How do you explain the normal guy keeping up with the actions of superpowered people and robots and stuff?

I'm a sucker for the no powers in super powers setting but his power is to have power-denying or immunity to powers.

With obvious exceptions like, say, the Hulk punches him, he can't deny that because it's a fucking punch. He can only deny lasers and shit like that.

The power isn't intrinsic to him, the power is intrinsic to reality around him.

He's just that good.

If he's consistently keeping up with super-powered people and their equivalents, than 'normal guy' isn't so normal, plain and simple. No matter what the uninformed or narrow-minded would like to believe or lead others to believe.

You can't.

>Uses Batman as example o badass normal which is the incarnation of bad writing and pulling shit out of your ass
Batman would only work as a DMPC, his plotarmor is the size of YV Canis Majoris

And now I also read karate kid, the dude who dodges lightspeed traveling enemies, aikido'd a 10km meteorite back to space and cut a kriptonian's arm with his karate chop

Go die in a fire, your examples are the worst

He has greater narrative weight.

The player playing it is the GM's girlfriend or boyfriend.

>And now I also read
Except reading the (Near) part.

Never actually read Karate Kid. I just saw him shatter a building with one punch.
My original example was Rock Lee.
What's your better example?
MacGyver?

Technology.

There is nothing on this planet that's made of flesh and bone yet it entirely immune to enough raw firepower and technological advancement.

>Rock Lee
Totally NOT badass normal (yes to badass, not to normal I mean), he has an unique ability not even kages can accomplish, he's also a natural in that fucking ability making Kakashi shit his pants.

There were superpowered people in MacGyver? shit, I just realized how little I remember about that show.

He's just That Good.

In words of another user:
"A guy who trained to shoot so hard he became a Doomguy. A guy who trained to be a surgeon so hard he became Franken Fran. A guy who trained to sword so hard he became Virgil."

Ordinary people performing superhuman feats simply by the virtue of training until they broke through their human limits. The basis of wuxia fiction. The exemplar. The paragon. Whatever you call it, the main conclusion is obvious.

He's. Just. That. Good.

By accepting that they are extraordinary. Stop trying to have your cake and eat it too, you're just as special snowflake as a half-kitsune samurai possessed by a ancient evil except you think you're being clever.

Hence why he *was* my example.
Got a better example of someone who is just-that-good?

>There were superpowered people in MacGyver
How about Murdoc the unkillable assassin?
Or Bigfoot? Or Merlin? Heh

>Go die in a fire
Pic related

>Got a better example of someone who is just-that-good?
Not him, but Doomguy.

He never seemed like a very fleshed out character, unless I'm mistaken.
But he fits I suppose.

In nu-lore he's at least a little magical even if that magic is mostly just rage and mad skills.

Actually, does having a certain amount of magical ability count as being a normal? Because then you have stuff like Iron Fist.

>Actually, does having a certain amount of magical ability count as being a normal?
If everyone in the setting (or the very overwhelming majority) has the same oamount of magical ability or more - yes, it counts as normal.

Short answer, you don't.

Long answer, the gap between the 'normal guy' and the superpowered folks/robot users is so big, that either the normal guy will end up severely falling behind (and being the Yamcha of the group: an otherwise strong guy forced to irrelevance and even joke status) or being ridiculously overpowered by plot fiat.

Case in point, Batman. Sure, he's supposed to be in physical peak condition and have the highest intelligence humanly possible, but by the end of the day he is still human. Yet he has to pull some incredibly unbelievable and downright superhuman stuff to keep up with the Justice League and the literal dark gods they fight on a regular basis. Batman is great in Gotham, but as soon as you acknowledge the rest of the D.C. universe he becomes utterly fucking bullshit.

>3. Captain Charming, a diplomancer face so charismatic that he doesn't need to defeat the killer robot, he can (b)romance it.
>4. Luck. Captain Tylor level luck. Five leaf clover level luck. It's not a super power if it's just coincidence.
I guess you could pull these, but both would already give the game an incredibly humorous, tongue-in-cheek tone. You get the same ridiculousness as with Batman, except it's played for laughts.

>for laughs
Who is Tylor - the luckiest idiot who ever lived, or the most magnificent scheming bastard, manipulating people like pawns?
There is no answer, and I like it that way. That's not for laughs. That shit is dead serious.

Also,
>five leaf clover level luck
Get on my level. It's like you don't even know about fractal clover leaves.

