Powers that break your game

Any SHRPG

Recently I read an article and twenty years ago, I would have agreed with it...but now? Not so much

Here's the article: https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-superpowers-that-will-break-your-story/

For those of you who can't be arsed to read it, here are the five:

1. Super Tech Because, like, people can share tech.
2. Mind Reading Because then you can't have mysteries.
3. Precognition Because then they have an in-universe reason to know what's coming.
4. Super Speed Because there are decades of stories telling them what they can do and how they can get out of that trap.
5. Power Stealing Because all those powers! They build on each other! Limitation builds character!

(Okay, I'm getting a little tongue in cheek there.)

I don't want to get into a huge point-by-point refutation because I think this is missing the point (and yes, I have written entries are powers that are hard to deal with)

There's a distinction here between "This power is hard to write for" and "This power will break your story."

First of all, what kind of person are you that you are coming to the table with a story? Do you expect players to act out roles instead of making choices? Uh, no, not any players that I have known. Look, at best you are presenting a situation, and they react to it in their own ways. An NPC nudges a dog out of the way with his foot because today's just too stressful to give some ear-scratches. Maybe you've got a good idea of how they will react but I've been in too many situations where the PC suddenly says, "What? He kicked a dog? He's going down!" or the equivalent.

So, in the interest of breaking up the status quo:

• Why can't they share the super-tech? Maybe you've got a reason, maybe not — a lot of comics strive very hard to be “Our world with...” worlds, and figuring the logical extrapolations of some events would quit that, so they never figure out the logical consequences of unstable molecules. But there's no reason that you have to follow that reasoning. (In fact, Base Raiders asks you to figure out how you want to change the world.)
• If you have a mind reader in your player group, why the hell are you giving them mysteries like this? They read a mind, they know the answer. Now, maybe there are laws about mind reading (the first time somebody read a Senator's mind and it was known, legislation would be drafted right quick!), and maybe not, but why are you putting these situations in here? You might as well say, “You solve the problem if your character can step on that box!”
• Even comic book games work hard to make precognition be something a little hard to deal with, because (I totally understand) that then you have to make it come true. And frankly, I wouldn't allow it either except in the vague sense: “I see orange and green swirls...” and you have no idea until late in the session that those mean Aquaman or something. But they want it to be useful because they paid points for it or it's taking up space on their character sheet that could be used by a real power. And I can't help you because that's one that I give for free if I give it at all. Look, you can have precognition but you need an explanation why it's a crap power because I can't guarantee that I'll do it by the end of the scene, let alone the end of the campaign. But I think that's a problem with me, not necessarily the power.... My use of premonitions tend to be either vague or bad. Nobody sees good specific things when I'm running.

That's something of my response to all of these: yeah, these powers often break the first thing that comes to mind ... why are you presenting them when you know that you have a player character with one or more of these powers? If you want to say, "These are powers that will make it harder to run," you bet; you're going to have to think around them. Or maybe, "The players are smarter than I am at figuring out the consequences," well, no duh, because they have one character to think of and you have dozens, regardless of relative brain power.

Look, I ran an adventure once where the bad guy tried to fly away and at that point I looked at the character sheet and the bad guy had Flight 3. Everyone else had 6 in movement powers *at least*. So I took my lumps and instead of the session being about the return and threat of the villains, it became about the consequences of various supervillain actions (because once I started, the NPCs started talking about other things that other supervillains had done). And it was a pretty good session. It wasn't standard and it was form-fitted to my campaign like a contour sheet, but it was pretty good.

The players still laugh about the villain tooling down the street at something like 15 mph thinking he could get away.