This wiki has a lot of awesome powers, but they're kind of scattered and not as organized as they could be. I've been working with Jess and Nekron the last couple days to try and reign some powers into a standard we've had for many of our others powers. That standard is having four sort of "tiers" of certain powers - for example, if you look at Supernatural Strength you can see that it's grouped into Peak Human, Enhanced, Supernatural, and Absolute.
We were working on bringing similar changes to the "<Tier> Combat" powers pages when I realized something. This doesn't just have to be for powers. We can group all powers into these tiers. This would be helpful for people who use the wiki for making characters for Role Plays. You could think of these as tiers that reflect scope of power, useful for RPs, story writing, and general classification. Following is the exact proposal.
Universal Power Tiering:[]
The goal would be to create four pages, one for each of these "Tiers". These pages would explain the criteria of these tiers, provide links to some example powers, and maybe talk a bit about the usual scope for these powers. It would also have a link to the "Category:<Tier> Powers". Then we can go around and just add powers to the Category for it's "Tier", which should be pretty easy.
Worth noting is that these "Tiers" are for powers and not for characters. Additionally, some pages could get the treatment of Supernatural Strength where they get their own tabs on their pages to navigate to the different Tiers of the powers more easily.
So, how do these Tiers works?
- Peak Human is the first, and it refers to feats that are possible in real life, though still extraordinary.
- A good example is the athleticism of Mr. Terrific/Michael Holt (DC Comics). It's very impressive, but definitely possible for humans.
- In cases where a power represents technology, Peak-Human simply means that the technology exists in the modern day, but is cutting-edge and typically difficult to access. An example of Peak-Human Technology would be a fully self-driving car, a VTOL, or a powered exoskeleton.
- Enhanced Tier is the second tier. Enhanced powers represent powers that are above the ability of a human, but are still more-or-less physically possible.
- A lot of the Physiology pages are likely to end up here. Basically all of the generic Animal Physiology pages - a character who is a hybrid of a human and a tiger is not possible to produce in real life, but nothing that physiology grants them is physically impossible or too over the top.
- If a power is related to technology, it's a similar deal here - It includes technologies that theoretically work in real life/obey the laws of physics, but that we don't have any known ability to create or have problems we haven't yet engineered around. As a rule of thumb, if you could likely see it become a real thing in the next 60-80 years, it goes here. Examples would be flying cars, man-portable (and effective) gauss/energy weapons, and genetically mixing together a human-tiger hybrid. This also includes human-like general AI.
- The Supernatural tier is where most of our powers likely land.
- Anything that is superhuman AND physically impossible goes here.
- That's all Magic powers, most of the Manipulation powers, etc.
- As far as technology goes, this is for truly SciFi tech. Force fields, Faster-Than-Light technology, and Matter Transporters fit in this tier.
- Anything that is superhuman AND physically impossible goes here.
- The final tier, the Absolute Tier, is the domain of gods and truly over-powered cosmic entities.
- We already have something of a category for these, the Almighty Powers.
- As far as tech goes, this is stuff that's truly miraculous. Tech on this level is to the point where it's not recognizably technology - hard light systems, intergalactic travel, and pocket universes go here.
I think if we implemented this, we'd help people to navigate our site and find powers. It would give RP'ers a good way to talk about scale, and it'll help to organize things more. I wanna know what people think bout this idea - should we do this? Is there an improvement you think we should add to this? Or are there problems I don't know about? Comment and let me know.