What can Muggles do?

[Mechalich]

Surprised that no one's brought up the trope yet- it's at least tangentially related.

In most narratives, the watchword for the common folk is 'strength in numbers'. Or, to put it another way, 'quantity has a quality all its own'. Generally speaking, there are gonna be a whole bloody lot more of the common folk than the super-types (whether 'super-human', super-natural' or whatever), and humans, no matter how ordinary, are terrifyingly good at figuring out how to kill things.

Even Saitama, for all his game-breaking power, isn't outside the realm of possibility for mundanes to put down; at least, not entirely. It's implied pretty strongly that he still needs to breathe (cf. when he gets blasted to the moon) and he still sleeps, whether he has any actual need to do so or not. Put some decent surveillance on him (as far as I can tell, his travel speeds are still observable), sneak in and remove his CO2 detectors, turn the gas on, and leave. Even if he's totally immune to poison (which is certainly possible, given that this is Saitama), not having any breatheable air in his apartment while he's asleep is gonna do him in.

Muggles also talk to one another- in a modern setting, the level of problem-solving available on any subject that you can get enough people interested is ludicrous. Almost nothing that you can get enough (bored) people looking at will remain any kind of a secret, at least not for very long.

So... what can muggles do? Piss them off enough, or get them curious enough, and there's almost nothing they can't kill, almost no secret they can't discover.

... all of this with the caveat that yeah, there are power levels beyond what mundanes can have any perceptible effect on.

Strength in numbers is certainly a thing, but there are limits to how far that goes. In the most basic sense, if we're all fighting with swords, only so many guys can surround a person at once, if your hypothetical superswordsman can't be harmed by that many and never gets tired (or regens fast enough) then no number of people makes a difference. There's a seen in Sword Art Online where this point is made explicitly by having the stupidly over-leveled protagonist Kirito stand there and let some goons hit him for a while but he fails to take any damage because his auto-recovery is higher than their combined DPS output.

Functionally, there's a point at which extreme personal power becomes political power. To quote Petey from Schlock Mercenary: "I am a foreign power." Any being powerful enough to take on say 100000 - 1000000+ of their contemporaries just isn't playing on the individuals only stage anymore, they're a political entity in an individually shaped package. Exactly at what point this happens varies from system to system and setting to setting of course, but it is a thing and settings where such individuals exist are different from settings where they don't. And this is still different from settings where literal invincible gods like Superman (Saitama's a bad example because One Punch Man is a gag comedy, Superman works much better) walk among the masses and could, if they so choose, totally rewrite society wholly according to their own wishes - something Superman has done on numerous occasions in various alternate universes.

[NichG]

At one point for a game I had to calculate the rate at which an individual godlike entity with supreme but local combat power could kill off people who were trying to avoid it. Lets say it uses 6 second rounds, can teleport with one action, and can kill everything within say a 30ft radius with another action. The Earth has about 25 million square miles of habitable land - that corresponds to about 800 billion instances of the entity's kill zone. There's about 5 million rounds in a year. Assuming people didn't move, and were uniformly distributed over the Earth's surface, the entity would require 320000 years to totally wipe the Earth's habitable regions of life. If instead the entity teleported to people individually and killed them, one person every 12 seconds, then it would take 700 years for it to kill every human alive today - in which time, trillions more humans would be produced.

It cannot be killed by any number of humans, but neither could it out-damage humanity's collective regeneration rate.

In essence, a fight between it and the collective resources of humanity is meaningless - neither side can possibly achieve their goals if they decide to have the goal 'kill the other via brute force'. Could that entity wipe out humanity by being smarter about it? Possibly so - but then, it has more to do with the attribute 'being smart' than the attribute 'being an absolute combat god'.

[TeChameleon]

Strength in numbers is certainly a thing, but there are limits to how far that goes. *snip*

Which was addressed by my statement that there were power levels beyond what mundanes can have any perceptible effect on. That being said, 'strength in numbers' can be remarkably strong when those numbers start going into the billions.

Also, when raw power starts translating into political/social power by simple virtue of its existence, things start getting very interesting, since, unless a being's desires are simplistic to the point of its sapience being questionable, straight force will not be able to achieve those desires. Er, not sure how well I phrased that... 'can't get everything you want with a fist unless you're rock-stupid'..? Eh, whatever. Point being, once we've got the godlike monsters out of the arena of pure combat, we're back into 'what muggles can do'. For example, Goku might be able to bitchslap worlds out of existence, but he likes to eat, and somebody's gotta grow, prepare, and cook all that food, something he cannot do by himself, no matter how much he flexes, glows, grunts and screams at the landscape. And with that need for other people comes a measure of control over the godlike combat monsters.

