12 KiB
[Challenge Companion] Inexploitability
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7d93qw/challenge_companion_inexploitability/
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Score: 17
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Created: 2017-11-16T01:53:38
Post:
tl;dr: This is the companion thread to the weekly challenge, post recommendations, ideas, or chit-chat here.
I think that inexploitability is one of my most important criteria for munchkinry in a story; if a protagonist has a bright idea, I start wondering why no one else had that bright idea before, and the work should have an answer available. There are lots of good reasons that no one would have thought of a thing before, but it should be rare for someone to lever the rules of the world open, given that there are other people trying the same thing.
Beyond that, I tend to like settings that are a bit lived in, where all the obvious things have already been done and become part of the world, or where all the obvious things have been tried and found wanting for reasons that have to deal with complex, underlying issues that aren't obvious on first blush. I don't know that I'm in the majority on that; it's obviously compelling to see someone become powerful in short order, or find a hidden exploit that allows them a lever of power, and that becomes hard to do if you assume that hundreds or thousands of people have been hunting for the exploits for hundreds of years.
Comments:
u/None [+9] (9 hours later)
[deleted]
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+21] Godric Gryffindor (20 hours later)
No, it tells you that you can't write an unprecedently good story better than anything that has ever been written before. I mean, just like somebody has to win the lottery, somebody in the world has to be the best, but just like with the lottery, that person is never you. It's me.
u/None [+6] (20 hours later)
You should write motivational speeches Eliezer
u/ShannonAlther [+8] (14 hours later)
Only if you assume that the fiction market is saturated.
u/Gurkenglas [+4] (10 hours later)
Only so long as you optimize what you're writing. Write random characters and nobody will have written it before! Unless you count that as ripping off the strategy of "writing random characters" from someone else. In that case, you would rip off the strategy of "write a story" from most everyone else in any case.
u/EthanCC [+2] (20 hours later)
A truly randomly generated character would be...interesting.
u/wren42 [+3] (4 days later)
guys I rolled up a character and it turns out my protagonist is an ethnically ambiguous teenage girl with above average intelligence and a mid-level super power who cares about improving the world but is caught up in the moral gray zone of realizing her vision.
u/EthanCC [+1] (4 days later)
I was thinking more along the lines of the computational neuroscience equivalent of putting a bunch of brain in a bowl, stirring it up, and shoving it into a human frontal cortex.
u/wren42 [+1] (5 days later)
sorry I was being sarcastic, as that protagonist is super tropey in ratfic
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (3 days later)
Other people are saying "no because, X", but that's essentially kinda true. Inexploitability is like Murphy's law, it's especially true when you're not aware of it. People who have a bright new fanfic idea and don't stop to check if it's been done before are likely to find out that all their ideas were already done better by someone else.
The solution is to study what's out there, then focus on your comparative advantage.
u/trekie140 [+4] (3 hours later)
I think the Night Angel trilogy has one of the best examples of this. The magic system is highly exploitable and that makes the munchkin characters extremely powerful, but it makes perfect sense how cultural taboos and medieval-level infrastructure has put the world in such a position. The first book may be my favorite, by far, but the power progression over the course the series is among the most rational I’ve ever seen.
Magic can do basically anything, but is so difficult to learn for the relatively rare people who can do it, which they won’t even know if a trained mage doesn’t find them, that most mages only master a few spells that they can make a living with. Magic schools study and teach spells academically, but kingdoms are afraid of how powerful such institutions could become so force them to be discriminatory in a way that ends up encouraging trade skills over science or management skills.
For example, an all-female school was immediately accused by neighboring governments of attempting to breed super wizards with mages from an all-male school that already existed, so they had to forbid faculty from marrying and expel any student who got married. As result, over half the students end up moving back home to help out their husbands with the family business.
The munchkins in this world are the handful of people with the wealth and motivation to travel the world and learn everything they can about it. Nearly everyone else stays in their homeland due to political conflicts and widely varying cultural taboos that were created by geographical barriers, so travel between countries is the exception rather than the norm.
Even the exploits munchkins use are all about taking advantage of their opponents limited knowledge like using spells they wouldn’t expect to see. Combat mages are vulnerable to attacks they haven’t been trained to counter, and that level of specialization resulted in a divide with civilian mages that only an outsider perspective could bridge when they had to organize an army out of random civilian mages.
The evil mages have access to spells that allow them to communicate faster and build up a larger knowledge base, while also incentivizing members to explore the world in order to better subjugate it, but their strict religion combined with the influence The Dark Side has on their psychology hampers their ability to munchkin. No matter how smart the cultists and psychopaths are, they can’t think outside of the box their minds are in.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+3] Godric Gryffindor (18 hours later)
Which trilogy are you talking about? I think there may be more than one called "Night Angel". The one I found was a graphic novel.
u/trekie140 [+2] (23 hours later)
This one. Keep in mind that even though I consider the first book to be a masterpiece and the whole trilogy a fantastic series that seamlessly shifts genre from low fantasy to heroic fantasy to high fantasy, it is one of the darkest, most disturbing, and disgusting things I’ve ever read.
Remember all the horrible thing that happened in the show Jessica Jones? That stuff happens to children at the beginning of the first book. I absolutely despise gratuitous violence or sexual content in fiction so I would not have liked this story, let alone loved it, if it wasn’t handled perfectly with extreme tact in how much is shown vs told.
I’m convinced the only reason it was done so well is because the author’s wife is a psychologist for human trafficking victims, and made the central theme of the story about confronting abuse and despair. It’s still a tough read, intentionally so, but it takes you deepest pit of nihilistic depression so it can pull you back out into the light of hope.
At least, that’s what the first book does. The second is more like a really dark alternate version of Mistborn where the characters have superpowers that they use to fight an evil empire, while the third has them become archetypes fighting a mythological being with the power of destiny and Shakespearean drama. It’s still great reading and develops the characters further, it’s just not the masterpiece like the first.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+2] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)
Huh. Okay, then I did find the right series. I hazarded $11 on reading book one, and while it initially seemed promising, the end reveal of the big bad's identity felt like it was insulting my intelligence to the point where I didn't continue. Maybe if the munchkinism had started earlier, but it didn't start in volume one.
u/trekie140 [+2] (a day later)
I didn’t mind because the emotional state the book had put me in left me wanting goofy cliches like that to happen and I thought the reveal made sense even if there wasn’t any lead up to it. The other books aren’t any more rational, though, so if you didn’t get attached to the characters the way I did then I wouldn’t recommend them. The story only gets more pulpy as it goes on, which I enjoyed because I wanted to see these people’s lives get less horrific.
I’m the kind of reader who considers the rational elements of a story to be a bonus rather than a requirement. I’ll read anything if it can get me to care about the characters and themes, regardless of whether it makes logical sense. The Way of Shadows definitely has Breaking Bad-level complexity and planning on the part of the author, but there are still a couple Rule of Cool/Drama moments because he wanted to adhere to a fantasy formula as much as subvert it.
u/Kishoto [+2] (a day later)
u/trekie140 [+1] (a day later)
I absolutely believe that was what the author intended for you to feel. Out of all the victims of sexual abuse in the series, she was supposed to be the one who had been utterly broken by it from a young age. Her arc was all about realizing that she could have emotional connections with other people and rebuilding herself from the hollow shell her experiences had turned her into.
She was a direct contrast to Kylar, who had suffered abuse as well and done just as many horrible things as Vi in order to survive, but always managed to hold onto his humanity no matter how much he loathed himself. The fact that he hadn’t become the sociopath she had inspired Vi to try and change who she was.
I won’t pretend that I liked Vi as much as Kylar, his struggle against despair and self loathing deeply resonated with me. This book came into my life just as I began to acknowledge that I had depression and helped me understand what I was feeling as well as how to combat my particular brand of it. Seeing Kylar still have hope and keep fighting when the whole world seemed out to get him was inspirational to me too.
I still consider these books to be trigger warning: the series so if there was a part you just couldn’t stomach I totally understand. It’s miraculous that the author knew exactly how much detail I could tolerate hearing so as to make me to do internalize the existence of real horrors that are uncomfortable for me to think about without forcing me to look directly at it.