I always thought this was a fun topic. What power would you choose?
Stop any confrontation by yelling "enough!"
Side effect: your voice cracks in an absurd way every time you use this power. Both parties find it too funny to continue fighting. They instead laugh at you.
Finally a plausible power.
It gets the job done
The power to stop/start time at will while still able to move & interact with stuff
It only works when your eyes are closed.
Your side effect is super cool, specially if you imagine that even light would be frozen in time. People in this thread keep choosing side effects that would ruin the super power but this one would be a problem but still worth using the power. With some practice you might even overcome some of thrle drawbacks.
Now I want a super hero with this power and side effect
I like it especially if it works like a switch. Imagine how perfect your naps would be. You'd never oversleep.
Do you age while time is stopped? If so, might want to rethink those perfect naps. I'd 100% abuse it though.
Oh man that's a good one. So much for driving all those vacant Ferraris
Would an engine still work if time was frozen though? And if so technically you could still drive with your eyes closed.
What's funny is that the most obvious side effect to this is the most realistic: molecular manipulation in this way causes an incredible build-up of energy that either expresses as kinetic or thermal, depending, and almost always exponentially explosive from the moment you turn time back "on"... to say nothing of the disastrous effects at the fringes for such time-stop powers...
tl;dr: The Flash would've incinerated the entire planet long before he discovered how to keep from glassing it simply by practicing his powers.
Air particles also frozen
This is far more insidious than it seems.
That would basically mean whenever you stop time you are locked in position.
And can't breathe
Depending on how long you can hold your breath it might give you some extra time to think.
Also photons cease to exist once you move into their space, there would be no light to enter your eyes attoseconds after stopping time, meaning you would be blind.
Wherever I am, everything becomes peaceful. Nations at war start peace talks. Long standing conflicts are immediately solved.
Wherever you leave from instantly goes to war.
They (the place ) can no longer stand you and you can never stay in a single place for more than a day.
Hahaha. You got me!
I'll be like Lassie (the classical trope of the main character charging setting every episode).
All of the violence and hatred that would have been present around you gets redirected somewhere else in the world. The more discord there was in a place before you arrived, the harder the redirection hits its new location. You occupy a bubble of peace but outside of it things get even worse. You always hear about this and see the consequences of it but you are never able to directly observe it because whenever you try, the discord gets redirected somewhere else.
You cursed me!
I especially (dis)like the fact that I may occupy a bubble of peace, but at the same time knowing things are getting worse.
You reduced me to either an obnoxious self-entitled prick, or a pathetic loser.
Thanks a lot. The world now hates me...
The ability to speak and translate between any languages
Now you can also speak and translate the languages of the trees and the rocks and the inanimate objects all around you and you have no way to get them to shut up.
First human being to get ghosted by the earth; I can live with that honor
The power of anti-cheeto dust fingers.
You were born without fingertips and can't do biometric scanning. No one will give you a passport.
Not to be that guy, but one can still get a passport without finger tips, or arms for that matter.
Yeah I didn’t need my fingerprints scanned at all for a passport. Just my picture.
Not to be that guy, but your butthole has a print just as unique as a fingerprint.
Immunity to side effects. I can take any drug, and it only does the thing it is meant to do. 😤
Swallowing pills is extremely difficult, and can only be roughed down with a semi chicken dance shuffle that involves hopping and takes 4 minutes too long for anyone noticing.
Viagra no longer works. You can no longer get high off any opiod, just the painkilling effects. Cortisone no longer treats skin conditions. Breast cancer meds, HIV retrovirals, rogaine, most antidepressants, and you'd better stay tf away from blood thinners and valium
You get type 1 diabetes
You have 10x the tolerance and nobody believes your immunity claims.
"Bullshit, dude."
"I'll show you..." Downs an entire bottle of Viagra, maintains an erection for exactly 3 hours 59 minutes
Immunity to internet-reply-based side effects
But Everyone loves you. Oh... wait....
The power to manifest any desired food in any quantity
It's all rotten.
