Is there a way to do Super Speed without it being overpowered?

By focusing on making interesting but balanced mechanics for representing it rather than wanking 'realism' when dealing with impossible superpowers?

Any superpower no matter how powerful is only ever relatively overpowered
If you put them up against a good counter power then it doesn't matter like if Flash went up against Superman yeah he could run circles around him but Superman could tank everything Flash threw at him
If you put either against a non super powered thug then that thug is lucky those guys don't kill people

AlsoIt's a fucking superpower just do whatever

Yes, just give everyone super speed as time goes on. Fuck any power creep, make everyone gods.

This. Or any power really.
Pyrokenisis isn't overpowered when you can throw fireballs, it is when you can set the entire planet on fire at will.

It's all a matter of scale.

This. Speed with normal person perceptions. It's like how teleporters often prefer to be able to see where they're going.

I haven't gotten a chance to run this yet, but I really like the idea of a speedster whose powers are based on time dilation.

He goes fast by changing the rate at which he experiences time. So you still get all of the fun combat applications like dodging bullets, super-speed wedgies, etc., but there are drawbacks that balance things out and provide opportunities for RP. For example: no running on water, no running up walls, his power isn't useful for travel because even though he seems to be going very fast to everyone else, to him running ten miles is still running ten miles.

Also, it lets you hand wave all the annoying nit picking about how sharply he can turn and whether or not he can touch things without breaking them. He can do anything he would be able to do at normal speed because he isn't actually going a hundred miles an hour. It just looks like he is to everyone else.

sounds kinda like Hunter Zolomon aka Zoom

except zolomon can still do hax BS

I've always felt that "super speed" is implicitly taken to encompass a ludicrous amount of ancillary powers.

If you actually had to account for friction and inertia it would be damn near useless.

Furthermore not having correspondingly fast senses and mind would also put a severe limit to its usefulness.

The user would also need super durability to interact with objects at superspeed unless he wants to be smashed by his own momentum.

So basically Quicksilver.

It doesn't actually solve how he would interact mechanically with other things does it?

Sure it does. If he punches someone, his fist exerts the same amount of force it would at normal speed. If he manages to get hit by a bullet, it does the same amount of damage any other bullet would do. His speed isn't changing, a minute just goes by quicker for him than it does for you.

Is this unrealistic? Yes. Is it bullshit? Also yes. But the point is to make things simple and fun.

Superspeed, but not super thought.

You can move at incredible speed but you can't think as quickly, so you'd better plan your shit out way beforehand. You've had the practice to know how long it takes you to run a mile, but you need to run, turn, run, turn, and run, to get anywhere.

Want to rescue people from a burning building? Better hope you have the layout memorized. You're running blind. You basically close your eyes and hope.

If you get really good, you can walk along and punch 30 guys at once by carefully timing your punches before you activate your super speed. Fuck it up, and you'll punch nothing but air as your muscles act out of sync with your position.

This reminds me of the PC Game "Freedom Force".
Their speedster, The Bullet, has an unknown speed limit, but he restricts himself to about 300 mph because if he goes any faster, his brain and reflexes can no longer keep up.

Or the Tiger Beetle
phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/04/tiger-beetles-become-blind-when-they-run/

This. Screw teleporting into objects... imagine teleporting into a cloud of flies... there's now flies *inside* you...

Currently playing a Speedster in a M&M game. The compromise my GM and I came to leaves me incredibly squishy and prone to mental effects. M&M also arbitrarily gates attacks per turn to be independent of any super speed ability, so I can still only attack once per round, and can fluff it however I'd like.

The speed depletes a resource pool.

Vampire the Masquerade has celerity that gives crazy amounts of extra turns to a character, but they will burn through their blood pool pretty fast if they can't find someone to drain blood from during the fight.

The Mistborn books have Steel Feruchemy, which requires storing the physical speed up by spending time being stuck moving at a significantly reduced speed. Going at proper ludicrous speed burns through reserves really fast.

Mana can be the limiting factor in generic fantasy worlds.

