July 21, 2013: Checkmate

[LAYF]

This page was good enough to convince me to enter this strange, foreign part of the forum to express how good I thought it was. Really liked the call back.

*Runs back to the Games section.

Slaps Kuriks fingers with a bamboo stick.. get back you!.... running from your cage will ya? I'll teach ya!

Hmm... I don't see THunt as a gun enthusiast... so i don't know about the .38 but i could be wrong....

I'd be more willing to believe in the Norse number of valor some thing....

hmm....

[RedwoodElf]

but... but 38 was already special

nm, responded to a post that was deleted.. nothing to see here

although, I wonder if THunt used 38 as his special number b/c of the gun .38 special... hmm

Unlikely...a .38 is another arbitrary measurement, just like "Six feet" wouldn't work.

[willpell]

nm, responded to a post that was deleted.. nothing to see here

Aww, I liked that post about all the random meanings of 38....

[LAYF]

nm, responded to a post that was deleted.. nothing to see here

Aww, I liked that post about all the random meanings of 38....

This one?

some fun 38 number wiki facts:

-The number 38 was especially prominent in Norse mythology. The number was said to represent unnatural bravery, characteristic of the legendary heroes of Norse sagas. Most legendary sagas were divided into 38 chapters, and the number often recurred throughout stories, with the heroes combating giants or other beasts in groups of 38. The number came to be adopted by the Hardrada clan, and was displayed on their crest in the form of 38 ravens set around 38 outward-facing arrows.

-The number was also significant in Egyptian mythology, as it was the characteristic number of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death and mummification. Egyptian pharaohs were often buried with 38 statues of cat guardians, and their sarcophagi were adorned with 38 ankhs.

-The number of slots on an American Roulette wheel is 38.

-Bill C-38 legalized same-sex marriage in Canada

-The number of years it took the Israelites to travel from Kadesh Barnea to the Zered valley in Deuteronomy.

-The 38 class is the most famous class of steam locomotive used in New South Wales

-The gate of the sci-fi TV series Stargate SG-1 can stay open a maximum of 38 minutes.

-In Taiwan and some places in southern Chinese mainland, "3, 8", but not "38", is slang for stupid/idiot,especially women.


Hmm.. just fun...

[Starfire]

WICKED!
WICKED COOL!

And yes, I almost splooshed my coffee with Minmax's last words!

Thank you for keeping us all guessing and kudos to those of you who guessed the outcome!

[Wolfie]

Elvors had posted something right before me that I didn't quote, about the .38 special... which was then deleted for some reason. So my response was a non sequitur

[willpell]

This one?

Yep, that's the one I meant.

[Khazar]

I've been wondering about Psimax's motivations now that he's dead, and I've realised something. Psimax is super-powerful, capable of killing everyone in the maze (38 wasn't his original weakness), yet is constantly worrying about killing "variables". With his power, he would probably be able to reduce the population of the maze of many to just himself. He doesn't need to be quick, just quicker than everyone else, and since he can teleport he could definitely manage this (or he levels up until he can). With the maze empty he would have an infinite amount of time to eradicate the pocket reality, and there would be no unaccounted-for variables (everyone is in a constant state - dead). He could even do it multiple times to be sure.

I know that this would make an awful plot - "invincible psion kills everyone and then deletes the maze". In fact it wouldn't even be a plot, so the psion had to act as he did for a story to be possible, I understand that.

My question is: can anyone give me an in-universe reason why he doesn't do this?

I've sort of thought myself into a corner here and am looking for help

[Starfire]

I've been wondering about Psimax's motivations now that he's dead, and I've realised something. Psimax is super-powerful, capable of killing everyone in the maze (38 wasn't his original weakness), yet is constantly worrying about killing "variables". With his power, he would probably be able to reduce the population of the maze of many to just himself. He doesn't need to be quick, just quicker than everyone else, and since he can teleport he could definitely manage this (or he levels up until he can). With the maze empty he would have an infinite amount of time to eradicate the pocket reality, and there would be no unaccounted-for variables (everyone is in a constant state - dead). He could even do it multiple times to be sure.

