be in 20 years in absence of any supermen. It's not possible to make accurate hypotheticals without state-of-the-art understanding of how the world is now.

Political structures change rapidly, but the patterns of human life are considerably more stable, and the mostly change in the balance of fractions of output and proportion of population between the labor, middle, and rentier classes. Low-powered supers are likely to simply assimilate into the rentier class in some way - for instance by replacing current sports stars with super spectacles - but it's different for truly high-powered supers who represent the arrival of a brand new 'god' class imposed on humanity that has never actually existed before.

That's really the big power-level break point. So long as institutional power remains able to match the personal power of supers, then the supers are forced to assimilate into society and ultimately their personal power is mostly going to be translated into institutional power of their own. Becoming ridiculously rich - a form of institutional power even many superhero settings openly acknowledge - is an easy way to achieve this transition. However, when personal power exceeds institutional power, the supers are able to shape the institutions to their whims, and that's when the world changes. Superman: Red Son is partly a thought experiment along those lines and one of the better stories told within that framework. At the same time it's also a good example of how it's much easier for a being with immense personal power to destroy existing institutions rather than create new ones. Though the Soviet Superman can instantly topple Stalin, actually running the government of that alternate universe USSR proves rather more complicated than a few blasts of the old heat vision. It is a rare, though critically not unknown, superhero scenario that contains anyone with the power of 'ultimate governance' (Michael A Stackpole's Age of Discovery novels is one of the few cases I can think of with such a character).

[Accelerator]

It is a rare, though critically not unknown, superhero scenario that contains anyone with the power of 'ultimate governance' (Michael A Stackpole's Age of Discovery novels is one of the few cases I can think of with such a character).

The only superhuman power of governance I know of is Exalted with bureaucracy charms.

[Seppl]

The only superhuman power of governance I know of is Exalted with bureaucracy charms.One could argue that the Dune series (especially book 4, God Emperor of Dune) is about super-governance. While in-universe it is only a derived power, coming from the real power of futuresight (coupled with strong conventional training in the art of government), one of the main themes of the books is how such super-beings could shape the present and future of human society as a whole. Which is looking decidedly unlike our world, meaning that super-futuresight and super-governance are out of the question regarding superpowers that would not change the world.

[Ibrinar]

The question is... how early is this?

Stone-age man with the power to throw fireballs and minor pyrokinesis is not anything useful in a world of grenade launchers and flamethrowers, but is a god amongst men ina world of fire-hardened sticks.

How early is this, and just who gets the powers? If supers can, in the package of a lone human being, be slightly more durable than a tank and be just as fast as a car, all in the package of a human being, with the offensive capability of a missile launcher, then there's probably going to be a dozen or so revolutions as hated dictators find themselves blown to bits by angry revolutionaries, as bullets bounce off their skin.

Most of the world isn't like the US. People may complain, but using strength of arms to get your own rule and power is pretty much procedure in other parts of the world.

Yeah if superpowers had always existed culture would be much different. The rare superpowered would likely be revered.

But for it being new hmm. Combat wise blasting power without any defensive powers can probably go relatively high before changing the world. The firepower of a tank in a human sized package would be terrifying but if powers are rare and bullets or explosions still kill them, then most stable societies could deal with it. And I think you can go higher than tank with that being true. If there is no way to tell whether someone has powers it would make killing a politician or something easier though. As others said combine offensive power with the ability to shrug of most normal weapons and things change.

Mad science powers are pretty much guaranteed world changers af they aren't super rare or inherently can't be mass produced. Powers like mind control can change much if the users want to. Personal teleportation wouldn't change the world I think but the ability to create persistent portals would if it allowed to travel between countries with a step. Powers like truth detection, mind reading, seeing the past can change part of the world, for instance the justice system.

[Lord Raziere]

*shrug*

If you look even a hair below the surface, high-power settings like the DC Universe only resemble our world on a very superficial level. You have eldritch horrors lurking below the ocean (and Aquaman down there kicking their asses so hard that they blow out their eardrums when they fart), alien invasions happening so often that I'm amazed that they aren't included in the Metropolis weather report, every second glowing thing you touch will cause you to sprout superpowers (seriously, I once tried mentally listing the various items of power from the DCU- not even counting permanent power-granting stuff like cyborgization or the Quantum Field or Speed Force or whatever- and there were more than I could comfortably keep track of. Power Rings, Cosmic Rods, and Miraclo, oh my!), magic is real, as are I'm not sure how many mutually contradictory religions all at the same time, somehow...

And yet it all somehow comes in a package that more-or-less resembles the modern world. Sometimes, it just happens 'because the narrative said so'.


Remember: Any modern day is possible as long as all the villains are under unspoken agreement to take turns attempting to change it one crazy supervillain plan at a time.

[Tvtyrant]

Pretty dang super if most super powers suck. My Hero Academia does a decent job with everyone having nonsense powers, and a tiny fraction of people have decent ones. Early on a group of adults whose powers were basically to be differently shaped lost to a smaller group of school children who had decent powers (which is why the show is about them.) Of those 4 are actually high level supers, the rest are middling (like permanent invisibility or being a frog.)

