The part about Watchdog that confused me was that I thought putting 3 precogs in the same room was a sure-fire way to make sure they're all wrong since their predictions are tainted by each other.
Like precog 1 predicts heads, then precog 2 messes up precog 1's prediction by also reporting heads, which gives 50/50 odds that it turns out tails simply because the two precogs couldn't account for each other correctly.
Also because thinkers seem to hate each other.
That could be fanon though. And honestly I should just be here for the ride, thinking about this stuff takes the fun out of it.
That's not really a big obstacle to Watchdog unless you assume Thinkers and info-Tinkers are basically all relying on precog. (Which, though precogs are depressingly common within Worm, they aren't
supposed to be The Most Common Form Of Thinker) And even then, in your example they wouldn't interfere -the precog mutual foiling is centered on the issue of precogs making decisions based on precog. Two or twenty or two hundred precogs all asked to predict a coin flip from a non-parahuman would all give the same answer.
It's when you're dealing with a precog con artist selecting the coin face based on what you're going to say interacting with another precog whose answer is based on what the coin flip will be that their powers wig out and they're just two regular people using regular human decision-making.
The peterborough chronicle is the first recorded mention of the wild hunt in England.
The Knights of the Round allegedly drove the hunt temporarily out of england.
Dando's Dogs (The Dogs of Dando) allegedly followed the hunt seeking to retrieve the soul of their master, stolen by the hunt.
I was thinking in terms of something a bit less poetic, but then I regularly gawk at how Actual Government Programs actually
do get names running off this kind of logic.
So I might go with riffing on the Peterborough Chronicle? Not sure.
The 'fix' of Watchdog is easy:
There's no need to fix it, or headcanon "only the bad thinkers get sent there actually".
They're overworked and stretched thin like the entire rest of the world, and where in their starting days they had enough of a narrow scope to be reliable and precise, as the PRT and they grew alongside it, the problems unfortunately grew faster.
Assuming The Wild Hunt continues on its good intentions (if not necessarily good results), the precognitive parts of the thinktank perceive if not necessarily register that, and so focus on more outright malicious dangers, the rest of the analytical thinkers follow suit, and the end result is, even though from on high they get the order "look into X", only a few people are free to do so, (to say nothing of potential Accord-lites who are convinced their thing is the more important bit and so focus on that (but probably without embezzling the funds of the organisation)).
So even though in theory the think tank is a wide pool of different thinkers intended to, through that breadth of perspectives, bring more accurate information, in practice it only happens when shit's actually going to be hitting the fan. At which point, the people who need to hear it might not get the message in time.
I.... don't think I've managed to really get across the main reason I consider Watchdog a giant worldbuilding/storytelling headache.
So let's talk about the real world for a second!
When I was a child, DNA testing was New And Exciting technology in the field of criminal investigation, with people enthusiastically (and extremely naively) positing that it would End Crime Forever because of course you would always be caught perfectly. (The less delusional folks restricted their End Crime Forever predictions to 'end
specific types of crime forever', such as rape. Still hilariously optimistic, but 5-year-old-me didn't actively wonder if these people would score negative on an IQ test) Now, even aside from the realities that DNA testing was slow, expensive, and not actually perfectly reliable, the
relevant thing I'm getting at is that folks like professional assassins figured out the rules and worked out how to minimize the presence of incriminating DNA at crime sites.
This happens with every forensics technique. You invent fingerprinting, and people start wearing gloves when committing crimes. You figure out scent tracking with trained dogs, and people figure out they can do things like go through a river to make it way harder to pick up the trail again. It's an eternal arms race that will almost certainly continue so long as something recognizably like human civilization exists.
Okay, so why am I bringing this up in relation to Watchdog?
Because every single cape in Watchdog is effectively a new forensics technique for aspiring criminals to keep track of. However many dozens or
hundreds of these folks there might be.
Even if I generously assume that evidence derived solely from a power is not admissible in court so The Guy Who Actually Is A Perfectly Reliable Lie Detector can't get a judge to jail you by just interrogating you and pinning you to the wall with probing questions, that's not going to stop the criminal justice system from using this stuff as an extra helping hand for getting an investigation to evidence that
is court-admissible.
That's all maybe a bit abstract, so let me give a concrete example using a canon Watchdog cape and a slightly-tweaked version of Monster's events.
Let's imagine that when Cherie and Taylor burst into the Dragonslayers' lair and murdered them all and took their stuff, that last bit didn't happen. They just killed everyone and left. Furthermore, in this alternate timeline, Cherie and Taylor are mustache-twirling villains (Cherie: "I call the Evil Goatee!") who were being maximally scrupulous in their act of multiple homicide, going to enormous pains to counteract every forensics technique they know about. They left no fingerprints, they scrubbed away any traces of their own DNA, they made sure to obscure that the deaths were caused by murdertentacles, either killing the Dragonslayers more 'generically' (Knives, guns, whatever) or using murdertentacles but then adding further damage to make it look like it wasn't murdertentacles. We'll also say they did this about as perfectly as one could possibly do, so regular police, when they were called in by somebody finding the bodies six months later, have
literally zero leads.
With zero leads, the cops leave it as a Mystery Case in their files, right?
No, they pass this on to the PRT. Watchdog is called in. For the purposes of this exercise, Kenzie of Ward happens to get assigned to this case: she shows up, she sets down her stupid canonical camera box for peering into the past and displaying in full 3D whatever happened in the area at whatever date she cares to name, and she scrolls that dial back until finally it's showing something of relevance: Taylor and Cherie's full act is displayed and recorded, photos of their faces are taken, and the PRT starts scrutinizing these two teens who have zero reason (beyond general paranoia) to think that the PRT could possibly trace these murders to them. Kenzie now sets up camera boxes in Brockton Bay at 'hotspots' for activity from this pair: she monitors them for months, figures out their MO or just listens in directly to their private conversations about what to do next, and eventually an op is set up to Catch Them In The Act: you might think Cherie's power would forewarn the Evil Mustache Pair, but nah, Kenzie has remotely monitored her and figured out how her power works and either Tinkers Are Bullshit comes into play (Kenzie makes a camera box that hides the emotional signatures of people or some such) or other capes are tapped who can neuter this hazard. (eg a teleporter hanging out with the ambush team outside Cherie's range, going on Kenzie's signal, who is watching Cherie from out of range using her camera boxes)
Evil Mustache Cherie And Taylor are caught red-handed, possibly having had no idea Kenzie
existed, and off to jail with them!
And I'd have to invent and keep in mind dozens to hundreds of such esoteric, non-obvious forensics powers when trying to figure out how the PRT would be likely to Realistically respond to... anything Watchdog would be likely to be called in on. (And possibly plenty of things they wouldn't be called in on, depending on power mechanics. Think of how PtV lets Contessa account for Imp without having to actually know her power exists and all, as a comparison point)
And if I wanted the result to be intuitively sensible to readers, I'd furthermore have to constantly do Interludes with these guys that lay out their powers and duties and whatnot.
Watchdog honestly has a lot of interesting potential as a
perspective. A Procedural Mystery story (or series of short stories) taking a look at how parahuman powers open up all kinds of options for the criminal justice system, upend assumptions about what can give away criminals, etc... that could be really fascinating!
But for a story like The Wild Hunt, Watchdog is
just defined enough to imply the above stuff must be happening all the time, but not defined enough to actually readily figure out what the
specific implications of Watchdog's existence would be. Which is awful and miserable to try to engage with.
Isn't literally everyone she's killed a villain? I'm not sure where you'd get that connotation. Now have some of those murders put heroes in danger, sure, but that's just reckless shortsidedness, as one might expect of a teen.
I'm talking about stuff like 'seen stalking Arcadia' and 'her partner-in-crime terrorized a Ward in their civilian ID'. Stuff that
really doesn't resemble 'I exclusively target Villains'.
'Who all actually died' is not the only metric people use to guess intentions.
