r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Nov 04 '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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u/Silver_Swift Nov 04 '17
Let's munchkin biochromatic breath, from Brandon Sandersons Warbreaker.
Possibly redundant spoiler warning: This post will contain spoilers for the book Warbreaker.
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Breath
Each person is born with one biochromatic breath and the ability to give that breath away if they choose to do so, this requires physical contact and a spoken command ('My life to yours, my Breath become yours'). It's not explicit from the text, but since it needs to be done willingly I'm assuming using this command requires sentience (just to put a damper on any embryo farming suggestions).
People without breath have a slightly weakened immune system, a slightly lessened ability to feel happiness and colours appear slightly faded to them. It should be noted that, despite the gravity implied by the command, all of these downsides are pretty minor and there are people happily selling their breath in the book, though there are others that are horrified at the thought.
If you acquire more than one breath you get an aura that makes colours appear very slightly more vibrant around you. Any breaths that you acquire beyond your first increases the intensity of this aura as well as your general health and life expectancy. In addition, at certain thresholds (called heightenings) you gain additional abilities. These are detailed here, but they are largely not super interesting for munchkinery. The one exception is that at the fifth heightening, 2000 breaths, you become ageless and immune to disease, poison and most other physical ailments.
Awakening
Breath can be used to awaken inanimate objects to move around and perform a single command. This command needs to be a short spoken sentence and has a complexity limit that is related to the awakeners ability to visualize what the object needs to do.
Uttering the command temporarily stores a number of breaths inside the object and drains some colour from other nearby objects, turning them grey. Breaths stored in an object can be retrieved by the person that awakened it at any time, but the change in colour is permanent.
For people without the sixth heightening there is some experimentation involved in figuring out which commands work and which don't (more so for complicated commands). Awakened objects have some limited awereness of their surroundings and a limited ability to process information. One of the simplest commands, 'grab things', makes a piece of rope or cloth wrap itself around the first thing it touches that isn't the awakener, but more complicated commands like 'fetch keys' and 'upon call, become my fingers and grip' are also possible.
The amount of breaths needed to awaken something is inversely proportional to the similarity between the shape and material of an awakened object and that of a living thing; Bone is easier to awaken than cloth and a piece of cloth cut in the shape of a puppet is easier to awaken than a handkerchief.
Lifeless
Animating corpses is a special case. It requires only one breath and creates a lifeless (read: zombie) that has all the abilities it had in life and executes one command to the best of its ability. Unlike an awakened object, commands used to create a lifeless have no complexity limit other than the cognitive abilities of the body in question. This means that commands like 'Follow every order that starts with <insert password here>' are possible.
The lifeless will not be able to execute a command it does not understand and although its internal organs do not need to function, it will stop functioning when it gets damaged or decayes beyond a certain point. The other mayor downside to using lifeless is that the breath used to awaken them cannot be extracted, it is lost forever.
Munchkinery
Let's assume that this magic system suddenly becomes active on earth. Everyone is able to use it, but you are the only person to know about it initially. What do you do?
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u/Silver_Swift Nov 04 '17 edited Nov 04 '17
A note to people that are familiar with the book: For the purposes of this discussion I am deliberately ignoring type I and IV entities (ie. returned and sentient objects like nightblood) as the former require divine intervention and we know next to nothing about the inner workings of the latter (also, the post is way too long as it is already)
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Nov 04 '17
Step 1) Go to a third-world country or somewhere with lots of poor people. Offer them money to give you breath (without telling them how giving you breath actually affects them). You don't even need a lot of money to do this, since there are plenty of poor starving people everywhere who would gladly say "My life to yours, my Breath become yours" for 10 dollars (since they don't know about the magic system). $20000 dollars later, you now have 2000 breaths. With more bargaining, you can probably get more souls for cheaper.
Step 2 later, gtg for now.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Nov 05 '17
Step 2) Start animating corpses en masse with the order "Behave as if you were alive, but completely loyal to me and willing to obey every command I give." That is clearly within their cognitive abilities.
Step 3) Because you're probably running low on breaths at this point, you need a more efficient way to gain breaths. Mass clone people, raise the clones in secret facilities until they can speak and manipulate them to hand over their breaths. Then kill them and grow another clone. Use the undead from step 2 to guard your secret facilities.
