Two Powers Each

[Deleted]

I think they could have expanded the original powers though, in ways that aren't entirely new powers. If they had three abilities each, perhaps something along the lines of this:

Prue: Telekinesis, Levitation, Banishing.
Piper: Freezing, Deceleration, Time Looping
Phoebe: Premonition, Sensing, Vision Projection.

To elaborate (for the sake of this, I'm disregarding Paige for the time being and imagining 7 seasons):

Season 1- No problem here, keep it as it was, developing smoothly.

Season 2- Prue starts training and begins to defy gravity ever so slightly. She notices more as she fights more. Towards the end of the season, she can actually suspend herself in the air for a few seconds.
Piper and Phoebe's development can remain pretty much the same; with Piper becoming more selective with unfreezing and Phoebe getting better at summoning visions.

Season 3- When Phoebe meets Cole, she senses something, but can't quite put her finger on what. As she gets closer to him and as the season progresses, her power strengthens and she is able to clearly recognize him as a demon rather than having it revealed to her. Piper gains far more control over her power allowing her to unfreeze body parts and (later in the season) slow down time. Prue becomes a much more capable fighter and becomes skilled at combining her TK and levitation stunts.

Season 4- Prue's telekinesis increases in strength, becoming quite destructive when angry (but not quite to the extent of Morality Bites). Phoebe begins getting some premonitions without touching anything and her senses grow stronger.

Season 5- Prue becomes able to banish beings, removing them from the building and blocking their entrance for a certain amount of time. Phoebe can sense people's location. Piper's freeze/slow down can spread across wider areas.

Season 6- At the start of the season, Phoebe learns she can project her visions into other people's minds, allowing her to share them with her sisters and others. Later on in the season, she realizes that she can project other visions too, incapacitating enemies by playing all their worst, most traumatic moments at once. This is what will later become her "Morality Bites" power, but for now it can't kill, just severely hurt and disorientate.

Season 7- Piper becomes capable of time looping a moment in an area. Fighting greater evil than ever before, Piper can use this to give the sisters more than one opportunity at a vanquish and to practice different tactics. She can also lock thought to be unvanquishable demons in a moment. As with developing her ability to unfreeze, she gradually learns to break a time loop at a point of her choosing, allowing her to save her sisters or an innocent by looping a moment back to when they were okay and breaking it before they're hurt.

The main thing with all these powers is that none of the sisters can vanquish a demon with a simple hand wave. Prue's would become the most offensive, but even she would only be able to do a lot of damage to a demon (short of reflecting energy balls or sticking them with sharp objects of course). So The Power of Three is still a necessity.

[Deleted]

Mar 11, 2015 19:25:57 GMT -5 @p3nathan said:

I think they could have expanded the original powers though, in ways that aren't entirely new powers. If they had three abilities each, perhaps something along the lines of this:

Prue: Telekinesis, Levitation, Banishing.
Piper: Freezing, Deceleration, Time Looping
Phoebe: Premonition, Sensing, Vision Projection.

To elaborate (for the sake of this, I'm disregarding Paige for the time being and imagining 7 seasons):

Season 1- No problem here, keep it as it was, developing smoothly.

Season 2- Prue starts training and begins to defy gravity ever so slightly. She notices more as she fights more. Towards the end of the season, she can actually suspend herself in the air for a few seconds.
Piper and Phoebe's development can remain pretty much the same; with Piper becoming more selective with unfreezing and Phoebe getting better at summoning visions.

Season 3- When Phoebe meets Cole, she senses something, but can't quite put her finger on what. As she gets closer to him and as the season progresses, her power strengthens and she is able to clearly recognize him as a demon rather than having it revealed to her. Piper gains far more control over her power allowing her to unfreeze body parts and (later in the season) slow down time. Prue becomes a much more capable fighter and becomes skilled at combining her TK and levitation stunts.

Season 4- Prue's telekinesis increases in strength, becoming quite destructive when angry (but not quite to the extent of Morality Bites). Phoebe begins getting some premonitions without touching anything and her senses grow stronger.

Season 5- Prue becomes able to banish beings, removing them from the building and blocking their entrance for a certain amount of time. Phoebe can sense people's location. Piper's freeze/slow down can spread across wider areas.

Season 6- At the start of the season, Phoebe learns she can project her visions into other people's minds, allowing her to share them with her sisters and others. Later on in the season, she realizes that she can project other visions too, incapacitating enemies by playing all their worst, most traumatic moments at once. This is what will later become her "Morality Bites" power, but for now it can't kill, just severely hurt and disorientate.

Season 7- Piper becomes capable of time looping a moment in an area. Fighting greater evil than ever before, Piper can use this to give the sisters more than one opportunity at a vanquish and to practice different tactics. She can also lock thought to be unvanquishable demons in a moment. As with developing her ability to unfreeze, she gradually learns to break a time loop at a point of her choosing, allowing her to save her sisters or an innocent by looping a moment back to when they were okay and breaking it before they're hurt.

The main thing with all these powers is that none of the sisters can vanquish a demon with a simple hand wave. Prue's would become the most offensive, but even she would only be able to do a lot of damage to a demon (short of reflecting energy balls or sticking them with sharp objects of course). So The Power of Three is still a necessity.

I really like those ideas, the power progressions are very faithful to each woman's original power. I like how you put thought into keeping Piper's power time related which is difficult, as it makes it had to think of decent progressions for it. 

I agree with not making Prue's power as violent as it was in Morality Bites, that was just insane. Similarly, I would make Phoebe's vision projection power slightly weaker. Basically, I think each sister's power should be able to kill someone at least once or twice, but not routinely like Piper's exploding. 

