I always thought it was foolish to refer to mundane actions such as Aim, Brawl and Taunt as "Powers" when Spells, Innate Talents, Honed skills, Mundane Acts, and Super Acts that set one apart from their species could all fall under the catch all banner of "Abilities"
-Green Martians like Jonn use flight as an ability as mundane as humans use the ability to walk or run that shouldn't be referred to as a power
-A John Stewart's Green Lantern ability to fly sets him apart from mainline humanity that could rightfully be called a power
-The Punisher letting off a burst of automatic weapons fire should not be refereed to as a power
Issue 0 CoH player barely let my subscription lapse before NC Soft called it quits; my incarnate gear *Sniff*
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While not opposed to it, Powers, was just a generic term for what went into the power tray. :p
Powers = Stuff You Can Do
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While it's true that the word "power" might not adequately describe all the things characters in a game like CoT can do it does serve as a general enough term to cover a majority of actions you can do regardless of the source of that action. Frankly I think "power" fits more scenarios as an official superhero game term than the word "ability" does.
Basically no one word would ever be good enough to cover everything. Therefore the word "power" is a good enough catch-all for our purposes.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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Well, I suppose you could substitute "Actions" for "Powers" ... so instead of having Power Trays you have Action Trays. But honestly, at that point you're just quibbling over semantics for something that hardly anyone pays attention to [i]while playing the game[/i], turning it into a fight that's not worth having, really.
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This argument has been going on as long as there have been superheroes, I'm sorry to tell you.
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The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
Well apparently Superman was cool enough to have both "powers" AND "abilities" so for him there was no argument. ;)
Several earlier posts in this thread already concluded that for the purposes of this "superhero" game it'll just be easier to use a single generic term for these things, even if that term doesn't perfectly describe everything.
The real problem with trying to use multiple terms comes in how different character concepts might handle the same situation or activity. For instance a magical creature might have the "power" to fly but a tech-oriented person might have the "ability" to use an anti-gravity flight suit that allows him/her to fly. As Relynne mentioned you could easily start to quibble over countless examples like this.
One blanket term to label all of these things is just the most practical way to do it and the word "superpower" (or the even more generic word "power") fits the bill well enough for this.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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