STORY (skippable)
Across the world adventurers dive into tombs, mausoleums, and sunken cities in search of treasure. They clear out orcish keeps, goblin camps and dragon lairs to keep the people safe. And they meet with lords who wish to hire them to retrieve a certain item from its lost location.
You are one such lord, the rightful heir of the Kingdom of Calantha. Ever since your family was cruelly cast down from the throne, you have been forced to eke out a miserable existence, with but a few thousand acres of land to call your own, and a couple shabby mansions to live in. But no more! Today your work has born fruit, and you have found out at last where the shards of the Crown of Command were buried when your lineage was deposed.
(It was so unreasonable to object to your family's rulership! Your great-grandfather was the most popular king Calantha has ever had, with 100% approval rating among the populace! Yes, okay, this might have something to do with the Crown's kingdom-wide mind-affecting properties, but it still seems unreasonable for a band of plucky heroes to storm his palace, kill him, break his crown into three pieces, and cast his family into exile).
But now you know where the three pieces were hidden, and you will see your Crown reforged! Then you will reclaim your throne and rule as a wise and just king! (Starting, of course, by wisely hunting down and justly executing every descendent of anyone who was involved with the coup against your great-grandfather).
The three pieces were hidden in dungeons across the land: one in the Lost Temple of Lemarchand, one in the Infernal Den of Cheliax, and one in the Goblin Warrens of Khaz-Gorond. You've been able to find out something about what's defending each of these dungeons, via a mixture of divinations and sending in the last of your dutiful family retainers to scout them out. (Their loyalty and sacrifice will be remembered. Not by you personally, though. You have people for that.) Now all that remains is to hire three teams of foolish adventurers, tell each one you have lost a 'prized family heirloom' in a nearby dungeon, and offer to pay them to retrieve it! Simplicity itself!
Unfortunately, money is...a bit tight. And those greedy adventurers refuse to do anything unless you pay for a 'full party' of 4 of them to enter each dungeon! Not only that, if things start to look bad they'll run away rather than pressing on to the end! (They mutter something silly about the risk of awful death. Isn't that what you're paying them for?)
So it seems you'll have to brush off your mathematics skills, learned when you were a child from your teacher with the help of your whipping boy. (You weren't allowed to whip him unless you got the math problems right, which was extremely unfair to you but did at least encourage you to develop your skills rapidly.)
With some careful analysis of past adventures, you think you can probably select adventuring teams that will be able to successfully conquer those three dungeons. Then, at long last, you will have your vengeance! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (You need to get this maniacal laughter out of your system now, it wouldn't do to show it while you're hiring the adventurers).
DATA & OBJECTIVES
- You have 36,000gp to spend.
- You must hire 12 adventurers (three groups of four) and send one group of 4 to each of three dungeons - the Lost Temple of Lemarchand, the Infernal Den of Cheliax, and the Goblin Warrens of Khaz-Gorond - to retrieve the fragments of your ancestral crown.
- Your goal is to maximize the probability of succesfully retrieving all three fragments.
- Six classes of adventurer are available: Fighter, Ranger, Mage, Cleric, Druid and Rogue. Adventurers are available in levels from 1 to 8.
- Hiring an adventurer costs 1,000gp x that adventurer's level.
- So you could hire, for example:
- 4 Level 3 Fighters (12,000 gp) for each dungeon...
- ...or 1 Level 8 Mage and 3 Level 1 Fighters (11,000 gp) for the Lost Temple, 2 Level 5 Rogues and 2 Level 1 Rangers (12,000 gp) for the Infernal Den, and 1 Level 7 Druid and 3 Level 2 Clerics (13,000 gp) for the Goblin Warrens...
- ...or any combination of 12 adventurers totaling 36 levels.
- The Adventurer's Guild representative shrugs and recommends that you hire the first 12 Level 3 adventurers you see, of whatever random classes strike your interest - you can start with that as a baseline, but you think you can improve on that with the data you have, by selecting the right combination of classes for each dungeon and possibly by sending out some higher-level and some lower-level ones.
- You have a dataset from the Adventurers' Guild of past dungeon-crawling attempts, with what adventurers went on a dungeon crawl, what encounters they ran into, and whether they succeeded in looting the dungeon or failed and were forced to retreat.
- For the benefit of those whose tools make manipulating this data difficult, I've added some derived columns that may be easier to work with. I do not, however, guarantee that any particular column I've added will be useful or necessary to your analysis.
- You can trust the adventurers to return the crown fragments if they get them, but they are located at the bottom of the dungeons - for the adventurers to successfully complete the dungeon is both necessary and sufficient for you to receive the corresponding crown fragment.