I know that this would make an awful plot - "invincible psion kills everyone and then deletes the maze". In fact it wouldn't even be a plot, so the psion had to act as he did for a story to be possible, I understand that.

My question is: can anyone give me an in-universe reason why he doesn't do this?

I've sort of thought myself into a corner here and am looking for help

Hi there,

Here are some suggestions that came to my mind to answer why.

1. He might not have thought of that. I have found in my experience that very gifted people don't always see the simple solutions.
2. He might have thought that his math was quicker then going around killing them all and then having to do math.
3. He might have a chance of not surviving it. 218 chances to die. He could have calculated the odds and since they weren't 100% he didn't want to risk it.

[PseudoFenton]

My question is: can anyone give me an in-universe reason why he doesn't do this?

I've sort of thought myself into a corner here and am looking for help

The maze needs some method of allowing the final iteration of alt-universes to complete the maze, and to accommodate the completion of the maze should it have been made impossible to finish. As, when you're dealing with an iterative cycle, you don't want to get stuck in an infinite loop.

So, considering there are mindless alts (zombies and blademax) who might very well struggle to actually, you know, follow the simply instructions required to leave the maze and reset it - there has to be a method of allowing a reset without having to wait for starvation/old age deaths of the only remaining "living" person in the maze.

It is therefore likely that if only one universe remains in the maze, they auto-win and leave. Psimax could attempt to immobilise some of the other inhabitance of cause, but it may be hard to prevent suicide attempts in this situation. It may also be that its an impossible to test for condition (last one alive wins) without triggering it, so Psimax would rather avoid the potentiality for 'accidental' winning and just prevent anyone from winning thus maintaining order.

There is another possibility, Psimax wants to create the 'Ground-hog day' effect, where everything repeats exactly as it did last time, allowing him to uncover every last detail and take them all into account. However, thanks to the 'butterfly effect' where subtle differences can manifest into much larger changes over time, he would attempt to keep contact with all other inhabitance of the maze as low as possible. Attempting to kill them all may allow one to sneak past whilst he's busy in a fight, which resets the maze and means he has a new opponent and a new set of causality to deal with and 'predict'. It is therefore simply easier and more efficient to study all of their actions without interfering with them at all - which includes killing them all.

There is technically one other reason. Deluded as he may be, Psimax seeks oblivion, not suffering - it is therefore less cruel to just 'obliterate' their lives (and let them play out as they normally would), than it would be to personally slay each of them over and over again.

[Khazar]

That does make sense, I think. If the zombie alts were the last ones alive, there is not really any way for them to win (climbing the tower, choosing the right key and then opening the door with said key), so I guess the maze has fail-safes. Not accidentally winning is a very good reason for him to avoid him being the only one alive. It's a weird thing, avoiding the win conditions.

Although... The 'avoid accidentally winning' idea makes sense from psimax's perspective (as much as anything does), but I'm not so sure about the maze having fail-safes (not that Psimax knows, or would be able to test for them easily). I guess I'm saying I agree with your reasoning of psimax's logic (and hence the answer to my original question) but I suspect the maze of many would simply wait for people to die of starvation/old age if they are unable to solve the maze or get locked out of the final room. The maze does not care how you die, simply whether you are dead or not; or so I believe.

[rwstyles]

Since the MoM is outside of time, I see no reason that it can't wait for the last stragglers to die of old age if nothing else whenever no one wins.

They did this, without the killing in Star Trek NG once.

[PseudoFenton]

but I suspect the maze of many would simply wait for people to die of starvation/old age if they are unable to solve the maze or get locked out of the final room. The maze does not care how you die, simply whether you are dead or not; or so I believe.

This may well be the case, but picture these two scenarios:

1) The established teams in the maze consist of multiple zombified groups, including such terrors like zombified-insubstantial fire-elemental-FMK! The outcome becomes obvious, thanks to all of the competent groups already escaping and being replaced with less competent groups, all the non-zombie groups die or become zombies. As they're all stupid zombies, all be it with some potent powers, they take over but no-one wins.