If a world of superpowers like "heat tea" or "thumbs like lighters" is the norm and 1/1,000,000 are actual supers then it's pretty easy to just shoot people at the top end with increasingly large guns and missiles.

[Tyndmyr]

A lot of it's about numbers. If you have one Superman, the world is mostly the same. Yeah, he's a celebrity, and he maybe changes how crime works in his city or something, but ultimately, he's one dude. He can't be everywhere at once.

If you have all of the heroes from DC or something, it gets a lot different. There's a lot of celebrities, so they start displacing other celebrities. Maybe people pay less attention to sports, or to politics, or to actors. It's hard to say *exactly* who loses out, but things start changing. New, powerful powers are probably news stories. If dangerous powers are a thing, that affects reactions a lot. Supervillains being routine would screw life up in all kinds of ways.

Principles like equality take something of a hit. If a person literally can do whatever he wants to you, and nobody can stop him, are you really equals? Probably not. Superman, as he stands, is mostly a hopeful icon. The idea that one person, granted an awful lot of power, would choose to use it all to do good.

This is probably not realistic as a general rule. Most people with power are not saints. Some people, if given sufficient power, would eventually become full on monsters. Some powers make this a huge problem. An evil flash deciding to kill people would be mostly unstoppable even by many superheros. We can imagine being lucky enough that one guy gets superpowers and is a good dude, but the larger the number of people, the more certain it becomes that somebody is going to start misusing them. Most probably won't be monsters, but just people that would like making money. Still, that's going to change society.

You can get away with much higher numbers if the power tier is lower. Consider Looper, where a substantial percentage of the population has tk, but it's so minor that it's basically a card-trick tier thing, not practically useful for much of anything. That doesn't change the world much.

I don't mind the Boys, because in part, we're exploring exactly this. What happens when the wheels come off. There's no really good reason why the world of DC looks like it does, but there are very, very good reasons why the world of the Boys looks like it does.


The only superhuman power of governance I know of is Exalted with bureaucracy charms.

Worm has thinker powers that often relate to governance. Accord is really, really good at making plans. He has a plan to solve world hunger, and it is, apparently, fairly effective. But he can't really convince anyone to let him, a super villain known for deathtraps to, yknow, run everything.

Sort of a Doctor Doom problem.

[Rodin]

Pretty dang super if most super powers suck. My Hero Academia does a decent job with everyone having nonsense powers, and a tiny fraction of people have decent ones. Early on a group of adults whose powers were basically to be differently shaped lost to a smaller group of school children who had decent powers (which is why the show is about them.) Of those 4 are actually high level supers, the rest are middling (like permanent invisibility or being a frog.)

If a world of superpowers like "heat tea" or "thumbs like lighters" is the norm and 1/1,000,000 are actual supers then it's pretty easy to just shoot people at the top end with increasingly large guns and missiles.

A world like MHA becomes difficult through sheer randomness. Your large guns and missiles are doing fine until a super appears with teleportation who can pop into the armory with a bomb. Or someone shows up with the ability "can remote control large guns and missiles". Or someone who can reverse time, create sparks in the magazines, mind control the operators, etc. etc.

You quickly reach a point where the only solution to a group of supers with unknown powers is "a bigger group of supers with better powers". Even then it's not concrete - a relatively weak power can beat a stronger one by taking it by surprise.

[Tvtyrant]

A world like MHA becomes difficult through sheer randomness. Your large guns and missiles are doing fine until a super appears with teleportation who can pop into the armory with a bomb. Or someone shows up with the ability "can remote control large guns and missiles". Or someone who can reverse time, create sparks in the magazines, mind control the operators, etc. etc.

You quickly reach a point where the only solution to a group of supers with unknown powers is "a bigger group of supers with better powers". Even then it's not concrete - a relatively weak power can beat a stronger one by taking it by surprise.

Yeah, but if they are weak to guns and missiles then it can be fairly smooth sailing. There will always be challenges to the status quo, I just don't think its quite as hamfisted there as say Marvel where there are tens of thousands of high powered mutants and thousands of other people with powers or DC with its deities that only show up to get smacked in the face once in a while.

Sanderson's Steel Heart or Looper both do a decent job showing what superpowers could do to society if strong enough, but they are also super boring. Practical Guide to Evil has superhero types inside of a high fantasy story and it works okay, but fantasy and hero tropes are literally divine narratives so it is pretty meta.

[JeenLeen]

I think Wildbow's Worm (if there's a divide of good and evil supes) or Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart and its sequels (if supes are innately evil) do a good job. The Boys probably also does a good job, in a "if supes are mostly evil or at least selfish" angle. All have supes as relatively new.

All have supers that range from relatively minor powers (Worm less-so) to Superman-esque levels.

In Worm, they are a major factor in policing cities, since otherwise villains would be able to do too much. Some places are de facto owned by villains.

