World building: most powerful superpower?

Okay let me rewrite this: I've been creating a world mostly like our own except that there are humans gifted with 'miracles' To sum up, here are a set of rules to these:

Original rules:

• Who can and will be granted these miracles are pretty random, but those that can be granted this miracles should at least witness something they love get destroyed at a point in their life, from teddy bears to a whole galaxy. (edit: see below)

• these powers will persist until they die, in which a bony disk containing a lesser level of miracle can be extracted from their body.

• the miracles given are at random, one can easily get silly things like pyrokinesis after watching their house burned down or omnipotence while sleeping after watching their bread get eaten by their bully. (edit: the primary miracles are determined since birth, and most only have one, only that they are locked and usually unlocked by the above rules.)

• most people can only get at most 3 lesser miracles using bony disks without proper mental training. (edit: they are changed to tertiary miracles, see below)

• most miracles are graded over their overall potential, super speed can easily be outgraded by mind reading. (edit: figured out the hard way that this rule totally sucks and should be ignored, keeping this rule here so maybe someone who only recently read this wouldn't be confused by other's opinion on this rule.)

• a primary miracle can be granted with a lesser primary miracle if the person's lucky enough to get a useless primary miracle. (we now have secondary and tertiary miracles)

• one can 'ascend' their primary miracle, that is, sacrifice their primary miracle for another one, hopefully less dumb, by random requirements per person. (edit: by using a certain artifact, which is available everywhere, but found very rarely.)

• one can upgrade their primary miracle using 'upgrade disks', a special bony disk, and any upgrade disks that are held or absorbed by a person can be extracted upon death. (edit: they are created when an animal that is imbued with certain potion effect dies within 6-10 hours of them after ingesting that potion.)

• main miracles can also be obtained by one who don't already have one by using a 'starter disk', yet another special bony disk. (edit: yet another obsolete rule, please disregard)

• miracles with great raw power (ex:necromancy) come with 'refresh disks', which means that they need to apply a spell using a miracle user that can imbue this disk with power after every use.

Additional rules: (if any of the above rules contradict the rules below, disregard the above ones.)

• there are a few types of miracles by their power and consistency:
  • Primary, which is mostly random, they can either have cooldown or use refresh coins, and most can only have one primary miracle. These miracles are also upgradeable.

  • Secondary, simply said they are HP and MP. One can draw from MP points to use a predetermined spells that can drain opponents' HP or MP points, or do mundane things. if one's HP is drained out, they will get hurt like real-life humans or choose to defend themselves using their MP with lots of penalty cost. The inverse also works, if one's MP points are drained out they can cast spells from HP with lots of penalty cost. This miracle can be easily trained as they are consistent among humans and are recharged by resting or primary miracles that can recharge this miracle (like healers). Note that guns do exist and can drain HP, however their high costs means most of the time it's easier and more cost-effective to train one in secondary miracles than investing in guns (and also they do not have knowledge of mass-producing smokeless gunpowder until too late). Some people also carry melee weapons.
    • Individual HP, MP and other stats like MP-to-damage ratio or damage reduction may vary from person-to-person, and forces a few creative fighting styles.

    • One can also recharge HP and MP mid-battle by forcing the body to create an excess of adrenaline to be thrown the blood, speeding up metabolism and heightens the need of oxygen. Failure to maintain good balance of chemicals may result in regular hypoxia or hyperventilation, which might force the user to forfeit (or fall flat on the ground) with lots of HP remaining.

    • However, any damage that happens after the HP is drained would be healed (or not) by the same mechanism real-life human uses (cuts, limb loss, damage from heat/electricity, death, etc), provided there are nobody with a physical healing miracle. There also happens to be a few spells that bypass HP entirely, which is the basis for surgery in this world.

  • Tertiary, which comes from lesser bony disks (the ones you get from dead bodies), and have separate MP which is drawn from metabolism (in other words, you can recharge them by eating.)

• Most people are born with secondary miracles, it's primary miracles which are random, volatile and have to be unlocked.

• There exists a Government that has miracle-tracking technology and takes control over 3 small regions, which is said to be utopia. the first 4 stories below will take place in these regions.

My questions are:

• there will be 8 most powerful miracles, one is:
  • ability to create starter/upgrade disks by killing someone and destroying their soul, and any miracles held by the 'someone' will be captured and automatically fully (3-50 upgrade disks worth) upgraded in a special disk.

What will be the rest 7 be for you? Take note that biological immortality and ability to destroy a city is considered 'meh, sub-par at best.', mostly because they're not potentially useful. (at least not anymore, and also I'm not a fan of "breaking the rules" miracles as they will result in "goku vs superman"-tier situations where each will try to outpower the other, creating so many fillers.)