Now the maze could well just wait around for them all to die off from starvation, or even have a timeout element built in so that after 100 years of no victory is resets. The problem is though, the maze has not changed at all during this reset, so it plays out exactly the same way. Over and over, forever repeating the same 'play through', the only difference being a slightly higher number of their failed counter - which could prompt a slightly different outcome every so often, but there is very little difference between 1982771 and 2463213 when you have no context for how many times the last loop has played through. As such, the maze gets suck in a repeating loop forever, which means no other alts can enter the maze, and it effectively breaks.

The maze needs a way of preventing this form of endless loop, allowing a single surviving reality to 'win' simply due to being the last one standing allows the maze to break out of this loop. The maze can't very well iterate through an infinite number of alt-versions of the group if it gets stuck dealing with the same 200 or so groups for all of eternity.

2) The maze has just added a new group, unfortunately it consists of an immortal-kin with mind control powers, who doesn't want anyone else to win. However, she gets pinned under a trap (that probably should have killed her if she wasn't immortal) shortly after leaving the starting room. Despite her best efforts to use the other inhabitance to rescue her - they all die of starvation before smashing through all of the one-way doors and puzzle locks and actually finding her. As such, she is stuck and can't win, but noone else can because she mind-controlled the lot before they could get to the exit and they've all since died.

In this situation, the maze either sits idle forever (because it's waiting for her death, which will never come) or it resets due to a time out - but falls into a similar iterative loop where due to the composition of the inhabitance - the maze simply cannot proceed as normal.


Either way the maze can't do what it's intended to - it needs a way to test for these conditions, and provide a means of change that will prevent the same set of events repeating over and over. Having a solo-survivor auto-win, or after a year whoever has the most HP auto-wins, or whoever got closest to the exit auto-wins, or simply temporarily discarding a random team should there be no victory after 1000 iterations (something psimax could've actually triggered by accident and spoilt his whole plan). Of cause the maze may shuffle where each team starts after 1000 iterations of no-victory too, which causes change and promotes a different set of circumstances to play out, without actually changing which parties are currently 'loaded'. There are many solutions to avoiding endless loops, but whatever they are, the maze needs something to break them when they occur - else it'll stop functioning as intended and be pointless.

Sufficient to say Psimax is probably aware that there will be measures in place to do this, and therefore is both attempting to not accidentally trigger one himself (and therefore win, as he wishes to stay there to build his machine) and is probably working 'against the clock' despite the apparent ease of just forcing a reset any time something goes wrong. He could easily theorise that there may be a limited number of 'no-win restarts' before the maze starts altering variables itself... which would throw off all of his calculations forcing him to start over, or even cause him to 'win' somehow. Therefore, it is in his best interest to work quickly, and study as much as possible without altering anything (the ability to scry on any part of the maze using the machine probably helped a great deal for that). Therefore his goal is again one of observing, and not killing, all of the inhabitance, in an attempt to buy himself as much time to work on the machine before he is forced to reset the maze.

[EatsAPeach]

" The maze can't very well iterate through an infinite number of alt-versions of the group if it gets stuck dealing with the same 200 or so groups for all of eternity." Sure it can; time is meaningless there. But there may indeed be failsafes, like if only one group is left and they just wander, a door opens and lets them into the treasure room. It depends on whether the Maze prefers to have people win and take the dangerous treasure back into the world, or fail to be worthy of dangerous stuff and eventually wander back out again empty-handed . . .

[Baeronvonbleat]

So at this point the Kin's can re-write reality so that Psi'max is vulnerable to everything, and all his power is focused into only one strength he can't figure out (plus his Kin and Forgath just kill him immediately everytime) and when they finally succeed, he's left dead! Kazaa!

[PseudoFenton]

sure it can; time is meaningless there.

Technically time it isn't meaningless - its actually just cut off from the main time line, allowing any amount of time to pass without causing any time dilation beyond the last iteration you lived through to become fixed when you leave (thanks to erasing any other time that occurred).