TL:DR? Nobody can fight all the time, no matter how godlike they are, and when they're not fighting, there's stuff they're gonna want that they need other people to provide. Once that happens, said 'other people' are going to have a certain amount of say in what the super-fighters do or do not do.

[awa]

but that particular entity is being wildly inefficient, you don't need to be clever just dont go out of your way to be stupid. Most of the time humans live in cities with a lot of people very close together so no need to kill them 1 at a time. If it teleports into a foot ball stadium and activates its power its just killed dozens of people in one shot and likely killed hundreds more through panic. Teleport into a plane and do that you have killed every one on the plane and anyone the plane lands on. Jump into government buildings and wipe out the leadership panic spreads. It doesnt even need to do these things on purpose random luck will get most of these things eventually. Bare minimum force multipliers like starting fires can devastate cities, farms, forests, and oil fields if their is an entity ready to interfere with emergency work. Tons of dead bodies also spread disease and with the devastation to governments there will be no effective system for dealing with these.

Human society collapses rapidly, millions starve as industry collapses and war start over limited resources and just the fractious nature of humans. Humans need a lot of things to survive and their are a lot of problems that will rapidly erupt if we are forced to abandon the cities and hide in the technically habitable wilderness.

I mean its unlikely such a creature would manage to exterminate all of the humans but if a few terrified primitives hiding in a jungle, disease infested scrabbling for bare minimum survival is all that's left its clear who won the conflict.

TeChameleon
yheah but do what i say or i will hurt you and your family and if you still wont i will find someone who will is a very compelling argument, its worked for tyrants through out history and those were mere men you could in theory fight.

evil goku wants a five star dinner he can rob a bank and buy it, or he can simply threaten to hurt the cook if he does not comply. (hes also a bad example cause he is both a farmer a hunter and a fishermen able to prepare his own food)

[NichG]

but that particular entity is being wildly inefficient, you don't need to be clever just dont go out of your way to be stupid. Most of the time humans live in cities with a lot of people very close together so no need to kill them 1 at a time. If it teleports into a foot ball stadium and activates its power its just killed dozens of people in one shot and likely killed hundreds more through panic. Teleport into a plane and do that you have killed every one on the plane and anyone the plane lands on. Jump into government buildings and wipe out the leadership panic spreads. It doesnt even need to do these things on purpose random luck will get most of these things eventually.

The point about running the numbers is exactly that 'random luck will get most of these things eventually' is false. That's a perceptual bias - because we as humans have a very clear perception of particular things that are important to our lives, we assume by default that those things will feature almost immediately in any other event of significance that occurs. When someone talks about missile threats or terrorism, its natural that we first imagine the things that would most strongly influence us. But in reality, those points make up an extremely small portion of the whole of human civilization. If there are, for example, 100 world leaders whose deaths alone would cause a significant disaster, the entity will on average take about ten years of killing someone every 12 seconds before it ends up finding even one.

In order to break-even with humanity's growth rate, the entity would need to basically sustain access to regions of population density of 1 person per ~100ft^2. Tokyo, for example, is 6000 people per km^2 - that's about 0.1 people per 100ft^2. The highest population density city in the world is Manilla, at about 41000 people per km^2 - which is still below break-even. Of course you think of football stadiums and planes and so on, but those are a vanishingly small portion of human timelines - they're salient moments of a human's life where they experience a high density, but they're not representative of how people are actually distributed.

You mention that the extensive deaths would create a load on the system that humanity can't bear, but humanity's death rate is 55 million people a year - more than this entity would be killing by a factor of 20.

The point of this example is to show how some automatic assumptions we hold about the importance of things are way out of whack. The discussion in this thread over the last page or so has been about how the mere existence of superman would totally warp the world around him. But this example shows that, no, the mere existence of supreme force isn't enough for it to have an effect. It's the willful direction of force - acting smart - which determines the impact, much more so than the existence of the potential for force itself.

And that's why arguments like 'well, Saitama could take over the world' or 'well, Superman could take over the world' aren't really a discussion about their power sets - it's a discussion about their psychology, as well as their ability to comprehend the structures of the world in a sufficient way as to sustain control. Those attributes are being taken as given in order to lionize the importance of the powers, but those attributes are actually quite significant in distinguishing between muggles which have a large impact on human civilization and those who don't - they're not something to be taken for granted. And in most cases, those power sets are simply a convenience to make stories fit within the kinds of time-scales associated with most storytelling. Superman, with the knowledge and comprehension and desire to use his powers to effectively conquer the world, could still conquer the world without his powers - it would just take decades rather than months. And Lex Luthor as his primary antagonist demonstrates that exactly.

[Florian]

Most of the time humans live in cities with a lot of people very close together so no need to kill them 1 at a time.

