Costume-clad or not, many speculative fiction characters have a superpower of some kind. Maybe they can levitate, shoot lightning out of their hands, or read long blog posts in a single glance. Whenever you give your character an ability that people in real life don’t have, it creates a potential plot hole. That is, your real-life brain may not consider all the ways a power could be used, leaving audiences to wonder, “If Superman can fly fast enough to make time go backward, why didn’t he just fly fast enough to stop the missiles?”
Some powers create a bigger risk of plot holes than others. If you’re planning to include powers in your story, keep a close eye on these troublemakers.
1. Super Tech
Who doesn’t love a nice suit of powered armor to wear on a Saturday night? While technology isn’t strictly a power, it’s used the same way. Iron Man, Batman, even Spider-Man with his web shooters: all rely on their gear to get the job done. That’s great, except why doesn’t everyone have access to that gear?
Unlike inborn abilities, technology is shareable. That’s what makes it so useful. And yet, gadget heroes have almost exclusive access to their particular brand of tech. If someone else gets their hands on it, they’re probably a nemesis, as we saw with Obadiah Stane in Iron Man.
So why don’t heroes share their gadgets? Tony Stark, a man with little to no skill in combat, is nearly unstoppable when wearing his suit. Imagine what Black Widow could do with one. It’s clearly not a production problem, as Stark makes dozens of suits in Iron Man 3. It could be his paranoia and fear that others will misuse his inventions, but that excuse doesn’t hold up so well in the face of repeated threats to Earth’s existence.
Beyond the suit itself, Stark’s technology could have completely reshaped the world. In order to make his suit work, Stark had to perfect the arc reactor technology, which is described in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as being something akin to nuclear fusion. That is, a way to produce massive amounts of energy without any harmful by-products like carbon dioxide or radioactive waste.
So why is the MCU dependent on fossil fuels the same way we are? Stark could single-handedly solve the global energy crisis by licensing his design or just making it open source.* The only downside is that someone with nefarious intentions might make an Iron Man suit, but so what? Stark’s suit is a lot less dangerous than a nuclear bomb, and we already have plenty of those floating around.
Spider-Man’s web shooters are a smaller example of this problem. The web material itself would be incredibly valuable for its strength to weight ratio, and it can’t be that expensive to make because he’s always able to get more of it. At the very least, it’s a ticket out of the poverty that Peter Parker perpetually struggles with, to say nothing of the vast benefits to society.
How to Fix It
Since super tech’s big problem is reproducibility, the fix is to make it unreproducible. However the technology works, some part of it must be difficult or impossible to replicate. Power sources are a good bet. If a character in your story gets around via teleportation gauntlets, make the gauntlets’ fuel an exotic element completely unknown to human science. Parts salvaged from an alien spacecraft are another solution, especially in a science-fiction setting.
Or, if you’re really ambitious, tell a story about a character who must continually invent new super tech because last week’s invention has become old hat. Impact-stopping cotton was a great idea, but now the criminals and police alike have access to bulletproof long johns, so your character will have to think of something else!
2. Mind Reading
Did your friend really miss lunch because of car trouble, or are they just avoiding you? Wouldn’t you like to reach out and pluck the answer from their brain? No, you wouldn’t, because mind reading your friends would be creepy and wrong, but it’s still a cool superpower!
Unfortunately, mind reading is also very difficult for writers to manage because it destroys mystery. You’d be surprised how many stories rely on mystery, even when that’s not ostensibly what they’re about. For example, look at Counselor Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). She can’t even read thoughts, just emotions, and the writers still didn’t know what to do with her. If her power actually worked like the show says it does, aliens wouldn’t be able to pull one over on the Enterprise, and half of TNG depends on aliens pulling one over on the Enterprise.
That’s why Troi only stated the obvious or was so vague that she wasn’t helpful. She either told Picard that the shifty Romulan was hiding something or mentioned a “presence” that she could give no details on. Occasionally she did have useful information to offer, but no one listened to her. In the episode Samaritan Snare, she warns the other characters that Geordi is in danger when he beams over to assist an alien ship, and they ignore her.
Not only is this unsatisfying, but it also doesn’t make any sense. Why have her stationed on the bridge if her abilities are never any help? And if they’re as useful as the show claims, why don’t the characters listen to her when she says something is wrong? Because if her powers had worked as advertised, it would destroy the drama.
The Martian Manhunter faced a similar conundrum on the Justice League animated series. In addition to his suite of other powers,* the green man from Mars could supposedly read minds so well that he could locate people on Earth from the League’s orbiting space station. Naturally, they forgot about that whenever finding someone became part of the drama.
How to Fix It
Step one is to make your character’s power require active intent. They must focus in order to use it, rather than an “always on” passive ability like Troi has. This means they can still be surprised, which is essential. Next, limit the information they can get from reading someone’s mind. Maybe they can only read surface thoughts. That way, when they first tune in on someone, they’ll get a confusing jumble of semi-random images. Only by engaging the target in conversation and specifically bringing up the topic they’re after can they draw out the desired information. “So, hear any good jokes about missile codes recently?”
Another good limit is to require some kind of ritual behavior in order to read someone’s mind. The Vulcan mind meld is a great example. Spock has to touch the other person’s face then go through a fairly lengthy chant before he can get anything. That’s not something you can easily deploy over a negotiation table, but it’s still useful.
3. Precognition
What’s going to happen next in this article? If you had precognition, you would already know! Also you can probably guess from the section title. Precognition is the ability to predict or see the future. Some characters get it via actual visions; others are just so smart that they know all possible outcomes for all possible events.
In either case, you have the same problem. If a character can see what’s coming, they’ll always be prepared for it. Ambush up ahead? Just go around. Plane going to crash? Don’t get on board! If the character is a protagonist, then there’s no tension because they’re never in danger. If it’s a villain, the heroes can’t credibly defeat them.
This happened in Alphas, with the one-off antagonist Marcus Ayers who is so smart that he can predict tossing a penny into a drain will knock over a rusty nail, which will scare a sewer rat, which will then chew through some cables, knocking out electricity to the block. That’s right, his ability is the power of Rube Goldberg.
