Doubt Protagonists

[name_here]

Actually you could fire it infinity times as long as you don't keep track of how many times you've fired, because you never know how many bullets are left.

[RobbyPants]

Maybe if you were really scatterbrained or if you just weren't paying attention during the heat of the moment. Still, it seems like at some point, you'd realize that you've likely fired more than you should have, and then the power would just stop working...

...unless the only limitation is not knowing the exact amount as opposed to knowing that what you did was completely impossible.

[tzor]

Innumermancy
An unknown number could be high or low. Using Innumermancy, a character could get enough change from couch cushions to buy a soda or continue firing bullets from a pistol without reloading. So long as the amount stays unknown, it can always be sufficient for the character's needs.

So, is the idea here, if you have a gun that can hold eight bullets, but you don't know how many are in it, you could be able to fire it eight times, so long as you don't check? Also, if you don't know the capacity, you might be able to get a few more than normal?

This is interesting, and it seems to reward slightly absent-minded play. How much of this is known by the player and how much by MC? It seems hard to hide this type of mechanic from a player who would normally meticulously track their ammo.

But you would know, more or less. After all, it's your gun, you loaded the gun. You know how many bullets can fit into the clip. The basic parameters are in fact known to you. That part's really hard to fake.

On the other hand, when the shit hits the fan and the bullets are flying, how many shots did you fire? Sometimes you fire without thinking and without counting. Sometimes the numbers don't exactly add up.

The solo vs group situation is hard because it's hard to fire upon a group without thinking about each shot one at a time, but group vs group this is definitely possible. It doesn't always mean that there are more people dead than there are rounds available, some of those rounds might have even missed the target. Some might have been shot twice. (Yes, this really happens in the real world when people are in the middle of a gunfight.) The point is that at one point, you should have run out of ammo and one person should have been standing but somehow you didn't.

I think that is the best scenario, not a forced test case (these should always fail) but a complex situation where if you could add everything up, the numbers just don't come out right.

[Grek]

Any power that has the requirement that you not observe the object that it effects could pausibly have a mechanic where you get a severe penalty to the action when someone has recently looked at the object, which fades with time. Thus, it is nearly impossible to disappear a gun with innumeracy if they checked that it was still there 30 seconds ago, easier if they checked up on it before entering the building, and trival if they haven't looked at the gun since last week. Protagonists (what with being twitchy motherfuckers that are always checking that their stuff wasn't stolen by the greys) are effectively immune to these powers, as long as they know and are able to keep checking.

With Innuermacy specifically, I think it would be interesting to make it so that you have to fail a observation check to successfully use it on your personal possessions, by dent of having sufficent distractions to keep you from noticing anything weird happening. Being in a firefight, being injured, being scatterbrained and being on drugs should all impose penalties to your observation skills and, in turn, a bonus to your innumeracy abilities and other effects that require that nobody, self included, notice you used them.

E: If we decide to use the Warp Cult method of ammo tracking, ie. make an ammo check to see if you have any left, then Innuermacy could just give a bonus to that, in addition to the active effects where you look for loot in the couch.

Dousing should not be in the game as a general ability to find anything at all no matter what it is you're specifying. It should either allow you to find generic objects, or only tell you where a specific object is, rather than letting you say where you think it is and have it turn up.

Imperium could simply be the power that people will automatically believe you when you claim to be some specific authority figure, until someone questions the fact, or they have been presented with evidence to the contrary. Once they've shaken the effects, Imperium (from anyone at all) does not work until the next Reality Quake.

[Manxome]

Thinking about it, the halting oracle is a bad example; I'm studying for an algorithms test right now, and my default reaction for anything is to reduce it to a known problem (in this case, "Where is the nearest piece of paper with the answer to the following question: does the following function halt?"). A better idea: just ask the question. Dowsing reduces to Clairvoyance via a dictionary and "Where is the nth word in the sentence that best answers this question:?".

Um. You're assuming that you can embed an uncomputable problem into a simple request and that the magic will instantaneously and correctly answer it. You can very easily put a stop to that by simply not allowing that. For example, you can use dowsing to find a piece of paper with the word "yes", or you can use it to find a piece of paper with the word "no", but you can't ask for "whichever of the items from this list best communicates information that I don't have."

Let me repeat my original objection to Mass Wild Guessing: "I don't see any way that Wild Mass Guessing can be restricted enough to avoid massive game breakage without significantly altering the flavor of the ability." I feel like you're comparing Mass Wild Guessing (with half a dozen restrictions not in the original description) to the most wildly overpowered interpretation of the other powers you can come up with in order to conclude that it's OK, but the issue is that weak versions of the other powers exist, while Wild Mass Guessing seems to have only incredibly powerful versions.

