Character Superpower Workshop

Basically, Random Questions Thread: Superpowers Edition

This thread is for those of you who are writing stories with characters who use superpowers.

Do you want to know the full implication of your character's ability, how it can be utilized?

Do you think your character's power is too strong and wants to know how to limit it?

Do you want to know how your character's power will be useful in real life?

If you got questions of this sort, you got the right place.

I wouldn't say this thread needs any rule, but when someone posts his/her character's superpower and related questions, do try to answer those first, preferrably but not necessarily, until he or she gets a satisfactory answer.

So, who want to start?

Edited by dRoy on Aug 9th 2019 at 9:18:43 PM

Would a character be considered overpowered in-universe if they have a rather OP power BUT said OP ability doesn't affect most of the opponents they face?

Three of the main female characters have power over solids, liquids and gas respectively. Their skillset involves creating, manipulating, destroying the state of matter they specialize in and transforming other forms of matter into a solid/liquid/gas of their choice. They are able to transmute material foes into powder/water/oxygen which kills them. The destruction/transmutation abilities can be blocked via Deflector Shields, Hard Light armor, Anti-Magic, or being an Energy Being.

At the start of the story this ability is pretty broken but the enemies wisen up, sending out shielded troops or troops with energy-based armor, and later on almost all the foes the girls fight are Energy Beings who are immune to said transmutation effects (and can phase through any matter they create). Would this balance them out?

I honestly have no idea, because I don't know how the "energy" in your verse works. I mean, for example, if those energy have to come from something that is not energy (like ones that generating shield, etc), it's still pretty gamebreaking.

Also, unless those energy beings doesn't need to breath or immune to the effect of gravity, those female characters still can counter by reshaping the terrain itself.

The Energy Beings don't need to breathe, and a number of them can phase through physical substances so even terrain is not an issue. Structures made by the Energy Beings are also made of Hard Light so it's impossible to shape that form of terrain too.

Basically the Energy is drawn from another dimension (which is saturated with it), and said Energy Beings are the denizens of that dimension. They thus technically have an unlimited amount of energy to draw from.

edited 4th Sep '14 4:11:49 PM by ironcommando

How are the energy beings beaten, then?

The Energy Beings must be hit via energy-based or magically-enhanced attacks. Thus the girls will usually need to infuse their attacks with magic. (such as firing Mana crystals, using living water infused with Mana, or lighting up the air in flames). This probably won't kill the Energy Beings in one hit which will sort-of balance it out.

Yeah, that sounds balanced enough.

So I have a setting where monomolecular knives are considered sort of "standard equipment" for anyone worth mentioning in CQC, and many varieties of blade exist which can get even sharper, like blades with a subatomic edge, blades that can cut through quantum strings, and blades that are arbitrarily, conceptually sharp and can cut through anything with zero resistance.

How many ways could this screw me over in the future that you guys can think of?

You could make the characters fight intangible Energy Beings or mooks with Deflector Shields to deflect said sharp blades. Are the non-conceptual ones able to cut through energy and Hard Light as well as they do with matter?

edited 4th Sep '14 5:18:48 PM by ironcommando

Most of the fights in this setting aren't physical altercations. Knives are a last-resort, "I'm in melee range so why not" option, when most people normally fight with guns or enchanted weapons and have either the advantage of speed, regeneration, or a hide thick enough that the knives can't cut it (yes, believe it or not, there are people in this world with particle physics-wrecking flesh that mono-atomic knives cannot cut).

I just wanted to know if I'm underestimating what these knives might be capable of, even in a setting where most fights are settled by who can cheat the hardest.

edited 4th Sep '14 5:24:02 PM by KSPAM

Considering how most knife fighters avoid contacting blades at all, preferring to go for limbs and bodies instead, I'd say it doesn't mean a whole lot, really.

Unless you use knives in order to manipulate the terrains to your favor, that is. That could lead to all sorts of possibilities and potentially epic fight sequences.

Have knives so sharp that they can cut through spacetime or even the fabric of reality itself? If there are guys who can resist such weapons it may not be that implausible...

edited 4th Sep '14 5:42:34 PM by ironcommando

So I got a character, whose power is to control friction. What are some ways this can be used in combat?

I can think of:

• Crawling wall
• Make people either slip or unable to move from the spot.
• Pushing heavy, non-fixed objects to people.
• Derailing vehicles
• Making objects bounce off of his skin

The user in question can't use it on very small objects (so no stopping the blood flow by increasing friction in the veins or anything like that) or really large things.

I've been told that this character can probably use superspeed. Now, I'm not a very science savvy guy, so I don't really know how reducing friction can increase one's speed. I heard that the faster an object becomes, the stronger the friction becomes. So is the friction the same thing with air resistance, or something? Does the air resistance slow things down a whole lot, when the object in question is a man who is muscular, but not that much?

edited 7th Sep '14 6:49:30 PM by dRoy

There was actually a character back in Marvel's old New Universe comics from the '80s with that power. Initially, she used it for the obvious stuff - making people slip, making them stick to objects, things like that. At one point, though, she used it to keep an opponent's eyelids shut.

edited 7th Sep '14 10:57:11 PM by Tiamatty

Holy shit, that's incredibly Simple, yet Awesome!

