What does a world with supers look like?

[Surgo]

The comic books I've read (mostly restricted to the old-school Avengers and Marvel vs Capcom 2, which is not a comic book) don't really talk about the rest of the world outside of that which is readily affected by the superheroes. I mean, I know Spiderman is a school teacher, but we don't know what he teaches. And for a supers game, that can be an important question.

The Dungeonomicon was partially about thinking how concepts like "magic" affected the rest of the world. So what does superhero land look like? I have a hard time accepting the idea that cancer and continent-wide starvation are problems that humans face in a world that has Reed Richards and Doctor Doom in it. What sort of widespread threats to humanity would exist in the form of diseases with people who have the superpower of being ungodly intelligent? What about other "mundane" threats to humanity, like organized crime? It would probably still exist, but what would it look like? What would be different?

What would governments actually look like? How about police forces? What would the average citizens think? In my limited experiences with supers comics and supers literature, nothing really addresses questions like these.

[Maxus]

Well, I've been in a chatroom sl where there were 'supers,' who were people with powers. A lot of them try to find a niche where they can use their powers in a job (someone who could create materials worked as a tailor/clothing-store owner, and someone who could create large areas of flame worked in a power plant, reducing the need for fuels. A guy with a Naruto-like ability to create physical doubles of himself for whatever purpose worked as a janitorial staff of a building).

You're also going to get people who want to use their powers for personal gain. And, therefore, you're going to get people employed to hunt down and capture or kill the criminals.

So the version we used was...an attempt at integrating supers into normal society, instead of the usual 'normal people hate us' thing the X-men do.

[Username17]

The answer is: it depends.

It depends on the number and the power of the superheroes and how much shit is on their plate at any given time. If you pretty much just have one Superman (as is essentially the case in most Superman centered comics), and he's dealing with an alien invasion every week, then the only thing that changes is that everyone becomes numb to world ending threats. It's like living in South Korea. So I can only imagine that there'd be more WiFi and pornography.

In other worlds, and constructions of what are nominally the same world, there are many superheroes. Enough that there are guys sitting around with magic and super science that have nothing to do but cure diseases and solve energy crises. In such worlds, magical and technological marvels should take over everything. People should be walking into summoning circles as part of the mass transit systems of major cities and to travel between cities.

Most Superheroic worlds don't actually go there. They pretty much assume that we're talking normal Earth, 20 minutes into the future, and guys with super powers came on the scene right now. But yeah, history changes in response to events and breakthroughs, and every super hero's story has a crap tonne of those. So really, what most super heroic worlds look like is simply profoundly unrealistic. It's like Forgotten Realms. There have been huge advances in pretty much everything and individuals can build teleporters and call lightning from the sky, but things still look like recognizable Earth history for no reason.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

Frank nailed what I dislike in most superhero comics - the rampant ignoring of even the smallest, most logical consequences. Nothing seems to leave the "superhero scene" and enter the mass market. Only the heroes and villains have cybernetics, flying cars, and nanobots. The population and even the army (apart from "hero squads") don't get anything.

[virgil]

I hate to mention this...*cough*Watchmen*cough*

[angelfromanotherpin]

Only the heroes and villains have cybernetics, flying cars, and nanobots. The population and even the army (apart from "hero squads") don't get anything.

There was an old Champions supplement which dealt with this issue.

"Officer, how come the V.I.P.E.R. agents get jetpacks and lasers, and you get a .38?"

There was an underground technology war going on, and keeping it out of wider distribution was a big part of it.


But on the original topic, there's a lot of possible answers depending on the set-up. Wild Cards, Godlike, and Aberrant all tried their hands at semi-realistic what-if worlds, and came up with different answers. A lot of it has to do with how much information the public has, and how they got it.

In Wild Cards, supers are the lucky survivors of an otherwise lethal/disfiguring disease that was used in a major terrorist attack on New York right after WWII. So early on, they're not thought of so much as modern-day gods, but rather as potential vectors. Then some of them get the celebrity treatment during the Red Scare, and that warms the public up a lot. By modern times, there just are people who happen to have superpowers, and who may or may not use them in a practical way (especially since most of them get one power and are otherwise normal squishy people).

