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I have noticed a number of questions appearing on the World Building stack exchange revolving around how to kill/stop a character with some set of powers that makes them unstoppable. Here are a few of them:

So my question is:

Is it worth creating a new tag for these types of questions, and if so what should the tag be called?

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  • $\begingroup$ One alternative if people feel like the questions are generally generate repetitive answers and so cannot make for a good question, is to create a general question that has a long community answer with all possible ways and what scenarios they work well with. $\endgroup$
    – Anketam
    Jan 29, 2017 at 17:43
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    $\begingroup$ It's not necessarily true that we want to encourage these questions $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Jan 30, 2017 at 14:46
  • $\begingroup$ @HDE226868 I do not know how I missed that meta question when I was writing up this one. $\endgroup$
    – Anketam
    Jan 31, 2017 at 0:00
  • $\begingroup$ If we must have a tag, I'd like to half jokingly propose "munchkin" $\endgroup$
    – Journeyman Geek
    Jan 31, 2017 at 3:24

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Tags exist for a purpose - to categorize questions and find ones you are interested in. In general "meta" tags are a bad idea, and while we have a few they have very specific and well understood reasons for existing.

You would have to sell me on the idea that there exist experts in the world on "killing-superpowered-characters" or "overpowered-check" who might be interested in following worldbuilding and looking for questions with that tag.

This seems unlikely for me.

Just because questions have similarities doesn't mean we need a tag for those similarities unless that tag actually serves a purpose.

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  • $\begingroup$ I wasn't actually thinking of "overpowered-check" as a meta tag when I posted that, but you raise some interesting points. I do think that there is a general class of answers for "how do i reign in an overpowered power", given the prevelance of such articles in many role-playing game design forums. $\endgroup$
    – SRM
    Jan 30, 2017 at 18:49
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We have the tag. But you're right... there are a lot of these questions. But rather than focus on these, I suggest something broader: a tag for , which could include super powers or artifacts or spells or just changes in physics, when what you're specifically looking for is whether or not this change results in an "unplayable" world. With the word "power" in it, the autocomplete should suggest this to anyone working on a super powers question when they type in "power", which I wager is common.

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  • $\begingroup$ It'd be interesting to expand on this and see where it goes. It looks to me like overpowered-check could be similar to reality-check, in which a valid answer may be "Yup, it's overpowered." Of course, that still doesn't address some of the issues I brought up in this meta thread meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4317/… $\endgroup$
    – Cort Ammon
    Jan 30, 2017 at 16:30
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The tag that first sprang to mind was "invulnerability", however, since this is more about questions about overcoming an invulnerability there is an obvious tag. It is somewhat facetious, but this is the current archetype for this scenario.

And that obvious tag is -- kryptonite.

Sorry if this seems like a joke, but it does fit the bill. On the other hand, the classic phrase for this overpowering of the overpowered and overprotected is, of course, Achilles' Heel.

Using either tag of kryptonite or Achilles' Heel, at least, will help to deflate questions about overcoming invulnerable adversaries. Something they are usually sorely in need of having done to them.

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