In Steelheart, all supes are evil, and government has basically collapsed as cities get destroyed or made into city-states by whoever runs them. I forget if a government technically exists or not, but de facto it doesn't.

In The Boys, it seems kinda like Worm except there aren't villains to require the heroes (and the heroes are mostly working with one company instead of a government branch), so they get more celebrity and have less threats.

In both Worm and The Boys, society is mostly as it is in the real world. Sure, in Worm, being a henchman is a career path and it's not uncommon to have a supervillain attack, but most cities and people live mostly as they do in the real world--just with a potential catastrophe at any moment. The real-world impact for individual people in The Boys is mostly related to media and a chance of being killed by accident while supes fight criminals. But for the average person, probably not much change of it significantly impacting their life.

The Steelheart completely changes mundane life, on the other hand.

[Anymage]

I don't mind the Boys, because in part, we're exploring exactly this. What happens when the wheels come off. There's no really good reason why the world of DC looks like it does, but there are very, very good reasons why the world of the Boys looks like it does.

The discussion in The Boys thread that sparked this idea was...
One group of people with a few high placed friends but very little clout beyond that saw someone get assassinated by having their head up and explode. And super terrorists being smuggled into the country was something that was known to happen. Cue fans second guessing how much Congress should've been on watch for random heads exploding and what protective measures they should've taken.

With the not unreasonable expectation that if public figures had to prepare for situations far beyond the capacities of a mundane human from our world - including the requirement to carry detectable weapons in order to do damage on a significantly increased scale - those protocols would quickly require major paranoid ramp ups in any location that's meant to be secure.

It's little things like that which even mid-tier supers would require massive workarounds for.

[Seppl]

A lot of it's about numbers. If you have one Superman, the world is mostly the same. Yeah, he's a celebrity, and he maybe changes how crime works in his city or something, but ultimately, he's one dude. He can't be everywhere at once.

They don't have to be everywhere at once. One unstoppable Superman could enforce their own sense of morality on the whole world by holding anyone in a position of power personally accountable. The Superman does not have to stop every injustice themselves, if the people, with the power to stop the injustice, will actually do so for fear of the Superman's "divine" wrath.

[Rydiro]

Worm has thinker powers that often relate to governance. Accord is really, really good at making plans. He has a plan to solve world hunger, and it is, apparently, fairly effective. But he can't really convince anyone to let him, a super villain known for deathtraps to, yknow, run everything.Accord has the most unnecessary power of all supers. Drama and plot demand that every single one of his plans is useless. He does not impact the story even once with or without his powers. He is just a stubborn obstacle for the real characters.
Second most useless is the guy who gets stronger the longer the fight goes on. His power doesn't ramp up fast enough in this super-powered rocket-tag, so he always gets taken out early.

[Telonius]

I think that the thing that would make a superpowered world bear very little resemblance to our world, would be something in the area of mind-control powers. People have an incredible ability to normalize any situation. Whatever crazy stuff is happening, people will still be people - unless their thoughts and motivations have been somehow altered.

[Mechalich]

I think that the thing that would make a superpowered world bear very little resemblance to our world, would be something in the area of mind-control powers. People have an incredible ability to normalize any situation. Whatever crazy stuff is happening, people will still be people - unless their thoughts and motivations have been somehow altered.

Mind control is certain one of the many extremely destabilizing power sets out there, though it's hardly alone. Physical boosts are actually the least destabilizing, because they mostly represent an increase in force and human society is pretty good at increasing force right back. Being forced to confront a super-powered bank robbery with a tank platoon would be fairly ridiculous the first time, but at least you could do it. Something like mind control is completely outside context to existing solution sets. Powers like cyberkinesis could absolutely destabilize the modern world, as could esoteric abilities like precognition (if you could see even one second into the future you could wreck the stock market utterly).

[Accelerator]

Accord has the most unnecessary power of all supers. Drama and plot demand that every single one of his plans is useless. He does not impact the story even once with or without his powers. He is just a stubborn obstacle for the real characters.
Second most useless is the guy who gets stronger the longer the fight goes on. His power doesn't ramp up fast enough in this super-powered rocket-tag, so he always gets taken out early.

Accord has a crippling weakness.

Author fiat. Seriously, there are some issues with worm. It's pretty ok, but so far, the author has written it so that superpowers can't improve the world at large. Powers go to the people who would be most prone to misuse it or use it for fighting, Tinker powers can't be mass produced, and mass matter production can't be used to make buildings.

[Accelerator]

as could esoteric abilities like precognition (if you could see even one second into the future you could wreck the stock market utterly).

Question.

Wouldn't that make them bring you in for questioning for things like insider trading? Or at least, try to bar you from it?

[warty goblin]

Question.

Wouldn't that make them bring you in for questioning for things like insider trading? Or at least, try to bar you from it?

With precognition on the order of a second to a minute, probably not. At that level you wouldn't generally be buying or selling in response to major news or world events. You'd be buying this stock now, then selling it 35 seconds later because you knew the price would go up a tiny amount before dropping again.

