Detecting Power Levels

Hi, I’m Munin and today we’ll be bitching about power levels. But before you click away, I want you to know you are not dealing with the average bitching power levels anymore.

This is not a post about how they make no sense as they grow, it is a post about introducing a mechanic for a major plot device, and having to turn that mechanic off from time to time for dramatic effect.

It is not a “well, had Toriyama grabbed a calculator and made 3.5x kaioken we wouldn’t have to deal with…” kind of a problem, it is more of a reflection of a “…shit, how do you fix that?” that has no right answer. It is just a discussion for you maybe avoid on your own stories.

Ki sensing in early Dragon Ball

Dragon Ball actually introduced this in the last relevant earth tournament, Goku had learned how to feel instead of using his mind and all that thing that will definitely not be recycled 40 years from now on a certain other tournament.

Goku can sense energy, he can know if you are raising your arm, even without looking at you. And that is as far as it goes here, it is just a boast that Goku is on a different level than the others, and that is the end of that.

Funny thing is I don’t think that is ever used that detailed with in a fight. Goku just mentions again they can do that against a Babidi grunt and there is a huuuge maybe on the 2008 special (that is canon, btw).

Ki sensing as establishing an enemy

This is the first actual narrative of Dragon Ball using the ability, broadly speaking. Radditz shows up and Goku can sense that he cant beat it, he senses from a far.

This is the kind of thing that gets repeated over and over. Sayans show up, two enormous power levels. Conveniently not really mentioning how absurdly strong Vegeta is for the standards at the time, just that he is much stronger.

Freeza casually flies by? Holy shit what the fuck is even that?

Buu awakens. A super Sayan 2 battle immediately comes to a halt because WHAT THE HELL?

So on.

If you want to read a series that does this absurdly well: Claymore. You’ll find many characters having to deal with this overwhelming energy and it is like the Freeza saga whenever it happens.

Ki sensing as a plot device

If you are reading this in the 2020s, the freshest memory you’ll get from this is Frieren. Without spoilers: Demons don’t hide energy, and they see their hierarchy as hiding energy, but Frieren’s main trick is hiding her power level so they underestimate her.

Claymore has its own mechanics like this but they all involve massive spoilers and I really want you to go read it, so I’ll talk about Dragon Ball instead.

Through the whole sayan saga it is established that power levels can change, and taking them for granted is unreliable. Nappa is totally a demon that would die to Frieren if you think about it.

At this point hiding their power levels is just to justify that there are hidden growths, mostly for Gohan, but the spectacle here is Goku’s multipliers that I won’t talk about.

Comes next arc and… that is the name of the game.

Gohan and Krillin are EXTREMELY outmatched but they can survive a week on Namek because the villains are on the dark. Scouters break for dramatic effect and a namek broke it once he realized what that thing does.

So villages can’t be wiped out as soon as a beep detects them, they need to be scouted, and the heroes can use their powers because no one will know. Except another wild card treat, the villain from the previous arc.

Vegeta also now knows how to do that, which people think it is bullshit but Goku learned the kamehameha from just looking at it too, so who knows? Maybe half the time Vegeta was getting punched was because he was paying too much attention to the eyebrow twitches on Goku or something. Point is: We have the other villain also with the same advantage.

As soon as they get scouters back, guerrilla tactics stop working, you are back to being immediately detected, but that is the final part of the arc. It tries to wrap things up really quickly. If you don’t watch the anime, that is.

Cell saga comes in and Toriyama flips it on its head, the main threat lurking around is playing the guerrilla tactics. The Androids are looking for Goku… slowly, and only the most unbothered one can sense energy, but you can’t just escape the androids easily or even find them because… they have no energy.

The suspense is dragging the plot again because this time everyone is in the dark at some point. When one can detect it Toriyama starts wrapping things up with fights over fights again.

And well, Buu saga does this the least, but it is a big Wham moment when the smarter, new Buu can feel energy, or at least is bothered to realize what that is. The plot twist here is Toriyama doesn’t wrap things up and they have to literally tell the villain to sit down and wait.

They try to drag this again with god ki later but it is immediately dropped so screw it.

The Problem

As you can see this is a fantastic writing tool. The problem is… well, you know, power levels are bullshit.

This is fortunately, very minor in Dragon Ball. Yet… Earth is not that big, all things considered. Goku at 16 had swam halfway across the world in a week and he was just hungry after that. So there are things that happen that should be impossible to ignore.

You can say “oh, they were distracted by freeza rushing in towards the dragon balls when dealing with Vegeta”, even though that didn’t happen with the Ginyu force, well, it did a bit, but not when dealing with Vegeta, but in general ki sensing is not a skill you can easily ignore most of the series.

Super Sayan Vegeta acquiring this, likely on Earth, or the kids turning into super sayans and no one knowing is the kind of crap that shouldn’t happen and will confuse kids that will smugly write about it on the internet nearly 40 years after it happen.

