Need help working the bugs out of an ability.

Me again. So I came up with a new character and gave her an ability revolving around the idea of 'Silencing.' At its most basic, she can create an area around herself or a target where sound doesn't exist. Now, this would be fine if it were the kind of story where supernatural characters fight against regular human soldiers, but this character is a major antagonist who goes up against my main cast of other supernaturally powered characters, and everyone ranges from kind of OP to stupid mega OP in terms of power. So I thought "what if she could 'silence' not only sound, but other phenomena like light and heat, etc." But after thinking about this for a bit I quickly realised that I'd taken a low-power ability and turned it into a super King Kong Story-Breaker Power. The way I have the power working is that within the ability's area of effect, whatever phenomena it silences is completely negated. This works fine with sound, light, magic, and even time (yes, I know Time Stands Still is the ultimate Story-Breaker Power, but I imposed several limits on it, like only being able to use it in her demon form, having it kick the crap out of her mana and stamina, and giving the main character a convenient 11th-Hour Superpower that can negate it, so it's all good), but when I started to apply it to other forces it became an instant 'I win' button. Silence heat? Now the entire area instantly falls to absolute zero and everything in it dies instantly. Silence electricity? Now everyone disintegrates because the electrical bonds holding their atoms together are gone. Silence cell division? That would presumably also allow all cellular activity to be silenced and everyone dies again. Silence the flow of liquid? Great, now you can stop the blood in everyone's veins and everyone dies. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Originally I'd decided to just pare it down to only affecting sound, light, magic and time, but now I have the problem that it's basically just Captain Tousen's Bankai except now it also stops you from using magic, and then whenever the fight crosses the Godzilla Threshold the character just pulls a Dio Brando and wins the fight instantly. What I'm saying is now it's too generic and although it's certainly powerful enough for the story it feels like it's too limited. And because I'm more used to just piling all the most stupid OP abilities into my characters and having them all balance out by virtue of their powers cancelling each other out, I'm not especially good at paring down abilities to fit lower ends of the Super Weight scale, especially when I feel like I'm sacrificing some uniqueness or utility just for the sake of not having the story implode on itself. So help me tune this thing.

I've got it down as far as sound, light, magic and time go. The power creates a spherical area of effect centered on either the character herself or a target of her choosing within her line of sight, where sound, light, magic or time just stop working. The specifics for each one are as follows:

• For sound it's easy, everything within the zone of effect is absolutely silent. Sound just plain doesn't work at all, and no sounds can get in from outside the zone either. It's obvious use is for sneak attacks, made more useful by the fact that the character can hide her demonic aura and can Flash Step. Also has some psychological torture uses. It would be quite disconcerting to be in agony and not be able to hear yourself scream after all.

• For light it's just as simple. There is no light inside the zone and everything is completely pitch black. No light gets in from the outside and the area looks like a hemisphere of complete blackness for anyone looking at it from outside. I thought at first of using it like invisibility, Saying that maybe it stopped light reflecting from inside the zone or something, but one, I realised that that would just result in the area looking completely opaque and be useless for stealth, and two I really kind of wanted to rip off Tousen's Bankai and do the whole 'pitch black void where you can't see jack shit and the enemy comes at you from all sides' thing. So light is sorted. I guess it would also completely block laser attacks regardless of their power as well.

• For magic it's a little less straightforward. Within the zone magical energy can't transfer itself from the air to the caster, or from the caster to their surroundings, but it doesn't affect the flow of mana inside of things. This is so it doesn't just instantly depower everyone completely or instantly kill anything that needs magic to live. It also means that there is still the possibility of stabbing your magic sword into someone and channelling magic directly into them from the inside. However, there is a kink with this one I can't quite work out: The main character has a sword that can insta-kill pretty much anything it hits with a powerful dark magic curse. I want this antagonist to last for a while and the idea was that she could use her ability to 'silence' magic by stopping the curse from entering her body. But the way I've got it that it doesn't affect mana that's inside of someone's body wouldn't allow it to be used that way. Need some help with this one.

• Finally with Time, it's basically just Time Stands Still inside of the area of effect. As noted it can only be used in the character's demon form, is a massive drain on energy to use, and the main character spontaneously manifests her ability to negate it when it's used on her. Also it can only be kept up for about 30 seconds tops, so it's as balanced as I'm gonna allow it to be.

I'd kind of like to get it to work with silencing heat and electrical conductivity, but I outlined the problems I've run into getting them to work with this concept. Also, I dunno, I can't come up with a reason why it arbitrarily only works with the forces that don't just turn it into an 'everyone dies instantly from an unavoidable source, I win' scenario. So anyone who's used to coming up with weird conceptual ideas for powers and tuning them so they don't break the plot is welcome to offer me advice. While I don't really like hard Sci-Fi and real world physics getting in the way of telling a story the way I want it to, with a power that works by completely suspending some fundamental physical law I can't really just say A Wizard Did It and that the power works how I want it to because it just does.