As long as the character has a tension relating to running out of extra-attacks or extra-movement or extra-dodges or whatever then it can be dramatically balanced out.

I slapped it into my game recently with some minor time powers. They're very powerful, but limited and story-tied, and prone to consequence.

What it boils down to is this: players who want to have fun doing cool shit with a neat toolbox, and people (they are not players) who want to grind down their boring souls with rancid powergaming abuse.

so things that touch him are automatically shifted into his frame of reference? Otherwise the problem remains.

If the speedster (in timeframe A) while running picks up a stationary object (in timeframe B) it will experience a rapid acceleration corresponding to an enormous change in momentum. Since this happened over a very short amount of time in timeframe B it will correspond to an enormous amount of force.

The speedster will naturally experience the reactionary force of this exchange due to newtons third law of motion. extrapolating on this principle we can see that the speedster would need to use enormous force in his frame of reference to enact any change in ours. most likely air would feel like a thick syrup around him and even breathing would be problematic.

The underlying problem is that momentum is depends on force over time. so if you change want to change the time it is going to change the force or the momentum.

Now that i think about it that actually makes for a rather elegant power limitation, since the faster he moves(/the faster his time goes) the less he is able to affect the world.

Not entirely sure how to implement it mechanically. Maybe having a speed factor on strength and endurance? so while in moving in 4X time he'd have an effective strenght of 0.25X his normal strength (or whatever factor you want for him to still be super enough).

That's only really applicable in melee though, it doesn't tell us what happens if he fires a gun at super-speed. I guess it would be damn hard to hit anyhting since he'd need a use a lot of force to adjust his aim while in that timeframe, but i guess the targets would be a lot more stationary too.

>Is it bullshit? Also yes.

You may be over thinking this.

Also, I think we are talking past each other somewhat.

In the original post I used the term hand wave. Which means something different than to solve the problem. My imaginary speedster doesn't have to deal with any of the problems you mentioned because his power doesn't change his speed. It just changes time a little bit.

I fully understand how ridiculous that is. I freely admit that it doesn't solve anything. But super speed is something that just doesn't make sense, no matter how you try to explain it. I was just trying to share the specific way in which I like it not to make sense.

A book I read once was about a bunch of kids who gain superpowers, but using them is exhausting. One kid had superspeed, but her shoes would wear out almost immediately and she'd get out of breath at shorter distances than normal, but importantantly her reaction speed did not change.

Near the end of the story, the opposing faction set up a trap to lure her to them, but she doesn't know that they've stretched wire across the doorframe at neck height.

One of the ones I liked had him become less tangible the faster he got. So he could zoom around at super speed, but not be able to interact with anything until he slowed down.

Speedsters lose to backstabs and booby traps all the time.
You can say it's jobbing, you can say it's inconsistent, but it happens.

Sure, Worm does it .Velocity is a super speedster but the faster he moves the less he can affect the world. So he has to leave super speed and risk getting splatted to fight or change the world.

Oh i am absolutely overthinking it, but i don't really see how "he dilates time" is a marked improvement over "he goes fast" if you are just going to hand-wave any complications anyway. I think my logic is at least somewhat sound and fits with your idea while at the same time solving OPs question of how to limit the powerlevel.

i knew i recognized this idea from somewhere.

Do what D&D does, nothing, you move from A to B in less rounds than other classes, that's it.

T. Guy playing a dude who moves at mach 3.

fuck it, i am now legit worried about that girl. tell me she by some miracle didn't run into that wire. please

Unless you are going into a speedster v speedster, this is pretty much the only way a speedster can lose a fight. You have to essentially out-predict the speedster to beat them.

Staying still is also surpsingly effective

Super Speed isn't overkill.'
Super Reflexes are overkill.

The fact that the Flash can move at Mach Lolwhatever isn't the problem, it's that he gets 10,000 attacks per round.

Honestly, I can't remember whether she falls for it or not now.

>Is there a way to do Super Speed without it being overpowered?

Yes, just do what the name say, its super speed not super speed AND acceleration

>Gone series. She survives.