Not true. Smaller nations have less need to concentrate the infrastructure, so the ratio of city dweller to country dweller is different, at times with a 10:1 ratio in favor of the country dwellers.

Consider this: Germany is the second most densely populated country, but none of the major cities, not even the capital city, manages to sport a population that comes close to London or Paris (not even together), let's not start comparing them to U.S. cities. It´s similar in Austria, Switzerland, Poland and so on. The difference in infrastructure also means completely decentralized industrial centers, power and water supplies and so on. Same reason that nuclear weapons are seen as more or less threatening by different nations.

[Frozen_Feet]

And that's why I repeatedly make the point that you can't just ignore Saitama's comedic qualities if you put him in another setting.

If someone takes a picture of him punching a tsunami? It's infinitely more plausible in a setting like GitS that such a picture is faked, compared to there being a random guy with indefinite strength.

Someone notices an anomaly in the weather patterns? Why would they jump to this non-descript guy being the explanation? Saitama doesn't consistently go around changing the weather and there is no consistency between his feats when he does so!

Someone directly witnessing him? It's more plausible for them to question their senses than accept what's happening at face value. If that's dumb, then I have news for you: being dumb in this particular way is normal for humans. We are fairly good at stubbornly holding to our worldviews even in face of contradicting evidence.

Someone notices he one-punches a cyborg? They aren't going to extrapolate world-threatening force from that, because it is impossible to do that within constraints of realistic physics. It is a MASSIVE leap of logic from "this guy beat a cyborg" to even "this guy could survive an artillery shell to the face". We already know this from his own story. He was put through standardized testing. It came out as a false negative, because Saitama doesn't consistently demonstrate his upper level of strenght, he does not and cannot explain his strength in any plausible way and he utterly lacks most other qualities you would expect from a true Superman. When he is not one-punching monsters, he's the guy who worries about Saturday evening sales, overwaters his cactus, fails at videogames and cannot catch a single mosquito. It didn't even occur to him to compete in a martial arts tournament before someone else specifically pushed him to doing it.

[Rater202]

saitama didn't set a false negative.

It's noted during the physical testing that he set records(implicitly by a wide margin) in every category.

His final score was low becuase he completly and utterly flunked the written test.

[Lord Raziere]

Depends on what kind of supernatural creature your talking about.

something like, zombies, orcs and goblins? they'd be extinct to normal humans with normal intelligence. so would most vampires, werewolves might last longer but they'd die sooner or later. anything with regeneration but with weakness to fire, dead, anything with known weaknesses or lack of proper use of weaponry and organization are dead. fae weak to iron? dead. if there is a known easily used nonmagic method to kill them, humans will use it and things will die until they are gone.

it gets harder in the case of things like giants or dragons. thing is, we're kind of like mice to these things, and guess what mice are still around, but if if we catch a mice they're dead, or in some cases a pet. if they existed, we'd be rats living in the walls of their homes, they wouldn't be able to kill us all because they'd have other things to do, but we wouldn't be able to kill them directly, because since when has a mouse ever killed a human directly? the best individual communities would hope for is not bothering them too much so they don't call their human exterminators to use some method of killing us or hiding so that they don't swoop down and grab us for a snack, if we get tech advanced enough, possibly engineering a giant/dragon disease to infect them with and watch them die in droves while hoping they don't have giant doctors.

another case is low level supermen, as in worlds where their powers don't destroy cities. often these guys are highly variable in what they can do, their individual magic and abilities so varied and unique that the general strategy is to basically kill them with greater numbers or send so many people at them that one of them figures out the tactic need to kill them and executes it from sheer inevitability ala monkeys on typewriters. this applies to low level wizardry as well.

mid level supermen (people who can destroy cities) are basically walking nukes. for these, the strategy of open combat is no longer viable, as they can hold any city they are in hostage and thus kill millions of people if they are aware and given time to respond, thus assassination is the tactic you must use, and kill them before they can do a single thing. hope that poison or slitting their throat in their sleep works! or your screwed.

planet level supermen (people who can destroy planets) are basically mid level supermen but worse. with these guys you have to make sure you don't cause any trouble while on the same planet as them before killing them, or they can respond faster than you to anything, they can sense disturbances across the globe, you better hope you can catch this living god while they are asleep and kill them without using normal methods, because if you can't, you screwed in so many ways, and if you can't well, your just going to have live with the threat of destruction based one guys whim hanging over your head.

anything beyond that is basically academic. evil Goku can destroy your entire universe in an instant, so all normal humans are basically ants to easily squash. worse, they could decide to destroy the entire universe for reasons completely unrelated to you happening on the other side of the universe that you have no say in or knowledge of and could never really respond in time to prevent. Evil Goku levels of supernatural creature is something normal humans pray to appease once a day then move on with their day and if today is the end of the world, whelp you did your best, it was a good run for existence.

basically,normal humanity can probably kill a lot of things near its level of power, but past a certain threshold its more likely the best chance of survival is not killing it, but learning to live with it, or under it, because the alternative is too horrible.