Which sounds really bad but then you can basically replace all of the fertilizer in the world and will solve the nitrogen runoff problem for all of the planet for your entire life.
It manifests as a storm cloud, raining the food down over a large area over a short period of time.
I've seen that movie
Having this ability will cause you to lose self-control and become morbidly obese.
How bout the power... to move you.
You keep accidentally making random people's heads explode.
I did not mean to blow your mind.
I'd rather be able to kill a yak from 200 yards away
I’ll go first. The power to always know a person’s next move.
Side effect: you have a vision of the first move they'd make after taking your mom/dad on a date
First commentor missed the Cassandra side effect: you can do nothing to change it and no one believes you.
You can see a person's next move at the expense of generating negative causality, wherein large objects are attracted to you at high speed. See the man unwrapping a sandwich? Boom, hit by a bus/piano/anvil/whale.
Side effect: you're never prepared for the move they will be making next.
Ability to controls technology with my mind.
you are extra susceptible to suggestion, don't turn off your adblocker ;)
Feel like it would still be worth it
You now also know absolutely nothing about tech
Or you get zaped back in time to the 18th hundreds
The ability to resolve any kind of conflict!
You can only do it with extreme violence
To use one of the all-time greatest movie quotes: "Put the cookie down!!"
You have the power to make people instantly be extremely hungry
Side effect: you have a premonition of exactly what their bowel movement will smell like as a result of whatever they eat due to their hunger
When using your power you get uncontrollable diarrhea
The power to travel through time, at the speed of regular time
The power to control gravity at the atomic and cosmic scale
You already do, just a very tiny amount.
The power to change stoplights from red to green (and back again)
But you can only change the light after you’ve gone through it
You're the only one who is able to see the changes.
Edit: I decided that a superpower which only alters your perception is not really a superpower, so let me improve it: All drivers who have the same eye color as you will be able to see the changed colors. Other drivers will see the original colors. Enjoy!
Free frogurt with your choice of toppings.
Potassium Benzoate
The power to have ghost doctors from the 1750s perform really bad srs on anyone who tries to think of a bad consequence of me having this power.
The ghost doctors read "srs" as "serious" and just give me a mild glare
While they slice and dice you
The ghost doctors have bad eyesight and mistake you for everyone else.
Enjoy your mutilation
The power to send messages to your past self
Every time your past self reads one of your messages they looselose the ability to read one word forever.
Like... They just understand a loose definition of the word? :P
Lol, yes, thats that I meant, absolutely.
Granted. Unfortunately, it only works when you send yourself hate mail.
Granted. Your past self now has the ability to send messages to you!
I can inflict my current emotional state at will on other people of my choosing.
Anytime you use this power, immediately afterwards you feel everyone in a half mile radius's feelings at 200% intensity at the same time.
That seems like a cascading landslide of horniness.
Not with my depression it ain't.
Touche.
to turn invisible for as long as one likes
You're blind while you're invisible (which is by the way what would actually happen if you had a magical way to turn invisible).
Someone has watch Solar Opposites recently.
Never heard of it. Is it any good?
It's a cartoon on Hulu, sharing similarities with Rick & Morty, art style, dark humor, athough they remain quite different (you may hate R&M and still enjoy Solar Opposites). I like it a lot. In the latest season, 2 of the main characters become invisible, and as a side effect they are also blind, because the light passes straight through their eyeballs without interaction.
Thanks! I'll check it out.
But you stink like a skunk every time you turn invisible.
The power to choose my own side effect
Exactly. Whatever side-effect is cast upon you, you THINK it was chosen by you. You're 100% sure it was your decision. You're blissfully but unfortunately erroneously way too self-confident.
I have a big dick.
You have a way way too big of a dick
Shape shifting
But it hurts like hell and you are in pain the entire time you shapeshift
Worth it.
You get testicular cancer
Snip snip problem solved!
Every time you morph into a male body you have to repeat this process
Not many scenarios I can picture myself doing that in, so still a win!
💀💀💀
Be able to have multiple save slots, change the outcomes of a timeline then save it within a savefile, and being able to bring items from different savefiles to the others. Would be cool to collect different iterations of games and movies.
