17 KiB
Problems with Power Upping
-
Author: u/hoja_nasredin Dai-Gurren Brigade*
-
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3zjnp7/problems_with_power_upping/
-
Score: 23
-
Created: 2016-01-05T10:42:40
Post:
A lot of fiction on this board (and not only here) is about a character playing the rules of the wolrd he is in and gaining a lot of power very fast. It's very intertaing to read at first but after a certain power level it becomes boring and lose its cahrm.
How do peeple avoid this problem? How do they make the story still intresting after that point?
Comments:
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+23] fear of last pages (3 hours later)
1.1) The protagonist could be gaining power linearly, while each new problem he encounters would require exponentially more power to be solved.
There was a series of books (warning for Russian) by Nick Gorkavyi, for example, where the technologies were graded by tiers.
First tier technologies are the most important discoveries made during a year. For instance, some new type of highly efficient light bulb. Second tier technologies are the most important discoveries during a decade — things like the info-crystals. The third tier is assigned to those technologies that remain significant on the scale of centuries — the steam engine, the airplane, the telephone, etc. The most significant technologies are important throughout millennia — printing press, mathematical expression of nature, nuclear energy, spaceships, computers. These are technologies of the 4th tier and they define the focal turning points of history by their arrival.
In this series, even while the protagonist eventually builds herself a multi-billion revenue corporation, her development in terms of economic and political power still doesn’t dwarf all of the problems that she has to face, because for some of them (ranging from world-class social and economic issues to the heat death of the universe) even that much power isn’t enough when not applied smartly.
As a real life example for this could serve projects of the Gates foundation.
Another example for this are wars waged at infinite scales (see: Chronicles of Amber, Transdimensional Brain Chip, Time v.3.0)
1.2) Or even if he himself is progressing exponentially, the requirements (the problem) just grow by a steeper function.
Long before space travel, when we hadn't even filled up Terra, there used to be dirtside frontiers. Every time new territory was found, you always got three phenomena: traders ranging out ahead and taking their chances, outlaws preying on the honest men — and a traffic in slaves. It happens the same way today, when we're pushing through space instead of across oceans and prairies. Frontier traders are adventurers taking great risks for great profits. Outlaws, whether hill bands or sea pirates or the raiders in space, crop up in any area not under police protection. Both are temporary. But slavery is another matter — the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break. It starts up in every new land and it's terribly hard to root out. After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men's habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground — there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their 'natural' right to own other people. You can't reason with them; you can kill them but you can't change their minds. The Guard is just the policeman and the mailman; we haven't had a major war in two centuries. What we do work at is the impossible job of maintaining order on the frontier, a globe three thousand light-years in circumference — no one can understand how big that is; the mind can't swallow it. Nor can human beings police it. It gets bigger every year. Dirtside police eventually close the gaps. But with us, the longer we try the more there is. So to most of us it's a job, an honest job, but one that can never be finished.
The protagonist encounters such a problem where all his accumulated power is useless simply because it’s inapplicable. E.g. reaching certain goals would be a very difficult and slow process for a world leader if he doesn’t want to convert his political system to dictatorship simply because the human factor will obstruct his efforts — some of his citizens just won’t be ready to accept the changes quickly enough.
limitations — tropes like “ascended beings have to act only through avatars\proxies in a single world”
3.2) bottlenecks — “an ascended being can only apply a small amount of their power per unit of time for various reasons”.
u/alexanderwales [+14] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
The central question is why they lose their charm, which I think needs an answer before we try to get into how to keep that from happening. (Technically we should first question whether it's true that they lose their charm. But I'm already in agreement on that and think we can take it as a given.)
If the story is only interesting because of the escalation of power, then the problem can't really be avoided. Eventually you would have to escalate power to the level of city-wide (or planet-wide) destruction, and humans are bad at scale, so that doesn't even help you all that much.
