6.2 KiB
[D] Worth the Candle: Doris, how does she work?
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Author: u/SkyTroupe *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8cgslz/d_worth_the_candle_doris_how_does_she_work/
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Score: 23
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Created: 2018-04-15T17:46:27
Post:
Title. I'm very confused and would love an explanation on how Larkspur is using her to follow them.
Comments:
u/PurposefulZephyr [+25] (5 hours later)
I have only a hypothesis, based on current knowledge of Luck:
Let's assume that Luck directly, uniformly and consistently changes odds to those a person would find preferable. That it's like a constant force, nudging your actions towards a better outcome.
I'll use shells game as an example.
You have 2 shells, under one of which there's the winning marble. The placement of the marble is random and you want to find the marble on the first try. You have positive Luck score. You are not betting against anyone but yourself (to prevent conflict of different people's Luck).If you played the game enough times, you'd find your win-rate is a consistent... 60%.
Now let's place a sheet of paper under each of the shells. Each paper has a name of a place on it. In one of those places, your target awaits.
If the shell game continues to behave like previously, then after enough tries you'll find the correct answer is simply chosen more often.If said experiments could be successfully replicated in world of Aerb, a sufficient amount of people with positive Luck score could find people simply by randomly choosing possible locations, then comparing which outcome is the most often chosen.
Assuming that your average Doris has non-zero Luck, then enough Dorises with enough work hours put into this weighted guessing could come to a probable conclusion.Of course, there's a lot of factors that could muddle the outcome:
- Is Luck a constant force, or does it change like a muscle does- weakening from exhaustion, used to it's full potential only in dangerous situations, increasing it's strength with usage (Joon did train his Luck, but he's broken anyway.)?
- How does different people's Luck interact with each other, if at all? Will a normal person's guess be less likely to be correct if it would inconvenience a lucky person? If so, then what would be the range of said influence?
- How far-reaching and smart is Luck? Will it let you be late to the bus if it'll stop you from being in middle of a shootout? What about not knowing what you want in the first place?
u/SkyTroupe [+5] (21 hours later)
That was incredibly thorough and concise. I love it.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+2] Mouse Army (7 hours later)
Its pretty explicitly stated that only elves/unicorns/Joon have a luck stat - how did Doris get Luck?
u/PurposefulZephyr [+8] (13 hours later)
Joon, despite being an immensely powerful RPG character, still is a human. His starting Luck was 0.
It could very well be that people can train their Luck, but it's hard to do so reliably. By this logic, gamblers and veteran soldiers could have a small amount of "trained" Luck, which could be tested experimentally.
Dorises could recruit exceptionally lucky ones, or try to "manufacture" them, by pitting them against deadly games of chance. Other option would be finding items or potions granting permanent (or temporary, but very cheap) boost of luck.
We haven't yet heard of such artifacts, but even one granting only a modest boost would be enough here. Not enough for the battlefield, but just enough for precognition work.Many things which are uneconomical for a party of adventurers could be perfectly viable to a country of millions.
Just got to be economical enough to make a profit.
u/WarningInsanityBelow [+6] (7 hours later)
Do we know that Doris isn't an elf/half-elf?
u/VilhalmFeidhlim [+11] (52 minutes later)
It's briefly mentioned a few times in that arc that Doris has some additional method of 'reading' probability, though it's admitted that they don't know the specifics:
"“No,” I replied. “We still don’t know how they found us. My guess is that they have precognition of some kind, but we need to know the details, whether it’s probability based or has some kind of limits that we can work around.”
“Which means he still fails half the time,” said Amaryllis. She frowned. “Unless he sent them out after flipping torches twice in a row, and so on down that line of thinking, but that depends on how well Doris can see probability, which is unknown.”
u/Adeen_Dragon [+5] (22 minutes later)
Iirc, we aren't given an explanation. It's just taken for granted that Doris the nation can track down people.
u/valeskas [+4] (24 minutes later)
Presumably one of 9,513,912 Dorises is capable of telling Larkspur the probability of Amaryllis (or anybody else) being in any specific location.
u/Mister-person [+3] (a day later)
Imagine you roll a die, and if you get a 6, you duplicate yourself 10 times. Now, out of 15 of your possible futures, you've rolled a 6 in 10 of them. You've now increased the probability of 6 from 1/6 to 2/3. Maybe, by some weird quirk of magic/game mechanics, this effect gets extended to the rest of the world. I like this theory because it's simple and doesn't postulate any additional powers besides duplication, and it explains things like why someone would decide to duplicate themselves so many times. There's probably some weird implications about subjective experience in there too.
u/lowercase__t [+1] (a day later)
I really like this interpretation.
u/Arganthonius [+1] (2 days later)
Isn't she a normal person, other than the fact that there are nine million of her? I mean, if there was an entire city composed entirely out of clones of me, I don't think we would exactly be going kumbaya all the time and being perfectly cooperative, especially if there were external economic and political pressures. Also, the probability thing seems to be part of the exclusion, because the Slayer of Horrors quest drew special attention to the guy who was responsible for two exclusions but made no such mention for Doris.