How to make telekinesis not overpowered?

How does one limit a person with telekinesis to prevent them from altering a person's organs? One telekinetic squeeze to the brain, even a very light one, and that person is dead. How do you prevent a telekinetic from simply wiping out an entire room by thinking about it? I haven't seen many settings where this has come up. They usually just...don't for some reason, as if nobody thought of it. Can anyone give an actual reason as to why a telekinetic couldn't do this?

Some ideas for restrictions on telekinetic powers:

• The telekinetic person has to be able to see what they are moving, so they couldn't directly affect a person's internal organs unless those organs were showing. Depending on the tech level of the story, if the victim wasn't cut open, the telekinetic person could use things like surgical cameras to view the insides of someone and manipulate them that way (this could be used in a beneficial way to do telekinetic surgery). This idea would also prohibit the telekinetic from affecting things that are too small for them to see, such as individual cells/molecules in the body.
• Heavier objects are harder to lift telekinetically just like they are physically, which would prevent the telekinetic person from being able to do things like uproot entire buildings or cities.
• To go with the above restriction, multiple objects are harder to manipulate than single objects.
• Telekinesis doesn't work on anything that is alive and can move, or if it does, then the victim can fight against it and possibly win depending on how strong they are.

edited 18th May '15 2:23:49 PM by Rainbow

Another possibility: telekinesis only affects objects as a whole, with the force applied evenly throughout the object. Thus a telekinetic wouldn't be able to affect just someone's spleen, as that organ is attached to the rest of the person's body, and any force applied is applied to the entire body.

Living things may resist the effects of telekinetic power, making it easier to chunk chairs at people than to rip them in half.

Range. The farther away something is, the harder it is to move it.

Alternatively, to meld several of the above suggestions together: each telekinetic has a set limit to the amount of telekinetic force that they can generate in a given time. Thus: -To move multiple objects, one -A more massive object would require more force to overcome inertia, friction, gravity, etc. -Obviously, it is harder / more draining / more limiting to move something harder or faster. So poking someone from across the room is easier than punching or shoving them, and it could be out of the realm of possibility of most telekinetics to become a gun, say. Certainly not as a first resort or main weapon. -Any object (so one could blast a living thing with concussive force, but it would be much more difficult to, say, hold them in the air, while people-puppeteering would be near-impossible(except with say, a corpse)

Well, it's not exactly telekinesis, but in what I'm working on some characters do have powers that could, if allowed to work on everything with no limits, be used to do broken things in much the same way as telekinesis can.

The solution to that one was fairly simple. Everyone, even those who do not have those powers, has the ... let's say "energy", that makes it possible to use those powers, and this provides them with a degree of resistance. Because of this resistance anyone who would be able to affect others directly and forcibly with their powers is strong enough that the weaker ones probably wouldn't stand a chance in a more indirect fight anyway.

But really, in the end it all boils down to having rules that can be used to veto certain uses, rules that never get broken by anything in the story. What exactly those rules are is up to you.

I can never justify pure telekinesis. It doesn’t make “logical” sense to me for some reason. I have to simulate it with aerokinesis, because I CAN justify a person’s mind being “linked” to an elemental’s in such a way that the elemental acts like one of the person’s appendages.

Oh, I'm doing it that way as well. The closest the stuff in my story comes to being actual telekinesis is creating invisible (but not undetectable) tendrils that can be used to manipulate stuff around the one doing it (something like combat tentacles, essentially).

But the question was how to stop any ability that operates on the basic principles the same or similar to those of telekinesis from being overpowered. So if you have any ideas about that, throw them in.

edited 19th May '15 1:32:35 AM by Kazeto

You could decide that (almost) everyone has enough TK to shield their bodies from the TK of others, even unconsciously. In fact, skepticism could fuel the shields so only extremely powerful TK-users can penetrate them.