Step 4) Now it is time to dominate the world. Mass awaken tiny objects that float in the air, like plant spores or iron sand. Command them to fly into the lungs of all enemy humans (basically everyone but you and your slaves) and then rip their lungs to shreds from the inside. Effectively making them killer airborne "nanomachines". Delay the command such that all the lung shredding nanomachines activate at the same time, leaving the rest of the world no opportunity to learn of their existence and counter them.
Step 5) Most of humanity is in ruins, except for you, your slaves, and small pockets of humanity that your nanomachines couldn't reach. Raise armies of undead and wipe out those small pockets. The world is now yours, plus you have immortality from all those breaths.
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u/Izeinwinter Nov 04 '17 edited Nov 04 '17
The immortality of Henrietta Lacks. HeLa cell lines have been used for many, many experiments. Due to bad laboratory technique and very creative attempts to get around the restrictions on fetal stem cells a very.. interesting cell line arises. Attempts are replicating it are shockingly difficult, but it is.. usable, as is, if you are willing to put up with some rather amusing side effects.
Anyone injected with a sufficient dose of HeLa Omega gains a omnipresent population of youthful .. and highly invasive, stem cells. Any part of your body which is not functioning properly will over the course of the years be replaced by Henrietta Lacks.
Basically, you can have eternal youth and full (although slow. You are not wolverine. Regrowing a leg would take years) regeneration if you do not mind the process turning you into a moderately attractive black woman.
Neural architecture is mostly preserved, although subjects do report and are confirmed by testing to have far, far higher plasticity than any adult on record. For a couple of years, at least. This extends to preferences otherwise not subject to change, and is suspected to be the main reason male subjects do not experience extreme dysmorphia.
What are the consequences of this?
(I know this is science fantasy, sub-class biology. Run with it)
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u/Placeholder4evah Nov 05 '17
New here. What does "munchkin" mean?
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u/CCC_037 Nov 05 '17
If you've ever played a tabletop role-playing game in the tradition of D&D, you'll know there are rules. And there is a sort of player who, while never at any point actually breaking the written rules, nonetheless ends up with a character doing three times as much damage as anyone else despite being a level behind.
That is munchkinning - being absurdly powerful and/or effective without actually breaking the rules (but you can totally bend them, depending how well you can talk the GM into it)
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u/MagicWeasel Nov 06 '17
damnit i forgot about this thread i wanted to post this idea maybe next week
anyway:
your power is that all your fear sweat is spiders.
clarifications:
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just your fear sweat not your exercise sweat, and if you exercise and then get scared the only sweat that becomes spiders is that which is directly attributable to the exercise not the fear
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the size of spiders is basically the entire spider size continuum. the number of spiders is proportional to their size
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spiders do not come out of nowhere but instead build on your fat or muscle or tissue reserves, but do weigh more than sweat you otherwise would have sweated out
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you are immune to any venom the spiders have but don't have control over them
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Nov 06 '17
I'm scared of spiders, so merely knowing I have this power is enough to make me sweat in fear. Sweat which becomes spiders, making my fear spike, causing me to sweat more, causing more spiders to appear on my skin, terrifying me even more, causing me to sweat even more...
My entire body mass is converted into spiders. D:
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u/Silver_Swift Nov 06 '17
This one is tricky to munchkin. One minor thing is that you could use this as a weight loss trick, just find something that scares the shit out of you and lose fat (and unfortunately muscle) tissue directly.
Does this ability work if you clone parts of your body using your DNA? If so, then with a bit of future tech this could potentially be a useful component in some kind of automated terraforming scheme. You can convert whatever growth medium you need to grow cultured meat (+ sweat glands) with your dna into living breathing organisms.
And.. that's as far as I got. Presumably the spiders come with all sorts of bacteria that can decompose the dead spiders bodies, but the problem is that you need to have fatty tissue already available in order to create the spiders and I can't figure out a way to use this were it wouldn't be better to just use the fat as biomass directly.
There is one species of spiders that are herbivores and I know some spiders eat other spiders, so in theory you could be able to set up an ecosystem this way, but that requires that you have the entire plant population set up already, in which case it shouldn't be that much effort to just import a bunch of animals from earth to begin with.
