scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3n8ua3.md

[BST] How would you best abuse the observe and examine system if you were a real life gamer?

• Author: u/None *

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3n8ua3/bst_how_would_you_best_abuse_the_observe_and/

• Score: 2

• Created: 2015-10-02T16:53:35

Post:

Like in my previous threads on abusing the inventory and food systems this time I'm exploring what I consider the most powerful system so far, the observe and examine system. I'm interested in how these systems can potentially be abused partly because of curiosity and partly because I may write a rational The Gamer story in the future. Keep in mind that you can only abuse this system on its own. There will be more threads on other systems in the future.

The Rules:

• By focusing on an item, place or animal (including humans) you can get information (in the form of a floating window) on it that is 100% accurate even if no one else knows this information. This process only takes about a second.

• You can increase your observe skill with practice, allowing you to see more information. It becomes exponentially harder to increase your skill over time. This skill applies to everything you observe or examine.

• When examining items (which can include any object or plant) you will get a detailed report on its characteristics, durability, and uses. After practice you can glean more information from items such as value, how old the item is, and other more detailed information.

• When examining a place (which you can do by focusing on it at a distance) you will see information about it's uses, who or what lives there, danger level and other information. You will see more detailed information the higher your observe skill is.

• When focusing on a human or animal you can see things like their name, physical fitness, intellect, health, age, and skills. At higher levels you can see things like their mood, weaknesses and strengths, and even gauge what they are about to do (in general, not exact).

• Everyone, including yourself, has a nameplate above their head detailing their name and level (which is an abstraction of their combined physical and mental strength + their skills). You may be unable to examine powerful people unless you have a high level in your observe skill. If this is the case you cannot see their name, level or any of their skills or abilities.

• No one can see any of the information you see, when you examine something it will just look like you are focusing.

• Cameras, mirrors, binoculars and pictures will all work. You can observe things in pictures or videos, though there are some limitations. If you observe a person in a picture that is 10 years old you will get what they were like on that day, not what they are currently, same with items or places. You must also be able to see enough to accurately make out what the thing is. If an image is too blurry, or does not capture enough of the object or person to make them recognizable the observe will fail and you will get no information.

• You must be physically looking at something with your eyes to examine it, you cannot simply think about examining something.

• You cannot examine things that are intangible or imperceptible. You cannot for instance examine a scientific theory or a religious belief and figure out if it is true. You cannot examine things like bacteria that you cannot physically see unless you are looking at it through a microscope.

Comments:

u/None [+5] (40 minutes later)

If you're starting out with a small amount of money you can use your skill to go to garage sales (and other things where people sell "junk") and buy things for cheap that are actually antique.

I can't think of higher value example of where you can leverage information you know, but other people are uncertain of, to make money. I'm guessing this skill wouldn't really work on the stock market. I'm guessing this skill also doesn't work on lotto tickets (or at least probably not at the level where your easiest way to make money is shopping around for lotto tickets).

After that you can likely use your skill on people to build a company of dependable people. I'm not sure what field, but it should be something that you can use your examining skill early on, but also something that you can hand off to others eventually.

In a previous thread someone mentioned the Randi prize, this would also be a good idea for getting starting capital, but information is harder to leverage if everyone knows you can do it.

u/Jiro_T [+6] (an hour later)

You could gamble and look at the back of a card and see "ace of spades with the back showing", although that will get you thrown out of the casino whether they know what you're doing or not.

You could go to a gold mine and analyze a sequence of "items" which consist of a column of rock a foot square and some large depth, and find where all the gold is.

I already mentioned diagnosing diseases, engine trouble, and well, anything that needs to be diagnosed. (Diseases are probably to be avoided because practicing medicine without a license is illegal.)

u/None [+3] (6 hours later)

This was my idea as well, which is why I think this is the most powerful power so far. The item power could make you a great smuggler or thief but with this power just by identifying where gold, gems, ore etc is you can easily become the wealthiest person in the world.

You could start a mining company (after you use the power to work your way up to a couple million bucks of capital) and find all the best people to run it. Then go around and start analyzing cheap land people think is crap. You'll soon find mines of all different kinds and then just buy the cheap land and start mining the crap out of it. Repeat and become the worlds richest person in a couple years. Best of all you can analyze your protection, friends, workers, and business associates to make sure they will never betray you. World domination isn't an outside possibility if you can leverage tons of money + knowing peoples weaknesses and strengths.

Wonder if anyone can exploit this power more than I already have?

u/derefr [+2] (5 hours later)

The digital equivalent of diagnosing disease: you could presumably see software vulnerabilities pretty instantly by just staring at the source code. You'd be the Magic Instant Debugger™.

u/None [+1] (20 hours later)

You have goddamn supernatural powers. Any lawyer that tries to prosecute you is going to have a hard time reconciling a law assuming normal competency with something that makes you a human MRI scanner.

Really, you could just contract yourself out to hospitals as a cheaper alternative to certain tests.

u/mrmonkeybat [+1] (4 days later)

practicing medicine without a license is illegal.)

Alternative therapists, Homeopaths etc don't seem to have this problem. If you tell someone to go to a Doctor and ask him to test for a certain disease you will be doing nothing illegal.

u/derefr [+3] (5 hours later)

First thing that comes to mind: music producer or book publisher. Stare at a "slush pile" and instantly know which artists/authors are worth pursuing.

Actually, wait, even better: go into venture capital. You might not be able to judge an anti-inductive system like the stock market, but judging businesses' investment applications shouldn't be nearly as fraught.

u/Jiro_T [+4] (an hour later)

This is subject to one of the exploits also used for the inventory version: what's an item? ("I pick an item consisting of a visible spot connected to a one molecule wide corridor connected to a center section".) What if I want to pick, oh, the tumor in someone's body (plus the one molecule wide corridor) and I don't know exactly where the entirety of the tumor is located?

