Need a lame power.

how about being able to see through another persons eyes, but only when your eyes are closed, and you wouldn't be able to control the other person. so your MC could use this power to see what another person is doing at the time and then be able to direct the others he is with to attack targets.

 

Me and a couple of my freinds also had a lame super power conversation, but it was more of a "well, if you were a super hero, your power would be the ability to go back in time for seventeen seconds." things of that nature. my favorite was the ability to move any object three inches. on the surface, fairly usless, you MIGHT be able to dodge a bullet, or you could make somebodies sword miss a block, but if you really get into it, you could move building foundations, the starter in a car, or just for the kill shot, move someones heart three inches to the left inside their body.

 

Yes.

No. Bodies count as single objects.

If someone had like an arm cut off and then stitched back, he could undo the stiches and make the arm fall off again. But he can't affect anything that is a single mass of matter. It has to be "an object stuck to another object."

Uncertain.

Not really, no.

Yeah, well, it's not like I'm actually going to allow that. I do impose rules about power gaming.

 

Not if you're a journalist. Trust me.

 

LAMEST POWER OF ALL TIME: Being able to feint on command.

 

Feint as in a fencing move or did you mean 'faint'? -chuckle-

 

You mean the power of being a mother?

 

You want something lame that can be levelled up through practice? I will supply some ideas:

• If you setting is modern day or later in terms of tech, consider the ability to interface your own mind with any machine so long as it can receive what you are inputting (no mouse clicks to MS-DOS and no GET requests to a camera). Because this would feel like interacting with a body part, you wouldn't have to "learn machine language." You'd intuitively know what it feels like to send a data packet through IPv4; that part "just works" just like moving your finger "just works." Here's the catch: that's it. You can't send a million GET requests in a minute to a server you don't like to DoS them for the same reason you can't punch someone you don't like a million times in a minute. There's no programming language in your head for high-level concepts like "do this set of actions n times, or at trigger x." Everything that must be done must be done "manually." Furthermore, you need to know something about the machine you are interfacing with. You don't get implicit knowledge of how many DIP switches are in a slot machine or which ones you need to switch to get the jackpot just because you are in front of it. Same with that killer robot you need to shut down.
• I once made a rabbi zombified by an entity from another dimension who could create throwing Stars of David that were energy constructs. Now that's not lame, especially since they were homing missiles, but the better (worse) idea is symbol manipulation. Creating symbols.
• The ability to "equip" anything you touch, like the CalebCity's video "Super Human Interview 2" at minute 3, second 20. It doesn't say anything in the video about the usefulness of it, but judging by the way he stabs a hole through the solo cup, it implies that his insta-wear ability could be used simply to wear things that shouldn't be worn, like a skull, so long as he can touch them.
• Similarly, his video "If you learned how to deflect in real life." shows someone with the power to just block things, but he can't control it. Maybe imagine a cool power that can only be triggered through external forces. That would make it lame, and the growth arc could concern coaxing the power.
• Trivially, any super-powered boost to a skill that the protagonist doesn't already have, especially if the skill is intrinsically lame and only made combat-worthy by way of how the protagonist shoehorns it. Stage magic (aka card tricks and rabbit hats) could be made deadly if it involves eventually slitting someone's throat with a card with a previously unseen razor blade glued to it, but in the short-term, you'll be a fool.

 

I got an idea for another power that is relatively weak but can be leveraged for greater power.
The ability to be magically unfireable. Incapable of being fired. This can be used to political ends by laying low, then getting a job in some low level, public-facing part of a company you don’t like. Be the absolute worst employee ever, do everything short of actual sabotage and illegal stuff, and yell at all the customers. Whenever that arm of the company must be cut off due to poor performance, because no one wants to go their, then get transferred and start again.

 

Idk if this power would fit but heres an idea I had scraped from my own story:

Something like the Midas Touch.
This power allows the character to turn objects they touch into a specific material (in my original idea the power could turn things into rock).
There need to be specific rules ofc. Such as the object must be touched with hand for so and so long or the object can only be so big.
As I had this power in mind, it starts of being for the character pretty useless since they had little control over it (they later could control it) and they turned things to stone that shouldn't be. And also that the character didn't know how to use the power most effectively in combat (because of the restrictions I gave them (time and size)).
As the story progresses however the character lerns to use it effectively and turns actually quite op, being able to make weapons out of everything (example: making needles and throwing knives out of a single hair strand, leaves and other things).
It is quite a practical power that can be used in combat not only to attack but also as a shield to defend and in most situations the Character still needs to use their brain to figure out how to use this power most effectively.
I ended up giving the character in my story a different power since he was suposed to be only a side character and with this power would have turned way too strong for the main cast LMAO.
If I am ever going to use it or something like it I would definitely use it for the main character haha.
It is still a cool power tho.
I hope it gives ideas.

 

It seems to me that rather than lame you seem interested in giving your character a power that is, or at least appears to be, underpowered in comparison to the other characters. None of the examples you give, at least in my opinion, are lame. Of course they could be given a silly or lame twist, e.g. "create barriers made out of cotton" but it doesn't seem like that's the sort of thing you're going for.

I think one way of making something seem underpowered is to make it very specific. For example, you can create barriers, but their combined size can be no larger than the width of your arms squared, each barrier has the strength of a sheet of plexiglass, you can only create these barriers in a six feet sphere around your body. Obviously these sort of mathematical exactitudes don't fit all kinds of stories, but a nice thing about them is that it gives the author very little room to cheat. If we really understand the way an ability works then we can really believe it when the characters comes up with a new way of using it, like using the above ability to create several razor thin pieces of barrier in the air between him and an opponent who is charging him, or creating "barrier steps" to basically give him the ability to run in the air.