[Frozen_Feet]

saitama didn't set a false negative.

It's noted during the physical testing that he set records(implicitly by a wide margin) in every category.

His final score was low becuase he completly and utterly flunked the written test.

1) I already pointed this out.

2) He did get a false negative when you consider that he is stronger than the other S-class heroes and the Hero Association correctly ranked Genos as an S-Rank. Pri-Pri-Prisoner makes an even better comparison point, because he essentially has the same powers as Saitama, just weaker.

If Hero Association can recognize Pri-Pri-Prisoner as S-level but cannot recognize Saitama as such, then they failed to extrapolate Saitama's true level of strength from his test results.

[Florian]

@Lord Raziere:

You're falling not the trap that NichG pointed out: You look at it from a purely individual perspective.

[Lord Raziere]

@Lord Raziere:

You're falling not the trap that NichG pointed out: You look at it from a purely individual perspective.

I'm not.

Dead races:
weaknesses are shared, armies develop strategies and refine them to perfection, while every monster are bound by certain kinds of stupidity and behaviors that make them predictable. their power as a species simply doesn't outweigh their weaknesses, especially when humans already drive real world animals to extinction that are stronger than them. I could have no trouble seeing entire societies of people getting so good at killing these things that hunting supernatural creatures would be for sport, in evolution, versatility beats niche every time.

Giant races:
if we're living in a world where these exist, evolution is vastly different enough that its more likely that the humans in this world are just incredibly small and the giants and dragons are just big to the humans there. and as a society, do mouses dominate over us? no. they hide, they cower, they run, maybe humans could organize, but so can the giants. and so in a world where those giants exist, we wouldn't have the evolutionary opportunity to become dominant in the first place. humans would be the mice of that world, they'd consider it completely normal to be living in the margins of the giants society that vastly out powers them.

lower superhumans:
you cannot generalize what their powers are, while it is an advantage to these X-men like people in that it allows for a wide variety of small tactics and unpredictability, warfare is not built on individual strength but on a greater strategy and united work, organization, communication. their varied powers makes it hard for them to come up with united long term widespread strategies, greater numbers and enough bullets will kill these people one way or another

Mid to high superhumans:
at this point, your not dealing with war anymore, your dealing with nuclear politics. sure the entire world can decide this or that, but this one guy is effectively a nation all on their own because they can single-handedly nuke this or that, open warfare against this person is stupid, it actively is endangering the lives of not just everyone you love, but every single being within a hundred mile radius at BEST. how many cities are willing to lose to kill this one person? and thats assuming there is ONLY ONE OF THESE. if there are more, that complicates the situation, makes it more dangerous and it doesn't really matter if there are 1 or 1000 of these, your treading lightly around them regardless.

Evil Goku:
At this point whether its the individual level or not is meaningless. you only need one of these to endanger literally everything that exists. if there is more, screw everything I guess. society is at the mercy of this individual not snapping their fingers to end everything. does it matter if there is two? No, your screwed regardless of which one snaps first.

there is not a bit of considering the individual level here at all. I'm being purely general. considering the individual involves making an individual with certain preferences, scenarios, story, in a certain situation with certain background with a certain goal and so on. I have not even begun considering the individual.

[awa]

And that's why I repeatedly make the point that you can't just ignore Saitama's comedic qualities if you put him in another setting.

If someone takes a picture of him punching a tsunami? It's infinitely more plausible in a setting like GitS that such a picture is faked, compared to there being a random guy with indefinite strength.

Someone notices an anomaly in the weather patterns? Why would they jump to this non-descript guy being the explanation? Saitama doesn't consistently go around changing the weather and there is no consistency between his feats when he does so!

Someone directly witnessing him? It's more plausible for them to question their senses than accept what's happening at face value. If that's dumb, then I have news for you: being dumb in this particular way is normal for humans. We are fairly good at stubbornly holding to our worldviews even in face of contradicting evidence.

Someone notices he one-punches a cyborg? They aren't going to extrapolate world-threatening force from that, because it is impossible to do that within constraints of realistic physics. It is a MASSIVE leap of logic from "this guy beat a cyborg" to even "this guy could survive an artillery shell to the face". We already know this from his own story. He was put through standardized testing. It came out as a false negative, because Saitama doesn't consistently demonstrate his upper level of strenght, he does not and cannot explain his strength in any plausible way and he utterly lacks most other qualities you would expect from a true Superman. When he is not one-punching monsters, he's the guy who worries about Saturday evening sales, overwaters his cactus, fails at videogames and cannot catch a single mosquito. It didn't even occur to him to compete in a martial arts tournament before someone else specifically pushed him to doing it.

