“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.
Can’t hold game controllers without an erection not practical
I mean the dexterity would be literally fucked up, but imagine smashing your literal dick on a finishing move, while 1v1ing your homie
It would be my middle finger for flipping people off what would I even press with that
If your shapeshifting doesn’t break thermodynamics, then you’re not able to shapeshift into anything smaller or larger than yourself.
(Though, perhaps, you could stretch it a little by ‘cheating’ it – become larger by shifting into a hollow shape filled with air, become smaller by shifting into a shape filled with very dense material. But there are limits to that – too big, and you’ll float away like a balloon; too small and the ground/floor beneath you won’t be able to withstand the pressure, so you’ll sink down into it – and you’ll never be able to change your overall weight/mass, which might compromise your disguise in some situations.)
Simple. When you shapeshift, your extra mass gets shunted into Z-space. When you need extra mass, mass is borrowed from other masses in Z-space.
Shapeshift into a black hole!
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.
Some versions of shape shifting have very real downsides. Remember Odo from Deep Space 9
Notice how his face looks like it was crudely sculpted out of clay? This is because in the story he’s a shapeshifter. But this isn’t shapeshifting like Animorphs, where you just have to imagine an image of an animal that you’ve absorbed the pattern of. That form of shapeshifting is like a menu. You mentally select a form to shift into, and the powers take care of all the pesky details.
But some forms of shapeshifting, like Odo’s, don’t work like that. You can’t just mentally tell your powers “make me look like John.” If you want to look like John, you instead would have to mentally picture every single minute detail of John’s face and body. Imagine if you had to consciously recall and build up your entire form detail by detail every time you shifted.
This is why Odo looks so odd. His true form is a puddle. Him taking a form is like a painter painting a picture - every detail has to be consciously chosen. Maybe a true master painter could shape shift into a form with a realistic face, but most folks would end up looking like Odo.
It’s been a while since I watched it, but wasn’t Odo shitty at shapeshifting because he was raised away from his people (puddle)?
Sure. But if you’re granted shape shifting powers today, will you have that level of expertise? No your skills would be far below Odo. Hell you’ll probably have to spend a few decades as a puddle before you even figure out how to turn yourself into something as simple as a plain cube. I’m telling you, be careful with shape shifting. Depending on the malevolence of the genie or other entity granting you these powers, it’s very easy for shape shifting to end up as a fate worse than death.
From what I recall, as the years go by, he gets better at it. In that one where they get stranded on that planet which sends them back in time he’s essentially using his “real” face.
True Changelings can impersonate people flawlessly. IE Martok, Doctor Bashir and Chief O’Brien were done perfectly.
He does. And that’s the problem. It took him decades just to learn the level of shape shifting given to him in the show. If you end up with Odo’s version of shape shifting, it’s going to take a similar another of time to master it. Hell, it took him years to figure out the most basic forms. It took him years just to figure out how to be anything other than a puddle.
What did I pick?
Russia.
Funny, I picked the power that makes me unaffected to anything involving other powers.
That house you’re sitting in? Boom, now it’s a catapult. Gravity is your new enemy.
Was it done by your powers? Then I guess it’s a normal house 🙃
You can teleport wherever you want in the universe, but I’ll be the snail walking towards you. I just need to find where you teleported from.
I had a stray thought about what it must feel like to be a fish and now suddenly the entire planet is an ocean. I’ll try to fix it in a second, at the moment I’m trying to think about how not to drown.
Really, superpowers need a lot of caveats or it’s just horrible. Even in comics / cartoons people don’t have the knowledge and responsibility to use their powers properly. But, at least those people are given super-endurance and massive plot armour along with their powers.
If someone could change reality at your will, could their puny human brain manage such an enormous power? If someone could shapeshift, could their modified body put up with the stresses of that new shape? Does having the shape of a bird give you a bird’s ability to fly – not just the knowledge but the hollow bones, etc? If someone had super strength, would it follow that they have super skin that won’t rip and tear if they punch a wall? If someone could fly, would they run out of oxygen at 10km height? Would they be able to fly up there without freezing?
I picked the ability to transcend physicality and now I’m in a warld of pure imagination, where my ass is even more of a dumpster fire than it already is, because all the air is fire in this warld. I do regret this decision.
When you become a pen where do you put the money? Checkmate shapeshifters.
Yeah, but then you’d really know what it sounds like when a hand grenade goes off in a bank vault.
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!
Wait, this is about superpowers? “Turning into a pen” is a sex move in my colloquial vocabulary.
“Don’t mind the pen holding the bag of money”
Why does that pen have two bags with two hundred thousand euros? Does anyone else find it odd?
prop hunt
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.
It’s not actually shapeshifting you just perfectly transform everyone’s perception including yourselves to appear as such. There, no more physics breaking.
