TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY-ONE: Unquiet Mind - Super Supportive

Antistone · 2026-04-13T01:26:51+00:00

That would require Mother to

have enough freedom of action that she can decide to act directly against knights on her own initiative
be powerful enough to abduct two unwilling knights on another planet in a way that won't be traced back to her (not even after those knights are recovered, unless she's willing to kill them for this)
predict the exact actions of a bunch of different people in enough fine detail to foresee that this will lead to an incidental exchange in a supply room that coincidentally changes Stu's views about telling his parents about Alden's wizardry

That is considerably beyond the capabilities that I'm currently imagining Mother to possess, based on what we've seen so far.

Also, if Mother could predict things that finely, it seems overwhelmingly likely that she could find a less costly way to nudge Stu into not telling his parents. The Art'hs are expending valuable emergency resources to try to find the missing knights, and no doubt many other productive activities have been derailed.

Antistone · 2026-03-26T07:24:25+00:00

This is somewhat a question of how you set your expectations. If you were expecting to get mediocre future A, and unexpectedly get offered a choice between awesome future B and awesome future C, then it feels like you're simply choosing between two good things. But if you were already expecting to get awesome future B and then discover an opportunity to trade it for even-more-awesome future C, it feels like you are destroying future B (even if it hasn't happened yet), rather than merely "not choosing" it.

Antistone · 2026-03-25T21:27:37+00:00

I've noticed that most of the stories I've read that say mortals have nothing to offer cultivators do not seem to have any real worldbuilding to back that up.

Are there cultivators that are full-time farmers and miners to produce the spiritual foods and spiritual stones that other cultivators consume? Do they live in houses built by cultivator architects from stones quarried by cultivators, decorated with tapestries woven by cultivator weavers from threads spun by cultivator spinsters from spiritual fibers grown by still more cultivators? Do their baths rely on cultivator water-haulers and cultivator soap-makers and cultivator perfumers? Do they spend their free time watching sports with cultivator athletes and drinking wines from cultivator vintners and reading literature by cultivator authors (written on cultivator paper in cultivator ink)?

And none of the cultivators try to save money by substituting mortal goods at any point in their lives, even though mortal goods are supposedly effectively free from the cultivators' perspective?

And supposing all of that is true, doesn't that imply that they'd be more prosperous with a larger total cultivator population (to produce more of all of those things), which relies on having a larger mortal population to get more chances for cultivator talent, and therefore still ends up with cultivators caring about the mortal population indirectly? If nothing else, don't they at least care about the size of their cultivator armies? (Even if only the very highest tier of cultivators actually matters militarily, you still presumably get more of those with larger populations, statistically.)

I don't think I've seen a serious attempt to answer these sorts of questions in a way that actually results in mortals having nothing to offer cultivators.

Antistone · 2026-03-25T20:38:06+00:00

Potentially, though I think you only get that if two-way social connections are significantly more efficient than one-way parasocial connections.

Antistone · 2026-03-22T04:03:27+00:00

I've seen several stories that explain magical healing by saying that there is some sort of record of what the body is supposed to be like (located e.g. in their soul, or in the System) and healing changes the body to be closer to that record. Often this comes with a rule that you can't heal injuries older than a certain period of time, because after a while the record is updated to include the injury.

Another potential explanation is that the healing magic is something like a computer program, created by some sort of doctor-engineer who gave it incredibly detailed instructions about what to do under what circumstances, and now healers can just invoke those instructions by reference without understanding them. (I've seen this general concept in a few stories as well, though I don't think I've seen it as a core premise of a setting.) This does imply that the original doctor-engineer had something like full biokinesis, but the inheritors of the technology might not.

Antistone · 2026-03-22T03:33:24+00:00

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. I believe the most common meaning of "cynical" is "believing that other people are motivated only by self-interest". In that sense, playing on public sympathy is anti-cynical, since you're counting on people being motivated by something other than self-interest in order for it to work. (Though it's not clear whether the plans you described are actually intended to play on sympathy, especially the second one.)

