Super Power Thoughts: Inventors
Sep. 11th, 2014 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tuftearsThis has been irking me a bit lately, as I read various superhero 'fics' -- serials and the like. Whenever people write about most heroes, they have clear-cut powers. This is part of what makes Worm so interesting; not only do they have specific powers with known effects and ranges/strengths, they are often inadequate to the task, so they can only win the fight by outsmarting their enemies.
Then when it comes to inventors-- often referred to as 'tinkers', sometimes as 'contrivers' for those who exert magical power in technological guise-- all that goes out the window. Inventors can do anything, given some time in a lab and access to materials.
I've mused about this before but that was about why inventors don't seem to have more impact on the world. This time I want to talk about why inventors' abilities are so poorly defined.
When you look at stories like Legion of Nothing and Brennus in both cases, there's never a clear definition of what they can do. In fact, in Brennus, many people remark on the protagonist's unheard of ability to improvise deadly weapons from ordinary components in the heat of battle. In Worm, Taylor often remarks that tinkers are cheating, since they can quickly devise solutions that render her insects powerless. The only thing that restrains them is authorial intent: does the author want them to win or not?
This isn't true for superhero RPGs, of course. In Champions or Savage Worlds, you don't get to invent new powers on the fly; invention is just the 'special effect'. New inventions represent the character developing new technology. Points are how you balance the characters against each other.
But in fiction... How do you balance it? How do you make readers feel that the inventor superhero has limits on his or her power?
Sometimes you let it go; it's all about wish fulfillment. Tony Stark's "Iron Man" is liberal in the use of 'hey, look, new technology!' -- very often it turns out that Tony Stark had anticipated needing a certain technology, and is then able to summon it and put it into use quickly. On the one hand, it makes Tony Stark look smart. On the other, when it's not foreshadowed (as it so often isn't), it looks like "deus ex machina".
But if I were writing superhero fic... I'd want to hew toward power balance somehow. Maybe "story" inventing needs rules. Note that I'm specifically excluding 'contriving' here: this is specifically about inventors whose devices work by real (story universe) laws.
So what would those rules look like?
* Power. All inventions require power equivalent to the effect they cause. You can't just build a tank-cutting laser with a flashlight and two D-cells. You need a truck-sized power generator.
* Miniaturizing isn't free. Each order of magnitude you reduce a device increases the cost by about that much. For example, if you want powered armor with the speed and strength of a car, but you want its power pack to be backpack-sized, you'd better plan on the materials costing $100k.
* The farther in the future your technology is, the more expensive it becomes. We live in an age of internal combustion and fission nuclear reactors. Let's say you want to claim your power source uses antimatter. Total annihilation of matter should be fiendishly efficient, allowing you to make a really tiny power source, right? Well, first you have to build an antimatter-generating cyclotron; apply the miniaturizing rule as above if you want to use less than a football sized plant. Then apply the 'futuristic technology' multiplier. Hope you also made a money press!
* You can repurpose your inventions if you need to, as long as they share technologies. That tank-cutting laser? You can totally turn it into a wide-area flash to blind people or a battleship-sized welding torch. What you can't do is to turn it into a teleporter or a sonic stunner.
* Specialize. Inventors should have some easily defined focus-- maybe they like lasers, sound-based machines, or gravitics. Outside that focus, they'd be limited to 'state of the art' or worse. If they can do everything, the story becomes boring.
* Beg, borrow, steal, or buy. Inventors need materials. They can't just go to the city dump and get materials or spare parts. (this actually happens quite a few times in the superhero fics I've read) Real-world materials yield real-world results. Super results require super materials and devices. I picture inventors negotiating with other inventors, or forming a company and working together.
Which naturally leads toward the second half of things: what should the inventor-based superhero be doing?...
... honestly? Probably not 'going out there and fighting crime'. Sorry, Tony Stark, but that's a waste of valuable inventing time and an endangerment of a nationally critical resource, the inventor.