So yeah, help appreciated. Just don't go all pedantic on me when offering advice. This is supernatural Urban Fantasy, not a thesis on the workings of the Minovsky Particle.

edited 29th Sep '16 7:35:05 PM by OmegaKross

Make the effective range of the ability correspondingly drain her mana or magical reserves or whatnot.

Or...

The range starts with the topmost level of her skin. So she's almost completely silent, nearly invisible, impervious to magic, and doesn't tire/take "minor" damage - and she can keep this up for as long as she likes and turn it on or off at will.

From there, it takes some effort to extend it out to things she wears and holds - armor and weapons - and the effect isn't as pronounced. At 'combat-level strength', she appears as a breeze in the air armored in and wielding a warping of light; every blow from her weapon is draining and seems to age/wither what it touches.

Extending it out to a battlefield radius means that her opponents have some trouble hearing and seeing (think earplugs and greasy glasses), while their magic is less effective than usual - and all of it a bit sluggishly, as though underwater or in a dream.

It's less effective when used on others because their own innateness rejects it (hers accepts it all) - kinda like how your own sweat on your own body cools you down, and someone else's feels uncomfortable.

(Apply heat and electromagnetism in the same way, where she benefits greatly and others in range suffer somewhat, as she sees fit. This prevents them from being insta-kills, but makes it difficult to counter her.)

Hmm, doing it that way wouldn't allow for the 'void of soundless darkness' trick which is becoming pretty central to her fighting style and powers the more I think about how to use her. It does actually drain her mana more to affect larger areas with her power though (the maximum radius where she can effectively use it without draining all her mana is about 200ft, and only 50ft when she stops time.) Also, making her completely impervious to magic would both make her more powerful than her full-demon mother and also be a rehash of the Pope's complete natural immunity to magic (yes this is the same story with the Elf character with the magic eyes and the Magitek Church Militant, and the same one where I named my main character the equivalent of Darknessriver Moonchild.)

I'm considering giving her a spell that allows her to cloak herself in mist or something in order to better make use of her stealth capabilities, since I can't use her ability to silence light to do that if it just creates a black spherical area centered around her. As for her weapon draining people's stamina and ageing them due to temporal shenanigans, this wouldn't really work with the concept of 'silencing', plus that and she already has a cursed sword that has supernatural abilities of its own that I haven't come up with yet.

The magic thing is still bugging me. If I make it so that it's just complete Anti-Magic within the area then not only is it a copy of an ability I've already given to another character, but it would depower her as well if she wanted to use it over an entire room or battlefield, and kill any of the Fae characters in the main party instantly because magic is critical to their existence (the only reason it doesn't depower the other character with this ability is because that character is a Magitek cyborg powered by Azoth instead of regular mana.) But if I have it so that it doesn't affect the mana inside of people and just stops the flow of mana in the area itself then I cant use it to prevent being insta-killed by the main character's sword. Unless I have it so that she can selectively use her power inside her own body or something, so that she can contain and neutralize the magic from the curse before it spreads. That might actually work...

If I were to follow the same rules for electricity then I would be able to have it prevent electrical conductivity without instantly destroying atomic bonds and disintegrating everyone, which would be an ability so OP that it'd have to be literally her only power. Though if her silencing powers don't work inside of people and objects then how would I be able to use it to stop machines from working, which would be the main function of silencing electricity? Is there a difference between electrical current and the electrical bonds between atoms? I can't think of a reason to justify it targeting one but not the other. Unless it just stops the flow of electrons instead of completely breaking electricity... yeah, I'm going with that. Electricity is sorted.

The only thing I can think of to limit the effectiveness of silencing all heat in an area is to make it a severe drain on mana or only have it usable on very small areas, since I'm pretty sure that getting rid of all the heat in an area would cause it to instantly fall to absolute zero. Is that right? It would be cool to be able to get a justification for removing all the heat in an area without killing all the main cast. Maybe... she develops this function for her ability late into the story? Also, she'd have to be somehow immune to it herself if She were to use it centered on herself.

Sorry if my stream of consciousness rambling is hard to follow. It's how I work these things out. Oh yeah, I didn't mention it before but she's able to use multiple 'silence' functions at the same time, so she can layer the different functions of this ability onto the same area. Except stopping time, because that is so OP that it doesn't need any more adding to it. The more functions of her ability she uses at once, the more it drains her mana, but sound costs barely anything to silence as it is her ability's basic function, and light is cheap enough to maintain for a long time as well. Silencing magic is dirt cheap on small areas, but becomes costly over larger areas. And stopping time takes everything out of her as mentioned previously, so she can only do it for short periods.

Your suggestion that other people's bodies reject her power in some way might be a justification for the power not working inside of people. Won't do much good if the entire surrounding area falls to absolute zero though.

edited 30th Sep '16 12:24:49 PM by OmegaKross