Side effect: there’s a 50/50 chance a save slot becomes corrupted.
Question. Is that chance everytime you access that save slot?
Yes. That was the intent. I should have made that more clear.
FUUUUUU
I can summon whatever food and drink I want in the moment
The summoning makes you feel nauseous
But it'll always appear on the opposite side of earth
I will always have full knowledge of everything and know how to do anything
You never get to use the power for your own enjoyment because people will never leave you alone…you will constantly assaulted with questions because everyone knows you have the answers. You have no peace.
Damn you got me... This sounds horrible
You become completely physically disabled, almost a complete vegetative state, and can't physically do any of it.
I'll know how to construct a full exoskeleton with a brain interface and communicate the instructions to someone who can build it for me. Just look at how well Stephen Hawkins fared
the power to make plants grow faster
You age proportionally to the plant until the effect is done.
i.e. make a plant that takes 10 days to grow to maturity grow in the span of 2 days, you age 10 days in those 2 days
Excess consumption of nutrients rapidly depletes the soil causing biome collapse
The power to teleport 1m forwards.
The object nearest you is also teleported to the same location as you but 1 meter above your head. It could still work in your favor if the object nearest you is a hat!
If we count clothes as objects then each time they teleport they'd be butt naked with their underwear on their head.
I am 100% okay with that.
Everything in the whole universe also moves 1m forwards at the same time
Forwards is relative to the direction the Earth is traveling around the sun.
Your clothes and anything you are carrying don't teleport with you
Dying on command.
But you'll wake up the next day in a someoneelse's body somewhere else on earth knowing nothing of your new bodys past experience language or anything. You can only remember your past life experience.
This might not be as bad as I sounds actually. Could be interesting.
Interesting. So I could turn into plutonium or something and blow myself up? :P
Plutonium doesn't blow itself up. 🤪
Furthermore, there's no mention of retaining sentience once you're a mineral.
Once plutonium reaches critical mass it automatically explodes.
Your average full grown adult is well more than critical mass.
It explodes yeah but it's more like a radioactive flashbang than a nuclear bomb, there's a great video online explaining how they had to coordinate chemical explosives and concave lenses to properly aggravate the uranium.
Fair, though that particular shapechanging option has a deadline of ~24,000 years, so they'd better hop to it.
You have to yell out the OPPOSITE of what you want to turn into.
Bit easy to game, no? "I want to turn into an anti-XXXXX"
Nope. If you want to becomea dog, you have to tell CAT! yelling anti-xxx would just turn you inside out.
I don’t make the rules.
You can't control your feet and they always shapeshift to a size that makes your shoes too tight.
Just take off the shoes before.
Time&space travel
Only one at a time. Every time you travel the universe shoots away from you at millions of miles an hour.
that still let's you teleport
Only if you know which way the planet is moving in the universe and how fast. Travelling in space doesn't mean gravity is going to magically do your exact positioning for you.
I think I'll add my own:
You teleport in 1cm units relative to the center of our galaxy, meaning you have to think of xyz of each teleportation and you if you miss caclulate enjoy being dead and in space.
Time is in epoch ms and leaves you in the same spot relative to the center of the galaxy.
Telekinesis.
In order to manipulate objects with telekinesis, you sever the link between the object and the earths gravitational pull.
Every object you use your power on now has the ability to drift and float away if not strapped down.
This includes, but is not limited to: people, animals, and buildings.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Side effect: you have a 25% chance of your pants and underwear being affected instead of your desired target.
Granted. You also have prostate cancer.
Thanos snap that targets right wingers.
Only those that aren't racist.
The snap makes them even louder and more obnoxious.
Stop any confrontation by yelling "enough!"
Side effect: your voice cracks in an absurd way every time you use this power. Both parties find it too funny to continue fighting. They instead laugh at you.
Finally a plausible power.
It gets the job done
The power to stop/start time at will while still able to move & interact with stuff
It only works when your eyes are closed.
Your side effect is super cool, specially if you imagine that even light would be frozen in time. People in this thread keep choosing side effects that would ruin the super power but this one would be a problem but still worth using the power. With some practice you might even overcome some of thrle drawbacks.
Now I want a super hero with this power and side effect
I like it especially if it works like a switch. Imagine how perfect your naps would be. You'd never oversleep.
Do you age while time is stopped? If so, might want to rethink those perfect naps. I'd 100% abuse it though.
Oh man that's a good one. So much for driving all those vacant Ferraris
Would an engine still work if time was frozen though? And if so technically you could still drive with your eyes closed.
What's funny is that the most obvious side effect to this is the most realistic: molecular manipulation in this way causes an incredible build-up of energy that either expresses as kinetic or thermal, depending, and almost always exponentially explosive from the moment you turn time back "on"... to say nothing of the disastrous effects at the fringes for such time-stop powers...
tl;dr: The Flash would've incinerated the entire planet long before he discovered how to keep from glassing it simply by practicing his powers.
Air particles also frozen
This is far more insidious than it seems.
That would basically mean whenever you stop time you are locked in position.
And can't breathe
Depending on how long you can hold your breath it might give you some extra time to think.
Also photons cease to exist once you move into their space, there would be no light to enter your eyes attoseconds after stopping time, meaning you would be blind.
Wherever I am, everything becomes peaceful. Nations at war start peace talks. Long standing conflicts are immediately solved.
Wherever you leave from instantly goes to war.
They (the place ) can no longer stand you and you can never stay in a single place for more than a day.
Hahaha. You got me!
I'll be like Lassie (the classical trope of the main character charging setting every episode).
All of the violence and hatred that would have been present around you gets redirected somewhere else in the world. The more discord there was in a place before you arrived, the harder the redirection hits its new location. You occupy a bubble of peace but outside of it things get even worse. You always hear about this and see the consequences of it but you are never able to directly observe it because whenever you try, the discord gets redirected somewhere else.
You cursed me!
I especially (dis)like the fact that I may occupy a bubble of peace, but at the same time knowing things are getting worse.
You reduced me to either an obnoxious self-entitled prick, or a pathetic loser.
Thanks a lot. The world now hates me...
The ability to speak and translate between any languages
Now you can also speak and translate the languages of the trees and the rocks and the inanimate objects all around you and you have no way to get them to shut up.
First human being to get ghosted by the earth; I can live with that honor
The power of anti-cheeto dust fingers.
You were born without fingertips and can't do biometric scanning. No one will give you a passport.
Not to be that guy, but one can still get a passport without finger tips, or arms for that matter.
Yeah I didn’t need my fingerprints scanned at all for a passport. Just my picture.
Not to be that guy, but your butthole has a print just as unique as a fingerprint.
Damn, you really hate him don't you?
The power to be happy.
Only while asleep
But you make all people in your vicinity happy, too.
Well that's a nice side effect actually
It was never stated that the side effect must be bad.
Seems like a win win
Happier than yourself*
You make everyone around you miserable
Mostly worth it.
*For others
But only when you are naked. Otherwise you'll be miserable. Sorry this got kinky real quick
Already to too close to irl
But only at the expense of others...
Immunity to side effects. I can take any drug, and it only does the thing it is meant to do. 😤
Swallowing pills is extremely difficult, and can only be roughed down with a semi chicken dance shuffle that involves hopping and takes 4 minutes too long for anyone noticing.
Viagra no longer works. You can no longer get high off any opiod, just the painkilling effects. Cortisone no longer treats skin conditions. Breast cancer meds, HIV retrovirals, rogaine, most antidepressants, and you'd better stay tf away from blood thinners and valium
You get type 1 diabetes
You have 10x the tolerance and nobody believes your immunity claims.
"Bullshit, dude."
"I'll show you..." Downs an entire bottle of Viagra, maintains an erection for exactly 3 hours 59 minutes
Immunity to internet-reply-based side effects
But Everyone loves you. Oh... wait....
The power to manifest any desired food in any quantity
It's all rotten.
