That Voodoo That You Rarely Do

"The roaches, the rats, the strays, the cats
The guns, knives and bats
Every time we scrap"

DMX - Who We Be


So there's this anime called Darker than Black about murderous secret agents with superpowers. It's less guilty of pushing its big cool gimmick than most other shows of its type. Nonetheless, said superpowers get predictably overused, especially since they sound cool on paper but in most situations don't accomplish anything that a pistol slug, taser or closed-circuit camera wouldn't do just as easily.

Seriously, in the time it took you to slash your own forearm and fling your disintegrating blood at your opponent, you could've unloaded five rounds of buckshot in his direction, with greater spread, range and accuracy and without sending yourself into hypovolemic shock.
Dumbass.

Three posts ago I was talking about party sizes in computer role-playing games and the importance of small hunting pack dynamics, a.k.a. the five-man band. I ended up mentioning the X-Men. Superhero teams make an interesting counterpoint to regular superheroics. A loner hero tends to need a bit of everything: strength, resilience, mobility, problem-solving ability. Try to think of a single superpower that Superman doesn't have or can't duplicate somehow. The X-Men were allowed more individual personality.

Angel flies. He doesn't tear tanks apart with his bare hands or summon hurricanes. He has wings and he flies and he flies using his wings. It's his thing that he does. Cyclops shoots eye-beams and Marvel Girl levitates things. Those are their things that they do. Oh, sure, over time the comic acquired more multi-purpose characters, but the original concept allowed for such counter-intuitive greatness as a wheelchair-bound superhero. Of course, you still have to ask yourself why Angel's not dropping tear gas canisters onto his antagonists' heads in that panel (dumbass) or why not a one of the many X-men ever carries a first aid kit. I don't know if you guys noticed, but you tend to draw attention in the form of bullets and energy blasts. Boo-boos happen!

In terms of roleplaying games, super and/or magic powers almost have to be expanded to all-purpose sets or schools. After all, so as not to sound hypocritical, let me admit I'd be the first to complain about a lack of complexity or versatility. However, it does get a bit annoying when everything you do revolves around your core gimmick. You fast-travel using your ice skill and shield yourself using your ice skill and crowd-control enemies using your ice skill and heal yourself using your ice skill and fry hamburgers somehow by using your ice skill. Secondly, it's also annoying to see a pyromancer doing 54 damage at 30 meters with a fire bolt and cryomancer doing 54 damage at 30 meters using an ice bolt. Quit milking it. If it's the same magic missile across the board stop trying to re-brand it. Thirdly, flapping his wings should not be the only thing Angel does. Would it kill you to toss a few grenades? Maybe carry a pair of binoculars? A net? Could you not at least shit on people while you're up there, you overgrown pigeon?

How much could one get done with ordinary implements of war and peace by adding one simple superpower? Just one. Could you build an online game around this? Maybe not a skill or class-based RPG, as it would kill such genres' core attraction of character development. It might, however, be the perfect way to spice up FPS games. Build an online MMOFPS with a decent physics engine and all the usual pistols or swords, horses or tanks, what have you. Then allow each individual player one, just one (1) singular superpower. Flight or x-ray vision or super strength or juggernuttery or teleportation or regeneration or whatever you want. Darker than Black's agents usually made rather more liberal use of mundane gear than the X-men did. Why not build a game around such agents instead of all-purpose Kryptonians?

If everyone needs to shoot each other, if that's a core ability, then it doesn't need to be re-iterated a dozen times over for every single playable class with different colored effects. Just let everyone pick their medieval or modern or futuristic weapons of choice from a common pool, bought and sold and crafted and looted like gear in any other game. Let every individual's superpower be a game-changer instead. In fact, we already have one endlessly recurring example in multiplayer: invisibility. Rogues / assassins / infiltraitors / spies have been retardedly overpowered in World of Warcraft, Team Fortress 2 or any other PvP game due largely to their stealth ability, and such classes have been predictably popular and over-played due to being overpowered since before Y2K. Flight, though more rarely featured, is similarly popular for much the same reason. Paired with even relatively weak weapons, these gimmicks routinely make players unbeatable.

Giving every player a choice of one game-breaking gimmick should be a way to both avoid the stereotypical five-man band or nuker / tank / healer archetypes and to prevent magic from becoming trivialized and homogenized. Guns, knives and bats (and band-aids) are all-purpose. Superpowers should be situational. Shoot your way through your enemies. When you reach a reinforced bunker wall, then you can spray your magic disintegration blood all over it, to achieve what guns alone cannot. Let superpowers take the place of five-minute-cooldown "ultimate" abilities. With a clever enough system of bonuses and weaknesses, it should even be possible to allow players to each design their own individual superpower at character creation. A Hulk-like jump followed by decreased movement speed, a self-damaging speed power or a flight ability paired with hampered aiming, regeneration paired with lethargy, etc.

Just stick to the core rule: you only get one.