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: 2014-09-12 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?"