New OOTS products from CafePress
New OOTS t-shirts, ornaments, mugs, bags, and more
Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 12
Results 31 to 52 of 52
  1. - Top - End - #31
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Tyndmyr's Avatar

    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Location
    Maryland
    Gender
    Male

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Accelerator View Post
    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.

  2. - Top - End - #32
    Dwarf in the Playground
    Join Date
    Feb 2019

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Tyndmyr View Post
    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.

  3. - Top - End - #33
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Tyndmyr's Avatar

    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Location
    Maryland
    Gender
    Male

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Accelerator View Post
    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.

  4. - Top - End - #34
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Ramza00's Avatar

    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Location

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

    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.
    Stupendous Man drawn by Linklele

  5. - Top - End - #35
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Tyndmyr's Avatar

    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Location
    Maryland
    Gender
    Male

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

    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.

  6. - Top - End - #36
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Ramza00's Avatar

    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Location

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Tyndmyr View Post
    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.
    Stupendous Man drawn by Linklele

  7. - Top - End - #37
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    GreataxeFighterGuy

    Join Date
    Mar 2008

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post

    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.

  8. - Top - End - #38
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Flumph

    Join Date
    Feb 2005
    Location
    Santa Barbara, CA
    Gender
    Male

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

    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.
    Last edited by sktarq; 2020-10-09 at 03:53 PM.

  9. - Top - End - #39
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Tyndmyr's Avatar

    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Location
    Maryland
    Gender
    Male

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Ramza00 View Post
    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.

  10. - Top - End - #40
    Troll in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2015

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

    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.
    Now publishing a webnovel travelogue.

    Resvier: a P6 homebrew setting

  11. - Top - End - #41
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Ramza00's Avatar

    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Location

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Tyndmyr View Post
    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.)
    Last edited by Ramza00; 2020-10-09 at 05:21 PM.
    Stupendous Man drawn by Linklele

  12. - Top - End - #42
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Flumph

    Join Date
    Feb 2005
    Location
    Santa Barbara, CA
    Gender
    Male

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    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)

  13. - Top - End - #43
    Ogre in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2017

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Ramza00 View Post
    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.

  14. - Top - End - #44
    Troll in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2015

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    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.
    Now publishing a webnovel travelogue.

    Resvier: a P6 homebrew setting

  15. - Top - End - #45
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Ramza00's Avatar

    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Location

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    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.
    Stupendous Man drawn by Linklele

  16. - Top - End - #46
    Ogre in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2017

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

    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.

  17. - Top - End - #47
    Troll in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2015

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
    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.
    Now publishing a webnovel travelogue.

    Resvier: a P6 homebrew setting

  18. - Top - End - #48
    Dwarf in the Playground
    Join Date
    Feb 2019

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

    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.

  19. - Top - End - #49
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    RedWizardGuy

    Join Date
    Mar 2009

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    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.
    "That's a horrible idea! What time?"

    T-Shirt given to me by a good friend.. "in fairness, I was unsupervised at the time".

  20. - Top - End - #50
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    BardGuy

    Join Date
    Jan 2009

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

    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.

  21. - Top - End - #51
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Lord Raziere's Avatar

    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Gender
    Male2Female

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

    Quote Originally Posted by JeenLeen View Post
    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.
    I'm also on discord as "raziere".


  22. - Top - End - #52
    Ogre in the Playground
    Join Date
    Mar 2020

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

    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.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •