Non-conventionally powerful Super Powers

[Sajber]

If there's anything that I can say about TGD from all my time lurking around here, it would be that you're creative in measures beyond anything else I see on the net when it comes to RPGs. I'm hoping to get some help with that creativity!

I'm going to start a new Super Hero-campaign tomorrow with my gaming group, and while I have quite a few ideas and tomorrow's session ready, one of the things I'm still stumped on is my my villain design. Being the first session, I figured that doesn't really matter much, since everybody will be learning the rules: Truth & Justice (http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/products/tj.asp) They'll be fighting a guy with Super Strength and Regeneration, which will probably require some level of problem solving on their part. But for future villains...

Those Super Powers that are normally considered powerful are the invulnerability, telekinisis, teleportation, time travel, etc... The Pheonix can do basically anything with her telekinisis, Superman has too many powers to count and Galactus is, well, Galactus.

One of my all-time favourite powers are those of Magneto. "Control metal", simple. But FROM that, he can do innumerable variations on other powers, without actually possessing them! He can fly with the help of a metal-containing suit, he can manipulate metal objects all around him for both offensive and defensive purposes, all in endless variation only limited by creativity.

I want more of those kind of powers! Not powers that inherently can do anything (like The Pheonix), but that can come pretty close with clever use and creativity. The kind of powers that, when revelead to the players, will give a sort of "Oh? Doesn't seem that dangerous..." reaction, followed by "Holy mother of ****, take cover!" when I start doing weird things with them.

Google has yet to give me anything other than the starard fare already mentioned. Any tips or ideas would be greatly appreciated![/url]

[virgil]

It's a bit of a cop-out, I know, but this site has a pile of them...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... esomePower

[spongeknight]

Take a look at the Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. They have all kinds of crazy powers.

[deaddmwalking]

It seems if you're willing to let the power be 'unleashed', you can achieve similar effects with a number of different powers.

For example, if you have the ability to quickly raise the temperature of objects you could do some of the following

Defensively
-Projectiles fired at you heat up and break apart, like a meteor entering earth's atmosphere.
-People attacking you with melee weapons are damaged by the extreme heat
Offesnsively
-You can burn people. Duh.
Miscellaneous
-You can turn any object into slag by raising the temperature beyond the melting point. This allows you to walk right into Fort Knox and/or destroy the guns of the guards.
-You can fly by heating and exhausting normal air (no need for combustion)

You could do something very similar with Mind Control. Or the ability to teleport objects (including self).

My recomendation - pick something that you think reflects the nature of your overall villain, and it can be anything. Is it important that he have a connection to flowers? An animal totem? Whatever you think makes sense for your backstory, then we can all spitball powers that tie to the theme in some way.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think that creatively using superpowers is sort of like asking for tips on how to win the local raffle without just buying more tickets.

If you want to have people ooo and aaa over such things as a matter of course, you have two problems.

The first comes from another thread and referred to people punching above their weight class as a DMF, but the same principles hold:

Okay... so how does the fighter take on the Solid Iron Demon?

He runs the fuck away and lures the solid iron demon into a trap, where he kicks it into the volcano/blast furnace/sphere of annihilation.

Seriously, the way you think this through is to take a WW2 tank, plop it down in the middle of the 12 century, and task a single man to destroy it. I *guess* you might be able to crush it with huge boulders, but that wouldn't work for a solid iron demon. He's solid, there's nothing to *crush*.

But he isn't going to pick up a wooden maul or an 8 pound mace and beat the thing to death.

That's exactly right. That is how an unenhanced mortal human warrior protagonist would defeat a solid iron demon boss. But that also clearly shows why such a character is wholly inappropriate for a high level D&D game.