Because Ayers is so smart, he predicts every trap the good guys set for him, until suddenly he doesn’t. At the episode’s end, one of the heroes’ plans works, even though it’s not notably different than the others. It just had to work because the episode was over. And then of course Ayers escapes because he even saw his own defeat coming. Fortunately he never showed up again, because then the writers would have faced the same problem.
Fred, from the show Angel, used to do this too. When she was still unstable from her long years trapped in a demon dimension, she would do things like prepare traps for enemies who hadn’t arrived yet. Of course, she lost that ability once she recovered enough to be rational about it, because otherwise she’d have broken the story.
How to Fix It
The solution is similar to that of mind reading. First, make a character’s precognition something they must focus on to use. They can try to predict the outcome of taking a left turn, for example, but not automatically know when an enemy is sneaking up on them. Second, give them only short glimpses forward. They can judge the immediate effect of their actions, but the long-term consequences are much harder to know.
Finally, build in an inherent risk. The character might get lost in their visions of the future if they use it too often. Instead of making a choice, they could be paralyzed by the sheer number of potential outcomes.
4. Super Speed
If only you had super speed, you’d already be done reading this article! Super speed usually comes in one of two flavors. A character like the Flash is actually moving really fast, while Hiro from Heroes achieves the same effect by slowing down time.* In fiction, the effect is the same: a character who can cover distance and perform actions at a far greater rate than normal people.
What plot holes does this power create? Better to ask what plot holes it doesn’t create. First, there are the simple physics issues. Speed requires energy. If the Flash is actually moving at twice the speed of sound as the show claims, he would possess so much kinetic force that any impact would shatter his bones. Then there’s the question of atmospheric friction that would burn him up like a cinder. This did actually come up in the Flash, but only as a super creepy way to get one of the female characters to take her now smoldering shirt off.*
Physics would also make the Flash a living gun. If he just carried a bag of rocks, he could throw them so fast they’d be deadly projectiles. For the non-lethal option, he could carry a bunch of the ubiquitous tranquilizer darts every super hero show has.
Hiro’s ability creates fewer physics problems because it’s more blatantly magical, but both he and the Flash share the issue of being extremely overpowered. They can dodge any attack, outrun any fleeing foe, and run away from any fight they can’t win. On the Flash, the character seems to constantly forget his own powers. In one episode, the Trickster* slowly reaches over and attaches a bomb to the Flash’s wrist. Even a normal person could have flinched out of the way. Hiro and the Flash’s fights both feel anticlimactic and pointless, because they’re both effectively invulnerable unless they make a mistake.
How to Fix It
The most important fix to super speed is introduce limited durations. The Flash wouldn’t be nearly so overpowered if he could only maintain his speed for a few seconds. Running that fast must be exhausting! This also introduces a tactical element. Your character has to decide if now is the time to use their reserve or if they should save it.
Another option is to enforce the physical consequences of moving at high speed. Your character’s limit isn’t how fast they can go, but how much punishment their body can withstand. Every step they take puts enormous pressure on their joints. Air friction burns them, possibly to the point of serious injury. Can they even breathe while moving that fast?
5. Power Stealing
Why settle for just one power? What if you could have all the powers? You’d have all the plot holes, that’s what. Any character who can take other character’s powers will become unmanageable given enough time. Imagine all the other problems on this list, plus a bunch of others I haven’t thought of yet. That’s a character who steals powers.
Exhibit A is Peter from Heroes. All he needs to do is stand near another person, and suddenly their abilities are his to command. Forever. I wonder how the writers thought that was going to work. Peter avoids any serious problems in season one because he doesn’t know how to use these abilities. But that couldn’t last forever, so they gave him amnesia to make him learn how to use his powers again. You may be noticing a pattern.
One superpower is a challenge to deal with. Two or three is down right difficult. Superman, with his never-ending suite, is near unmanageable. Characters like Peter are far worse than Superman, because there isn’t even a theoretical limit to what they can do. Soon they’ll acquire so many abilities that creating a challenge for them is impossible.
Sylar, the show’s most memorable villain, had the same problem–though at least he had to murder someone to get their ability. Even so, he quickly grew so powerful that defeating him in a credible manner was impossible. That’s why his arcs are so strange later in the show. The writers literally did not know what to do with him.
How to Fix It
Making your characters work like Rogue in the X-Men films is a good place to start. Her ability stealing is temporary, so there’s no risk of a cascade effect. It also means that she often steals a power she has no idea how to use, which further complicates the situation. Finally, the fact that her ability is debilitating to whoever she takes the power from further limits its use. She can’t just get the powers of all her teammates before a fight, because doing so puts them all out of commission.
You may have noticed that limits are always the solution to story-breaking powers. That’s no coincidence. Problems arise from these powers because someone who thought they were cool included them without the proper limitations. In the same way, while you might have a knowledgeable character in your story, you wouldn’t have them know absolutely everything. Characters must have limits, or else it’s impossible to construct meaningful conflict.
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I can think of two more ways to limit precognition.
a) Make the power uncontrollable for the character. He or she has flashes of precognition, but they never know when it will happen and what they will see. It might give them an edge when you need it, but leave them exposed to danger at other times. (An interesting example of that one is in “Too Many Magicians” by Randall Garrett, where a murderer has enough precognition to know when to stab someone throught the keyhole of a door, but can’t use it to, for instance, win a card game.)
b) Make clear the visions become more and more unreliable the further the event is away on the timeline. Something happening in a minute or ten can be seen clearly and will reliably happen, something happening in a day or a week might never occur like it was foreseen.
Since the post got bumped by a recent comment, and I’ve got a relevant thought on the issue of precognition:
Decided to wait until Changeling: The Lost 2E comes out, and I’ve decided one theme of the Chronicle I’m going to set up is going to explore how people deal with prophecies, now that they’ve been thrust into a world with the supernatural. One of the True Fae villains has the shtick of giving out self-fulfilling prophecies of doom, and secretly pulling strings to make them happen if the recipient doesn’t start self-destructing. One indirect ally is going to be a high-Wyrd Changeling who sends out warnings from prophetic dreams, leaving the recipient to interpret them.
