Abilities that are good cross-system

[Quertus]

So, I've been thinking about characters who are big fish in small ponds. And wondering, what abilities still look cool when you take them outside their pond, and compare them to the multiverse?

For example,

Marvel: self-reincarnation. The ability to come back from the dead under your own power is pretty good, regardless of your PoV.

Wheel of Time: balefire. Die. Anything you did recently, retroactively didn't happen… although we still remember it. Oh, and you can't be resurrected.

D&D: Heward's Handy Haversack. Bigger on the inside, reduces weight, what you want us airways on top. It's like undetectable extension + built-in accio - what's not to love? Other than it shutting down on many planes, of course.

What else exists in the realm of abilities that look good, no matter whose point of view you view them from?

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, silver things will look cool even if the new universe makes them obsolete.

Take Conjoiner Drives for example. Any setting that can't understand them properly will be impressed, because these things let you move a lot of stuff pretty darn fast. Any setting that surpasses them is going to be even more impressed, because the technology is designed to work around limits they don't have to face.

Conjoiner Drives aren't reactionless drives, although they bare a striking resemblance. What they are is highly efficient rockets and to accelerate comparatively miniscule amounts of hydrogen so fast a pair can accelerate a 4km long ship and cargo at 1g and being it incredibly close to c. They have inbuilt magnetic ramscoops to help them collect hydrogen and I believe can provide thrust in at least two directions (implied in the second Revelation Space novel if not outright stated). To do all this they require insane amounts of energy but you don't have to provide the energy, they pull it out of another place.

Even if you have FTL travel the Conjoiner Drive is an incredibly impressive piece of engineering that matches a good number of reactionless drives several times it's size and remass tankage (which is clearly not nil, as systems don't move at ramscooping speeds).

Once you get into what the higher tech in that universe it can be even more insane. Inertia manipulation, although you can't drop it to or below zero, gravity manipulation to the point people can come and go to neutron stars (although that's not something the protagonists actually get), complete recreation of dead people, and even a galaxy wide network of robotic life omit intelligent or sentient when required. And the Greenfly, even if that went wrong.

[Lord Raziere]

Any ability that manipulates luck, time or space, because those are forces that you can't really escape no matter where you go.

However given most setting take place on planets, gravity manipulation is pretty useful to, its probably less useful in deep space however. Abilities that manipulate energy and heat are pretty useful almost anywhere as well.

Another consistently useful ability across systems/universes is the ability to manipulate or read minds, as we tell stories about people so the manipulation of people will always be useful no matter what person you encounter.

[Rater202]

High speed regeneration coupled with extended longevity/eternal youth. Anything that lets you shrug off damage or recover faster from something that would kill or cripple someone else.

Since you mention Marvel? Symbiotes, if you get one that will work with you. Continuous evolution and adaption and it's essentially a living space suit, able to keep you alive in a vacuum for months without food, water, or oxygen. It's implied that being bonded with one removes your need to breathe for yourself or eat, and they enhance every physical aspect of your being. They can also kill gods, consume and magnify magical and cosmic energies, absorb the DNA of other beings and tinker around with their genes to accelerate their evolution, store an infinite amount of information, and develop the means to generate a wide variety of weapons both in the forms of claws, tentacles, blades, spikes, and bludgeons and in various acids, toxins, and other chemical weapons—the Sleeper Symbiote can make napalm.

[NichG]

So, I've been thinking about characters who are big fish in small ponds. And wondering, what abilities still look cool when you take them outside their pond, and compare them to the multiverse?

For example,

Marvel: self-reincarnation. The ability to come back from the dead under your own power is pretty good, regardless of your PoV.

Wheel of Time: balefire. Die. Anything you did recently, retroactively didn't happen… although we still remember it. Oh, and you can't be resurrected.

D&D: Heward's Handy Haversack. Bigger on the inside, reduces weight, what you want us airways on top. It's like undetectable extension + built-in accio - what's not to love? Other than it shutting down on many planes, of course.

What else exists in the realm of abilities that look good, no matter whose point of view you view them from?

I'm assuming that for this, the ability should be available in a small pond too? General classes of things that make me take notice when a system provides them are:

Plotmancy stuff:
- Things limited by imagination rather than specific lists. Illusions, Polymorph Any Object, Wish, stuff that allows shaping of specific memories or emotions, etc. Those sorts of abilities are huge lever arms - someone who doesn't know how to use them will find them weak, whereas someone who practices them and comes up with a lot of uses in advance can be vastly more effective even at the same level or intensity of effect. As a sub-set of these, anything that logically requires some impersonal force in the multiverse to think or reason on behalf of the user is potentially scale-breaking. For an example that ticks both boxes, in the Elder Scrolls RPG you can make arbitrary Detect X spells where X is more or less anything you can name. It's intended to model the various effects in the CRPGs like Detect Life and Detect Key, but as written you can make 'Detect Culprit', 'Detect Written Truth About What Will Happen Tomorrow', 'Detect Those Who Will Be Future Enemies', 'Detect Programs that Halt', etc

- Anything that allows autonomous scaling independent of the primary power and advancement scales of the system. Something that lets you make an arbitrary amount of undead regardless of your level, which stick around (even if you don't control them), etc. As a corollary, anything which can make a permanent change to a character or situation and is not consumed. Things which cause unhealable damage, but also something that gives a free skill point once per person that never goes away, or something which lets you teach someone a language for free, or something that lets you gain a stacking point of resistance to any damage source you've experienced in sufficient amplitude, or things that can change a character's race or subtype, or things that let you create permanent matter, etc...

- Any dramatic editing/inverse causality stuff, even minor things. Things which prevent a certain outcome 'will not be slain at the hands of man' or which can force a certain thing to be a guaranteed point in time 'will meet themselves in a bar in Georgia at some point in the future'. Any form of backward time-travel, even really short-duration and message-transmission-only stuff.

- Anything that hints that a widely held multiversal truth is a lie.

Stuff for conflicts:

- Absolutes of any form. 'Immune to any amount of fire', 'Immune to any degree of fear', 'Avoid one attack regardless of its source', 'Hit a target and get through its armor, regardless of its toughness', 'Ignore DR and Hardness (or equivalent) to any degree', 'this happens to the target regardless of their defenses', 'this procures information regardless of how that information is hidden', etc. Lesser but still potentially relevant long-term are nigh-absolutes that have specific counters but anything other than that specific counter does nothing. One of the most potentially powerful scale-crossing attack spells in D&D 3.5 IMO is Hail of Stones, a 1st level spell that does raw damage in an area, offering no save, no SR, and requiring no attack roll. Meta-magic it up and it's a better direct damage godslayer than most other things you could do.

- Things which can potentially bypass or counter absolutes (either absolutes in the form of specific mechanics, implied absolutes resulting from the cosmology or philosophical underpinnings of the multiverse, etc). It can be because there's some kind of hierarchy like 'Immunity Penetration defeats Immunity'. But it can also be a semantic thing like 'this effect kills something outright, but its not a death effect' or 'this effect goes back in time and changes what happened, so it can resurrect those who normally could not be'.

- Things which force others into a particular paradigm in order to be able to interact. Flight, etherealness, 'can only be hit by magical weapons', etc are classic examples. Even if the thing is relatively common, this basically has a small chance of making certain conflicts automatically unwinnable for an enemy of arbitrary power or scale. If you have the ability to not be harmed by non-magical effects, a high-tech prime material with antimatter-pumped lasers or graviton beams might still not be able to touch you with a fleet of starships, even if the Cleric of a Lv3 party in another setting could make your protection irrelevant there. Similarly, things which let someone slide by as an exception to the normal counters and interplays - psionics in a multiverse without psionics/magic transparency, 'I'm a magic user but I don't use the Fade/I'm not actually a magic user, its X,Y,Z' in any number of Dragon Age crossover fics I've seen. Another example is the psionic ability that lets you skip yourself or a target over a period of time - useful for removing doors, or for surviving the end of the multiverse.

- Anything that scales with the target rather than the user. A spell that deals 1% of the target's max HP in damage for example. Or abilities which reflect damage caused by someone else with no cap.

[Mastikator]

Teleportation would be a game changer for humanity. Especially if you can bring things/people with you. Sign me up for some space exploration please. Not of that "fighting crime" nonsense.

[Duff]

Also, enhanced communication - Telepathy, mind-reading, message spell, planet wide mobile phone network...

[Silly Name]

Any form of "charming"/mind-control is potentially horribly powerful, especially if you end up in a world where most people have no way to counter or detect it. Of course, it's also a terribly morally suspect ability, and extremely dangerous in the hands of people with little to no moral qualms.

[Satinavian]

I don't know. Teleportation, Communication, polymorphing, mind control etc are certainly useful. But they are also present in so many settings that they are often not particularly impressive when ported to another setting. "I can do basically the same thing you can but in a slightly different way" just doesn't really cut it. The luck manipulation thing is better, but still quite common as is "bigger on the inside" stuff.

Also "i have godlike powers to reshape reality literally to my whim" is cheating as this encompasses to much other abilities to be seriously compared to one of them. If we would allow for stuff like that it ould automatically win by default.

[Lord Raziere]

I don't know. Teleportation, Communication, polymorphing, mind control etc are certainly useful. But they are also present in so many settings that they are often not particularly impressive when ported to another setting. "I can do basically the same thing you can but in a slightly different way" just doesn't really cut it. The luck manipulation thing is better, but still quite common as is "bigger on the inside" stuff.

I don't recall this thread being about powers being particularly unique, its just about them being good cross-system and universes.

thing is once you start getting into the unusual and strange stuff, you also start getting into things that are setting specific and thus may not even work outside that universe: take for example, The Force from Star Wars. it can do a lot of useful things, but its something thats unique to the star war universe, doesn't exist outside of it and isn't inherently a part of a jedi, its just something they access externally.....and thus if a jedi goes outside of it, what happens? do they lose access to the force? or is the Force somehow extending to other universes now? which has implications beyond just giving that single persona access to its power. who knows how the Force interacts with other universes after all?

or take DnD's smite evil: does it even work outside the DnD cosmos? put it in a more amoral world and well, without the cosmic morality computer the smite evil runs on, does it even function? if it does but the alignment system isn't there, what does that mean? even if we use the less morality inclined divine strike, would it even function without a connection to the divine energies that power it?

there is no answer to this, and the most realistic hypothetical answer is "it doesn't work, because they are setting specific and thus stop working, as they have lost access to the place where it does work". a lot of this will depend on very subjective guesswork and logic.

[NichG]

I take it to be less 'this power won't even work' and more 'what powers from a (themed as) low-power setting would still be impressive to a character from a (themed as) high-power setting?' Or maybe more evocatively, imagine a deity coming down from their divine realm to seek the aid of a mortal of no particular special or chosen character, but one who has cultivated an ability that is learnable within that setting or society. What abilities make this story make sense?

"He's a divine entity in charge of the domain of war, she's an investigative journalist with the strange fortune to always have exactly 3 clues exist and rise to the surface wherever she goes, together they fight crime.", etc.

[Lord Raziere]

I take it to be less 'this power won't even work' and more 'what powers from a (themed as) low-power setting would still be impressive to a character from a (themed as) high-power setting?' Or maybe more evocatively, imagine a deity coming down from their divine realm to seek the aid of a mortal of no particular special or chosen character, but one who has cultivated an ability that is learnable within that setting or society. What abilities make this story make sense?

a lot of sensory abilities are pretty low powered but useful no matter how high powered you get, I guess.

[Duff]

I don't know. Teleportation, Communication, polymorphing, mind control etc are certainly useful. But they are also present in so many settings that they are often not particularly impressive when ported to another setting. "I can do basically the same thing you can but in a slightly different way" just doesn't really cut it. The luck manipulation thing is better, but still quite common as is "bigger on the inside" stuff.

Also "i have godlike powers to reshape reality literally to my whim" is cheating as this encompasses to much other abilities to be seriously compared to one of them. If we would allow for stuff like that it ould automatically win by default.

Any power becomes a lot less cool if everyone in that setting can do it. If everyone can manipulate luck, but no-one can teleport, which one's cooler?

So, for any power. part of the answer is assumed to be "unless everyone else can do it"

[Kazyan]

While this isn't a general-purpose answer, I find that in any RPG system, whatever they call "Celerity" tends to be The Good Stuff.

[Spore]

I am a humble man. The ability to create food and in extension make a world easily habitable and enjoyable is a very great tool for elevating the mood towards fantastical heights or utopian futures. In the reverse, a lack of basic nutrition or housing can make a game post-apocalyptic and/or grim-dark.

In stuff that is more the focus of roleplaying games and less a part of the backdrop of said games, I would say perception. Be it basic (superhuman) perception of D&D, super hearing or sight or more primal/magic stuff like "magic perception" or instinct aka sixth sense type stuff. The first prerequisite of participating in something is to be able to be aware of it.

[MoiMagnus]

Systems in which having followers/minions/invocations is not strong are pretty rare.

Marvel: self-reincarnation. The ability to come back from the dead under your own power is pretty good, regardless of your PoV.

Surprisingly not that much IMO.

Rapid self-reincarnation is always good. But at any table in which a dead PC gets replaced before the next session by another PC of comparable power (and possibly the same family/clan/whatever), slow self-reincarnation is more a character trait alike to family connections than an actual power.

It is acknowledged in games like Mutants and Mastermind for example, as the capacity to come back from the dead one month later cost as much as a +1 modifier to an ability score. (While the capacity to come back from the dead almost immediately is quite expensive).

[Martin Greywolf]

Superspeed. People keep underestimating it, but if you are even 20% faster that everyone else, you will essentially never loose in melee combat unless you're ambushed. With what we see most actual speedsters do, with them being at least supersonic, they are 28 times faster than Usain Bolt, and if they dodge bullets, they can accelerate at ~10-20 Gs, depending on what bullet exactly it is. At this point, all they need to do is throw a rock at you to simulate cannon impact. With their bare hands, you don't want to know what happens when they start to use slings or atl atls.

[Anonymouswizard]

While this isn't a general-purpose answer, I find that in any RPG system, whatever they call "Celerity" tends to be The Good Stuff.

Enhanced speed and reaction times are normally a godsend, especially anything that'll give you an extra action in a round. Even if you can't get an extra action anything that allows you to increase the speed of certain actions is great, I did once work out an M&M build for a character who could design and craft an invention in a single combat round.

In general the order here in terms of desirability is +actions, +limited actions, +initiative, +defence, + move. I tell you, every experience I've had with Vampire: the Masquerade has been 'Celerity is broken, even at 1BP an action, even limiting attacks to no more than half your actions'. If I ever run pre-V5 again I would have it give extra Defence dice you could swap out for extra movement or bonus dice on some skill rolls.

It is acknowledged in games like Mutants and Mastermind for example, as the capacity to come back from the dead one month later cost as much as a +1 modifier to an ability score. (While the capacity to come back from the dead almost immediately is quite expensive).

I remember that power, I played a robot with an active internet connection who was always tinkering with himself (my previous character had gone villain, established with the GM early on, and I played the base AI he'd built a body fo). He had the ability to come back after one week because he'd just upload himself to a new body, but that body generallly wasn't 'ready to go' and he'd need to print out some new components and get somebody to put them all together (the base had full 3D printing and a complete workshop despite being at the top of a skyscraper, because we went straight from having a technologist/telekinetic to having a full blown AI).

It's main purpose was to let me come back next week if I died in a session as we ran in roughly realtime. However the first time I got blown up the GM let me come back for free for two reasons: it was the last session and I paid points for something I never got to use. M&M is so unlethal coming back from the dead is actually of questionable value.

Of course, if I was smart I'd have stuck on a limitation of 'only if the group's central server and workshop are still intact', but the GM was never going to attack headquarters and was smart enough that he'd have disallowed it.

[SimonMoon6]

Dimension Travel abilities (including D&D's Plane Shift spell) are always going to be useful.

Not only can you flee from your opponent, you can flee to another plane of existence. You're not going to be found. Even people who can track teleporters (which are rare) can't find you. They can't detect you with telepathy or anything (okay, D&D's scrying spell still works with a penalty, but they still can't teleport to you since you're on another plane).

And of course, that's without taking into account that other planes/dimensions/universes might be ripe for the plucking. We already know about all the ways to abuse planes where time flows faster for example. But in some universes, there might be other dimensions full of gold or diamonds. Or magic items. Or there might be universes where the inhabitants don't have magic or technology figured out, so your minimal amount of magic and/or technology would allow you to easily conquer them.

A lot of the usefulness of this ability does depend on the setting (what are the other dimensions?), but even just as an instant escape, dimension travel is an incredible ability.

Plus, it often comes with the equally useful banishment ability. For example, with plane shift, you can touch someone and make them go bye-bye. Send someone to the Positive Energy plane and they heal so much that they explode (or if they're undead, healing hurts them instead, so they just die). There's not much they can do about it if they don't also have the ability to travel through dimensions (I mean, they can make their saving throw against the Plane Shift spell itself, but otherwise, they're dead instantly).

[Jay R]

In TOON, a character who tries to do something clearly impossible (an elephant trying to get through a mousehole; a cricket trying to lift a mountain) has to make a Smarts roll. If he fails the roll, he succeeds at the task.

[Stonehead]

This might be a little too mechanical, but abilities that give rerolls are always very valuable, regardless of system.

Usually, these abilities come from luck, fate, or subtle time control, so I'd say all of those are useful cross-setting.

[Man_Over_Game]

I particularly liked the fact that the Wheel of Time series uses two different distinct magic sources, a male and a female, and the bad guy of the series polluted the male version and offered filters to any men that join him.

Since male magic is more powerful, it ensures your rivals kill themselves by going crazy, while the most sensible ones join you and become addicted to power. It's pretty brilliant. The only reason Rand managed to do what he did was because he just happened to have the willpower needed to stave off enough of the pollution before it became a big problem.

On top of that, the curse of the world is that knowledge is never passed down, which is why the symbols for fate in that universe is both an infinite symbol and a wheel, a representation that nothing is allowed to change. As a result, folks don't know why things are the way they are (like the Aiel), while still trying to adapt, and end up repeating the same mistakes with no actual progress. The minute someone actually starts trying to gather knowledge, the world enters a new age - not because of magic or even new knowledge, but that knowledge itself wasn't able to make a lasting difference.

[Lapak]

The power that the Archive has in the Dresden Files probably fits into this category. She's inhabited by a complex enchantment such that she automatically knows anything ever written down or recorded by a human being in all of history, constantly updated when new information is recorded anywhere and packaged with the ability to both filter for what she wants/needs and make use of the knowledge. In-setting, this is obviously useful and also makes her an absurdly skilled magician, since magic is a study-based thing there, but it's a ridiculously useful ability in any other setting, too.

[Stonehead]

Superspeed. People keep underestimating it, but if you are even 20% faster that everyone else, you will essentially never loose in melee combat unless you're ambushed. With what we see most actual speedsters do, with them being at least supersonic, they are 28 times faster than Usain Bolt, and if they dodge bullets, they can accelerate at ~10-20 Gs, depending on what bullet exactly it is. At this point, all they need to do is throw a rock at you to simulate cannon impact. With their bare hands, you don't want to know what happens when they start to use slings or atl atls.

I think I actually disagree with this one. I mean, I agree with the fact that it's way more powerful than comics portray it, because people for some reason don't assume that faster things carry more energy. But I think super speed is definitely subject to the "Big fish in a small pond" effect, because different settings have different levels of super-speed and power levels.

Super speed is valuable if you're faster than the other guy, but if you take Quicksilver, and put him in the DC universe, he's not a big deal at all. The power scale is just completely different.

Compare that to telepathy, which other people have brought up. You could take a telepath from a low-power, street level crime fighting story, and transport him to a high-power, "bullets bounce of my skin" story, and he would still be useful. Or at least, more useful than the strongest martial artist from his home world.

[NichG]

I think I actually disagree with this one. I mean, I agree with the fact that it's way more powerful than comics portray it, because people for some reason don't assume that faster things carry more energy. But I think super speed is definitely subject to the "Big fish in a small pond" effect, because different settings have different levels of super-speed and power levels.

Super speed is valuable if you're faster than the other guy, but if you take Quicksilver, and put him in the DC universe, he's not a big deal at all. The power scale is just completely different.

Compare that to telepathy, which other people have brought up. You could take a telepath from a low-power, street level crime fighting story, and transport him to a high-power, "bullets bounce of my skin" story, and he would still be useful. Or at least, more useful than the strongest martial artist from his home world.

This does bring to mind a particular one that's always broken - powers that let you give it or lend it to someone else. Something that increases your speed by 20% isn't that impressive. Something that increases the recipient's speed by 20%, whatever it happens to normally be, is going to keep up.

So, more generally, anything that multiplies rather than adds.

[Rynjin]

I particularly liked the fact that the Wheel of Time series uses two different distinct magic sources, a male and a female, and the bad guy of the series polluted the male version and offered filters to any men that join him.

Since male magic is more powerful, it ensures your rivals kill themselves by going crazy, while the most sensible ones join you and become addicted to power. It's pretty brilliant. The only reason Rand managed to do what he did was because he just happened to have the willpower needed to stave off enough of the pollution before it became a big problem.

As I recall, it's not so much that Saidin is "more powerful", it's that male Channelers tend to be better with Earth and Fire weaves, while female Channelers tend to be better with Water and Spirit. The former two are bent much more easily toward combat applications, but in terms of raw energy the two power sources are completely equal, just with practitioners that have different priorities, since Water and Spirit are the primary components of weaves like healing and Traveling.

[Stonehead]

I just thought of something new, but after re-reading the thread, it's basically just a variation of this:

- Anything that scales with the target rather than the user. A spell that deals 1% of the target's max HP in damage for example. Or abilities which reflect damage caused by someone else with no cap.

The ability to copy abilities is always valuable. In fact, it's actually better in the big pond, from a certain point of view.

---

This does bring to mind a particular one that's always broken - powers that let you give it or lend it to someone else. Something that increases your speed by 20% isn't that impressive. Something that increases the recipient's speed by 20%, whatever it happens to normally be, is going to keep up.

So, more generally, anything that multiplies rather than adds.

This is, in a sense, another form of scaling with the target. Multipliers give absolute bonuses based on the target's stats.

[AntiAuthority]

I have a few ideas.

Size manipulation. Sure, you can just get really big and crush someone or really small to sneak around, possibly sneak into someone's body and destroy them from within... Or you can use it more practically and shrink down resources such as food for transportation, then enlarge that same food to such a degree so that a single potato could potentially feed an entire village.

Intangibility, as nothing can really hurt you. Especially if you can make yourself selectively intangible, so that while the thing attacking you can't hit you, you can interact with it all you want. There are other practical applications though besides combat such as stealing items from places without hardly anyone noticing. For example, I was watching one of the animated Godzilla films on Netflix and Ghidorah was intangible as he existed in another universe but could still interact with and drain Godzilla's abilities as Godzilla was unable to interact with him.

Controlling the weather. Might not seem like much, but being able to call down storms or create droughts is an effective power all around. Army approaching? Call down a few tornados. Enemies are gathering resources? Make it so unbearably hot that they're likely to suffer from heatstroke and make it so that the vegetation dies from not having had water in who knows how long... Or just make it so hot that things start boiling.

Regeneration. In Dragon Ball, Cell can regenerate from a single cell... Which is troubling... In DC, Lobo's regeneration is so potent that he make other Lobos from a single drop of blood. This is broken, as bladed weapons or anything that can potentially cause blood loss are likely just going to make you more enemies... Literally.

Creating Minions. While not inherently powerful, as it depends on the minions in question... But if you could, say, summon beings as powerful as yourself and you're already incredibly powerful, that's pretty useful.

Spontaneous Adaptation. In DC, Doomsday has the trait of "never being able to be killed the same way twice." In essence, if you kill him and he just comes back... What you did the first time won't exactly work because he's adapted against it. In some cases, this power might give the wielder the ability to spontaneously develop the abilities needed to defeat their opposition at that exact moment... Even if yu hadn't displayed such abilities beforehand (IE plot-armor, but eh...) There's also the ability to adapt to reality itself trying to kill you and your adaptations win out over it.

The ability to turn off other people's abilities. Think someone who eats/nullifies magic living in a world where magic is abundant and fundamental to society... Yeah.

Durability Negation. Simple, you attack a monster with scales harder than adamant? Doesn't matter, the scales might as well be made out of cardboard, as you ignore all resistance to negate the damage. This is done in a variety of ways in fiction, such as blades that vibrate on a molecular level to attacks that target the person's soul or existence.

Resistance to baleful polymorphs. In essence imagine you have a character that can turn people into inanimate statues... A character immune to this, however, would simply start attacking the person while as a statue, as it makes no difference if their flesh is stone or not.

Invulnerability to Erasure. Being erased from existence is fine and all... Except this person just pops back into existence a split second later. Killing them doesn't do anything, as they resurrect immediately after. Going back in time to kill them as a child does nothing to their present self either, as this person will continue to exist regardless of how much time shenanigans goes on.

Buffing and Debuffing. A classic, but being able to augment someone beyond their normal limits or make your enemies weaker than they normally are is an impressive power and can tip the odds in whatever favor the user(s) want.

Destruction. Being able to destroy anything you encounter is useful in almost any universe, especially if it's some nigh indestructible super fantasy material like Adamantium or Nth Metal.

Creation. Being able to spontaneously create things out of nothing is something typically held in high regards across fiction. Whether it be life or inanimate objects.

Being Omni-anything.

The ability to create, control and destroy concepts and abstracts. Imagine someone destroying the concept of "defeat" for themselves... No matter how bad things are, things will somehow end up with them winning, or at least stalemating. This is broken in every sense of the word.

[Quertus]

I've been struggling to parse and categorize the variety of responses that this thread has received.

There's… what's still cool when… a) you're among gods / people who generally outclass you (but who can't do this one specific thing); b) it (or a similar concept) is more common on another world / more people can.

There's… what powers are…a) broad b) powerful c) "abstract" (luck/rerolls, destroying concepts)… enough that they are useful on *any* world.

There's… I don't care what anyone else can do, X is cool.

And, curiously… there's plenty of responses advocating things that… a) I feared would be trap options, or even b) things that I don't consider particularly "cool" to begin with, even in a small pond.

So I begin to suspect that, like with matters of taste, questions of "what abilities will players find lackluster in the larger community vs which ones will shine no matter what" does not have a "right" answer.