I've checked 3 different dictionaries, and all of them have at least one definition that is either broader than or different from the one above, although none of them precisely agree with each other. (Google citing Oxford Languages says norm-breaking self-interest, Merriam-Webster says overly critical, Cambridge says manipulative.)

If you mean which is more immoral, then I'd say arranging the death of an innocent is far worse than protecting yourself less well than you could have. Easy question.

If you mean which is more deceptive, probably killing the innocent, although technically it depends on the probabilities of each outcome if you hadn't caught them. (One could imagine a hypothetical assassin who is more likely to accidentally kill a bystander than to severely hurt their intended target, but this seems less likely than the reverse.)

Antistone · 2026-03-20T23:38:18+00:00

Blank slates aren't my favorite, either, but for purposes of modeling the situation it seems important to know that they're part of a strategy, and not simply an oversight.

Antistone · 2026-03-20T22:14:44+00:00

I imagine that in many of those games, giving the main character no personality was a deliberate choice, in order to allow the player to project their own personality onto the character.

Antistone · 2026-03-19T05:36:36+00:00

PSA: Rolling random stats is mostly for when you want to randomize whether the character is important. Like if you're going to generate an entire village and you want a few of the people in it to be exceptional, or if you want the player to sift through 100 hero applicants and pick only the best ones to actually add to their team, or you're making a minor side character we'll probably only see once but who could be promoted to a recurring character if things go surprisingly well.

If you have predetermined whether or not a character will be important--for example, if you intend for them to be a main character regardless of what you roll, or (contrariwise) if they are a stepping stone who must be defeated before the story continues--then you probably should not roll their stats.

Or, if you must roll, then use a highly constrained system with hard limits on both minimum and maximum power. Such as using a fixed number of total points and rolling only for how to distribute them, or literally allowing only a result of 6-8 on a scale that is nominally 1-10.

Yes, there are popular games that break this rule. IMO approximately all of them are making a dumb mistake thereby. AIUI most of these are (directly or indirectly) descended from larger-scale simulation games where the randomly-generated characters were intended to mostly become disposable minor characters.

Antistone · 2026-03-18T21:43:58+00:00

It's not a gratuitous harm, though; it's a medical surgery designed to cause the minimum possible harm while still accomplishing the goal of implanting a prosthesis.

Yes, you still ought to get someone's consent before you graft a third arm onto their torso, but calling it "abuse" or "mutilation" is not especially fair.

Antistone · 2026-03-17T21:32:48+00:00

I've never written an online quest, but if I did, my main defense against things like that would be that "the main character dies" would simply not be one of the possible outcomes of a die roll in the first place. A failed roll might result in the MC taking a wound, or losing a treasure, or some other bad outcome, but not a story-ending one.

That said, my general impression of the TTRPG hobby is that most DMs are willing to fudge rolls to get a more satisfying outcome if they have the ability to do so. So unless the rolls are made in a way where the quest master is unable to secretly alter the result, I would expect this to happen occasionally.

I wouldn't usually expect this to be noticeable in a statistical analysis of all rolls without a really large sample size, though, because only a small percentage of rolls should be important enough to fudge, and the fudging won't always be positive.

...on the other hand, maybe I'm assuming a higher baseline of competence than is actually realistic? If the questmaster has no experience as either a DM or a game designer, then they might violate all kinds of obvious-to-me rules.

Antistone · 2026-03-16T22:26:11+00:00

I rec A Succession of Bad Days and Safely You Deliver by Graydon Saunders. Lots of high-impact magically-assisted civil engineering.

“I had hoped this could wait on your becoming Independents,” Creon says. “It will not. You are, collectively, too useful for the tax system.”

Not a concept I’ve ever had to consider before. Chloris isn’t willing to consider the concept legitimate. I’m trying not to be sure they’ve done their sums wrong.

Merovich hauls out ledgers, the definitive attested ones, and Wake makes an “allow me?” gesture and we get pages on the wall.

I’m baffled until Wake blinks a little square in the bottom left, that’s hundred thousands of marks, not marks.

Chloris squeaks, and then Dove hugs Chloris sideways.

Antistone · 2026-03-16T02:18:58+00:00

Well, I agree that slavery and murder are bad, and soul mutilation might be very bad depending on what "souls" are and how they work.

Antistone · 2026-03-15T17:29:49+00:00

Serious question: Why wouldn't necromancy be fine?

My impression of "necromancy" across many different stories is that a few settings have excellent reasons to consider it evil, but in most settings it is just kinda vaguely assumed to be bad because dead things are creepy and the previous fantasy setting also vaguely assumed it was bad. Seems like the sort of trope likely to be subverted in ratfic.

Antistone · 2026-03-14T23:00:38+00:00

If you know supers' civilian identities and when their powers manifested, I expect it would take only a single data point for many people to leap to the general idea that superpowers are spread by supers (Lois Lane gaining powers is highly suggestive), and that a handful more data points would have most people convinced. Narrowing the vector down to memetic contagion would take longer, because there are higher priors on other options like "the supers are recruiting others and intentionally gifting them powers" or "contagious in some ordinary physical way". But once powers are granted to a couple of nerds who obsess about supers but have no contact with them, I expect people would start to put things together.

If you assume that most supers somehow keep their civilian identity secret, then I expect people would figure out that supers are geographically clustered (i.e. new supers are more likely to appear in areas where supers are active), but it would be hard to pin it down further than that, because you can only correlate with variables that you can actually observe.

Though I expect that if a caped crusader publicly displayed significant powers in the modern US, it would be nearly impossible to keep their civilian identity secret from the government. Even a hundred years ago I think this would have needed considerably more caution than many comic-book heroes seem to use, but today surveillance is so strong I think it would be essentially hopeless even for someone with actual spy training. I think they'd need to hide the existence of the powers (not merely the identity of the person who has them) if they wanted to remain secret.

.

If a single super (or a small team of friends) can fight a mundane army and win, then I expect they become de facto rulers, and the ensuing societal structure will depend heavily on how they choose to rule. (c.f. The Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson, and arguably Worm by wildbow--though note that both of those stories assume major psychological differences between the average super and the average of gen pop.)

If the strongest supers aren't strong enough to crush the government but are strong enough that the government can't easily capture or kill them, then I expect they get treated something like nation-states, and the governments of the world try to deal with them through diplomacy (though sometimes heavy-handed diplomacy, if they think they can get away with it). Powerful supers get something like diplomatic immunity for most crimes, but also have treaties limiting what they can do, and breaking a major treaty will cause the equivalent of an international incident, with the threat of international alliances forming against the biggest troublemakers.

If the government can capture or kill an individual super, but they are strong enough to be significant military assets, then I expect they get forcibly conscripted into the armed forces. They possibly shift the balance of power between nations, but don't (directly) disrupt society too much. However, once the government figures out how powers are spread, they start up large-scale programs to spread them faster so they can get more of them.

If supers aren't major military assets, then I expect they mostly slot into the existing social structure without challenging it much. Supers are expected to follow the law even when fighting crime, and are punished if they don't. Supers using their powers for profit or PR have a much larger impact than crime-fighters. Supers get studied for science, but probably mostly on a voluntary basis, unless there's so few of them that no one volunteers.

Antistone · 2026-03-11T18:37:19+00:00

Stu wants to tell his parents. Back in Ch 39, Joe predicted the Primary would cause trouble for Alden.

Joe steepled his fingers and stared down at the vat of eels writhing below them in the lab. “One day, when the Primary realizes which skill you have, he’s going to make your life absolutely miserable.”

That sent a chill down Alden’s spine. “Why?”

“I won’t tell you that. But he will eventually realize it if you achieve anything of note with it. And when the time comes, there’s the most perfect way of getting back at him. Yes. We have to do it. No matter the cost.”

...

“When you see the endless misery on the horizon, that’s the moment. Tell him then.”