There was a great example of mind reading in Buffy the Vampire slayer. The reason I felt it was a good example was because there are downfalls like being able to hear everyone’s thoughts at once. Imagine the stress that would entail. I’d go mad. Not only would you hear the normal everyday noise, but also the thoughts of everyone as well. For people like me who have trouble with noise or in Buffy’s case not being able to concentrate on her duties as a student and as the slayer this to me is an interesting twist.
For some reason, this reminds me of the ouroboros in Hatching Magic. He can see far into the future and the past, but can’t predict events that will happen soon.
Problems like this are one reason I like Captain America as a superhero. He is just powerful enough to justify his role as an action hero that should have been killed were he not enhanced. But he is not so powerful that there is no drama in terms of whether or not he would succeed. Despite the other problems, as you note, this is also why Iron Man is an appealing superhero. Because his armor is a finite resource, it frequently puts him in a position in which he is running low on power in combat and thus has a sense of vulnerability.
On the issue of technology, one reason why it is justified somewhat is the simple fact that developing new technology to replace the old is extremely time consuming. Right now, we already have the technology to stop relying on fossil fuels and have a much greater degree of equality in the world as well. It is just that we could not afford to change because it would require completely remaking all of civilization. This idea is refereed to as technological lock in, with the QWERTY keyboard being an oft cited example.
Black Widow might actually be less effective wearing a suit. Because she trained to fight using her normal body, fighting inside a suit would be extremely unnatural and thus harder for her. Playing to her strengths of being the silent assassin has its uses.
This is also another reason why I think it would have been more interesting if Stark started off with little in the way of resources. Going by the Marvel cinematic universe, he could have started in the first film as a mid level employee of Stane’s company, with the suit as his wonderful invention out of a place of desperation after he was trapped in a cave with a box of scraps. After destroying the first suit in his escape, he began using what resources he could skim off the company to create a second. His second suit would thus be illegal and cause him to be fired, especially as he also simultaneously realizes what Stane was doing. It would thus make sense that he isn’t even remotely in a position to deal with producing new technology until several films into the franchise as he would not have sufficient resources to really make it work on his terms.
Though I suspect that arc reactors are also far more easily weaponized than nuclear power. Look at how easily Pepper overloads it in the first movie, or how easily Vanko does the same in the second. A nuclear reactor may produce a great deal of radiation if there is a problem, but an arc reactor would explode.
Telepaths are an idea that could easily have as many flaws as they do strengths. One obvious one is that whatever means telepaths use should logically be jammable. This is something that is almost always ignored in science fiction, with no logic behind it. All signals can be interfered with in various ways and something that produced high powered white noise would easily overcome a human telepath. It could also be used as a telepath detector by cranking up the power to a painful range. Such a technology would actually make it quite difficult to use a telepath’s abilities to the fullest. It would require something like sabotaging said jammers.
Another possible weakness would be a telepath being utterly overwhelmed by the world around them in a fashion that leads to them not being very effective. Buffy is one of the only examples of this that comes to mind. I could see a telepath being the one to wear a Magneto helmet as the only means to get a sense of peace, which would also likely be required in a world with jammers. Another possibility, as used on Heroes, is that of delibrately thinking about irrelevant things as a means of avoiding detection. In that case it featured a character deliberately thinking in a foreign language.
As for precognition, another solution is that used by Star Wars, that it is only a possible future. Especially if there is something that gets in the way of said powers. Despite the fact that the overall movie wasn’t all that great, the film Push(which also stared pre Cap Chris Evans) had an interesting idea in terms of dealing with precogs. The antagonistic precog could see intentions, and so Evans’ characters came up with the idea of giving his allies sealed orders to be opened at specific times before wiping his own memory of creating them. He was thus able to get the drop on his enemy as she only saw the events as they were already happening.
As an alternative to the above, the heroes could just intentionally go into the situation without a plan. It would thus serve as an interesting solution to the Unspoken Plan Guarantee trope. One could also argue that this was the case in the Battle of Endor in Star Wars. All of the factors that led to the Rebel Alliance success were unplanned.
You are amazing! You just mentioned my favorite male super hero, Captain America, and female, Black Widow!
I think Nat would do better with a Black Panther suit than an Iron Man one.
Sookie Stackhouse is another example of a mindreader whose powers are a massive problem, both in the show and the books. The number of times she would have known all sorts of things and solved crimes but it wasn’t convenient for her to know that just yet.
It is mostly explained away as her having trained herself to block out the thoughts because they are omnipresent noise. But that’s like saying you walk through a crowded room and don’t hear conversations. Someone talking about bumping off the local citizenry is going to be noticed.
In fairness, Sookie is probably one of the better handled mindreaders in fiction.
Oh, you forgot the worst one, the one that when used lets you know that the show is in trouble or that the writer doesn’t know how to solve things in the book: time travel! Once you get time travel, you can fix any problem retroactively, can compute anything (just go back in the past and let yourself know what you computed), can do any amount of physical work if you are patient enough, can multiply yourself. The worst sin is when someone uses it as a ‘reboot’ mechanism and suddenly all the people and stories you loved are insignificant and there are a lot more special effects. Oh, thanks a bunch!
I absolutely agree, but then superheroes don’t usually use time travel. Time travel is more of a general plot device, similar to FTL travel in science fiction. I would even go as far to say that any possible story that involves time travel can use something else instead.
The only real example of time travel I feel is both dramatically interesting and hard to replicate is that of Groundhog Day(and the variations on it like Edge of Tomorrow). Though my favorite variation on that was from Person of Interest, which used the extraordinarily fast processing of an artificial superintelligence to allow various scenarios to play out in a handful of seconds rather than having them all play out real time with a person remembering what had occurred. One amusing version even had the characters act out their dialog as summaries rather than actual lines. It was explained as the AI being in a hurry and not taking the time to come up with actual dialog.