This is already a thing that is done, just using predictive modeling instead of precognition. Arguably it wouldn't really make a person all that much of a killing, simply because a human does not have the ability to output data at the volume neccessary to make this financially useful.

[Lord Raziere]

I mean the only power that might not change the world if people had it would be Luck Manipulation. why this? well, while incredibly powerful its incredibly abstract and hard to prove is a real power while also being dependent on factors that already exist. people have strange or fantastic luck all the time in our world and people who could manipulate that luck to make sure they benefit or other people benefit well....well an outside observer wouldn't see anything super going on, just a lot of weird coincidences going on in rapid succession. you can technically prove that someone is incredibly manipulating luck by making them flip coins and rolling dice to and telling them to make it always roll a 20 or something like that, but fundamentally speaking you can't really do anything about it. you might be able to manipulate luck to luckily make us find solutions to various problems but they would look an awful lot like the solutions we would've found anyways. any superhero would at best, look like an action movie hero: incredibly improbable and badass but still just a guy with a gun going around shooting people.

the only question of a luck world is what happens when two luck manipulators try to get jackpot in the lottery, but there is always only one winner ticket so whatever happens there can't be a duplicate result, meaning their luck manipulation will either cancel each other out or one will prove to be stronger. all other games involving chance would just have to make them go on the honor system of telling them to please not use it, because anyone luck manipulator enough to make all their rolls good could also manipulate luck so that people luckily do not notice. assuming of course anyone believes that luck manipulators exist if they don't see it for themselves.

[Sapphire Guard]

I expect a lot of world leaders have staff super bodyguards. If you have powers, but aren't interested in ruling, the next best thing would be 'work for me, and I'll give you a good life'

[warty goblin]

I expect a lot of world leaders have staff super bodyguards. If you have powers, but aren't interested in ruling, the next best thing would be 'work for me, and I'll give you a good life'

Which means you're also about half an inch from those fun periods in the late Roman Empire, when the Praetorian Guard liked to play "who do we want as Emperor this week"

[Tyndmyr]

Accord has the most unnecessary power of all supers. Drama and plot demand that every single one of his plans is useless. He does not impact the story even once with or without his powers. He is just a stubborn obstacle for the real characters.
Second most useless is the guy who gets stronger the longer the fight goes on. His power doesn't ramp up fast enough in this super-powered rocket-tag, so he always gets taken out early.

Oh, I entirely agree. Far stronger thinkers exist in that universe, but Accord made a good example that wouldn't risk spoiling anything important about the story. The guy's plans are pretty irrelevant to the plot.

I would agree that mind control screws with...all kinds of stuff. As a power, it also sort of leans evil. It's usually reasonably hard to use that for good, yknow?

[Accelerator]

Oh, I entirely agree. Far stronger thinkers exist in that universe, but Accord made a good example that wouldn't risk spoiling anything important about the story. The guy's plans are pretty irrelevant to the plot.

I would agree that mind control screws with...all kinds of stuff. As a power, it also sort of leans evil. It's usually reasonably hard to use that for good, yknow?

There are quite a few things it can be used for. For example, dealing with hostages or extracting information without torture. Then there's the theraupetic uses. Got something you don't like about yourself? Call up the hypno-therapist to do some psychic surgery on you.

And Accord's plans were significant in Ward, Worm's sequel

[Tyndmyr]

There are quite a few things it can be used for. For example, dealing with hostages or extracting information without torture. Then there's the theraupetic uses. Got something you don't like about yourself? Call up the hypno-therapist to do some psychic surgery on you.

Mind control won't necessarily fix you after the control's released tho, right? And giving someone else power over...you, for forever, seems pretty bad. Combat, sure, it works there, but jacking someone's body seems, generally, at least sort of evil. At best, it ends up as a lesser of two evils scenario, but the applications for pure evil are extremely broad in comparison.


And Accord's plans were significant in Ward, Worm's sequel

Ugh, Ward. That whole plot was...rough.

[Accelerator]

Mind control won't necessarily fix you after the control's released tho, right? And giving someone else power over...you, for forever, seems pretty bad. Combat, sure, it works there, but jacking someone's body seems, generally, at least sort of evil. At best, it ends up as a lesser of two evils scenario, but the applications for pure evil are extremely broad in comparison.



Ugh, Ward. That whole plot was...rough.

I guess there were some problems with just 'what' kind of mind control we get. I mean, I wouldn't mind someone snipping away my tendency for intrusive thoughts and ADHD.

Ward has its own problems. Problems which can be reflected here.

For starters, superhuman versus human conflict. Doesn't even need to have big powers. People hate each other over tribal names, ancestries, sexualities and skin colour. Let alone something like superpowers.

[Tyndmyr]

I guess there were some problems with just 'what' kind of mind control we get. I mean, I wouldn't mind someone snipping away my tendency for intrusive thoughts and ADHD.