• there will also be a certain miracle that are tied with magic orbs, what should these orbs do? My idea is that these magic orbs-and-miracle combination can let the person control chemical elements (oxygen ,nitrogen and stuff) (edit: they are now used to share miracles. thank you phoenixfalcon.)

• I have also straightened up the plots of my 'stories', which are (by order of birth):
  • Greed
    • male MC's primary miracle: ability to aggregate chemical elements to each other on his hands (ex: carbon atoms or oxygen), and only works at very limited range, 5m maximum, ready to use whenever.

    • personality: well, greedy.

    • MC starts as a young researcher in miracles, and finds some orbs. he works on a machine that can give everyone primary miracles without having to unlock them using random chances to make lots of money, kills a bunch of people with it to power it, and focuses on having to choose lots upon lots of choices that ends up in his downfall.

  • Gluttony
    • male MC's primary miracle: always active Mind Reading, 30m radius, eventually upgraded to something?

    • Personality: wise, but not very nice when criticizing.

    • Extra: he doesn't have any secondary miracle and thus must avoid combat at all costs.

    • female MC's primary miracle: ability to charge refresh coins of other people, costs 1000 MP per coin.

    • Personality: innocent?, reckless.

    • extra: she holds a bony disk which has the aforementioned top 8 miracle, which also gives her almost infinite MP slot, but not the ability to heal MP. note that she found the disk.

    • Greed MC's son, a young surgeon, gets to a relationship with a nurse-in-training. After a while he finds out that she holds a curious bony disk that can kill people. A bunch of mafia is mad that a few of their comrades are gone and a guy that already has 7 of 8 of the bony disk tries also to get it. the rest are huge spoilers. It was written to subvert 'you are a special snowflake' stories that are floating everywhere nowadays, and also has big choices for the female MC to make. I also don't know which part of this is gluttony. please help. (take note that the female MC is the one guilty of gluttony)

  • Pride
    • Male MC's primary miracle: ability to counter any attack directed at him, but only if he stands still and pridefully, which means he has to taunt his enemies until they attack him. this also makes him unable to attack anyone since these attacks will be redirected at him and hurts him. His HP and MP is listed as imaginary number, aka i (google it). (the miracle was 'luck', which is ambiguous.)

    • personality: humorous, troublemaker.

    • Female MC's primary miracle: ability to secrete powerful digestive enzymes in aqueous matrix that will eat through any organic matter and can be shut down by rising the temperature of the liquid to boiling water temperature. produced at 50 ml per hour. (I like to think of this girl as a type of mama bear.) (I'm not putting her in the gluttony part since she can't absorb what her enzymes destroy)

    • It's mostly just fun satire, but the plot hasn't gotten anywhere yet.

  • Envy
    • Male MC's primary miracle: ability to reject each and all kinds of outside items, from healing potions to bony disks to upgrade or refresh coins. which is why he's envious of everyone, he can't have a decent miracle like other cool kids. yet he can eat or get damaged normally, it's just the cool stuff that's restricted from him. Always active.

    • personality: not very angsty, at least for a 30-years old man that gets PTSD from war.

    • Female MC's primary miracle: Still dunno, but she has to focus on her secondary miracle as the plot.

    • The Pride MC's son, a soldier recently dismissed from war with really bad shrapnel scars, meets up with his friends back home. The War was between three major cities that destroyed the 'dystopian government' and now turns against each other. yet another bad guy takes the top 8 miracle disks and uses the war as a chance to become the victor. the bad guy kills off MC's friends in a siege. Envious from not being able to die in their sleep like his friends (silly, I know, but think of yourself in his place), he runs off as a refugee along with a younger sister of his friend that hauls from rather far away. It's a subversion and deconstruction of 'dystopian government vs rebels' stories that also floats everywhere.

  • Lust
    • Male MC's primary miracle: I dunno, maybe straight up arousing superpower?

    • he's still poorly developed, don't blame me.

    • Female MC's primary miracle: normal attack deflection. has 8 uses and recharges one use per few minutes.

    • The Envy MC, finally peaceful and wrapped up, along with his wife travels very far away from war to meet with his uncle, the Lust MC's father. He knows there are a few people that can help Envy MC with cooling down the conflict in the other side of the planet, and seeks help with the lust MC's parents to find them. three guesses upon what happens next. this should also be a subversion and deconstruction, although I don't know what should be deconstructed. please help.

  • Wrath
    • Female MC's superpower (yes, superpower): Berserk mode, 3 minutes of use gets recharged per hour, maximum 7.3 minutes, which is replaced with elemental iron manipulation (Anger usually is represented with blood. Blood contains hemoglobin. Hemoglobin has Iron in it.), and then added with mind control and immortality using upgrades.