Person of Interest also had a variation on the classic Star Trek time travel plot, the Edith Keiler dilemma. That was the dilemma of allowing a good person to die in order to insure a better course of events for the world, relying on the accuracy of predictions by an ASI. For a version without any supernatural elements Castle(with Nathan Fillion) also featured this idea. What is nice about realistic versions of the scenario is that they present a context in which there actually should be a debate rather than one of simply accepting fate as it is.
Even Terminator, the classic time travel story, is really more about an out of context baddie than about time travel itself. The old Star Wars EU featured the novel Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter that was largely a retelling of Terminator featuring the titular Sith Lord. It also featured a gender reversed Sarah and Reese, with the Sarah as a young female Jedi with little experience and the Reese as a scoundrel that discovers some secret involving the Sith machinations. In that story, the out of context was that it was a Sith Lord that no one could have predicted was back. The Winter Soldier also largely features the same concept with the titular antagonist. Person of Interest also featured the same concept with assassins receiving targeting information from an AI and thus massively outclassing normal characters. It also featured characters believing they were in a government procedural rather than a work of science fiction.
In a more general fashion, non-linear storytelling allows many of the same issues as time travel, dealing with questions of inevitability and destiny as well as past actions and their consequences. True Detective and How I Met Your Mother both extensively featured elements of this concept through use of that structure. As a roleplaying game, Microscope largely does the same thing, even pointing out the problems with time travel in gameplay.
I’ve found that the best way to use time travel in a story is to make it so the character in question has little to no control over it. “The Butterfly Effect” (the original, I’m denying the existence of the crappy sequel) is a great example of this. I’ve also heard that “12 Monkeys” which makes time travel a “one-way trip” type of deal worked just as well.
It goes back to the basic rule listed in this article “place limitations.” A lot of the plot holes caused by fixing a problem using time travel could have been repaired using the “it takes a lot of energy to do so, so we have to get it right during the first try,” (like an enormous group of spellcasters and it drains all of them or like 99% of a ship’s energy crystals so only life-support and basic movement forward remains– time travel as desperation move iow) but not the “you have to be back by a certain time” as that makes no sense when there’s unlimited access to a time travel device. “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” is the most recent example of this but “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” also suffered from this problem.
The power stealing issue comes up in Brandon Sanderson’s new Mistborn sequel, “Shadows of Self”. The villain uses the art of hemalurgy to steal powers from other magic users, killing them in the process. She has the power as long as she keeps the metal spike she used to kill them inside her own body. Here’s the catch. If she has more than one spike in her at a time, she can be controlled by the deity known as Harmony. Since her goal is to overthrow Harmony as ruler of the universe and set humanity free, that would be a serious problem. Thus she can only have one power at a time.
That’s an excellent balancing factor. Sanderson is good at creating balanced magic systems.
The online novel Worm has a nice solution to the super tech problem. The heroes in the story who create and use fantastic technology, along the lines of Batman or Ironman, are another class of parahumans called Tinkers, their powers no less supernatural than those of the shape-shifters, telekinetics, flyers, etc. (and all sharing a common origin).
The machines a Tinker builds require frequent maintenance by the specific Tinker who created them, and soon malfunction or fail altogether if given to others. You’ll occasionally see close associates of a Tinker using one or two of that Tinker’s creations, but no mass production, because a Tinker can only maintain so many items at a time.
Parahuman powers are roughly divided into twelve types, organized in a mnemonic rhyme:
Mover, Shaker
Brute and Breaker,
Blaster, Tinker,
Master, Thinker,
Striker, Changer,
Trump and Stranger.
However, a lot of them have powers in more than one category. If Superman were in that universe, for example, he would have extremely high Mover, Brute, and Blaster ratings, and a moderate Thinker rating as well due to his enhanced senses and ability to process the information received from those senses more efficiently than a human could. Virtually all Tinkers are rated in other categories as well based on what powers their equipment gives them (Tony Stark’s suite would make him another Mover/Brute/Blaster combination).
It’s a terrific story, but has large helpings of all six of the “dark” narrative elements discussed in the Mythcreant article How to Talk About Dark Stories — tragedy, gloom, grittiness, creepiness, threat, and explicitness — thanks mainly to one of the major antagonist groups, a demented gang of parahuman serial killers known as the Slaughterhouse Nine. Some of that crew would give the Heath Ledger version of The Joker nightmares.
Worm is also different because it isn’t afraid of exploring the implications of truly game-breaking powers. There are plenty of people in Worm with powers that would break most stories but in Worm they’re simply part of the setting.
Definitely agreed with you on these, awesome insights!
For one story I am working on two things limit the super tech, the first is simply resources, its a post apocalypse so while people could make mechs or robot arms actually getting the resources let alone the people is super hard as the world is a wreck & most people are dead.
Secondly, what stops the tech from overtaking the heroes with psychic or ki based powers is that tech can only take the energy production and processing so far before it basically hits a wall. After that it needs a conscious mind who need to basically do the equivalent level of training to the other characters so they can’t overtake them that easily.
IE, Iron Man could not get in one of the battle suits and fight at the same level as the top heroes despite the battle suit theoretically being able to reach that level cos he has to know how the energy works, how the machine works, how to interlock with it and mesh with the machine and so on and it requires high level of focus and training to use at the higher levels, even for the robots.
Limiting resources is a good solution, and a post apocalyptic setting has that built in, so it sounds like you’re on the right track.
Thanks I am glad you think so!
I’m definitely going to need to keep aspects like scarce resources in mind for more story elements like repairing damage and such as well.
I also think it can be used for some good drama, like the MC would be wondering why one person has four robotic limbs when there’s plenty of other people missing limbs as well & basically get told that said character is too useful to not be given preference Of course this can create bitterness amongst the survivors, made worse by this character in particular hating having prosthetic limbs over biological ones on a philosophical level.
Add in that there’s a group that does have a lot of resources but it notoriously immoral and people have to start weighing their options creating more issues. (Of course even their resources are more limited than they’ll admit.)
Thanks for the response & article!
Worm solves most of these pretty well. All people with superechnology powers need to personally maintain all their equipment (because it’s their personal superpower that enables them to understand it) which badly limits sharing; by the time the story takes place some super-tech gear is starting to be reverse engineered and put into production by muggles but it’s slow going. The only tinker that is able to subvert this and operate and maintain massive amounts of technology at once is a game-breaker and one of the most powerful people in the world.
Mind-reading is basically impossible in worm-world because -hand-wavy explanation about the computational requirements- the only cape who has mind-readingish powers is a game-breaker and one of the most powerful people in the world, though fortunately she’s also an emotionally unstable moron.
Precognition is limited in more or less the way you describe it- each precog has pretty limiting restrictions on the kind of information they can get and overusing it causes crippling headaches. The only person with at-will access to precognition without limitations is a total game breaker and one of the most powerful people in the world.
Superspeed can mostly only be achieved by playing with dimensional shenanigans which tends to have built-in limitations, like one guy who achieves super speed by shifting into a dimension that lowers his mass and the force of friction on his body which also makes him weaker in normal space while he’s phase-shifted.
Power stealing (or other meta-powers) are simply broken, people with power stealing are the most powerful people in the setting.
Yeah, Quicksilver is also an overpowered example of super speed. HISHE’s videos on x-men days of future past comments on it perfectly.
Regarding precognition solutions, another method is to have a weakened psychic like Drusilla in Buffy. In her first appearance she is too frail to take action on her visions, then other subsequent times nobody can be sure if her vision commentary is true or just crazy babble due to her mental instability of being tortured into insanity by Angelus. When she was human with precognition she lived in a society that condemned her knowledge as demonic and taught her to reject that side of herself. She’d get visions and instead of helping someone in trouble, she’d do nothing because she was taught that precognition was bad and made her an evil person when all she tried to be was devout and good.
Or Cassandra in Greek myth. She could accurately predict the future but her curse was that no one would ever believe her. The tv show of Disney’s Hercules had a teen Cassandra with this problem. Even when the visions applied to her and she knew them to be true, the plot revolved around stopping the vision from happening which ultimately made it happen and had to be resolved from there. I can’t imagine a psychic in a crew or team putting up with no one believing them for long though so that limit really only works for background characters with fringe loyalty.
Agents of Shield has a “speedster” named Yo-yo. But her ability is limited to within a short amount of time before she has to go back to where she started. This greatly dampens her ability and makes her less invulnerable.
I’ve also done some time travel in a few of my books, but they all end up being a time loop that isn’t realized by the character or even the reader until it is fulfilled so the loop stays connected and time isn’t changed (think 12 monkeys).
I also find that mind readers may run the risk of going insane if they read the wrong mind and quite a number of characters in my books have felt the ill-effect of this and are very careful when they try.
As far as precognition goes, I try to use the example that Star Wars has used. There are short snippets and a definite showing of an event, but not necessarily the result of the event. This leads to misinterpretation.
One of my antagonists has some very high tech. However, he was defeated by being hit hard by several different battles, one right after another, that left him vulnerable. Of course it took everything that everyone had, but in the end, the high tech lost to those who were more determined. This, in essence, brought him back to the very time loop that he was trying to avoid.
I even had one individual travel through time so often that he had no idea if things have happened, will happen, or are currently happening. He didn’t know if he was in this here and now or a later or earlier here and now. Even his speech and thinking reflected this and it drove him insane. Eventually he died becoming another time loop that he was trying to avoid.
Anyway, with the right imagination and a little bit of fun, even the greatest of powers could be limited or even turned into a deficit.
Sounds like you’ve got a good grasp on how to limit these powers.
And I can definitely see how excessive time travel can throw a person off. Multiple playthroughs of some games does this to me. “Oh, yeah, in this save, I did X instead of Y. Oops.”
Robert Sawyer’s novel End of an Era has time travel back to the dinosaurs.
The limitation is, it takes enormous energy to travel back just a few years or months; it takes less energy the farther back you go.
A limitation on magic or magic tools could be that the tools can only be manufactured in one location in the whole world. Or magic, or magic tools can only be used in one location in the world.
Or they can only be used in very limited circumstances.
This article assumes two things:
1. First, that every story has to seek to challenge the protagonists, but I disagree, because interesting stories can be made whose objectives are not to challenge the protagonists, but other things, like more philosophical reflections, to find the place in the world, think about nature of the reality, etc.
2. Second, to challenge the protagonists, the superpowers must have intrinsic limits, but this is not the case, because they are already limited when the other side can also have them.
to 1.) Usually, stories are build around a version of the hero’s or heroine’s journey and that means setting up a challenge which forces the hero to grow in some way. Other topics are possible, but in fiction, they’re usually only themes, not what the story part (things happening) is about. Even finding your place in the world usually is a challenge – because if you had already found it, you wouldn’t be looking for it, and finding it means leaving behind what you know and facing new things (places, people, philosophies). That is a challenge all by itself. A challenge doesn’t have to be an end boss like in a video game or the big bad from an action movie.
2.) Quite often superpowers are rather specific and thus only one person will have one specific type of power (on a specific level with specific talents), see mutants (X-Men or otherwise). Even if you look, for example, at the benders of one type in Avatar, you will find that they prefer different uses for their bending, work with different sub-materials, or expand it beyond what is seen as regular (such as Iroh or Azula bending lighting, Toph bending metal, or Katara bending blood). Superpowers need a limit of sorts, because otherwise there is no story behind them. ‘How I destroyed all my enemies with my heat vision’ would be a boring story. ‘How I managed to save people despite some jerk with a bald head throwing Kryptonite my way’ is much more interesting. Which is why, apart from throwing Kryptonite his way, the best way of challenging Superman is to give him a problem his powers alone will not solve.
However, all the points of the article suppose not to take the powers to their final consequences, because that would break with the story, but I do not agree, because you can take the powers to their final consequences and keep having good stories, about super tech developed by both sides, precogs that cancel the precognition of other people, etc.
