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"Yea, I picked the power to change reality at my will. I can literally do anything I want. Water is breathable now. Disease doesn't exist. I created a moon base by snapping my fingers and people can teleport to it. What did you pick?"
"Oh, uh... shapeshifting..."
So I don't risk fucking up thermodynamics next time I drop acid and making atoms stop being a thing.
I mean I’ve seen myself “functioning” when I’m a tiny bit high. No way I’m trusting myself with that much power. “Oops, instead of teleporting those guys on the surface, I halfway burried them”
Even shape shifting is dangerous but the worst thing I risk is getting blood everywhere when I flip you off turning my middle finger into a dick thicker than my hand
I would be fuckin impressed though, when that thing fthwamps on the table.
If you've read Watchmen you know what the downside of that power is. Godlike power leads to detachment from the human race. You lose the connection to everything you ever loved, to your humanity.
The worst that being a shapeshifter will do to you is getting you into some kinky sex.
When you become a pen where do you put the money? Checkmate shapeshifters.
You can stuff a roll of hundos up any of your holes and when you turn into a pen, the money stays inside you, so if you're willing to sodomize yourself, you can make like five thousand dollars a pop. I've done this forty-six thousand times and I am buying my third house with cash as we speak!
The best part? You don't need superpowers to shove cash up your butt. Realize your dreams today!
Why does that pen have two bags with two hundred thousand euros? Does anyone else find it odd?
The "pick a superpower" game needs rules, because otherwise, the best option is omnipotence.
It's kind of a tacit rule that it's about comic book super powers so we don't go biblical with it, but I get it. Hell, marvel has reality benders. I use "pick a mutant power" so at least we're working in x-men lore.
If we are going X-men level mutant powers, I always thought an underappreciated one was Forge. You can basically fix any problem you have with technology. He could have built something that made Iron Man look like a tinker toy if he wanted to.
And still, something like Prof X is almost always the correct answer. IIRC he has the power to just make the entire world drop dead if he wants to
I mean, technically his power is telepathy, just dialed up to 11. You could probably specify limits on magnitude.
Any power can be OP if you up the magnitude of it all... E.g. I shapeshift into the sun, ending all life on earth.
“Don’t mind the pen holding the bag of money”
i believe the most powerful super power is mind control, because you can make people believe you have the other super powers, see you using those powers, and then do the thing you needed the super power to do, before forgetting they actually did it themselves
Lol, lazy ass.
“Yee, I wish for a superpower that makes people think I have a superpower”
“Why”
“Can’t be arsed with the whole flying thing, just rather sit on that couch right here”
Mind control can't change your sex (or just make it feel better, with fast recovery), make you live longer, or help out when you're having a rough time on the toilet.
It just turns everyone into your slave. You're a villain by default.
More importantly, it's super boring. People with mind control powers can have whatever they want—materially—with basically zero effort just by forcing people to give them stuff. There's no struggle, and if there is any, it's just you sweating or getting a headache while staring off into the distance.
Jumper style teleportation. I know it’s not objectively the best, that would probably be Atom Eve’s power from Invincible, but Jumper is the only media I’ve ever seen that’s left me a deep, unquenchable yearning to have a power. For days afterwards I was daydreaming about where I would teleport to.
You could get a cheap house in the middle of nowhere. You could get into movies for free. You could rob a bank. If you felt heroic you could be a top tier EMT. Maybe a low-risk astronaut. Bring the pieces of a giant rocket into orbit a little at a time until they can go anywhere with it. I could also spend more time with dispersed family.
Most importantly you could go to your favorite restaurants around the world whenever you wanted.
prop hunt
Telekinesis but with perfect control. Turn lead into gold, bend light around yourself to become invisible, fly wherever you want to go, fake super strength by lifting stuff with it, make peoples heads explode.
Good luck plucking out the neutrons, protons and electrons off each lead atom, I've heard they don't enjoy staying still
Hence the "perfect control" part.
Yeah that'd be my vote too. If there's no range constraints... Like you could just yoink a fuckton of carbon out of the atmosphere, plant trillions of seeds instantly, etc: climate change solved. Watching tv and some politician or CEO is saying evil shit again: rip em in half mid speech for the world to see. Invading another country? Your entire military inventory from bullets to nukes just turned into dildos. War solved. Religious text or paraphernalia? Dildos. Public religious speech? Large diameter dildo. Religion solved.
The amount of good you could do in just a few minutes...
Why bother with a heist? Just turn the tip of your finger into a great big diamond from time to time.
Or more classical: Impersonate a rich person and do some transfers out of their accounts.
Why the tip of your finger? Just use a fingernail, clip it off, donezo.
“What’s your wish?” “I want my fingernails and boogers to turn into diamonds”
“The fuck is wrong with you”
I'd want the powers of the Jessica Jones villain played by David Tennant where you can make anyone do anything. But instead of using it to rape and shit I'd make rich people turn their homes into homeless shelters and give their wealth away and I could just walk out of any bank or store with whatever I wanted.
If I shapeshift into an inanimate object, where does my consciousness go? Pens don't have a brain, or any senses at all. Could I even perceive the world around me? Would I live forever in pitch darkness, unable to think, unable to change back? All for a bank robbery?
Magic.
Ok. Valid. However, once you turn into the pen, you’re a pen on a shelf next to a bag full of the stolen money, which I assume the bank employees, that were not traumatized by seeing you turn into a pen, will put back into their drawers. Pen probably confiscated, studied, disassembled.
Gotta rethink that one. Lots can go wrong.
In a case where you can't pick "changing reality" as a power, "time control" is pretty much the next best thing. Pause time, rewind, fast forward
Selective time control, so you can pause, rewind, fast forward things independently. Now you've added immortality into the mix.
Beyond immortality, it also provides you with other incredibly powerful (and perhaps terrifying) abilities:
You can, of course, become incredibly wealthy if you choose. Lottery numbers are your playground. Perfectly timed investment choices are trivial. You can accrue decades' worth of compound interest in seconds. (Do be careful, though. You could probably wreck the global economy if you take this too far.) Robbing banks is so beneath you. How much cash does a typical bank have on hand, anyway? A measly few hundred thousand? You could easily make millions, billions of clean, legit dollars in the blink of an eye. Forget robbing the bank, you could easily own the bank.
From an outside perspective, you never seem to need to sleep. And you can definitely never be caught sleeping and vulnerable. You just need to pause time around you whenever you want to take a nap, then resume time when you wake up.
It unlocks true 'time travel' -- by pausing yourself and moving the universe forward or backward around you, you can travel freely to the past or the future. And not just yourself, either. You could easily take objects or people with you if you wanted.
By extending the 'keep your perceptions a few minutes ahead' strategy, you can gain limited clairvoyance -- always knowing what's going to happen in the future. At least, what's going to happen to and around you in the future.
You can now 'teleport' to any location that you could otherwise get to. Just pause the universe around you while you go there, and resume the universe after arriving. Alternately, you could just slow the rest of the universe instead of pausing it entirely, and now you can cosplay as a super-speedster who can move arbitrarily fast.
In the (unlikely) event that you actually need to fight someone instead of just using time shenanigans to avoid the fight, you could go back in time and either prevent what made them mad at you in the first place, or kill them while they were young and vulnerable ... or sterilize their grandfather, so they never existed in the first place.
If you want to fight someone without messing up the continuity of the universe and potentially creating huge butterfly effects, you can just fast-forward or rewind them specifically. Rewind them until they're a fetus. Fast-forward them until they're a dusty skeleton. Really horrify your enemies by doing that half-and-half -- age regress their top half while accelerated-aging their bottom half. Or just pause them indefinitely and leave them as a helpless statue. You could even troll them by slowing them way down -- let them try to fight you while moving at glacial speed. Laugh at them while the bullet they shot at you takes decades to cross the room. (For extra trauma points, you could slow/pause most of their body, while allowing their brain/sensory organs/vital organs to continue at full speed, so they'd be fully aware of how slow they're moving and able to internally agonize about it for a long time.)
I was going to say this too. Time powers can be used to mimic all other powers, therefore making it the best.
The thief has gone missing but we recovered the money and this pen that laid on top of it. I'll book it into the evidence locker.
I use my shapeshifting ability to look exactly like myself, simultaneously concealing the ability. No one knows I'm actually me, but not really.
I feel like shapeshifting would be an awful superpower if I got to choose. Why would I choose a superpower to cancel my insecurities? Your appearance is a huge part of who you are. How you look is a reflection of the life you lived and the work you put in to look a certain way. Magically being able to look perfect won’t make you secure, it’ll just make you come up with new things to be insecure about. Insecurity isn’t about looks, it’s about strength of character.
So the very first thing you think about when picking a superpower is one that's primary benefit is deceiving people?
Not materialize unlimited amount of food and address world hunger?
Not healing any disease with a touch or better: remotely? Or materialize vaccines with a snap of fingers? Or capturing CO2 out of the air??
We had way too many Hollywood superheroes movies. Now people think a supe is either an invincible warrior or can do super nasty things. No one wants the least spectacular highest good brought to the world powers?
Think through the state of the world and the consequences of those things. Unless you're also invincible you will be killed for doing literally any of those things.
Lets just do world hunger. We produce around 2.5x the amount of food needed to feed everyone to the average american caloric intake. That's something we already do. We have the ability to ship any good anywhere in the world within 12 hours, or alternatively, keep a good fresh enough to be sold over MONTHS of transportation (think the fresh fruits picked in South America that is shipped to Thailand to be processed and shipped to china to be packaged then shipped to the US to be sold 3-6 months after they were picked.).
We have no world hunger. There is not a lack of food. There is not a lack of transportation.
Hunger is used as a weapon. Period. That is the totality of the reason that any single person or group of people do not have the ability eat 3 square meals a day.
If you, as (presumably) an American were to just bring food to Cuba, you will be investigated by congress and Trump's DOJ both on criminal charges. (see Hasan Piker currently being subpeanoaed for just filming Cubans and bringing food.)
If you magically could produce infinite food, you have just taken away the most used weapon in world history. This means you are the single most hated and despised person by not only those in power, by but everyone that benefits from those in power, and that's a lot of people, and they own (effectively) all the guns and nukes.
The reason people dream small with superpowers is because, realistically, as long as you don't drastically change the status quo, you're safe.
Just choose reality manipulation. All superpowers in one.
My dumb ass would transform into a bowling pin or something. Then the detective would say something like, “Hey WAIT A MINUTE. This is the same bowling pin from the Chicago job.”
Then the detective's buddy looks at you and says:
"Ooh. Tough split."
Shapeshift into money (gold bars?), get yourself deposited under your name, then shapeshift back into a person and leave during some kind of scheduled reserve review or transfer.
Heist by way of reverse heist.
Shapeshifting into inanimate things is great until you find out it's DnD polymorph rules and it gives you 0 INT/CHA/WIS, I would be afraid of testing tbh
Can I slightly cheat and choose all the powers of one superhero (or maybe more of a trickster god)? I want Bugs Bunny powers, since he's the most powerful being in the universe.