He can't turn it off. From his perspective, he's moving normally in a nearly frozen world.

worm.wikia.com/wiki/Battery

Limit them. Can't change course during movement, still runs into stuff.

like rain

The same handwaving bullshit that keeps your body from liquefying or burning up limits the force of your strikes.

don't give them super strength.
flash should not be able to out punch mid-tier like grod.
also I like how young speedsters are usually ADHD as a handicap.

Make it deal damage.

Running is a physical activity, right? Works the same for speedsters.
Phasing through the speedforce feels like sprinting, that's it. You can only GOFEST for as long as you can run. You come out exhausted.

I always wondered, if you're super fast and all your reaction time and such is enhanced to compensate, doesn't that just result in the world slowing down and you moving at your regular speed? Like even if I want to zap across the world in an instant, I still have to physically walk my ass over there, it's just that for everyone else it looks like an instant transportation, even though I'm spending months if not years getting there relative time.

That's how the flash has said he works sometimes. Apparently talking to people is literally hell.

Wally West once talked about how when he runs long-distance he falls into a kind of trance, so yeah it does take ages from his perspective but it also seems to pass by pretty quick because speed force trance.

The whole trance thing hasn't really ever been mentioned again in the following 20 odd years of comics, but that's how I justify it to myself.

Does the trance also give him all the energy and durability to keep running those distances, as well as the awareness to avoid obstacles?

It's jobbing and it's inconsistent.

Fuck this scan, fuck Identity Crisis and fuck everything it represents.

who the fuck knows, it's literally just one throw-away line. presumably yes.

The trance is to deal with the boredom though, why wouldn't he be able to avoid things at a relative 3 miles per hour? Hell with all his bullshit I bet he takes fairly regular naps along the way.

Are you telling me that a superhero comic has not explained how a character's powers work in great detail and with real world science? Shocking!

>why wouldn't he be able to avoid things at a relative 3 miles per hour?

Well, even when you're running normally, you probably don't want to fall into a trance and lose your focus, lest you run off the road, trip on something on the ground or smack into a pole or a tree.

Necessary acceleration/deceleration time. Massive fatigue. Not bundling a scaling speed of perception to go with it by default. Not actually being able to interaction with anything at high velocity without shattering it or you into hundreds of millions of vibrating pieces. Etc... Super speed beyond "runs faster than people" is actually a pretty fucking stupid power unless you start throwing in all the implicit facilitating powers, which are arguably more useful than the speed anyway.

What the flash does isn't super speed, he just breaks physics with the power of plot.

Quick silver is much better because there are consequences for his speed and a actual limit. If you accelerate and hit someone with the force of a truck, you have to remember your body is also experiencing the same amount of force.

Yeah, but he's pretty fit, so tripping or bumping into something (again at a relative speed) isn't going to do much. Might sprain an ankle.

I think Dune did it good

Miles Teg wasn't Flash level of OP but he was able to move so fast normal humans could only see a blur

The catch is, it's fucking exhausting for him, doing it too often can kill him and he has to eat so as much as normal human eat in month every time he uses that "power"

I like this.
One of my favorite super-speed moments was in a Smallville episode where Clark had to zip across the barn to save Lana from some damn thing and instead of seeing him whoosh, time froze and you just saw a teenager awkwardly scramble down a flight of stairs in a rush.

Fitness level does basically nothing to protect you from the full weight of your body*vector bearing down on a few narrow focal points in a fall. At a certain point the additional speed and weight you gain from more muscle will add up to more damage than "cushion" not that that's how that really works anyway.

being fit won't lessen your odds of a concussion

like, the most noticeable difference you'll see is when going from schlubby-piece-of-shit to sorta-fit, from there it's a matter of diminishing returns as far as fitness-level:resistance-to-basic-physics goes

There are inhuman entities out there that have Speedforce^2.

Imagine being the Flash, and you come across this ancient Eldritch force, and you engage your Speedforce, but instead of that Eldritch thing stopping, YOU STOP.

And suddenly that THING from beyond has moved a huge distance.

Bonus points if the Speedforce using hero is the only one that can see these Speedforce^2 entities.

