>>109529495The reason you make the powers specific is that by establishing rules, you create the room to create both tension and exploitation.
We will NEVER know what Superman can actually do, or how well he can do. Superman's power level swings all over the place, and he frequently will just get new powers handed to him out of the blue, most of which never get mentioned again. As a result, its hard to imagine putting Superman in a situation where he actually needs a clever solution to get out of it, because we are used to him being handed new solutions out of nothing.
Everyone's talking about Jojo, so lets talk about Bruno Bucciarati. Here is a guy whose power is 'can put zippers on anything'. Thats a power that sounds really fucking dumb, and in some ways it is. But its also really fucking USEFUL in indirect ways, like putting a zipper on a wall and unzipping it so you can step walk through the now open hole. Or zipping a dismembered hand back onto the arm. You establish a specific, questionably useful power and you build up the hyper-specific rules for it and how it works so that you can create situations that seem unwinnable and then brilliant (or somethings just insane) solutions that exploit those rules so that you can eek out a win and it feels like the character earned it rather than just got handed a situation-specific powerup so they could end the issue.
This doesn't always work out in practice, lazy writing or the writer taking a shortcut can undercut this trick a lot. But when it works, it really works.
