It would have been possible to price every little thing in terms of Plot Points or some other developmental currency, and there are many fine products on the market that have done so with good results. They do this, of course, to make certain that every character at least starts at an even level of power, and then secondarily, that opponents can be created of appropriately challenging power levels.
This is all well and noble, but we don’t care. That is, we don’t care enough to put a price on every little thing. Many experienced gamers are horrified that we just gave away self defined powers. “How can we possibly keep such a loose system balanced?” they ask. And we respond that it doesn’t matter - not in canon GAFT.
We are simulating a cartoon. Slow and subtle builds are not appreciated here. We are not simulating a 16 book fantasy series where the boy who will be a mighty hero/wizard/king by book 12, spends most of book one running through the woods with only his father’s rusty broadsword. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we wrote this game because we don’t have that kind of time.
Our heroes need to be awesome from the get-go. Remember that they will never be home. There is no secure base, no supporting organization, heck half the time they won’t even know when and where they are. Since they are super-heroes to begin with, they start out as a match for just about any realistic foe they might encounter. Fine. We are not simulating prime time dramas or respectable literature of any sort. Happily, mythology and speculation provide a wealth of fantastic foes and situations more suitable to our purposes.
Randomly travelling through time will inherently frustrate the little souls of power-gamers. There is no reward for specialization, and accumulating resources is next to impossible. Besides, as any experienced game-master will attest, there are all kinds of way to hit a character where his precious bonuses won’t protect him.
Drama in an RPG comes from three sources:
Most if not all characters will find that their Awesome Powers do not provide an immediate solution to two out of those three. (Most, in fact, will be equipped only to deal with conflict.) A good episode will present challenges from all three directions. If you can do that, you can have Superman and the Three Stooges (did we mean Justice League?), and still have a fun game.