You get the feeling like you're about to come

Do you run head first into things often?

Set Limits: Cheetara could only keep up her maximum speed for 2 miles, iirc. Then she'd start slowing down for awhile. Some speedsters have a caloric requirement to go with their speed.
Weaknesses: Super Speed doesn't necessarily mean super reaction time or super senses. Sure you can run at 500 mph, but you still react like a normal dude. My favorite seldom used one is that the super speed ages/injures you due to any number of factors; like the strain it puts on your body and such.

>I always wondered, if you're super fast and all your reaction time and such is enhanced to compensate, doesn't that just result in the world slowing down and you moving at your regular speed?
In regards to the Flash, there is only one sane answer.
And it leads into a weakness that can be exploited.
The Flash must be able to vary and control his perception of time, otherwise he would go insane, as he'd have lived several millennia if lifetimes already.
If the speed of his perception of events is controllable, then he can choose to have a cross country run at mach 8 seem like running 300mph.
Still fast, but, manageable and kinda fun.
Conversations are still intensely torturous, like having to wait for a commercial to load and play every few minutes when watching a video.

And the key to this is that it is vulnerable to his expectations.
He is always going to want to run the world on a bit of a fast forward, because he's impatient.
So when he sees some goofy jackass dressed like a bat break into his friends & his new clubhouse, he's going underestimate him, think he can speedily take care of it, show off for his friends, and leave it fast to make it interesting.
When smoke appears out of nowhere, before he can speed up his perception, he is tripped, thrown into a wall, and knocked out.

Other weakness pointed out in the thread are much better, but this one even works on the Flash if you can surprise him.

I don't have the pic, but I actually can justify most of that old-school comic where Batman takes out the Justice League.
(With Superman absent and Manhunter trying to stop the fight with words)
Except the last panel where Wonder Woman is lying on the ground unconscious after one kick to the stomache.
She would have been getting up to tear his head off.

Had a supervillain M&M game with a character like this named Quick Fix.

Basically he was a time manipulator who did everything he could to come off as having superspeed, because he was smart enough to realize "Wow, I can control time. Everyone's gonna come after me if they know that."

He talked fast(which being highly intelligent helped with a bit), he tried to move fast whenever he could(which came off to everyone else as speed. To an actual speedster, he'd look like he was running normally but in fast forward if that makes sense), right down to his costume design which involved a number of racing stripes and flame decals. The one bug was he was also a fixed moment in time and immune to timeline changes, which his supposed superspeed couldn't explain(which did come up, as the game started right after a major timeline change, and only me and one other PC knew something happened).

He also used a gun in combat for a while, using his time-slowing powers to set up cleaner shots, and only used his fists when he got into a fight with actual speedster that was too fast for the gun. Turned out I forgot his hand-to-hand skill was way better than his gun skills.

Shame that game died almost as soon as it started. Had a lot of potential to go places.

It's bad enough when it's just one

Should the Flash not be stronger than superman? Strength is useless against superior speed.

no but then i don't have to be aware of things coming at me at near light speeds

Comic book power levels are worthless because comic books are even more imbalanced as anime.

Think about it, Superman has lifted infinity twice and yet is still supposed to be cowed by characters like Lex Luthor or Toyman.

this is how we use "speed force" or trans-dimensional shifting of energy, which surges or draws energy and force shifting the "rules" of kinematics back and forth as practical magic

Wouldn't that disintegrate anyone he was carrying? I feel like it would.

Because his own code of ethics means he won't arbitrarily murder someone like Lex Luthor, whom he can't actually prove of wrongdoing.
Further, your knowledge of comics is based on soundbites. The example you brought up is a decade and more old, and doesn't even apply to the setting anymore.

Did not he killed the joker?

You are mixing canons.
It happens often, don't worry about it.

Doesn't this fag think in ato seconds whatever the fuck that means?

This is another reason why power levels are stupid in comics, depending on the writer in charge, characters will gain and lose effectiveness on a whim.

One minute the Flash is witnessing moments in attoseconds and evacuating a village in the time it took a nuke to go off yet in another story, he's tripping on banana peels and running into deathstroke's sword.

How does he put them down without them carrying on moving at mach 10?

At any fraction of c the difference in density between air and steel is negligible.

Friction would have shredded them.

Speed force.

An attosecond is a VERY small unit of time. I think the smallest we can measure with current technology is something like 12 attoseconds, and Flash can apparently percieve things in less than a single attosecond.

Basically what I do. I do enhance endurance a bit so the character can throw some fast punching without pulverizing their hand, but there are an endurance and perception hazards going on. Plus all the collateral damage of something moving at the speed of sound in the middle of a city.

Though there was still one time a player managed to be broken as fuck at an early level by using martial arts and speed manipulation.

The only time I've seen flash tier super speed, and mind you that means not just running fast but doing everything fast, was epic dexterity in scion. It added automatic successes to everything dexterity based, including attack rolls and defense values. It basically meant that whoever had the higher epic dex would always hit and could never be hit.
Hell not even DC plays it straight. If they stayed true to how they represented his powers 100% of the time he should literally never get hit by anything ever.

Someone post some the stupider shit Flash's rogues have done

Speedforce bullshit.

The speedster's mass decreases inversely to how fast they accelerate, meaning they're incapable of producing more force than they could moving at ordinary speeds.

>Is there a way to do Super Speed without it being overpowered?
Limit how fast they can move.

Be realistic with their super speed. If you try to punch someone while going super fast, you're going to break your fist and your arm.

Super speed also doesn't mean they can see and hearing everything really slow and are constantly bullet timing everything.

Pretty much, have super speed be "you can run fast" and that's it. It's not quite as cool but it's also not overpowered.

See

150% of normal speed would be pretty fucking fast, especially if you could chage direction/speed without momentum you'd be pretty powerful.

Use the Speedforce too much, or in weird ways, and THEY will notice you.

I saw the post and I've honestly seen better reasoning for why Goku couldn't kaioken while in Super Saiyan before Super came out.

Like if the Flash's perception changes to allow him to witness shit without going insane, why exactly would he underestimate someone like Deathstroke or Batman or any other supervillain who is capable of murdering him if they get a good shot in?

If anything, wouldn't Flash have trained himself to be capable of switching his perceptions on a dime, considering the many times he's done stupid shit like slipping on a banana peel or getting stabbed by deathstroke?

It's an explanation that begs more questions the more you really put any amount of thought into it and the reality is that the only reason why he falls for anything is because the writers make him, not because of any inherent weaknesses on his part.

Go back and count how many of those examples were from situations where he could have, might have, maybe have underestimated his opponent who didn't have super powers.
Fighting Barman before meeting him, for example.

>wouldn't Flash have trained himself to be capable of switching his perceptions on a dime
First, you presume that's even possible.
Perhaps it takes a moment of dedicated thought that can always be exploited at superspeed.
Then remember that the Flash has, to my knowledge, never been described as a brilliant tactician, approaching combat with rigorous and disciplined training, or having a serious, Veeky Forums grognard nature in order to eliminate all possible weaknesses.

I made a scientist speedster once, and it worked out pretty well. He had quite a bit of speed for the lower-power game we were doing, which I was able to do because other than that he just had an aoe disarm, a multiattack punch, and scientific and engineering skill with inventor.

Basically I was fast as all hell, but without any armor, any momentum I put into my punches could hurt me severely. It was nicely limiting, and it let me have a lot of fun with the scientist aspect. I would observe an enemy for a few rounds, testing its capabilities and limitations. Then I'd try and use the environment or my super speed to design and build an invention really quickly (like one to two turns quickly). It made it way more challenging and interesting than just "I build up speed over the half-mile that separates us and and punch him." It helps to not want to break the game in the first place.

It doesn't take a genius to go "ow, getting stabbed from a katana that I ran into fucking sucks, maybe I should work on not doing that in the near future."

Even animals can learn things through negative reinforcement, it's not "Veeky Forums grognard nature" to lower your exploits, it's being a functional sentient being who doesn't like being in a hospital for a few days.