Which sounds really bad but then you can basically replace all of the fertilizer in the world and will solve the nitrogen runoff problem for all of the planet for your entire life.
It manifests as a storm cloud, raining the food down over a large area over a short period of time.
I've seen that movie
Having this ability will cause you to lose self-control and become morbidly obese.
How bout the power... to move you.
You keep accidentally making random people's heads explode.
I did not mean to blow your mind.
I'd rather be able to kill a yak from 200 yards away
With mind bullets? That's telekinesis, Kyle...
Tell me .. What is the secret of your power?
I’ll go first. The power to always know a person’s next move.
Side effect: you have a vision of the first move they'd make after taking your mom/dad on a date
First commentor missed the Cassandra side effect: you can do nothing to change it and no one believes you.
You can see a person's next move at the expense of generating negative causality, wherein large objects are attracted to you at high speed. See the man unwrapping a sandwich? Boom, hit by a bus/piano/anvil/whale.
Side effect: you're never prepared for the move they will be making next.
Ability to controls technology with my mind.
you are extra susceptible to suggestion, don't turn off your adblocker ;)
Feel like it would still be worth it
You now also know absolutely nothing about tech
Or you get zaped back in time to the 18th hundreds
The ability to resolve any kind of conflict!
You can only do it with extreme violence
To use one of the all-time greatest movie quotes: "Put the cookie down!!"
You have the power to make people instantly be extremely hungry
Side effect: you have a premonition of exactly what their bowel movement will smell like as a result of whatever they eat due to their hunger
When using your power you get uncontrollable diarrhea
The power to travel through time, at the speed of regular time
Side effect: you still age at your regular rate.
oof
Ability to eliminate others side effects.
They transfer to you
Omnipotence!
The power to control gravity at the atomic and cosmic scale
You already do, just a very tiny amount.
The power to change stoplights from red to green (and back again)
But you can only change the light after you’ve gone through it
You're the only one who is able to see the changes.
Edit: I decided that a superpower which only alters your perception is not really a superpower, so let me improve it: All drivers who have the same eye color as you will be able to see the changed colors. Other drivers will see the original colors. Enjoy!
Free frogurt with your choice of toppings.
Potassium Benzoate
The power to have ghost doctors from the 1750s perform really bad srs on anyone who tries to think of a bad consequence of me having this power.
The ghost doctors read "srs" as "serious" and just give me a mild glare
While they slice and dice you
The ghost doctors have bad eyesight and mistake you for everyone else.
Enjoy your mutilation
The power to send messages to your past self
Every time your past self reads one of your messages they
looselose the ability to read one word forever.Like... They just understand a loose definition of the word? :P
Lol, yes, thats that I meant, absolutely.
Granted. Unfortunately, it only works when you send yourself hate mail.
Granted. Your past self now has the ability to send messages to you!
I can inflict my current emotional state at will on other people of my choosing.
Anytime you use this power, immediately afterwards you feel everyone in a half mile radius's feelings at 200% intensity at the same time.
That seems like a cascading landslide of horniness.
Not with my depression it ain't.
Touche.
to turn invisible for as long as one likes
You're blind while you're invisible (which is by the way what would actually happen if you had a magical way to turn invisible).
Someone has watch Solar Opposites recently.
Never heard of it. Is it any good?
It's a cartoon on Hulu, sharing similarities with Rick & Morty, art style, dark humor, athough they remain quite different (you may hate R&M and still enjoy Solar Opposites). I like it a lot. In the latest season, 2 of the main characters become invisible, and as a side effect they are also blind, because the light passes straight through their eyeballs without interaction.
Thanks! I'll check it out.
But you stink like a skunk every time you turn invisible.
The power to choose my own side effect
Exactly. Whatever side-effect is cast upon you, you THINK it was chosen by you. You're 100% sure it was your decision. You're blissfully but unfortunately erroneously way too self-confident.
I have a big dick.
You have a way way too big of a dick
Shape shifting
But it hurts like hell and you are in pain the entire time you shapeshift
Worth it.
You get testicular cancer
Snip snip problem solved!