    • Lust MC's (illegitimate?) daughter finally sets off to cool off the war that has been going for 20-something years, and discovers that simply going mad to fix short-term problems aren't enough to do the trick. She upgrades her primary miracles and takes anger management lessons before she's worthy to stop the war. I would also like to add that this is yet another deconstruction and subversion.

  • Sloth
    • Male MC's primary miracle: save-and-load feature, which is nice. maybe needs more miracles? (was omnipotence while asleep, REM only)

    • The new president turns out to yet be another tyrant, which uses the Wrath MC as a tool to become ruler and the Envy MC's son, Sloth MC, is too busy sleeping to help the Wrath MC fix the problem. This was planned to be a deconstruction of 'history rhymes' saying.

Maybe anyone want to help straighten the plot? thank you. (And please warn me of potential Mary Sues/Marty Stus)

(notice that all of these characters are of working age, I don't really like child heroes or high school drama stories since there are enough of those things already. maybe I should also deconstruct high school drama? I can't make it really good, though.)

(This has been edited more than 3 times already.)

edited 12th Mar '16 8:10:55 AM by legonut031

"Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're right." -Shirou

bump

edited 12th Feb '16 5:10:44 AM by legonut031

"Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're right." -Shirou

rebumping because nobody seems to respond after weeks

"Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're right." -Shirou

To be quite honest, this world seems like it would be incredibly unstable. I mean, if people can suddenly gain absolutely insane powers from slight annoyances, and whole cities can be destroyed without anyone caring too much, doesn't seem like there'd be much sense or order. It would probably either be anarchy, or at best a highly unstable feudal type government.

That said, let me answer your questions:

1. I think absolute mind control would be one. In a world like this, the ability to control the will of people around you, especially other miracle users, would be immensely powerful.

Also, the aforementioned omnipotence, since you know, omnipotence basically means you're a god.

2. What I think would be interesting is if the orbs allowed people to share the power of their miracles with others in their vicinity. For instance, if one person had a miracle that allowed them to light objects on fire, they could use a magical orb to allow everyone around them to also have this power.

3. Honestly, I'd make luck Greed's power rather than Pride's. As for Pride, I think the power should be persuasion. Basically, a subtle form of mind control that makes it far easier to convince people.

Envy's could be the ability to copy the miracles of people around you.

Sloth and Gluttony could be related, giving the ability to fully satisfy your human needs with only small amounts. For instance, Sloth gives you the ability to have the equivalent of a full night's rest in a few seconds, while Gluttony gives you the ability to have all your daily nutritional needs satisfied by say, one grain of sugar.

Lust's ability... Well, if you really wanted to go that direction, you could make it related to sexual arousal. Or maybe the ability to manipulate the relationships of yourself and others.

Your current idea for Wrath's ability is fine, I see no need to change it.

The world they exist in determines how power is ranked, not the other way around. Or to phrase it another way, the only way you can declare something 'powerful' or even a 'superpower', is if that power is stronger relative to some benchmark.

Those benchmarks are in the world you make, which you haven't shared here. So it's a difficult question to answer in a way that would be useful.

Technically, I'd say that one of the most broken powers is "having all the powers of everybody ever created in fiction, with none of the negative ones or the drawbacks associated with them."

In your universe terms, the most powerful superpower theoretically would be having all of them w/o the drawbacks (and the ability to know how to use all of them).

...eheh

Fate. The power to always end up succeeding regardless of the process. The world bends over backwards for them.

Power Nullifier: The more powerful other abilities are, the more powerful this becomes.

Omipotence. You know, actual omnipotence. Would still lose to the previous two assuming it doesn't just arbitrarily overwrite.

If city-destroying is considered old hat, I think the "best" powers need to be ones that inherently break the rules. "Strength has no meaning before an absolute" and all that. Frankly, your one preset example of "extracting powers from souls" sounds kind of useless, all things considered, so I don't think you've fully thought this through.

edited 4th Mar '16 9:47:59 AM by Clarste

The Ability to Refill Anything.

Now everyone pat me on the back and tell me how clever I am!

Thank you guys for the feedbacks.

Yes, I haven't fully thought about that before I made the original post. I might remove that rule from my main rules since it has no importance so far in my plot.

I haven't fully set the benchmarks, maybe someone can help? My idea is that they can be ranked by:

• raw power (ex. hulk-like superpower or moving at high speeds)
• developmental potential (ex. persuasion)
• area of effect (ex. range of telekinesis)
• some other things

edited 9th Mar '16 8:24:44 PM by legonut031

"Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're right." -Shirou