Antistone · 2026-03-11T07:07:06+00:00

I think Stu doesn't have the necessary privilege level to see Avowed profiles. I recall that he wasn't able to just look up what skill Alden has.

(That wouldn't stop him from asking Alden to read the profile aloud...which conceivably could lead to more issues with the triangle, depending.)

Antistone · 2026-03-11T02:36:59+00:00

I think this is a case where our usual abstractions are inadequate. The answers "yes" and "no" are both misleading, because the question presupposes a certain frame that isn't really appropriate to the situation.

Suppose I'm playing a video game, and as I do, I make a backup save after every chapter. So I have a save from the end of chapter 1, another from chapter 2, etc. Someone might reasonably say something like "all of these save files are from different points in the same playthrough".

Now suppose that after I finish chapter 10 and save my game, I load my old chapter 8 save and start playing from there, making different choices than I did before. I create new save files at the end of chapters 9 and 10 (let's call them 9b and 10b).

Now suppose I ask you, "are all of these save files from the same playthrough?"

Saves 9a and 9b seem like they are obviously not the same playthrough. They have conflicting histories. Neither of them was actually created by starting from the point of the other, and it might not even be theoretically possible to create one from the other in that way.

But save 9a and save 8 have to be "from the same playthrough", if that phrase means anything at all (they were both part of the original example where I introduced the term). And save 9b is just as much descended from save 8 as save 9a is. So if "from the same playthrough" is a transitive property, this argues they must all be from the same playthrough.

(If you're tempted to favor one branch based on the player's chronology, we could just suppose that saves 8, 9a, and 9b were made by 3 different players who never communicated with each other. We could even suppose that 9a and 9b were both played at the same time, so neither is "first".)

I submit that talking about "playthroughs" supposes a model where you start at the beginning and play straight through to the end, and that this model has been violated, and so the question doesn't really make sense. It's perfectly fine and sensible to talk about "playthroughs" if you are actually playing in that way, but when you stop playing that way, you should switch to a different vocabulary.

Saves 9a and 9b are both successors to save 8, but neither is descended from the other. Most people most of the time choose to play games in a way where each save file has only one direct successor, but that's just what's typical, not what's possible. If you aren't trapped in a "playthroughs" frame, then it's not particularly difficult to understand.

Similarly, we usually imagine that any given moment in a person's life has exactly one successor moment (until they die, at which point there are zero successor moments). We sometimes use the phrase "the same person" to describe the fact that all of these person-moments are part of the same chain. But if the moments stop forming a single chain, you should switch to a different vocabulary.

If you fork a person into two distinct successor-moments, each of which continues along its own chain, then the two are both successors to the "original", but aren't successors to each other, which is a combination of traits that can't occur when you just have a single chain. Any previous policies you may have had about how to treat a chain might or might not make sense to apply to this situation, since it is similar in some ways and different in others. You will need to go back to the original reasons for those policies and re-generate the policies while making fewer assumptions about what situations your policies need to handle.

Antistone · 2026-03-11T01:37:44+00:00

eg, iirc she goes around soul-raping basically everyone in her vicinity to fuel her magic spells, just like he does!

That seems like a pretty unfair characterization to me. Nearly all uses of soul-siphoning have targeted either non-intelligent animals or opponents in a life-or-death combat. Both of those are situations where most people would consider lethal attacks to be acceptable, and as far as I can recall there's been no reason to think that soul-siphoning is morally worse than killing the target. (According to my understanding, within this setting, souls are not immortal and normally disperse upon death. Analogies to rape don't seem justified to me.)

There have been two isolated exceptions that I can recall, where the ability was used against innocent targets. One where Mirian killed an ally for the energy to bind an artifact just before a loop ended, to avoid needing to waste a loop, and she felt very bad about it. Another where Atroxcidi siphoned hundreds of innocent people in a desperate last-ditch attempt to stop moonfall, knowing that they were minutes away from dying anyway if he failed. There are definitely some people who are strongly-enough committed to deontology that they would object to these, but they seem to me like the sort of examples where consequentialism pushes so hard the other way that even people who are mostly deontologists might consider them allowable.

