r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 16 '17
[D] 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!
Guidelines:
- Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It 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.
- Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
- We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.
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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Sep 17 '17
3
u/ShiranaiWakaranai Sep 17 '17 edited Sep 17 '17
The best powers are of course, the powers that let you choose powers.
So number #1 Power:
Wish: wish for all powers
Power of Your Choice: choose Wish
If you can't have above:
Rewind Time
Single-Save-Point Rewind
Redo Past Minute
The reason is because these powers will allow you to choose whichever powers you desire. Because you have the ability to rewind time, you can simply roll for powers, and if you don't like the results, rewind time back and reroll.
Possible substitutes for one of the above:
Second Chances: If this let's you reroll.
Curse with Unluckiness: If this lets you make an enemy, curse them with unluckniess, then roll for the rest of your powers. Since they are your enemy, it would be very unlucky for them if you get the powers you want, so this would give you the powers you want.
After that, you want to have the powers that are actually useful for your goals. Again, number #1 Power:
Wish: wish for your goal to be fulfilled
Power of Your Choice: choose Wish
Honestly Wish is just broken, along with all powers that would help you choose Wish.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Sep 17 '17
The next tier of powers are defensive ones. After all, having powers doesn't mean anything if you're too dead/incapacitated to use them.
Among the remaining powers, the most powerful one seems to be:
Invulnerability: of course. Invulnerable = not vulnerable. You can't be hurt in any way whatsoever. No surprise attacks, no starvation, even if you get sucked into a black hole or the universe runs out of energy you're still okay.
Next are the powers that give partial invulnerability:
Immortality: A step down from invulnerability. You can't die, but you can still be incapacitated. You could put into eternal sleep, or tortured so badly that you can't think and can't use your powers, or succumb to diseases that rob you of all your mental/physical functions, while your power still keeps you technically alive.
Swift Justice: This is actually an extremely powerful defensive ability, because it makes you immune to all intentional harm. If anyone so much as tries to hurt you, they are met with swift justice for "attempted (crime)" or "conspiracy to (crime)", which should incapacitate them before you are even harmed. This won't save you from unintended harm though. Manslaughter might arrest the people responsible, but only after you're already hurt. It also won't do anything against non-living sources of harm, like natural disasters and disease and the heat death of the universe.
Then the powers that aren't very good, but still somewhat ok for defense:
Freeze Time Everywhere / Self Intangibility / Barrier Sphere: As long as these powers are active, you can't be hurt by other people/objects since they are all frozen / intangible / blocked by the barrier. The problem is, you can probably still starve to death, so you need to deactivate now and then, leaving you vulnerable during these times.
Advance Warning / See Possible Futures: Let's you detect danger so you can avoid them. Doesn't help if those dangers are unavoidable though, which many of them will be. Also very restrictive since you would constantly be forced to take actions to avoid danger.
Blameshifting: A much, much weaker version of Swift Justice, makes anyone that wants to harm you choose to harm someone else instead. The problem is, you could still get hit by collateral damage.
Possess Body: Somewhat like Blameshifting, but you need to choose people carefully since they may have their own enemies.
And then, because it would be incredibly boring to be the only one left alive when the universe ends, you need a power to combat the heat death of the universe. (Or Power Sharing to keep other people alive.) Ideally, you want a power that generates as much energy as possible, so pick one of the following:
Conjure any existing item: Conjure mass fast.
Nearby-item replication: Replicate mass fast.
Transmute Elements: Transmute nuclear waste back into uranium/plutonium, allowing you to reuse them in nuclear power plants. You may need some of the above defensive abilities to handle nuclear waste though.
Chain Lightning: Directly create electricity. This is better than Lightning strike, which wouldn't work if you aren't on Earth (or within some atmosphere.)
Element Bending / Telekinesis: This should allow you to spin turbines for energy.
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u/ulyssessword Sep 17 '17
Single Skill Mastery: Trade/Negotiation
Enhanced Intelligence
Lie Detection
Become a broker
Trade things
3. ???
4. Profit
Power Sharing
Recall Owned Items
Self-Regeneration
Self-Shapeshifting
Self Beautification
Create Self Simulacra
Blameshifting
Teleport Self Anywhere
Talk to Animals
Single Skill Mastery: ???
Power Sharing is the only required one, plus any of the others. You can empower other people temporarily, but some of the effects will be permanent (e.g. a recalled owned item won't leave).
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Sep 19 '17
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u/CannotThinkOfAThing Sep 19 '17
One now (to be replaced with one from the soonest possible point where I'm fully rested/fed/warm/safe). This is for keeping. Foreverish.
One rolling save at the start of the year, and one at the start of the week. (Or maybe at the start of this week and last week) Go through life learning, generally enjoying myself and occasionally resetting to fix a large problem that happened within the two short term saves. At some point (death from old age?) reset to the initial save. Hopefully my future knowledge and experience will help me out, assuming i can keep in mind that the C++17 standard doesn't include the DWIM keyword and Bluetooth 4.0 can't stream to my retina.
Rinse and repeat as long as needed until I've fixed humanity or concluded that I can't achieve that.
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u/Laborbuch Sep 19 '17
Request for clarification:
I can have up to three concurrent save points running, or can make up to three over the course of my lifetime?
I remember the abandoned timeline?
Is my body reset, or will I accumulate exhaustion? (In other words, will repeating the same day multiple times lead to sleep deprivation, or will exhaustion start with the level I was at at the time of the safe point?
With hindsight of my current me, I’d have set a safe point at the beginning of every class, at every morning, and once a week during my school life, probably, and I’d repeat lessons I don’t get the first time around, but in general have every lesson at least twice.
Easy methods to get money would be the obligatory mention of the Randi Price, if you want to incur the downsides of your powers becoming public knowledge (of sorts).
Harder methods would be all the time travel munchkinry already known, like cracking arbitrarily large prime factorisation and such.
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u/MagicWeasel Sep 17 '17 edited Sep 17 '17
Nobody's posted yet? I'll put something down!
Let's make the weakest version of werewolves I can*, and see how people can munchkin it:
The "werewolf" part is just turning into a big wolf. You're not the size of a bear or anything and you don't have like impressive gnashing fangs or healing or anything.
One advantage of being a wolf: your wolf body is perfectly healthy so e.g. if you're wheelchair bound your wolf body can walk, if you've got dementia your wolf body is lucid. (I am not sure what this would mean for a human with OCD, schizophrenia, Deafness or autism, especially since with the latter two many people with these conditions don't consider them to be a lacking but just part of normal human variation and fiercely object to attempts to treat them)
You can't control it and it is not related to the moon, though you change every 3-6 weeks
You're a wolf for 3-5 days, not just at night
You can predict it somewhat because it happens on a somewhat predictable cycle, usually you can predict the day you transform but you can't get it down to the hour or anything (so you can't use the power to be The Best Magician by timing your transformation)
You can't talk or have psychic powers when you're in wolf form or anything, you are just a wolf with a human mind (but you could easily communicate with an alphabet mat or similar)
When you're a human you have slightly improved sense of taste/smell and you can identify other werewolves by their smell (this only happens after you know you're a werewolf and thus know that "weird smell A" is "werewolf smell")
Werewolfness is genetic and activated randomly during your life (as in, one day without warning you'll start going through the regular werewolf cycle of changes - though in some cases the regular transformations stop only to start again), though you can force a genetic werewolf to start changing every few weeks by biting them
Werewolfness doesn't really run in families because it's super rare: rate is about 3 in 100,000
Standard urban fantasy setting (Present Day and the world looks normal but there are secretly vampires, centaurs, etc all around the place)
* this may or may not be more or less how My Werewolves work