Maybe initially but when scientists try and find out what happened to that tsunami they are going to have data and it will eventually push them in the right direction particularly in a setting like ghost in the shell where they will likely have millions of cameras watching a tsunami even if they dont all see the punch directly.

yes if the monster is completely mindless just a simple animal randomly bouncing around it wont be very effective but if it has human level intellect even a dumb human its kill count will be utterly massive if it stick to large gatherings and planes. And people panic look what happens when a plane goes down what happens when every plane goes down? look what happens after a mass shooting what if a much larger kill happens every hour? Panic is a massive force multiplier, if it makes any effort say by starting fires in oil refiners he can probably destroy every refiner on earth in a week. Wipe out the oil supply you wipe out the food supply of industrial nation then their population collapses. Are industrial system requires a lot of thing to function this monster if it is sapient can figure it out to even if it takes it longer then it took me.

What happens if it makes the decision to kill any world leader/ government official it sees on tv just pops in and kills it them, this would cripple most governments who then are unable to provide the disaster relief services.

Terror, starvation, terrorism against target crippled nation states these would kill vast swaths of the population

[Cluedrew]

To NichG: I love your last couple of posts in this thread. I have nothing else to say at this time.

[Rater202]

1) I already pointed this out.

2) He did get a false negative when you consider that he is stronger than the other S-class heroes and the Hero Association correctly ranked Genos as an S-Rank. Pri-Pri-Prisoner makes an even better comparison point, because he essentially has the same powers as Saitama, just weaker.

If Hero Association can recognize Pri-Pri-Prisoner as S-level but cannot recognize Saitama as such, then they failed to extrapolate Saitama's true level of strength from his test results.

Rank in the Heroes' Association seems to based not just on actual power but intellect(otherwise why have a written test) ability to game the system, and how popular/marketable you are.

It doesn't matter how much stronger than everyone else Saitama is, he flunked the written test, shows no interest in playing politics, and he's just a bald guy in a goofy suit so in-universe he's not very marketable. Combine this with how nobody knows about all of the major threats he took out early on...

And even then, he's allowed to sit in on S-Rank Hero meetings specifically because he's only not S-Rank on technicallities.

[Frozen_Feet]

Saitama is allowed in those meetings because several S-class heroes become his best palls, not because his powers are accurately known to the association. Furthermore, we know for fact that several S-class heroes were given rank based on merit or perceived merit alone, without ever taking the test (King is the obvious example, because if they had adequately tested him, he wouldn't be a hero) . Which again highlights how, if they'd correctly extrapolated his strength, he wouldn't be a low rank.

All of those others things I already noted & discussed about.

[Rater202]

Saitama is allowed in those meetings because several S-class heroes become his best palls, not because his powers are accurately known to the association. Furthermore, we know for fact that several S-class heroes were given rank based on merit or perceived merit alone, without ever taking the test (King is the obvious example, because if they had adequately tested him, he wouldn't be a hero) . Which again highlights how, if they'd correctly extrapolated his strength, he wouldn't be a low rank.

All of those others things I already noted & discussed about.

In the very first meeting Saitama sat in on, it was said by the old martial arts guy that he was there becuase he was only not an S-Rank on technicalities and that based on his skills he'd be there sooner rather than later.

[TeChameleon]

In the very first meeting Saitama sat in on, it was said by the old martial arts guy that he was there becuase he was only not an S-Rank on technicalities and that based on his skills he'd be there sooner rather than later.

True, but Silver Fang's opinion was in the minority- he had gauged Saitama's strength as being S-rank-level even at that point, although he still underestimated him considerably. Saitama mostly just tagged along with Genos (seemingly out of nothing more than curiousity), and nobody seemed to care that much, at least not enough to fuss at Genos about it. I suspect it's (the?) The Doctor principle- act like you belong somewhere with sufficient confidence, and often enough people will go along with it without even necessarily worrying about it that much.

And even if the 'pop up and everything in the vicinity dies' monster under discussion was highly intelligent, the odds are that it would, at most, cause a significant restructuring of human society, but nothing beyond that- certainly not an extinction event. And frankly, if it got problematic enough, odds are good that someone would just up and nuke the thing, populated area or not.

[Florian]

What happens if it makes the decision to kill any world leader/ government official it sees on tv just pops in and kills it them, this would cripple most governments who then are unable to provide the disaster relief services.

Nothing would happen. That is, unless we're talking about very old democracies with outdated internal structures or nations rules by a centralized regime/autocracy.