So yes, you can shift your focus to some domain that hasn't been escalated; Punch-Harder can punch his way through walls, but he can't punch his way through hearts and minds (except in the very literal sense). But if you're going to do that, then the power escalation just sort of turns into fluff. If our central conflict is Punch-Harder trying to get elected to public office, do we really thousands of words about how he discovered his power and trained himself up to being able to punch down buildings? It tends to feel like a bait-and-switch to me, unless done really well.
You can walk back some of the power escalation in a variety of ways, but that's an even worse bait-and-switch. Don't do that.
If you keep escalating conflict to match or exceed the escalation in power, you're still going to run into problems eventually. Sometimes these will be worldbuilding problems, but other times they'll be human empathy problems. If Punch-Harder starts off saving a man getting beaten to death in an alley, then eventually he has to save multiple people, and we start caring less about people when they're in the aggregate. We can't really appreciate the difference between a thousand people being at risk and two thousand, not on a level that it works in fiction. Same goes for a fight; we can't easily conceptualize differences in power level unless they're quite large.
You can escalate the personal stakes for Punch-Harder, like his wife and daughter, but you can only do that so many times.
I think a better solution is to just stop before the story loses its charm. For my tastes, there are a lot of stories out there that are just too long, not just because of a lack of editing, but because the author just wants to play in the world. If power escalation is one of the primary ways that the story is delivering hedons, then figure out a way to end the story once the power escalation is done. Otherwise the story is just dragging its feet.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (7 hours later)
Dunno how effective this is or how good an idea it is for some one to try to pull this off but one thing I did is make the 'sorting algorithm of evil/suspiciously balanced escalation of the enemy' fit into the narrative.
Several characters became aware of this happening in the world. But the stakes of 'NOT' playing along to the escalation of the enemy were too great.
that said I also ran into problems of escalation and it kind of lead to tone shifts that don't quite fit harmoniously into the entire story.
The whole project could use an editor pass to clean up a lot of those plot points and give a sharper punch on things.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (12 hours later)
Yeah, the worldbuilding problems inherent in continuous escalation can get pretty serious. Eventually power (of any kind) gets to the point where it should be warping society around it, and if the antagonists are pre-existing then it doesn't make that much sense that society isn't already warped.
You can do a Lensman Arms Race depending on what kind of story you have going on, but that still leaves you with a problem of running up against a wall sooner or later (probably sooner), and then you probably have to deal with warping the setting around the ever-increasing size of the conflict. (You can tie the escalation of conflict and power together in a variety of other ways as well, but Lensman is one of the most popular.)
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
Fortunately I was sort of going into it from the perspective of the protagonists being society warpers from the get go, so having the proper 'ramifications' of every boost in power fit well.
At one point a character was taking in volunteers to become unsleeping hyper rational high octane transhumans (with the disclosure that said procedure was effectively agreeing to shortening your life span to at most ten years).
This was necessary to have sufficient skilled and inter-cooperative labor to construct an ICBM infrastructure capable of simultaneously attacking the enemy kaiju as well as lifting the population and necessary life support into orbit.
It was a really fun story/setting and I kind of want to revisit it and tell much more narrow stories about each of these various eras.
u/redrach [+6] (39 minutes later)
With This Ring is an interesting example, although some people dislike its approach. In that story the protagonist mysteriously finds himself in possession of an extremely powerful xenotech device but the world he's in is already so full of beings on a similar level that no matter how far he's come he's still very far from breaking the system. The story's less about him getting godlike power (which he basically has from the onset) and more about the connections he makes with other people and how he uses his powers to solve various problems. It's a very episodic style compared to other stories, and that's what turns some people off it. I like it though.
u/None [+5] (2 hours later)
All I get from googling that title is some shitty romcom.
Link to the story, please?
u/Zephyr1011 [+4] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (3 hours later)
u/Sparkwitch [+7] (8 hours later)
I think the important step is to differentiating challenges from dilemmas.
In real life, and in a lot of meatier stories, there are problems which have no ideal solution. No matter which choice is made someone will be disappointed, something will be lost, some aspect will resolve in failure. We, and the characters in those works, are forged and defined by which particular sacrifices we are willing to make for which particular rewards.