• You aren't the fucking protagonist. You are a character. One. The game doesn't fucking revolve around you, and you don't get any fucking plot armor. You can't use up that much screen time on a rube goldberg trap. And it probably wouldn't work anyway, because you have to roll the actual chances rather than having it automatically work because it's the last desperate attempt at the en of the story.
• That's not even the boss. Seriously, that's not even the final monster, that's Iron Demon #7. And when you kill him the credits don't roll. Hell, you might not even move on to the big boss, because there could easily be six more in this encounter. They aren't using conservation of ninjitsu even, each one is just as powerful as when you did encounter one as the boss - five levels ago.
• You are fighting in a goat pasture. Since this isn't a piece of single author fiction with an ending written ahead of time, you won't get a set of terrain features geared towards providing a set of Chekhov Guns for you to use at a dramatic moment. It's just you and maybe your power ring. Anything you can't do with the shit on your character sheet is something you very likely cannot do.

-Username17

Get that? A lot of times, creative use of superpowers means performing sleight of hand so that people don't notice that the plot cheated like a motherfucker in order to line up enough Chekov's guns so that Color Boy's powers ended up doing something rather than just acting as another speedbump.

The second problem is that 'creatively' using superpowers quickly runs into the problem where a use is only really creative among people who are unfamiliar with it its possibilities. Or worse, when people do become familiar with the possibilities, when you to torture the semantics to get a new effect and get that same surprise. The OP mentioned Magneto's superpowers and that's a perfect example. To a layman control over the electromagnetic spectrum sounds lame and boring and will be surprised at all of the stunts you pull from it. To someone with more experience with science and/or the genre, it's about as exciting and creative as hearing that Elminster cast a spell to cause seizures.

So, to get the same effect, you have to take some other superpower and either torture the semantics or introduce new rules as the plot demands. For example, if someone has the power to 'understand any language' the writer might them have them to code up the universe's most powerful AI because they understand computer language. Or allow them to become the greatest martial artist in history because they understand body language.

[GreatGreyShrike]

OK, there is an entire web serial novel that is good source material for supers games called Worm. I strongly recommend reading the original work (it's great) but because it is long, I will summarise a few things from it - It's protagonist is Taylor Hebert, a teenager who gets the superpower of total and precise control of all insects within a certain radius of her (a few city blocks), and can perceive what they do.

Spoilers for the series (suggest reading the link instead of the below):

Taylor makes extremely good and versatile use of her powers - scouting and espionage and surveillance, swarming with venomous insects, weaving spidersilk traps/nets/etc, communicating by forming bugs into words or buzzing, suffocating people with insects into esophagus and lungs, forming human-shaped bug 'swarms' as distraction or obfuscation, making her own and teammates costumes out of spider silk, etc. She also synergizes a bunch of her abilities with other people's abilities - at one point she combines her ability to weave quick spidersilk strands around a giant monster with another person's ability to freeze whatever he touches in time to slice a giant monster in half.

Others in the setting have very unconventional superpowers and make amazing use of them as well. For example, Coil, in-universe, has an ability where he can maintain two seperate timelines at once with full knowledge of each timeline in whatever timeline he's in, then collapse one of them and split the other into two new timelines. He can, e.g., plan an attack then execute it in one timeline and not in another, then if the attack fails he can collapse the timeline where it failed and try again. He can also do a lot of other scary/evil stuff that might lose him loyalty or even lives of his minions for intelligence, then collapse the timeline where he did that so he still has the resulting info.

There are lots more characters who exploit weird abilities well in this setting.

It's a really solid read; the first couple chapters are rougher than later ones, perhaps, but it gets really really good, and it has more than enough people with unique powers to fuel quite a long campaign.

[Maxus]

Thermokinesis. The ability to move heat from something to something else.

Would probably involve frost forming on the walls before the character melted something in half.

[Laertes]

The most powerful superpower that I have ever seen in anything was a character in The Authority who could see ten seconds into the future at all times. I recommend that you do not take this since no sane GM will allow it.

If you want to go for cheesy but also awesome, then I recommend control over elemental air. Wind currents can lift people up, knock them off their feet, smash through walls, whatever you like. Air puts out fire, brushes aside water, knocks over rock, tears paper, and as always, disarms scissors. It's basically "make stuff move" but in a larger, more dramatic way. Plus, being able to move air means that you can do tricks with air pressure... and what is an explosion but a sudden release of pressurised air?

