Notes on my performance:
. . . huh! I was really expecting to either take first place for being the only player putting serious effort into the right core mechanics, or take last place for being the only player putting serious effort into the wrong core mechanics; getting the main idea wrong but doing everything else well enough for silver was not on my bingo card. (I'm also pleasantly surprised to note that I figured out which goblin I could purge with least collateral damage: I can leave Room 7 empty without changing my position on the leaderboard.)
There were only three likely hypotheses based on the problem statement: A) adventurers scout one room ahead, B) adventurers take optimal path(s), and C) adventurers hit every room so all that matters is the order. Early efforts ruled out C, and the Bonus Objective being fully achievable under A but not B made A a lot more plausible; however, further investigations[1] made it seem like that might be a fakeout[2], so I (narrowly) chose to max-min instead of max-max; even in retrospect, I'm not 100% sure that was a bad decision.
Notes on the scenario:
I have strongly ambivalent feelings about almost every facet of this game.
The central concept was solid gold but could have been handled better. In particular, I think puzzling out the premise could have been a lot more fun if we hadn't known the entry and exit squares going in.
The writing was as fun and funny as usual - if not more so! - but seemed less . . . pointed?/ambitious?/thematically-coherent? than I've come to expect.
The difficulty curve was perfect early but annoying late. A lot of our scenarios commit the minor sin of making initial headway hard to make, discouraging casual players and giving negligible or negative reward for initial investigations; this one emphatically doesn't, since pairing high-traffic rooms with high-challenge creatures was an easy(-ish) way to get better-than-random EV. However, the central mechanics of "dungeoneers scout one room ahead" and "loud fights alert" interfered in ways that made it hard to pin either of them down: more rows and columns might have made this smoother (imo a 4x4 or 5x5 dungeon would probably have been easier than the 3x3, especially for reliably distinguishing between hypotheses A and B), as would having more simple and easily-discoverable rules to use as a firm foundation ("When given a choice, Adventurers will always choose rooms with Sirens, and never choose rooms with Tar Pits"?).
The timespan was a very good choice for the season (and I'm absolutely doing things this way next time I run an end-of-year game) but paired badly with the premise. Your last Christmas scenario was, in retrospect, a really good match, because (possible spoiler for any reader who might want to play it)
it was puzzle-y and un-random enough that a player could be 100% confident their inferences were correct, so it wouldn't occupy mental real estate once they put it down, and they wouldn't mind waiting for their answers to be confirmed
but this one was kind of the opposite.
There was one aspect about which I have unreservedly positive feelings: the chrono effects, the hag poem and the varying numbers of adventurers were all excellent red herrings, seeming like they might hint towards subtle opportunities for performance improvement (and/or a secret Bonus Bonus Objective) but being quickly dismissable as fingertraps. (Yay verisimilitude!)
In summary, I think I'd put this one at about a 3/3 for Quality and Complexity . . . though I suspect others might have radically different opinions depending on how all the above happened to hit for them.
- ^
I found a row where Adventurers were clearly choosing an easy path starting with Orcs over a hard path starting with Boulders, and took this to mean "adventurers take perfect paths under at least some circumstances" instead of "there's some predictable condition for which Orcs<Boulders". Whoops!
- ^
"You tried to play the GM instead of the game? Doom! Doom for you!" <- what I thought you might be thinking
1I think puzzling out the premise could have been a lot more fun if we hadn't known the entry and exit squares going in
I think this would have messed up the difficulty curve a bit: telling players 'here is the entrance and exit' is part of what lets 'stick a tough encounter at the entrance/exit' be a simple strategy.
The writing was as fun and funny as usual - if not more so! - but seemed less . . . pointed?/ambitious?/thematically-coherent? than I've come to expect.
This is absolutely true though I'm surprised it's obvious: my originally-planned scenario didn't quite work out as intended (I'm still trying to assemble mechanics for it that actually work the way I want them to) and this was my backup scenario.
imo a 4x4 or 5x5 dungeon would probably have been easier than the 3x3, especially for reliably distinguishing between hypotheses A and B
Interesting. I trimmed it down to 3x3 as part of Plan 'Try Not To Make Everything Too Overcomplicated', trying to use the smallest dungeon that would still make pathing relevant in order to avoid dropping 16 separate encounters on players.
There was one aspect about which I have unreservedly positive feelings: the chrono effects, the hag poem and the varying numbers of adventurers were all excellent red herrings, seeming like they might hint towards subtle opportunities for performance improvement (and/or a secret Bonus Bonus Objective) but being quickly dismissable as fingertraps.
