trading in forever for today

Etymologically, “entad” was coined to mean one‍-​of‍-​a‍-​kind. For parahumans, it's only a bit less explicit.

Weaver Dice consists of reams of documents on the topic of generating powers. In a cursory search, I couldn’t find it stated explicitly, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. Parahuman abilities are deeply personal‍ ‍‍—‍ wildbow wouldn’t have written a booklet’s worth of exposition on power generation if just picking one off the rack was a viable option.

Burnscar is a pyrokinetic‍ ‍‍—‍ except she can teleport through her flames and loses control the more fire burns around her. Lung is a pyrokinetic‍ ‍‍—‍ except that’s a mere side‍-​effect of how the longer the fight goes on, the more he transforms into a dragon, scaling to match any threat. Circus boasts minor pyrokinesis along with a grab‍-​bag of other abilities like hammerspace and preternatural balance and coordination. Spitfire spews napalm‍-​esque combustible chemicals that melt almost anything‍ ‍‍—‍ including herself.

Essentially every classic power gets this sort of treatment: there’s always a twist.

So, again we have that dilemma. We can’t reuse ideas, and we probably can’t cheat and say this guy’s unique power is to resist fire damage by 20% while this girl’s “unique” power is 33% fire resistance. We won’t simply rescale and reskin powers.

Even still, another escape hatch beckons. Because how hard it is to hit a million power ideas depends on how good those ideas need to be, doesn’t it? In terms of scale, My Hero Academia outclasses Worm by a few orders of magnitude: it outright gives 80% of the population quirks. Except some of those quirks are things like “extra flexible fingers” or “blow bubbles (they’re just normal bubbles)” or “slowly attract small objects.” [Years ago, an old friend‍ ‍‍—‍ author of Inheritors‍ ‍‍—‍ fleshed out his power system, and the defining example of the weakest tier of power was “immunity to caffeine.”]

But Worm and WtC do not take this route. The source origin of parahuman powers essentially requires that powers be, if not good, then useful. Some are C‍-​tier, but I don’t think you get any F‍-​tier powers. [Well, not naturally‍ ‍‍—‍ botched Cauldron experiments definitely produce unnaturally shitty powers.]

For entads, it’s harder to say: the text gestures at a notion of “i‍-​factor”, but never bounds it from below. It’s possible that shitty entads exist, but we never see them for for the same reason any story element is disproportionately interesting rather than boring‍ ‍‍—‍ the narrative anthropic principle.

With that, I believe I have paced the perimeter bounding this cage we’ve found ourselves in. How do you write about a world with a million special abilities, each one unique and useful?

Perhaps this seems a niche concern‍ ‍‍—‍ if it’s such a strain on disbelief, we can always not write settings that entail millions of bespoke effects.

But the true scope of this trope isn’t so easy to escape. How many times have you read a story with a magic library, if not a whole magic school? How many times have you seen a wizened magic veteran characterized by an appellations like “master of a thousand spells”?

I’ve always found myself faintly mystified, never fully satisfied by these portrayals. The art direction for magic libraries always renders them as having shelves upon shelves‍ ‍‍—‍ at a glance, you can spot hundreds of books. Maybe not all of them are about magic, but some of them must be. What’s in them?

Even the most complicated magic system you’ve heard of is necessarily still described by a fraction of the book you read it in. In most cases, the rules of the system are either vague or clearly summarized, and both fail to truly convince me that you could write an entire textbook of exposition.

What amuses me‍ ‍‍—‍ and helpfully serves to indicate why almost no one does this‍ ‍‍—‍ is that the key to making a magic textbook feel necessary is, in some sense, writing the system poorly. If you’re designing a magic so rule‍-​bound that you could write a textbook on it, then you probably care about making it clear, and limited, and all those Sandersonian virtues.

To motivate a textbook, you’d have to make your magic system confusing. The reader ought to be frustrated and dissatisfied with the simplified explanations offered in passing dialogue, wishing instead to just get a complete explanation.

Beyond spells and magic items, what about bestiaries? There are currently a thousand pokémon. That series relies on “regions” to explain why this new game has a new batch of monsters you’ve never seen before.

Kanto, famously, is an actual region of Japan, roughly 32 km2. Let’s round that figure up to 51 to account for the sourthern waters (some mons are aquatic, and we do visit islands) and compare that to the surface area of earth (510 million km2) and even supposing that each Kanto‍-​sized patch of the planet has a paltry 1 unique pokemon will still net us millions‍ ‍‍—‍ the very same order of magnitude that’s been haunting this section.

It goes without saying that no one can be expected to populate an entire roster on this scale. So why linger so long on this point? Two main difficulties arise.

The first is false abundance. We’re told a system is huge, but in practice it feels so small. This is what I was getting at when I digressed to magic textbooks: the empty promise of complexity when the rules of the system can be explained and understood in five minutes. The promise of endless diversity when, after millions of words and multiple volumes, we’ve seen maybe a few dozen spells total.

The second is blank page syndrome. I run into this often when drafting short stories set in my fantasy stories‍ ‍‍—‍ especially Black Nerve and Vermin Cathexis. The magic systems I design are always strive for that sprawling abundance and complexity. So when my characters encounter a new magic‍-​user, what should their gimmick be? It’s lame if it’s just a stock power like pyrokinesis or levitation. There should be more to it.

I can come up with some pretty damn creative powers when I need to [A Mind Like a Massacre is an easy one to point to, though it’s actually hard to find any other ready‍-​made examples of posts that are just about a powerset. On reflection, it’s startling to realize how many of my coolest power ideas are tucked away in Black Nerve documents I’ve never shown anyone. [Or are old enough to be embarassing. I had linked to the Nous Inspira write‍-​up at first, but on reread I opted for something newer.]] But my process of creative extrapolation[Creative Extrapolation] is slow. I might spend all day working out the ramifications of an idea and crystallizing it into something coherent.

That’s unacceptable if the ultimate destiny of these powers is to get handed off to a team of jobbers that appear in a single random encounter. Not only is this inefficient, it’s wasteful.

One trope common to battle gimmick stories, played both for comedy and tragedy, is some character showing up to a fight‍ ‍‍—‍ only to be killed before the audience gets any explanation of what their deal actually was. They had not yet realized the full potential of their gimmick. Now they never will.

A power that’s just pyrokinesis is lame, there should be a twist, but if we never see the twist in action, they effectively were just a pyrokinetic.

This finally brings us to the main subject of this post. Both of the problems outlined above could be solved by quickly sampling from a rich space of powers. If it’s quick enough, it’s useful for random encounters. And if the space is rich enough, it’s easier to believe “master of a thousand spells” is meaningful, once we’ve see enough unique spells to be convinced there really could be thousands of the things.

The solution we’re groping toward is clearly some variant of a random table. Design a couple of templates like {“control of”, “immunity to”, …} and {“fire”, “ice”, …}. Assign them to dice rolls or card draws, and you’re good to go.

Right? Well, it gets a lot more complicated than that.

Read the rest of it on my site: