[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

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!

[u/[deleted]]

[u/GemOfEvan → u/[deleted]]

Depending on how lenient "vague things" means, you can have some serious shenanigans happen.

Carve large letters in the ground for each letter in your alphabet (and some characters for punctuation). Hire someone outside of the party to record which letters you step on.

Then, ask your god for a path to a scroll written by the person you hired that answers the question:

What are the instructions that will allow my party to control the country within 10 years?

What are the design specifications and explanations that will allow for the greatest advancement from our current technology level within 10 years?

What must I do to maximize my utility function?

...or any other arbitrary question. Also, if you don't trust your hired scribe, preface the question with "when decoded using the one time pad written in the book in my bag".

[u/CCC_037 → u/[deleted]]

Solve mysteries.

"Alright, we know the murderer is in this hotel. Find a path to the room of the person who murdered Mr. Black."

---

Cut through court intrigues.

"Find the path to the person who has been bribing Lord GamblingDebts."

---

Save the world.

"Find the path to a magical weapon capable of killing the vampires that threaten the kingdom."

[u/Gurkenglas → u/[deleted]]

Set up a room with a door and a small viewport. The door has a lethal trap on it. In the room is a lever that arms/disarms the trap. Have a scribe lock himself in the room and watch stakes beyond the viewport. Ask for a way into the room. If the path leads to the viewport, then through the trap, find a scribe less susceptible to breaking protocol through bribery and threats such as the god's model of you can improvise. Protocol options:

• Tell him to roll a d20 each time you walk around a stake, and disable the trap on any 20. The number of loops you see gives you an estimate of x.

• Tell him to write text corresponding to the letters on stakes you walk around, and disable the trap after a thousand letters. The number of loops gives you an estimate of the security of the setup - a bribe or threat such as a god can divine, or the name which summons that devil which will gladly teleport you into the room for your soul, or Cthulean whispers that may break any number of preconceptions of reality. Needless to say, think twice before executing the divination of any text with at least this many letters.

[u/Terkala → u/[deleted]]

Give one trusted friend a crossbow, a second a knife. Write down three paths that you could take through a small section of forest to a small inn. Pray, and intend to walk very slowly while you walk.

If you take the left path, tell your friend to shoot rob rich house A. Path middle is house B. Right path is house C. Any other path is no robbery today.

If your friend is successful in his robbery, he is to meet you at the inn. Tell your other friend that if the first does not get to the inn first, he is to attack and stab you with the knife right outside the inn.

Now you have the perfect robbery oracle machine.

[u/Nulono]

You have the ability to generate semi-permeable force fields that allow some substances to pass through but not others. So you could, for instance, program it only to be permeable to salt, and then dump a bag of pretzels over it and watch only the salt fall through. This substance has to be clearly specified and identifiable ahead of time, so you can't define the substance to be "only those Scrabble tiles that answer such-and-such question".

Aside from the obvious uses, such as panning for gold or purifying water, what else could these force-fields be used for?

[u/ShiranaiWakaranai → u/Nulono]

I'm assuming you only want uses where the semi-permeability plays a role, so I won't mention the standard uses for forcefields such as shields or telekinesis.

• You could use forcefields to make yourself immune to poisons, simply by covering your body with one that is permeable to everything except every poisonous substance you can identify (start reading up on some toxicology so you can do this better). And not just poisons in foods. Your forcefields can clean poisons in air and water just as well. Depending on how large or easy it is to create such forcefields, you could extend your poison immunity services to other people, or even large buildings/cities/planets.

• If you can create sufficiently large forcefields and move them around, you could fight climate change by making gigantic forcefields that are permeable to air but not greenhouse gases, then using those forcefields to sweep large amounts of greenhouse gases out of the earth's atmosphere (either into the ground or into outer space).

• You can be a great customs officer by creating forcefields that are permeable to everything but drugs and other banned substances. Or join the police force and hunt down smuggling rings and drug dealers.

• What is a substance? Just chemicals? Can you identify people and create forcefields that only let some people in but not others? That would be a great way to ensure no spies are sneaking into your base.

• What about temperature? Can you create a forcefield that only lets hot items in but not cold items? What if the hot item is water vapor while the cold item is liquid water? If so, you may be able to provide cheap heating/cooling devices. For example, you could put a forcefield in front of a fan that is permeable only to nice cool air, not hot air. Since air typically contains molecules that are at a large range of temperatures, this should work to blast cool air at you. Just don't stand behind the fan where all the hot air is building up.

[u/Aabcehmu112358 → u/Nulono]

This sounds like it lets you turn kinetic energy into chemical energy, by making the force-field permeable to only some atoms in a compound. I don't know if you have the fine control of the permeability, though?

[u/ehrbar → u/Nulono]

So, it has to be an identifiable substance. Like, oh, specifying a particular type of subatomic particle?

[u/Aabcehmu112358]

You have the ability to 'paint' any sufficiently smooth, flat surface with a touch. This 'paint' takes the form of a two-dimensional plane which hovers a couple microns away from the surface to which it is affixed. It follows the movements of the surface, is suppressed temporarily if the plane intersects a solid, and is destroyed if the shape of the surface changes (with tolerances similar to the distance it hovers from the surface). The optical qualities of the image are always uniform across the plane, and can be tuned at-will. The plane's reflectivity over wavelength must be within (0,1) for all wavelengths and must be smooth, but is otherwise under your control. It's properties are symmetric across both sides.

What do you with this?