A.D&D.Sci May 2021 Evaluation and Ruleset

post by abstractapplic · 2021-05-24T16:25:13.704Z · LW · GW · 16 comments

Contents

  Ruleset
    Species
    Days Since Death
    Butchery
      Mild Boar
      Jungle Mammoths
      Dragons
      Jewel Beetles
    Universes
    The NPC
  And the winner is . . .
  Reflections
  Scheduling
None
16 comments

This is a followup to the D&D.Sci post [LW · GW] I made last week; if you haven’t already read it, you should do so now so you know what I'm talking about here.

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Ruleset

Generation code is now up here; this section goes through the important points.

Species

The carcasses obtained by the stranger are 41% Mild Boar, 31% Jungle Mammoths, 5% Jewel Beetles, and 23% Dragons (5% Green, 2% Gray, 8% Blue, 8% Red).

Days Since Death

The days since each creature’s death is modelled by rolling two d10s and taking the lowest result.

(For the rest of this post, let “[DSD]” stand in for “Days Since Death”.)

Butchery

Mild Boar

The revenue from a boar is found by rolling a d4, a d8, a d12, and a d20, then summing every result greater than [DSD].

EV is graphed below.

Jungle Mammoths

The revenue from a Jungle Mammoth carcass is given by 20+10d4-3*[DSD]

EV is graphed below.

Dragons

Valuable components of Dragons are Scales, Tongue, Heart and Spleen.

A Dragon has 5d8 Scales; these are worth 1sp apiece, unless it’s Red, in which case they’re worth 2sp apiece (this is the only way colour is relevant).

A Tongue is worth 10sp, so long as the corpse is less than three days dead. A Heart is worth 30sp until day five, and a Spleen is worth 5sp until day seven. Once these thresholds are passed, the organs lose their magic and become worthless.

EV is graphed below.

Jewel Beetles

The revenue from a Jewel Beetle is found by starting with a value of 1 and rolling a d6 repeatedly. On a 1, stop rolling and take the value as your revenue; on a 6, double the value and keep rolling; on any other roll, add your result to the value and keep rolling.

EV is infinite. This is cold comfort to those who won the one on auction, which happened to be worth only 18sp.

Universes

I got 7 entries. These were randomly assigned between two universes, and the universe with three human players got an NPC to even the odds.

The NPC

To hedge my bets against an unexpected level of cooperation – if all or most of the human players made low bids, I didn’t want the NPC to ruin their fun – I knew I had to make NPC behaviour derived from player behaviour, while not granting it any unfair advantage. Therefore, for each lot, the NPC bid is randomly selected from the seven player-submitted bids.

(Three of you become aware that one of your compatriots appears to be a flickering, translucent tangle of selves. The auctioneer, noticing your concern, reassures you that it’s probably fine and this sort of thing happens all the time.)

And the winner is . . .

The winner, making a 51sp profit, is . . .

 

 

 

 

 

. . . hilariously, the NPC.

(I know, I was surprised too. Check my evaluation code if you like.)

However, the most successful human player was . . .

 

 

 

 

 

. . . GuySrinivasan, with a 31sp profit!

(As promised, you get to specify one non-ridiculous thing about July’s scenario. DM me when you’ve made your decision.)

Reflections

Pitting players against each other was interesting. When designing this challenge, I devoted a decent amount of thought to troll-proofing – the reason you have a finite budget is so players bidding unreasonably high could do limited damage – but what actually threatened to derail the scenario was cooperation; even in a zero-sum winner-take-all system, two of the seven entries were “1sp on everything”. If there had been a few more bidders like that, and/or if more than one of them had happened to end up in the same universe, this could have been a very different game.

The other novel thing about this scenario is how it built on earlier work. To me, this experiment was an unqualified success: I got to reuse a lot of code and conceptual legwork, players could balance priors from the previous scenario against new evidence from this one, and I felt more comfortable throwing a wicked problem at people who had already had a ‘normal’/‘fair’ challenge of the same kind. I enthusiastically solicit feedback on these points, and on all other points.

Scheduling

The next scenario ought to be ready early-to-mid-June. However, as rationalists, we are all familiar with the is/ought distinction; see you when I see you.

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