Precognition is the ability to see things which have not yet happened with a certain likelyhood (it’s not a very precise superpower, normally) – not something which ‘cancels itself out between two or more people.’ Both sides would have precisely the same information, if their seer could see the future with 100% accuracy. So the challenge here would be which side uses it better. Which side is better prepared to deal with the situation they now know will arise.
Supertechnology would lead to a technology race, just like weapon technology has done since the first human realized that you could sharpen certain rocks and turn them into things to kill other things (or other people) with, so you would never see the ‘final consequence’ of that. There would always be that one engineer or scientist who thinks up another way to optimize the technology.
If we look at magic and assume two mages are precisely equal in power, they wouldn’t cancel each other’s powers, but the one who reacts that fraction quicker or remembers that spell which is more suitable would take the win. Other factors, such as health, physical strength, or more experience would come in as what sets people apart. No two people are precisely alike in every aspect.
The problem with taking a lot of superpowers to their final consequence is that you need the same maxed-out power or the exact opposite of that power (that is how you cancel most powers) to make the story interesting. It’s much easier to weaken the powers, to demand a price, to attach a problem to using them.
I’m glad that I’m only using mind-reading for my villain, and that I already used those rules. My villain can only read when they want to, and they can only read what the person is thinking about.
Good rules on the whole.
Just one question: can your villain only read conscious thought or also the unconscious things underlying it? Because if it’s only conscious thought, they still can be lied to, if they read the undercurrent as well, that would be impossible.
Eh. The reason why Iron Man suits aren’t everywhere in MCU is that nobody knows how to build in the Arc Reactor. Just because it’s technology doesn’t mean it’s reproducible.
In Iron Man 1, Obadiah Stane was able to more or less re-created the Iron Man suit using only basic blueprints (The Iron Monger). However, Stark Industries scientist blatantly states that shrinking the Arc Reactor down to the size of a donut is blatantly impossible (leading to the “Box of Scraps” meme), despite the fact they have a larger model of the Arc Reactor.
Basically, if the super-tech is far too advanced for anyone outside of another super-genius to do it. I can send a computer back to the Romans but they won’t know how to re-create it.
Yep, which is why my article focuses on the issue of the tech hero sharing their gadgets, not on other people recreating them!
Yet a super genius shows up in the second film who manages to build his own arc reactor, and in the comics Ironman suits are regularly stolen.
The tech leaking is often a plot point in Ironman/MCU, so it should be coming through more often as an arms race of some sort.
The Flash dilemma continues to annoy me. In two episodes h was able to catch bullets that were coming BEHIND him. But when he fought Green Arrow the old “behind ya” trick worked on him, and arrows are significantly slower. No matter how much skill Oliver had he shouldn’t have been able to beat Flash at all. Also, the fact that he should be able to defeat villains before they even move is just frustrating. But there is one apparent issue with you using the Flash with the whole physics problem. The Flash is protected from all of the debris, heat, and other things by the Speed Force, otherwise he would burst into flames often. It provides an “aura shield” for him.
I got a bit of a chuckle out of #1. Worm (a web serial by Wildbow) prevents “tinkers” (superheroes whose power lets them design superscience gizmos) from being hugely disruptive by making the tinkertech break down quickly if the original tinker doesn’t maintain it*…and they’re still considered to be one of the most disruptive categories of capes, especially by the protagonist.
Worm also limits two of the other three abilities. There aren’t any true mind readers, and quasi-mind-readers are limited (e.g. just sensing emotions or being supernaturally good at cold reading). Super-speed is uncommon and limited to well below the speed of sound. Finally, precogs are present and not particularly limited, but they’re all treated as being extremely powerful (ranging from “critical resource for international security” to “biggest threat humanity has ever faced”). All but the most powerful precogs are also limited by other powers (including all other precogs) disrupting their view of the future.
…I like Worm, in case it’s not obvious.
*With a couple of exceptions, specifically one of the most dangerous villains in the world and a member of a team who specialize in giving supertech to un-powered people
…Oh, and power theft. Forgot about that.
I think there’s only one power copier in Worm, and he’s explicitly limited to one power at a time, generally inferior versions (especially for less-physical powers), and usually lacks the required sensory powers (e.g, he borrows a healer’s biokinesis without having a great idea of what he’s doing). There are a couple of other characters with access to a bunch of superpowers, but they’re two of the most powerful characters in the setting.
I feel that the Deadpool arc Soul Hunter is a great example of how to limit precognition, Spoiler Warning, the guy who has it can only see a few moments ahead, and he can’t see further when he’s going to die, he can’t see to far ahead and he relies on it to much, as shown by how terrified he was when he lost it, when Vetis, the demon behind everything, gets the power there are some things that he can’t see, Deadpool blows up the Baxter building, Vits doesn’t know what building it his, he was cocky because he had become an invulnerable shape shifter who could survive underwater, comunicate with sea life, and see a few moments into the future, his cockiness blinded him, I also love the line from Micheal “You may be able to see what we are going to do, but you can’t see what we already did”, precognition seems to be treated like the person can see everything that happened and will happen, this points out that major weakness, he seems to only be able to see what going to happen to him in that place at that time, this is one of my favorite arcs from Deadpool, it comes after dead presidents and I highly recommend both of those stories.
What if we all have the power of power-stealing, but don’t know because that’s the only power anyone has?
Mind Blown.gif
Although I think there’s an X-Man comic where they heal Rogue by having her touch another mutant with power stealing abilities and somehow this power-ception fixes her wounds.
It actually would make more sense to have her touch a mutant like Logan, who has a high healing factor and can live with the loss of energy and power.
In Judge Dredd there are judges with precognition and clairvoyance, but in addition to requiring concentration and focus and usually providing little glimpses only, those powers are also not fully reliable. How reliable they are vary from psychic to psychic, and the system keeps tabs on how often visions from each particular person come true. One judge might be, say, 50 % reliable and another 75 %. That’s sufficient to make them useful, but it doesn’t break the stories.
