Story-Breaker Power: Difference between revisions

** The Snake of the Festival is the God of ''Creation'', and ''he'' seems to have no problems showing off: infinite power, immunity to flame, [[Prehensile Hair]], and a sword that {{spoiler|causes anyone who tries blocking it to sustain heavy injuries (Blutsager)}}. Plus the whole "Creator" bit.

* The ending of ''[[My-HiME]]'' is made of these, complete with {{spoiler|[[Artificial Human|Miyu]] [[Ass Pull|pulling powers out of her ass]] until she cracks the barrier to Fuuka by essentially smashing it with a really big mallet, the resurrection of everyone who had died at that point up to and including the [[Big Bad]] of the first half of the series, Yuuichi [[Took a Level in Badass|taking a couple hundred levels in badass]], and finally ending with [[Batman Can Breathe in Space|HiME Can Breathe In Space]].}}

** One cannot forget the new protagonist of Force, Tohma. He starts out rather basic, for this series anyway, but then {{spoiler|he becomes fully infected and is turned into a [[Divide by Zero|Zero Divider]], [[Cursed with Awesome|a person who can cause everyone around him to fall unconscious and possibly die, doing so completely subconsciously.]].}}

** Accelerator actually can't count anymore. His ability can be countered as shown by Amata Kihara. His power can even by disconnected and taken away from him. There are also a lot of characters stronger then him currently. His awakening could still count but that's another story.

** There's a list of at least a dozen characters, if not more, in the Toaru-'verse who are explicitly so broken no one can touch them except maybe a few other people on the broken list. There's a character who can make you fall into a coma if you ever think even the slightest negative or confrontational thing about her anywhere in the universe that's undefendable except with a [[Power Nullifier]] or [[Anti-Magic]]. There's a guy who's powerset includes the ability to be +1 in power to whoever he's fighting, can hit you with an instantaneous attack from anywhere that ignores everything but causality and destroys whatever it hits, and defends the same way PASSIVELY. Or the guy who can completely negate and make useless anything he thinks of "as a weapon". To be perfectly blunt, it's an entire UNIVERSE filled with cheating, insufferable assholes, who are all powermad, crazy, genocidal, [[A God Am I]]-types. This is done simply because the author needed people who only the somewhat doofy, nearly powerless main character could beat, catered to his own ability.

 

== Comic Books ==

** One fight with the Weaponsmaster had a twist on the situation. Superman was ill and told the bad guys that now he cannot judge the force of his blows, thus they risk death by punching. Yes, making Superman sick just makes him more dangerous.

* One of the classic comic book examples is [[The Flash]], or really any [[Super Speed|super-speedster]]. There's no reason the Flash shouldn't see the villain and have him tied up and in prison before the villain has a chance to react. Instead super-speedsters get treated like normal people with a few arbitrarily chosen speed based abilities.

*** Although in ''Kingdom Come'' The Flash can no longer talk with anyone except Superman, because he's too fast (only Superman's supersenses can hear him). In fact, he's so fast he's constantly blurry, even when standing still. The Spectre mentions that Flash is forever alone, unseen by most people in the city he guards "though all feel his presence".

*** Lampshaded a bit in the New 52 where Barry Allen is informed how fast he can process sensory input is the biggest bottleneck to his powers. At one point he gets shot due to over-thinking, and reverts to just processing the super-speed environment on a somewhat instinctual level.

** Lampshaded in a recent ''[[Green Lantern]]'' issue: {{spoiler|When [[Blackest Night|Black Lantern]] J'onn is fighting Hal and Barry, he picks up the fire station they are in and throws it into another building, saying "I'm as powerful as Superman. Why does everyone ''forget'' that?" Indeed, by the end of the issue he's incapacitated them both.}}

* This has been done right at least once, in ''[[Watchmen]]''. Dr. Manhattan is a [[Physical God]] who wins the Vietnam War practically singlehandely and ''should'' easily dissect the problem in the comic and excise it... except [[The Chessmaster]] plays not against his powers but his post-empowering uncertainty to get him to leave the planet.

