Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Invisible Brainiac: I find your Team Titan idea VERY interesting! Not just how you split the telepathic abilities amongst them, but also how you came up with personalities to match. I'd definitely read a mini about them.
Thanks!
Telepathy is an interesting power, because it can go so many ways. Mentalla, for instance, was said to specialize in direct mind control (as does Saturn Queen, apparently). Saturn Girl is just generally good at everything. But even an above-average Titanian might have a specialty, whether it be memory or sensory perception or linking up with animals / affecting sentience itself or manifesting people's hopes & fears or dream manipulation or linguistic functions, etc. There's tons of possibilities!
Registered: Aug 2006
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I remember the Postboot Colu was said to prize theory over applied research. My concepts revolve around Coluans who subscribe to various theories of intelligence.
Brainiac 8 of the Brainiac line hit upon a novel idea her ancestors never did. She believed in Howard Garnder's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, and was able to devise a way to allocate her twelve thought-tracks among these 8 at will.
She can have up to a 10th level functioning in each of these 8:
The only reason she doesn't reach up to a 12th in each is so she has some "juice" remaining for the other 7.
The applications are boundless. With a 10th level interpersonal intelligence, she has been known to break even the most hardened criminals in interrogation, and to negotiate agreements between planets who have been warring for generations. A 10th level in musical intelligence allows her to hypnotize or heal the mind with her compositions. When she focuses on visual-spatial and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence she can mimic the movements of animals and has superb athletic ability.
Titans Idol - vote for your favorite Titans members!
From: Wouldn't you like to know? | Registered: Oct 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Invisible Brainiac: Brainiac 8 of the Brainiac line hit upon a novel idea her ancestors never did. She believed in Howard Garnder's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, and was able to devise a way to allocate her twelve thought-tracks among these 8 at will.
Ooh, that's intriguing! Even if she wasn't a 'Brainiac' with a 12th level intelligence, a bog-standard Coluan willing to devote their brain-power to something other than Brainy's exclusive (and limiting) focus on Logical-Mathematical intelligence could be very interesting.
A Coluan focusing on Interpersonal intelligence would be terrifying good at 'schmoozing' and social manipulations (and yet also empathic enough to be likely to use their insights for good!).
A Linguistic genius could be like Cypher, from the New Mutants.
I had considered Coluans who focused on Tactical/Strategic/Military studies (imagine a Coluan Sun Tzu!), or Social manipulation, or even Finance (Ferengi, eat your hearts out!), or Governance (the ultimate societal engineer, the consumate politician!), but breaking it down using the Theory of Intelligence is inspired!
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
Since you guys have brought up Coluans, can anyone point me to a source that explains just what the heck a "level of intelligence" is in the DCU? Or some sort of benchmarks for what the different levels may do? I've never understood the term, and don't recall where humans are on the scale, if it's ever been mentioned.
From: Manhattan, NY | Registered: May 2011
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Eryk Davis Ester
Created from the Cosmic Legends of the Universe!
posted
Traditionally, Earth-humans are 6th level, normal Coluans are 10th-level, and Brainiacs are 12th-level.
I'm pretty sure the Coluans themselves invented the measure of levels, so I've long suspected that, much like IQ tests in the real world, there's a certain amount of bias in the measurement.
From: Liberty City | Registered: Jul 2003
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Except I think IIRC they redid the measurements when ... Threeboot Brainiac 5 saying he was a 12 ... and all of Earth was a 6. which sounds weird ... or something like that.
I would refer to the previous system.
From: Ninja Land | Registered: Nov 2004
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Eryk Davis Ester: Traditionally, Earth-humans are 6th level, normal Coluans are 10th-level, and Brainiacs are 12th-level.
I thought humans were 3rd level, and Kryptonians 5th, on the Coluan scale? (Making Superman 100x smarter than Batman, which is hilarious, considering how Batgod is portrayed...)