Think about the distinction between a superhero setting where having an origin is always publicly noticable and flashy, and a setting where when a person gets powers, only they know about it until they use them in front of people. And that's just one factor which seriously changes how the world is going to relate to super-people.

Oh, and Peter Parker teaches 'science' to the lower grades, bio and chem to the upper grades.

[Josh_Kablack]

Again, I *really* need time to do my current Champs game justice.

It's originally a straight X-Men rip:

Starting as a bunch of kids in 1985 in and now into early 1986, we've saved the passengers of Japan Air Lines flight 105, exposed Ollie North's illegal "super-soldier" trading program in Nicaragua, rescued the hostages from Egypt Air 648, captured Abu Ndal agents before they could carry out their assault plans against the Rome and Vienna Airports, won Charlie Wilson's War with a whole lot less blood than happened in reality, and prevented the Challenger Disaster.

That's really only about 12 months of in-game time, and that's just the altered-history aspects of the game - we've also fought mob killers, stolen Primus mecha prototypes, defeated passage of the Keene Act, and a number of other comic tropes. By the time the game world plunges into the Mckeena/Vinge singularity of 2012, the world will look nothing like our own - despite the time traveler/natural force in the setting that keeps trying to set events back into familiar patterns.

But the interesting parts of the game are really how the different characters are trying to cope with the realization of what they can do.

The precog character spends every waking moment in front of a monitor bank using the supercomputer to prioritize emergency responses and deploy appropriate subteams from available members to every disaster in the country - this started out as cool superheroism, but has slowly turned into a creepy portrayal of truly obsessive behavior in the face of depression - he is not well, yet he's completely necessary to what the team does.

The telepathic martial artist has infiltrated the Abu Ndal organization to prevent future attacks (like the berlin discotheque bombing) and is wrestling with the ethics and morality of re-writing peoples minds wholesale in order to save lives.

The illusionist's originally comic drug use (hey, look you can see my hallucinations) alternates between being a way to escape responsibility and a means of vision quests for self-improvement.

The ice character and the weather control character have built a weather dominator and have begun an attempt to terraform deserts into arable land as a way to deal with the famine in Ethopia and elsewhere in africa - this makes perfect sense to the characters, but is almost certain to alarm the heck out of a number of governments.

The unstable telekinetic has decided that the world is too uncertain to go on being an explosive (literally) anti-social basket case and has proposed to his girlfriend in hopes of starting a family. The shapeshifter

The shapeshifter has decided to pursue buddhist enlightenment, as the best way to be sure her intentions do not cause harm on a worldwide scale - but is so far unwilling to try to reconcile that with her status as a double agent within the team

The master of earth has raised a volcanic island where he and others can be alone without fear of being hunted nor having to worry about harming normal humans.

and that's just the quick overview

[Lago PARANOIA]

Let's start with something mild: Avatar the Last Airbender. In this setting superpowers are just used as a technological base; however, since it's a spiritual thing rather than a genetic thing, a lot of the problems caused by genetics-based superpowers (discrimination of or by mundanes, stunted science, etc.) are gone. However, certain features of the setting like Sozin's comet makes political balance extremely swingy, Avatar or no.

One of the few redeeming things about Naruto despite its many problems is that it is a detailed look into how superpowers would change a setting. They're by and large genetic, though not entirely. Things are set up so that a mid-level ninja isn't challenged by hundreds of mundanes, so somewhere along the line someone got a brilliant idea that combat would be decided entirely by ninja fighting from now on in proxy wars. As ninjas got more numerous and more powerful, however, the intensity of wars steadily increased until it broke the world and the survivors had a forced peace. Unfortunately it's totally possible for a few madmen to shatter that peace with brute force which is what's happening right now. The muggles pretty much cower in villages and hope not to piss their ninja overlords off. By and large, they're very lucky right now to be living next to people who have relatively egalitarian social views but occasionally we get to see just how bad shit can get in villages where the ninja doesn't give a care about the muggles (Land of Sound).

