I guess. I never really fully bought that argument. Like, Supes or Legs or whoever aren’t omnipotent—it’s just a matter of scale. You don’t need to turn off their powers to threaten them, just give them a threat of an appropriate level. Superman has plenty of foes who are, more or less, just as strong as him. Legacy had Iron Curtain, I guess; he could use more punchier foes—well, really more foes in general. Plus, you can always have ways to threaten the heroes that are lateral to their powers—all the superstrength and bulletproof skin don’t do anything against Miss Information’s reality warping or Mr. Jitters’ frighteningness.
Also, I do feel like the Superman (2025) film had a pretty clever spin on the classic kryptonite moment: instead of just heroically willpowering though it or whatever, Supes essentially talked the kryptonite down. (It makes sense in context.)
The RS is different from kryptonite, though, in that although sometimes Lex and others can synthesise it, often it’s a rare substance, but there’s never been any mention of any limiting factor for Blade using RS. He seems to essentially be able to have it on him whenever he wants to.
According to the DC Wiki, Kara has been exposed to Pink K—but in that story, its effect was just to make her fall in love with some random dude.
That can work in a comic, but it doesn’t do so well for RPG purposes. I think we’re all familiar with power imbalances between PCs leading to one (or more) characters who require such high-powered foes to be a straightforward threat that a bruising hit to the party tank would one-shot most or all of the other PCs. It’s especially an issue in most supers RPGs (although Sentinels handles it better than most) but it happens even in other genres. That one Traveller dude in battle dress calls for the opposition to have guns that will outright kill some poor chump in ballistic mesh just from the collateral plasma splash.
I remeber fiddling around with Champions way back when where one powerhouse hero had most of his powers bought with a limitation that they couldn’t exceed the active points of whoever they were contending with, so his attacks and defenses scaled up and down constantly depending on who/what he was attacking or being attacked by. Never did quite work, but it did sort of solve the massive power imbalance issues. More importantly, it fit his theme of being “Mister Fair Play” and sticking to measured responses to violence.
Sure, team balance, in both games and stories, is a related but distinct issue from the kryptonite thing. I agree that the SCRPG does handle it pretty well; here, Superman and Wildcat can both have for instance, Wildcat is just more restricted in who he can punch. And sometimes it is addressed in comics, as well. I recall, in the novelisation of Crisis on Infinite Earths (I don’t recall if the original comic had it), despite Batman being absent from one of the big attacks against the Anti-Monitor, the Flash notes that he recognises the strategy being used as Bats’. So even if a hero isn’t powerful enough to directly punch or blast or whatever a threat, they can likely still contribute in other ways.
I don’t suppose he happened to have a cool jacket proclaiming his adherence to that ideal?
for instance, Wildcat is just more restricted in who he can punch. And sometimes it is addressed in comics, as well. I recall, in the novelisation of Crisis on Infinite Earths (I don’t recall if the original comic had it), despite Batman being absent from one of the big attacks against the Anti-Monitor, the Flash notes that he recognises the strategy being used as Bats’. So even if a hero isn’t powerful enough to directly punch or blast or whatever a threat, they can likely still contribute in other ways.