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Comments on What are reasonable limitations for probability-manipulating magic?
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What are reasonable limitations for probability-manipulating magic? Question
I'm imagining a sort of magic that only manipulates probabilities. That is, you cannot achieve something that's against the laws of nature (for example, you cannot create energy out of nothing), but you can make unlikely events more likely and likely events more unlikely (as a simple example, you can cause dice to fall on six far more often than they should). The strength of a wizard is then given by how much he can bend probability; with sufficient strength a wizard can do "thermodynamically impossible" tasks like heating up stuff without a heat source.
Now I imagine that those with the ability can do it just with the power of their mind (maybe some quantum consciousness thing). This however raises two questions:
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If you can do it with your mind, then why can't everyone do it, and why are there wizards with inherently different strengths?
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Any magic should come with a cost (or else it would be overpowered). What would be a reasonable cost for this type of ability?
It would be nice to find "natural" answers to those questions (that is, answers that don't seem arbitrary, but intrinsically linked to this type of magic).
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What came to mind immediately on reading the question, limitation-wise, was that you actually need to understand the current probabilities and what contributing factors you want (notionally) changed. Changing the fairness of a die, then, is (maybe) pretty easy, since you could nudge the bouncing cube away from seven minus the target number more often than an even chance. You only have one piece and a lot of opportunities to shift things. But (ignoring setting ideas) encouraging a car to stall, you need to know the relevant mechanisms, their failure modes, and the existing odds that they'll happen. That could take days to work out, when you only have a few minutes.
Not everybody does it, because not everybody has the patience to prepare that kind of work.
And the cost also seems potentially straightforward, despite the question trying to avoid it at the end: Arbitrariness.
That order imposed on events needs to "come from" somewhere, making other events more difficult to predict as their probabilities skew. Sure, your pursuer got a stone in his shoe, but do you really want to risk climbing that fence with your heart condition after lucking out like that...? Those upcoming actions used to be random, but now they very much are arbitrary, and nobody can guess how, because nobody knows the state of every system just prior to borrowing that randomness.
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