Quote Originally Posted by sktarq View Post
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.

Quote Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
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.