Possession Implies Mastery: Difference between revisions

== Comic Books ==

* Subverted mercilessly in Marvel Comics' ''GLX-mas Special #1'', where the second Grasshopper is taking his first jumps in a brand-new super-suit. After foiling a villain, Grasshopper is approached with a dinner invitation by his unwitting sister. After denying her advances, he makes a heroic exit by engaging the suit's "Maximum Jump" ability, {{spoiler|which propels him into space, killing him instantly. Sidenote: to this day, there have been three Grasshoppers in Marvel continuity, and not one have them have survived more than a single issue. The most recent one debuted and was killed in all of three panels.}}

* Averted for most of the [[Blue Beetle]] legacy. The first one, Dan Garett, got powers from it by saying a magic word (ultimately revealed to be misusing it, and the magic likely damaged its true function). Then Ted Kord came into possession of the scarab but never got it to work, instead borrowing its motif for his costume and gadgets. It was only the third owner, Jaime Reyes, who had it work as intended - but he still hasn't mastered it; the scarab activated because ''it'' chose to, and he still argues with it over what to do at times.

* ''[[Ultimate X-Men]]'' member Colossus lampshades this when Weapon X forces him to stop a train, pointing out that just because he's super strong doesn't mean he's strong enough to do this {{spoiler|though it turns out he is.}} Weapon X doesn't care.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

** 4th edition plays it straight: any adventurer who spends five minutes studying a magic item will automatically know everything useful about it.

** Weapons were first just allowed by class lists, but obvious issues led to simple solution in AD&D -- penalties for non-proficient use. A character can grab any weapon, but this won't do much good without a proficiency in it, which for a non-warrior class may or may not be learnable at all.

** In third edition, you could get the "Skillful Enchantment" on any weapons. After being so enchanted, anyone can pick up the weapon and use it at least as well as they can their normal weapons or better in the case of character classes that least emphasized combat (so it eliminates the non-proficiency penalty and sets your attack bonus up to the middle progression if it wasn't already at that level.)

* GURPS has similar, highly amusing tables for meddling with stuff you don't understand. Including modifiers for poking it with a stick.

** The Orks would seem like a straight play of the trope, as the "Mechboyz" know tech on a genetic level, including captured enemy hardware. Looking deeper, all Ork tech runs on the psychic gestalt generated by Ork belief in the fact that the tech will work, to the point where a human opening up an Ork gun may find simply a load of junk parts in a shoddy casing.

* This is an unfortunate fact of life for ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' card game players; duelists looking for a quick and cheap (figuratively, though ''definitely'' not literally) victory will "netdeck", or go online and copy a tournament-winning deck card-for-card. The theory is that playing a tourney-winning card will give them the ability to win more, and assuming they'll be able to pull off all of the best combos and strategies associated with that deck as the original player has. This should not work in reality, but somehow it ''does'', because within the (relatively) simple ruleset of a card game, the idea of being able to reverse engineer the winning strategy for ''using'' the deck just from looking at its parts makes a bit more sense.

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[[Category:Common Fan Fallacies]]