Every time you morph into a male body you have to repeat this process
Not many scenarios I can picture myself doing that in, so still a win!
💀💀💀
Be able to have multiple save slots, change the outcomes of a timeline then save it within a savefile, and being able to bring items from different savefiles to the others. Would be cool to collect different iterations of games and movies.
Side effect: there’s a 50/50 chance a save slot becomes corrupted.
Question. Is that chance everytime you access that save slot?
Yes. That was the intent. I should have made that more clear.
FUUUUUU
I can summon whatever food and drink I want in the moment
The summoning makes you feel nauseous
But it'll always appear on the opposite side of earth
I will always have full knowledge of everything and know how to do anything
You never get to use the power for your own enjoyment because people will never leave you alone…you will constantly assaulted with questions because everyone knows you have the answers. You have no peace.
Damn you got me... This sounds horrible
You become completely physically disabled, almost a complete vegetative state, and can't physically do any of it.
I'll know how to construct a full exoskeleton with a brain interface and communicate the instructions to someone who can build it for me. Just look at how well Stephen Hawkins fared
the power to make plants grow faster
You age proportionally to the plant until the effect is done.
i.e. make a plant that takes 10 days to grow to maturity grow in the span of 2 days, you age 10 days in those 2 days
Excess consumption of nutrients rapidly depletes the soil causing biome collapse
The power to teleport 1m forwards.
The object nearest you is also teleported to the same location as you but 1 meter above your head. It could still work in your favor if the object nearest you is a hat!
If we count clothes as objects then each time they teleport they'd be butt naked with their underwear on their head.
I am 100% okay with that.
Everything in the whole universe also moves 1m forwards at the same time
Forwards is relative to the direction the Earth is traveling around the sun.
Your clothes and anything you are carrying don't teleport with you
Dying on command.
But you'll wake up the next day in a someoneelse's body somewhere else on earth knowing nothing of your new bodys past experience language or anything. You can only remember your past life experience. This might not be as bad as I sounds actually. Could be interesting.
This would make a great book
Basically Quantum Leap
Powe of kicking cures diabetes.
Kicking causes your legs to fall off.
Shapeshifting
Into any mineral
Interesting. So I could turn into plutonium or something and blow myself up? :P
Plutonium doesn't blow itself up. 🤪
Furthermore, there's no mention of retaining sentience once you're a mineral.
Once plutonium reaches critical mass it automatically explodes.
Your average full grown adult is well more than critical mass.
It explodes yeah but it's more like a radioactive flashbang than a nuclear bomb, there's a great video online explaining how they had to coordinate chemical explosives and concave lenses to properly aggravate the uranium.
Fair, though that particular shapechanging option has a deadline of ~24,000 years, so they'd better hop to it.
You have to yell out the OPPOSITE of what you want to turn into.
Bit easy to game, no? "I want to turn into an anti-XXXXX"
Nope. If you want to becomea dog, you have to tell CAT! yelling anti-xxx would just turn you inside out. I don’t make the rules.
You can't control your feet and they always shapeshift to a size that makes your shoes too tight.
Just take off the shoes before.
Time&space travel
Only one at a time. Every time you travel the universe shoots away from you at millions of miles an hour.
that still let's you teleport
Only if you know which way the planet is moving in the universe and how fast. Travelling in space doesn't mean gravity is going to magically do your exact positioning for you.
I think I'll add my own:
You teleport in 1cm units relative to the center of our galaxy, meaning you have to think of xyz of each teleportation and you if you miss caclulate enjoy being dead and in space.
Time is in epoch ms and leaves you in the same spot relative to the center of the galaxy.
Telekinesis.
In order to manipulate objects with telekinesis, you sever the link between the object and the earths gravitational pull.
Every object you use your power on now has the ability to drift and float away if not strapped down.
This includes, but is not limited to: people, animals, and buildings.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Side effect: you have a 25% chance of your pants and underwear being affected instead of your desired target.
Granted. You also have prostate cancer.
Thanos snap that targets right wingers.
Only those that aren't racist.
The snap makes them even louder and more obnoxious.