Story Breaker Power / Literature

Story-Breaker Powers in literature.

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• Apprentice Adept:
  • Mach gets access to the Book of Magic in Book 5, and promptly becomes the most powerful Adept in history, able to freely break the rules of magic that had been previously established. He's kept in check by Honor Before Reason; while he could simply blast either side in the plot into ashes by raw power alone, the circumstances under which he became the Robot Adept left him honor-bound to play by the rules that both sides had agreed to, essentially functioning as a Living MacGuffin.
  • Just possessing the Platinum Flute puts an Adept on par with Mach. In the hands of a master musician (like Stile or Clef), it can invoke magic powerful enough to destroy the planet.
• Fairy magic from Artemis Fowl series could qualify as this, seeing as it allows users access to functional invisibility, healing, and limited mind control. And those are just the abilities open to all fairies. Serious magic users can do a whole lot more. The books manage to balance this out by explaining that each fairy has only a limited supply of magic, and that this magic must be regularly replenished via a ritual which can only be performed during the full moon. Thus, in any situation where magic would instantly solve the problem, the characters will inevitably be either completely drained of magic or not have enough left for the job. However, Book 5 introduces the demon warlock No.1, whose magic pretty much shatters all those rules. Aside from not needing to perform the Ritual and pretty much being a bottomless well of magic, No.1 is also capable of feats which were previously thought to be impossible (including time travel, flawless mind-wiping, and repealing a centuries-old hex that had stumped generations of fairies in a matter of minutes). He's so powerful that the books constantly have to find explanations for why he doesn't just immediately solve the problem (from not knowing how to use his powers in Book 5, to having his powers suppressed by animal fat in the final act of Book 6, to not knowing about the crisis in Book 7, to going off to work at a hitherto-unmentioned moon base in Book 8).
• The Red Order from The Braided Path trilogy. They are essentially a combination of a Distaff Counterpart and a Good Counterpart to the Weavers. Both factions can enter the Weave (essentially a state that allows them to manipulate reality itself) and do battle with one another. However, the Red Order have an innate advantage due to their abilities being inborn (in contrast to the Weavers needing witch stone infused masks to enter the Weave), being much more in tune with nature (due to being women) and being less likely to need to indulge in activities that range from music and painting to rape, murder and mutilation to come down from any Weave induced highs (due to most of them accidentally setting their surroundings on fire when their powers are first activated, meaning they have a negative experience to fall back on to prevent themselves from getting lost in the Weave). Why does it take them three books to destroy the Witch Stones and defeat the Weavers once and for all? Anyone with magical power and not a Weaver is marked out as Aberrant and therefore shunned in society (if not outright murdered), the Weavers have already managed to ingratiate themselves into the most powerful Bloods in Saramyr while the Red Order operate mostly underground due to the aforementioned stigma, and the Red Order's powers, while more effective than the Weavers' can still be unpredictable, so members need a lot of training, but have no obligation to stay once they have control- as the Red Order, unlike the Weavers, respects free will.
  • It's particularly noticeable with Kaiku, who is powerful, even by the standards of the Red Order, to the point where even her powers being sealed by the more experienced Cailin is not enough to hold them down as she's able to break the seal in an emergency. What stops Kaiku from coming into her own is her inexperience and trouble focusing on her training due to her preference for action, until she (1) heals one of her comrades with her abilities and realizes what she might be capable of, and (2) finds herself at a disadvantage in a battle against a more experienced Weaver towards the end of the second book.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Aslan is literally God (specifically Jesus written by a devout Christian), physically present in the world of Narnia. The first book sets up a conflict of an Endless Winter, then proceeds to have Aslan solve it off-page, before the protagonists even meet him. The only tension comes from Aslan biding his time and then agreeing to let the Big Bad kill him (which wears off, because again, Jesus); meanwhile, the ostensible main characters mostly wait for Aslan to solve everything or fail at doing so themselves. C. S. Lewis may have noticed the flaws of this setup, because in the sequels Aslan is mostly relegated to a guide and occasional Deus ex Machina helpmate.
• Circleverse: Trisana Chandler's weather magic is treated as one in-universe, hence why in The Will of the Empress Ishabal Ladyhammer magically breaks nearly every bone in her body. Whether or not it actually is a story breaker is up for debate: it is extremely powerful and can end any physical threat in seconds, but this is a universe where binding even a powerful mage is very possible with the right preparation.
  • The reason it's seen as a breaker in-universe is often because those who want her power are too short-sighted to see its drawbacks. Yes, being able to pull storms or earthquakes to wreck the armies of your enemies or bringing rain to water your kingdoms fields would be a plus, but it also brings unintended consequences with it. That storm you brought also took away the undercurrent from the ocean and now you have bad fishing. That quake destabilized the once-solid ground under your own lands and now they're a giant sinkhole. The rain disrupted a natural cycle, leading to a drought. Add to that, the power itself is massive (being basically nature itself) and the amount of self-control it takes to simply not let your emotions dictate/decimate the immediate local atmosphere is incredible.
• In The Dark Tower, one of the side characters in the last book has the power to materialize anything, including inter-dimensional portals, out of thin air when he draws them on a paper. Guess what happens when he draws something/someone already there, and then erases it.
• It's quite minor compared to most examples, but Flight is a storybreaker in Dinoverse. Three of the four main characters are put into the bodies of dinosaurs. The fourth, Janine, becomes a pterosaur. Very nearly every single one of the problems the other three face would have been made trivial by Janine flying and helping them - she could find them when they got split up, report on the locations of resources and threats, retrieve small items from far away, and escape danger herself. So Janine first has to laboriously learn to fly, then decides to abandon the group and be a pterosaur. For the entirety of the book, she's either absent or unable to fly.
• The Dresden Files: The Archive is a magical construct that places all recorded human knowledge into a single person. Originally, it was created to mitigate tragedies like the burning of ancient libraries. It also means a little girl nicknamed Ivy automatically knows and understands everything people write (bank records, nuclear physics, psychology, emails, tomes of necromancy...) without even trying. She's not the only character with a degree of omniscience in the series, but she's the only one who is a human with some measure of free will to use it. She understands science well enough to build her own nukes, knows enough blackmail material to keep most world leaders in her pocket, is a magical one girl army, even compared with the most powerful wizards in the setting, and she would become fully aware of any plan against her the moment someone made the mistake of communicating it in written form. What keeps her from making all the heroes irrelevant? While Ivy, the child has free will, the Archive doesn't — the Archive is bound to neutrality, and it takes a considerable effort of will for her to even give out small pieces of knowledge. Even if she could, using her power for her own benefit would turn a whole host of other supernatural powers against her at once, and even she probably can't hold off the wizards, two courts of the fae, the fallen angels, and three nations of vampires all at once. Plus, she's more interested in kitties and otters.
  • Interestingly, that's the public version, as far as the other supernatural communities are concerned regarding the Archive, but the line about "mitigating tragedies like the burning of ancient libraries" is simply a cover. According to Word of God, the Archive is engaged in a long-term conflict in which her power set is actually necessary: the Oblivion War. The Archive exists specifically to have a guiding intelligence that can plot, plan, and react to enemy maneuvers on a time scale of generations. In the Dresdenverse, power and the ability to alter the mortal world can come from mortal belief. Many hostile Lovecraftian gods get both power and a foothold on reality via people simply knowing about them. So the Archive exists to be able track who writes down knowledge of those dread gods and work with various other supernatural powers to deal with them, leaving the Archive with the sole human holder of that knowledge, and then, when, say, a thousand years have passed with no mention of a given opponent having shown up in anyone's writings, the Archive...simply deletes them from her memory. With the last mortal with knowledge of them having forgotten them... bye-bye toehold in the mortal realm. So reacting and displaying her power like Harry Dresden does would be both foolish and dangerous in the long run, as it would quickly (on the timescales of concern to the Archive) result in endangering the Archive.
• The Elenium:
  • The Tamuli has mind reading. When a member of the race known as the Shining Ones joins the party (who have this power, among many others), she's able to easily see who The Mole is in the party, and find out that he's basically the Big Bad of both the Tamuli series and secretly the Big Bad behind everything that happened in the Elenium series as well. Though by this time, the villain's plans have progressed so far that it STILL takes a book and a half to set things right.
  • When Sparhawk gets control over the Bhelliom, it offers its own suite of ridiculous powers - worldwide teleportation, the ability to pull information from people's minds from a lot further away than Xanetia can, and at one point it intercedes with the spirit of the world to massively accelerate tectonic activity in one area for a few minutes, causing earthquakes across half the continent. It has other powers that are not used in the narrative proper, such as the ability to instantly kill on contact. Unlike Xanetia, however, this has limitations; its mind-reading in most cases is limited to a general consensus rather than Xanetia's individual and specific scan, preventing it from locating the bad guys instantly, and the villains can detect Bhelliom in action and are holding hostages that they will hurt or kill if Sparhawk takes the Blue Rose out of its box and starts turning people into frogs or something.
• Vika, from The Ember Blade is the only one who can fight back against the Dread Knights by calling the power of the Gods of Ossia into herself. However, she's often overcome by doubt in both herself and her faith, as well as being incapacitated for a good chunk of the book, which prevents Aren and his group from steamrollering the Krodan forces that are after them.
• Gwendalavir Universe:
  • Drawing in general is ridiculously powerful, since it is able to materialize anything the person in question is able to imagine provided they have sufficient power to get into the upper echelons of Imagination (the place where Drawings come from). The protagonist Ewilan and other high powered Artists are very often depowered through various means as to not break the plot.
  • Building was confirmed in supplementary materials to have been the origin of the art of Drawing. In L'Autre, the trilogy it features in, it is only used to control the Great House in the middle of another dimension as no one is able to teach Shae other applications of her power, likely also to not break the plot.
• Harry Potter:
  • Voldemort believes the Elder Wand to be this, as it's one of the three Deathly Hallows, making it the Wizarding equivalent of the Holy Grail or The Spear of Destiny (though he's ignorant of this history, having been raised a Muggle). In practice, however, the Elder Wand is merely a very powerful wand, and its infamy makes it a Doom Magnet: those who wield the Elder Wand tend to end up murdered for it, and in the end, it dooms Voldemort himself when he fails to realize that Harry is its true master. When it finally passes into Harry's hands, he chooses to break its curse by never wielding it, and in the movie he seals the decision by snapping it in two. On top of that Dumbledore actually claimed the wand himself by legitimately defeating its previous owner — a difficult feat to be sure, but nevertheless proof that the wand is only half the equation.
  • Time-Turners allow you to travel to the past and create a Stable Time Loop, establishing the way it had always been, basically retconning your own story as you see fit. This means that you can never be ambushed or caught off-guard for you will be/have been warned in advance by your future self. Any important event can be witnessed retroactively, so truth can always be established, even when there were no reliable witnesses "the first time". Naturally, these awesome devices were used once to resolve a minor conflict and then forgotten about only to be casually destroyed later, when ignoring them was no longer plausible.
  • The Marauder's Map is a real-time map of Hogwarts that can not only track any human within Hogwarts, but accurately identify them despite any attempts to disguise their identity (Animorphism, shapeshifting, etc.). Rowling had to have it confiscated for most of the fourth book for exactly this reason, and admits that she sometimes wishes she'd had Crouch keep it.
  • Harry's Invisibility Cloak is another one that can cause problems from time to time. It renders Harry completely undetectable by most means, and (as shown in Deathly Hallows) resists attempts to magically remove it. In the first book, Harry and Hermione only get in trouble for smuggling Norbert because of a gratuitous Idiot Ball of them forgetting to put it back on, and Snape had to confiscate it for the climax of Prisoner of Azkaban to have any tension at all. In later books when he's fighting for his life against Voldemort and his minions, he never thinks to wear it into battle, despite the enormous edge invisibility could give him in a fight.
  • Albus Dumbledore is the primary, character-type, embodiment of this through the series. He is the single most powerful character in the series, acknowledged and even feared by everyone to be the greatest wizard. Word Of Rowling even confirms that anyone who fights him would be subjected to a Curb-Stomp Battle. As such, Rowling makes sure that Albus is nearly always away during the first four books, either becaue he has a job or the villains knows it's a suicide mission to keep him at bay so they try their best that he doesn't even know, so he can't help Harry with the life-and-death situations he is facing, and when Rowling finally displays a glimpse of what he is truly capable of in the fifth book, he single-handedly makes the initially desperate situation into a win for the heroes by thoroughly stomping an entire army of Death Eaters, while even the arrival of the Order only reaches a stalemate, and then schools Voldemort himself, which not even 3 exceptional witch and wizards combined can do, though in that case it was because they had also been suffering a Worf Had the Flu in the form of having fought for hours while Voldemort was fresh. Afterwards, Rowling decides to kill him off after seemingly realizing Dumbledore was way too powerful for her idea of a finale in the sixth book by causing him to make a severe mistake that leaves him dying and even then she still had to further weaken him so the finale that leaves him dead after using the last of his strength in annihilating an entire group of Inferi with a single spell. The finale book ultimately justifies this and downplays the story-changing level of Dumbledore's abilities, as it is revealed that Harry had to defeat Voldemort himself. The reason why he is mostly absent in the conflicts is because Harry needed to develop enough skill and learn his true powers himself and Dumbledore is fully aware that he is too powerful and having him around wouldn't have helped Harry develop enough to win when the ultimate fight comes between him and the Dark Lord, actively choosing to not get involved unless absolutely necessary. In fact, the real last work of Harry Potter eventually confirms that Dumbledore did have the ability to kill Voldemort himself, explaining that he decided against it because he wanted Harry to be better than him.
  • Word of God says there was a scrapped character called Professor Mopsus who could see the future with perfect clarity but she left him out because he would take away the story's drama.
  • The Fidelius Charm can render any place or thing perfectly invisible and intangible, with Flitwick describing the charm as being so powerful not even Voldemort can dispel it. The only way to reveal the charm's target is to seek out the Secret-Keeper and obtain the information about the target's whereabouts, at which point the target is now visible and tangible to the person who obtained the secret. Known uses in early books imply that the Secret Keeper has to be outside of the charm's area as part of the effect, but the last book's reveal that the Secret Keeper can be inside the charm's area is a major source of Retroactive Idiot Ball.
• Heralds of Valdemar
  • This is a setting with Psychic Powers, including seeing the future. This is generally nerfed down, so Foreseers either only see the next few minutes ahead or can't control their visions well and get weird flashes without context or several possibilities.
  • A lot of story tension hinges on Poor Communication Kills, and a lot of things could be straightened out more quickly using the aforementioned psychic powers. Humans are constrained by Mind over Manners. Companions are not, but have a general rule about not sticking their hooves in to fix anything without being explicitly asked.
  • Tarma and Kethry's books straddle the line between Sword and Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy. Sorceress Kethry has Need, a Cool Sword that gives her the ability to fight skillfully. In the hands of swordswoman Tarma, Need protects her completely from hostile magic, to the point where Tarma with Need is a Curb-Stomp Battle against any given magic-user. Tarma and Kethry never think about this or hand Need over before facing a powerful mage. She only ends up in Tarma's hands in really dire moments of near-defeat.
    • In later books, Need 'wakes up' as the ancient mage spirit bound to her becomes conscious. She's able to use her Anti-Magic at will, not just ignoring the Big Bad but using the power of his attacks against him. She's also extremely psychic and monitors events happening many miles away, and unlike a Companion she will mention what she's learned unasked if she sees fit.
• In the Honorverse there's the infamous Grav Lance — a very short-ranged, but ridiculously overpowered One-Hit Kill weapon that easily shrugs off any possible Deflector Shields and oneshots even the heaviest Mighty Glaciers of a ship, which with a careful application might as well become a "Press X to win" thing. Unfortunately, all this was completely unintended, as all the implications were understood by the author only after his carefully planned Lensman Arms Race with its several Game Changer innovations laid the groundwork for a Grav Lance to shine. So, after Ret Gonning it to the hell and back, Weber simply hopes that the fans would let it go.
• Galbatorix from the Inheritance Cycle is constantly referred to as impossible to defeat. Not only does he have over a hundred years of experience over Eragon, as well as hundreds of Eldunari and another Rider at his disposal; his voice is said to be his greatest weapon. Up until he discovers the name of the Ancient Language, that is.
• Jack Blank's power is his ability to control and talk to machines. The series primary antagonists, the Rüstov, are living machines. One of them is living inside Jack. Normally this means instant death, but Jack's powers keep The Corruption resulting from the infection in remission involuntarily. In the third installment, End Of Infinity, the Rüstov are smart enough to saddle Jack with a Drama-Preserving Handicap to prevent him from using his technopath powers against them directly, as well as to speed along the development of his corruption. Once Jack manages to overcome it, he single-handedly destroys the entire Rüstov race with a wave of his hand by forcibly ripping each one out of their hosts without harming the host bodies, then crushing them with a thought.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle has the true language. A Nested Story depicts a hero known as Taborlin the Great, who knew the true name of everything and could command it accordingly; after being trapped in a tower, he told the stone to break, allowing him to command the wind to carry him to the ground. A couple only intermittently-properly-pronounced names stuttered out without fluency (the name of the wind) almost qualify in themselves, and when a character accidentally pulls off a full phrase the words instantly turn a fairy queen, one of the most powerful beings in the world and a literal sexual predator whose entire nature revolves around trapping and never releasing men, into a simpering soft-hearted love-slave that lets him free when he 'bluffs' her with a painfully transparent 'trick'.
• Known Space:
  • Larry Niven once wrote of this problem, which he encountered when he introduced the General Products Hull. The hull couldn't be damaged by anything except gravity or antimatter. Introducing this into the universe could potentially ruin a lot of stories and he ended up setting most of the stories before the hull was invented.
  • Teela Brown's "luck gene" prevented anything bad from happening to her unless it led to an even better outcome. Niven wrote one last story set after all humans were supremely lucky, "Safe at Any Speed", then mostly gave up on setting any stories later.
• R.A. Salvatore creates these frequently in his epic The Legend of Drizzt series, and strangely enough, not to the main heroes. As the series progresses, Salvatore seems to believe that he must one-up each of his previous adventures (rather than just writing a string of fun adventures for the Companions which some readers might get bored of). This means that each successive villain must prove themselves more of a threat to the supremely awesome Drizzt, which can only be done by breaking the universe's continuity, and unfortunately, often the immersion of the story, to do it.
  • One of the first main examples is Obould in the "Thousand Orcs" trilogy (and "The Orc King" follower). Although Obould is an orc in the D&D universe of Forgotten Realms, which means he should be a low-wisdom, dull-witted brute, especially as he is the leader of a large tribe (and hence he must have gained power through force of combat and murder), he instead is more akin to a Proud Warrior Race Guy, using intelligence and cunning to defeat his foes. This in and of itself isn't a main issue, however, Obould grows increasingly invincible through the series, enough to cleave a highly-trained Elf (known in D&D as the Mary Sues of the universe) during single combat. He also receives artifacts from out of nowhere (seriously, the shaman must have pulled them out of his posterior) which are even more powerful than anything which can be found in the D&D manuals. An impenetrable helm, an insanely powerful greatsword, invincible armor, etc. It breaks the immersion of the story to see impossible raiment of the Gods given to an Orc, while the master craftsmen Dwarves and the ancient relic-possessing elves are sitting pale by comparison. Throw in the supreme frustration of watching every human in the story, except for the Dwarf Bruenor's adopted kids, be essentially an extreme moron with the brains of an addled, horny goat, and you have yourself a quite unbelievable story, with pretty much EVERY element (including the complete disappearance of all intelligence, wisdom and commons sense from all human leaders in the story) being an absolute necessity to even give Obould the chance to do his dark work. If any one of these (per se) illogical and immersion-breaking plot elements didn't fire at the exact coincidental time they occurred, we wouldn't have a story.
  • We also see it with various villains (but only important ones) being able to take direct shots from Wolfgar's Aegis Fang and Cattie Brie's Tamauril with barely a flinch, whereas earlier in the series, they were skewering or blasting a dozen opponents (even dark elves) a time. But against the drow later in epic, Tamauril was just barely making the main villains pause, even with a direct hit.
  • The Drow after the Companions reboot were suddenly far more powerful, invincible, and boring-to-read as even before (they were pretty much Mary Sue villains anyway). But with the latest book, reading the ten-page-long Tiago Baenre's encounters with anyone other than Drizzt (even Kings who would, in their own right, be way more powerful than even a Drow commander), was so frustrating, because the reader knows it's all just swordplay pornography (which R.A. Salvatore has delighted in from the days of his first works) against a random mook when it's obvious the drow would win any face-to-face combat unless they faced Drizzt or the companions personally.
