Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[Max_Killjoy]

Sorry, but I fail to see how that answers the question about Tony Stark, let alone the question about special and magical. Could you go over it again in more detail? I may have missed something.

OK, to be blunt about it.

The DC and Marvel universes are perhaps the sinkiest, kincheniest examples of The Curse of the Kitchen Sink ever to sink a kitchen. Almost everything in the Marvel, DC, and most other "superheroic" comic settings is total "rule of kewl" nonsense. It's an example of taking the "We don't give even a single F if any of this makes a bit of sense, we're just slapping down whatever sounds cool on the page" option.

So that is exactly where the character with tech that "other people just can't use because we said so" fits in the breakdown of options I did -- in the one where making a damn bit of sense is thrown completely out the window. He's not an example of anything.

...

As for "special and magical", I have explained what I'm trying to say there so many times and so many ways over the last six months, I don't know how many other ways I can explain it at this point. No matter how carefully and meticulously I try to explain it, somebody takes some little part of it and runs off on some completely pointless tangent.

As I said earlier...

No matter how I word it someone gets confused as to what I mean, unless I write a damn treatise every time I post. And yet people want to give me grief when I wish language was more precise, and less mushy and overlapping and vague.

My point was that it's "magic" in the sense of "outside the realm of the normally possible in that reality". Of course, if I word it like that, then someone will chime in that because magic is part of that reality, it's perfectly normal in that reality, and we end up with a 15-page tangent of philosophical naval-gazing that ends up with some nimwit trying to prove that the world only exists in our imagination and that the chair holds you up because you believe in it or some nonsense.

I could just say that the fighter in that setting is tapping into the same forces as the spellcasters, just via different means, in order to do things that people normally can't do, but I've seen that blow up into a tangent too.

...

Now, if we wanted to make some sense out of a character with tech that was unique to him and no one else, we've got two choices:

1) They've so far been able to keep it out of everyone else's hands, but technically it's something anyone could use if they had the thing and the manual (or time to figure it out).
2) It's literally magic with a tech veneer or "theme", and is enchanted in such a way that only the enchanter can use it.