Pick Your Powers

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

What would your theme and powers be if you were a superhero? What about a supervillain?

[Melanie, the neutral party]

I would want a subtle power like good luck. It wouldn't make me subject to fame or attack, but I could still use it to effect positive change in the world.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Melanie wrote: "I would want a subtle power like good luck. It wouldn't make me subject to fame or attack, but I could still use it to effect positive change in the world."

Like Domino, sort of? Would you have this power regardless of if you went good or evil, or are you so sure you'd be one or the other that it's silly to think of the other one? haha

[Tomas]

If I was a villain, I'd take the most insidious superpower: doubt. I'd make people doubt whatever would cross my mind.

Not sure what my superpower would be. Maybe something similar to Eragon's 'empathy spell'? To induce guilt in bad people...

[Melani]

Good or evil, I want the power to teleport. The fact that I wouldn't have to sit in commuter traffic for two hours every day would make it so worth it.

[Becky]

If I was evil, it would DEFINITELY be the power that Kilgrave has in Jessica Jones.

Actually, I might pick that one for my superpower as well, and just use it better. :P

[Trike]

I heard a podcast once that asked which three powersets you’d want, which was overkill, I thought. By that criterion, you can be a god. Choose Doctor Manhattan, who is immortal and nearly omnipotent, and Professor Xavier, who can read anyone’s mind, so nearly omniscient, and for fun, Superman’s inherent toughness. Boom, deity-level powers.

Since some true heroes brought City of Heroes back to life last year, I’ve been busy creating superheroes on a regular basis. When the game was live and legit, I lost track after I made more than 200 characters. As someone on the forums once said, CoH allowed us to be Stan Lee because the game itself was Jack Kirby. Here is just a tiny, tiny sampling of characters I made back in the day: https://www.deviantart.com/dashmccool...

But for me in real life, I’d choose a healing factor like Wolverine/X-23/Deadpool. Currently struggling with my right eye going blind yet again due to the three chronic illnesses I carry around. It’d be nice to not be sick and recover from anything.

My theme would be Able To Sit Comfortably Man.

[CBRetriever]

not quite superpowers, but as a child, I wished that I could make these situations exist:

1. every time you tried to do something harmful to someone or something (hitting, shooting, etc) it happened to you instead.
2. every time you threw something away in a non-approved container, it ended up in your bed

of course #1, as I now realize, would eliminate all BDSM and spanking type sex games and surgery, shots, and correction of physical deformities

and #2 would lead to a lot of house fires from cigarettes ending up in beds

[Melanie, the neutral party]

Allison wrote: "Melanie wrote: "I would want a subtle power like good luck. It wouldn't make me subject to fame or attack, but I could still use it to effect positive change in the world."

Like Domino, sort of? W..."

If I was a villain, it would be an accidental villain. You know that type that trusts the wrong person and thinks what they are doing is "good." I can't see even a superhero version of myself being intentionally villainous. Using my luck to make money is more chaotic than evil.

[Tomas]

Melani wrote: "Good or evil, I want the power to teleport. The fact that I wouldn't have to sit in commuter traffic for two hours every day would make it so worth it."

Well, teleporting is very practical, can only agree with that even though my time spent commuting is shorter.

CBRetriever wrote: "...of course #1, as I now realize, would eliminate all BDSM and spanking type sex games and surgery, shots, and correction of physical deformities..."

Well, people are not born with perfect knowledge of the world and your superpower would work well if you limited it to deliberately harmful intent.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Oh, Tomas, I love those! So "harmless" in terms of aggression but so important in impacting outcomes.

Becky! Wow, I bet you also hit all buttons that say "do not hit this button" too don't you!

LOL Trike, ah, it would be so nice to sit comfortably (I say while typing at my standing desk...)

Chessie, cosmic justice is so delicious. You could be the Schadenfrau and distinguish between the pain people want and the non-consensual kind.

Melanie, I almost just phrased my question "so what would your villainous powers be" because I assumed you were too good to be a villain, but then I didn't want you to feel self conscious, so I'm doing it now instead haha

[Tomas]

Allison wrote: "Melanie, I almost just phrased my question "so what would your villainous powers be" because I assumed you were too good to be a villain, but then I didn't want you to feel self conscious, so I'm doing it now instead haha"

Well, I don't want to burst your bubble but teleporting can be used for nefarious purposes.
Someone threatening your evil plan? Give them a gun with one bullet and teleport them on a deserted island. No need to make them walk the plank, no need to get a ship.
Want to cause some chaos? Teleport something large to a busy place and watch the chaos unfold.