[Lago PARANOIA]

One Piece is a very weird case. While there are ridiculous amounts of superpowers just waiting around the corner, they're distributed at complete random -- you eat a piece of fruit floating in the ocean and you gain them.

However, gaining superpowers in this way is explicitly inferior to training for them. Someone who ate a fruit with no training is just not as good as someone who did an even modest amount of training. So even people with crazy devil fruits like Blackbeard and Eneru actually get most of their power by training with their fruit a lot, rather than just coasting on their genetics or money like Superman or Iron Man. And they're still in an arms race with people who just do a lot of situps. This leads to situations where gaining superpowers sort of gets you a blank stare from the muggles, because even if you conquer them they can do a training montage and in a year come back and kick your ass; Eneru for example only lasted as long as he did because he picked on an island of pacifists.

[Josh_Kablack]

Most Superheroic worlds don't actually go there.

Notable exceptions largely started with the Squadron Supreme (first time around) and Watchmen. More recent takes on the idea include the Authority, Astro City, and Top 10.

[Ganbare Gincun]

IMHO, Astro City does the best job of showing how superheroes affect the "regular" world around them and vice-versa. Good stuff.

[Amra]

So what does superhero land look like?

The most likely description of a land with "superheros" in it is "a smouldering wasteland". I'm not even joking. If your superheroes have world-altering powers, and if they are not exactly and precisely counterbalanced by super-threats, we're all pretty much hosed.

I have a hard time accepting the idea that cancer and continent-wide starvation are problems that humans face in a world that has Reed Richards and Doctor Doom in it.

Well, quite, because godlike intelligence and the ability to apply Comic Book Science to any problem means that the world can't possibly stay the same if such people have any real desire to change it.

Trouble is, there's no reason whatsoever to suppose that superheroes, depending on their cultural backgrounds and actual powers, are going to have any less ideological diversity than 'normal' people. Normal people have their priorities well and truly fucked up, and get excited about stupid shit...

People are cool with Spiderman keeping the criminal population of Metropolis down because really there's not a hell of a lot else he's good for. But... what's the deal with Superman? How come nobody ever says to him "Fuck man, you're busy putting criminals in jail whilst actual governments send actual rape squads out against their own people? What are you, retarded?"

Superman is a moral basket-case, but if he did start cleaning up the world (and who could resist?) he wouldn't be able to stop.

But it wouldn't even have to be something so obviously outrageous that led superheroes to take over the world, no, not when people have their ideological axes to grind. Don't wear clothes or eat meat on the same continent that Naked Vegan Girl makes her lair or she'll fry you with Earthpower Beams from her eyes. She'll probably form an alliance with The Flying Hippie to sink whaling vessels all over the planet, but once that's done they'll end up devastating Northern Europe over whether to plant soybeans or pot.

In the meantime, the Ashigaru of the Gods arises to avenge the insult to his nation's traditions by committing mass cetacicide and the Brain-Bending Bishop of Bath and Wells attempts to save the world by subverting the thought processes of leading Muslim figures to make them publically convert to Christianity.

People have their priorities that may or may not match what you think are the most important issues, and there's no reason to think that supers would be any different. In the absence of outside influences that forced their super-abilities to participate in a zero-sum game, the world would go to hell in a month.

What would governments actually look like?

There basically wouldn't be any, not in the case of superheroes with world-changing powers at any rate. No government can maintain its legitimacy indefinitely in the face of a force majeur. Once Superman had stopped a government from sending out the rape squads - thereby demonstrating once and for all that he can act with impunity regardless of the legal legitimacy of the authorising authority - he has effectively called time on all governments. Everyone would know that their government was only acting with Superman's tacit approval.