Normally, a government is split into three very distinct branches that are kept separate by design. The typical division is into three branches: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary (for example, the trias politica model). In case were talking about a federation, we also have a horizontal separation in power beyond that.

As democracies are geared towards an election circle of both, their legislature and executive branch, they put institutions in place, mostly in the form of administration and bureaucracies, that are empowered to keep a nation up and running on the last state of laws and (executive) orders they were given. That is doubly true for federations, where we have the same system on the federal as well as on the member state level going (in my country, the levels are (EU >) federation > member state > county > community).

"Outdated internal structures" can mean two things in this case. Either there is a massive overlap between the legislative and executive branch, for example, when ministers appointed by the president (or other leader of the executive) are part of the parliament/direct leaders of the administration, or when the whole thing is set up in such a way, that, as part of internal checks and balances, the administration cannot act without getting a budget from parliament and direct orders from the executive.

Broadly speaking (you know, forum rules), quite a lot of second wave democracies were implemented in such a way that they can seamless switch between three modes: Parliamentary, presidency and administrative run, with the local equivalent of the supreme court being in charge of the switching, as an independent unit.

Some might understand this as a kind of "deep state", but I'm pretty glad to live in a nation where the institutions have a high level of autonomy and the administration can always switch into high gear when needed. Something like providing disaster relief services just happens and gets funded on an automatism (we are rather embarrassed when politicians of any branch show up on the scene and try to claim the effort as their own), or having a detachment of our military stationed in the capital with standing orders to preserve the constitution, even against the will of the people, when someone tries to turn us into an autocracy.

Closing remark on this, before I get more coffee, take a shower and get ready to work, you'll notice that I'm talking indirectly about the difference between the situation of just having replaced the king/queen with a democratically elected replacement (parliaments are actually pre-democracy... tho), in contrast to more modern systems and institutions. One can more or less say that the world didn't really notice that Germany was without an actual government for nearly a year or that Italy regularly goes without a government half of each year, but we would notice a break down when France has no president.

Consider this in the wider topic of this discussion (RE: One Punch Man, Dr. Manhattan, any given president and so on) and you will find huge differences when it comes to accumulation and use of power, with systems set up to be more centralized not being prone to personal power in any case.

[Bohandas]

yes if the monster is completely mindless just a simple animal randomly bouncing around it wont be very effective but if it has human level intellect even a dumb human its kill count will be utterly massive if it stick to large gatherings and planes. And people panic look what happens when a plane goes down what happens when every plane goes down? look what happens after a mass shooting what if a much larger kill happens every hour?

It loses its novelty and becomes the new normal?

[Beleriphon]

Getting a bit close to real world politics, but we've been on the brink of nuclear apocalypse plenty of times without Dr. Manhattan around, and indeed countries have rushed to gain nuclear capabilities or stockpiled nuclear weapons in bids to win an eventual nuclear confrontation. This isn't such a new story, nor does it require such characters to exist. There are myriad historical 'for want of a nail' interventions that would feasibly put us much closer to, or even well past WW3 right now. Adrian's broad concern wouldn't be unfounded in our history, but his solutions would suck in both the fictional world and the real world.

Watchmen is if anything a story about classical strengths in the end being flaws.

Whilst admittedly true, the issue with The Watchmen is that the Black Frigate comic in a comic is supposed to be a parallel story to Adrian, and the people are ultimately dumb and that's why Dr Manhattan just leaves at the end of the story, but also agrees to go along with Adrian's scheme. Never mind the whole thing being a deconstruction of superheroes as a genre, despite Alan Moore being a bit... loopy... he's a great story teller.

On Muggles. Can we agree and just say they're normal people, and effectively inconsequential to the story being told? They're unnamed police officer #37 in a Batman story. Batman is probably a muggle compared to Superman, but at the same time Batman very much not a normal person in any story he appears in. The closest characters that actually matter to the stories that might qualify in DC are Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and Alfred.

If about what can muggles compared to the non-muggle? According to the lady that coined the phrase, nothing. A whole brigade of SAS apparently can't defeat a half dozen wizards in Harry Potter, despite the muggle Prime Minister being aware of the fact that Voldemort is actively committing a terrorist attack on British citizens, at a school no less. Even if you some how think wizards are separate political entity from the British polity I kind of feel like the PM of the UK might, just offer to help. Why don't they? Because muggles are pointless and laughable, that's why they have such a stupid name.

[King of Nowhere]

Muggles can perfect skills above any magical user, because magic users still have to spend time training in their abilities and muggles don't.
This is not really supported in most systems; that's why i made the specialized expert class, linked in my signature; to create a mechanic to support this fact.
"But wizards can magik themselves to be better"
Ok, but if those same buff spells are used on the muggle, the muggle will get even better.