Either way, just because "time is meaningless" there, does not mean that the maze can afford to run a non-concluding simulation of a universe for the entire duration of the actual universe. The maze was built with a purpose, it is assumed to be able to fulfil that purpose, having it effectively stall means that it is flawed and not fit for purpose.
Kin herself says that "the process repeats until infinity is satisfied and every alternative reality in which we've entered the maze of many has ended with our success." Should the maze become held up in an infinite loop then, being detached from the multi-verse and the natural flow of time or not, it still doesn't have the time to waste - else it'd be unable to actually satisfy infinity.

Right, I need to dedicate some thought towards muffins or what shade of green I like best, something a little more mundane - all this talk of mechanical interplay of time and speculative thoughts on the functionality of a fictional place can take its toll.

[EatsAPeach]

So at this point the Kin's can re-write reality so that Psi'max is vulnerable to everything, and all his power is focused into only one strength he can't figure out (plus his Kin and Forgath just kill him immediately everytime) and when they finally succeed, he's left dead! Kazaa!

I'm hoping they can just leave him dead in a heap while they cycle everyone in the Maze through the treasure room and send them back, and maybe send PM's body back with the zombies as a light snack so he stays dead? Then reset the Maze to allow a group of Kins, maybe even recruit some more Kins(maybe even ours), and open the door, pick out treasure, and exit, which would restart the Maze and allow new parties in.
The Zombie party were apparently zombies when they entered the Maze, meaning they are at least alert enough to want treasure, so they may be capable of winning. Zombie Forgath was pretty sharp for an evil guy. I bet they are after an Amulet of Epic Healing or something to turn them, and maybe their world, human again instead of a Jade Teapot. The zombies our group met were technically dead already for Maze purposes.
PM's Kin and Forgath trouble me; I think they may be a match with TortureMax. They have died thousands of times and they remember it all, and nobody knows that yet. They are going to need a lot of therapy, and TM, who will probably revert to a more cheerful MM, might be just what they need. They must have an odd backstory; likely PM wasn't crazy at first and may have lost it after destroying the counter. I think he's been killed over and over by alts immune to psionics and twice his strength, and somewhere in there he decided life sucked and decided to vanish himself. Once he got the machine going, he became scary powerful but not before.
We may get to hear some of these backstories! If the Kinfolk become Maze Gods and bring the groups up one by one, maybe they will be able to explain them as well.
On an unrelated note, my local TV keeps promising "NewsMax, with FutureMax Weather," but so far no bald, one-eyed newscaster or Tardis-driving meteorologist has shown up.

[JustRight]

So at this point the Kin's can re-write reality so that Psi'max is vulnerable to everything, and all his power is focused into only one strength he can't figure out (plus his Kin and Forgath just kill him immediately everytime) and when they finally succeed, he's left dead! Kazaa!

I'm hoping they can just leave him dead in a heap while they cycle everyone in the Maze through the treasure room and send them back, and maybe send PM's body back with the zombies as a light snack so he stays dead? Then reset the Maze to allow a group of Kins, maybe even recruit some more Kins(maybe even ours), and open the door, pick out treasure, and exit, which would restart the Maze and allow new parties in.
The Zombie party were apparently zombies when they entered the Maze, meaning they are at least alert enough to want treasure, so they may be capable of winning. Zombie Forgath was pretty sharp for an evil guy. I bet they are after an Amulet of Epic Healing or something to turn them, and maybe their world, human again instead of a Jade Teapot. The zombies our group met were technically dead already for Maze purposes.
PM's Kin and Forgath trouble me; I think they may be a match with TortureMax. They have died thousands of times and they remember it all, and nobody knows that yet. They are going to need a lot of therapy, and TM, who will probably revert to a more cheerful MM, might be just what they need. They must have an odd backstory; likely PM wasn't crazy at first and may have lost it after destroying the counter. I think he's been killed over and over by alts immune to psionics and twice his strength, and somewhere in there he decided life sucked and decided to vanish himself. Once he got the machine going, he became scary powerful but not before.
We may get to hear some of these backstories! If the Kinfolk become Maze Gods and bring the groups up one by one, maybe they will be able to explain them as well.
On an unrelated note, my local TV keeps promising "NewsMax, with FutureMax Weather," but so far no bald, one-eyed newscaster or Tardis-driving meteorologist has shown up.