This...is not really quite how those were intended. The intent was something more along the lines of 'Easter Eggs'.
Wow, I think got more lucky there than I really deserved to.
This was really interesting, I could see that there must be something complicated going on, but I never got close to guessing the actual system. Encounters alerting other encounters is both simple and feels intuitively right once you see it.
After stealing most of my ideas from abstractapplic (thanks) I spent most time trying to figure out which order to put the C-W-B-H. I found that having the toughest encounters later worked best, which must be an effect that is actually caused by the random players putting their strongest encounter in room 9, so a strong encounter in room 6 or 8 will help alert this final encounter. So even though it is not built in, the other builders preference for putting dragons in room 9 makes strong encounter more valuable for the later rooms. Luckily this caused me to switch from C-B-W-H-D to C-W-B-H-D, so the Boulder trap alerted the Hag, giving me the final 3 points.
I guess this says something about emergent effects can still be valuable(ish) even when you haven't grokked the entire system...
Anyway, thanks a lot for an enjoyable challenge.
1I feel like a big part of what tripped me up here was an inevitable part of the difficulty of the scenario that in retrospect should have been obvious. Specifically, if there is any variation in difficulty of an encounter that is known to the adventurers in advance, the score contribution of an encounter type in actual paths taken is less than the difficulty of the encounter as estimated by what best predicts the path taken (because the adventurer takes the path when it's weak, but avoids when it's strong).
So, I wound up with an epicycle saying hags and orcs were avoided more than their actual scores warranted, because that effect was most significant for them (goblins are chosen over most other encounters even if alerted, and Dragons mostly aren't alerted).
This effect was made much worse by the fact that I was getting scores mainly from lower difficulty dungeons, with lots of "Nothing" rooms and low level encounters. But even once I estimated scores from the overall data with my best guesses for preference order, the issue still applied, just not quite so badly.
In the "what if" department, I had said:
> I'm also getting remarkably higher numbers for Hag compared with my earlier method. But I don't immediately see a way to profitably exploit this.
The most obvious way to exploit this would have been the optimal solution. Why didn't I do it? The answer is that, as indicated above, I was still underestimating the hag (whereas at this point I had mostly-accurate scores for the traps and orcs). With my underestimate for the hag's score contribution, I didn't think it was worth giving up an orc-boulder trap difference to get a hag-orc difference. I also didn't realize I needed the hag to alert the dragon.
In general, I feel like I was pretty far along with discovering the mechanics despite some missteps. I correctly had the adventurers taking a 5-encounter path with right/down steps, the choice of next step being based on the encounters in the choices for the next room, with an alerting mechanism, and that the alerting mechanism didn't apply to traps and golems.
On the other hand, I applied the alerting mechanism only to score and not to preference order, except for goblins and orcs (why didn't I try to apply it to preference order for other encounters once I realized it applied to preference order for goblins and orcs and that some degree of alerting mechanism score effect applied to other encounters ?????) (I also got confused into thinking that the effect on orc preference order only applied if the current encounter was also orcs). I also didn't realize that the alerting mechanism had different sensitivity for different encounters, and I had my mistaken belief about the preference order being different from expected score for some encounter types (hey, the text played up how unnerving the hag was, there was some plausibility there!).
I think if I had gotten to where I was in my last edit early on in the time frame for this scenario instead of near the end, and had posted it, and other people had read it and tried it out, collectively we would have had a good chance of solving the whole thing. I also would have been much more likely to get the optimal solution if I had paid more attention to what abstractapplic said, instead of only very briefly glancing over his comments after posting my very belated comment and going back to doing my own thing.
In my view, a fun, challenging and theoretically solvable scenario (even if actually not that close to being solved in practice), so I think it was quite good.
This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.
There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores.
RULESET
Encounters
The following encounters existed:
Each encounter had a Threat that determined how dangerous it was to adventurers. When adventurers encountered that, they would roll [Threat]d2 to determine how challenging they found it.
However, many encounters had two different Threat levels, depending on whether they were alerted to the adventurers or not. (A dragon that's woken up from its slumber, or a hag who's had time to prepare her nastiest spells, or orcs who have gotten their armor on, are much more dangerous than the same encounters when surprised by the adventurers).
Traps and Golems do not rest and cannot be surprised, but Goblins/Orcs/Hag/Dragon encounters could be drastically more/less threatening.
