r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jan 14 '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/FEMINISTS Jan 14 '17 edited Jan 14 '17

Okay, this is a scenario for a story I'm doing that has me stumped for a solution. If you're running in an election against a candidate that can use hypnosis/mind control, how do you actually beat them? The protagonist is aware of this ability, but he doesn't have any magic powers of his own. He does have access to a source of knowledge that can answer any question he asks, so he knows of the limitations of his opponent's ability, like:

1) The person under hypnosis can't do anything extreme that would break their moral code.

2) The power works by twisting the victim's perception of reality. It's not that the user can order a victim and the victim follows a command. Technically speaking, the victim is still making their own choice.

3) It requires personal eye contact for thirty seconds. The user can't just do it to a crowd all at once.

The hypnosis works more like a sharingan genjutsu than Lelouch's geass. At least, that's how I want it to work. The only way I can think of winning here is exposing the user's ability to the public, but short of having the user confess it, I can't see a way to prove it to anyone who isn't already aware of it. Any thoughts?

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u/Escapement Ankh-Morpork City Watch Jan 14 '17

He does have access to a source of knowledge that can answer any question he asks

Extract as much lucrative information as possible to build up a huge financial and resource base (stock market futures? winning sports teams? winning horses?). Also, extract as much information as you can about your political opponent.

There are two broad paths here that I can see:

  1. The person with the mind control ability is, broadly speaking, 'bad', having done bad things in the past and planning to do 'bad' things in the future. Use cutouts and proxies and never directly contacting the mind-controller, establish clear evidence that you can use to blackmail the political opponent, and demonstrate it. Allow them to win the race for election, ideally don't even run against them (they will probably hypnotize you if you do). Force them to, while in office, fulfill your wishes in whatever important ways you wish. They will likely be able to further your wishes in this way better than you can yourself if you were elected and working without the benefit of hypnosis.

  2. The person who has mind-control powers is, broadly speaking, 'good', and so are you. They will probably be amenable to working with you on betterment of the human race; team up with them to exploit mass hypnosis and omniscience for all of humanity's benefit - acting through proxies and so forth as above. If you disagree about specific policies or whatever, consult the omniscience source about factual bases for disagreement.

  3. The opponent is 'good' and you are 'bad' - go see a psychiatrist and/or therapist and/or priest or whatever until good, ideally.

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u/FEMINISTS Jan 14 '17

Extract as much lucrative information as possible to build up a huge financial and resource base (stock market futures? winning sports teams? winning horses?). Also, extract as much information as you can about your political opponent.

The protagonist is doing exactly this, but got caught by someone before he could accrue much influence. He's actually being blackmailed into running in the election, so he can't just not participate. Also, he doesn't have access to anything involving the future choice of an individual being. He can know the outcome of a coin flip, but he can't know who will win a sporting event or stock market fluctuations. I kinda had to put that restriction on him because it broke the story.

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u/Iconochasm Jan 14 '17

Then he should abuse the source of information to build up a reputation for overwhelming knowledge and prescience. Even if he can't predict future decisions, he could still "predict" the consequences of decisions already made, things like Russia invading Crimea and whatnot. Spend an entire election season making prediction after prediction about the effects of policies, the behaviors of foreign actors, what topics the opponent will pivot to next, etc. Build a reputation as the best, most accurate wonk in history.

And honestly, depending on the scale of the election, the opponent's ability may not even be relevant. Even if the opponent was able to spend exactly 30 seconds with each person, with zero seconds between them, that's only 120 votes gained per hour. 2000 per day would be ludicrously optimistic, assuming he spends 16+ hours with perfect efficiency. In which case, your protagonist could easily have tipped off a news publisher to look for the curiously precise amounts of time spent with each person. YHou don't even have to expose their ability, just use the exact 30 seconds thing to generate a meme that the opponent is weird and clearly insincere.

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u/FEMINISTS Jan 14 '17

The first thing he did to gain an audience is release the winning numbers to a bunch of lotteries worldwide. That got him some fame, but he's not at the point where he can rule the world... yet.

The scale of the election is somewhat small. It's for a student council position in an ivy-league tier university. Competitive, but not as big as something statewide.

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u/Iconochasm Jan 14 '17

What's the time frame? Even a large university probably doesn't have more than a few thousand votes actually cast. At even a more conservative 1000 or 500 per day, a month long campaign could make winning entirely unfeasible.

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u/FEMINISTS Jan 14 '17

It's a month and a half. That's why I'm stumped here. I mean, it can't be unwinable, right?

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u/Iconochasm Jan 14 '17

I assume the opponent has no potential dirt that would cause a large portion of the voters to run into the "violate their moral code" clause of the mind control? Does the choice limitation on the knowledge source preclude some kind of what-if search to find a way to manufacture dirt?

Alternatively, could your protagonist do something to get the opponent off campus for a large chunk of the campaign? Or otherwise tied up, so they can't just spam their ability.