They can make inventions and go out using the inventions themselves, of course. But these inventions can be mass produced. Instead of having one man in an Iron Man suit, they could be equipping a team of responsible agents and sending them out. Going out alone is kind of a sign that one doesn't trust anyone else with such amazing powers.
That does go against the whole mystique of being an inventor. It seems like the real reason people want inventor superheroes is so they can have awesome powered armor suits.
Well. It's not like Sylia Stingray of the Knight Sabers didn't have her own 'hardsuit'...
Edit to add: I guess the upshot of this ruleset is, I don't think it's as interesting when inventors can bang together junk and make super-futuristic gadgets that do anything. Think of the inventor as MacGyver. The reader can have more fun trying to guess what the hero inventor is going to do with an old car engine, scuba tanks, spare parts and electronics, and her trustworthy sonic screwdriver if she knows the inventor isn't going to somehow improvise a spaceship.
Then when it comes to inventors-- often referred to as 'tinkers', sometimes as 'contrivers' for those who exert magical power in technological guise-- all that goes out the window. Inventors can do anything, given some time in a lab and access to materials.
I've mused about this before but that was about why inventors don't seem to have more impact on the world. This time I want to talk about why inventors' abilities are so poorly defined.
When you look at stories like Legion of Nothing and Brennus in both cases, there's never a clear definition of what they can do. In fact, in Brennus, many people remark on the protagonist's unheard of ability to improvise deadly weapons from ordinary components in the heat of battle. In Worm, Taylor often remarks that tinkers are cheating, since they can quickly devise solutions that render her insects powerless. The only thing that restrains them is authorial intent: does the author want them to win or not?
This isn't true for superhero RPGs, of course. In Champions or Savage Worlds, you don't get to invent new powers on the fly; invention is just the 'special effect'. New inventions represent the character developing new technology. Points are how you balance the characters against each other.
But in fiction... How do you balance it? How do you make readers feel that the inventor superhero has limits on his or her power?
Sometimes you let it go; it's all about wish fulfillment. Tony Stark's "Iron Man" is liberal in the use of 'hey, look, new technology!' -- very often it turns out that Tony Stark had anticipated needing a certain technology, and is then able to summon it and put it into use quickly. On the one hand, it makes Tony Stark look smart. On the other, when it's not foreshadowed (as it so often isn't), it looks like "deus ex machina".
But if I were writing superhero fic... I'd want to hew toward power balance somehow. Maybe "story" inventing needs rules. Note that I'm specifically excluding 'contriving' here: this is specifically about inventors whose devices work by real (story universe) laws.
So what would those rules look like?
* Power. All inventions require power equivalent to the effect they cause. You can't just build a tank-cutting laser with a flashlight and two D-cells. You need a truck-sized power generator.
* Miniaturizing isn't free. Each order of magnitude you reduce a device increases the cost by about that much. For example, if you want powered armor with the speed and strength of a car, but you want its power pack to be backpack-sized, you'd better plan on the materials costing $100k.
* The farther in the future your technology is, the more expensive it becomes. We live in an age of internal combustion and fission nuclear reactors. Let's say you want to claim your power source uses antimatter. Total annihilation of matter should be fiendishly efficient, allowing you to make a really tiny power source, right? Well, first you have to build an antimatter-generating cyclotron; apply the miniaturizing rule as above if you want to use less than a football sized plant. Then apply the 'futuristic technology' multiplier. Hope you also made a money press!
* You can repurpose your inventions if you need to, as long as they share technologies. That tank-cutting laser? You can totally turn it into a wide-area flash to blind people or a battleship-sized welding torch. What you can't do is to turn it into a teleporter or a sonic stunner.
* Specialize. Inventors should have some easily defined focus-- maybe they like lasers, sound-based machines, or gravitics. Outside that focus, they'd be limited to 'state of the art' or worse. If they can do everything, the story becomes boring.
