The Probable Chicken

An item for D&D and other TTRPGs.

Everyone has heard of Schrödinger’s Cat.

(If you haven’t: it sits in a box with a flask of poison, a radioactive source, and a Geiger counter. If radiation is detected (i.e. a single atom decays), the poison is released, killing the cat. Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, until someone looks into the box and resolves reality into one of the two possibilities.

Schrödinger came up with this to criticise the absurd conclusions of quantum mechanics, and it ended up as one of its founding thought experiments; he never intended to do this to a cat, but ended up with a reputation as a cat-hating monster. Simultaneously successful where he failed, and failing where he succeeded.)

I cannot abide cruelty to cats.

Enter the Probable Chicken. Cats eat chicken. It is one of many reasons why chickens are such nervous animals.

As with the cat, you place the chicken in a box with a means for killing it (while leaving the meat edible), dependent on whether or not a radioactive source decays.

This creates a state of uncertainty. Uncertainty leads to nervousness. As everyone who has been underprepared for an exam knows, nervous energy scales exponentially, and there are few beings more nervous than a chicken, even outside a box with a 50% chance of killing them.

Nervousness is, of course, a property of consciousness. A dead chicken cannot be nervous.

There are two circumstances. Either the atom decays, or it doesn’t. Either the chicken dies, or it doesn’t. We don’t know which until we open the box.

If the chicken is dead, then that nervous energy must dissipate somewhere, most likely as heat. You open the box and there is a flash-cooked chicken, feeding 2d6 people, healing all HP, clearing all negative conditions, and all is well.

If the chicken is alive, though, it has for a brief moment stood on the cusp of infinity, that nervous energy still rippling through it, considering anyone who has opened the box to be its most immediate predator. It has statistics as for a Tarrasque, with a d4 hit die, replacing the Bite attack with Beak, the Horns with Wings, and the Tail with Cloaca.

It remains in this terrified, terrifying state for a number of rounds determined by each player (including the GM) rolling 1d20. Even numbers add to the total, odd numbers subtract from it. It is possible that the chicken emerges in a state of nervous energy that immediately dissipates; it is also possible that the chicken has enough time to destroy the kingdom before returning, once again, to a normal, probable chicken.

As the merchant who sold you this box says: you can’t know until you try it.