[Trike]

CBRetriever wrote: "not quite superpowers, but as a child, I wished that I could make these situations exist:

1. every time you tried to do something harmful to someone or something (hitting, shooting, etc) it happen..."

Those are great. I’m okay with #2. I hate smoking.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Oh, no, Melani's is practical, completely morally-neutral, agreed. Teleporting would be soooo useful, no matter what you were trying to do. Melanie's good luck power could be nefarious, but since the question was what would you have for either good or evil and she only answered with one power, that's what I was clarifying :)

[Tyler]

Yeah, teleportation might have to be mine as well. Only, I wouldn't worry too much about my commute per se. I'm pretty sure I'd get picked up by NASA *yesterday* and be the first person on Mars a few days later. If you're going to skip a commute, at least go big =P

[Becky]

Allison wrote: "Becky! Wow, I bet you also hit all buttons that say "do not hit this button" too don't you!"

>_> Sometimes.

Sometimes I only press ONE of them. <_<

[Becky]

Tomas wrote: "Well, I don't want to burst your bubble but teleporting can be used for nefarious purposes.
Someone threatening your evil plan? Give them a gun with one bullet and teleport them on a deserted island."

If memory serves, I think that this was effectively used in the beginning scenes of that Youtube series "Impulse" - only it was Antarctica or somewhere frigid and the victim was just left there to freeze to death.

[Midiain]

I used to always play an evil or amoral character in games. Lately I've softened that to antihero. Good and evil are both limiting. I follow only my own code.

For a superpower, I'd go with shapeshifting. To keep it from being too overpowered, maybe limit it to only non-mythical, organic creatures of relatively similar size. Like no very tiny or very large things.

Of course, that wouldn't prevent me from shapeshifting into something like a pterodactyl just to stir up a little chaos now and then.

[Benjamin]

From movies - I'd totally be Spidey. When I read Divergent, I wanted to ride the Dauntless Zipline. That being said, In my dreams, its just a given that I can fly.
I've never really thought about being a supervillain. I'd be a supervillain with depth though. Like Gul Dukat from Deep Space Nine. Or Thrawn.

[Micah]

My superpower would be the ability to instantly manifest the best pie you ever tasted. Whatever your favorite is, BAM! There you go.

"You don't have to thank me. It's all in a day's work for … Pieman."

[Phillip]

I'd have the power to negate all powers. Boom, you're all back to being regular humans. I also think the power to automatically have the answer to any question pop into your head would be quite useful and benefit humanity.

[Beige]

Micah wrote: "My superpower would be the ability to instantly manifest the best pie you ever tasted. Whatever your favorite is, BAM! There you go.

"You don't have to thank me. It's all in a day's work for … Pie..."

Haha! I which I could upvote this one, especially if you can do sweet and savoury.

[Don]

Sidekick, Al Mode

[Margaret]

Don wrote: "Sidekick, Al Mode"

Not "Simple Simon"?

[[deleted user]]

Teleporting sounds fun, as long as you are assured of not ending materializing in the middle of a concrete wall. I would definitely want some kind of safeguard to go with that power.

[Jacqueline]

I just want teleportation to be a thing anyway. Hurry up Science. Catch up with science fiction. Beam me up Scotty. NOW.

I always thought Storm had a great power. I’d really like the ability to control the weather. You can use it for good to break this drought or put out bushfires. For bad you could flood places or send in the lightning and electrocute people.

There’s a Norse God of Luck. I remember in The Amazing Johnsons (New Zealand show where the Norse gods moved to NZ and are reincarnated down the family line and it’s pretty good) the older brother was this guy and he never lost a bet.

[Brian]

Time. Stop it, start it. Speed it up, slow it down. Fast forward, Rewind. I just worry that it would eventually become tedious.
Though I wouldn't set out to be a villain, that power would probably de-volve a person. But think of the good that could be done in the meantime!

[[deleted user]]

A potentially fun, but also a recipe for historical chaos, would be the power to travel through time by yourself, strictly via the power of your brain. Imagine all the things you could then see and live through.