* Beg, borrow, steal, or buy. Inventors need materials. They can't just go to the city dump and get materials or spare parts. (this actually happens quite a few times in the superhero fics I've read) Real-world materials yield real-world results. Super results require super materials and devices. I picture inventors negotiating with other inventors, or forming a company and working together.
Which naturally leads toward the second half of things: what should the inventor-based superhero be doing?...
... honestly? Probably not 'going out there and fighting crime'. Sorry, Tony Stark, but that's a waste of valuable inventing time and an endangerment of a nationally critical resource, the inventor.
They can make inventions and go out using the inventions themselves, of course. But these inventions can be mass produced. Instead of having one man in an Iron Man suit, they could be equipping a team of responsible agents and sending them out. Going out alone is kind of a sign that one doesn't trust anyone else with such amazing powers.
That does go against the whole mystique of being an inventor. It seems like the real reason people want inventor superheroes is so they can have awesome powered armor suits.
Well. It's not like Sylia Stingray of the Knight Sabers didn't have her own 'hardsuit'...
Edit to add: I guess the upshot of this ruleset is, I don't think it's as interesting when inventors can bang together junk and make super-futuristic gadgets that do anything. Think of the inventor as MacGyver. The reader can have more fun trying to guess what the hero inventor is going to do with an old car engine, scuba tanks, spare parts and electronics, and her trustworthy sonic screwdriver if she knows the inventor isn't going to somehow improvise a spaceship.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 11:07 pm (UTC)He envies people who live where you can have normal jobs, work your way up in a company, have patents, all that civilized stuff that makes life easier.
Some inventors in comics have niches. They're not ALL Reed Richards.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 11:18 pm (UTC)Hmm, y'know, now that I think of it, no one ever calls Batman an inventor, but where does he get all these neat toys? There has to be a BatmanGadgetsCo. subsidiary of Wayne Enterprises.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 03:28 pm (UTC)I run into this same problem in RPGs ... when the "tinker" ability isn't EXPLICITLY defined as merely trappings for some sort of "power pool" or whatnot. That is, let's say one of the characters is a spellcaster, and he has this SPECIFIC set of spells that work in this SPECIFIC way. Quite often, I'll have players accepting the rather arbitrary limitations of this without complaint; any arguments will be over the fine-print wording of ambiguously-worded spell descriptions by rules lawyers. (E.g., from my WoW RPG campaign, "It says I can summon the rhino anywhere within 50 feet ... so what if I summon it 50 feet in the air right above the head of my enemy? Let's see -- according to {swipe} your DMG, it says that if it weighs 2000 lbs, then the falling damage will be umpteen-d6, and it doesn't say ANYTHING about a saving roll, so it must be automatic....").
On the other hand, have something like a "Mechanics" skill listed somewhere on the character sheet, and eventually a player is going to say, "I want to build my OWN weapons with my remarkable fix-it skill." That actually just came up in my Star Wars campaign, whereupon the other players immediately balked, suggesting that he couldn't just manufacture weapons ex nihilo, and if he was going to just dig through scrap, there ought to be some sort of downside, or else ... why buy anything? My treatment of "on-the-fly" repairs and gambits to "cobble-together" weapons would be that these are temporary, patch-gap solutions until you can get something a little more reliable and permanent. For instance, you basically slap some sealant and duct tape on something, but EVENTUALLY (perhaps when the ship's under a lot of strain, or the pilot rolls a "Despair" on some skill check) it's going to tear free and possibly cause even more damage, unless the ship can limp its way to a star port and get some proper repairs first. Or, you're weaponless in the midst of a scrapyard, so you might scrounge around and find several mostly-drained batteries and some unstable reactor cells, and you could rig together a proto-blaster with hideous accuracy and a warning from the GM that a "Despair" result won't merely mean the device fails, but that it'll probably do some harm to the operator, given the dangerous energies you're trying to harness with substandard materials in substandard conditions.