• In the Liavek books, if you ask Elmutt a question, the answer he subconsciously prefers will come true. This doesn't seem impressive, until you get to questions like "What will become of me?" or "What could possibly go wrong?" He doesn't seem to be able to change the past, but he can radically alter people's physical conditions, kill people, more or less brainwash them, and on one occasion doomed a man to be killed by a particular person. Once the first story is over — when Elmutt knows how his powers work and has sorted out his issues — it's more or less impossible for a story involving him to have dramatic tension, unless the question is asked by someone who has no idea what they're really doing. He's only had two total appearances in the series — his origin, and an unnamed but plot-relevant cameo two books later.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Gandalf, being effectively The Archmage and most powerful member of the Fellowship, regularly either leaves the group or is unable to help them, because having him would immediately turn the tides in the heroes favor. He goes offstage for hundreds of pages after the Balrog to allow other characters to struggle. He did this earlier in The Hobbit as well, as he would often leave Bilbo and the Dwarves to go on other business, leaving them to fall prey to spiders and elves. In fact, Gandalf ended up being such a famous example that "the Gandalf Problem" is another name for this trope.
  • Tolkien explicitly noted in a letter that he saw the Eagles as this: though they are weaker than their film depictions, an entirely good-aligned race of creatures capable of combat, fast flight, and carrying others in a story mostly about long, difficult travel and desperate and disorganized warfare would be a major issue to work with. They spend most of the story distantly separated from the good guys (it's implied they have their own war to deal with), and only really play a role in the plot twice. It's not for no reason that using them to fly to Mount Doom, or at least to expedite the journey to Mordor, is a classic Just Eat Gilligan argument among readers, and though other readers have managed to suss out potential reasons why that wouldn't work, Tolkien himself only really made the statement that using them like this would destroy the story's feel and the impact when they do show up.
  "The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness."
• The H. G. Wells short story "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" (and later film adaptation) has the eponymous character suddenly discovering that he could do anything simply by declaring it to be so. Some of his miracles have unintended consequences and he ends up breaking, not the story, but the planet. Only hitting the Reset Button saves everyone.
• In My Brother is a Superhero, Zack has six different powers, and basically wins instantly if he faces a problem at full strength. As a result, the author keeps having to come up with ways so this doesn't happen, at least until the end of each book. Examples include being drained from a previous task, contracting an alien cold, not being in his own body or just refusing to believe in whatever ridiculous threat that Luke has discovered. The one time he did struggle when fully charged, it was in a The Game Come to Life situation against a character even more ridiculously over-powered.
• Necroscope's Harry Koegh his virtually unlimited teleportation power, and makes the climaxes of his stories anticlimactic, especially combined with the near omniscience his ability to talk to the dead grants. Basically he knows all about you if you've killed people, and can drop a bomb on your head no matter how heavy your defenses.
• The Peripheral: Thanks to her control over the assemblers and the 'aunties', Detective Inspector Lowbeer is, for most intents and purposes, a nigh-omniscient Physical God, able to listen in to nearly any conversation, summon microscopic Attack Drones to assault her enemies, construct almost anything, and literally warp the fabric of London to deliver weapons to her allies. This is limited, however, by the fact that she's been given these powers by a corrupt and paranoid oligarchy to root out anyone who might destabilise their control over society — hence, she needs cast-iron proof before she can actually kill anyone. Thus it's implied she worked out who the villains were long before the reader does, and this is the only thing keeping her from breaking them apart into their constituent molecules for most of the story.
• Fruit from the aforementioned The Priory of the Orange Tree (or from the later-mentioned Mulberry or Hawthorne tree) gift people with incredible magic - which is probably why Ead starts the book having not eaten any of the magical oranges for a long time and running on dregs, or her magic would have solved the wyrm problem a lot faster.
• Lila Black in Quantum Gravity eventually becomes consumed entirely by her mechanical half and becomes a story breaker as a result. Book four reveals her to be capable of forming just about anything metal, as well as having limited control over metal and machines, and nigh invulnerability; her body reconstructs itself after being smashed to pieces, and doesn't even need to breathe. And that's aside from the Armour, a fey, which can transform any way it likes and tends to trick attacks into backfiring, or the shape-shifting weapon of intent that warps reality in response to what she wants. On her return to Demonia she battles through an unspecified number of opponents without the slightest scratch, or even needing to devote much thought to it. The loss of the weapon tones her down in book five, and by the end of the series she is looking less overpowering by deed of simply encountering an even more dangerous opponent.