And that's with just Superman in the picture. Once you add in Naked Vegan Girl, The Flying Hippie and the rest - assuming their powers are on the same sort of scale - then you've just written the world off as a playground for beings of titanic power who have to rule the world for its own good. That's the tragedy of the thing. If I got Real Ultimate Power this very minute, there's nobody who could persuade me that going out into the world and forcing everyone to stop taking part in state-sanctioned murder isn't the right thing to do. And then I'm a tyrant: not because I'm a power-tripping asshole, but because I'd genuinely want to do what was right and I couldn't live with myself if I let thousands of people die when I could save them.

Now imagine the same scenario with a dozen people involved, each of whom have different - and conflicting - ideas, all heartfelt and genuine, about the Right Way for the world to be...

Rocks fall, everybody dies.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well there was that POWERS arc where the superman knockoff finally lost it - vaporized the batman knock-off for continued pedophilla, unilaterally disarmed nations and ended up vaporizing the holy sites of most major religions. (thereby setting up the all-powers-are-outlawed now background of the next couple arcs)

and also


WANTED (the comic series, not the movie) also did a semi-decent job of portraying a non-wasteland superpowers dystopia.

Once the begin thinking beyond trying to set superman's girlfriend up with a box of kryptonite condoms and get down to the real business of evil, they kill off all the good guys carve the world up between themselves in a psuedo-gangland truce that's not really all that stable, but does provide a plausible explanation for why they don't share their death rays and matter translocators with the general populace.

[Parthenon]

Depressingly, that makes some sense Amra. My first thought was to try to pass that off as a problem with the DC universe, but Marvel is just as bad.

Thinking about it, whats the most powerful you could have superheroes that doesn't destroy humanity? Batman or Captain A would probably be fine, but would Iron Man or Hawkman work?

Random thoughts of different supers going through my mind and suddenly all I can think of is wondering why the fuck Poison Ivy is in a city.

---

@Josh:
Umm... Wanted? The one where every single cop knows about the worldwide organisation so scary they stay the fuck away just from mentions of it? Don't get me wrong, I loved it, but trying to sell it as a world in which supers exist and yet don't affect the majority of the world doesn't quite work.

---

I thought of this, dismissed it then thought some more on it: Rising Stars.

A comet comes along and gives all the kids who are being conceived in one town at the time super powers, ranging from invulnerability (just not being hurt or affected, not super strength or anything) to being able to perceive and communicate with the dead to Superman level abilities.

Since most of them are pretty useless, most of them don't really affect much. They all know each other, and since the US government got in early and helped educate them they would be mostly of similar backgrounds so the whole Naked Vegan Girl thing would be less likely to happen. In fact they had one teacher who they all really liked who became a role model for a lot of them.

However, after a while, they do decide to get together to change the world. They initiate schemes where neighbourhoods police themselves to reduce crime, the geniuses try to create new technologies to help everyone, the telekinetic rejuvenates the middle east, and one super removes all nuclear weapons from the world except one nuclear weapon from each country.

They create a new age of humanity. Meanwhile, the old governments and military get pissed at them, and on the pretext of giving them all Nobel Peace Awards, bring them all together and set off a nuke underneath them.

Thats where it ends. Definitely. No, it doesn't have some bullshit thing where the sole survivor uses a spaceship to go to another planet and become another comet to cause powers in another race. It ends at the nuke.

[Josh_Kablack]

@Josh:
Umm... Wanted? The one where every single cop knows about the worldwide organisation so scary they stay the fuck away just from mentions of it? Don't get me wrong, I loved it, but trying to sell it as a world in which supers exist and yet don't affect the majority of the world doesn't quite work.

I never said it didn't effect the majority of the world. I said it was a plausible alternative to the smoking wasteland presented by Amra.

It's a setting where powers and comic-book tech exist, but aside from the secret criminal masters of the world and the cops who have to look the other way, most folks are completely unaware. Such things really do not spill over into the everyday lives of most people within that world - and when they do, serious effort is made to present them as events that happened within real-world contexts in order to keep the general population unaware.

[Amra]

I'm not familiar with WANTED (beyond the movie) but... what sort of power-level are we talking about here, Josh? What sort of super-crap can the characters pull off?

As for all the policemen in the world keeping a secret, erm, doubtless there's more to it than that, but I'm not feeling the plausibility right now!