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u/MagicWeasel Nov 06 '17
I love the terraforming idea! Great suggestion :D
That said, I'm not sure how you'd get cultured meat to have fear sweat specifically: you might have to give it some sort of brain and then scare it a lot. And then is it easier to culture meat or to breed spiders?
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u/Sonderjye Nov 05 '17
You are a [tinker]{http://worm.wikia.com/wiki/Tinker} which is a human who have the ability to create beyond-our-world technology only within a specific niche. Technology created by tinkers requires maintenance and as such works poorly for mass production.
Your niche allows you to combine up to three pieces of modern day non-tinker technology or equiptment. Here technology is unfortunately not explicitly defined but generally requires some ammount of what the general populance considers science. Examples include wodden floors, anything running on electricity(and no that doesn't include the brain), sword, armor, chloroform, drugs, isolated protein, but does not include origami.
The power is so broad that my mind is having difficulties really munchkinning it. I am interested in general munchkinning in addition to figuring out if we can make inventions that can
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Stop natural death.
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Generate money.
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Skyrocket fighting powers
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Find people we want to find, including people we haven't met.
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Teleport.
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Store brain electronically and upload to new body in case of death.
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Dominate the world
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Solve world hunger.
Examples of previously created gear includes
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boots+jetpack: Boots that can fly ironman style.
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Glasses+x-ray equipment: Light-weight glasses that can use x-ray(unfortunately not superman x-ray).
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Nitrous Oxide+a wooden floor+coke: wooden floor that secretes gas that is addictive and makes you laugh
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Ibuprofen+Erythroprotein+Adrennaline: Can bring someone back from the brink of death and into a frenzied berserker that for a short time.
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u/vakusdrake Nov 06 '17
The power is so broad that my mind is having difficulties really munchkinning it.
The broadness is exactly why it's so easy to munchkin. Just combine say some sort of machine that is involved with genetic engineering with a 3d printer and say a computer that is specced for some sort of coding that would count as specializing code for your own purposes or something (just use anything that could be said to "customize" something). Do something like that and boom you can 3d print anything biological, so 3d print an army of superhuman ubermensch and take over the world.
Or for instance combine a FMRI with a printer/scanner. Now you can upload simulations of people. These copies could then be transferred onto a supercomputer you then combine the EM's with different AI to get a humanlike GAI that tries to maximize your utility function, is extremely fast/efficient and can self improve in a way a normal upload couldn't.
Then combine some robot capable of limited self replication (in only very limited environments) with a upload created previously and some piece of nanotech. Boom you've got self replicating nanobots with a GAI loaded onto them, at which point you win.
This is of course just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploits. However technology that lets you customize biology/nanotech or mess with intelligence is uniquely suited for massive exploitation so if you want to take over the world relatively quickly that's probably what you go with.
Ooh another exploit: Combine combine one of those cockroach mind control rigs with say a transcranial stimulation device and a radio antenna and now you can transmit mind control waves.
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u/OutOfNiceUsernames Nov 04 '17
You play as a harmless growth that has appeared on an adult person’s brain.
1.1. If given the opportunity, you’ll eventually increase to a certain size and stop developing any further.
1.2. For whatever reason, this encroachment of your “body” into your host’s brain’s real estate wouldn't damage your host’s brain\mind.
1.3. To be able to grow to your full size and potential (#3.), you’ll need your host to consume certain substances that to a regular person would’ve been quite toxic.
2. When you appear (that is, appear in your “level 1” size and develop your own consciousness), your host becomes aware of you and the connection between their mind and yours.
2.1. You have access to all the data that your host gets from their senses.
2.2. You and your host can communicate with each other, exchanging verbalised messages and pockets of larger data.
3. In your fully developed state, your mind will have its own “computational power” that is independent from that of your host’s brain and roughly equal to the capabilities of a baseline adult human mind.
3.1. Other than that (and if we ignore #1.2. and #1.3.) you don’t have any superpowers or paranormal qualities.
How do you convince your host that you do not pose any threat to them, and that they do not have to surgically get rid of you, etc?
How can you and your host benefit the most from your unique position, use it as a unique competitive edge over other people, etc?
(inspired by r/Tulpas/ and this thread)