*** Pro-Tip for DMs in this instance when you have a villain with high Intelligence (such as a dragon): {{spoiler|1=Cheat. So you didn't have the Intelligence to give your [[Big Bad]] cold resistance? Good thing that your [[Big Bad]] has an Intelligence far greater than your own, and ''did'' remember to prepare such a countermeasure. That's [[Schrödinger's Gun]] for you.}}

*** Really, this isn't that hard to do. Any spellcasting big bad you just state that he's always got one of the myriad scry fooling or blocking spells on his lair (heck, theres a standard magical item that makes him not scryable), stick a permanent anticipate teleport on his fortress in case of teleporting in, dump a bunch of magical traps of the "These go off if anyone bar me or my trusted minions is nearby" variety and have a contingent spell immunity up (say from the feat, or spell) that "Makes me immune to any spell effect that would incapacitate me". Plus have a silent Dimension Door or two memorised to jump away if all this fails.

** The ''Wish'' spell, which is pretty much as it sounds. The player wishes for ''anything'' to happen and reality will reshape itself to make it come true. There are some limitations, and some downsides. The spell is difficult to obtain and cast, and drains the life force of the caster (read: XP loss) to empower the events. If the wish is something too insane, the caster may die without yielding enough power to make it happen. Second, and usually even more importantly, you should be ''very'' careful what you wish for. Just wishing for a lot of gold, for example, may result in all the gold in every king's treasury teleported to you. However, how you will explain that to their armies that are sure to follow is not in the scope of the spell. In fact, the GM is specifcially instructed by Gygax on what wishes to give them a chance, in Second Edition, and if the players ask for more, to make SURE they regret it.

** ''Miracle'', the divine flavor of ''Wish'', is even more broken: The spell-replicating function of ''Miracle'' carries no XP burn and can duplicate the effects of ANY 7th level spell or lower and ANY 8th level Domain spell or lower. Only the massively broken reality-warping function of the spell incurs a possible XP burn. Also, ''Miracle'' is not a spell cast so much as a supplication made of a deity, removing the possibility of the spellcaster receiving any magical backlash—of course, if the deity in question (which is to say, the DM) doesn't feel like granting the request, ''Miracle'' may simply fail.

*** Easiest way to deal with this is "Err, ok, that's the eighth time this week you've used Miracle. Your deity tells you to shut the fuck up and stop bothering him, and ignores your petty request"

** The Glibness bard spell had a lot of room for potential abuse in an intrigue-based scenario due to the poor wordings of Bluff and Sense Motive for a time: essentially, a successful Bluff check to tell a lie, no matter how absurd it was, guaranteed it was believed as complete truth. Coupled with Glibness that gives a massive +30 bonus to Bluff checks to tell lies and immunity to lie-detecting magic and the team's bard investing skill points in Bluff, it was possible to make anyone believe anything and destroy a perfectly crafted intrigue campaign. [[Obvious Rule Patch|This was fortunately addressed with a slight rewording:]] instead of making a lie appear to be true, Bluff makes your interlocutor not notice the character is lying, but an absurd statement may not be believed and the character's sanity may be heavily questioned instead.

* The ''[[Hero System]]'' rulebook puts stop-sign icons next to powers that have the potential to be Story Breakers, such as Danger Sense, Intangibility, Time Travel, or Summoning. The [[Game Master]] is urged to consider tightly limiting or outright disallowing them.

* Warp is extremely powerful in ''[[GURPS]]'', so much so that it is explicitly banned for players in the ''[[Dungeon Punk|Dungeon Fantasy]]'' books. The authors did eventually cave and add it in with the requirement that the player take a small Unusual Background named "Ha-''ha''! I Can Teleport!" and isn't able to improve it.

* The rulebooks for ''[[The Dresden Files (game)|The Dresden Files]]'' make suggestions on this front in two ways. In the section on building opposition, most of the guidelines are along the lines of taking your villain and giving him powers equal in cost to the [[Player Party]]'s. It suggests you create a group of antagonists instead, since as the party gets more powerful, the villain's powers would make them damn near impossible to fight effectively if the model was followed.<ref>One character having powers equal to three or four low-level characters is doable; one character having powers equal in cost to three or four high-level characters results in someone with huge magic potential, is impossible to hit, damn near impossible to harm even if you do hit'em, and will heal fast even if you somehow manage to harm them.</ref> It also suggests that Harry Dresden himself might be one, and gives suggestions for taking him out of the picture. Needless to say, Harry's margin comments are less than enthused about it.

{{quote|'''Harry:''' Billy, this whole section DISTURBS me. I'm making this face at you. Like, the one in the picture [http://i54.tinypic.com/2iia90o.png right here]. }}

 

== Video Games ==