In terms of little details, I think right away “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong” must be specified, because if you let rationalists try to think “How bad could it be at maximum badness?” it will get very bad, very quickly.
For instance Situation 1: Imagine every day you spend most of the time outside, you get struck by lightning, and every day you spend most of the time inside, there is an earthquake and whatever you are inside collapses on you.
I can see Rationalist attempting to make and spend most of their time in structures made mostly out of pillows: They collapse, oh well, they get rebuilt in 30 minutes, It turns pain into a daily chore.
On the other hand, Imagine Situation 2: Every day through hellish quantum mechanics enough anti-matter appears in contact with your skin to cause a non fatal, but excruciating, matter-antimatter reaction explosion.
Now, at this point, the rationalist might realize something like “Okay, well, I’ll arrange things in such a way that any explosion will fit into one of two categories: It will be fatal, or it won’t actually cause me pain.”
And while the rationalist is attempting to build the arrangement that does this, A giant bear comes by and breaks it and painfully claws them into pieces (nonfatally).
Situation 3: Rationalists can be rationalist all they want, but they’ve been captured by the giant bears and had all of their limbs systematically clawed off, plus they’ve been blindfolded, gagged, earplugged, and are periodically used as claw sharpeners.
Of course, if some parts of hell are like situation 1, and some parts of hell are like situation 2, and some are like situation 3, I expect rationalists to attempt to figure out why that is, unless you want to have Situation 4:
Situation 4: There’s one constant rule of Hell: Every someone figures out all of the other rules of hell, those rules change.
Ergo: Once someone figures out “Oh, well, I can avoid the Lightning and the Earthquakes with pillow structures.” then the Giant Bears and Antimatter Skin Explosions come. Once you figure out how to get used to being used as a Giant Bear claw sharpener, something else happens, and that thing is even worse.
Basically, there is a range of darkness you can have here, in terms of writing. In terms of difficultly levels, this might be expressed as:
1: Hard.
2: Impossible.
3: You’re helpless.
4: Struggling can only make it worse.
I was writing a story about a character starting at rock bottom and working their way up, and I actually had the entity setting this up mention to the character that there had been previous versions of the character that just went irrevocably insane, and were deleted and reset because previous versions of ‘rock bottom’ had been set to low to ever get out.
Wouldn’t that count as learning a rule and cause the meta-level rules to change to something worse if you started using your knowledge to make it more tolerable?
In terms of little details, I think right away “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong” must be specified, because if you let rationalists try to think “How bad could it be at maximum badness?” it will get very bad, very quickly.
For instance Situation 1: Imagine every day you spend most of the time outside, you get struck by lightning, and every day you spend most of the time inside, there is an earthquake and whatever you are inside collapses on you.
I can see Rationalist attempting to make and spend most of their time in structures made mostly out of pillows: They collapse, oh well, they get rebuilt in 30 minutes, It turns pain into a daily chore.
On the other hand, Imagine Situation 2: Every day through hellish quantum mechanics enough anti-matter appears in contact with your skin to cause a non fatal, but excruciating, matter-antimatter reaction explosion.
Now, at this point, the rationalist might realize something like “Okay, well, I’ll arrange things in such a way that any explosion will fit into one of two categories: It will be fatal, or it won’t actually cause me pain.”
And while the rationalist is attempting to build the arrangement that does this, A giant bear comes by and breaks it and painfully claws them into pieces (nonfatally).
Situation 3: Rationalists can be rationalist all they want, but they’ve been captured by the giant bears and had all of their limbs systematically clawed off, plus they’ve been blindfolded, gagged, earplugged, and are periodically used as claw sharpeners.
Of course, if some parts of hell are like situation 1, and some parts of hell are like situation 2, and some are like situation 3, I expect rationalists to attempt to figure out why that is, unless you want to have Situation 4:
Situation 4: There’s one constant rule of Hell: Every someone figures out all of the other rules of hell, those rules change.
Ergo: Once someone figures out “Oh, well, I can avoid the Lightning and the Earthquakes with pillow structures.” then the Giant Bears and Antimatter Skin Explosions come. Once you figure out how to get used to being used as a Giant Bear claw sharpener, something else happens, and that thing is even worse.
Basically, there is a range of darkness you can have here, in terms of writing. In terms of difficultly levels, this might be expressed as:
1: Hard.
2: Impossible.
3: You’re helpless.
4: Struggling can only make it worse.
I was writing a story about a character starting at rock bottom and working their way up, and I actually had the entity setting this up mention to the character that there had been previous versions of the character that just went irrevocably insane, and were deleted and reset because previous versions of ‘rock bottom’ had been set to low to ever get out.
After learning the constant rule, you find a ruleset that doesn’t seem too awful, and then don’t learn it.
Hell is trying to abstain from pattern matching.
Reminds me of talesofmu. Your strategy looks like trying to play the GM, and is likely to get you punished :)
Wouldn’t that count as learning a rule and cause the meta-level rules to change to something worse if you started using your knowledge to make it more tolerable?
it might do. You’d have to check by writing it, of course.