How do doctored images work? If I have an image of a bald man with hair photoshopped on him, does it work? What if I have an image of someone deaged? What if I have an image of someone that is deaged, and that happens to be byte for byte identical to an image of the person actually taken at that age? Do the results I get depend on the history of the bytes?

What does it mean to get a report on something's "uses"? Anything has a near-infinite number of types of use and probably different numbers of each one, unlike a video game where an object only has one use. Do I get a reading of "1000 uses of this sword to kill things with, 100 uses if I use it to break glass windows, and 1 use when the use is melting it down for scrap"?

"Imperceptible" is a vague term. I can see a computer, but I can't see its program. Would I be able to gain information about the computer that depends on what it's programmed to do? You probably want to answer "no" to this, but you can't answer "no" without excluding a wide variety of things that you would probably not want to exclude. I can't see microscopic threads in my shirt, but those microscopic threads may affect how long the shirt lasts; am I unable to get information on that?

More generally, concepts like "item", "imperceptible", "uses", and such don't really divide reality at the seams.

Also, I would ask if the difficulty of finding information through this system exactly matches the difficulty of finding it without. If not, that can be used for exploits. It's hard to diagnose a disease or a fault in an engine, but the window may say "has disease X" or "engine with broken piston". Or "prime number".

u/None [+1] (2 hours later)

I would generally say that if you examined a doctored image it would say this is doctored. Your right about the uses thing in my mind it would be the most obvious and useful uses first with specific and less useful ones later, with a hard cap on the number of uses displayed based on skill level. This of course brings up the question of who is deeming what is useful or not, which I have no clue. Gaia I guess lol.

Unsure about the computer thing an easy fix would be to say you could never have that high of a skill level to know it, but this is of course all hand waving.

I would say in general the less complex the problem the less skill you need to have a specific diagnosis, someone with obvious cold symptoms could be easily identified as having a cold, but if its some obscure complex thing it will require more skill, perhaps more than you could ever achieve in your lifetime.

Were trying to make stupid video game powers logical so unless I wanted to severely nerf the powers (which I would if I was writing a gamer story) I have to just make up stupid shit to make it work. The point of the exercise is to basically find out what I need to nerf and see how hard these vague things can be abused.

u/Jiro_T [+1] (2 hours later)

I would say in general the less complex the problem the less skill you need to have a specific diagnosis

Trying to pin this down, I think you mean something like "A disease is 'more complex' if given a set of symptoms produced by the disease the probability of the disease is still small". That still doesn't work because whether something is a symptom depends on whether you know about it. We know that some diseases produce high temperatures; we don't know that some diseases produce "positive result on test X, where X will be discovered tomorrow". Are both of those symptoms? And if not, what happens the day after tomorrow; does your window now start showing the disease because there is suddenly a symptom we know about?

Likewise, if you mean "a disease is 'more complex' if it requires more tests to determine that you have it", how many tests it requires depends on which ones you give first, how expensive they are, and how rare are the other diseases you have to exclude.

In fact, "hard to diagnose" or "more complex' are a lot like "item", "use", etc. Whether something is hard to diagnose depends on circumstances; it isn't a fact about the world like "the square root of 2 is not a rational number".

u/None [+1] (3 hours later)

I would say it becomes harder to identify things that are further from current human knowledge. I'm not saying you can't identify a disease no one even knows exists yet, just that it would be harder (aka require more skill level). The same with an item, in the future a certain material might lead to some sort of super fuel that would change the world, but you probably couldn't identify that particular use.

In The Gamer manhwa there's Gaia who gives these sort of powers but doesn't want to break the universe too much or advance humans too fast, hence it becomes harder to observe things that are father from human knowledge. We are pretty much using The Gamer rules for this system and unless you want to nerf the power you have to have some sort of external force limiting you like in dungeons and dragons you can't just conjure gold.

u/Murska1FIN [+1] (14 hours later)

Maybe make the origin of the information from Observe be 'collective consciousness'. So that the more people know about what you're trying to find out, the easier it is. If only professional doctors could diagnose the disease you're looking at, then it takes more skill. If no-one could, you're out of luck.

u/Jiro_T [+1] (a day later)

Imagine a disease that can only be diagnosed if you take someone's temperature.

It would not make sense to say that the power only works if you take their temperature. That would imply that you can't diagnose anything unless you give the full set of tests that a doctor would. So it has to be possible to diagnose someone if a doctor would know enough to perform a test, even if he actually hasn't done it.

Now that we've established that, consider a disease that can only be diagnosed by a test that is well-known and easy but expensive, or a test that is well-known and easy but is risky or has side effects (such as cutting the patient open to do a biopsy)....

u/SpeakKindly [+3] (12 hours later)

You could spend all your time looking at old photos trying to figure out if your ex ever really loved you.

u/clawclawbite [+2] (an hour later)

Detecting counterfeits, medical conditions, and industrial inspection (this is a flawed space telescope mirror) are industrial uses. You can also find spies, so the you could be interesting for espionage.

Observe stars in the sky and see what you get. If there is life out there, it may be noted.

u/Gurkenglas [+1] (2 days later)

Talk to an expert on quantum physics and set up a double slit experiment that determines whether the information you can obtain after the fact about something's history destroys decoherence.

u/drageuth2 [+1] (2 days later)

Get examine to a high level through grinding it doing other things in this thread. Look in a mirror. Examine self. Use the information to find my biggest flaw/weakness and get a numeric measurement of how bad it is. Try one thing after another to try to improve the numbers. Optimize, munchkin, cheat..... move on to the next weakness. Gradually become more and more awesome.

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