(Leaving the stuff below because it's a fine little mini-rant; it's just that it really has virtually nothing to do with what you actually wrote. Shouldn't post when I'm distracted. I really like the idea of the backstory event that pulled away everybody's powers, and revealing "balancing" stuff within the context of the adventure... this is really useful. And believe me, there's a grand idea brewing for Greater Forces...)
I dunno. A story can get away with things an RPG can't, at least with our social contract. In a story, you can can rely heavily on defining once that the character is uber in way X, and then spend most of the story with power X unavailable, where the character is trying to just get power X back or bring it to bear, and facing all the dramatic difficulties of "cosmic power, itty bitty living space".
Try to do that in an RPG campaign and your players eventually pour their diet coke on you. If the player buys "controls computers" and then never gets to control any computers, the game just ends up being one big frustration-fest. I wouldn't want to play in that campaign and neither would my players.
There's more of a simulationist aspect to games than to novels. You have to show, not just tell. If the character can control computers, then *most* encounters have to have computers she can control. Limited, obviously - it's easy to have computer-control be only part of the solution. But then we need to make her useful for the rest of the solution, too, as she can't exactly sit out all the fights.
(The first couple of seasons of Smallville had kryptonite in almost every episode, and it eventually irritated the hell out of me. At some point, he's not Super at all, he's a wimp who falls apart all the time because everybody and their cat has kryptonite.)
So it's really not a viable option to have most of the stories make most of their powers useless. That's simply no-fun roleplaying. For a climactic battle, sure - that's the way to raise the stakes. But for most of most adventures, they have to be able to bring their strengths to bear, and face an opponent commensurate with those strengths.
no subject
I dunno. A story can get away with things an RPG can't, at least with our social contract. In a story, you can can rely heavily on defining once that the character is uber in way X, and then spend most of the story with power X unavailable, where the character is trying to just get power X back or bring it to bear, and facing all the dramatic difficulties of "cosmic power, itty bitty living space".
Try to do that in an RPG campaign and your players eventually pour their diet coke on you. If the player buys "controls computers" and then never gets to control any computers, the game just ends up being one big frustration-fest. I wouldn't want to play in that campaign and neither would my players.
There's more of a simulationist aspect to games than to novels. You have to show, not just tell. If the character can control computers, then *most* encounters have to have computers she can control. Limited, obviously - it's easy to have computer-control be only part of the solution. But then we need to make her useful for the rest of the solution, too, as she can't exactly sit out all the fights.
(The first couple of seasons of Smallville had kryptonite in almost every episode, and it eventually irritated the hell out of me. At some point, he's not Super at all, he's a wimp who falls apart all the time because everybody and their cat has kryptonite.)
So it's really not a viable option to have most of the stories make most of their powers useless. That's simply no-fun roleplaying. For a climactic battle, sure - that's the way to raise the stakes. But for most of most adventures, they have to be able to bring their strengths to bear, and face an opponent commensurate with those strengths.