In honor of NaNoWriMo, I offer up this discussion topic for fans of HPMOR and rationalist fiction in general:
How many ways can we find that stock superpowers (magical abilities, sci-fi tech, whatever), if used intelligently, completely break a fictional setting? I'm particularly interested in subtly game-breaking abilities.
The game-breaking consequences of mind control, time travel, and the power to steal other powers are all particularly obvious, but I'm interested in things like e.g. Eliezer pointing out that he had to seriously nerf the Unbreakable Vow in HPMOR to keep the entire story from being about that.
Bit over a decade ago, when I was still a naive wild-eyed idealist blissfully unaware of anything realistic about people at all, I set up the foundations for most of my sci fi/fantasy/etc fictions. The piece of supertech I immediately had to nerf was technology based around a form of space compression--somewhere between the MCron Crystal (Marvel) and Dynocaps (Dragonball). And today, I'm still coming up with more reasons to nerf it heavily, to the extent that the civilization based around this technology must certainly have had a shady counsil of vagueness...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.