[Sha]

Time Freeze or Super Speed. I have thought about this a lot.

[Micah]

Beige wrote: "...especially if you can do sweet and savoury..."

Sweet. Savory. It's all up to who the pie is for.

[Micah]

Margaret wrote: "Don wrote: "Sidekick, Al Mode"

Not "Simple Simon"?"

Simple Simon is my archenemy.

[Tomas]

Michel wrote: "Teleporting sounds fun, as long as you are assured of not ending materializing in the middle of a concrete wall. I would definitely want some kind of safeguard to go with that power."

That's the reason why, in some cases, teleportation is limited to either having visited the place before or knowing the coordinates.

And yes, shapeshifting is also cool.

[Faith]

I'd like the power to see a kind of flag hovering about everyone who walks past in the street which tells me their flaws and hidden secrets, e.g. 'manipulative narcissist', 'not the real father', 'fake degree certificate', 'found innocent of a crime they did commit', 'abandoned two children' /or/ 'never did anything wrong', 'gives people the benefit of the doubt', 'pays school fees for a child they've never met'. That would be endless entertainment.

[Micah]

Faith wrote: "...see a kind of flag hovering about everyone who walks past in the street which tells me their flaws and hidden secrets...That would be endless entertainment."

Or endlessly depressing.

[Cheryl]

I've always chosen shapeshifting, whether for good or evil, but there are some awfully good other answers up there. I love Doubt, and Empathy, and the others that are all about making the world a nice place.

[izzy]

Simple power of talking to animals! I love wildlife and always wondered what animals are saying, like dogs when they bark

[Eva]

Teleportation, money generation and healing powers for me, please!

Telepathy would be a nightmare: imagine trying to have a relationship with someone and hearing their every petty, negative, bored, annoyed or indifferent thought about you - and everything they think about about their favorite actors on tv, and all the things your friends are too polite to say, and just the endless blahblah - no, thanks!

Time freeze would also be a nightmare because you'd be blind and deaf and unable to move: you can only see thanks to light waves reflecting and traveling from objects to your eyes - no time, no vision. Same with sound waves, but I guess less of a problem. But finally, you can only move because the air molecules around you are in constant movement and can be displaced by you - stop time and you'd also stop their ability to make place for your to go anywhere. Also unable to interact with anything, push anything, since all those atoms would be stuck in place. You'd freeze from cold, too, since non-vibrating atoms would mean nothing warming your body from the outside (all of these assume that you can stop time outside your body, but it continues for you). And finally, since time around you stops, but it doesn't stop for you, you'd be crushed to death instantly, since you'd maintain your momentum of earth hurtling around the sun and through space at great relative speed. Earth and the universe would stop moving but you'd continue at your current velocity, smashing into the hardened, inflexible molecules around you. So nah, thanks, no time shenanigans for me. :-D

[Ben]

Eva wrote: ".Time freeze would also be a nightmare "

Time manipulation could work in some fashion, provided you were able to specify what was " frozen" and what was not, when most people think of freezing time their usually thinking of simply stopping the motion and possibly awareness of animals(which of course includes people) this could be done thru a form of telekinesis to achieve the same effect, heck if your telekinetic powers were great enough you could speed up or reverse time in a sense by controlling the rotation and tilt of the globe

[Brian]

How about the ability to *bestow* the condition experienced by Bill Murray's character in the movie Groundhog's Day?

[Silvana]

Allison wrote: "What would your theme and powers be if you were a superhero? What about a supervillain?"

Anything Aquaman can do. Bye bye cumbersome diving gears.

[Trike]

Eva wrote: "Time freeze would also be a nightmare because you'd be blind and deaf and unable to move: you can only see thanks to light waves reflecting and traveling from objects to your eyes - no time, no vision."

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Neither time nor distance are relevant to photons, so if you can step outside of a moment you might just as plausibly postulate that you become akin to living light. You are decoupling yourself from the illusion of time caused by your corporeal being.

Getting down to the Planck Scale and shifting over to quantum mechanics essentially renders time meaningless. Photons aren’t the only things in the universe which completely ignore time and space, so you can approach “time freeze” from that angle, too.