Another way of looking at it--I'm not sure whether this was Frank's intent--is that if you interpret each of these as a "school" of magic, you could write a spell list for it that covers the listed examples and where the individual spells do specific, constrained things. For example:

Bottomless Quiver (Innumermancy)
"It was like they were shooting the guns from the movies--they never run out of ammo."
Prerequisite: You must look into a container (a bag, a suitcase, the magazine of a gun, etc.) and see at least 3 objects that appear interchangable. After looking, the container must remain on your person at all times, or the effect is broken.
Effect: You may remove interchangable objects you saw from the container, one at a time, without decreasing the number remaining in the container. As with all Innumermancy effects, this effect fails if you try to keep careful track of the numbers involved. Because people can't avoid making rough subconscious estimates, the container will usually still end up empty after you have removed roughly 2-3 times the original number of objects.

How much of your life is under controlled conditions?

0%.

All these powers can be demonstrated under controlled conditions, because they are actual magic powers. But the point is that outside of controlled conditions, it's hard to tell whether you have a power, or are just really lucky/skilled/whatever.

Controlled conditions don't just happen randomly in everyday life, but it is entirely possible to deliberately manufacture them if it is your actual goal to prove that your magic powers are real.

Most of the powers on the list specifically affect things that can't be controlled, either because we don't have precise models for them (e.g. reaction to authority) or because they specifically only work when you are, in fact, not modeling them (e.g. Innumermancy, Dowsing). Clairvoyance, as described, makes testable predictions with far too much entropy to plausibly be dismissed as luck, even in situations where another person exists who is clearly and distinctly aware of the answer before you guess (e.g. the person calling you, whose identity you guessed).

[Lokathor]

I think that you guys are forgetting that even if you have a power there is probably going to be a power activation roll or test of some kind, so that powers aren't on all the time, so that even when you're in a situation perfect for how a power works to help you out it just might do nothing at all, because that's the name of the game folks.

[fectin]

Actually, if most powers work by GM fiat, they could easily just not work in controlled conditions. That makes places like hospitals and science labs into either really scary places, or strangely neutral ground.

The Lost ties in well with a mechanic that says Doubters can't screw with other Doubters. They can have that immunity, so they at least get to play the same game as everyone else.

[Maxus]

Total thread necromancy. I was thinking about this today because I pulled a Doubt move to get myself a soda from a vending machine at work.

I was 15 cents short, my boss and my co-worker present didn't have the change, so I sighed, got down on my belly and pulled a dime and a nickel out from under the machine.

It weirded them out--they said I acted like the change would be there because I wanted it to be. Or something.

So after that incident, I remembered this and I've had it on the brain since.

Is there any chance of the Doubt project moving forward, Frank? I recognize and respect you've got a lot of other things going on--including the CPFH--but this one always interested me, too.

[RobbyPants]

Total thread necromancy. I was thinking about this today because I pulled a Doubt move to get myself a soda from a vending machine at work.

I was 15 cents short, my boss and my co-worker present didn't have the change, so I sighed, got down on my belly and pulled a dime and a nickel out from under the machine.

It weirded them out--they said I acted like the change would be there because I wanted it to be. Or something.

So now, you need to go in early, scatter some change under the machine when no one is around, and do it again in front of them. They'll think you're a wizard. Or the devil.

[Maxus]

Total thread necromancy. I was thinking about this today because I pulled a Doubt move to get myself a soda from a vending machine at work.

I was 15 cents short, my boss and my co-worker present didn't have the change, so I sighed, got down on my belly and pulled a dime and a nickel out from under the machine.

It weirded them out--they said I acted like the change would be there because I wanted it to be. Or something.

So now, you need to go in early, scatter some change under the machine when no one is around, and do it again in front of them. They'll think you're a wizard. Or the devil.

Thanks to dark hair and glasses, I'm already called Harry Potter. There's folks who think my first name really is Harry.

But I'll pull that one sometime.

[echoVanguard]

Maybe I'm missing the message here, but it seems to me that a lot of these power designs kind of stomp all over the premise of characters not knowing whether or not their powers are real. It seems to me that this entire game idea would function best as rules-light - each character has one or more "Talents" that are known only to the MC, which would work similar to FATE Aspects. For example, one character might have "Just missed me" while another would have "Access Granted". Then, whenever a character attempted to invoke a power, the MC would determine whether that power fit one of their talents, and if so, activate the power (without telling the player).

If you use the obfuscated results system in the main Doubt thread (posted here), the player would play their card and the MC would take it up, determine the value, then ignore it if the action in question didn't fit with the player's Talents. Either way, the player is never sure what abilities they really have, and can't conclusively determine if the abilities actually do anything at all (lab testing conditions don't work because the player runs out of cards). Everything is fuzzy but the player still has a resource system to use, a character concept to pursue, and a limited ability to affect the world beyond the dice.

echo