I like the idea of psionic experiments failing because skepticism literally disrupts telekinetic forces and extrasensory probes.

edited 19th May '15 2:15:45 AM by nekomoon14

Just make it require enough concentration that, yes, a telekinetic could kill someone by squeezing their brain, but not so quickly and easily that someone with an offensive power of their own (or a gun) couldn't potentially keep them from having time to do it.

They don't squeeze brains because of the telekinetic police. From a circle of elders to an organization of TK-savvy spies, when a TK user is found to be using their powers in a manner which violates any given rules(for example, murder by brain-crushing), the TK police punish that user usually in the same manner.

So say a guy goes rolling out to squish brains with his powers. The TK spies report his behavior, restrain him and his power, and carry out their sentence.

Adds a layer of fear and mystery if there are other TK users out there looking to execute those who don't follow their rules.

Perhaps there's telepathic feedback? If you use your telekinesis on a living body, you feel some reflection of the force you exert. Possibly up to equal. So you can squeeze brains, but it takes you with them.

Chronic headaches being a side effect of the telekenisis, and the headaches can damper and shatter the user's concentration and cause it to fail. Overuse of the power can cause other negative effects, such as tumors, memory loss, loss of motor control, and so on.

Gil Hamilton (Larry Niven's character) can affect objects as if with an invisible hand, limiting his range, and was very weak (had trouble lifting a cigarette). His villains tended to be able to stay far enough away for it to be a non-issue.

So... weak, low range, and these limitations are known.

In the project that I'm working on, Ki powers exist, and can be used by some people. These people can infuse their Ki (or Qi as I've called it in the story) into other objects, or people, allowing them to manipulate them similar to telekinesis.

Some of the rules that I use to limit this are:

. Qi users have a defensive barrier, protecting them from other Qi users.

. Qi can only be attributed to a whole, rather than specific parts of an object.

. It is very difficult to do, so most Qi users can't pull it off.

I remember reading a story once, not sure if it was a work of fiction or folklore, it was certainly pretty old, that had vampire hunters facing off against vampires with limited telekenitic powers.

So they drenched their weapons in garlic and/or wild rose juice in order to not have them snatched right out of their hands. And also drank holy water so the vampires couldn't magically toss them around like rag dolls.

Now, if you take the vampire element out, this can still work as story device. E.i. have an anti-magic/telekinesis agent which characters can either consume or immerse themselves in, thus, negating or weakening the effects of telekinesis.

One way I like to limit telekinesis is having an energy requirement - just like lifting something larger physically takes more energy and effort, same thing with lifting things telekinetically. So pushing back a really heavy object like a car would really take a lot out of the user, and they would feel dizzy and drained afterward. So I basically treat it like mild superhuman strength over a distance. And speaking of distance, I also believe in the "distance principle", that things further away are more difficult to move.

Another thing I once explored was having two characters with telekinetic powers, but they used it a bit differently. One of them focused on finesse, being able to move multiple small objects (or fluids) at once in intricate patterns, but not being able to lift anything heavier than half their own weight or bend or break stuff. The other focused on power, being able to bend and crush objects (but as was mentioned before, they have to be able to see the object) and move things about as heavy as a golf cart without getting too exhausted, but having difficulty being precise with movement and often accidentally breaking or erratically moving small objects.

I'm thinking of an inversion of ArsThaumaturgis' idea: to properly manipulate an object, the user needs to constantly and actively probe at its structure and weight distribution with a separate psychic function. Without doing so, they would have no hope of keeping the uniform force distribution needed to perform a telekinetic manoeuvre. For example, a TK user trying to lift a car would need to "feel out" every wire, bolt and ball bearing in the structure and shift the psychic force appropriately. Any loss of concentration on their part would jack up the balance, causing them to topple it over or rip the engine block out of the hood. This obviously makes it a mentally taxing ordeal - easily leading to tunnel vision and opening up the user to attacks. In a combat situation, under stress and heavy gunfire, a TK user might try crude moves like ripping off light fixtures over an enemy's head or launching a cloud of small objects at their general direction, but complex ones like bludgeoning a foe with a flying microwave oven would be extremely difficult to pull off without external help. In short, this TK mechanism still allows the user to launch devastating attacks, but it also makes them hard to perform and easy to disrupt. This could answer your concern regarding its use on human beings as well, as the human body is a flexible, highly mobile structure, and thus harder to get a lock on.

