In an otherwise normal modern day setting, many of the patients of a certain mental hospital woke up one morning finding out they have superpowers.
Keeping with venerable comic book tradition, of course their powers are all somehow related to their personal fuckups/mental illnesses/disorders/issues.
This is due to some people fucking around with consciousness based reality warping technology founded on misunderstood psychic alien science.
Which comic book superpower would go with which kind of mental illness?
Hardmode: what sort of character would that produce?
Thomas Hill
>Traditional super-strength, invulnerability, flight, big strapping chin - narcissism
>Telepathy - paranoia
>Pyrokinesis - pyromania
>Teleportation - kleptomania
>Regeneration - addictive personality disorder
John Gutierrez
Recently I've had the idea of a bizarre and weirdo power: objective morality manipulation. You can manipulate what ethical decisions are objectively right and wrong. I guess this would imply you could summon angels and demons to do your bidding. This would probably be a bit of a mindscrew about a delusion that your god or Jesus or speak to god.
Leo Hill
>when you make a fake magazine cover but you don't know that you're not very good at English so you don't think that you need to have anyone else proofread it before you post it
Gavin Kelly
>The voices! They want me to really make sure I don't forget bread at the market! Aaaah!
Jackson Flores
Isn't it a bit underwhelming to give the paranoid telepathy? With all the other cases you could see them abusing the shit out of their powers. With this guy, he'll just be cured.
>O-oh. I guess people weren't plotting to hurt me after all.
Ayden Williams
Yes, because that's how mental illness works.
Evan Gomez
No it gos deeper, people know you can read there minds and are thinking wrong things to misslead you!!!!!!!
Gabriel Butler
I once thought of using this on a lovecraftian horror style game.
PC were to enter a mental house because reasons. And the patients were puzzle type of fights, each using their disease.
A setting like OP would be closer to Watchman than to Superman.
Caleb Adams
Teleportation would be claustrophobia
Kleptomania could be pocket dimension, able to put things in a pocket space where no one else could get them
>Dissosiative Identity Disorder Make duplicates Hulk or Jekyll/Hyde powers (this could also be from bipolar disorder)
>ADHD Superspeed
>ADD multitasking
>Schizophrenia hallucinations and reality warping (maybe keep it small scale, like summoning familiars, or slowly warping their home)
Ian Anderson
That depends on what kind of teleportation. If you can only bamf yourself away, it fits both of those disorders. But if you can bamf objects to you, that's a kleptomaniac's dream.
Ryder Gray
>Auditory Hallucinations: Telepathy.
You actually CAN hear other peoples' thoughts. But you're not always sure. You've got three internal monologues and someone else's thoughts in your head. Can you figure out which is which?
Julian Stewart
Depression: Nullification of other powers in a radius around you.
Evan Bennett
What about OCD?
Jaxon Butler
>With this guy, he'll just be cured. Depends on the strength of his telepathy. He might actually influence all those around him to start plotting against him.
Kinda like the reverse of Phantoms, where a telepathic creature became a monster because it absorbed people that were scared of it. People saw it as the devil, and it learned the world from them, so it became the devil.
His mind sees a world out to get him, and that's just what he creates. Still a bit underwhelming, but he could lash out as a villain with additional telepathic talents, I suppose.
Brayden Stewart
>Depression Man >has the power to create cavities in the Earth of any size or shape he desires >gets a job working freelance for construction and mining firms >meets up with geologists all around the globe to do experiments with them in his spare time; our knowledge of the Earth’s interior is massively expanded >gets his life together and is able to live quite comfortably on his billions of dollars gained through the above That turned out happier than I imagined when I started writing it.
Christian Bell
Ever read Doom Patrol?
It's basically this.
Jaxon Miller
Sounds right up the superpower wikia's alley, where it can shine proudly next to "cooking proficiency" and "baseline human physiology"
Cameron Ortiz
>depression man >happy Nah. He'll take those jobs because someone asks him to, but he won't really care. He'll sit on his throne of money and be no happier (or sadder, angrier, etc) for it. Within a year he'll commit suicide by digging straight down.
Carter Young
What would autism give?
Nathaniel James
the ability to get gf
Bentley Barnes
Cancer
Evan Parker
If you're down for a big fucking read then 'Worm' is a Webnovel by J.C McCrae (Screenname Wildbow) which has an extremely similar hook to this.
Anthony Sanders
For bonus points, it even has it's own tabletop system made by the author of the book, though it's pretty much an eternal WIP.
Logan Torres
What if paranoia gave you telekinesis instead of telepathy? You're convinced that someone is tampering with your property whenever you're not paying attention, but it's actually your own subconscious. Autism would probably give you no *direct* powers, but instead make you a Tinker from Worm and let you build robots or power armor or weird airships. Depression could give you a variety of powers, depending on the exact nature of your ennui. Some would be able to negate enemy powers, some would have invincibility or regeneration, some would have raw destructive ability like that mining guy described above, some would be able to create temporal nonsense like slowing other people down. Stasis fields? Bipolar people can heal others' injuries... sometimes.
Hunter Rogers
>Autism would probably give you no *direct* powers, but instead make you a Tinker from Worm and let you build robots or power armor or weird airships. Not all autistic people are savants.
Nathan Green
No, but even the people who aren't tend to develop weird obsessions and become hyperknowledgeable within those narrow domains.
