[The Willful Wanderer]

3. Super Strength (and simply Superhuman strength)

Superhuman strength is probably the second most common ‘super’ ability. In a way, this is a shame, because it is among the most difficult superhuman abilities to properly represent in all ways. While it does not have as many ‘riders’ as invulnerability, it carries a decent-sized set of its own. Additionally, it is nearly always given restrictions or limitations that either make little sense, or may as well not be present. This only worsens the situation that results from trying to give a character such an ability.

In the case of super strength, what it is not is actually about as good a place to start as what it is. After all, strength is a much more relative thing than resilience, and with the broad range of degrees out there, it’s neccessary, to a point, to define the ‘level’ of the super strength. For the purposes of this dissertation, we’ll consider super strength to be broken down into several levels. To a certain degree, these can be described by capability, but they may also be generally figured by measuring dead-lift capability- how much weight the being in question can raise from floor-level to arm’s-length overhead in one shot without stopping.

1. Barely Superhuman: Could punch through a brick wall with a bit of effort. Can lift and throw as much as one ton english, though only very short distances- maybe a few feet. Dead lifts slightly more, maybe a ton and a half.

2. Modestly Superhuman: This level of strength is possessed by a startlingly large number of superheroes and anime heroes. It generally indicates being physically strong enough to shatter concrete into a gravelly substance with a straight punch. Can probably dead-lift as much as six or seven tons english.

3. Greatly Superhuman: This level of strength allows feats such as supporting highways, holding up a barrier against a large rockslide, or breaking harder rocks and softer crystals barehanded. May dead-lift up in the range of twenty or twenty-two tons.

4. Excessively Superhuman: For most intents and purposes, this level of superhuman strength is no different from any level above it, for reasons that will be discussed later on in this entry. Can probably crush most hard crystals and gemstones, provided appropriate protection from own strength. Could potentially dead-lift eighty or ninety tons.

5. Incalculably Superhuman: In most situations, no character would be able to take advantage of the full extent of this strength. Could potentially crush coal into diamonds, and then the diamonds into diamond dust, provided appropriate protection from own strength and the diamonds in question. Likely dead-lifts several hundred tons.

6. Unlimited: For all intents and purposes, there is no feat of pure strength beyond this character, though without protection from their own power, or some unusual circumstances, they still will not be able to enact feats beyond the ‘excessively superhuman’ level. Could potentially crush matter into neutronium, or crumble neutronium, provided appropriate protection from own strength, the materials involved, and the heat generated. Can dead-lift weights that cannot reasonably be expected to exist in a liftable form- appropriate barbell and dumbell weights would instantly collapse into black holes.

Why have I divided the quality up like this, you may ask? Because these are the typical levels that such ability appears at. Level 1 super strength is possessed, basically as a minimum, by almost all (>75%) characters that appear on the Battlefield, and by nearly any physical combatant in a heavy-duty fantasy/sci-fi/superhero setting. It is, however, still barely within the range of human normal, though usually only under extremely strenuous (read: adrenaline-use) circumstances. Level 2 super strength, however, is markedly less common than level 3 super strength. Most super strong characters seem to default to level 3, and most characters where superhuman physical power is not a major character attribute simply don’t bother with super strength at all, excepting physical combatants, who tend to default to level 1. In most cases, when a player wants a character to be superhumanly strong, but does not wish to be outright excessive, the character will have level 3 super strength. Characters with this level of strength tend to still be fairly skilled combatants, but there is a notable tendency to rely on raw power over finesse and skill. The remainder of cases use level 4 or higher super strength. Cases of level 5 or 6 super strength are extremely rare among characters created by those with more experience, partly from the sheer ridiculousness sometimes caused by that grade of physical power, partly because that level of raw power starts becoming useless, and partly because it is very difficult to actually represent such capability in a character.

Now... what is super strength NOT, but often represented as?

Super strength is not the ability to catch excessively large objects moving at high speed. To a certain extent, it will aid with that, but if the character in question has no protection against the impact, they are going to be jelly, no matter how strong they are- a fifty-ton ball of ice and rock moving thousands or even hundreds of thousands of miles per hour has a HELL of a lot of momentum.
Super strength is not the ability to ignore leverage. You may be strong enough to lift a whole city block’s weight, but two things will still stop you from ripping one from out the ground and clobbering someone with it- One; the weight, focused on your standing surface, will drive you right through said surface. Two; the city block itself won’t withstand the leverage, and whatever part you grabbed is going to come off in your hand. And three; no matter how strong you are, you aren’t going to be able to find a way to bend your body that won’t prevent you from falling over from that amount of weight centered that far away from your feet.
Super strength is not invulnerability, or even resilience. Some methods of gaining super strength will incidentally cause improvements to durability, and increased resilience is necessary to actually apply the super strength without breaking your own body, but they are two separate things, and disabling one won’t disable the other.
Like invulnerability, super strength is not going to allow you to ignore pushes. Inertia still has effect. No matter how strong you are, if you’re 200 pounds, and you get hit by a twenty-ton train going a hundred miles per hour, you are going to be moved.