Also, with more unique powers, it would've forced the writers to come up with more creative plots.

[Deleted]

Mar 13, 2015 12:37:32 GMT -5 @deano said:

I really like those ideas, the power progressions are very faithful to each woman's original power. I like how you put thought into keeping Piper's power time related which is difficult, as it makes it had to think of decent progressions for it.

Thank you, glad you like them. Yeah, I wanted to keep Piper's power time related and I thought since time loops has been introduced into Charmed previously, it'd be interesting to do something with that.

Mar 13, 2015 12:37:32 GMT -5 @deano said:

I agree with not making Prue's power as violent as it was in Morality Bites, that was just insane. Similarly, I would make Phoebe's vision projection power slightly weaker. Basically, I think each sister's power should be able to kill someone at least once or twice, but not routinely like Piper's exploding. 

Absolutely. I recently watched a few videos on Youtube of Charmed vanquishes. It really highlighted how often Piper's explosion power was used as an easy solution in later seasons... and how little the power of three was actually used.

[Deleted]

Mar 13, 2015 17:36:25 GMT -5 @p3nathan said:

Thank you, glad you like them. Yeah, I wanted to keep Piper's power time related and I thought since time loops has been introduced into Charmed previously, it'd be interesting to do something with that.

 - it would've been cooler if Piper had been the one to sense the time shift in 'Deja-Vu All Over Again' rather than Phoebe. I understand how Phoebe's heightened awareness would make her able to sense it, but if Piper's powers had truly been kept as time-related, it should've been her who sensed it, especially as her power would be so similar to Tempus'. 

Absolutely. I recently watched a few videos on Youtube of Charmed vanquishes. It really highlighted how often Piper's explosion power was used as an easy solution in later seasons... and how little the power of three was actually used.

Tell me about it . Her exploding demons got so tedious. It was the same old scenario - Paige disarms the demon then Piper blows them up, there was almost no point in Phoebe being there. The best part of none of the sisters having an overly offensive power was that it gave Phoebe the chance to shine with her martial arts skills. If her powers had progressed they way you wrote it, her heightened awareness/intuition could've eventually given her Buffy-like skills. 

[Melinda Halliwell]

The trouble is most demons and warlocks were too easily vanquishable in the later seasons because they didn't grow power wise like the sisters did I.E being able to resist Piper's power or being thrown against a wall instead of disappearing completely which's why her exploding power was too tedious then.

Had that worked on lower level beings only and then required the power of three for upper level vanquishes with a spell, blood, flesh combo potion I would've respected her power more then.

[Deleted]

Yeah I'd agree with that.

I think Piper's explosion power actually ended up being one of the most inconsistent powers in the show, no doubt because they knew they'd overpowered her without the demons changing all that much. I noticed it in season 7 especially, she'd blast demons far more, but then the next moment she'd have no problem blowing them up, then the next moment she could just about graze them. It wasn't that the demons varied in power, it just ended up being terribly random; whatever served the script. They made a big mistake having her blow up an upper level demon as soon as she got the power.

A lesser example would be Phoebe's empathy. In the first ep she has it, before she even got a handle on the basic sensing aspect, she was becoming impervious to attacks and using other people's powers. Much like Piper's power, that overpowers Phoebe right from the get go and leaves them with no space to grow the power over time (short of her becoming an unstoppable god)... so instead they just had contrived reasons for it not to work on certain occasions until they eventually wrote it out.

That was always one of the problems with the sisters having more powers. As well as the power of three being used less. It meant that the sisters actually became too powerful and too useful on their own for the writers to manage half the time.

Whereas in season 1, each sister did their part and complimented one another- Prue: Offense, Piper: Defense, Phoebe: Intel. It worked because they needed each other and we could actually see the power of three in practice. They couldn't do everything with their individual powers, but then that's what spells and potions are for.

[Deleted]

Couldn't agree more, guys.

Piper blew up Tarkin from the Brotherhood and a Banshee within the first two episodes of getting her new power. Then suddenly in Season 4, she couldn't even blow up random warlocks etc. Immunity to her powers was just as randomly written as the strength of her powers was. For example, the Furies and Vampires were immune to her powers; fair enough, that just means they're upper level demons; but she could use them on Cole and numerous other powerful demons. It was just all over the place. If she had to have that power, they should've made it so it could only kill warlocks/lower level demons; throw back/blast stronger demons and not even affect upper level demons.

Agreed, Nathan. The way Phoebe went from barely being able to control her empathic powers, to suddenly being able to deflect fireballs was ridiculous. If they wanted the sisters to be this powerful, they should've waited until the last season, in the lead up to the final battle. I mean, the joke of it is with all these fantastic powers, they used them less and less in the big important battles: S5 - they used the power of the Gods to stop the Titans; S6 - was mostly about Leo, Chris and Gideon and barely involved the sisters; S7 - Zankou stole most of their powers, forcing them to use take inspiration from Prue's power; S8 - the Hollow was involved. Seriously, the best team effort vanquish after S4 was their battle with the Triad at Magic School (even then Phoebe didn't really do anything).

I agree with Nathan that they perfectly complimented each other in S1-3, even Prue getting Astral Projection and Phoebe's getting Levitation didn't overpower them. The powers were just so unbalanced after S4. I didn't even mind Piper having the firepower after Prue's death, because they needed it and it didn't seem to overshadow her sisters' powers to the extent it did in S5-8. The Power of Three was meant to be a unit that only worked at its best due to collective effort.

[elementfury]

Prue Telekinesis / Flying

Piper Freezing / Molecular Combustion

Phoebe Premonition / Empathy(channeling
others powers)

Paige Telekinetic Orbing /Lightning (it's a power she had has enchantress, and also a power elders have)