Some Four-Color Supers Genre Conventions

• People are hard to kill or seriously injure with superpowers. Powers can cause great property damage and throw people around like rag dolls, but even normals will survive being thrown around like rag dolls by superpowers. Fights with superpowers usually result in lots of property damage and the losers getting rendered unconscious without anyone being seriously hurt in the process.
• People with superpowers are hard to hurt or kill by any means.
• The more damage an attack will do to a super, the less likely it is to connect. It is essentially impossible to tag a super with an attack that can kill him with a single hit. This is how super-types with little or no armor avoid getting hurt.
• In a streetfight, it is almost impossible to hit the Masked Maurader with a gun, very difficult to hit him with a knife, and not so difficult to hit him with a fist. (Unless you're a supergoon whose fist does more damage than a gun. In that case, hitting him with your fist is even harder than hitting him with a gun.)
• It is very difficult for a super to injure himself with his own powers.
• Very strong characters can pick up large objects without them breaking under their own weight - even if they would realistically do so.
• Masks are extremely effective at hiding identities.
• The flimsiest of excuses are also effective at hiding identities (but the super trying to hide his secret must come up with some excuse).
• Typical costumes can survive the use of superpowers just as well as normal clothing survives normal human activities. They will sometimes come out worse for wear, but rarely will be utterly destroyed.
• Thugs and gangsters can easily equip themselves so as to outgun the police (and no, this is not realistic). Not that all their "sexy" full-auto guns and sci-fi superweapons do them much good against superheroes.
• Guns are about as good for civilian self-defense as Handgun Control Incorporated (HCI) claims - i.e. not very. (If ordinary civilians could defend themselves against criminals, what need would there be for superheroes?)
• Non-super hunters are cruel and cowardly yahoos who would do better to stay home and beat their wives.
• Most superheroes are "no killing" pacifists. Exceptions tend to have weaker and less exotic powers.
• Villians are strangely reluctant to kill other supers. Even villians who are casual killers of normals or who put great effort into murder plots against their opponents avoid out-and-out killing of superheroes. Instead, they capture them and/or throw them into deathtraps.
• Superpowers work effectively only for those few who are fated to be supers. They they can only be reproduced by and/or for those so fated and (to a lesser extent) their chosen followers. But those who are so fated can acquire them fairly easily. This means that a few special individuals can build grav sleds out of chicken wire and old radios while most people must continue to use ordinary cars.
• The existance of superpowers will not cause major social, political or historical changes - at least not in the US or in areas Americans are familiar with. Superpowers can cause great social, political, and historical changes in places that most Americans haven't heard of. Life in the USA-with-supers will generally be just like life in the "real" USA.