Thanks for the birthday wishes, all. It was… alright. Spent most of the day playing Signalis, actually, trying to distract myself from the stress of needing to go see family for my little “celebration”.
This actually gave me some thoughts on your speedster problem, if ones that would have to be brought in from the start.
[...]
Let's set aside the garments for a bit and say, okay, you get a super costume. And you get at least enough required secondary that if you were to just run all out with nothing messing with you, you could run all-out and wouldn't self-destruct any more than a normal person pushing their limits of all-out sprinting.
But what if they're only as super-durable as needed for that? Just because you're able to run at speed X doesn't mean your arm can take the full force of throwing a running-start punch at that speed. You might not get fully physics'd like a generic human who was subject to the same kinds of forces and would be reduced to chunky salsa, but you could throw your arm out, tear a muscle, or even break a bone depending on just how far that durability superpower is lagging. This would mean having to get creative to take out bad guys.
While I already had that in mind, for whatever reason you made me look at it from a different angle, I guess because I was thinking about the super-super salsa speed and not just “dislocated shoulder” speed. That actually helps, considering that, despite how much HeroAca likes to
say that people suffer broken bones and such, the way the characters react is
clearly not on that level of injury, and I’ve been struggling to kind of rectify that dissonance for my adaptation.
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Third, there's inertia. This is one where, while I don't know a lot about comic book supers because I've touched barely any of the genre first-hand, I feel like you do get differences in speedsters. Some can pull the "flash step" gimmick where they can move short distances at max speed and stop on a dime, letting them dodge, bob and weave, or "teleport" behind you at super speed. Others can't -- they're subject to inertia and even if they don't need much of a warm up to hit their stride, they do need space and time in order to stop.
So since this is a crossover I’m working with, the non-HeroAca half of the equation has its own set of superpowers and world mechanics that means I can’t quite use the normal interpretation of this, but it does give me an idea for upping the apparent skill floor for my main character. To boil it down, I’m thinking the equivalent of using MP/stamina to make those tight turns and quick stops; not writing them as if they need the space and time, but making drawn-out battles a bad proposition.
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All of these serve to make "All out" not just something the hero can do until and unless it's dramatically appropriate or sufficiently necessary. They can struggle through layers of action at less than full throttle, still being fast and impressive for it, but also straining over how much they can really use. And then when the stakes are highest, you can pull out the full force use of their powers and make that one moment really impressive. As long as they feel afraid or concerned about being limited rather than smug that they've got an ace in their pockets, it will still feel like a challenge.
All some good suggestions, I thank you. Sorry I didn’t comment on every point, some things I just didn’t have anything to say on. I’ve finally gotten to the last season of HeroAca and the, like, weird tonal shift and a thousand contrivances are breaking my brain, so I haven’t been able to focus as much on this project (not that I don’t already bounce between a dozen perpetually-in-the-works projects as is).
Oh, weirdly enough, a related video to this turned up in my feed
https://youtu.be/btKRFfsmZI8?si=EZs8EfIxqlkWa0EDIt's about speedsters!
Oh, that’s actually pretty good. The algorithm had another very similar one waiting for me that also helps. Thanks for the find.
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