I think the *most* common rendition isn't so much permanently tinkering with the mind as it is temporarily controlling it. Which is often ended via willpower on the part of the hero, somehow. Usually after control is rested back, the hero is back to how they were.

Mind-modifying powers would be...also interesting, but also prone to some horrifying misuse.


Ward has its own problems. Problems which can be reflected here.

For starters, superhuman versus human conflict. Doesn't even need to have big powers. People hate each other over tribal names, ancestries, sexualities and skin colour. Let alone something like superpowers.

Yeah. The resolution to that conflict was deeply unsatisfying. And it's fair to note that the world of Ward looked increasingly unlike ours. Perhaps that particular rendition was a bit unrealistic, but the fact that it would change dramatically given enough world ending threats is fair. Eventually it's going to diverge enough to be essentially sci fi.

[Ramza00]

Why would you want a story about superpowers while looking like this world? I ask this for an unintentional consequence of this is all worlds are a mixture of forces clashing, by introducing an X factor it would be normal for a new status quo to arise.

But by creating supers while remaining similar to our world you would need some form of neutralizing forces and thus often in those said stories you have things like reactionary governments using force to create some form of hierarchy the reactionaries see as good.

Thus the illusion of change combine with being familiar enough to our world often creates a flawed simulacra in the process. It will feel as unnatural as that pleasantville movie. Something that looks at first glance like our world but in the end is very gilded, a veneer painting that hides a corrupt underbody that drives the artifice.

[Tyndmyr]

There's nothing inherently wrong with a different world, but most stories want to keep a world at least vaguely like ours. It makes the story telling easier, people can just assume that if something isn't detailed, it works the same way as in our world. You can spend less time on world building and more time on plot.

DC and Marvel kind of try to keep to that, sort of...because it's easy on new readers to figure out what's happening. Pop open a book, gotham's got batman beating up a crime kingpin, you're pretty much up to speed. The further your world diverges, the more explaining you have to do.

Sometimes fantasy or space operas will get way out there, but they run the risk of bloating out the books with explaining that slows down the story. Not impossible to resolve, but it *is* more of a challenge.

[Ramza00]

DC and Marvel kind of try to keep to that, sort of...because it's easy on new readers to figure out what's happening. Pop open a book, gotham's got batman beating up a crime kingpin, you're pretty much up to speed. The further your world diverges, the more explaining you have to do.

I would argue that DC and Marvel are not our world. Sure the land masses are the same, some of the countries are the same, and supposedly the government structures of these countries are similar, but the worlds do not feel like ours anymore.

Furthermore the points I made also apply to even those worlds even though I feel those worlds abandon the premise that they are like our world. Looping back with the OP in DC with Superman and Wonderwoman, or Marvel with the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, and Spider-Man it no longer feels like our world. If it did feel like our world we would say something even more Fantastic than those comics. :smallsmile: :smalltongue:

[dps]

This is getting towards what happens. Essentially the order of the world breaks down if you allow supers with sufficient personal power that it exceeds the institutional power that can be brought to bear against them.

I think that this is mostly correct, but how much institutional power can be used against a super depends a lot on what exact powers they have. Simple physical strength or super speed would have to be at very high levels for an individual to have much of an affect on society, whereas even relative weak mind control or reality warping powers could be fairly hard to counter, depending on exactly how they work.

[sktarq]

Firstly I'm surprised nobody has brought up Aberrant the game yet. Which very much explores the results of what happens when classic superpowers suddenly started showing up in our history around the turn of the century.

As for how much effect they will have itwill be a matter of both numbers and impact.

the more people who have even moderate powers the more things will change....especially socially. how will even the existence of minor powers effect something like religion? fame? questions of who is and is not part of various in-groups? Just think about the how the slot for "power" would mess with people dating life? or how HS cliques operate?

the more impact a power can have is the second. To some extent this gets to the direct impact of the powers. Lift a building? well that's something. Not as much as being able to be invisible and plant ideas in a major leader's mind...so leverage is going to be more important than direct power. Sure a human flamethrower like Diablo might not be all that world changing, but his status as a child of some deity in the minds of his millions of followers could well be. Weather control? okay now we are talking about personal power that can challenge governments so it can happen but by the time direct force-on-force is leaning in the Super's favor the world will already be reeling from those weaker supers who can leverage their talents.

[Tyndmyr]

I would argue that DC and Marvel are not our world. Sure the land masses are the same, some of the countries are the same, and supposedly the government structures of these countries are similar, but the worlds do not feel like ours anymore.

They diverge to some extent, but Gotham still mostly stays Gotham, and Metropolis still mostly stays Metropolis. It feels as if they lean hard on ways to avoid progressing too far away from what's known. Ultimately, Batman's gonna knock the guy out, drag him to Arkham, from where he escapes.

[Mechalich]

Firstly I'm surprised nobody has brought up Aberrant the game yet. Which very much explores the results of what happens when classic superpowers suddenly started showing up in our history around the turn of the century.

Because its terrible?

