A friend mentioned how frustrating it is to try to come up with powers, only to realize “Worm already did that,” and the exercise becomes less fun as a result of that lack of novelty.
I can sympathize. I’m not the only one to notice that parahuman powers have a particular flavor or to grapple with it while trying to generate powers.
But I don’t find myself worrying about copying Worm. (In part, this is because I have often copied Worm on purpose; the lack of originally doesn’t stop me) but I also don’t feel that I’m recapitulating Worm when I don’t want to. But am I right to think that?
Did Worm map out the whole space of powers fifteen years ago? Are all of us living in the world it built?
The influence is hard to escape in webfiction. More usefully, the idea that “Worm already did that” can be broken down into two broad categories. There’s the stuff Worm did because it’s just a very reasonable way to specify a power when you’re taking into account implied secondary powers and potential exploits — that is, thinking about powers in a rigorous way.
Obviously a kinetic is going to need to have a sense for the things they control. Obviously a speedster is going to have something limiting them from imparting ridiculous forces via f=ma
Thus, you can’t worry about these similarities too much, because trying too hard to innovate here almost definitionally requires handling powers in an unreasonable way.
But there’s stuff Worm did because it’s just a reasonable to way to do it — given Worm-specific assumptions.
This is what’s more fruitful to pick apart, because Worm makes a lot of assumptions, but it can be hard to notice them because either those assumptions are the obvious ones to start with if you have sensibilities in common with wildbow (and girl do we), or because Worm does a really compelling job of framing its arbitrary assumptions as obvious, either through in-setting justification or otherwise taking it for granted.
Some basic assumptions come to mind right away. The first one is that we’re dealing with superpowers at all, rather than something . Capes usually have a single power which is mostly thematically coherent and mostly doesn’t change, which rules out entire classes of cantrips or synergy effects that would be useful for a wizard with a bag of tricks, but don’t make sense to have a whole character centered around.
The other base assumption is what powers are for. In Worm, a cape generally needs to be able to hold their own if and when other capes are coming for their neck, either in combat or by already winning before the fighting starts. I’ll circle back to this point later.
No, the first really interesting thing to call out is the ontology of powers.
Worm tends to frame powers in very reductionist-materialist way. The most goofy example of this is an early moment where, when discussing the nazi that creates ghosts, they’re described as ego forcefield projections or something, because Worm is too smart to include ghosts without rationalizing it somehow.
The exact quote is in Buzz 7.9.
Crusader was flanked by a half dozen translucent replicas of himself, each armed with a ten foot long spear. He could use his power to generate ethereal simulacrums of himself, a legion of ghosts, if you wanted to be dramatic. I was more willing to peg them as some sort of semi-sentient forcefield molded in his shape or some telekinetic energy infused with fragments of his ego. Whatever. The important thing was that his images could carry him up into the air, letting him fly, and they could pass through walls, armor and other solid barriers to impale you with those spears of theirs.
But Worm’s ontology is limited in another way: because powers are atomic and interact with the mostly-familiar real world, they fundamentally express themselves legibly in that language.
You get powers that manipulate “fire” because we know what fire is, you’re much less likely to get powers that carve the world along elemental divisions we’ve never heard of. (Notably, if Worm’s superheroes had appeared a hundred years ago, you wouldn’t get a guy whose power is control of plastic, unless he also got some manner of plastic generation. If your world has its own materials and mechanics, then you can easily go broader than Worm.)
This might tempt you to imagining some color out of space type incomprehensible element, but “mana” is also a ontologically foreign element. Including any common currency or typified interaction between powers takes you into territory Worm doesn’t venture very deep into, because most power interactions there happen through the intermediary of how they affect real world objects.
When powers have to directly interact, it’s often in weird ad-hoc ways. (E.g., thinkers mostly cause vague handwavey thinker interference? unless you’re built different like Coil.)
There’s also a Yu-gi-oh! versus Magic the Gathering style design difference — do your powers operate on shared keywords, or bespoke rules? Worm has “flight” is a common power for capes — “the Alexandria package” — but generally flight is implemented differently in different powers: there’s no ontology of flight as such.
A fun analogy for this is to consider the difference between a roguelike item pool and a skill tree. In roguelikes, you can get any item in any order, so you want avoid designing items that require a specific build to have any effect at all. In a game with a skill tree, though, you can have have the capstone abilities build on previous perks, because they require them.
Capes in Worm have almost no shared skill tree. What powers start to make sense the more of them do?
And this is without even broaching the possibility of throwing out reductionist materialism entirely. But I’m not usually as fond of stories that lean hard into overly conceptual or whimsical or eldritch effects.
Next up is how powers cluster together. Here, it’s easiest to point at “Breaker” specifically as a really weird power category you wouldn’t necessarily derive from first principles. So you can likewise get a system that feels different from Worm just by taking a specific type of power and elevating it to the same level as the Movers and Shakers. Or alternatively, skew the distribution, and say your system almost never produces strikers.
It’s worth noting the meta of what powers exist affects what powers make sense to exist. Whether it’s worthwhile to have power nullifying and amplifying abilities depends on how many powers exist. Abilities like “I’m unpredictable, even to thinkers” or “I can create a material that registers as controllable to every telekinetic power” go hard if that type of power is everywhere. But I’ll touch on this a bit more later.
Next, we have gaps between powers. Consider the Manton Effect. This is one that people (myself included) love to copy, and structurally it just says two types of powers don’t overlap. It’s an elegant way to dodge the TK heart-attack problem — if a psychic can generate enough force to throw around objects, why can’t they kill everyone by twisting vital organ a little? — but there are other ways around it.
In general, inventing similar constraints can be helpful. In Black Nerve, for example, we can observe that vesperbane techniques for affecting brains or compelling behavior are rare and quick to get excluded.
In my notes for Running Out of Skin & Time, I mention a few cool structures in its power system, but here’s an instructive one: ranged powers are rare. Almost everyone only has “striker” powers that require touching something to affect it. Powers with merely “breath attack” range are thus considered quite powerful. Because of this limitation, I can have it so that only magic-users get this system’s equivalent of Manton-resistance, and this doesn’t break the setting because “TK heart-attack” would still require approaching you.
But it doesn’t stop there, because the general form is presented via a different logical formula. Instead of “either you can’t affect life or can only affect life” it’s “if your ability targets someone, theirs can reflexively target you.” So if you try to TK heart-attack someone, you would trigger their “counterscar” which basically gives them a domain expansion-style sure-hit use of their power on you.
Actually, domain expansions are fun to mention, because that’s another way to get a power system that feels different. Domains per se are probably too powerful to give to everyone (JJK made sure not do that), but these days I like to give my systems that sort of “convergent milestones”, a shared reference point allowing for similar yet contrasting ways for different powers manifest them.
Even without assuming power fantasy, it’s still useful to think of “convergent applications”. In Worm, every power is useful for conflict. What happens if instead every power must have a use in navigation?
What I’ve learned (second-hand) about Jojo’s stands seems relevant — I feel like stands right out of the box won’t be mistaken for Worm powers. Y’know, on account of the stand part.
When I first read Worth the Candle, I considered it a spiritual successor to Worm; the way entads interacted tickled me in a similar way to how Worm approached power tactics. Wales has made no secret of being very influenced by Worm (he was an /r/parahumans power user back in the day), but linking the powers to objects rather than people greatly changes the feel.
It’s also worth asking what causes powers to take effect. In Worm, you mostly just will it to happen. A lot of other settings invoke verbal or somatic components, or require equipment. That also changes the feel.
So yeah, there’s plenty of room to craft powers that feel fresh, mostly by backing up changing the question you’re starting with.