Paladin scenario unrelated to alignment!

[Rhuadin]

If you were expecting a discussion of good versus evil, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

With that out of the way:

You're a paladin. You worship the goddess of the harvest. As a symbol of your devotion, you have been bestowed an artifact; it is a cornucopia from which you may summon a bounty. You have been sent to alleviate hunger.

Now this horn of plenty is special. You may expend one charge to magically satiate a target for 24 hours. This effect requires no line of sight -- so you can feed anyone anywhere. Each day, for every 10 charges that remain (rounded down), it gains an additional charge. Thus if you have 40 charges, in the morning you will have 44. If you ever fall below 10, you will never gain another charge. There is no upper limit of charges. You always know how many charges are remaining in your artifact. This artifact grants you knowledge and location of all individuals who are dangerously malnourished. It starts with 50 charges.

How would you use this gift? Could you justify feeding someone if you were down to 10 charges, knowing that food would not regenerate from that point on? On the other hand, could you justify accumulating so many charges that you could feed everyone in the world every day from the new charges, knowing that until you reach that point people are dying of starvation?

Your goddess is very hands off and provides no guidance. She is also forgiving and will not cause you to fall regardless of what you do. (Aha, so this Paladin scenario also doesn't involve falling ;) )

Bonus scenarios:
What if both the artifact's satiation power and hunger detection power only have a range of the village you're currently in? The kingdom you're currently in?

What if, instead of directly satiating someone, it creates actual food in front of them with an equivalent caloric/nutritional value?

[slaydemons]

I would use say the 44 charges I would use three because then I am still feeding people and I am gaining more charges until I got 55 charges then I start with 4 per day you get where I am going with this right

[Xuincherguixe]

Emptying one charge on a person isn't going to alleviate much hunger.

You my friend need to educate the people on matters of crop rotation and how to effectively hedge risk with proper use of corn futures...

Err. Wait... scratch the second one.


Buy meals for the hungriest of the hungry. At some point you probably are going to work on the economy though.

[Amnestic]

Scenario 1) Use minimal charges per day such that they steadily increase still while still satiating others. Eventually I'll have enough to feed the world, but before that I can rest easy knowing I'm helping some people along the way. It's arguable that those lost charges used along the way would delay that eventuality, true, but overall I think my best path would be to feed as many as I can while still progressing to the end goal.

2) No difference, except I'll reach the desired charges "target" sooner, and it means my Paladin mount is going to be getting a lot more exercise.

3) No difference again. Sucks that they have to spend time eating it, but thems the breaks.

[ffone]

Save all the charges until you have as many as you would use per day even if it were unlimited. Need / wealth / the-alleviation-of-suffering has Present Value but I imagine its discount rate is much shallower than 10% per day.

With the right social connections the paladin can probably prevent the starvation of those who would've been saved by the 'early' uses of the ring, by telling rich people that he'll repay them at high interest if they feed the poor today. He can then use his awesome ring to generate that wealth: charge some of those who can afford it for the satiation, charging maybe 1/2 of what their actual food would cost; as time goes on food prices will plummet from the ring usage itself, but he can still make lots of money.

[Ravens_cry]

Feed those who are without by the basic plan implemented by Slaydemons, and engage in a Teach Them How to Fish program through crop rotation, pest control, irrigation, fertilization with compost and manures, and better storage and preservation, creating enough food for all while having the horn as backup in case of famine.

[TheCoelacanth]

Don't use any charges until after building up enough to feed everyone in the world forever without depleting it. Thanks to the exponential growth this should only take about 9 months.

[Vonotar]

Steadily build up charges until I can feed everyone everywhere. Kill everyone so that I reach my goal faster.

[Razgriez]

As being a Deity related to Harvest, and crops. I'm pretty sure Patience is a major virtue for followers of the goddess in question. If that means, that they have to wait a day or two to make sure they aren't the last people to receive the Artifacts blessings, then that's something they'll have to live with.

Harvest don't always go the way you want, even in today's age of technology and machinery. And that means sometimes having to make due with limited bounty of crops if the weather was bad, or pest or disease that destroys crops have spread across the land.

If that means you have to stretch out your Artifacts power reserves to make sure others also gain it's benefits, then they will have to live with that.

Who knows, maybe another year, after another bad harvest, the same family may need it's powers again.

Don't forget, as a Paladin, while charity is a major aspect of your character, a good point of Charity, is also helping to teach those in needs to also become self-sufficient. You don't need to do all the work. No deity of good, is going to require a holy knight of their faith to know many different crafts or professions. But getting the party's ranger to provide some hunting and tracking tips for catching game to help supplement those crops, is useful.

Basically, it's following the old heritage, give someone some food or money, they'll be ok for a day. Teach them how to make money, or make/grow/hunt/catch those foods, and they'll be good for life.

[LibraryOgre]

While the "build forever" scenarios are great, I've got an odder consideration:

When did you get this artifact? If you got it in spring, I would DEFINITELY follow the "let it build until it can be used indiscriminately" rule. I'd spend the spring, summer and fall, however, teaching everyone about things they can eat now. Charges would be expended only to meet an immediate, drastic need that cannot be met by normal feeding or, perhaps, cagily... if there were someone who wished to experience this artifact, without actual need, I might charge them a large amount for the experience... and invest the money back into feeding the hungry.