...
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 03:28 pm (UTC)When it's not a "stop-gap" solution, it gets more complicated. With many game systems, once you reach a certain threshold of skill, it typically becomes something like "Okay, you get an automatic discount on 'buying' new gear if you are willing to spend X days per N credits worth of cost of the item," reflecting the idea that while the ship is traveling through hyperspace, you're tinkering with all the spare scrap cluttering the cargo hold and making discount "upgrades" to your blaster. Same mechanic, just cheaper, because you've invested in the skill. Or, it's a "chance of discount" -- make a skill check, and if you pass, you avoid the $X cost you'd normally have to worry about, but if you fail you just can't, and if it's a crit fail, some sort of disaster happens (the more dangerous the item, the worse the disaster -- so beware making your own homemade explosives).
And if a player wanted to invent a NEW AND IMPROVED version of a weapon ("I want a smaller, lighter version of a blaster pistol"), then I'd probably have to negotiate over the particulars, and ultimately it would boil down to the PC getting to add a new item to the game's gear-purchase list, but it would still be MORE EXPENSIVE than the baseline item by far. It's not merely a mod on an existing item, but a significant improvement, and unless the scope of the game allows an awful lot of in-game time to pass, it's NOT going to be mass-produced.
But that's on the low end. With the typical superheroic tinkers, we're looking at INVENTORS who create marvelous items ... and my usual problem with the trope is that it begs the question of, "Why is there only ONE of this device, and why does only the CREATOR get to use it?" When the story first starts, well, the inventor might be working in secret, and it's a prototype, and he doesn't have the resources to build more than one device at a time, and he's forced to work on his own. But after a while, once the hero gets established, and he gets to join the League of Awesomeness, then one might wonder ... if Superpower Suit grants Mere Mortal Inventor all these cool powers, how much cooler would it be if you boosted the powers and defensive measures of Scrawny Psychic Wonder so he wouldn't be such a glass cannon who keeps getting targeted first by the bad guys?
Or, you know, have a special unit in the US Army equipped with a mass-produced version of these suits. Or Super Cops, or whatever.
Now, I know in the case of Iron Man, sometimes other people HAVE put on the suit, or a copy thereof, but so often this just seems like a temporary thing -- and by the end of the movie, we're going to have Tony Stark sending his suits up in the air and exploding like fireworks, because the Iron Man suit is just TOO COOL to exist in mass quantities.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 03:43 pm (UTC)A concession could be that, owing to the problems inherent in mass production and cost-cutting, or simply by being "behind the curve" on continuing advances due to the time required to move from design to mass production and distribution, they might never quite be AS AWESOME as whatever prototype our hero has on hand at any given time.
But the sort of super-tinker who just keeps inventing shrink rays and freeze rays and casually hops into a time travel device he just invented when we want to have a "back-in-time" adventure (and then forgets about it when there's a genuine problem that might've been solved by time travel) ... that's just poor writing in general, and it's no different from the generic "wizard" who just "casts a spell" to accomplish whatever it is the writer wants him to do, and completely FORGETS about the spell later on whenever its utility would prematurely solve some problem later on.
I think I'd like it better if it's the brilliant mechanic who keeps fine-tuning his personal vehicle, but he acknowledges that there are TRADE-OFFs to his tinkering. Say, for his own suit, he disables the automated systems that allow the typical pilot to control a battlesuit -- because he KNOWS the workings of the machine well enough that he can tell when there's a problem or when he's pushing things too much, so he trusts his own judgement rather than an artificial safety valve that might be TOO cautious, but he wouldn't force this "innovation" on everyone else, because it would be a recipe for disaster.