Thinking about it, whats the most powerful you could have superheroes that doesn't destroy humanity? Batman or Captain A would probably be fine, but would Iron Man or Hawkman work?

It's a funny thing when you consider all the "Spiderman could totally take Batman" conversations you have as a kid, but "powerful" in the sense of bestriding the world like a colossus =/= "powerful" in the sense of being able to take down other supers.

Spiderman is a tough cookie, but just how much difference could he make to the situation if you dropped him into Darfur and asked him to sort it out? Bugger-all, is the answer. Likewise, Batman. They'd be great shock troops and you can pretty much guarantee that any unit they support is going to win any conflict it gets into unless someone calls in an artillery strike, but they don't have what it takes to bring a country to heel.

I'd say that superpowers become a problem when you combine "invulnerability to conventional attacks" with "ubiquity" and add any "overwhelming force" power on top of that. Once a super can effectively be anywhere at any moment - whether because they can travel at the speed of light, or because they can know everything that's going on by switching on their super-brains and have an action-at-a-distance power - they're in control.

How powerful is too powerful? Hard to say. The *really* scary powers in Heroes were Matt and Maury. They couldn't stop bullets, they couldn't survive a falling bomb, couldn't fly, couldn't regenerate, couldn't shoot lasers from their eyes... but they could be in your head, controlling your whole world and you'd never know it. However, lacking any real invulnerability or immunity powers, they're only dangerous so long as people don't know about them. That is, right up to the point when they get into influencing range of supers who *can* do all that other shit but don't have the wherewithal to shut them out.

I'm still going with the smouldering wasteland/righteous tyranny scenario.

[Parthenon]

Yeah, superheroes are spectacularly useless at fighting white collar crime. The only example I can think of offhand is Batman in the No-Mans-Land where Bane is sent to destroy all the records of ownership so Luthor can take over large quantities of land. The solution? Beat up Bane, make sure there are copies and... well, um? Admittedly, I read it a couple of years back.

---

Wanted's supers regularly go into other dimensions of DC level powers just to fuck with their shit.

They have one villain who has Clayface type powers made up of the shit of the most evil people who have ever lived, geniuses who are good enough at controlling conversations it is almost at mind control levels, one with Bizarro level abilities and the main protagonist has the super power of being able to put a bullet in the face of anyone. I'd say about Marvel level (ignoring galactic things like Drax or Galactus) up to DC level.

The reasoning behind the fact that they haven't destroyed the world is basically that they already have while killing all the heroes. Then, they put the world together while wiping the minds of the few heroes they leave alive just to be able to pick them up and fuck with their minds every now and then. Then, they parcel out the world between the surviving villains.

So, any villain in the Fraternity is completely free to go apeshit and kill whoever they want, do whatever they want, and it is all hushed up. So, it is a worldwide secret organisation that regularly causes huge massacres on a scale just under Dresden that is known about by all the police, the military and the government, but is completely unknown by everyone else.

As I said, I really like it, but it doesn't really work as an example of a world where you have supers and the normal world separate. Too many people know about the Fraternity. And it has multiple people who have super powers, are psychopathically insane, with drastically different mindsets who are supposed to get along, have peace between each other and keep it all a secret.

[Username17]

I'd say about Marvel level (ignoring galactic things like Drax or Galactus) up to DC level.

The Wanted characters are DC characters, so they are by definition DC level characters. They don't have a character with Bizarro levels of power, that's literally Bizarro with the serial numbers filed off to aoid trademark infringement. The main character is Deathstroke.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

The "I am no superhero, I just played one in a tv show" was a very nice touch though.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I have to ask--why are superheroes so bad at fighting white-collar crime?

Or rather, why do they ignore it so much? For example, how many times has Superman rescue people from a collapsed mine? Don't even bother counting, he's probably done it at least half a dozen times. But then how come he just flies back home with a 'looks like my job is done' rather than ruminating how the hundreds of safety violations the mine committed in the last 5 years probably caused the disaster?