Once winter came, I'd use the device more freely, as food is harder to find, and hunger more deadly.

[Callista]

Yeah, the potential to help later if you wait is infinite; the potential to help now is limited. It's like the marshmallow experiment. And what's more rewarding to a paladin than feeding hungry people? But if we're talking about your basic Lawful paladin, he'll wait. They're not generally impulsive like that.

I don't think the season matters because, long-term, there's always next winter to worry about.

[LibraryOgre]

I don't think the season matters because, long-term, there's always next winter to worry about.

The season matters because, if it's spring, there's food now. In abundance. There's animals coming out of hibernation. There's spring succulents, early crops and young fruits. Using the magic now, except in extreme circumstances, is somewhat wasted.

If you start in winter, however, you have a more acute need of food. It's harder to get, more in need (since keeping oneself warm burns calories) and going outside is a more dangerous proposition. In that case, I'd be inclined to "feed" a few people each day, and have them search for more mundane sources of food, rather than spend large amounts of magic.

As others have pointed out, not using the cornucopia for a while will eventually fill it to a point where it can be used more or less indiscriminately. 40->44->48->52->57->62->68->74... in a week, you go from 40 to 74 charges if you don't use it. Another week? 139. One more? 267. (Even more, since I started from 40, instead of the 50 specified) If you wait out a good chunk of the year (the 9 months above), you'll be able to feed large amounts of people, all the time. Patience will lead to greater rewards for everyone.

[Jothki]

It's pretty much your basic cook your seeds/plant your seeds deal.

[Elric VIII]

What if you got a Cleric of your diety to Plane Shift you somewhere that time flows very rapidly and you allowed the charges to accumulate there. That would minimize everyone's suffering. Just find a Planar Shepherd handbook to find the best plane for this.

[Runestar]

Hmm...1.1 to the power of 365 (1 year) would give 1.3 x 10^16!

This would allow you to feed 1,000,000,000,000,000 people every day! (maybe a bit less, because I didn't factor in the rounding down part). How many people are there in your world? So after a year, you would basically have solved the world's famine issues?

[Rhuadin]

Yep, after one year you could feed one quadrillion people. So being able to wait a year will solve all of the world's hunger problems.

And Razgriez makes a very good point about a goddess of fertility being patient, since part of her domain is about crops growing. Callista makes as good point that lawful paladins are good at planning.

I'm sorry I didn't specify a time of year, because I feel like it does matter since it only takes about 9 months of waiting to feed the world (let's say that the population of the world is equivalent to the real world). So, the artifact magically appears in your possession on December 1st. Although I suppose that means for the other half of the world, summer is just beginning :)

I really like Elric's answer. I'm glad there's someone to remind me that there's always an answer outside of the box.

I kind of want to make the scenario a bit less easy to wait through now.

Bonus Scenario 3:
Let's say that the artifact starts off with 10000 charges. The 'interest rate' is 1.5% and the horn only recharges once every Monday. If I did the math correctly, it should take around 15 years to amass 1 billion charges. For those of you whom are waiting without expending any charges, is it still worth the wait?

[WarKitty]

Oddball thought:

In the first scenario, I'd go find all the people with mouth/throat/digestive issues that would ordinarily be fatal due to inability to eat, and feed them with the artifact.

[Ravens_cry]

Using it to feed everyone ever may not be the best idea. One, you just destroyed the entire food economy. Sure, they are fed, but now these people don't have jobs. Even medieval farmers needed occasional outside resources. Two, artefacts can be destroyed and certainly stolen. Are you, as a single person, able to handle that responsibility? You are a Paladin, not a god. Imagine if after say, 20 years of feeding everyone everywhere with this Artefact and it gets stolen. Some clever thief or a TPK while on some other quest, or raid by forces of evil on your headquarters. The entire food production infrastructure is by now kaput. At most you have the farm equivalent of micro-breweries for the gourmet, not nearly enough feed the world.
Personally, I would use it in times of famine and shortage and to help those without, but using it to feed everyone everywhere is too darn risky in my opinion.

[Gnoman]

How much time does it take to expend a charge? How much knowledge of the target? There's a big difference between "I want to feed all the starving children of the world" and "I want to feed little Susie Cobbler, becuase her father's to sick to make shoes. I want to feed Billy beggar because his father's too healthy to beg. I want to feed..."

