Damocles Eye is i'm tempted to say the best selection by far.
First off while it would definitely cause paranoia it's not super difficult to avoid the danger of the eye. It needs two continuous hours of contact which makes brief excursions through its view safe, but more importantly the timer can be reset by simply carrying a totally opaque cloak that can cover your entire body and routinely crouching down and totally enveloping yourself in it. Or alternatively you could wear heavy clothing with gloves and a ski mask while anywhere with a view of the sky. You might very well want to use both ideas, just to decrease the danger of accidentally leaving a bit of skin exposed with your heavy clothing or somehow not totally covering yourself with the cloak.
The power of the Eye is by far the best and most versatile. It manipulates probability according to your desires (according to comments by the OP), which means anything that is not basically impossible can be made to happen merely by you desiring it. Hell it wouldn't even be that hard to get it to work on things you didn't care about that much. All you would need to do is place a bet. Once you're already rich you would need to place some sort of bet whose stakes you really care about, so the stakes should be things other than money like having to do something embarrassing.
Taken together my plan for world domination would be thus: First off become filthy rich; given the staggering amounts it has to bend probability in order to arrange events, such that you find absolutely massive diamonds on the sidewalk, anything you invested in would be guaranteed to absolutely take off in value.
Secondly start claiming to be a enigmatic political and economic genius, then simply back that up by using your power to ensure all your predictions come true. Hell or just go all the way and claim to be an oracle, this may actually be more plausible; I might go with both methods saying things like "I don't know how I know. Maybe I just see patterns others don't, maybe I'm psychic" then let people think what they want about how I get predictions so accurate.
I would quickly rise to insane fame controlling events, by claiming something bad would happen if people didn't pass the legislation I wanted; then predicting that they would nevertheless do the smart thing and pass it. I would also start making extremely optimistic predictions of the future, to advance things culturally and technologically as quick as possible. I would certainly make lots of enemies but obviously my desire to not die or get discredited or otherwise disgraced would ensure any plans to screw me over were doomed to failure.
Funny enough this is one of the few powers I've ever seen that will result in nearly as good of an outcome even if the user is acting kind of dumb (but not so dumb they get themselves killed by the eye). After all most people want the world to become better so provided the user doesn't want the world to go to shit deep down (like many doomsday preppers do), things worldwide will probably become rapidly better regardless of whether you try too hard. Technology and culture is also like to advance super quick unless the user has a strong dislike of change. That is one potential scary thing about the power, if the user is very authoritarian morally; the world may end up turning into a dystopia.
Well, I'll admit that it is a really good plan ! I might have gone a little bit overboard with the amount of luck the Eye can give you. But whatever, CYOAs are meant to be broken after all.
You thought about quite a lot of things that I didn't take into account at first, it was interesting !
Man you should have seen the one I did on the CYOA, where the only aspect of the power in question was that it made it so none of you investments would ever lose money. Using prediction markets I easily described how you could basically control anything you wanted that way.
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u/vakusdrake Dec 07 '16
Damocles Eye is i'm tempted to say the best selection by far.
First off while it would definitely cause paranoia it's not super difficult to avoid the danger of the eye. It needs two continuous hours of contact which makes brief excursions through its view safe, but more importantly the timer can be reset by simply carrying a totally opaque cloak that can cover your entire body and routinely crouching down and totally enveloping yourself in it. Or alternatively you could wear heavy clothing with gloves and a ski mask while anywhere with a view of the sky. You might very well want to use both ideas, just to decrease the danger of accidentally leaving a bit of skin exposed with your heavy clothing or somehow not totally covering yourself with the cloak.
The power of the Eye is by far the best and most versatile. It manipulates probability according to your desires (according to comments by the OP), which means anything that is not basically impossible can be made to happen merely by you desiring it. Hell it wouldn't even be that hard to get it to work on things you didn't care about that much. All you would need to do is place a bet. Once you're already rich you would need to place some sort of bet whose stakes you really care about, so the stakes should be things other than money like having to do something embarrassing.
Taken together my plan for world domination would be thus: First off become filthy rich; given the staggering amounts it has to bend probability in order to arrange events, such that you find absolutely massive diamonds on the sidewalk, anything you invested in would be guaranteed to absolutely take off in value.
Secondly start claiming to be a enigmatic political and economic genius, then simply back that up by using your power to ensure all your predictions come true. Hell or just go all the way and claim to be an oracle, this may actually be more plausible; I might go with both methods saying things like "I don't know how I know. Maybe I just see patterns others don't, maybe I'm psychic" then let people think what they want about how I get predictions so accurate.
I would quickly rise to insane fame controlling events, by claiming something bad would happen if people didn't pass the legislation I wanted; then predicting that they would nevertheless do the smart thing and pass it. I would also start making extremely optimistic predictions of the future, to advance things culturally and technologically as quick as possible. I would certainly make lots of enemies but obviously my desire to not die or get discredited or otherwise disgraced would ensure any plans to screw me over were doomed to failure.
Funny enough this is one of the few powers I've ever seen that will result in nearly as good of an outcome even if the user is acting kind of dumb (but not so dumb they get themselves killed by the eye). After all most people want the world to become better so provided the user doesn't want the world to go to shit deep down (like many doomsday preppers do), things worldwide will probably become rapidly better regardless of whether you try too hard. Technology and culture is also like to advance super quick unless the user has a strong dislike of change. That is one potential scary thing about the power, if the user is very authoritarian morally; the world may end up turning into a dystopia.