[Amra]

Superheroes have to ignore white-collar crime, or the suspension of disbelief falls apart completely. In fact, the whole heroic trope falls apart because the sort of black-and-white morality that allows him to hurl super-villains into the sun doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny once he starts getting involved in that sort of thing. Also, it makes for a shit comic.

Let's say that Superman rescues a bunch of people from a collapsed mine and does indeed get seriously pissed off over violations of safety codes. What does he do then? Does he go to the "bad guys" - i.e. the mine owners - and tell them to get their act together safety-wise, or he'll... what, exactly? Disintegrate them with his eye-lasers? Let it be known to the world that he's pissed with them so their stock value plummets? Frighten them into submission?

The thing is, all that would be wrong. Flat-out, straight-up wrong. That's why we have courts, and hearings, and people giving evidence and mine inspectors. Certainly he could employ his super-powers to good effect helping to gather evidence and making sure that nobody is bribed, blackmailed or otherwise dissuaded from taking part in the legal process... but seriously, *yaaaaaawn*. And also, it still amounts to "Don't you fuck with these people because I say you musn't and I'm the biggest badass anywhere."

Superman can't get involved with white-collar crime because he only has blue-collar solutions: fuck with Supe and he'll blow your shit up, or throw it into the sun, or grind it to powder. Anything else he can do is stuff that anyone else could do, and that doesn't make for a good story.

Without wishing to offend anyone - and such is genuinely not my intention - even war is a white-collar crime. When it's just a bunch of guys shooting each other because of something someone said about their moms, or because of drug-distribution fiefdoms, or because they don't like each other's religions or whatever, then Superman flying in, banging their heads together and telling them to stop is all cool. Once it's war - even if it's war for the same stupid reasons - the scenario changes. War is waged by governments against governments, or at least by authorities recognised by some governments as being governments, and you can't interfere with that process for the same reason you can't just terrify the mine owners into obeying safety codes. Once you've done that, you've demonstrated that you are not only able but willing to supercede the temporal authorities of "normal" humanity, and that's where politics ends and tyranny begins.

Take this scenario. An Evil Genius has managed to build himself a Weapon of Scary Doom in an obscure location in Russia somewhere. Let's say it's something along the lines of a nuke; a weapon that can destroy whole cities anywhere in the world. Superman hears about it, flies in, gets paralysed by Krypton Beams, is freed in an unlikely manner 4.8 picoseconds before the doomsday device flattens New York, prevents the destruction and zooms home to tea and medals.

All fine? Yes, up to a point. We can give the nod here because we can just about bring ourselves to believe that Russia isn't going to make a fuss about someone invading their sovereign territory to disable a potential world-menacing threat. But if it's the Russian government with the doomsday weapon, built as a deterrent, what can Superman do?

Nothing, is what he can do. Or everything, but there's no middle ground. Once he starts interfering with politics, there is no more politics.

That's one thing the comic-book writers (or at least the ones I've read, which admittedly isn't terribly many) have got right. Superheroes with Real Ultimate Power basically can't do anything except deal with Supervillains or natural catastrophes. They can only interfere with shit that doesn't "belong" to anyone. Anything else is an admission that they're in charge, and then we're either into nuclear holocaust territory or a hopefully-benevolent worldwide dictatorship. And it would happen; how many people reading this, if granted such awesome power that you could do almost anything and would never have to answer for it to anyone, wouldn't change the world for what they think is the better? And how much of an asshole would it make you, in most people's eyes, if you didn't?

A world with superheroes - or possibly even worse, with a superhero - of that calibre eventually wouldn't even have governments, just executives that existed to carry out the superhero's diktats. Or it would just have a superhero who did nothing else all day but save people from collapsed mines, runaway trains and hurricanes. There's really not much plausible middle ground.