[Josh_Kablack]

I've always been fond of Prehensile Hair as one of those "lame in the comics, but has a bunch more potential" powers.

The traditional use is somewhere between Limited Stretching / ranged Strength/ AoE Telekinesis / and an entangle. So in HERO terms, Medusa is basically just a Brick with stretching and some funky modifiers allowing her to grab or entangle a bunch of mooks at once. Vidaldus has prehensile hair as part of his "glam rock" character package and adds an oddly thematic Dispel vs Water-based powers into the mix. Godiva uses it as a special effect for a whole shape-shfting package, where she can form it into wings for (Flight), battering rams (Hand Attack), a hardened sphere for defense (Force Field / Force Wall) or set up camoflague (Invisibility)

None of those really get into some of the crazier things it could do. You could use super-strong hair as way to set up razor-wire traps, you could use super long hairs under precise control as a way to use sensory powers at a range and through non-airtight doors (by stretching a single hair ahead an mumbo jumbo about air vibrations or fiber optics) or you could go with a marionette theme, where superstrong hairs take physical control of other's movements.

[radthemad4]

Illusions can be pretty powerful.

I recommend being a T1000.

If you're playing in modern times you could try Upgrade from Ben 10 and possess and 'upgrade' devices.

[angelfromanotherpin]

A character from Rising Stars had telekinesis that only worked on very small objects. Like brain arteries. Or atomic nuclei.

Inertia from Squadron Supreme could transfer momentum from one thing to another. She used it for crowd mobility control and to transfer the impact from one person's punches to another, and not to infinitesemally slow the Earth and hurl people into orbit.

Electricity control is pretty boss. I had a supers game where a villain started throwing shock bolts, but developed a new trick every time he showed up, moving on to shutting down electronics, then controlling electronics, and finally cold disintegrating things by suppressing the charge on the relevant electrons Larry Niven-style.

Swamp Thing showed a few ways you could become a global-scale threat with plant control.

[Stahlseele]

Create Puppies at a point of your choice out of thin air.

Do it inside of somebody you want dead.

[Pixels]

Having just read Cucumber Quest, I can't help but think of the Extremely Specific and Pretty Much Completely Worthless Capsule Spell Machine. The spell Cucumber gets from the ESPMCWCSM is the ability to create an oversized bathtub drain on any surface. He uses it to drain the water in a midboss's lair so they could attack it, but a later guest comic pointed out that it would be quite useful in a wide variety of circumstances. The thought of creating a drain on somebody's face is pretty horrifying, and possibly immediately lethal.

Any ability that allows you to create arbitrary amounts of something out of nothing is going to have interesting applications. The ability to summon bananas sounds underwhelming, but when I'm creating peels under people's feet, stuffing bananas into machinery to clog it, creating impromptu barriers out of large quantities of fruit, and becoming the hero who cures famines around the world... well.

[Username17]

At its most basic level, what your power is doesn't even matter, just how strong it is. Your power is to create and/or control [thing] and what that [thing] is is largely special effect. It could be ice or hair or water or even nothing, and the important thing is how fast and accurate your manipulations are, and how resistant your manipulations are to other forces.

So let's take the most extreme example: Nothing Control. Your power is that you can control empty space. What that means in practice is that you can push matter out of the way leaving a vacuum of some shape. How good it is depends entirely on the parameters. If you can make voids by pushing air out, then you can maybe asphyxiate people or stop the transmission of sound, but if you can interdict an absence stronger than a bullet can push its way in you have the kind of badass forcefield that Tetsuo demonstrates in Akira. If you can make tiny areas of vacuum and push them open strong enough to cut flesh, then you can maybe do psychic surgery or Elfenlied style limb severing.

Now the same is basically true of any other kind of power. If you control plants, that runs the gamut from being basically just a pretty good gardener if the plants have to grow into their desired shape at the normal rate all the way up to a top tier superpower if you can have briars flail out fast enough and implacably enough to catch bullets. Same for orange juice control, earth control, and plastic control.