Encounters were alerted by the adventurers having sufficiently loud and dramatic fights in an adjacent room. If a Dragon heard the adventurers fighting a Golem in an adjacent room, it would wake up - if it heard them fighting Goblins in an adjacent room, it would just ignore the Goblin noises, roll over and go back to sleep.
Pathing
Adventurers always took as short a route as possible to the goal:
So they would enter in Room 1, then go to either Room 2/4, then room 3/5/7 (choosing from the two rooms adjacent to their previous choice) and so on.
At each step, an adventuring party scouts the adjacent rooms (using their sneaky Rogue/their invisible Wizard/their powerful Divination magic) and chooses the less threatening one (accounting for alertness, e.g. an alerted Dragon is more threatening than a Steel Golem but an unalerted Dragon is less threatening). If two encounters are equally threatening (e.g both paths have Goblins, or one has alerted Orcs while the other has a sleeping Dragon), they will choose at random.
Score
Depending on how well each fight went, it might do more or less damage: a fight with Threat X rolls Xd2 and adds that much to the dungeon's difficulty score.
Each adventuring team sums the difficulties of all encounters they faced to determine the overall score they give.
The tournament score is the average score given of all adventuring teams that entered your dungeon: in your case there are 4 such teams, so if your dungeon has e.g. a total Threat of 15 you will roll 15d2 4 times and average the results.
STRATEGY
The important things were:
To accomplish this, you lay your dungeon out like this (or the mirror version):
This layout does not rely on the Goblins at all: since the adventurers will never approach the rooms in the bottom left, it does not matter whether they contain Goblins or not. As such, if you were confident in this layout, it would not cost you any points to accomplish the Bonus Objective and leave out the Goblins.
LEADERBOARD
Christian Z R
(without Goblins)
CWB
OOH
XXD
C->W->B->H->D
(4->2->3->6->8)
CWB
OOH
XXD
C->W->B->H->D
(4->2->3->6->8)
abstractapplic
(with Goblins)
BOG
OWH
GCD
B->O->G/W->H/C->D
(3->4->2->3/4->8)
Yonge
(with Goblins)
COG
GOB
WHD
C->G->W->H->D
(4->2->2->3->8)
simon
(without Goblins)
CHX
OBX
WOD
C->O->W->O->D
(4->4->2->4->4)
Yonge
(without Goblins)
COX
WOB
XHD
C->W->X->H->D
(4->2->0->3->8)
Random Play
(with Goblins)
kave
(without Goblins)
DBX
OWH
XOC
D->B->X->H->C
(4->3->0->3->4)
Random Play
(without Goblins)
Congratulations to all players, particularly to Christian Z R, who managed to get a perfectly optimal score. (Condolences to abstractapplic, whose original answer was in fact also the optimal one but who later reconsidered away from it).
DATASET GENERATION
The dataset reflected a series of tournaments - each tournament had 4-8 contestants, and 3-4 judges[3] (whose scores were averaged together for each contestant).
There were two kinds of contestant:
None of this was directly important to solving the problem, except insofar as it created a variety of dungeons with different skews in encounters (e.g. dungeons with very large numbers of Goblins/Traps but not much else, or scary dungeons with multiple Dragons/Golems, were more common than would arise from pure randomness). Some players noticed a jump in average scores in the middle of the dataset (due to the Golemancer and Dragon Princess getting new powerful encounters added around the same time).
FEEDBACK REQUEST
As usual, I'm interested to hear any feedback on what people thought of this scenario. If you played it, what did you like and what did you not like? If you might have played it but decided not to, what drove you away? What would you like to see more of/less of in future? Do you think the scenario was more complicated than you would have liked? Or too simple to have anything interesting/realistic to uncover? Or both at once? Did you like/dislike the story/fluff/theme parts? What complexity/quality scores should I give this scenario in the index?
Average score will be on average 1.5 times this, with a small amount of randomness.
Adventurers in this dungeon will encounter the Clay Golem 1/4 of the time, and the Hag 3/4 of the time: ones who go through the Whirling Blade Trap room in the middle will choose to face the Hag instead, and so the only ones to face the Clay Golem will be those who choose first to fight the Orcs in Room 2 rather than the Orcs in Room 4, and then choose to continue to the Goblins in Room 3 rather than the (equally threatening) Whirling Blade Trap in Room 5.
There were supposed to be 2-5 judges, with the number increasing gradually as the tournament got more popular: due to a bug at lines 300-303 of the generation code, though, we left out 2 and 5 regardless of round number and just had either 3 or 4 each round.