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Alea Iacta Est - a Worm AU Fanfic

Reader mode
I wonder, does her ability work with non-standard dice...? Maybe like a magic 8-ball type thing?

And man, nobody's going to be any dice rolling games with her ever again. :p
 
Adyen said:
I wonder, does her ability work with non-standard dice...? Maybe like a magic 8-ball type thing?

And man, nobody's going to be any dice rolling games with her ever again. :p
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She need to have tactile contact with whatever she throws.
 
You know, everyone's ignoring the real import of the shape of things aspect...

Don't suppose anyone's heard of the voodoo practice of "reading the bones" before?

From what I understand of how reading the bones works, Taylor would be able to get much more detail out of a bones reading than 10+ dice rolls on a topic.


Also, 20 or so alphabet dice (with a blank side), miniaturized to maybe 1 cm diameter.

Taylor can easily roll them all with proper skin contact; they're not too small for her power to influence the rolls of; and she'll be able to get full-word, possibly short-sentence answers out of her powers. (what are my limitations? *roll* heh)
 
edale said:
From what I understand of how reading the bones works, Taylor would be able to get much more detail out of a bones reading than 10+ dice rolls on a topic.
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by that logic she could trick her power by asking it a question as she pushs a guy....think about it, imagine every bone in your own body dislocating itself to answer a question.
 
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edale said:
Also, 20 or so alphabet dice (with a blank side), miniaturized to maybe 1 cm diameter.

Taylor can easily roll them all with proper skin contact; they're not too small for her power to influence the rolls of; and she'll be able to get full-word, possibly short-sentence answers out of her powers. (what are my limitations? *roll* heh)
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This has been discussed, actually.
 
edale said:
Yes, but I took the idea, and the various WoG's about how Taylor's power works, and fit it all into something that would actually work with her powers.
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I thought it followed naturally from Ack's comment about the existence of alphabet dice, but perhaps not.
 
Hmmm... Can Taylor roll 1D2 (flip a coin) to get answers from yes/no questions? (landing on it's side would be for something outside the limjits of her powers)


Also, I could TOTALLY see Taylor going the two-face route, flipping coins and rolling dice to decide how to handle every encounter. Hell, even give her a 2-headed coin with a scratched out head on one side, and that's what she uses when deciding whether to kill or not, lol.
 
edale said:
Hmmm... Can Taylor roll 1D2 (flip a coin) to get answers from yes/no questions? (landing on it's side would be for something outside the limjits of her powers)


Also, I could TOTALLY see Taylor going the two-face route, flipping coins and rolling dice to decide how to handle every encounter. Hell, even give her a 2-headed coin with a scratched out head on one side, and that's what she uses when deciding whether to kill or not, lol.
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"Heads if there's more trouble if I kill this person, tails if there's more trouble if I don't." is a perfectly reasonable statement. It just doesn't say how much trouble on either side, or of what type, or even how soon it happens.
 
Ack said:
"Heads if there's more trouble if I kill this person, tails if there's more trouble if I don't." is a perfectly reasonable statement. It just doesn't say how much trouble on either side, or of what type, or even how soon it happens.
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Didn't you already say she wouldn't do stuff like asking what's most likely because it's less effective? I'm pretty sure that was your counter argument to why couldn't she just ask where is the most likely location for the next S9 or Endbringer attack or whatever as it would be easier to just roll for every possible location separately instead of rolling to find the few highest and then rolling the chances for them. Unless I massively misinterpreted this statement about that scenario anyway.
Ack said:
Better off finding out from other sources where they might be, then checking the chances of them being at those locations.
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Xilph said:
Didn't you already say she wouldn't do stuff like asking what's most likely because it's less effective? I'm pretty sure that was your counter argument to why couldn't she just ask where is the most likely location for the next S9 or Endbringer attack or whatever as it would be easier to just roll for every possible location separately instead of rolling to find the few highest and then rolling the chances for them. Unless I massively misinterpreted this statement about that scenario anyway.
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It's a different thing.

Going "Where are they most likely to be?" gives an almost infinite number of points for the power to sift through. Especially if asking the question somehow skews the result.

Whereas "Is more trouble going to result if I do this than if I don't do this?" is a binary question.
 
Ack said:
Going "Where are they most likely to be?" gives an almost infinite number of points for the power to sift through. Especially if asking the question somehow skews the result.
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Isn't that what their power actually does though? At least if it's like Dinah or Contessa or whoever it actually works by checking huge amounts of data points and converting them into the correct form, and you've already stated repeatedly that it doesn't take it's own predictions into account as that makes things a complex mess, not that it couldn't be easily bypassed anyway.
Ack said:
Whereas "Is more trouble going to result if I do this than if I don't do this?" is a binary question.
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A binary search provides functionally the same results as asking for the right location just taking slightly longer and is only binary questions so that shouldn't be the issue, it'd still be checking nearly exactly the same data after all whether she asks it the chance of a particular place or if it's the most likely place as it would basically need a way of checking it against everywhere else to work out the chance in the first place.
 
