Difficulties With Reality Altering Characters

[Calvin]

One of the hardest things about writing supernatural fiction is including characters who have the potential to solve problems in the blink of an eye, such as gods, genies or other reality bending individuals. Many times, authors use them mainly as a plot device.

I was just wondering, how would you as an author ensure that you keep a fair balance between creating a three dimensional character, and ensuring that their supernatural powers do not create a world where problems can be solved easily?

[T.R.]

There's a lot of different paths you can take with characters like that to avoid turning them into deus ex machinas.
I think one of the best ways is to set strict rules for a godlike/reality altering character that they're forced to adhere to to keep them from becoming too convenient, and place obstacles that they have to overcome, which helps helps show they also have flaws and thus humanizes them.
Alternately, I could make a universe where the reality altering character isn't the only one, and there's plenty of other god-like beings that can counterbalance what they do. This is harder because it can turn into a power creep where characters keep having to become more powerful to overcome the other powerful characters, and leaves all the normal people in the dust.

And then there's the easy answer of just slapping a character with amnesia or having their powers sealed, but it's really hard to avoid cliches with that one.

[Tara Woods Turner]

In addition you could make their attachment to/affection for the mortals serve as an abrogation of their powers. Lastly, a traumatic past event could become a natural obstacle to unchecked powers.

[Graeme]

Or the use of powers has unpleasant side effects so that they actually would prefer not to use them.

[Melissa]

As those above have stated - have rules, have restrictions, have limitations, have antagonists that are equally over-powered, forcing the hero to use ingenuity rather than their abilities to save the day.

My personal favorite is physical limitations, where in using magic is like using a muscle. Use too much magic, or too powerful magic, and it wears the magic user down until they're too exhausted to cast another spell.

[Jane]

I think it is always best to have limitations on what a character can do. Or they become untenable.

In one story I have mind speakers, but it gives them thundering headaches and mostly they don't enjoy the feeling of having someone else inside their heads. Similarly I have a character with the Sight, but she needs to touch people for it to activate, and sometimes when it does it makes her physically sick....

[C.B., Beach Body Moderator]

In Aladdin the animated series, to combat the Genie's powers his magic would not work on other magic. Magic could not alter magic.

I always liked that.

Also, it didn't work on machines, because reasons.

[R.]

I had to solve this one when I was writing a time-travel novel. Tom (the time traveller) sometimes knows about the future, but he can't warn the other characters without changing history in unpredictable ways, the worst of these being the "Time loop" in which a change to history causes an opposite change, and so on until something breaks, usually someone just stops existing.

Daphne was gone, and in the bathroom was a single sheet of paper. On it were the words "Your little friend is deceased, you don't know when or where. Now leave us alone." and a photograph of Daphne covered in blood and looking very, very dead.
The professor was visibly shaking. "Oh, dear God, no. To lose such an agile young mind like that, and for her to die so horribly..."
Tom was pale. "I should never have let her get involved, never."
"You didn't," I said, "it was the Usurpers. Listen! It's not your fault."
"But-"
"No. Look, there's got to be a time between their getting to the other end and her dying. If we can barge in there, this needn't happen. In fact they may not even have hurt her at all."
Tom's father was looking at the flat gadget again. "They're learning. Last time they left the link open and Tom manipulated it. This time they've collapsed it at once. I don't know when or where they are. I'm sorry, we have no way of finding either them or Daphne."
"No!" I was almost shouting. "There's got to be a way."
"Even if there was," he went on slowly, "you couldn't do it. You'd be setting off to catch the Usurpers because of the photograph, and if you make it Daphne doesn't get killed, there's no photo of her body, you don't set off, she gets killed, time loop, you both never existed. Is it better to let her have eleven years of life, with a nasty death at the end, or for her never to be born at all?"

[Flavio]

Answering to the main question, I'd say that the simple solution is: create bigger problems.

It's a question of scope.
Obviously if your character is trying to prevent a bank robbery and he is Superman, he's not going to have a hard time achieving his goal.

The problem is not creating a powerful character, the problem is creating on overpowered character. That is to say, a character who is too powerful for the environment he is placed into.

A living god is not going to walk around the neighborhood, solving petty squabbles, he is going to be tangled in a cosmic fight against multidimensional beings.

Adding flaws to counterbalance powers is another matter, which can of course be useful, but I wouldn't consider it an indispensible solution, nor something that would necessarily solve the problem.

[James]

I generally pick the bigger bad guy scenario when I'm stumped for a solution. Eventually you get a bad guy that in your case, laughs in the face of paradox and will push the hero to unparalled levels of thinking and actions.

[James]

never under estimate the uniting power of a truly maniacal a-hole