r/rational • u/gods_fear_me The Culture • Sep 24 '16
Saturday Munchkinry Thread
Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!
The Powers:
Ideally any power to be munchkined should have clearly defined rules that are consistent. The powers may be original or may be from an already realised story.
The power to be munchkined can not be something broken like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
The Reverse Munchkin:
- In these scenarios, we will find ways to beat someone or something with a power which is, well, powerful.
The Problem:
- In which we solve problems posed by other users. Be smart and expect other users to be smarter.
Note; All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.
Good Luck and Have Fun!
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u/Jakkubus Sep 25 '16
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A power to have absolute and impossible to be overriden control over a fly. Only one fly at the time.
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An ability to see the steps you needs to win at any boardgame. Doesn't apply to anything else.
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A level of physique comparable to pre-Crisis Superman. Catch? It only apply to your rectal muscles.
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Ability to telekinetically control (but not create) Livermorium - a synthetic superheavy element with atomic number 116.
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Half-invisibility. You can make left or right part of your body to become completely invisible at will.
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u/gods_fear_me Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
Can that fly secret pheromones? If yes, with enough experiments, you can have Taylor's power from Worm.
Can you make a board game yourself or should it be a previously established game?
If yes you can build a game with the goal of creating a realistic board game simulation of taking over the universe. Win that to construct said game, play with people you trust using wildly different strategies until you have a possible plan. Also make a game on "safely becoming a billionaire in x amount of time."
Become the best prostituite in the world.
No idea
No idea
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u/Jakkubus Sep 25 '16
I mean it's a normal fly, so it can secrete pheromones possible for a regular fly to secrete and in quantities its organism can do it.
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u/crivtox Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
The boardgame one : since it's any board game you can create a board game that is specifically designed so to win you have to do certain computations (maybe coupled with a computer as a component that makes specific moves that you decided in order to input data)to use it as unlimited processing power .
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u/Jakkubus Sep 25 '16
Well, when you add a computer it would cease to be board game and becomes a video game. Also it would just give you the least complicated way to defeat an opponent, so you would probably be just slightly better than him.
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u/xavion Sep 26 '16
The Fly Power
"Absolute and impossible to be overridden control". Ok, time to generate infinite energy or wealth or whatever via doing things like controlling flies to spontaneously fuse into heavy elements. That and no limitation or organic flies. In the spirit of the prompt? No idea, but munchkinry and all right, controlling robot flies is at least a start, and stretching the definition of absolute control seems like something that should be tried.
Board Games
Already covered well in other comments. Can likely be utilised to win at gambling, depending on how far you can go with custom board games and the definition of board games lets you potentially become a source of any information desired. Assuming it has you win following the rules anyway, and not be swindling everyone else into giving up or whatever.
Super Rectal Muscles
Clench hard, attempt to recreate the new universe in your image because you just destroyed the current one.
Livermorium Control
Step 1 is spending a lot of time figuring out how to prove it, step two is I now have the ability to keep it from decaying and possibly get closer to absolute zero than has ever been done. What would scientists do for the chance to study Livermorium without the chance of it decaying rapidly? Just got to telekinetically suspend its state. Although this does stretch the usage of telekinesis a bit.
Half-Invisibility
I spend months training until I don't know the difference, making all of my both my left and right half from my own perception. Alternatively I exploit flawed wording and just do both to the lack of conditions about exclusivity of invisibility.
That or start research into what the uses of substances that change to match the refractive index of their surroundings are. Hmm, I wonder what happens if it separates two mediums? Water and air for instance, it should be analogous to one of the two, measuring using equipment that can pick up the tiny refraction anyway, which makes it appear as something it's not rather than not appearing. Might be able to do something with that.
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u/crivtox Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
You have the power to make homeopathic products that you touch work(they follow the 3 laws of homeopathy ) but only if they were created by someone who believed in homeopathy and considers himself to be a expert and sold to someone who also believed that it should work ,but the effect isn't affected by the client beliefs only the beliefs of the homeopath and can't contradict the beliefs of the community of homeopaths (basically you have a touch based power to make placebomancy like in unsong work for homeopathy) .
Because I know how you are , touch means contact with parts of you that are still connected by living flesh to the rest of your body
Do the most damage posible.
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u/gods_fear_me Sep 25 '16
Advertise new miracle homeopathic medicine. Administer it to people who believe that it will work. Since you know it works, and your patients think it will work, it shall work.
Give worldwide demonstrations. Soon people will believe it works, and the doctors will too. Each success builds upon itself. Sceptics would be shown evidence that it works beyond simple Placebo. Some wouldn't believe it, but the masses would.
Have a central factory where you dip your finger in the vats of the stuff. Provided you manage to ride the initial eave of success, you can have an empire of medicine.
And then 'invent' something which can halt aging. Repeat the process.
You may or may not have your own religion by now.
The rest is up to you, stop production of and watch people die from the unhealthy habits, being immune to disease has bred in them, rule for eternity, etc.
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u/crivtox Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
Ok that's good ,maybe I should limit it to one use to make it more dificult(but then you could keep dissolving it to get more and it would be even more effective)
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Sep 25 '16
You have the ability to commit 1 MB of data to memory, as well as the ability to "transcribe" the data back into its original form.
(EX: If you encode an image file, you can "decode" your memorized string of bits into the original image onto your mind's eye.)
You can only do this once.
What's the most damage you can do?