Parameters are everything, and the actual powers themselves are just a flavor skin.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Although even then, flavor skin can be useful. I had a character in a Mutants & Masterminds game that abused the Sorcery rules to hell and gone - because the Sorcery rules had a loophole where if you loaded enough conditions on a power the cost went down to zero. So I basically ran up a thousand cantrips.

[rampaging-poet]

Jade from Whateley Academy can animate groups objects with a duplicate of her own brain. They aren't particularly strong, but they fly and they're hard to destroy. While that isn't the most conventionally powerful ability, she's more versatile than any of her friends except the high-level fairy queen wizard. Her real strength isn't the amount of force she can exert, it's her fine control (which has grown over the course of the stories). She's used her power to place an extra combatant on the field, provide "AI" and propulsion for super-science gizmos, fake necromancy by puppeteering corpses, give super first aid, and spy on enemy facilities as specs of dust.

[Shatner]

A few favorites:

Culinary Midas: The character can make what they touch edible. With sufficient attention, they can make the transmuted substance have a particular aroma and/or flavor, otherwise the food defaults to something idiosyncratic (gingerbread, bacon, gummi bears, whatever is funny or appropriate for that character). A chocolate gun still functions as a gun (shoots bullets, can be used to pistol-whip people) and despite smelling like a dove bar, it's still just as hard as the metal it was before. However, if you try and take a bite out of it, or stab it with a fork, a chunk will break off and that shit will be delicious. It literally melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

How is it powerful? First off, it'll make you a smash at any kitchen or party or place where hunger is a problem. But, it allows you to break into or out of just about anything, provided you have the stomach for it. Sabotage is easy; turn a generator into candy and within a day the local insects will have ruined it, shutting off the power long after you've left the scene. Depending on how dark you want the setting to be, if it can be used on a person it means they'll likely meat meet a grizzly end as bugs and small animals easily break off parts of them whenever they aren't quick enough to stop it.






The Unnoticed: The character is supernaturally nondescript. They are the manifestation of a "somebody else's problem" field. Others are categorically disinterested in the person, what they say, what they do, and when asked about them, they are utterly unable to fill the character-shaped hole in their memory. People still see the character, move out of their way on the sidewalk, sell them stuff from a convenience store, but they can't seem to muster the give-a-damn to retain any information about the character afterwards. Only by wearing something too gaudy to be ignored can the character have long-term interactions with others (e.g. wearing a gorilla costume, covering themselves in blue body paint).

How is it powerful? The character can basically go anywhere and steal anything small enough to fit in a pocket or under a coat; putting a folder of documents in a briefcase is fine but carrying an unconscious person or pushing a wheelbarrow full of diamonds is not. It's not a question of what they can do, it's more an issue of them finding a way of interacting with the rest of society.






Infinity Plus One: The character always seems to have more of something provided you don't do a thorough accounting first. Their pistol always seems to have one more bullet in the clip. They always have enough jelly beans to go around. They can always coax their car to drive another couple of miles despite "running on vapors". Now, if someone counts ahead of time then the character really will run out of small bills, but otherwise the character can always manage to fish exact change out of their wallet.

How is it powerful? If put in charge of something valuable but not easily quantified (e.g. a sack of rubies, a crate of ammunition, a backpack full of pharmaceuticals) then the character can always make it stretch longer than it should. While impressive from a logistical standpoint, it might seem like a power that lacks oomph in combat. Not so. Give the character a flamethrower or a chaingun and they can level a compound. Simply put, the character always has more, including more dakka. Just don't look too hard or you'll collapse the waveform or something, and then the character has to get by like everyone else.

[TiaC]

Jade from Whateley Academy can animate groups objects with a duplicate of her own brain. They aren't particularly strong, but they fly and they're hard to destroy. While that isn't the most conventionally powerful ability, she's more versatile than any of her friends except the high-level fairy queen wizard. Her real strength isn't the amount of force she can exert, it's her fine control (which has grown over the course of the stories). She's used her power to place an extra combatant on the field, provide "AI" and propulsion for super-science gizmos, fake necromancy by puppeteering corpses, give super first aid, and spy on enemy facilities as specs of dust.