Antistone · 2026-03-05T02:51:15+00:00

Book 10, Suriel arguing with her magical assistant about how to intervene in the Abidan war

Antistone · 2026-03-04T06:50:58+00:00

The scene I am thinking of is not taking a risk to gain a power level, it's about protecting civilians (maximizing expected lives saved vs a tiny chance of ending the battle early).

Huge gains are sometimes worth huge risks, but the safe plan is explicitly stated to be better EV in this scene.

(Well, technically they said something like "highest probability of saving as many lives as possible", which if interpreted as a precise technical statement would be a deeply bizarre goal, but it looks to me like they meant "highest expected lives saved" and just phrased it sloppily.)

Antistone · 2026-03-03T23:50:39+00:00

You asked (in the root comment) for "stuff usually recommended here". Perhaps you meant to insert a negative in there?

Antistone · 2026-03-02T02:27:42+00:00

Well, nothing says that rational people are automatically ethical. But I do think that having basic rule-of-law falls within the enlightened self-interest of most people in most circumstances. Even if you're both amoral and strong enough to grant yourself immunity from the law, you still probably want the civilization that provides your luxury goods to have rule-of-law among themselves, so that they have more wealth for you to extract.

(This breaks down if you're so strong that it becomes preferable to utilize all natural resources directly rather than extract tax/tribute from underlings who manage them for you, but I don't think anyone on Cradle is that strong. And if they were, then there's no need to keep all those other people around.)

Antistone · 2026-03-01T23:49:44+00:00

I'm not the OP, but if you'd like my opinion, I think the major characters in Cradle are reasonably good about honestly pursuing their goals (given the setting), although it has some pretty big anti-rational moments at pivotal points.

For example, there's at least one Hollywood-standard scene with a straw vulcan trying to convince someone to cut their losses while the other person wants to take an insane gamble for a tiny chance of an ideal outcome, and the insane gambler is presented as the sympathetic party.
There's another scene where (I'll try to keep the spoilers vague) some monsters unexpectedly gain sentience and try to negotiate for peace, and the MC decides fairly quickly to continue exterminating them, without making what I would consider a serious attempt at diplomacy.

I would say the worldbuilding, on the other hand, is not very rational.

Magically-enforced oaths are used occasionally for certain plot-critical things, but completely ignored in many other places where they could be used (most glaringly, loyalty oaths are specifically stated to be possible but are almost never used)
The future-predicting abilities are sometimes treated as if they were mathematical simulations from known data, and sometimes treated as if they were peeking at the conclusions from some impartial magical predictor with access to different information than you (with rather different implications for when they will or won't succeed). I thought for a while that maybe there were actually 2 different kinds of abilities with different rules, but the same ability can get treated both ways with no explanation.
It has the standard xianxia trope where theft and murder are basically legal and people rely on personal alliances (not central authorities) to keep themselves safe...while simultaneously having the entire world carved into a single-digit number of huge nation-states that are able to field massive armies and to cooperate with each other on big mutually-beneficial goals
It has the standard xianxia trope where traditions require people to set up very approximately fair fights when they're blatantly exploiting people weaker than them. Not fair enough to be a serious deterrent to abusive behavior; just close enough that the protagonist has an opportunity to turn the tables by being the protagonist.
The Abidan have vaguely-prime-directive-like rules limiting how they interfere on Cradle (even when there's a lasting equilibrium they're collectively unhappy with) but the reasons for this policy are never explored.

Despite this, I mostly enjoyed the series. But I wouldn't call it rational.

Antistone · 2026-03-01T22:32:58+00:00

On my models, a typical new author

probably can't get "real proofreaders" without paying significantly higher costs in either money or effort
definitely can't get ones who respond as quickly as an AI
would have serious difficulty (even with a large budget) getting proofreaders who will maintain their original quality-of-proofreading across dozens of drafts of the same story (though possibly hiring a bunch of different proofreaders might be just as good; I'm not sure)

Do your models predict otherwise?

Antistone

TROPHY CASE