Asher Bennett
>CDO Ftfy MIND CONTROL
Gavin Reed
here you guys go. Weaver Dice's 'trigger' system is incredibly great at doing this kind of thing, with the underlying theme of every power basically being that it relates to the problem that caused it, but doesn't fix it and normally makes it worse in the long run.
Also, 100% everyone here should read Worm. It was fantastic, and the sequel is starting out stronger than the original. the Ward hype train is real.
Brody Wright
>When you've never worked graphic design/type for any marketing people and don't understand they don't care if the "the" should be there because it looks better without it It's nice that you tried.
Caleb Sanders
>When you've never worked as a consumer for yourself and don't understand you'll just buy something for yourself because they, which is also you, don't care about words and will buy it for Supergirl At least try, dude.
Justin Ross
As others have more-or-less said, you can't reason a delusional person out of being delusional, and you can't just "turn off" paranoia by proving to someone that it's not justified.
Xavier Watson
>it has super girl >it looks better without it >that what marketers care about is if people will want it not grammar >oh wait it's my exact point
Joseph Peterson
I always thought Paranoia would give someone clairvoyance rather than Telepathy. Especially if your a paranoid schizophrenic. That way you can always spy on people and have that "eyes in the back of your head" syndrome. Inevitably the patient would become reliant on this power as a crutch and it would only exacerbate their paranoia as they see/hear exactly what people do behind their back with other people. Plus it feeds into the concept of them being so afraid of Big Brother that they become their own fear to cope.
I'd feel Bulimics would get Super Speed via enhanced metabolism so they can literally purge the calories off by running or straight horror power like spitting up concentrated projectile stomach acid that could melt through anything like the Exorcist.
With all the trans/otherkin hysteria going around I'd expect them to have either shapeshifting powers or some form of illusion ability that allows them to "pass" as what they want. Imagine bringing a woman home and then she transforms into an ugly ham beast man mid-orgasm because they lost control of their shifting/illusion.
A main idea I had was a person with Manic Depressive disorder having electrical powers. He'd have two modes, On and Off. When he's manic (ON) he can discharge electricity via lightning bolts, fly, and magnetize things but he suffers from Smiling Bob syndrome while in this form. When he's depressive (Off) he drains energy, primarily electrical from the surronding areas and causes people to become lethargic until they pass out. Once he's absorbed enough energy he goes back to ON mode and repeats the process once he runs out of energy and/or has a depressive mood swing again.
Bentley Hill
The problem with paranoid schizophrenics is that their suspicion that people are out to get them isn't rational, it's symptomatic of a far deeper issue. No amount of proof you could give them would ever truly convince them of that.
Fates Worse than Death (and alternative cyberpunk game) has an iconic character named Tavin Bean. She was a brilliant little Street Kid with severe paranoia who tried joining a gang called the Omniscients (a group of people obsessed with sensory enhancement technology/biomods) in hopes that if she gained enough sense upgrades she'd be able to "truly know" if people are after her. Unfortunately, the more upgrades she got and never found anything (because obviously, there isn't anything) the more she merely became convinced that she's dealing with enemies that are more secretive and powerful, who are merely toying with her. The more that happened, the more desperate she became to acquire more sense upgrades so she could find them, but they always remain "a step ahead". By the time of the game, Tavin Bean is likely the most individually knowledgeable/aware person in the entire Manhattan Ghetto, and one of the most aware in the WORLD, but is so crazy that getting anything out of her is essentially impossible. Even FINDING her is an epic task because she's instantly aware of basically anything that goes on in Manhattan, naturally assumes that anyone who wants to meet her is looking to hurt her, and remains several steps ahead of them. Only the other Omniscients have good enough sense tech and information to be able to find her, which they do every once in a while in order to leave her gifts of clean clothing, food and medicine, because they feel guilty for having destroyed her mind like that.
Carter Murphy
Also: she's probably doomed since it's only a matter of time before her paranoia becomes so severe she begins thinking the regular Omniscient care packages are part of some conspiracy to poison her and just stops eating.
James Nguyen
>when you actually do graphic design and marketing for a living and some fag on a Laotian ant-farming BBS tries to start shit with you for no reason but they don't know what they're talking about and focus on the wrong parts so you're left wondering what they were trying to say
Asher Johnson
>Smiling Bob syndrome you mean he has an erection that lasts for more than 4 hours?
Mason Morris
>Laotian ant-farming BBS kekle meh pekle
Nicholas Wood
No, but unlike normies they tend towards savantism, I'm autistic and can barely count or even think sometimes, but I'm an aspiring author and everyone I've ever shown my work to says it's on a professional, university-tier level, or at least exceedingly high quality. It's all I'm good at, and I'm sure that while many are balanced and well-adjusted, there's an abundance of autists out there with their own 'specialties' and obsessions.
The powers would probably vary wildly, and revolve around the source of the autist's obsession, an autist obsessed with woodcarving might gain the ability to mentally shape it, an autist obsessed with computers might gain the ability to mentally interface with them, an autist obsessed with /pol/itics might gain the ability to mentally perceive someone's ethnic ancestry, and so on.
Elijah Gray
Shouldn't you be 18 to post here? Unless you aren't, I really wouldn't take pride in your writing being "university-tier".
Zachary Nguyen
Super speed of course. They can spend weeks of subjective time in ever more elaborate rituals.
Parker Rivera
>Telepathy - paranoia I would have picked something like invisibility, or super speed for a paranoiac (Can't hurt you if they can't see you/catch you)
>Teleportation - kleptomania Telekinesis or magnetic powers would be a better fit IMO