[TurtleKing]

Ravens_Cry has only hinted at the negative consequences this artifact can cause. If you do wait in either scenario till you can feed everyone on the planet each day you would have taken away one of the main population control methods that exists. *puts on Flak Vest* If you look at the Real World you will notice that the planet can only sustain so many people. Famine, Disease, and War are some the big population control methods that exist. Famine is one of the reasons that nations go to war. So you also reduce that population control method for a time. Without Famine the global population will increase. With a greater population comes a greater urbanization. Greater urbanization in turn results in less land being used for harvesting. So in time the world becomes one big city. The forests are gone as well the creatures that inhabit them. The oceans are also dead for the same reason. The toxic waste produced will be high unless technology has been invented to recycle it all. That brings up the point of few new products being made from all the rest being used in the process to this point. With everyone now living in one big city spanning the entire world the diseases become even more pandemic from the overcrowding. The reason todays diseases are becoming more pandemic today because of being able to affect more people. War as not been gotten rid of either has people now try to acquire a larger place for themselves among the shrinking land that is left. War now looks like giant "gangs" vying for supremacy.

Even if you manage to take some of the population to another planet then you incure a few scenarios. The first one is whether the artifact's power extends to the new world as well. If it does then the same will happen their as well. If not then that world is back to the way things used to be.

So frankly that artifact can cause more harm than good on the grand scale when you look at the big picture.

Edit: Just thought of a few things. If the satiating of the populace was magical where they didn't have to eat it then what happens to the digestive organs? The digestive organs start at the mouth and go all the way down to the rectum. If the process works in that way will mouth become no longer necessary? The mouth which includes the teeth and tongue among others is also used for speech. The point here is the digestive organs have many uses other than just digesting food. If any are wondering about the source of my knowledge I used to be a Medical Lab Technician. In that profession I was taught about the bodies chemistry consisting of the digestive systems and blood. I was also taught about the diseases from bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. So I do have some knowledge in regards to the biological workings of the human body.

[akragster]

Use the artifact to summon food, then sell the food at major discount price. Use the money you got from selling the food to buy food for the poor. This way, middle and upper class get cheaper food, and lower class get free food.

[begooler]

Seek out experts in sociology, logistics, economics and ethics and have them advise on the most effective way to use the item to help the most people.
The paladin can then feel confident that his decision was the best one he could make.
Even if the solution that the 'experts' helped him come up with turned out to not be ideal, the paladin still knows that he took all the information he could into account to arrive at the best decision possible- as far as he knew, at least.

[Mewtarthio]

I can't believe nobody's pointed out the obvious downside:

You worship the Goddess of the Harvest. How happy is she going to be when you make her portfolio obsolete?

[TurtleKing]

@Mewtarthio: I actually hinted at that with less land being used for harvesting. Begooler's plan is the best course of action. My earlier post was not a 'do not use', but a 'this is what can happen'.

Rhuadin happened to mention in his OP 'dangerously malnourished'. What if the artifact only works on the malnourished? To be malnourished is to most likely of not eaten for days. Most people would avoid that situation unless they are forced to. If that is the case then the impact on the world would be significantly less. The most use the artifact would get is part of disaster relief or aiding an area suffering from famine.

[Callista]

That's true; you would actually have to know where the person was in order to feed them. So you would be able to barely keep people alive, but no more than that. Most likely the effect would be that nobody would actually die of hunger--but you can become pretty uncomfortable before that happens.

[Kris Strife]

That's true; you would actually have to know where the person was in order to feed them. So you would be able to barely keep people alive, but no more than that. Most likely the effect would be that nobody would actually die of hunger--but you can become pretty uncomfortable before that happens.

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[stainboy]

A spell trigger item can be used once per round, so it can feed 14,400 people per day if the line moves fast. I'll wait however long it takes to generate that many charges per day, and devote that time to building the most impregnable fortress-city in the world, with the cornucopia at the center.

I'll need other people to guard and operate my fortress city, so now I need an uncorruptable totalitarian theocracy.

...

...

Ah, screw it, sell the cornucopia and start my career as a blackguard. (Item price is a function of current charges, right?)

[Zaranthan]

My paladin is going to wait the 15 years for the charges to go all exponential. In the meantime, I'll wander the world searching for large concentrations of hungry individuals (indicating a famine region that requires the aid of a powerful agent of the goddess of the harvest).

The detection only reveals those who are "dangerously malnourished," so the food industry isn't going anywhere. Nobody's dying of hunger, but neither does anyone want to go around nearly starving to death every day, hoping that the unseen force that sustains them just above the brink of starvation doesn't falter. This is one of the few infinite production hypotheticals that's actually limited enough to prevent the economic collapse ending that everyone on the internet is so fond of.

[Shadowleaf]

My paladin is going to wait the 15 years for the charges to go all exponential. In the meantime, I'll wander the world searching for large concentrations of hungry individuals (indicating a famine region that requires the aid of a powerful agent of the goddess of the harvest).

The detection only reveals those who are "dangerously malnourished," so the food industry isn't going anywhere. Nobody's dying of hunger, but neither does anyone want to go around nearly starving to death every day, hoping that the unseen force that sustains them just above the brink of starvation doesn't falter. This is one of the few infinite production hypotheticals that's actually limited enough to prevent the economic collapse ending that everyone on the internet is so fond of.

After one year, it can provide for one quadrillion people. After 15 years.. That's 4.21649162 × 10^226.

[Amphetryon]

December 1st: Is that in the Northern Hemisphere, where winter is closing in at that time, or the Southern Hemisphere, where it's nearly summer?