Time is the fictional story we tell ourselves to make sense of the universe, but it doesn’t actually exist. It’s an emergent property of things bigger than the Planck Scale, but it’s not required for physics to work.

So if you want to have the ability to freeze time, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be able to see. The quanta is still there, we’d just be perceiving it differently than we do now.

[Trike]

Ben wrote: "heck if your telekinetic powers were great enough you could speed up or reverse time in a sense by controlling the rotation and tilt of the globe"

Well, no, that’s not how even our perception of time works. If you could increase gravity or increase atomic speed in specific frames of reference, then you could alter the macro perception of time. But altering the rotation and/or tilt of the planet would have no effect on how we perceive the concept of time.

See The Order of Time, for instance. Here’s an article to start you off: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-...

[Eva]

Trike wrote: "Eva wrote: "Time freeze would also be a nightmare because you'd be blind and deaf and unable to move: you can only see thanks to light waves reflecting and traveling from objects to your eyes - no ..."
That's an interesting perspective - working with time not by stopping time, but by accelerating yourself to lightspeed so you become like a photon, for which there is no time and space (from its own point of view). But your mass would then increase to infinity, and for sight to happen light still needs to hit your receptors and they still need to pass on the information to your brain through the usual process and your brain would have to process it the usual way. I guess your superpower could accelerate those processes to lightspeed, but for that each chemical released and traveling at lightspeed would also gain infinite mass, and the energy needed to transport it to your brain would also be infinite. Furthermore, in order to "see" colors or light/dark, you interpret the light's frequency, and from its own point of view beyond space/time, it wouldn't have a frequency - frequency is only perceived within space/time as it requires wavelength.

So either you become a being of light (which cannot perceive anything nor experiences time or distance, so it can't decide to do anything either), or you somehow retain your body, eyes and brain which would then have infinite mass and be immovable (and also unable to perceive since signals couldn't be passed on without expending infinite energy).

Do you think we're overthinking this? Nah...

[Tyler]

Regarding time freeze, even increasing our, I guess I could say 'cognitive processing speed' would be pretty powerful. That way we would perceive everything as moving slower. Our body would also be moving slower, but our reaction speed would be unparalleled.

Would also want to couple it with either a robust self healing or a more durable body, otherwise I suspect we would be pulling every muscle imaginable. A commensurate stamina increase wouldn't be unwelcome either. To fully take advantage of the power, you'd likely be pushing your body to the limit during its use.

[D.W.]

I would like the ability to control non-ferrous metals....I would be rich man

[Cheryl]

See, that's why I'm not a fan of superhero media. They pretend it's not magic, but they defy the laws of science. For the purposes of this thread (and other conversations I've had on the topic) I suspend disbelief. Then I don't have to pick and choose what limitations might be placed on me. (like Tyler pointing out the need for a more durable body)

[Trike]

Cheryl wrote: "See, that's why I'm not a fan of superhero media. They pretend it's not magic, but they defy the laws of science. For the purposes of this thread (and other conversations I've had on the topic) I s..."

Oh, yeah, almost all superhero stories are Fantasy.

The rare ones where they don’t have any extraordinary abilities nor super tech are few and far between. The Phantom and Green Hornet come to mind, but they’ve been absorbed into larger superhero universes which have supernatural bits, so they become Fantasy by association.

[[deleted user]]

Trike, did you ever read the Doc Savage Series? While the author did make him pretty well better than a perfect human specimen, he still had not true superpowers and counted on his intelligence and vast scientific knowledge.

[Phillip]

It takes 10,000 hours to become a master. If you do nothing else but sleep four hours a day, this still takes about a year and a half per skill. When you master multiple martial arts, weapons, driving, forensics, detective work, etc. (*cough* Batman) all by your late 20s early 30s. Well, that is fantasy because you have the superpower of learning things inhumanely quickly.

[[deleted user]]

Phillip wrote: "It takes 10,000 hours to become a master. If you do nothing else but sleep four hours a day, this still takes about a year and a half per skill. When you master multiple martial arts, weapons, driv..."

That also happens in some sci-fi shows and books, not only fantasy. Remember Captain Janeway, of the series Star Trek Voyager? Depending on the episode, she could outskill her chief engineer, become a combat beast, invent a new physics principle to get out of trouble and more. It was one of the reasons why STV lost viewers: credulity stretching.