In theory, the MoM treasure room would contain at least one powerful item of value to each alternate reality - hundreds of backstories! THunt the master storyteller has a long career ahead of him. Well designed.

[EatsAPeach]

PF:"Kin herself says that "the process repeats until infinity is satisfied and every alternative reality in which we've entered the maze of many has ended with our success."
So the Maze prefers winners, meaning it will cooperate with the Kins as they implement Project Everybody Wins. I believe there are still groups hanging in limbo waiting to enter. Best case is the current turn doesn't end until the Kins fix everyone up with infinite loot and renewed health. I have a vision of MinMax and Forgath, wearing or carrying everything in the treasure room, confronting Kore and having to use up and throw away a fortune in weapon-loot before doing him any damage at all.
I've never understood why the alts don't just cooperate. Make way for the most dangerous to go first and win. Attack the traps as a group instead of competing? If it was a maze full of me, it would be sorted out in short order, and it may go smoothly for quests where only one person enters.
JustRight, it will be neat to see if each group can take anything they like from the treasure room. We've speculated that different groups may be there for different objects, although "Kin wants the Jade Teapot and MM wants to find the Goblins" seems to drive most of them. I wouldn't be surprised by the zombie group wanting Epic Health instead of a teleport spell, or the Hulk group wanting a Grimoire of Quantum Physics; there may be dozens of quest objects for dozens of groups, and no restrictions on taking the whole room full of stuff.
Do GoldMax a favor and toss him into a different world with a different not-Walter? Or let him suffer? Flip a coin.

[friedkitty]

Buut the Kins don't seem like they are in this to "save" everyone. They are in it to figure out a way to game the system to get stuff for themselves. The only reason they are really helping our FMK is to stop Psimax from screwing up what they have figured out is an easy XP generator, and a possibility to escape to a less evil reality than their own. And they are also only interested in saving Kins. Not everyone.

[Unlucky-for-Some]

Yeah I agree Friedkitty - I have been worrying that once PsiMax is confirmed dead then the tacit alliance between the Kinship and FMK may very rapidly fall apart. Both groups want fairly different things after all...

[stevedj]

You know... those are fine theories about the MoM. But, let's suppone one other theory, ok?

Suppose that the MoM does NOT have any failsafes as propsed above. Then, suppose it had indeed entered a state of "infinite loop" - that is, all the groups currently within the maze always die w/o a winner. Yes, including PsiMax (at least, until he broke his counter - and we have no idea what count it was up to when he did).

So, it would be interesting if PsiMax was, in a deranged sort of way, trying to "fix things" -- to get everyone out of the hell they were in (or something like that - I forget how he said it).

[willpell]

Zombie Forgath was pretty sharp for an evil guy.

If you mean Forghast, he was not really undead, he just had a ring which gave him some or all of the benefits and drawbacks of the Undead type. Actual Zombies have no Intelligence, so they couldn't have intentionally entered the maze in search of treasure; they probably just blundered in, drawn by the scent of prey from through the door, with non-FMK zombies from the same horde having touched the blade and been obliterated.

[Krulle]

Ring of Undead: http://www.goblinscomic.org/08092011/ (Panel 3)

[Dreamy]

If using one of 38 ways to kill someone with your thumb is valid, then if the Kins had just set the number to 4, anyone with four limbs could have been immune to PsiMax - using one of four limbs is at least as fundamental to their nature as 38 pieces of knowledge, one of which gets used. Some of the alts wouldn't have been immune, but the more conventional ones and MinMax would have.

Five.

Most of the conventional ones have five extremities poking out of the central body, unless you are arbitrarily excluding the head from your calculations
(And five is a prime)

But don't forget rule of DM. He'd probably have accepted a more convoluted plan, and maybe a more straightforward one. Certainly MinMax could have stalled while one of the Kins magically counted the exact number of hairs on his body - but when the player (acting on OOC knowledge) blurts out that "I know 38 ways to kill with my thumb" (which might even have been planned by Herbert when PsiMax got to drop that number) then you give the win to that player, whether you had planned it or not.

As for presentation, I like the flashback, since it doesn't break narrative and remind about the story being a game. It is quite an immersive tale, and it has gone a long way.