Aberrant gets exactly one thing right: the sudden arrival of superpowers means you get people with superpowers not a bunch of costumed comic book heroes and villains. Everything else about it's world-building is comically terribad, (making it about average for a White-Wolf product). Also, Aberrant is very clearly not a world that still looks like our world, as the supers unleash huge changes in the span of just a few years and ultimately break the universe in just a few decades.


They diverge to some extent, but Gotham still mostly stays Gotham, and Metropolis still mostly stays Metropolis. It feels as if they lean hard on ways to avoid progressing too far away from what's known. Ultimately, Batman's gonna knock the guy out, drag him to Arkham, from where he escapes.

Marvel and DC go so far as to use contemporary pop culture references, implying that people still watch the same TV and Movies in a world filled with supers. It's a very deliberate effort to make changing the world impossible. Both settings also come down hard on any attempt to spread technology developed by supers, to the the point that Tony Stark has more than once purged the Earth of other people who dared to try and use his armor designs.

This is partly a natural reaction to the burden of long-timeline stories, which impose limits on how much change you can have. Any world with powerful supers is unstable and will diverge from the course of history of a world without one hard and fast. However, in Marvel and DC supers hit the scene early in the 20th Century, and if you role with that it gets messy fast. Watchman is actually a pretty good example of how unwieldy the alternate history quickly becomes - Dr. Manhattan wins the Vietnam War for the US and Nixon ends up as president for life and that's...very weird.

[Ramza00]

They diverge to some extent, but Gotham still mostly stays Gotham, and Metropolis still mostly stays Metropolis. It feels as if they lean hard on ways to avoid progressing too far away from what's known. Ultimately, Batman's gonna knock the guy out, drag him to Arkham, from where he escapes.

Yeah I agree but I also say that is the "illusion of change" where these fictional worlds do not operate like our world, while simultaneously when we are explained how those worlds operate in more detail, what makes them move we see reactionary forces (this is contrast where you just take the place for granted and you never learn how Gotham came to be.)

For example Batman and fighting crime. Damian is almost 14. Thus he has to be conceived of when Batman was already Batman (to attract Talia and Ras al Ghul's attention) and you have to add 9 months to that. Furthermore Batman lost his parents when he was 8 and thus we are talking 25+ years where Gotham has not been a great place to live, maybe even 30, 35, or 40 years.

Look at these too closely and your suspension of disbelief occurs.

-----

The reason why Gotham is like the way it is is not some parallel real world history. Instead it is "tropes" and style choices for Gotham is similar to Gothic Fiction of the late 1800s (though we can trace precursors to this genre going back to the 1760s.) Gothic Horror Fiction is all about "modernity" specifically industrialization and the sins of it coming home to roost. Likewise much of Gothic Horror Fiction has other themes such as Imperialism (London being invaded by Count Dracula is a reverse imperialism fear), etc, etc.

Gotham is a Gothic story that is not realistic where you get a city for 25 to 40 years with only decline and no change, that is just not realistic. Instead you get this type of story for it is a story about a rich guy's family dynasty "decline" and how one many is trying his best to preserve said dynasty not by continuing his own family with genetic progeny but instead with trying to reclaim and restore the city in a way he idealizes with his mind, while simultaneously adopting family members who have a similar viewpoint to him. This is not realistic, this is romantic to the point Batman may be an absurd hero or the villian of the story.

These stories are pulpy, they are not realistic, they are aesthetic and they are meant to grapple with our present fears, fears we can not precisely articulate, but deal with them in a controlled fashion. When we read such a story it is both "like our reality, but also simultaneously not like our reality" and thus our brain can play with this place and do disavowal saying this fantasy world can not hurt me, while simultaneously the fantasy world we can learn from, and we also can inhabit a world of pure play even if we are doing social commentary.

You merely make the world more like our world if you want to do more social commentary, while you make the world less like ours yet still somehow seems like "home" (even if its not home) if you want to trigger play. For example everyone knows Harry Potter is not real, yet it can still trigger nostalgia and a longing for a home, a world that never existed for the daily life rituals seem familiar enough that people can identify with it.

-----

Note this is not the only way one can tell a fantasy or sci-fi story but that is enough writting for now, else we are explaining how things like cyber-punk and all of that works and that is a better thing to do in its own thread that recently resurfaced. (And a dozen of other genres besides these two here.)

[sktarq]

Because its terrible?

Aberrant gets exactly one thing right: the sudden arrival of superpowers means you get people with superpowers not a bunch of costumed comic book heroes and villains. Everything else about it's world-building is comically terribad, (making it about average for a White-Wolf product). Also, Aberrant is very clearly not a world that still looks like our world, as the supers unleash huge changes in the span of just a few years and ultimately break the universe in just a few decades.
..... Watchman is actually a pretty good example of how unwieldy the alternate history quickly becomes - Dr. Manhattan wins the Vietnam War for the US and Nixon ends up as president for life and that's...very weird.