Also, the "duplicate of her own brain" bit allows her to do insane calculation by means of putting a committee inside her head and get in 40 hours of studying every night.

Telekinesis is insanely lethal. It should only take a few ounces of force to give someone a fatal aneurism.

Weak telepathy or mental influence becomes impressive if you understand how to manipulate people.

Illusions are a classic example of creative powers.

[name_here]

You know, that telekinesis thing is one of my internet pet peeves, because it basically assumes every parameter except max force applied is unbounded. Most basically, do you know precisely where, relative to someone's face, you need to apply that force? I'm betting not, so even if you have unlimited precision and no line-of-sight rules you still can't do that without invoking the chunky salsa rule. Then there's the bit where most characters with TK can't get that kind of precision.

[Stahlseele]

nothing speaking against pushing in the eyes or strangulating them or simply crushing them, depending on how strong you are though. or simply fling them up into the air a bit higher and let them drop, if you are not strong enough . .

damage transfer with self healing capabilities?
you can be the party healer, or you can deal damage to yourself and transfer it to somebody else . .

[Insomniac]

How about odor or filth as a power? The Ultimate Pigpen!

[Shatner]

Rugrats did it

and Chuckie becomes Stinky (who smells as strong as two babies).

...

Just as she is about to finish them off, she smells something horrible: Stinky. He unleashes his horrible smell which makes Angelitron unable to breathe and explodes.

[TiaC]

You know, that telekinesis thing is one of my internet pet peeves, because it basically assumes every parameter except max force applied is unbounded. Most basically, do you know precisely where, relative to someone's face, you need to apply that force? I'm betting not, so even if you have unlimited precision and no line-of-sight rules you still can't do that without invoking the chunky salsa rule. Then there's the bit where most characters with TK can't get that kind of precision.

The carotid is probably an easier target anyways. I was assuming that tk came with a touch analogue that would allow you to feel the blood moving.

[Koumei]

I'd suggest watching Needless. I generally suggest people watch this, but in this case it's relevant:

One girl has "shapeshifting" as her power. Over the course of the series she uses this to:

• Turn her limbs into weapons such as drills (same team as made TTGL)
• Disguise herself as other people
• Make her body metallic to reduce incoming damage
• Transform from "Me (damaged)" to "Me (undamaged)" for healing
• Turn into an actual wall in a building

One guy has the power of "making objects invisible". He uses this to convince people he is a god with multiple powers:

• Levitation (walking on invisible crates)
• Forcefield (invisible wall between them)
• Teleporting/really fast weapons (throw invisible knives which turn visible just as they hit)
• Create pits/destroy ground (invisible floor)

Mind you, once they realise what his only trick is, the drill comes out and they rush him. "This can't be, I am a god!" "But mine is the drill...
shades.gif
...which will pierce the heavens"

[Sajber]

Oh man, so many good ideas, thanks so much! I will definitely start to read Worm, it should be interesting for more ideas. I especially like the Termokinesis, Momentum Transfer, and Summon Bananas.

I've never really thought of the powers' paramaters as being the most important, it's a very good way of thinking when creating villains. Just pick a flavour and figure out how to abuse it, basically.

In terms of flavour that I've already got floating in my brain... Well, I have an idea about the first Main villain being able to manipulate time in various ways (which is obviously powerful in a multitude of ways), more for story reasons than power. The characters will meet a Q-type character (i.e. Q from Bond movies), which is actually the present-day villain, yet to turn villain. He will later realise a great threat is going to come in the form of another villain (no idea as to what yet), and tries to prevent it from happening by going back in time to stop it and, as it happens, stop our heroes, as they are partly the cause. The heroes stop the time-guy, and the greater threat arrives. More adventures, ho!

Other things I've though about is the power to control sound waves, i.e. amplify, chance frequency, etc.