• In an obscure children's book called Samantha Stone and the Mermaid's Quest, Samantha spends much of the book trying to learn how to teleport — both herself and objects. She gradually becomes realistically better at it, able to teleport herself and others, but often not exactly where she intends. But by the end, Samantha is teleporting behind enemies to knock them out, teleporting out of ropes when tied up, and teleporting captured prisoners out of a cell. The villain only undoes this power by binding and gagging her, thus preventing her from casting the spell. However, the story ends shortly after that, on a cliffhanger.
• Skulduggery Pleasant has Teleporters. Able to teleport anywhere in the world so long as they've been there once, can carry hundreds of people with them, and their only weakness is that they risk over-exertion if they Teleport Spam too quickly. Fletcher, a young and barely-trained Teleporter, has solved (or caused) the climatic conflicts in two books and greatly assisted/hindered in a further four (which includes feats like turning the tide of an international war by teleporting an entire army across the country). To counter this, every Teleporter except Fletcher was literally backstabbed prior to their introduction, and Fletcher himself is often victim of physical or emotional trauma to keep him on the bench and away from the problem at hand.
• The Dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire. In the series history, the Targaryen have utilized their dragons as fantasy WMDs which ensured their dominance over the seven kingdoms. By the present day most of the dragons are extinct, and Daenerys's three new dragons soon become powerful and dreadful creatures that can easily decimate almost anything, and everyone wants them. The main problem is that they are unruly and vicious creatures that even Daenerys can't properly control.
  • Victarion Greyjoy's dragon horn can (supposedly) bind the dragons to his command, if this actually works it will probably become one.
  • Thoros of Myr is a Red Priest with the unique ability to bring dead people back to life. It can be done to the same corpse multiple times, although it is less effective each time he does it to the same body, and could be extremely useful if Thoros was aligned with a major faction. However Thoros has remained mostly neutral as of book five and has only used it on two people, Beric Dondarrion and Catelyn Stark.
• Star Wars Legends had a lot of writers in it over the years. Many of them gave Jedi in general and Luke Skywalker in particular New Powers as the Plot Demands. Sometimes it's used well, sometimes it's not. The Black Fleet Crisis out of nowhere gave him an unexplained control over rock - he effortlessly collects the ruins of a shattered castle and assembles it in the air, then makes those heavy dark stones change to a different kind of stone and flow and make a new castle, which forms and closes openings that can be used as doors and windows whenever he wants. No other books have given him anything like this power, and it's never been used again, although the ability to basically waterbend stone could certainly have come in handy.
  • Timothy Zahn, who wrote the first modern EU books and had heroes and villains who relied more on guile than force (or Force), complained about the tendency of writers to make Jedi incredibly powerful, as he considers that boring. He did try to solve the issue in Hand of Thrawn, by having Luke realize that relying on Story Breaker Powers blinds a Jedi to more subtle Force powers, though not all future writers took the hint. On a hilarious side-note, Zahn's main villain (Grand Admiral Thrawn) somehow managed to turn Art Appreciation into a storybreaker power, because he was just that much of a Magnificent Bastard.
• As a War Wizard, Richard in the Sword of Truth series is explicitly capable of almost doing anything with his magic. Goodkind gets around this trope, though, in that Richard doesn't have the slightest idea how to use it when he wants to. It only really works properly when it's time to end the book.
• Noah Watanabe's every-growing power does break Brian Herbert's Timeweb trilogy, since he has no Kryptonite Factor and no qualms about interfering for the greater good. However, Herbert deserves a certain amount of credit for keeping him under control for two books without using the Idiot Ball.
• The White Queen of The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign isn't just the most powerful being in the setting, but among the most powerful characters in all works of fiction. She can completely erase things from existence, freely control space and time, dominate humans and monsters through sheer force of personality, and can't be permanently killed... and these are just some of her many capabilities. She puts on a show of being Unskilled, but Strong, but is actually extremely skilled at using her powers. She's also the main villain, and her main limitation (and main motivation) is that she has a twisted love for Kyousuke and finds it fun to let him win, which is the only reason she hasn't won already.
• Worm:
  • The Siberian has a not fully understood power that renders her simultaneously a unstoppable force and a immovable object. This grants her an extreme degree of Nigh-Invulnerability, since any and all external force and energy will fail to create an effect on her, and also allows Siberian to create devastating attacks in battle, to the point of injuring other Nigh-Invulnerable capes like Alexandria, and to move very fast while bulldozing her way through any barriers and obstacles. She is easily the most feared member of the Slaughterhouse 9 and many capes have no hope of going against her. Though there is a weakness: The Siberian is actually a projection of Willian Manton, a completely vulnerable and otherwise completely normal man. When Manton is easily tracked down and killed off-page, the Siberian ceases to exist.