Xilph said:
Isn't that what their power actually does though?
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I think what he means is that "they are most likely to attack 7.25 meters to the left of the intersection of 23rd and Broad" is less than helpful when the chance they'll attack at that specific location is 0.00672% and 63% of the time they'll attack somewhere on the other side of the city. "Are they more likely to attack the north side or the south side?" gives a more useful result.
 
pepperjack said:
I think what he means is that "they are most likely to attack 7.25 meters to the left of the intersection of 23rd and Broad" is less than helpful when the chance they'll attack at that specific location is 0.00672% and 63% of the time they'll attack somewhere on the other side of the city. "Are they more likely to attack the north side or the south side?" gives a more useful result.
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So don't give it the chance to be overly precise like that? Ask it something like which city will be attacked next rather than the exact location, saying the power will default to being unhelpful when a totally unremarkable change like using the word city instead of location really shouldn't be that much of a concern.

Although that raises an interesting point, can she do something like ask about current data? I mean I doubt it's useful a lot of the time as it would require the data being learnable but it could still be valuable in some scenarios.
 
Xilph said:
So don't give it the chance to be overly precise like that? Ask it something like which city will be attacked next rather than the exact location,
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I'd meant that within the context of trying to determine where within a city an attack would occur. With thousands of cities around the world, you have the same problem; I'd prefer to start with "which continent" and go from there.
 
pepperjack said:
I'd meant that within the context of trying to determine where within a city an attack would occur. With thousands of cities around the world, you have the same problem; I'd prefer to start with "which continent" and go from there.
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It's still functionally the same though whether you use a search by repeatedly cutting out results or skipping to the end with the difference in time taken generally only a tiny matter of rolls due to the fact you could easily cut out huge chunks each time. It's still sifting through exactly the same data for the same outcome it's just asking for the intermediate steps with a search.
 
Xilph said:
It's still functionally the same though whether you use a search by repeatedly cutting out results or skipping to the end with the difference in time taken generally only a tiny matter of rolls due to the fact you could easily cut out huge chunks each time. It's still sifting through exactly the same data for the same outcome it's just asking for the intermediate steps with a search.
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But if the distribution over all possible locations remains the same, a binary search doesn't help you, it just gets you down to your uselessly-precise result faster.

Imagine you ask for the continent with greatest probability of next attack. You get, say, 60% chance that the next attack will be in North America. Then you try to divide between the eastern and western halves of a continent. You could ask "is the next attack more likely to be in the eastern or western half?" But then, even if you get "eastern half more likely", that could easily mean there's a 35% (unconditional) chance that the attack will be in the eastern half, and a 25% chance it'll be in the western half. You could divide it down more finely, but you'd only be finding the location with the greatest single unconditional chance, even if that chance is itself very low. Preparing defenses at that location is still most likely to be useless.
 
alethiophile said:
But if the distribution over all possible locations remains the same, a binary search doesn't help you, it just gets you down to your uselessly-precise result faster.

Imagine you ask for the continent with greatest probability of next attack. You get, say, 60% chance that the next attack will be in North America. Then you try to divide between the eastern and western halves of a continent. You could ask "is the next attack more likely to be in the eastern or western half?" But then, even if you get "eastern half more likely", that could easily mean there's a 35% (unconditional) chance that the attack will be in the eastern half, and a 25% chance it'll be in the western half. You could divide it down more finely, but you'd only be finding the location with the greatest single unconditional chance, even if that chance is itself very low. Preparing defenses at that location is still most likely to be useless.
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Especially if, for instance, your power is pinging off of Jack Slash's shard, and you're trying to predict Slaughterhouse Nine attacks, and he's finding himself picking targets that have a low probability on your scale.

Or if it's Endbringer attacks, and Ziz tells Leviathan, "Go somewhere else; they're on to you."
 
Ack said:
"Heads if there's more trouble if I kill this person, tails if there's more trouble if I don't." is a perfectly reasonable statement. It just doesn't say how much trouble on either side, or of what type, or even how soon it happens.
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Or 'do more people survive gold morning if I keep him alive, or kill him.'
Ack said:
Especially if, for instance, your power is pinging off of Jack Slash's shard, and you're trying to predict Slaughterhouse Nine attacks, and he's finding himself picking targets that have a low probability on your scale.
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"Where was the S9 5 minutes ago."

Just as useful for tracking them down, and results can't change from the inquiry.
 
Ack said:
Especially if, for instance, your power is pinging off of Jack Slash's shard, and you're trying to predict Slaughterhouse Nine attacks, and he's finding himself picking targets that have a low probability on your scale.
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Does that work? I mean I know Jack Slash's shard is surprisingly adept but is there any evidence it can tell when someone is remotely using a thinker power on them and adapt to that? He's not Contessa after all who works to avoid ever being in a bad situation and has a power to facilitate that. I swear I've seen stuff indicating it requires actual interaction too.

Of course any information they gain can be predicted, just make sure to ask it twice and see if things change as his power isn't so ridiculous it's constantly evaluating all capes to figure out the best spots to go.
 
Well, it probably doesn't actually work to that level of capability ... but then, the Nine survived for over twenty years with him at the helm.
 
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