Now I'd disagree on the terribad personally. Compared to the MCU and several others I'd say is a scholarly tome. Low expectations on my part may have something to do wit this.
Mostly because it does roll with the consequences of classic superpowers showing up and shows just how ridiculous it comes out. It is even quite meta in using the crunch to drive/rationalize classic super behavior. And besides the 11 year old with ADHD delivery (I swear the show via Media clipboard style WW got into for a while was horrid...Orpheus was the same) it covers a lot more ground than most settings do in the societal reaction and the differences (both logical and illogical) that various people have. As for the quality of the game....it's meh...as a source of what are sociological effects of classic superpowers its a gold mine of starting points.
Superpowers are going to make things weird fast in any alternate history (as the Nixon-for-life example shows)

[Anymage]

I would argue that DC and Marvel are not our world. Sure the land masses are the same, some of the countries are the same, and supposedly the government structures of these countries are similar, but the worlds do not feel like ours anymore.

Life in places with high concentrations of supers is obviously different. Xavier's Academy or Hogwarts or whatnot are fantasy fulfillment places, and operate on their own narrative logic.

If the governments and pop culture look overwhelmingly like ours, that wouldn't make sense if entrenched forces were reacting rationally to the realities of their world. Which I get why comic writers will gloss it over, I was just curious at what point it did become justifiable instead of us just having to mutually agree not to fridge logic the whole thing fall apart.

[Mechalich]

If the governments and pop culture look overwhelmingly like ours, that wouldn't make sense if entrenched forces were reacting rationally to the realities of their world. Which I get why comic writers will gloss it over, I was just curious at what point it did become justifiable instead of us just having to mutually agree not to fridge logic the whole thing fall apart.

The general rule of alternate history is that you get one big change that you can extrapolate outward from and expect the reader to reasonably follow. Any more than that and the story particularly becomes opaque. This is particularly true with long-running serial stories where events build on themselves. Doubly so when there's an expectation that the audience won't be following or have access to all parts of a story, which is something comics and comics-derived properties particularly struggle with. The average author who writes a ten novels series, for example, doesn't really need to worry about book nine being comprehensible to people who haven't been around since book one (though they do need to worry about people who maybe read book one ten years ago and aren't inclined to re-read the whole thing), but the MCU, for instance, cannot bank on everyone who goes to see Avengers: Endgame having seen all the prior movies - and thanks to box office reports we can actually say, mathematically, that a huge portion of the Infinite War audience hadn't seen certain prior films, particularly the Ant-Man movies, which is why Ant Man gets featured in the critical in-movie recap bit at the opening of the film.

Comics, therefore, have it pretty tough, and I sympathize with the writers. The lore of the in-universe characters is complex enough that comics timelines need to periodically reboot and various derivative works make a point of ignoring or tweaking plot lines according to need - DC alone is running multiple non-intersecting TV versions of its stories right now - which means everything else needs to be as familiar as possible or the audience will be utterly lost. This is something that dates back to at least WWII, which was a huge seminal, globe-altering event that several early comics passed through and whose contours therefore had to be preserved. This is something that actually happens to any universe with supernatural elements that date back at least that far, all of the various White-Wolf oWoD games had to tiptoe, generally very poorly, around WWII as a historical issue and try to throw up rationalizations for how supernatural interference didn't derail the course of events and leave the postwar world unrecognizable.

[Ramza00]

Life in places with high concentrations of supers is obviously different. Xavier's Academy or Hogwarts or whatnot are fantasy fulfillment places, and operate on their own narrative logic.

If the governments and pop culture look overwhelmingly like ours, that wouldn't make sense if entrenched forces were reacting rationally to the realities of their world. Which I get why comic writers will gloss it over, I was just curious at what point it did become justifiable instead of us just having to mutually agree not to fridge logic the whole thing fall apart.

With this logic if a humans can create a machine, and the machine can operate a chatbot that looks like it can replicates choices a human makes. Under this analogy then the machine thinks in the exact same way as a human, instead of just merely mimicking humanity.

There are pop culture references in Marvel and DC for they are not stand alone worlds, but instead are worlds mimicking the words of our our reality.

[Anymage]

I mean, I get why comics writers want to stick to a world that's mostly like ours. Like you said it avoids making it practically impossible for a newcomer to pick up if they weren't around from the beginning, and allows the writers to focus on plots other than logical extrapolation of largely alien worlds. Especially when many of the stories they want to tell hinge on real world political/cultural elements.

The thought was more born out of realizing that if people were going to fridge logic one or two stray elements as being "unrealistic", wondering how many settings wouldn't unravel completely if you really tried to fridge logic the heck out of them.

[Mechalich]

The thought was more born out of realizing that if people were going to fridge logic one or two stray elements as being "unrealistic", wondering how many settings wouldn't unravel completely if you really tried to fridge logic the heck out of them.

Very few. Robust world-building isn't exactly a high priority for most creators of speculative fictional settings. That's largely because robust world-building mostly involves adhering to a giant list of 'things you're not allowed to do' that most authors find incredibly restrictive. It's particularly tough in the realm of sci-fi, where the universe itself seems to be opposed to interstellar romps on the level of its very physical laws.