Do machines need friction to work as well, like firearms?

Friction is a force that resists motion, meaning that without friction an item set in motion will continue moving indefinitely. Even stuff like air resists the movement of objects, creating drag. Friction also keeps objects from falling apart (on macro-level)—without it a gun would fall into pieces, since its individual parts would be too "slippery" to remain attached to each other.

Don Rosa plays with the idea of manipulating friction in the Disney Ducks Comic Universe story, Cash Flow, where an inventor manages to create an anti-friction Ray Gun.

The gun is used in the story to achieve such feats as: 1. walking through a barbed wire fence (without friction the wire cannot scratch you), 2. open locks (without friction nothing holds the latches in place so they slide open on their own), 3. cause all furniture in a room to slide in a single corner (the floor is slightly slanted, which without friction is effectively the same as a steep downhill, and 4. make money flow like water and impossible to grasp.

edited 8th Sep '14 8:05:03 AM by Paradisesnake

Well, holy crap. It's good thing that the user of this power is a total idiot.

Yeah, the problem with giving characters superpowers that can manipulate the very fundamental laws of physics is that they're always at risk of reaching story breaking level. Lack of imagination on the user's part is one way of setting limits to what the character can do, but I prefer setting some kind of limitations for the superpower itself. Otherwise you really need to know your physics, or your readers are constantly calling Forgot About His Powers.

And about powers that utilize basic laws of physics... there's been talk on this site about how electromagnetism, being one of the four fundamental forces, has a lot of untapped potential. I've been planning to write a more realistic superhero/villain with electromagnetic powers (one who can only manipulate metals that are actually ferromagnetic for example), and I'd like to now what kind of feats you could actually achieve with them?

edited 9th Sep '14 3:12:45 AM by Paradisesnake

Depends on how great their control over electromagnetism is. Bonus points, almost anything can be magnetized (temporarily) with enough effort.

EDIT: Monsters who can randomly warp to different points in your personal timeline and attack you at any point in your past, present or future. They can also teleport anywhere there's a 120 degree angle or sharper, and their claws are sharp enough to cut through quantum strings, which is how they "burrow" through time and space. Oh, and they're Made of Air.

Realistically, how do you beat something like this without resorting to Deus ex Machina or contrived Kryptonite Factor? If you can't, then how should I, as the author, approach the logical failings of time travel that such an adversary is bound to bring with them?

edited 9th Sep '14 5:15:57 AM by KSPAM

I doubt I'm ever going to write a character who's on the same level with Magneto or the like, but let's say, for the sake of though experiment, that you have close to unlimited powers over electromagnetism. What would be the most fun you could get out of it?

This question interests me mainly because of videos like this one, where a strong magnet is used to levitate a frog with the help of diamagnetism. Seeing this kind of made me realize there's probably a lot of interesting stuff I don't know about magnetism.

edited 9th Sep '14 5:32:59 AM by Paradisesnake

If you had unlimited control over electromagnetism, you'd basically be God, able to pull apart matter atom by atom and reshape it at will, not to mention all sorts of other funky shit with energy manipulation. There's a reason electromagnetism is the most powerful of the four fundamental forces.

Hmm, matter manipulation is one of those powers I really don't want to mess with. Okay, let's drop the electro-part, and say you have the power to simply generate powerful magnetic fields. If you can—with enough power—magnetize things like water, would you say it's still worth the effort to do this, or would it be more reasonable to just use the power to manipulate something that's more easy to magnetize (like iron)? For example, would it be more practical to restraint someone using pieces of iron than using diamagnetism to manipulate the water inside the human body?

Time Travel related powers always suffer from the same problem: if your first attack failed, why not just use your powers to go further back in time to try again? This is the main reason why the Terminator movies make no sense whatsoever: After the T-800 failed to kill Sarah Connor and her would-be-messianic son the first time, why not just send another T-800 after the first one? Even if it would require a considerable amount of energy to use the time machine, you could send cyborgs once a month (always to the same exact time), eventually overrunning your target.

You can't really fight an enemy with time travel powers without having similar powers of your own. If the monsters have any kind of control over their destination, they can simply murder your hero while he/she is asleep.

edited 9th Sep '14 6:08:36 AM by Paradisesnake

If you can use diamagnetism to that extent, you could just immobilize them by controlling the trace amounts of iron in their blood

...I've been led to believe that, since it's part of a compound, the iron in human blood is not ferromagnetic?

It is, and it isn't. Technically, since hemoglobin contains iron, blood should be ferromagnetic, but it isn't on account of how small the iron particles are and how thinly distributed they are. They can't form strong magnetic fields on their own. They respond to strong magnets, but it would take a long time for any adverse side effects to a strong magnetic effect to become apparent.

This is, of course, assuming you're using the kind of magnetic field that a rational human being would willingly expose themselves to and not hilariously lethal industrial grade EM generators or superhuman Magneto powers

edited 9th Sep '14 7:20:35 AM by KSPAM