Quote Originally Posted by Zaq View Post
Ways in which Dominic Deegan could be better, #1,802:

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Start with the premise of mindbreak. If a sufficiently powerful seer becomes too stressed and overwhelmed for an extended period of time, they suffer mindbreak, which I think we can effectively call a magical Chernobyl, or at least on par with a major earthquake. It's a disaster, and one far-reaching in its destruction. Fine. Let us declare that this is an actual concern, because Mookie isn't writing this, so it won't be immediately forgotten.

Obviously, it is in the best interest of those in power (and those around them) to prevent mindbreak at all costs, since it's bad, bad news. If a king, for example, has a royal seer (and why wouldn't he? In a universe where such people exist, NOT having one would be a major political and strategic weakness), it is in that king's best interest to make very sure that said seer doesn't experience the stress and trauma that eventually leads to mindbreak. We have to assume that mindbreak isn't extremely common, or else it would be happening left and right, but it has to be a nontrivial concern. Every seer knows that mindbreak is real, and while it might only happen to 1% of the seers out there (or even 0.1%), it's still a problem. So, the king wants to make sure that his powerful seers don't get too stressed out or too overwhelmed.

Unfortunately, these are seers. Royal seers. Their jobs aren't to just scry adorable children saying the darnedest things for His Highness's amusement. Their jobs are to foresee disasters. Wars, earthquakes and other natural disasters, villainy from eldritch horrors and unscrupulous sorcerers, epidemic diseases magical and natural, and so on. If a king asks his seer what the likely outcome of invading a nearby country would be, the seer isn't going to just see a history textbook saying "in this year, Country A invaded Country B, expanding their territory but making a political enemy in the process." The seer is going to see bloody battles and destruction, loss of innocent lives, and the unrest that follows, as well as the glorious and politically important parts. That's . . . not easy to deal with on a regular basis. Furthermore, seers often have visions of upcoming important (usually dangerous or at least threatening) events . . . think about the start of every DD arc ever. Even when not instructed to investigate things, seers who care about anything at all are subject to this sort of thing.

These things are stressful. Being a royal seer would be a very stressful job. Your job would be to see horrible things (bidden and unbidden), and then to deal with the political and bureaucratic situation necessary to do something about them. (Remember, Mookie isn't writing this, so royal seers aren't Dominic, and they won't automatically have an answer for everything just because.) If the seer isn't basically also the king (which they aren't in this situation), there's going to be at least a low-level Cassandra complex going on, in which you'd feel like nobody is taking your warnings seriously, and that both makes you look bad and puts your country in danger. You'd also be painfully aware of all the intrigue going on around you . . . all the assassination plots (character and bodily), all the smear campaigns, all the backroom deals, and so on. Being part of that game (you didn't get to be a royal seer for nothing, of course), you wouldn't be able to just expose it all without getting thrown under several buses, but you're aware that nobody really trusts you, because you probably have something on them. You might see their assassins coming, but they're still coming.

The point is, it's a stressful job. Endlessly stressful. There'd be constant background stress, and there'd be spikes of traumatic visions both bidden and unbidden. (Not every vision is going to be a major problem, of course, but enough of them are.) And you know that mindbreak is a real thing. And so does the king.

The king, not being a total idiot (Mookie's not writing), is going to want to insulate you, the royal seer, from any more stress than necessary. But of course, you're a seer. It's very hard to hide things from you. It's extremely hard to lie to you. Any steps taken to make you easier to hide things from are steps that make you less able to do your job and see, for example, the assassins plotting against the king. And if you report that a dragon is about to awaken and rampage through one of your kingdom's smaller cities, and the king assures you that he's sending troops to deal with that even though most of the army is tied up in the war with your neighbor, you're going to know if that doesn't happen. It might be intentional (you DO, presumably, care about the people of your country), it might be unintentional, but there's a good chance that you'll simply know that the king is telling you what you want to hear and not actually fixing problems. On some level, the king knows this too, but he might not always have a choice . . . but that makes it increasingly hard to shield you from mindbreak, which is basically game over, man. Game over!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is called tension. It takes a premise, extrapolates it out for a few logical steps, and causes it to give rise to a fertile breeding ground for conflict. Stories told against this backdrop have many ways of proceeding, and they always have ways of causing conflict and struggle. You might have enemy operatives engaging in the dangerous business of trying to intentionally induce mindbreak in the royal seers of their enemies. You might have a callous and greedy courtier who seeks to use the seer's stress levels as leverage to get what he wants. Whatever! But the point is, you'd have SOMETHING.

And that's a way that some premises laid forth in Dominic Deegan could be used in a better story.
I don't think, with the system as we know it, an intelligent government/monarch would limit themselves to only one royal seer. Like you said, the royal seer would be under a lot of stress. The best way to alleviate that stress would be to just not put them under that stress in the first place, instead putting it on someone else. Multiple seers allows you to split up the workload and the stress between them, but presents some risk in the form of having not just one seer who could 'go nova' at any given moment. There are two ways I could see this manifesting: putting all the seers in one place or keeping them scattered about.

Keeping the seers together means you have an easier time keeping them happy, keeping them 'sharp' (allowing them to teach one another) and keeping them working together towards the same goals. On the other hand, if any of them Mindbreak, you're going to lose a lot of them in the process and 'working together towards the same goals' doesn't always mean your goals; basing most of your political decisions on what they say gives them a lot of political power and, unless they like you a lot, they could just take over.

Keeping the seers spread out, on the other hand, keeps you in control of everything and cuts down on losses of seers. However, you'll have a harder time keeping them all happy (since you can't ship exotic luxury goods to every corner of the kingdom for them, only money), a harder time protecting them and a harder time making sure there's no corruption.

Personally, I'd lean towards the latter. Keeps me in power at the cost of maybe a few innocents if one of them goes berserk. Would need to have check ups on seers pretty regularly just to double check on them and how they're doing.