- Based on your scouting, the encounters within those dungeons are:
- The Lost Temple of Lemarchand (8 encounters deep):
- Skeletons -> Poison Needle Trap -> Zombies -> Snake Pit -> Poison Needle Trap -> Skeletons -> Snake Pit -> Ghosts
- The Infernal Den of Cheliax (5 encounters deep):
- Orcs -> Snake Pit -> Wolves -> Snake Pit -> Unknown
- The Goblin Warrens of Khaz-Gorond (10 encounters deep):
- Goblins -> Boulder Trap -> Unknown x 8
- The Lost Temple of Lemarchand (8 encounters deep):
- You don't know what the 'Unknown' encounters are - you'll need to either try to figure out from the data you have on past dungeons what they are, or send an adventuring party that can deal with whatever happens to be there.
An answer key and leaderboard will be posted in about a week, most likely on Monday the 15th.
As usual, working together is allowed and encouraged, but for the sake of those who wish to work alone please spoiler-tag (type '>!' at the start of a line) any comments with information on the dataset.
Edited to add: the original version of this document gave an inconsistent dataset (hiding some information as 'Unknown' in some columns but revealing it in other columns). I've corrected that in the links, thank you simon for the heads-up. The old dataset is here if anyone wants it for comparison purposes, but should be strictly less useful.
There is mo obvious correlation between no encounters and probability of success, but it looks like this is caused by better teams of adventurers taking on dungeons with more encounters on average.
There are no teams where more than 2 adventurers are of the same class. There is probably a reason for this.
Where there are duplicate types the dungeon is only beaten 55 percent of the time v 64 percent when there are no duplicates, so I will have 4 different types of adventurers in all my teams.
There is no obvious correlation between the rank of the highest adventurer and the probability of beating the dungeon. Suggests having a balanced team is more important than just maxing one out, unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.
Looking at the probability of defeating an encounter when a particular type of adventurer is missing suggests the following:
Goblins - teams do better than average when a Cleric, Fighter or particularly a Ranger is present
Goblin Chieftain - Teams with a fighter in them do much better than those without, Ranger is second best
Wolves - Are very easy to beat regardless of the team
Orcs - Fighters seem to be best followed by clerics
Orc Warlord - Teams with fighters do much better than ones without.
Orc Shaman - Again fighters are best, though mages and druids seem to be pretty close Skeletons - Easy to beat, though teams with clerics do a bit better than average
Zombies - Teams with clerics do best, though mages come close
Ghosts - Clerics do best
Basilisk - Druids are best followed by fighters and clerics
Lich - Clerics are best followed by Mages
Dragon - The toughest to beat. Fighters and Rangers seem best followed by mages and clerics
Boulder Trap - Fighters do best
Lever Puzzle Room - Easy though rangers seem do do slightly better than most
Riddle Door - Mages and Clerics do better than most, though again this is easy for all
Cursed Altar - CLerics do best
Snake Pit - Easy though Druids do slightly better than most
Poison Needle Trap - Rogues do best
Fighters appear to be the best all round adventurer, followed by clerics.
Looking at the probability of winning an encounter when particular levels of adventurers are present
suggests the following.
(1) When either a level 6 fighter, ranger or cleric is present an encounter against goblins is almost always
won. Rangers seem to be slightly better.
(2) Where the highest rank of an adventurer is <= 2 the probability of defeating the dungeon is less than 50
percent. Between 3 and 7 it gradually increases from 61 percent to 68 percent, but there is a big jump to
87 when at least one level 8 adventurer is involved (Though there are only 30 cases of this).
Temple of Lemarchland
There are 86 previous dungeons which had encounters which are a subset of those in the first dungeon. It looks very much like a junior dungeon. 4/8 teams which were all of rank 1 managed to beat it, which suggests spending relatively little on this.
Infernal Den of Cheliax .
The final encounter of every "Infernal Den" is either a Dragon or a Lich.
Every Den which has either wolves or Orcs encounters has a dragon at the end suggesting that we are
facing a dragon here. A high level figher looks like it is the best bet agasint dragons.
Goblin Warrens of Khaz-Gorond
All dungeons with Goblin in the name have quite a few Goblin encounters, and most have a Goblin Chieftain. Poison Needle Traps, Snakepits and boulder traps are secondary threats. Teams with at least 1 level 6 of several types look like they have nearly a 100 percent chance of winning against, lower level rangers seem like they are slightly better than other types. Fighters seem to be best against a Goblin Chief, though team with a
fighter with level > 3 seem to do worse than ones below it, though this is possibly a statistical artefact
as the numbers are relatively small.
I don't think I can confidentally identify a good choice based on my current understanding.. Peering through the fog my best current guess is:
Lost Temple of Lemarchland:
level 3 cleric
level 2 rogue
level 2 druid
level 2 mage
Infernal Den of Chelaix:
level 7 fighter
level 2 cleric
level 2 druid
level 3 ranger
Goblin Warrens of Khaz-Gorond
level 6 ranger
level 2 cleric
level 4 fighter
level 1 rogue