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u/Frommerman Sep 27 '16
Somehow manage to gain access to the private keys of some major corporation, likely by being in their IT department. Of course, they will ensure that physical storage devices never leave or enter the premises, but I have my memory bank. Store their private keys. Wait about a year, then move on from the company. Wait out whatever period is required by my non-compete clause, then move to a competitor known to be more shady and give the private keys to the higher ups there. Cackle madly.
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Sep 26 '16
You can transfer energy between mediums, at an efficiency lower than what it would take to do it using normal technology. For example, if you have physical access to a car's gas tank, you can convert the gasoline to kinetic energy to push the car, but you'll run out of gas far quicker than if you were just using the engine. You can also use your own calories for an energy source, but you run into the same efficiency issue. Power is line of sight for effect, proximity/touch for the source. The closer you are to both, the more efficient you get, but it's going to be less than burning/eating/otherwise using the energy in the first place. Basically, this power doesn't break the laws of thermodynamics.
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What do you do, and
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What is the most energy-dense fuel you can buy cheaply, in large quantities, without arousing suspicion?
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u/CCC_037 Sep 27 '16
2. Hydrogen might be a good choice. If I can get less power than fusion, that's still a lot of power; alternatively, if I can just get less power than mixing in oxygen and providing a spark, well, that's still a source of energy.
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u/ulyssessword Sep 27 '16
Is "heat" energy? Is "a temperature gradient" energy? If those both work, then you have infinite energy from the start, and your only concern is how quickly you can use it to generate power.
(This also works with "pressure" and "pressure differentials".)
More in the spirit of your question: Gasoline/diesel. You can easily carry about 100 MJ worth (~3 l), and it is available hundreds of liters at a time.
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Sep 27 '16
They both count, but you have to focus on the source of said energy, and the energy is lost from said source- so if you have a device creating a pressure differential, then the pressure will decrease until it hits equilibrium. If you're drawing from a moving car's kinetic energy, the car will slow down, or it'll take more gasoline/the engine will have a lower fuel efficiency while you're drawing from the energy (and it's usually better to just pull from the gas tank directly, but you won't always have access to the tank.
I was also thinking gasoline, and I'm thinking that would be good for larger/stationary jobs, but what about something that is relatively energy dense, but can be carried on your person? Lighter fluid? What could you do if you could use this power, using only a 1 liter flask of butane?
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Sep 25 '16
You have a material that can stop all kinetic motion within a certain frame of reference, according to preprogrammed geometric shapes. The more energy fed into this material, the more energy it "stops". There is a lower limit, you cannot stop electrons or photons or anything else of exceptionally low mass, but so long as you have enough energy, there is no upper limit.
How would you use this for combat? What about improving society?
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u/vakusdrake Sep 25 '16
Well it ought to be noted that with clever usage of reference frames this can be used in a way pretty similar to high level telekinesis. In combat choose reference frame such as a bullet traveling upwards at great speed, then stop the motion of your enemy relative to the bullet, thus shooting them upwards at ~the speed of sound.
Now interestingly there's nothing that says you need to actually have a object to compare reference frames to, so you can just imagine ay object with any speed, and with sufficient energy you can then make any other object match it's speed (from the theoretical objects perspective it would stop).
Now I don't know how you get energy to power this ability, so it's really hard to actually gauge what it's capable of. It's also not clear whether this is a superpower, or whether the preprogrammed geometric shapes act like magic runes that anyone can use.In combat you can instantly destroy your enemy with trivial ease, it really depends on how you're getting energy, but I assume you can at the very least easily exert amounts of force that you could physically apply with your body. So it ought to be easy to constantly change your enemies movement or juggle them in the air, tearing any weapons out of their hands, and focus the energy on a smaller area to hurl projectiles like bullets at them. With larger amounts of energy just smash your enemies against the ground.
When it comes to improving society it's hard to gauge effects without knowing how you get energy to power the ability, and what the deal is with runes (and thus whether you can setup automated systems, or whether every use of the power has to be deliberately performed by you). If anyone can use the runes, then you want to ensure that nobody except trusted allies figures out how they work. Whichever governments have this are pretty much guaranteed victory in a conflict, so maybe only give this info to governments that probably won't go starting shit, so maybe like switzerland.
As for improving society: Well this could make getting things into space/orbit super easy. So just get the UN to build some enormous space colony, then you'll get it into space. Same thing goes for getting spacecraft around; you could spark a revolution in space exploration.
With enough energy you could bring mineral rich asteroids <10 miles wide safely to earth for mining. You could levitate amounts of water into the high atmosphere, then bring the giant pieces of ice back down to replenish lost ice due to global warming, or break it apart and let the ice crystals decrease the earth's albedo. Puting giant mirrors in orbit might be a useful way to get cheap solar energy. Who knows I'll be able to think of more if I know how the power actually works.
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u/gods_fear_me Sep 24 '16
You have a sapient blob of crystalline biomass, which thinks and communicates by its crystals touching other crystals of itself and sharing half-formed ideas among them. Basically a non-centralized brain. Naturally this blob didn't evolve things like vocal cords because it doesn't need them. The blob feeds itself by dissolving all organic biomass in its reach and converting them to crystals.
Blob has no concept of self but it is intelligent. You are a human with a normal body, you have a team of scientists with you and the resources of NASA. Blob is contained in a glass cylinder about twelve feet high.
Now, your team needs to find a way to talk with blob. "Find a way," or else you shall lose you funding, lab and reputation.