WARNING: RANT. YOU MAY SKIP THIS IF YOU WISH, IT IS NOT VITAL, THOUGH IT IS USEFUL
As an aside, you may note a theme here. This is a response to something I have seen a truly excessive amount of- people ignoring the fact that they’ve just been hit with an immense force. Too often, someone who’s invulnerable or super strong will take or catch a blow that has far more than enough force to send them flying, and will simply stand there. That cannot be done without some method of anchoring. Invulnerability and super strength do not grant immunity to inertia. They to not grant the ability to remove inertia. They never have, and never will. For anyone who doesn’t understand the concept of inertia, watch people bowling. When the bowling ball hits the pins, and they move rather than holding still, that’s inertia. If you start out with motion, that motion is gonna go somewhere.

At some point, I’ll probably address inertia on its own, because it seems to be an idea that is both poorly explained in school (that is, the teachers seem to try to bore you to death with it), and by-and-large uncomprehended. Hopefully, I can manage to make it actually interesting enough to pay attention to. But don’t hold your breath.
NOTICE: END OF RANT. IF YOU STOPPED READING, THIS IS WHERE TO START AGAIN.

At any rate, now that I’ve hit that tangent for a while, why don’t I get back to what I was supposed to be doing? Yeah, I thought that would make you happier.

Having defined what super strength is *not*, I am now left with defining what super strength is. This, surprisingly, is relatively simple. Super strength is the ability to exert force exceeding the levels of which a human being is normally capable. At least, this is the standard definition. Naturally, it does not always hold correctly. A super strong frog is not going to be able to exert the same level of force as a super strong human. Obviously, some sort of improvement is needed to the definition, so here it is: Super strength is the ability to exert force and/or power in excess of the levels of which the being with super strength should be capable.

For someone four feet tall with a build like a gathering of sticks, dead lifting half a ton is super strength. For someone five and a half feet tall with arms broader than footballs and even thicker-muscled legs, lifting half a ton is not super strength, but lifting a full ton is edging into that.

Hopefully this is enough to give the idea of what super strength really is. It had better be. Now comes the actually difficult part. Determining what super strength allows the character to *do*. However, you have to start small with something like this, so I will start by defining what normal strength allows a character to do.

Normally, strength determines a number of things about a character, through a variety of routes. The most obvious, of course, is how much weight a character can support. A stronger character will be able to support more weight- within a certain limit. Also, a stronger character will be able to hit harder within a certain limit. A character’s strength does a great deal to determine how far and high they can jump. It also determines how powerful of a grip they have, and it helps to determine the results of a contest of opposed force- within certain limits.

This certain limit, this key thing that has to be kept in mind when applying super strength, is the character’s body. If you wish to understand this, you have to look at a rather unusual example, one demonstrated subtly in a number of movies. Particularly, the case of someone punching somebody else, and injuring or even outright breaking their hand, because the target of the blow was protected by a piece of metal. Sometimes it is a funny event, sometimes an awe-inspiring event, and sometimes a troubling event. But how does it happen?

When a person is developing, growing up, they learn how tough, how ‘hard’ certain substances are. Because of this, they learn to expect them to give upon impact. Because of this, someone who is punching steel, and aware that they are punching steel, and furthermore aware that they are not necessarily strong enough to punch their hand through the steel in question, will pull their punch, instinctively, so that they do not break their hand upon striking. If you really feel the need to test this, get a large number of identical pillows, a friend, and a piece of hard wood (which you are less likely to break your hand hitting than a chunk of metal). Have your friend put the flat piece of hard wood into one of the pillows when you are not looking, and then cycle through them, punching each in turn. One of two things will happen- either you will punch the soft pillows with much less force than you normally would, expecting each to have the wood and therefore instinctively pulling your punch, or you will strike the pillow with the wood in it much harder than you would normally strike the wood, and your hand will hurt some (though not as much as it would, on account of the pillow padding the impact).

The upshot of this is that people are generally considerably stronger than they actually perceive themselves to be and act as though they are. However, they are unable to exert this strength properly without injuring themselves, excepting against very soft substances. This is something that martial artists have to work their way past- this is why for breaking cinder blocks or boards, a martial arts student will often be told to think *through* the target- to put the target of their punch beyond where the surface they are striking actually is. This helps to fool the instincts to a certain amount, so that the strike would be pulled *after* the point where it actually impacts, and the force is therefore greater, because the muscles have not acted to counteract their own force. When someone in a stressful situation acts beyond their normal strength, typically what this means is that they are temporarily abandoning these self-protective instincts, and exerting their true physical power. This is why extreme durability and invincibility seem to lend a certain degree of super strength to a person (or would). The downside of this is that the character in question does not have the usual ‘extra reserves’ of physical power for stressful situations- they can already safely exert their full strength without injuring themself, so the instincts to prevent self-injury are not in place.