That’s a very good way of handling precognition. If you only get small glimpses and they’re not always reliable, it’s still a useful power to have, because it will help you prepare better, but it doesn’t destroy the plot. After all, when it comes to an important event, precognition might not be available or just plain show you the wrong future.
In Xenoblade Chronicles, Shulk uses the Monado’s precognition extensively in battle. Besides the more straightforward limitations (he can’t control the visions, and they rarely last more than a few seconds), beasts called Telethia can instinctively tell when he’s seen their next move and change it accordingly. It’s similar to your typical scry-vs-scry I-know-you-know-I-know, except Telethia don’t actually see the future themselves, they just react to other people who do, and the only way to counter it is to cancel all magic, and only preemptively since it’s so fast.
Incidentally, near the end of the game (spoilers!), the main antagonist, who by this point has acquired power over the Monado, forces Shulk to experience traumatic visions. It just motivates him to fight back harder, though.
With Precognition, can the same “fix it” strategies also go for Retrocognition (seeing into the past) ?
Probably, though it would depend on the specifics of how the past-sight ability works. I think the main issue with that power is that it would make solving mysteries too easy, since you can just scry backwards and find out whodunit.
What do you think of a character who can read minds, but is cursed to never be able to mention what they read? Then they could find out that some character is evil, but they wouldn’t be able to tell their friends.
That would be one way to limit mind reading, though you could still run into problems with your hero knowing too much. Being able to withhold information is a constant of human social interactions, and making it so one party knows what the other is thinking will change a lot even if they can’t tell others about it. Depending on context, I’d also expect that eventually, the protag’s friends would just start trusting their judgement about people, since they have access to a bunch of hidden information.
In Benedict Jacka’s books the protagonist is a ‘probability mage’ who can foresee the outcome of whatever decision he makes. This allows him to do some amazing things, such as open safes by visualising himself trying every combination of numbers until he finds the one that works, investigate a building full of guards and traps without going in by seeing the probable outcome of walking into each room, pass through a guarded entrance by spotting the one moment when the guards are looking the other way, and so forth.
It’s prevented from being plot-breaking by several factors; there are so many probable futures that he can only investigate a few of them at once, so he can still be surprised by a future he hasn’t looked at, it takes concentration, time, and mental energy to use his ability, so it’s difficult for him to do anything else at the same time, it can be stressful (in the guards and traps example, he’d be experiencing his own death multiple times), and because he was trained by a feared Dark mage, many other mages believe him to be a Dark mage himself and/or still working for his former master, so don’t trust his predictions.
Super-technologies can be hacked by Technopathy(unless when uses more esoteric fundamentals than electrical engineering), “mind-reading as a bad superpower to have IRL” can be made unusually prevalent from having nyctophobe(for a telepath) teamed up with edgeords/edgeladies, Gundala(superhero from my country) have his Super-speed can let his own exposed skin scratched by air frictions, Power-stealing don’t need to be nerfed when used by villains
I generally agree with this post, particularly super speed.
Precognition is a tricky one as well. If you want to read an excellent series where seeing the future is done right check out the Alex Verus series by Benedict Jacka. He solves this problem in ways that are wonderfully balanced.
J
I’ve created characters with most of these powers (aside from super tech, since it would affect the world and every major character so much), and have had limiting factors on all of their abilities, or else storytelling techniques to make an excessive power play nice with the plot and theme. Feel free to take inspiration from anything that seems useful here.
Mind Reading: I have two of these, in a sense. One is a villain with pretty straightforward mindreading, acting as an adviser to the main antagonist, keeping him appraised of their group’s general mental wellbeing, trust in him, and thoughts about goings-on, as well as acting as a safeguard against potential betrayal. Though by its nature a strong ability, her version of it is relatively weak. She mostly gets “impressions” or “vibes” rather than a full mental transcript, can only clearly read focused thoughts, has to actively focus on a person, and her ability to read someone depends on how well she knows them and understands their mind. If she concentrates on a friend or family member, she could probably tell what they want for lunch, while she would get nothing from a complete stranger except maybe an impression of very strong emotion.
The other is a hero who can link with people’s minds only through their dreams, which she enters through her own. Obviously this is difficult to do undetected, requires both her and the target to be asleep at the same time, and picking out what reflects something real and what’s just a dream isn’t easy.
Precognition: A side character depicted as one of the most capable superheroes, she can perceive exactly four seconds in the future. In a simple fight, this means she can perfectly anticipate and counter every move, and even dodge bullets. She cannot foresee any further than this, and can only perceive what she will experience; if someone will be standing behind her, she won’t be aware in advance, and if she will be unconscious, she perceives nothing. She can be caught off guard if an action has delayed effects, or was set up prior to her awareness. Also, in what is ultimately her undoing, free will explicitly exists, thus she cannot predict a person’s actions if they are unsure what they will do.