  • Eidolon's power is basically that he has every power. He can only use three at once, but those three can be anything: invincibility, time reversal, absolute annihilation, etc. This makes him, by far, one of the most versatile and powerful capes in the setting, and everyone is really, really happy he's a hero rather than a villain. In fact, once his full strength is restored, he even manages to briefly put up a fight against SCION, and is one of the only capes who actually manages to harm the Physical God. Scion tries to retreat rather than waste energy fighting Eidolon, and when Eidolon pursues him he resorts to using his costly precognition to mentally break Eidolon rather than overwhelm him with pure power, something he doesn't do for anyone else.
  • In a setting full of versatile superpowers, Contessa's is the queen. She has the ability to know exactly how to accomplish any task, by asking her power how to do it. For example, she can ask "how do I defeat this team of powerful capes?" and she'll know exactly how to carry out a guaranteed path to victory. No matter how improbable it is, as long as there exists even the tiniest chance of victory for her, she will get that victory. And unlike other forms of prescience in the setting, her power cannot be countered by other precogs. Basically, if you don't manage to ambush her before she asks how to beat you, you've already lost... and she's aware of this weakness, so she mitigates it by periodically asking her power how she can keep herself safe for the foreseeable future. It's no wonder she describes her power as "I win."
  • Scion, as the entity that gave parahumans their powers, he has access to every power he didn't give up, dialed up to eleven. Naturally, the powers most capable of damaging him, he kept for himself, while most mental powers come with a built-in block against being able to use them against him. Among other things, he's the only thing invisible to Contessa's power, and he has his own version. His main power, unique to him, is "stilling"; the ability to cancel out wavelengths of any and every kind. This includes essentially all matter and energy, giving him obscenely powerful offense and defense. He is far and away the most powerful character in the setting. The only way he's defeated is by completely shattering his will to fight.
• As time went on, there came to be quite a few of these in Wings of Fire.
  • Surprisingly enough, RainWings of all dragons turn out to be this. With incredibly deadly venom, camouflage, and tranquilizers, they'd be more than capable of resolving most plots if they weren't held back by pacifism and their own sheer idiocy. Tellingly, Glory spends most of her time (after learning how to use her abilities) being Queen away from the plot, and Kinkajou is incapacitated or elsewhere whenever the other dragonets have to fight anyone in their league.
  • NightWings would certainly qualify for this, if their abilities were as real as they'd like to have others believe. Moon is the only character in the present-day that actually has the fabled powers of seeing the future and reading minds, and she's far weaker than most in this department.
  • Animus Dragons have the power to do anything they want. Yes really. The only things that hold them back are themselves, the fear of losing their souls, and the fact that there are multiple of them (It's also Common Knowledge in-universe that they can't bring back the dead, though this has never been known to be tried). Once the arc involving them ended, they had their powers removed because they'd be far too capable of fixing everything and likely willing to.
  • There's a reason Clearsight is only present in one book, and only with fellow story-breakers. Her omniscience is so ridiculously strong that she really shouldn't have any problems dealing with anything less than animus dragons... who of course use their own powers to blind her to the futures to get what they want. Once she gets her powers back, she manages to resolve the plot in a couple hours. What really cements her as this, is the fact that if she existed during the timeline of any of the main books, she'd easily be able to resolve every conflict the protagonists face.
  • The reigning king of this however, is Darkstalker. While this trope normally doesn't apply to antagonists, Darkstalker becomes the biggest Story-Breaker in the series by a large margin by being an animus with omniscience, Complete Immortality and Mind-reading. This isn't so bad in Darkstalker (the novel) since his animus powers are confined to his scroll, his Morality Pet has better omniscience than him, and he has very little practice seeing the future. However, when he wakes up in book 9, it becomes very clear very quickly that next to none of the protagonists actually stand a chance against his whims, especially once he rapidly makes himself immune to other animus magic. As such, he spends most of the storyline attempting to use his powers very little, and still faces no real opposition from anyone besides Turtle (an animus) and Dragons helped by Turtle's magic.

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