I’m on a career track to have a decent retirement in a few more years, and these powers wouldn’t detract from that. I’d have some fun with the powers in a way that’s not abusive, and I wouldn’t use them for financial gain unless they were near victimless (like buying 1000 shares of VTI if I knew it were going to go up).
Taking the million dollars would be kind of like a small lottery win. Yeah, that’s worth about $40,000 per year in retirement. Not bad, but not really exciting.
Ash Manipulation
(The ability to manipulate burnt or charred matter.)
Enhanced Leap
(The ability to jump longer and higher distances than normal humans.)
Omnilingualism
(The power to speak, understand and decipher any and all languages.)
#1 & 3 make me world-renowned for saving the Pompeii/Herculaneum scrolls, among other artifacts. #2 makes me a member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes.
My main concern with taking the super powers would be the monkey paw effect. Like my first roll had the ability to turn imagination into reality. Obviously powerful, but potentially very dangerous depending on what qualifies as “imagine”. How much do you have to will it into reality? Would I be modifying reality while I’m sleeping?
But consider powers like super speed. In reality, you’d burst into flames. And even if you didn’t you causing devastation running. A lot of superpowers need to come with “oh and ignore the drawbacks of it”.
But if it is guaranteed comic book-ified, then probably the super powers. There’s almost no super power that could not be used to make a million dollars. Heck get a book deal. If the Randi Challenge was still around you could win that trivially.
I’m already retired. I take the superpowers. I rolled a few times and each time, I got one that I’d like, and others that seemed harmless if I don’t use them.
Hmm, let’s say the next roll counts. I got:
Illusion Awareness - (The power to be aware of surrounding illusions.)
Helicopter Propulsion - (The power to achieve a form of flight by achieving a helicopter-like effect.)
Neurocognitive Deficit - (The ability to shut down a person’s brain functions.)
I wonder if that third is reversible? If it is, it would be terrific if some madman was attacking, or even if I were mugged.
See the thing is that a “healing factor” like Wolverine from the MCU would greatly slow aging. Greatly extended lifespan? No diabetes or colon cancer? No flu or COVID? No Russian assassin Polonium poisoning? Also potentially no getting drunk or stoned, really - but I’m virtually a teetotaler now anyway. Hell all that is worth wayyyyy more than $1 million dollars to me.
Probability manipulation could be much the same - it covers a potential range from everything like early Scarlet Witch (ow! she hexed me and I just got a papercut!) to…well…late period Scarlet Witch, who is virtually a god.
On the other hand, self-exploding is not worth more than $1 million to me.
ETA: So I’d probably roll the dice on the superpowers. Lower floor, but much higher ceiling since you get three shots at getting something good. Also, I have defined benefit pension and with my greatly accelerated life-span I’ll be destroying those actuarial estimates.
Telekinetic Vision (The power to enhance one’s vision with psionic energy/focus.)
Dimensional Storage (The power to store anything in a fold of dimension/space and re-materialize at will.)
Water Manipulation (The power to manipulate water.)
The first one as I understand it is essentially Superman vision?
The second one I can be an amazing mover, or thief, or the greatest Magician to ever live. I could actually make the Statue of Liberty disappear!
Third one, I’m a goddamn Wonder Twin. LOL
I’m certain I could find a way to monetize those things to more than a million dollars profit, and it’s probably extremely fun to have superpowers, I’d imagine.
Web generation turned out to be like SpiderMan, which might be useful, but coupled with ‘prehensile tail’, I wouldn’t need it for swinging through the forest.
Both together, I can see that I’ll be immediately labelled a freak and won’t get a moment’s peace. That’s partly because my third power was precognition. So playing the stock market should get me the millions too.
I’ll take the cash. The three superpowers I got were either largely useless or geared toward manipulating others, and I didn’t retire in order to get a different job, even if that job was superpower-fueled self-employment.
We’ve already done all the things for retirement, and we have a comfortable income. But an extra million would be a really nice cushion!
Choosing the money is incredibly mundane and unambitious. In fact, I think a better question might be what amount of money would you take over 3 random superpowers? I think it would have to start at around at least 50 million to even consider it.
Sure, maybe you’ll roll low and get some useless stuff. But there’s probably more than a 50% chance you get something that would be monetizable far beyond the $1 million. And there’s a good chance you can become incredibly powerful and change the world drastically. Think of what good you could affect if you were able to mind control powerful people or hear people’s thoughts or even any sort of offensive ability that would let you assassinate the world’s most awful people. It’s kind of hard to believe to me that anyone would choose what was essentially a guaranteed modestly comfortable life over the potential to be the most unique and powerful person ever to live.
Mine are pretty tame:
Poison Generation
(The power to create/generate a variety of poisons.)
Blood Flow Vision
(The ability to see the flow of blood of any living being.)
Heat Vision
(The power to generate beams of heat from one’s eyes.)
Would the poison generation one including creating it wherever I wanted? I suppose you could spontaneously generate poison in some war criminals food or what have you.
Blood flow vision - I suppose you might be useful for tough medical cases. Not exactly world changing, but it’s a unique ability you could monetize well beyond $1m and help people in the process.
Heat vision depends on how powerful it is. Do you fry people alive? Could you shoot your eyes into a giant boiler and power a series of gigantic steam generators with incredible power generation? At the very least, worth far more than $1m, and can do some good for the environment too. I would have to imagine that someone would find novel uses for physics-defying heat generation.