My suggestion is to make it so that the TK users have preset "mental blocks" that limit what they could do. Without these blocks, they could essentially warp reality. With them, they cannot move more than a certain mass at a time, they cannot use it on living organisms, they cannot use it with such extreme precision. You can choose what blocks TK users have (If they all don't have different ones).

make whatever the telapath is fighting powerful enough to resit it, thus balancing everything out

Which doesn't work in the long run, as relying on the target being powerful enough that it can resist whatever the ability can throw at them does not make the ability any less powerful, and in fact means that the one way to combat it that will happen will be to make the ability—when used by the character who is to win—stronger so that it can get through the resistance and hurt it, and after a few (at most) such encounters it will reach silly Dragonball-esque power levels where you just throw what you have at the other person and the first one to hit wins.

And that will be boring and pointless and will not make it any less powerful (in fact, the opposite is most likely to happen).

Also, considering your question in a certain other thread, you are trying to write a book yourself. Maybe you are trying to write it in another language and English isn't one you normally use, but even if that happens to be the case, your apparent disregard for anything that has to do with orthography (because half, if not more, of mishaps in the text you write could have been avoided if you just used a spell-checker) makes you look really incompetent and that's not encouraging people to help you.

my spelling isn't normally this bad, nor is my grammar, but most of the time when I'm browsing TV-Tropes I'm on my phone, who's keyboard is really hard to type on, and has its autocorrect programmed by a blind Chinese monkey

Now onto the "balancing out" thing i mentioned in my previous comment, because i really should have said more there. You see, what I meant is that being "overpowered" is relative, you could have a hero who's power is getting everything he wants, but if the villain has the power of killing everything instantly regardless of anything the hero wishes, then there isn't really much of a matchup is there? Of course, how you decide to make your telekinesis fair will depend a lot on the genre of the work. Another suggestion i have is to do nothing about it, and make the usage a moral concern, have the protagonist worry that if he overused his power that he won't be able to stop.

edited 31st Aug '15 12:23:21 AM by sliceofpi

Well, that is that then, as far as the comment about the appearance of incompetence goes. I did think it a possibility which is why the "apparent" and "makes you look" parts, though honestly that's exactly why I am not using a phone for anything of this sort. Because the spell-maimer that the usual phone has nowadays just drives me mad with how it mutilates most attempts at writing things. Because yeah, "blind Chinese monkey" pretty much covers it. Oh, and sorry if I offended you in any way with that one, I sometimes do that without meaning to since my sarcasm-o-meter is broken and I don't really find out until later.

Leaving that behind (because now I know and thus won't mention it again), yes, I do agree that it mostly depends on the genre and sometimes leaving it all as-is and making the boundaries of the ability's usage depend on one's morals can be a valid way to tackle this issue.

And with resisting ... well, point is, once we make someone resistant to it then we either make everyone resistant (because why wouldn't they be) and at this point it stops being resistance and becomes a genuine limit of the power itself, or we only make some people resistant and then it all depends on power levels and we get silliness (or on some clan-related limit that starts fine but then often puts the writer in a pit of spikes because it is almost certain that it'll not be used only the few times it had originally been planned to be used). Hence my reply to that particular part.

Oh well, to each their own, I guess.

The more fine the control one wishes to apply, the more difficult and straining the telekinetic "casting" or whatnot is.

One shove against somethong? Sure. Lightly tapping a specific part of the body? You stand a decent chance of knocking yourself out trying.

Leastaways, that's how I've balanced it out in the past.

The object must be "marked" before it can be used. What kind of mark depends. Blood, magic seal, simple touch....