Or, he's the McGyver who, in the right situation, can cannibalize a defeated combat robot and convert its arm-blaster into an awkward laser-cutting tool to get through a blast door (but it's too bulky to just carry around EVERYWHERE), or he can jury-rig a one-shot weapon (but warns everyone else to stand back just in case it blows up, since they don't have time to TEST it properly), and every now and again, his "innovations" DO NOT work exactly as intended -- certainly not on the first try. (I'd just want the writer to take care not to turn this into a recurring punchline -- when our brilliant inventor HAS TIME to test things ahead of time and work out the kinks, then his inventions are comparably reliable, not prone to just "blow up" for no particular reason for cheap laughs.)
Anyway, I guess the short of it is that I just want the writer to put a little more THOUGHT into what the inventor is inventing, and make an attempt to explain how he could really get the parts he needs from his environment, or that he'd REALLY just happen to have the right tool for a very specific job handy. (Maybe the device was intended for SOMETHING ELSE the heroes had dealt with earlier, "just in case that ever happens again," but right now there's an alternative, if not-quite-as-efficient, use for it.)
Otherwise, it's just -- presto! I point my high IQ at the problem, and, with no effort whatsoever, I have a solution! And on we go. I find that terribly unimpressive in a story.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 10:02 pm (UTC)I think it'd be interesting to see such a MacGyver-style inventor superhero, either in comic or story form, respecting the above-mentioned rules-- that is, requiring him to use his wits, not just "book smarts" or "smarts power" to win through problems. I don't have a definite story idea but I do feel like I have better understanding toward such a future story, if I decide to write it.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-14 12:55 am (UTC)And yeah, the reader needs to have an idea what the limits are, or will always be wondering "why did he invent his way out of X problem but not Y problem?"
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 09:58 pm (UTC)Re: 50-feet-above-head rhino... I think arguing for 'no saving throw' is kind of begging the question. :) If the rules didn't say that a target takes damage from having an object materialized over their head, then you could just as easily rule that the target automatically avoids the object, having had ample opportunity to notice the rhino being conjured out of the air. Creating said rhino is clever, demanding no saving throw is just being greedy.
Re: using 'repair' to cover jury-rigging devices from junk, well, I'm guessing the RPG system in question doesn't have an explicit 'MacGyver' skill the way Savage World does? You *could* just rule it out, but I agree with the general sentiment that building things from junk carries high risk and players should know/be informed of said risks.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 11:18 pm (UTC)Regarding moving super-tech into mass production, I'd argue that a large part of this will be infrastructure requirements. If I were transported back to the 1940s, I could use an electron microscope to carve myself an integrated circuit chip with modern linewidths... but it would be a hideously expensive one-off that took months to make (and that probably required custom-build chemistry gear to refine the ultrapure materials for as well). To gear up to mass-produce integrated circuits, I'd need to reinvent and build the infrastructure for all of the tools and chemical processes used in modern semiconductor foundries (which cost about $1 billion apiece with the infrastructure _already_ in place).
That near-magically-powerful supercomputer (by 1940s standards) would still be reproduced by governments and other organizations with the time and money to devote to making more of them as expensive one-offs, but they wouldn't be commercialized until the infrastructure for wafer-style production was in place. That takes time, a whole lot of investment money, and a strong enough business case to get the first two (non-trivial in the "world market for 5 computers" era or earlier).
Long story short, I can see a justification for it taking at least a little while for most super-inventions to go mainstream =^.^=.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 11:25 pm (UTC)There was a line from one of the Discworld books to the effect of, "all a dwarf really needed was his axe and a source of heat; with those he could make a forge, with the forge he could make simple tools, with simple tools he could make complex tools, and with complex tools, he could make anything". I'd mentioned this in the previous thread (about engineers having a hobby of figuring out how to bootstrap from "stranded on an island"), and it also gets a nod in a few of the various superhero books out there ("Soon I Will Be Invincible" touches on it a couple of times; being a supergenius just lets you do it in days instead of years).
That said, the "days instead of years" part seems to be the problem you have with the junkyard scenario :).