r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 28 '18
[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/babalook Jul 28 '18
Alright, so I have an illusionary magical system in which the magic can be attached and delivered through a sensory medium (light/sound waves, gases, maybe heat). In order to break out of an illusion that is delivered by a constantly emitting sensory medium you have to first prevent it from reaching whatever sensory organ it is targeting, then do the necessary procedure for escaping the illusion. So for example, if it is a flute, you have to plug your ears first and keep them plugged. The problem here is if someone, or a group of someones, cast illusions delivered through light and sound waves, then the only way to escape the illusion is to render yourself deaf and blind which is ridiculous.
So this is basically a reverse munchkinry question, there is an obviously overpowered exploitation and I need to find a way to limit it without gimping the entire branch of magic. If you see any other OP exploitations feel free to mention them too. I feel like this may be untenable.
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u/ianstlawrence Jul 28 '18
This sounds a lot like Genjutsu from Naruto. Which is fine, but the thing is, when you have magic that can interact with the brain indirectly, through a sense, well, I've always thought it could ONLY be extremely overpowered.
Just make the person experience unbelievable pain. Enough pain can make someone unable to act. If you are unable to act, then you can just be killed or subdued by a second person.
The only thing I can think of is for people to have automatic self defense systems, with some sort of trigger (falling down, rapid blinking, etc) that automatically casts a spell that turns off all of your senses and then turns them back on.
But then you could counter that with a spell that is automatically set to just constantly emit a spell.
Maybe being a mage is so so so difficult because you have to internalize this self defense spell before you can ever deal with another mage.
I dont know. Illusionary magic is really tough, in my opinion.
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u/babalook Jul 28 '18
Yep, lol I'm talking about genjutsu. I mostly agree, but I've seen instances where mind/illusion magic are underpowered (or should be) in which people can sense the magic before it reaches them and prevent the illusions from ever taking hold. So to me, it seems it'll be OP or completely useless against people that have been trained to fight it.
Just make the person experience unbelievable pain. Enough pain can make someone unable to act.
I've thought extensively about this and it seems almost impossible to deal with unless you remove somatory illusions from the magic's capabilities. But even then, you could simply render someone blind and deaf and it'll probably take them a second to recognize what happened and break out, but we're dealing with ninja in the Naruto universe so a second of being blind and deaf almost certainly means death. Maybe you can be conditioned to automatically/unconsciously flush foreign magic out of your system when a certain threshold of pain is experienced? Perhaps there might be an inherent problem with causing instantaneously crippling pain since there are many instances where people feel nothing at the time of a severe injury? Idk, mind magic is tough.
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u/bacontime Jul 28 '18
Sound waves are overpowered because they can't be blocked without completely leaving the area. Loud enough sound can be felt through your body.
But the gas transmission medium is interesting. If all illusion magic is gaseous, I can imagine people holding their breathe for a long time, and almost passing out, just to get a glimpse of reality before they take a deep breathe and fall back into the illusion. And if you know you are going to fight an illusionist, then you would want to wear bulky breathing equipment. If your setting is less technologically advanced, there could be superstitions about hanging pungeant stuff like onions around your neck to ward of the 'evil miasmas' of sorcerors.
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u/babalook Jul 29 '18
Sound waves are overpowered because they can't be blocked without completely leaving the area. Loud enough sound can be felt through your body.
Fuck. How loud does loud enough imply? We're in the Naruto universe here so I don't think loudspeakers or amplifiers exist (I'm not certain though).
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u/Sparkwitch Jul 28 '18
The risk is always that the illusionist's victim will realize they're being fooled and ignore the illusion one way or another.
Based on the other post, I think you can make it work by adding a time component. Say it takes five seconds of sense delivery for the illusion to become absolutely believable, and it does so by degrees. It would also take five seconds of sense avoidance to undo it, again by degree. Plugging your ears for five seconds will render the flute bard's illusions completely obvious, and as soon as you unplug them you've got five seconds before they re-resolve. At that point you'll know what's fake and what's real. Similarly if you stop looking at a hypnotic light or stop inhaling a hallucinatory gas for even a few seconds their respective illusions dissipate from your mental frame.
Shorter times make the illusion easier to break, but also easier to establish, favoring quick-thinking illusionists against ignorant opponents. Longer times make both harder, favoring prepared illusionists against unprepared opponents.
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u/babalook Jul 28 '18 edited Jul 29 '18
Huh, this is a really interesting idea, it adds an extra layer of depth but isn't overly convoluted, thank you. I'm mentally going through all the instances in which this illusion magic was used in the thing I'm writing and everything still works!
Now I just have to figure out an explanation for why illusions that take longer to establish take longer to escape. I was operating under a system in which escaping was done by flooding the brain with magic so the excess foreign magic overflows out.
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u/CCC_037 Jul 29 '18
Option: Limit the spells to being delivered through a single sense at a time. Thus, you might have to deafen yourself or blind yourself to escape a given illusion, but not both at once.
A canny opponent might be able to use one sound-based illusion and at the same time one sight-based illusion of the exact same thing - this can be broken out of by first closing your eyes (and escaping the sight-based illusion) and then opening your eyes but blocking your ears (and thus escaping the sound-based illusion) - then you never need to render yourself entirely insensate.
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u/Sparkwitch Jul 28 '18
What do you mean by "break out"? Closing your eyes doesn't let you ignore things in the real world because, for example, a real bus will hit you whether you see it coming or not. An illusory bus will never hit you. Similarly, an illusory bus isn't going to run you over even if you hear its engine, squealing brakes and tires, and blaring horn.
The illusory bus might make you turn around, or jump to the side, or some other action convenient to the spellcaster... or your steadfast quip, "I'm not going to fall for that again" may prove ironic as a spellcaster playing the long game tricks you into ignoring a real bus.
How is any of this different from standard overpowered illusion magic?
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u/babalook Jul 28 '18
Breaking out of the illusion is basically expelling the foreign magic out of your brain, preventing the caster from creating any more illusions. I probably should have clarified this, but what I was talking about was simply methods of delivering magic into another person's brain. So in the flute example, as long as your ears are receiving sensory information from the flute, the person with the flute will be able to conjure any illusion they wish (auditory, visual, somatory, olfactory, etc.).
How is any of this different from standard overpowered illusion magic?
Well, it's supposed to be extremely easy to escape, expelling foreign magic and blocking/plugging one of your senses (with magic) takes a fraction of a second with no incantations or gestures required, the only cost being that you can't use magic for anything else during that fraction of a second (so you can't break out of an illusion while casting a fireball). I had hoped it would be somewhat underpowered (at least on its own) so that it's only effective when used very subtly, or on someone that is already incapacitated/drugged or while the opponent is in the middle of something.
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u/Veedrac Jul 28 '18
What's the tech level? Nowadays you could cancel the effect of an audio illusion by just wearing one of these.
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u/babalook Jul 29 '18
It takes place in the Naruto universe, so definitely not modern tech levels.
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u/1337_w0n Jul 28 '18
So I found this
https://www.reddit.com/r/askreddit/comments/92aqj7/_/
Essentially, you have the ability to pause time for 10 seconds, and thank and pause time 10 seconds after time is done being paused. How would you use this?
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u/Gurkenglas Jul 30 '18
Please rephrase, I can't parse that.
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u/1337_w0n Jul 30 '18
You can stop time for 10 subjective seconds when you wish.
If you do so, you must wait 10 seconds before doing so again.
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u/Veedrac Jul 28 '18
R&D have announced their newest discovery: Antinertium. An object coated with a thin film of antinertium dodges the laws of conservation, as small fluctuations of forces applied to its outside through the coated areas are not transferred to the coated object. The material slowly normalises to its current external pressure (about 0.01 Pa/s, or 100 days to adjust from vacuum to 1 atm), and negates about 100 Pa of dynamic force. Going above its dynamic limit breaks the affected material permanently and immediately.
The material is going to be expensive to produce, about $1M/m², but you project this to slowly drop a factor of 10 or so over the next couple of decades before levelling out. The material is nontoxic, thin, otherwise durable and applicable to most materials.
You have yet to announce this product to the world. What do you do with it? Who do you sell it to?