Super Speed: A few characters have amplified versions of normal abilities like strength or speed, or have physiology including features from animals like a horse or velociraptor; they can run faster than an ordinary human can, but nothing unearthly. Only one hero has true super speed, performing dashes in which his body essentially becomes a beam of light. In practice, this looks more like teleportation, though he can also bounce off reflective surfaces and pass straight through transparent objects. Entailing a transformation, using his power requires a noticeable, visible “charge-up” and “cooldown,” making mirrors an effective way to counter him when he prepares a dash. In his transformed state, which lasts only from point A to point B, he cannot change direction, and cannot use any of his senses, nor can he carry anything or anyone with him, unless an object is small enough to fit within the area that gets affected (a principle made up just to explain how his clothes can move with him) – I guess if he taped a piece of paper to himself, that could work, but that’s about it. This ability is one of the most powerful possessed by any hero, and is used to present him as a seemingly unsurpassable friendly rival to the main character. It would also be very dangerous in the wrong hands, and a massive shift if he were to lose it, which brings us to…
Power Stealing: There’s no two ways about it; this is an extremely overpowered, godlike ability. If the heroes had this on their side, it’s hard to imagine how they could lose… but instead we wonder how they can win, because the main villain has it. He has a vast arsenal, and is unmatched in raw power; there are only a few factors reducing his power at a given time. One of the biggest is that some abilities are more rare than others; he is not always able to obtain them. There are a few mechanisms by which characters have superpowers, though most commonly they are born with them due to (evidently deliberately) altered DNA of unknown origin, and he can only absorb these powers; those which are not genetic are unaffected. He is significantly weakened by devastating prior injuries, limiting his durability and stamina (there are no powers allowing perfect regeneration), as well as requiring significant medical technology, creating potential vulnerabilities, necessitating he maintain a degree of caution. Many powers are relatively weak, and are only useful with a lot of training and knowledge, the more powerful and complex ones requiring even more expertise, so it would sometimes be impractical to steal a power he could not readily use. Many also come with drawbacks, so the more powers he absorbs, the more potential weaknesses he has and needs to be mindful of. Most significantly, all powers have a physical mechanism, and cannot be used unless that is replicated; if he steals the power of a character with wings which allow them to fly, he cannot fly unless he grows wings. This can make some powers incompatible, and there is a limit to how many additional or altered parts his body can handle; to compensate, he can redistribute or return powers, though this means he won’t always have the right tools for a given job. He is a relatively sympathetic character, neither sadistic nor cruel, and tries not to cause undue harm, so he usually holds himself back rather than unleashing his full potential. In many cases, it makes more sense to have a team of allies with useful powers than to try to do everything singlehandedly. He eventually goes through a redemption arc, though by this point the main antagonist is literally an evil god against whom his powers are useless, meaning he only gives the heroes a fighting chance rather than guaranteeing victory.
The villain’s power is also rivalled by a main hero with a similar yet contrasting ability; rather than permanently gaining powers at another’s expense, he can temporarily wield the abilities of his allies by forming a sort of link with them; the bigger his team, the more powerful he can be. Alone, or without sufficiently willing teammates, he is powerless, and a certain level of physical proximity is required. This hero and the main villain are depicted as the most powerful characters on their respective sides, are generally pitted against each other, and have their abilities deliberately compared and contrasted in both their literal and symbolic functions.
Generally though, my best advice is to err on the side of making your characters (especially protagonists) underpowered; give them an ability which is notable for its uniqueness, or which is effective because of the skillful ways they’ve learned to use it. Example: one of my villains exudes a chemical which dramatically increases suggestibility when inhaled (which is preventable by several means). Like with hypnosis, this cannot work to force anyone to do something they don’t want to do, and as such it wouldn’t normally be a very useful ability. However, he used to work as a hostage negotiator, and is skilled at persuading people and appealing to people’s inner thoughts and secret desires. He can’t simply say, “Jump off the roof,” but he might say, “Do you remember when you were a child, watching the superheroes on TV, wanting to be like them? Doesn’t part of you still wonder… if you can fly?” Aside from creating fewer plot holes, this tends to make stronger characters, since their effective use of their power comes from skill, knowledge, and creativity, rather than being defined by an inborn gift.
I’ve come up with a character who has precognition, but it’s limited by the fact that since so much of their energy is required to do so, they need more ‘mental energy’ leaving less ‘physical energy’. As a result of this imbalance, seers have very weak immune systems, making them more susceptible to various diseases. In addition, seering requires a lot of focus and mental strain, leaving seers vulnerable to attack, and fainting usually occurs after the visions (which aren’t always voluntary). Is this a decent balance, or should I change something?
This could make seers reluctant to use their powers, which is a good thing
But if seers still use their powers a lot, then this might not seem like much of a disadvantage. There’s also the problem of immediate gains vs long-term loss
> very weak immune systems, making them more susceptible to various diseases
You wanna be VERY careful here to avoid ableism
> vulnerable to attack, and fainting usually occurs after the visions
This’ll mostly prevent combat use, but between fights, when there is no immediate threat, seers will use their powers freely
And if the character is mostly useless during combat they need to be VERY useful otherwise
You also still have the regular problems of precognition. Either the vision to so vague it’s useless or so specific the characters have no agency, especially if the future can’t be changed
However, this can be a good limitation, and weakening a character at the right time is great for building tension. As long as you watch out for the pitfalls, this could work
One of the common ways to block “meta” powers is simply for there to be defenses against it. You know, like wards against mind reading or scrying or stuff. Quite a few game systems with abilities like that allow a “saving throw”, especially the mind reading one.
Power copying is one of those abilities where either there’s a crapload of limitations on it(at least at first), completely breaks the story, or is opposing someone who’s power they just can’t copy and/or is strong enough to give them a legitimate challenge anyways. It’s rare for all but the most power fantasy-esque characters to not have *some* limit, though of course in practice it’s less rare for those to not matter in the here-and-now, if the user has been around for a while.
Of course, while not quite the same thing, it’s worth remembering that more than a few fictional characters have tried to absorb energy fields bigger than their heads and suffered a myriad of unpleasant fates. Exploding is probably one of the kinder ones.
And copying powers is not the same as copying the skills to use them. Some powers don’t care about that a whole lot. Others do.
Also I can’t believe time-related powers didn’t get in. That one’s typically capable of encompassing the super speed one as well for slowing or stopping time, to say nothing of actual time travel. I assume because that one’s usually obvious enough that people make that mistake less?
You forgot teleportation. Like superspeed, being able to teleport vast distances or multiple times in an enclosed area makes one unstoppable. Many writers just sideline these characters or make them responsible for search and rescue or just transportation. This is not because these characters are combat-weak, but rather combat-strong. They trivialize most of the fights they are in. Like the movie Jumper, if you could teleport with another person, you could teleport them into a dangerous location (shark waters, snake pit, volcano, 2 miles up in the air, etc) or just teleport them to the other side of the planet.
The fix, of course, is to establish limits. Only places you can see or know well. Limit the number of ‘ports you can do in a period of time (jumping thru dimensions is physically tiring, etc) Limit the distance (it takes a lot of energy to teleport, so teleporting to the moon would knock you out, etc)