>Got a better example of someone who is just-that-good?
Batroc the Leaper.
Hawkeye.
Daredevil if you take Miller's interpretation that the chemicals only blinded him.
Bullseye.
The Shadow, sort of. Again it depends on the interpretation.
Jonah Hex.
Tarzan.

Captain Charming can be played straight and only be slightly humorous.

That's more super than most supers.

>Hawkeye.
>Bullseye.
>Jonah Hex.
>Tarzan.
Fair enough l

He's the only one who isn't an idiot.

Not Lee, but Guy.
Morning Peacock isn't a fire jutsu, it's punching so fast the air ignites.
Afternoon Tiger isn't a wind jutsu, it's punching the air so hard, it turns into a tiger.
8 Gates isn't about magic, it's about lifting.
Night Guy should have been "Final Lotus" or something like that

Yeah, Rock Lee is also a genius at hard work. They imply that his lack of ninjutsu is made up for by his discipline and endurance which is why he is able to progress in taijutsu so much. If he truly were talentless, he wouldn't be as strong as he is.

I like that Madara was actually more scared of full strength Gai then he was of all the other bullshit power level fighters he was fighting. It's like if Krillin was actually stronger than the Super Saiyans.

Haha I feel like Krillin gets a bad rap. In universe, Krillin is probably the strongest human being who has ever lived. He just has the misfortune of being surrounded by bullshit space aliens.

He has something else special about him.
Perhaps he has money, influence, power, perhaps he's just fucking lucky.

OP said no superpowers.

Depends on the system you build him with. If you use the Hero system he would keep up rather nicely. He is actually a rather powerful character and expensive to build.

Sufficient levels of fighting spirit

Or blistering, tooth-gnashing fury

Either or, really, but at the end of the day it basically relies on the universe having rules that allow the normal guy to keep up with the superheroes in that sort of way, because if they can keep up with the superheroes without that, then they aren't normal. Because, you know, they're superheroes.

I mean, you see this sort of thing in a lot of media. The prime example in my mind is Malazan Book of the Fallen, a setting where magic exists and is utilised to extreme effect, and there are guys whose biology is so fucked up that they can obliterate cities with their bare hands, but then there are also just regular humans who trained so hard and got so gud for so long that they can hold their own against both of the aforementioned.

Hell, it's even explained in universe, if you hold onto a certain mindset, and keep on doing amazing things and generally being a heroic normal of the sort who becomes a legend or a myth, the universe itself conspires to keep you alive so that you can keep on doing amazing things. Your 'push' becomes that much greater than a regular dude, on every level - physical, mental, social, philosophical, spiritual, blah blah blah. For a slightly more weeb example, Drifters or Katanagatari, which both feature otherwise very much human characters who just GOT GUD or got wise or got intelligent enough that they stand a fighting chance against people who can incinerate acres of land by waving their arms, or against robots or whatever.

It sort of reminds me of Morrowind's Kirkbridian lore, or Kill Six Billion Demons which ripped it's entire cosmology from Kirkbride's work anyway. You become powerful by having a powerful mindset, you become a legend by being legendary. Sounds like a tautology, yes, but it's not supposed to be easy to understand, or accomplish, because that would defeat the point.

tl;dr

REACH HEAVEN THROUGH VIOLENCE

Madara wasn't afraid of him but respected him and enjoyed fighting him. Basically put him on the same level as his old nemesis. Remember, Madara loved the fighting. Kind of made his plan for world peace ironic but w/e

He isn't fighting the people who he can't scratch nor working with the people who don't need him. Any average soldier is almost certainly going to be able to hold his own against someone with low-key super strength by just staying far away and shooting at him. Once you get more fanciful and make it, say, a operator from a secret special forces division decked out in power armor, it becomes obvious unless you have him on a Marvel/DC type of setting where everyone and their dog is completely immune to any and all conventional firearms

If you're talking something like a normal person getting into a fistfight with someone with super strength, there's no good way to make that realistic. On most comics you aren't shit unless you can at least effortlessly lift a car over your head. A punch from a person like that would make Mike Tyson look like a bad joke with minimal training, which probably means a few broken bones and serious internal damage if the guy gets a single punch in. The sheer resilience needed to not snap your spine if you can lift a car over your head would probably mean he would barely feel strikes from a normal person. People really understimate what super strength would actually entail. Even going for something less overt like 616 Captain America, he's still a martial arts master and at the peak of human ability, which means hardly anyone in the real would could lay a finger on him and he would STILL punch far harder than a heavyweight champion

Senpai, Captain Charisma is an established, serious archetype in Shadowrun. They call it the Face.

Also, you fucking don't, OP. The character in question is a protagonist, so they aren't "normal" people. Stop pretending they are and give them something useful with the rest of the team.

With that out of the way, the standard "mundane" feeling superpowers are gadgeteering, super-intelligence/planning, and force of will. Gadgets alone get you Hawkeye, super smarts gets you Taskmaster or Amadeus Cho, force of will gets you Iron Fist, James Bond, and any shonen anime bullshit you care to name. Combine the three and turn to eleven, you get Batman.

Those feel "normal" because they are based on trainable human skills. You can learn to build robots, influence people, surpass your limits or be just as keikaku smart, but you can't learn to bounce a bullet off your face or shoot eyebeams.

...

>protagonist, so they aren't "normal" people

>A guy who trained to be a surgeon so hard he became Franken Fran
>implying Frannenfrank is a good example of a mundane supersurgeon, when Black Jack is RIGHT THERE
>implying Virgil is anything close to an example of a swordsman who got where he is through normal means

As I said, in words of another user.

His name is Diomedes

I always liked the theory that he was actually a Bodhisattva and was helping the galaxy obtain enlightenment

juicing, dedication, luck

batman is believable, because he has all of those, for example.

Cids final limitbreak was calling in an airstrike, so lots of firepower maybe.

I like that it could be any of these.
He's still my favorite anime character.

>They have a bound magical artifact on the tier of the other supers.
Cheating, basically.

>They are good planners with good connections and reserves of mundane weapons.
Everything they do will probably go down more or less like pic related.

>They have an appropriately strong gun and are the main ones skilled enough to use it.
>They're really good at hacking/diplomancy/other vaguely setting specific skills
The skill variant of superpowers that's *technically mundane*.

TV Tropes, yes, but this is a good example.

The Midnighter of The Authority starts every battle by first running the whole thing through the supercomputer in his head a few million times, analysing every possible outcome, so he'll know precisely how the battle will go, and what he'll have to do. He's particularly fond of telling people that he's already beaten them a few million times, so doing it once more will be simple.

Though this was rather effectively inverted in Captain Atom: Armageddon. The Midnighter saw Captain Atom as just another target for a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Instead, Captain Atom treated the Midnighter (and his boyfriend/husband Apollo) to a total Curb-Stomp Battle, showing that sometimes Awesomeness by Analysis is no match for raw, unadulterated, world-shaking power, especially when the wielder of that power also out-thinks you.

>which ripped it's entire cosmology from Kirkbride's work anyway

As I understood it both Kirkbride and Abaddon cribbed their settings mostly from Hindu mythology, so it's less one ripping off the other and more both ripping off existing myths

While it's true that Big Boss is something like a "badass normal" he still isn't nowhere near "average". Sure he doesn't have supernatural abilites, but his skills and insticts are superhuman-level: he is a superhero.

Average Joes are those guys who get slaughtered by Vamp or suffocated by The Pain's hornets.

what about moxie?

...

Cid has already given us the answer (as well as batman and other not-supers) Technology yo.

Cid time and again is represented as a half crazed inventor of the world that rigs up amazing weapons or wondrous machines. All of which propell the world years ahead of their time, he's that good.

Do the same with the "normal" in your group. Give him the capacity to use tech to reduce the gap.

>Batman
You mean the guy who without technology outreacted the Flash? the guy who whitout technology withstood a punch with the force of 100 exploding suns? the guy who without powers beat the Justice League (without Superman) all by himself? the guy who without powers pressure pointed 2 full powered Kryptonians into submission who 5 seconds ago survived a hail of nukes? that Batman?

Batman just adds his Int, Wis, and Level to absolutely everything

Iroquois Plisken is the brass normal of metal gear solid anyway. Just a random navy seal who didn't die.

*badass

You don't, because every possible solution leads to them not being normal (or at least average) any more.

I think people have a strange expectation of "normal guy". Even in a real world setting with no fantastic elements, a "normal guy" doesn't cut it. You've usually got an action hero with a lot of brawn, quickness, and luck on their side.

What most people are thinking on in this thread of "normal guys" are mooks, goons, and civilians. Any fictional character who is capable of doing anything is going to be unrealistic, because storytelling isn't realistic. If it was, it wouldn't be fiction.

>If it was, it wouldn't be fiction.
Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.

Dakka. So much dakka. We talking Davy Crockett's and chain linked ma dueces and brrrt levels of excessive dakka

Gotta love the fact that "every technique at our disposal" is entirely compatible with "I set up enough explosives to vapourise you and the rest of the floor you're on in advance, so eat a fuck-ton of explosion".

Hamon is explicitly stated to be something that not everyone can use. The Joestars are already special at that point, in a way that's beyond the "mundane".

>storytelling isn't realistic.

No such thing as a normal guy

Simple, he's the team's cook

>Bodhisattva
Mahayana pls, Theravada is the true buddhism

HARD WORK AND GUTS

That's because as soon as something dumbly random happens, people get super angry and scream it isn't realistic.

I like it when the mundane person is the only one with above average intellect, whether naturally or just because they've been forced into so many dangerous situations without the get-out-of-jail-free cards that are superpowers, so they actually have experience figuring things out.

Basically, they're the person that shoots the villain/hero immediately instead of dragging the fight out with monologueing or gratuitous kicking when they're down or similar things that might get the opponent a chance to salvage the encounter.

Another one I like is that supers/mages spend so much time fighting, training and researching, that they don't have or are rusty at genuine life skills. The mundane character is the best of the group at normal people things, like talking, leadership, organization, and having contacts.

They are either NPCs or starting/very low level characters. Pass that and you better find your own version of special. Whatever flavor that specialness takes is less important than the very clear fact that you have it and are able to consistently rely on it.

The superpowers or robots are not very impressive.

Except, if we add the word "badass" in front of "normal" then we have a magical adjective which changes the noun through proximity.

"Normal":. something about which there is nothing extraordinary.
"Badass Normal": something badass about which the only extraordinary quality is it's aforementioned badass-itude.

You are mistaking, purposefully, "random civilian normal" for "Badass Normal".

Being Badass Normal requires dedication, planning, fortune and obsession, but no radioactive spider bites or alien DNA or genetic mutations or divine favor.

There are a few people who have been Badass Normal in actual real life. Mad Jack Churchill and Wolf the Quarrelsome spring to my mind, but you may have other notable historical, or contemporary examples.

Or you can just grouse over how because *you* can't retrieve a computer mouse 'swiftly' by tossing the cord around a bit, then a fighter should take a move action to do the same with a weapon lanyard. That'll earn you a lot of game design cred.

So the BtVS game approach, where slayers are killing machines, but Scoobies have far, far, far better skills and have bennies out the wazoo?

Robots understandable because they're built superpowers not so much, it's like the meme that women try to comfort their little prick boyfriend by saying guys with small dicks can be better at sex because they learn how to have good sex while guys with big dicks never learn. Which is stupid as it's saying a person with an advantage never learns how to use it better or be better at general in an action.

I am not familiar with those things you just said.

The idea is of course hardly original, but it seems to be a logical and inevitable consequence of being able to use magic/superpowers, to a greater or lesser degree based on their nature in a setting.

I'm saying that people are confusing the two. "Normals" don't get to be in works of fiction, they suck too much. What you've mentioned, the "badass normal" Nice TvTrope, brah , is what should be considered when talking about this sort of thing. The Badass normal is still insanely competent and does things that people have thought impossible. And if anyone argues with you, cite real life cases, like the ones you mentioned.

Joseph wins literally every fight at least partially because of asspulls. Even the fight against Kars only ends like it did because he suddenly just knew he had to block an attack with the Red Stone, which caused a chain reaction which blasted Kars off to space and permanently froze him. Then he proceeded to fall from the stratosphere into the ocean while riding a giant boulder, which only let him with relatively minor injuries. All that while missing an arm.

By those standards of "keeping up", I could theoretically defeat the whole rest of humanity if a meteor unchained a mass extinction event and only I miraculously survived

Willpower, luck, and JUSTICE.
A bit of technology helps too.

>Willpower, luck, and JUSTICE.
this

Nah, all people have willpower, ESPECIALLY mages and mentally focused supers. Same with luck.

Justice only helps some of the heroes. The rogueish ones and mundane villains don't benefit from it.

>Blackjack
My nigga

That's all entirely valid shit in the DC universe though.

Karate Kid learned God-hacks martial arts, that's it, anyone could do what he did.

Fuck DC for that, though. Their "peak human" is like 2x IRL peak human.

>2x
Taking into account that batman WITHOUT equipment could punch through a 2 meter thick marble wall I can reliabily say it's more than just 2x

I think you don't understand the implication in aikido a 10 km meteorite back to space, we're talking about a billions of tons object travelling at thousands of hundreds of times the speed of sound, if you tell me that's "powerless normal" you're stupid.

...

...

>How do you explain the normal guy keeping up with the actions of superpowered people and robots and stuff?

He plays them against themselves.