There's also the issue that, especially in modern visual media like movies and TV, just being an 'action hero' comes with a massive set of metagame narrative bending abilities that, translated into terms of super powers means they all have some level of innate probability manipulation, which makes it difficult to portray a character as blatantly super in terms of physical feats without turning it up to eleven. This was an issue that several of the Marvel Netflix shows had, in that while a character like Daredevil supposedly has pretty impressive super powers, his actual abilities on screen are only marginally better than that of someone like the Punisher who supposedly doesn't have any.

[Accelerator]

Which reminds me. Half of the question is how the supers come about.

Do supers come about from technology? Then high tech nations like Europe, Britain, America, China, etc... all get an advantge. Whether its cybernetics, super-serums, or just plain ass vita rays.

Do supers come from random mutation in the population? Then most countries are in trouble, since most western nations with all the guns and the weaponry are in the distinct minority on earth. That means lots and lots of people, who are not necessarily friendly to America or Europe, get superpowers, making things get ugly.

[tomandtish]

Both settings also come down hard on any attempt to spread technology developed by supers, to the the point that Tony Stark has more than once purged the Earth of other people who dared to try and use his armor designs.

This is partly a natural reaction to the burden of long-timeline stories, which impose limits on how much change you can have. Any world with powerful supers is unstable and will diverge from the course of history of a world without one hard and fast. However, in Marvel and DC supers hit the scene early in the 20th Century, and if you role with that it gets messy fast. Watchman is actually a pretty good example of how unwieldy the alternate history quickly becomes - Dr. Manhattan wins the Vietnam War for the US and Nixon ends up as president for life and that's...very weird.

In fairness, Stark's goal (initially at least) is to purge it of people who have STOLEN his technology. Of course, he then usually escalates.

Law and the Multiverse did a good piece noting that one of the problems with comics is that they tend to keep the world roughly the same as ours except for super. But given how long supers have been around, things should have changed dramatically.

[JeenLeen]

Not terribly relevant, but as an example of bad writing to close a plot hole: when I was designing a supers game (sort of based on the Worm-verse/Grrlpower webcomic), I thought about why some strong supers wouldn't just be nuked. So I decided there's a super whose power is world-wide nuclear control, but he uses to basically make violent utility of nuclear power impossible. If you shoot a nuke, you shot a very fast, very large paperweight.
So he's technically a 'hero' who lives in a fortress in northern Canada and wants to be left alone, and people generally leave him alone because he's made the world safer (in at least one way) and he'll nuke you if you don't. (That is, won't nuke your country, but if an army or super attacked him, they'd get nuclear-bomb-level blasts leveled at them.)

But I was pretty clear with the players it was just to close that possiblity. Especially as they were playing villains and I didn't want them trying to use nukes. And I wanted a reason why the army didn't use a nuke as a last-resort to try to destroy evil!Superman-types.

As a tangent, in an oWoD Mage game, we decided it didn't make sense that some groups didn't massively nuke major cities. So decided the Technocracy has wards in most major cities that make nukes not work.

[Lord Raziere]

Not terribly relevant, but as an example of bad writing to close a plot hole: when I was designing a supers game (sort of based on the Worm-verse/Grrlpower webcomic), I thought about why some strong supers wouldn't just be nuked.

simpler, easier explanation:
They live in cities. taking out millions of innocents its not worth taking out one with them. Any evacuation notice would tip them off to whats happening.

the only remaining course of action is to lure them out of the city and then they're asking "why do they want me out of a city?". Meaning you have to give them an actual reason to get out of a city and into a place no one will miss. Which for a hero means working with a villain obsessed with them who might not want to die being bait and thus will scheme against you, while taking out a villain means asking the hero to sacrifice their life to be bait, which the villain might not take since they might see the absence as an opportunity to visit their evil on others to take advantage of it or lure the hero back.

in short no matter how you slice it, its just not worth it. there is too much potential for the hero or villain to reject your plan to take out the other for their own reasons or see a nuke as an evil to get rid of/a weapon to have themselves, while the only way your firing a nuke on a single super with a city around them is if the situation is so bad, the villain so dangerous that you have no other choice because all the other supers have failed to stop it.

[Vahnavoi]

As a rule of thumb, a superhuman has to be at least as destructive as an ABC weapon themselves, before deploying ABC weapons becomes worthwhile. Because ABC weapons represent fairly extreme level of force, there is actually fairly large sweet spot where a superhuman is both:

1) largely immune to conventional weaponry, up to and including high explosives and fuel-air bombs with explosions measured in tons of TNT.

2) not causing as much collateral damage as a tactical nuke measured in kilotons of TNT.

Also keep in mind that a lot of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, solar flares etc. are vastly more energetic than even the most powerful fusion explosions measured in dozens of megatons of TNT. So if a superhuman is powerful enough to cause natural disasters, it starts to become likely that even ABC weapons are not enough gun. (https://images.app.goo.gl/vuRwYH7KqQNzUZeg7)