There are other things that affect strength- and strength affects other things. To a certain degree, strength and speed are interrelated. A higher strength allows a greater ability to push against air, to shove off from the ground, and a higher speed, meaning a greater inertia, causes an increase in the force exerted- so, to a point, super speed and super strength are correlated. A character with either will be able to exert a degree of the other, within reason. And a character who is limited to low speeds cannot fully exert their strength in an effective manner- they’ll be great for lifting and pushing, but actually striking will not be as effective. Likewise, a character with super speed but low physical strength will have significant limits on their top speed and be very easy to stop (provided you are fast enough to get in the way), though they may still have astounding acceleration.

These factors apply to super strength just as much as they do to regular strength, but there are further limitations and connotations to super strength.

For instance, the concept of a super strong character being able to strike the ground and cause a fissure. This, quite simply, will not happen. A character striking a surface with that level of power will force their fist or foot into the ground (provided the limb can survive that level of stress), and may create a significant shockwave and cracks, but unless the surface in question is extremely brittle and/or dense, all they will create is a hole big enough to fit the limb that struck. This is another matter of inertia and resilience- if the surface is not resilient enough to withstand the blow, that which is striking it will simply punch through, much like the way a bullet will pass through thin metal, walls, or similar substances- the force is simply too much, and while some of it gets spent on whatever got in the way, the rest stays with the projectile, which keeps going. Therefore, some other force or ability must be applied in order for such a fissure to be created.

A super-strong character ripping a mountain free of the ground, or an island, or any large mass of land, will similarly not happen. Even if the character is resilient enough to withstand the strain, the rock and dirt is simply not held together well enough to match the stress of that much power, or of its own weight, and all the lifter will actually come up with is two handfuls of dirt and/or rock.

One of the most important instances is when a super strong character strikes another character. To a certain point, it is reasonable for things to break and the defender to be flung away by the force of the blow. But after passing a significant level of power and/or speed, the amount of force will be too much, the area of the fist or foot too small, and the recipient of the blow not durable enough, and the limb will be thrust through the body of the defender, leaving a (likely very messy) hole.

Finally, and this is a point that many people seem to miss, just because a character is capable of exerting enough force to lift something, does not mean their body can withstand the strain. Your character may be able to exert enough force to juggle trains or wads of neutronium, but after a certain point, the materials of which the body are made of are receiving more stress than they themself can handle, and bone will splinter, muscle will be crushed, joints will snap off or be impacted into solid masses, and your character has just killed him or her self.

While there is no exacting guideline as to how to measure these things, applying a modicum of reasonability and sense will make them much more believable. Most of the more ‘believable’ reasons for strength involve the use of ‘extra’ forces, such as chi, magic, or other supernatural or extraordinary materials/energies/powers to exert this force- for instance, Superboy’s ‘tactile telekinesis’. Though, this is a somewhat wobbly example- it allows him to ignore inertia, due to the nature of telekinesis (oops).

There are, however, at least a couple of other believable reasons. One that is used with some actual frequency is having the character be extraordinarily tough, usually from having lived in high gravity environments, or simply being naturally more physically durable. This usually intertwines with a higher physical density, lending the character a certain level of high durability. While this is okay for the lower levels of super-strength, at the higher levels it becomes much less believable, as there is a point after which the character will simply collapse into a black hole on account of their density. The other one of which I am aware is the use of extreme physical training, though, as noted, this is not something capable of accounting for super strength beyond level one.

Naturally, a character who is simply physically larger will have a higher level of strength, both super and non. It would be unreasonable to expect an elephant to be less physically strong than a normal human being in a comparable state of health- there’s simply so much more muscle mass there that it is a silly proposition. Of course, again, the mass and volume of the being in question alters the aspect of leverage, making it another hard thing to define.

Unfortunately, the greater number of super strong beings in fiction have their strength either totally unexplained, or given some sort of glib reason, such as ‘He’s an alien’, or ‘She’s been training a lot’, or even just ‘well... you know... he just... um.... is.’ It is better not to go this way, and to ‘save the suspension of disbelief in your character’ for other, more unique character traits and abilities.

Some reasonable things to consider when creating a super strong character:

Why is the character super strong? Does whatever state they derive this power from have other affects on their state, such as high durability or constant self-injury? How aware is the character of the fact that they are excessively strong? Does it still hurt for them to hit something particularly hard, even if they break it instead of their hand? Can exercise improve this strength? Why? How? If the character is super strong because of magic, or ki use, or something of the sort, how much do they have to focus to maintain that super strength? How costly is it to them, in terms of energy? Does the super strength come accompanied by super endurance, or do they get tired just as fast as they would without it? Does the super strength show in their build? Why? How? Are they proud of it? Afraid of it? Are they only capable of producing it in times of extreme stress? If no, are they capable of being even stronger in times of stress? How did it affect the character throughout the time they had this strength?

Super strength, like invulnerability, can be a very tasty-looking power- but it is very hard to apply it correctly, and when one does, it turns out to be considerably less attractive without investing in certain other powers to avoid having it go to waste. Any time you are tempted to add/build in super strength to a character, you should look very, VERY carefully at the character concept in your head, and try to figure out if it really belongs with the character, or if you’re just adding it because a) everyone else has it or b) it just seems so damn useful.

[ January 17, 2006, 02:24 AM: Message edited by: Reiko, Yume, Selene, et al ]