There really are some things money (and power) can't buy. Mistakes accumulate. Responsibilities, too.
If the story is about leveling up then, yes, you reach a dead end when there's nowhere left to escalate... but ideally there was always an undercurrent about why the protagonist was escalating, and their success or failure in that relatively mundane goal determines whether it's a comedy or a tragedy.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+5] Godric Gryffindor (2 days later)
Fiction that escalates exceptionally well: Lensman, Worm, Hybrid Theory.
In no case does it escalate super-fast.
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
well after years of seeing lensman referenced it is time to finaly read it.
u/Ghostwoods [+2] (3 days later)
It's a lot of fun, but the style hasn't aged that well. I still love it, and definitely recommend it, but just don't expect modern prose!
u/Mekanimal [+9] (28 minutes later)
Taking HPMOR as an example, have an antagonist who is just as aware of how to game the system as the protagonist. Or have the primary conflict based on something their munchkin-ness has no advantage over.
u/lehyde [+4] Nudist Beach (an hour later)
You can stack the odds so extremely against the protagonist that the new found power is barely enough to deal with it. Examples: Worm, Postnuptial Disagreements
u/UltraRedSpectrum [+2] (an hour later)
Has anyone ever done a rational Wormfic before? This is the second time I've heard of it being exempt from the Lightsaber-Death Star Rule.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+13] Mouse Army (an hour later)
I think the sentiment is that wildbow already put in enough injunctions to prevent worm being rational; the protagonists are as rational as possible in their agent-influenced state.
Removing these injunctions at all makes the world fall apart instantly.
u/Ruljinn [+1] (5 hours later)
injunctions
How do you mean? Like Harry Potter's magical world making no consistent sense (except consistent inconsistency) or an entity enforcing restrictions?
u/alexanderwales [+10] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
I don't necessarily think that you're totally barred from making rationalfic of Worm, but you're really limited by that constraint.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+7] Mouse Army (5 hours later)
enforced restrictions. I know of 3, but eliezer said there is at least 4. Guess it depends on how strict you see "restrictions".
A) trigger events, only broken people get powers
B) Agents influence capes towards conflict
C) Endbringers
D) Amnesia surounding trigger events
Debatable:
E) path to victory contessa
F) ziz simurgh
u/Uncaffeinated [+2] (16 hours later)
Technically, A) is only partially true.
u/NotAHeroYet [+8] City of Angles Municipal Government (5 hours later)
Mental compulsions, making you not notice certain things unless you're very careful, is what i understood upon reading. Some secrets are impossible, or harder, to discover on your own as a result, and shards often tamper with your own methology and patterns.
Taylor, who before avoided conflict whenever possible, attacked a top-teir parahuman in the first section, and didn't even notice how odd that was. It makes a lot more sense, once you understand that.
u/Ruljinn [+3] (4 hours later)
What I think has been working for me is a situation much like what /u/redrach describes for 'With This Ring'
I'm writing a Buffy SI where the SI gets turned into a Vampire. It's set in season 3, so the early parts are all about running around digging up the magic items and stuff that wouldn't normally be found until later. But while the main character (Jack) is easily more 'powerful' as a result... the story glosses over the things where that matters at all.
Instead of drama being derived from combat situations where so and so might die if they aren't strong/fast/tough enough, most combat situations in my story are resolved via gratuitous violence and grenades. The focus of the story is on noncombat situations where 'power' isn't really relevant. Such as... Jack's attempts to annoy Buffy as much as vampirically possible, keep his brother Spike from drinking all the whiskey, and help Harmony win homecoming Queen (again, to annoy Buffy)
I should probably mention that my main character may or may not be insane.
u/mrphaethon [+2] Significant Digits (5 days later)
Structure the story in such a way that you use the reveal as your driving narrative force -- make it a voyage of discovery rather than a struggle against opposition.