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.

Spoiler: *

Show

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

[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...

Spoiler

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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