Superhero settings: SF vs “like here but—“

Icons

Traditionally, superhero comics have been "our world but with superpowers." In the big two, there's a more "our world but with superheroes" vibe, but the idea is that mostly, the world looks like ours on the outside.

On the other hand, anybody who's studied any world-building at all knows that one change begets another; it's the "For want of a nail" effect, and the earlier you introduce superpowers, the more things changes. Take a look at the differences between the Wild Cards world and your bog-standard superhero world.

(One of the nice things about Base Raiders as a game is that the setting fully embraces that: the whole intent is to change the world.)

But the more you change the world, the more background material there is for the players to learn, and frankly, I haven't that much patience any more. (Hey, I'm closing in on a signficant aging milestone.) So there's a tension between "Our world but" and "For want of a nail" (or, for Ray Bradbury fans, "The Sound of Thunder").

It seems to me that there are a couple of ways to deal with it.

• Ignore it. Lean full-tilt into either "Our world but" or "For want of a nail," and if that means ignoring the consequences/ease-of-introduction, so be it.
• Superheroes just happened. Some settings, like Green Ronin's Paragons, assume that the whole superpowers thing just came about. This ends up with you abandoning some aspects of comic book worlds because they made sense in 1940 or 1961 but not now, but it does give you a resolution of the tension. A subset of this is that there were so few super-powered people that things didn't really change, but now there's an explosion of them. An alternative is that superpowers have developed from pulp powers that were unreliable to the current set of superpowers, but that reliability has to be recent for this category.
• Superpowers stayed hidden. Yeah, there were superpowers but the people with them didn't put on gaudy costumes and fight in the open. There are certain powers that lend themselves to this, such as mind control.