They are “far away” or “oh the kids were hiding their power” doesn’t cut it because the transformations are the definition of exploding power, and they are meant to be way stronger than anything ever experienced. Cold and Freeza were not even on earth and the humans already gathered to see what they can do about it.

The situations I mentioned are just moments to surprise the audience, they are harmless. But I hope you can see how this can lead to a “spider-sense needs to be fired” situation. Because sure, characters will commit mistakes, but it is easier to not look at as screen when something is happening than the equivalent of listening a flying jumbo with megaphones being accidentally stealthy.

It is not even something that bothers me… it doesn’t bother me… it bothers me, it bothers me a lot… AND THAT ONE IS STILL GREEN.

Solutions

Well the easiest solution is to not make powers scale to the point it should be impossible to ignore them. Note that I didn’t say remove it at all, that is like removing phones from your universe because you couldn’t find a way to avoid immediate communication.

The rest is treating this special sense as… well, any other sense.

The most common you’ll see in media is a character following smells, and… while it is the easiest way of brushing off why someone lost track, it is hard when you make someone too sensible.

Focus on strategies like not being against the wind to someone’s position, even if the “wind” in question is some magic current or something. Don’t try to pull that off those “Well you clearly have the smell of that bakery from Brooklyn in 1980 that I ate on once, so you must be related to the Baker’s cousin” kind of thing.

Sonar is one thing that we act like it can only detect but that is just… sound that has to come back. To come back it needs to go there first, which means if you’re far enough you know you’ve been detected before they know it. Well that is a tense head start, huh?

Though granted, I know it is much less epic to see Daredevil howling or squeaking like a dying hamster to see, but the concept of “you can use to see, but others will see you too” is still underrated.

If you are pulling some Shakugan no Shana temporary pocket dimension kind of thing so just regular people don’t see it, make spells that are extra pockety and stuff like private chat rooms that move. This means people know something is happening on that specific spot, but they can’t know what is happening inside it until they cross the threshold. They know what it is, they might even know who but they need to get there to have a closer look. Easy suspense.

You can also make something really specific that you are forced to do, and you happen to be detected. In Lord of the Rings had the ring ping back home because the elves never bothered to install linux on it, I’m sure you can think of something similar.

Sci-fi it usually comes down to some kind of radar equivalent and its tech to counter it, but we never really talk about the budget. I don’t mean just “oh they destroyed the antenna or whatever”, more like they couldn’t build it on that specific antenna in the first place, because it wasn’t worth the cost.

“Jake, you can’t go there, we don’t have the dark matter defibrillator to avoid their gravitational waves detector!”

“I know, but this is the boonies of space, Alice, they wouldn’t build it here. I gotta risk it”

And one thing that we don’t use enough outside of heists is… lasers. Lasers in movies are always visible, and never the speed of light how this can be made into a region-wide thing.

Maybe you have a bottleneck and this laser spell is only there, but there is no other way to go around so that is how you cover ground.

The coolest solution to me, is take part of the examples I said before and have those “lasers” go across everything, but they’re a 4 to 8 meter wide line.

Some move, some are just pointing to dozens of angles for kilometers. Who knows? Some use mirrors. They can be seen by EVERYONE, and everyone can avoid them, but the problem is those sentinels will shift turns and strategies and this means things happening at the worst time for the protagonists.

Not only that but your characters sometimes have to outrace a tangent laser that is coming (because you know it failed the speed of light).

Cooler yet? You can use those things too but it means everyone that can spot two of the beans knows immediately how to triangulate how far you are from them.

With that said lasers should be invisible, maybe you have different places in the spectrum and it is an arms race to use uncommon ones, maybe the “scouters” can only detect them a couple of them at the time and are expensive, so shifting the spectrum is part of their strategy.

Maybe you are going for a more resourceful avoidance, like you can jump over them with stick, pretend to be a deer, or if they’re still invisible, check for them with some tiny smoke that is not too big to draw detection, or follow what birds do, since they can see it and they hate it.

My personal solution to my books, which I unfortunately didn’t have to use much because it is already a very rare power, and I just didn’t want to deal with it, is that ki is like a frequency.

All ki auras have the same natural frequency. If something is close enough you will detect it with yours, but far away? It is no different from sound and light, it is just waves that the vibration fades away.

You have to focus to sense further ones that are natural, and if you are trying to hide while using your ki, you have to make it vibrate differently. Let too much leak in an attack and you will be detected.

So if you are in this dire need to avoid someone, you will be actively vibrating it differently so it doesn’t get the same detection, but if someone picks up “your frequency”, they can lock in on you while giving up other frequencies. There is also another strategy I kind of like but that would be a major spoiler for my books. Maybe I’ll update it when I actually publish this part of the story.

Until then, I hope you have a good day, and I’ll sense your ki later.

PS: But seriously, go read Claymore