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.
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.
I think shapeshifting is different from matter transmutation. So you’re just be a big Sun made of flesh. Which would probably still bake the planet, but not for fusion reasons.
I think something as simple as: You can’t break the law of conservation of mass, law of conservation of energy or exceed the speed of light would cut out most bullshit.
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.
That’s what CYOA’s are for, they are the complete game that this question teases but never delivers.
My favourite is https://cyoa.ltouroumov.ch/viewer/
I’ve spent hours of my life, every single day, just browsing its insanely long list of powers and trying to make various combos and synergies.
Omnipotence also needs to have rules. What if it doesn’t come with omniscience? What if your powers are so immense that they’re utterly impossible to control? You move the muscles you’d normally use to stand up, and your power shoots through your legs, shattering the planet.
This sounds like a potentially funny anime
That’s basically the plot of Daily Life of the Immortal King. I would say it’s worth a watch.
A very short one.
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’m sure a piece of dust would have no problem making its way out of the evidence room, eventually. Assuming you can turn into one.
I mean you could also just turn into a fly/ant or something similar and leave the evidence locker. Not like they are hermetically sealed
I feel like choosing only one of these two options is needlessly limiting.
Lack of imagination is worst quality for a shapeshifter to have.
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.
I always liked the powers from chronicle.
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.
turn their homes into homeless shelters
Ok, so now you’ve sheltered 500 people, say 10 to a room. I suppose that’s nice for them, what about the other 770k in the US?
That’s where making them give their wealth away comes in. The homeless shelter thing is more of a “fuck you” than a practical solution.
There are 750 billionaires in the US. I get your point about them not having enough real estate to host 1000 persons each, but usually, people considerably underestimate how many billionaires there are and how much they’re worth.
They wouldn’t have to give up their home to shelter 770k people. They could to it with less than 1% of their combined wealth.
That, and my definition of wealthy encompasses more than just billionaires. I’d include centimillionaires, at least.
Edit: the best info I can find says there are about 65k centimillionaire households.
Their wealth is very different from their homes.
Sure. But this is unproductive bad-faith literal reading.
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”
“Kazaam your wish is granted!”
Your boogers now turn into diamonds…while they’re still inside your sinuses.
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.
Also some forms of shapeshifting can be horrifying. In some kinds of shapeshifting, you have to be able to visualize every minute detail of the form you’re shifting into. Imagine getting shapeshifting powers and shifting into another form. Then when you want to shift back, you realize you don’t actually have a “default form.” You can shift forms as often as you want, but you have to picture and visualize every minute detail. Your original form is now lost forever. Remember Odo from Deep Space 9? His form was roughly humanoid but clearly not natural. He had to consciously control every minute detail of his face.
Imagine trying to paint a photo-realistic painting of yourself. That’s a fraction of the level of detail you’ll need to capture every detail of the forms you’re changing into, including your original one. Even your original form is now lost, replaced with whatever half-remembered remnant you can cobble together with your mind.
Pictures exist tho, use them as references
Also I’m repping my ancestors. It’s a proud heritage
Just shapeshift into someone with other powers
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.
That’s also not really “telekinesis”.
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…
And then all the unintended harms because nobody has ever done things like that and so nobody has ever thought what the consequences could be.
There’s a really good scene in a JLA comic where superman and flash argue about this. Together they could just take away all the weapons, punish all the crimes, stop everyone from doing bad things ever. But the consequences of that are that it would take away the free will of people. Their heroes would become their masters.
Who was arguing which side? I’m guessing it was Superman who argued against taking away people’s free will?
There are also the unintended consequences to the economy and to the natural world. For example, provide food for everyone, and you accidentally bankrupt farmers. Suddenly remove CO2 from the atmosphere and maybe you shock and kill plants, etc.
While true, absolutely worth the risk. If I have the power to completely end a hostile military, I’m not holding back for fear of what it’ll mean for the dildo economy.
You get this power, but you have to do it one atom at a time. You can turn lead into gold. One atom of lead at a time.
at that point, why not just choose somehing like reality bending or omnipotence
Why no altruism?
Dude you just got super powers chill
90% of people would become supervillains if they got powers.
Change my mind.
i feel like i’d be doing a fair amount of public service with which peoples heads I’d be making explode.
Yeah, they could have gene-edited people’s cancer away. Or redistributed food to places that need it.
Yeah, they could have gene-edited people’s cancer away.
Eh… Actually making the genetic edits is the (relatively) easy part. Knowing which genes to edit is the hard part. And ‘perfect control telekinesis’ doesn’t help you with that.
Obviously. They’re LOOKSmaxers.
I can’t wait for _____maxxing to exit the lexicon.
That’s just waitmaxxing.