If humans are 6th, and normal Coluans 10th, that means that the average Coluan is only 10,000x smarter than the average human! (Although Brainy is a cool million times smarter than an average human!)
Registered: Aug 2006
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Shining Son: Since you guys have brought up Coluans, can anyone point me to a source that explains just what the heck a "level of intelligence" is in the DCU? Or some sort of benchmarks for what the different levels may do? I've never understood the term, and don't recall where humans are on the scale, if it's ever been mentioned.
As I understand it, each 'level of intelligence' is supposed to be an order of magnitude above the one before it. So someone with a '5th level effector intelligence' was 10x smarter than someone with a '4th level' intelligence, and only 1/10th as smart as someone with a '6th level' intelligence.
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
Now how the hell are normal earth humans supposed to write characters millions of times smarter than they are? And how are we to know when they're writing them well?
How do characters that smart ever make mistakes? (But boy, DO they!)
These are poor fictional decisions for ongoing storytelling in my opinion. Like saying the Green Lanterns have been around for millions of years. Same with the old Jedi Order. Unnecessary and it hampers future stories without any more benefit than saying they've been around for say, 2000 years. Or even 5000.
Harrumph.
At least they've finally caught on a bit and admit the Guardians' 3600 sectors do not actually comprise the infinite universe.
From: Manhattan, NY | Registered: May 2011
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Shining Son: Now how the hell are normal earth humans supposed to write characters millions of times smarter than they are? And how are we to know when they're writing them well?
Comics (and sci-fi) are kind of infamous for being clueless about scale. Never mind that being strong enough to lift a truck over your head would make you pretty much unstoppable in a fist-fight, Superboy has to be able to drop-kick the moon into a new orbit. Every thing has to be ridonkulously bigger and tougher and crazier than the last ridonkulously big and tough and crazy thing, until it's blown past ludicrous speed and well past caricature and possibly even past plaid.
And so, in that sort of comic book world, a guy who is the intellectual equal of *ten* men seems kind of lame. Brainy instead has to be as much smarter than a normal person as Superboy is as much *stronger* than a normal person. Ten times isn't enough. A hundred times isn't enough. To be 'super,' he's got to be a *million* times smarter than a normal person (and even then, Superboy's probably several trillion times stronger than a normal person, at least...).
And all the mega-disasters have to threaten the entire universe!, and yet be fixed by something that's terribly specific to Earth, which is one of 10,000,000 inhabitable planets in one spiral arm of one of 10,000,000 galaxies... Gosh, good thing that the disaster didn't happen on one of the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets that Superman's never heard of! We'd be screwed!
It's all terribly escalatory, to the point where the numbers just become meaningless, and you get stories from the old days where the Specter and one of his villains were *throwing planets at each other.* (Much, much later also done by the Celestials attacking Infinity-Gauntlet-wearing Thanos, with better art.)
For a time, the Legion was getting inflationary as well. Shadow Lass was able to block out the light of an entire star, while Sun Boy was, at the same time, able to generate sun-intensity light, to fool some spacegoing critters who navigated through an area. Element Lad was able to change the atmospheric content of the entire planet Earth (to the great discomfort of tens of thousands of Daxamites). In the Threeboot, Star Boy and Light Lass, with the help of some machinery, re-balance the gravitational forces of the solar system! Pretty cosmic stuff!
Sometimes I like that sort of thing, other times I can see it becoming problematic. (Element Lad has recently been toned way back, requiring Earth-Man's help and a Green Lantern ring boosting their power, to perform that same stunt, which is still vastly more impressive than his Threeboot incarnation, who could only change stuff he touched, and only for sixty seconds!)
I try to avoid Superman/Specter sorts of power levels when designing characters, just because, narratively, they are trickier to write for, and, as a role-playing gamer, 'party balance' is hard-coded into my DNA.