[violence in the media]

What about telepaths? Given that there is current research into brain imaging to determine what people are thinking, what level of accuracy would telepaths have to exhibit in order for them to be recruited by police and government forces? Even if they were viewed as a violation of civil liberties, can you honestly say that organizations like drug cartels, the CIA, or Mossad wouldn't use them to mind-rape information out of people? What sort of checks and balances would you need, or be able, to have to prevent a telepath from just making shit up? On the flip side, how would you even be able to hide white-collar crime from a telepath? Jean Grey or Professor X should be able to pick up on Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme if they ever ran into him, especially if he was being questioned about it at all.

You know, that would be a great super-villian, the Muckraker. He's a guy with super durability (to thwart the inevitable attempts on his life) and telepathy and he runs around airing people's dirty laundry via his website and editorials in major newspapers.

[Parthenon]

Yeah, Wanted is basically DC, but in my opinion with all the heroes gone the villains appear to be on the level of Marvel's heroes. The most powerful characters are probably only as powerful or useful as Iron Man, Thor or maybe Nova.

Maybe its just because the characters seen mostly are Deathstroke, Catwoman and Toyman and the BBEG is... ummm... can't remember the name and Google seems to have died, but its a Batman villain who Catwoman kills, but you mostly see it on a Batman level of power. Which ignoring JLA team ups and fan-wankery is basically Marvel level power.

---

Superman: Red Son was pretty good at that. Written by the same guy as Wanted, Superman lands in Russia. You then have lots of Russian versions of the normal characters.

However, it gets to the point where Superman saves everyone in Russia from everything, and people behave stupidly and with great risk just to be saved by him.

In the end he pretends to die and lets the human race deal with things without having a Deus Ex Machina hanging over their heads to save them.

In many ways Daredevil and Black Adam are the most useful superheroes. Maybe Tony Stark (not Iron Man) as the owner of a huge company.

[Amra]

What about telepaths? Given that there is current research into brain imaging to determine what people are thinking, what level of accuracy would telepaths have to exhibit in order for them to be recruited by police and government forces?

Slightly more accuracy than they'd have to demonstrate in order for police and government forces to just shoot them in the face. Seriously. If a government learned for a fact that someone existed who could pluck any secret out of anybody's head merely by getting within a mile of them, that person would have the life expectancy of a glass tennis racquet.

Even if they were viewed as a violation of civil liberties, can you honestly say that organizations like drug cartels, the CIA, or Mossad wouldn't use them to mind-rape information out of people?

That would depend on how many of these telepaths there were, and how reliably they could be identified. People in intelligence services of any stripe Don't Like Change, and their first reaction to a massive shift in the way information can be moved around, obtained or concealed is always to pretend it isn't happening. If we're talking about just one telepath, then the CIA, Mossad, drug cartels and the like will also queue up for the opportunity to shoot them in the face.

It wouldn't be until telepathy was well and truly out of the bag that they'd start to seriously consider using it in a strategic fashion. The only way telepaths would be likely to survive would be if said agencies thought that the other guys had them too and couldn't afford to waste them.

What sort of checks and balances would you need, or be able, to have to prevent a telepath from just making shit up?

Multiple telepaths, in a Minority Report-like setup, but somehow prevented from communicating with each other. Or, you know, by shooting him in the face.

On the flip side, how would you even be able to hide white-collar crime from a telepath?

By shooting him in the face? There's a theme developing here.

When you consider all of the vast and complex intelligence structures in the world that are predicated on the notion that people can't pull secrets out of other people's heads, it becomes quite frighteningly obvious what the preferred option is going to be for many vested interests. I'll give you a hint: it isn't "not shooting telepaths in the face".

[angelfromanotherpin]

What about telepaths? Given that there is current research into brain imaging to determine what people are thinking, what level of accuracy would telepaths have to exhibit in order for them to be recruited by police and government forces?

Slightly more accuracy than they'd have to demonstrate in order for police and government forces to just shoot them in the face. Seriously. If a government learned for a fact that someone existed who could pluck any secret out of anybody's head merely by getting within a mile of them, that person would have the life expectancy of a glass tennis racquet.

The problem is that the telepath may well have a) deathbed insurance on those secrets, and/or b) sufficient telepathy to foil his shooter.

As with most supers, antagonizing them is much riskier than just recruiting them.