It's not a competition. An engineer and a chemist will not try to kill each other to prove their way is best. They will use the expertise of both to make a chemical factory that none of them could make alone.

In my campaign muggles and magicians work together for greatest effects. The best weapons are made by muggles with their superior expertise, and then enchanted. Divination has limitations, mundane spying too; great espionage organizations will use both.
War Golems are equipped with cannons. Traps often employ antimagic fields and mundane explosive: suppress high magic defences, and a big enough explosion can bring down anyone.
The armies studied a cannon that can be disassembled and stored in a bag of holding so that a small squad can teleport with it outside range of detection magic, set some sort of illusion screen while they deploy the cannon, and shower death on the enemies.

In the end, the distinction between magic and mundane is somewhat artificial. Magic is just another tool.

That's if we discuss how muggle ways can compete with magic.
If we discuss how low level people can deal with high level people, it's an entirely different question.
One thing that was not explored is the existance of a middle ground. It's rare that you just have the god wizard. Where you have it, you often have wizards of lesser skills. Where you have superman, you also have batman and captain america.
Basically, you have those lesser superpowered beings who are strong enough to defeat the big bad even where the regular goons are not. Those lesser super, in turn, cannot just ignore the common people. So they are likely to live with the society and symphatize with them when conflict comes

[Max_Killjoy]

Whilst admittedly true, the issue with The Watchmen is that the Black Frigate comic in a comic is supposed to be a parallel story to Adrian, and the people are ultimately dumb and that's why Dr Manhattan just leaves at the end of the story, but also agrees to go along with Adrian's scheme. Never mind the whole thing being a deconstruction of superheroes as a genre, despite Alan Moore being a bit... loopy... he's a great story teller.

On Muggles. Can we agree and just say they're normal people, and effectively inconsequential to the story being told? They're unnamed police officer #37 in a Batman story. Batman is probably a muggle compared to Superman, but at the same time Batman very much not a normal person in any story he appears in. The closest characters that actually matter to the stories that might qualify in DC are Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and Alfred.

If about what can muggles compared to the non-muggle? According to the lady that coined the phrase, nothing. A whole brigade of SAS apparently can't defeat a half dozen wizards in Harry Potter, despite the muggle Prime Minister being aware of the fact that Voldemort is actively committing a terrorist attack on British citizens, at a school no less. Even if you some how think wizards are separate political entity from the British polity I kind of feel like the PM of the UK might, just offer to help. Why don't they? Because muggles are pointless and laughable, that's why they have such a stupid name.

The funny thing is, given Voldy's monumental arrogance and utter disdain for anything muggle... I doubt he even understands the sort of threat that a skilled sniper with a large rifle over half a mile away actually would pose... it's not like he goes around with a "deflect bullets" spell on at all times.

[Mechalich]

One thing I'm not seeing in the various considerations about how technology can compensate for superpowers is that, while this is to some extent true depending on the powers in question, it really only matters in situations like Marvel or DC where superheroes aren't a thing until around WWII. The ability of technology, and overwhelming numbers, to compensate for superhuman abilities decreases rapidly as you turn back the clock, because both technological capabilities and total numbers decrease rapidly. Even as recently as 1900 the global population was only 1.6 billion, less than a fourth of the current total, and there were no forms of powered flight.

The amount of power needed to 'ignore the common people' drops further and further as you go back in time. The martial exploits of someone like Lu Bu become much less ridiculous when you consider that he had better weapons, better armor, and was raised on a superior diet than 99.9% of the people he was fighting. When you're in personally fitted bronze plate and your foes are wearing linen wraps, you're going to mess people up.

So if your supers have always been there, it's much more difficult to imagine them ever losing their hold on power unless you specifically create a device to allow for this.

Take LotR for example. In that world Elves are just better than humans. It's not exactly quantified, but they are. And the elves proceed to rule the world and humans exist mostly in the shadow of their grandeur for thousands upon thousands of years. The only reason the humans actually become dominant is that the elves have a crappy birthrate, keep getting bored and leaving the world to go live in Heaven, and aren't sufficiently cold blooded to correct the demographic problem by the sword (and because Morgoth won't let them do that).

The baseline scenario for having a two tier world between one group of empowered persons - whether its wizards, monsters, mutants, sapient robots, or aliens, is one group either exterminating or enslaving the other forever. if you want it to be something else you need to create a reason why this is so. There's a nice xkcd illustrating this particular framework.

[TeChameleon]

It occurs to me that in most story frameworks, muggles are there as the backdrop to the story; for whatever reason, those that qualify as 'muggles' are the millions-to-one majority in that universe. A lot of the time (not always, of course), they serve the same function that the ocean does in a good sea story; the vast, uncaring backdrop that could crush the main characters, and indeed the majority of the plot, in an instant if approached the wrong way. Oh, sure, the average antagonist could probably murder them in the thousands or more, but if they drew the full weight of society's attention, then, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but *squish*.

And in cases where the antagonistic super is beyond the possibility of societal retribution, well, that's when we get things like the World of Ruin from Final Fantasy VI- a post-apocalyptic hellscape ruled by a deranged demigod.

[Florian]

@Mechalich:

I think you vastly underestimate on what kind of power scale baseline humanity can function. Only if we talk about the fact that "magic"/"supernatural" is expressly outside of "physics" and can't be accessed or replicated in any way, your statement holds true.

@TeChamelion:

In a story, "magic" is the explanation to succeed and prevail against the odds. The Alex Verus novels by one of our board members are build upon that (good read, can only recommend B. Jacka..). In contrast, the 12 Palaces series of novels feature more or less the opposite, a regular guy going against the opposite.

[NichG]

There's a bit of a difference between 'muggles as setting elements that an author has decided are less relevant' and the sense of the word as used in the original question of this thread, which was more about mundane versus magical methods of accomplishing things. Of course, if we go so far as to talk about entities in a fictional setting which the author has specifically decided not to tell stories about, then those elements can never be relevant in that setting. So we have Watchmen where figures like Rorschach, the Comedian, Ozymandias, etc are always at the center of events which change the world as opposed to, say, a widespread grassroots protest movement or the full force of a foreign government. In Harry Potter, muggles aren't relevant specifically because it's not a story about muggles, and yet at the same time it's a story written by an author, who makes a conscious choice as to the subject matter.

But that's very different than the sense of the word used to divide supernatural elements of a setting (or character) from elements that have direct real world correspondences (the so-called mundane elements). A wizard who is very wise has both supernatural elements (their magic) and natural elements (their wisdom). The killbot example I gave was to create a case in which something only had its supernatural advantages, but all natural advantages were removed - a counterfactual, in order to see whether the factor determining its impact had more to do with the powers themselves, or the way in which they were intelligently applied. In the end, if the killbot has to understand humanity and modern society well enough to for example target oil refineries, then for me at least that story is more about the strategy of dismantling society by attacking the oil than it is a story about how this guy can kill things within 30ft. At that point uou could replace the killbot with a terrorist organization or a foreign military and you wouldn't lose anything from the meaningful bits of the story.

[Frozen_Feet]

The baseline scenario for having a two tier world between one group of empowered persons - whether its wizards, monsters, mutants, sapient robots, or aliens, is one group either exterminating or enslaving the other forever. if you want it to be something else you need to create a reason why this is so. There's a nice xkcd illustrating this particular framework.

Those two aren't baselines - they are two possible endpoints based on specific (implicit) assumptions of the motives of respective parties and the assumption that the conflict has already run its course.

To give a real-life comparison: humans dominate over wolves now. (Having "enslaved" the majority of them by domesticating them and turning them into dogs and threatening the wild populations with extinction/extermination. ) However, in the history of humans as a species, things have been this way for just a fraction of time (H. Sapiens Sapiens is estimated to have speciated 350,000 years ago, while wolves were domesticated 14,000 and 6,400 years ago.) and we have no idea if things will remain like this "forever".

You can apply this to most low to midlevel "non-muggles". You can have very long timespans of co-existence where neither party has any ability or even reason for enslaving or exterminating the other.

[Hytheter]

For example, Goku might be able to bitchslap worlds out of existence, but he likes to eat, and somebody's gotta grow, prepare, and cook all that food, something he cannot do by himself, no matter how much he flexes, glows, grunts and screams at the landscape. And with that need for other people comes a measure of control over the godlike combat monsters.

Maybe not a great example. As a child Goku survived alone on a mountain for years and he later became a competent farmer.

[Clistenes]

The funny thing is, given Voldy's monumental arrogance and utter disdain for anything muggle... I doubt he even understands the sort of threat that a skilled sniper with a large rifle over half a mile away actually would pose... it's not like he goes around with a "deflect bullets" spell on at all times.

Wizards are surprisingly squishy in the Potterverse... like, a punch to the mouth, or grabbing their wand before they speak, or shooting at them would easily take them down...

They do have defensive spells that could make them bulletproof, but very few bother to learn them... hell, Harry had to learn basic defensive spells on his own, and his foes never use them...

The main reason behind Wizard superiority is that muggles can't know who is a Wizard with a wand in their pocket, and they can even make themselves invisible and erase nemories, so muggles don't even know they have a rival to beat...

If Wizards were smarter and more disciplined then yes, they could beat muggles easily even if a fair fight, but Harry Potter's Wizards are a bunch of lazy, ignorant, chauvinist hicks who can't be bothered to learn basic defensive spells during a magical war...