[ May 31, 2012, 01:47 PM: Message edited by: Set ]
Registered: Aug 2006
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Eryk Davis Ester
Created from the Cosmic Legends of the Universe!
posted
At least with super-strength it's fairly clear what it means to say that someone is a million times stronger than the average human. If the average human can lift 200 lbs, they can lift 200 million lbs. It's hard to even make sense of what "a million times smarter than the average human" would even mean. I have doubts that it even makes sense to quantify intelligence in that way.
Sometimes it seems like what they have mind is that he has more computational power than human beings (hence, his "computer mind" as it's sometimes called), but that's something very different than intelligence.
From: Liberty City | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
Yes, I had the same thought, that it was simply a larger amount of RAM and a faster processor, so to speak. But then nevertheless they do use the word intelligence.
Anyway, I'm certainly used to the physical hyperbole, but the mental ones just don't translate into anything that works for me. At least not something they've ever conveyed in action.
They do work well enough when you're 7 years old though!
From: Manhattan, NY | Registered: May 2011
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Shining Son: Anyway, I'm certainly used to the physical hyperbole, but the mental ones just don't translate into anything that works for me. At least not something they've ever conveyed in action.
With the Authority crew, characters for whom hyperbole was their thing, became more and more popular, until it seemed like more and more characters were being re-defined as abstract boasts, instead of 'super-powers.' (That, and characters being able to utterly wreck something that vastly outpowered them a mere 5 minutes ago, by dint of 'being badass' or 'being more ruthless' or something lame like that, like some Schwarzeneggar movie where striking a pose and quipping a quip makes bad-guys fall over dead.)
Everytime I hear that Aquaman 'controls 2/3rds of the life on the planet' as if that somehow is relevant to someone standing on dry land, I cringe. Sure, it sounds more impressive that way than saying, 'he talks to fish,' but having characters (like Midnighter, or Morrison's take on Batman) who are 95% hat and only 5% cat, just bug me. It wasn't cool when it was Psylocke bragging about 'the focused totality of her telepathic powers' or Dawnstar never-shutting-up about her 'infallible tracking powers that got me into the Legion,' and it isn't any cooler now that it's Midnighter or Aquaman or whomever living and dying by their trendy oh so very precious catch-phrases.
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
Triplicate Boy: Dru Lorgo is a Carggite who was born without the ability to triplicate which is native to his planet.
Some Carggites are occasionally born with this odd genetic quirk. It's seen on par with being a little visually/hearing-impaired; it can make life more challenging in certain respects, but it's not like it's completely debilitating.
Dru however can do something that no other Carggite has ever been capable of. He can triplicate anything else he touches (Editor's note: Carggite clothing is normally made of native organic fibres treated to respond to the wearer's power in kind...this is why their clothes triplicate when they do, but why for example Luornu has never created an extra couple of forcefield belts when they might have come in handy by just putting one on and triplicating...it took Brainy ages to figure out a way to attune even her flight ring/flight belt to her power).
Triplicate Boy seems to be limited to replicating anything up to his own body mass, and after approximately 12 hours the extra copies will simply vanish if he hasn't already dispelled them.
Anything he creates is an exact functioning duplicate of the original item. If he uses his triplication power on a sentient being, that being controls the second and third bodies as if they themselves had suddenly developed their own Carggite abilities.
Such an odd power does come in handy, but he's never really felt that it's quite Legion standard so he's happy just acting as a part-time hero on his own planet.
The Phage: A masked crimefighter on Somahtur. He has the ability to eradicate any virus or bacteria within his presence, a power which can have devastating effects on his fellow Somahturians who all possess a symbiotic relationship with these microscopic lifeforms.
Unlike his fellow Somahturian Infectious Lass, the man known only as the Phage has no desire to leave his homeworld. He also has a mild paranoia that if the UP got their hands on him, they would experiment on him to create a miracle cure for all diseases that would be abused by those in power.
The Phage is a Robin Hood type...he serves the common man, but generally distrusts any form of authority.
-------------------- Read the alternate adventures of the Legion after Legion of Three Worlds! postlo3w
Registered: Nov 2009
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