Epistemic status: Trying to make vague rambling gestures at the sort of thing I would ideally like to find inside the data in one of these scenarios.   Probably comes off to some extent as rude backseating of the author, I apologize for that but promise that no rudeness is intended.

The synergies/anti-synergies in this example arose mostly from ad-hoc things: 'Shapeshifting plus Sociopath is an extra +4, while Shapeshifting plus Otaku is an extra +5.'

The way I would ideally like the under-the-hood generation to work would be to have some kind of actual world model from which these synergies arise.

So imagine a world model that looks something like this:

A Hero will face four challenges en route to victory:

1. The Demon King will try to assassinate them while they are still weak.
2. They will need to rally followers behind them and build a power base.
3. The Demon King will try to kill their Fated True Love and drive them to despair.
4. They will gather their forces and march to siege the Demon Castle and gain victory.

Each challenge is implemented by rolling 2d10, and the challenge is passed if the hero rolls >8.  So a hero with no traits and no cheat power has a ~2/3 chance of winning each challenge and a ~1/4 chance of winning overall.

Monstrous Strength or Anomalous Agility makes you automatically pass Challenge 1 (you are nearly impossible to assassinate).

Barrier Conjuration applies +3 to both Challenge 1 and Challenge 3 (barriers can protect both you and your Fated True Love). 

Radiant Splendor makes you automatically pass Challenge 2 (very easy to convince people).

Rapid XP Gain applies +1 to Challenge 2, +2 to Challenge 3 and +3 to Challenge 4 (you grow stronger over time).

Sociopaths automatically pass Challenge 3 (since they will not be driven to despair even if their True Love dies).

Nerds automatically pass Challenge 4 (since once they are established they can make machine guns and tanks and so on).

Hikkikomori have a -3 penalty to Challenge 2 (they are bad at talking to people).

...and so on...

There would be a lot of interactions in this world model:

• Monstrous Strength and Anomalous Agility would work very badly together, and quite badly with Barrier Conjuration, as they would point at the same problems.
• Sociopaths would get less benefit out of Barrier Conjuration, as part of its benefit would be pointed at something they already passed automatically.
• Similarly, Nerds would get less benefit out of Rapid XP Gain.
• Radiant Splendor would be very good for Hikkikomori, who need to deal with their problems in Challenge 2.
• Rapid XP Gain would work well with one of the defense powers that helped in Challenge 1, as it would help with everything else.
• ...and so on...

But these interactions wouldn't arise from explicitly saying 'Sociopaths get less benefit out of Barrier Conjuration'.  Rather they would arise...naturally? organically?...out of a set of general rules.  And I feel in some fuzzy way I can't quite describe that this would be...a better way of modeling things?  A model that fits together better under the hood?  Mumble mumble emergent behavior?  Even if players aren't likely to actually reconstruct the full data model, I feel like this is in some way a more honest way of generating the data than having ad-hoc synergies and antisynergies?

Again, this isn't intended as criticism - I like the scenario, and I don't in fact think that I've done a good job of having a clean underlying data model in scenarios I've written.  I'm just trying to convey this sort-of-hand-wavy concept of 'the synergies exist inside a model' rather than 'the synergies are glued onto the outside'.

I think the puzzle was good, but it might have been better if the scenario had more explicitly included "Given the next X heroes, maximise their chance of survival" the way aphyer did. As it is, I was expecting that the perfect solution would have aphyer levels of analysis, which is why I said that I expected my solution was a baseline and others would improve on it, even though I had the right answer.

You did allude to this by asking "What will you tell the Goddess when she returns?" but the overall scenario as presented was "Find a way for you personally to survive" and that's the problem I answered. Considering how much richness was present in the rest of the dataset, I think the puzzle should have explicitly said "Goal 1 is to survive personally. Goal 2, which is harder, is to maximise the survival of everyone who comes after you." This would have made it an excellent puzzle - aphyer did AMAZING work, and I think them being able to solve the puzzle does not speak poorly of it at all.

This is mostly a matter of taste, but I was mildly disappointed that there wasn't anywhere to go beyond the basic analysis. There were pretty much only two answers, 'Got Tricked By Fated' and 'Didn't', with no room to improve your solution using further exploration of the dataset.

I realize this is an artefact of making the scenario accessible and easy to play - from personal experience, it is really really hard to make a scenario have a complex ruleset that enables deep analysis and several levels of success without also having a complicated dataset that drives some players off - but want to register that my personal taste tends towards erring in the 'more complicated' direction.

(...anyone who's ever played any of the scenarios I wrote probably could have told you that already)

I did still enjoy playing this a lot, so thank you for writing it!

I think the interactive is bugged in a way that makes Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor look worse than it actually is: Radiant Splendor is coded as 'RS' at the top, but as 'RB' when checking for the synergy bonus, and so the bonus is never given?

I spent all of my time trying to figure out how to figure out how much [the hidden variable causing the correlation between nerd and otaku] affects trait choices and winrates.

Apparently they are correlated without a relevant hidden variable. :D

Did you leave Temporal Distortion out of the explanation?

Looking at the generation code, aptitude had interesting effects on our predecessors' choice of cheats.

Good:

-Higher aptitude Hikkikomori and Otaku are less likely to take Hypercompetent Dark Side (which has lower benefits for higher aptitude characters).

Bad:

-Higher aptitude characters across the board are less likely to take Monstrous Regeneration or Anomalous Agility, which were some of the better choices available.

Ugly:

-Higher aptitude Hikkikomori are more likely to take Mind Palace.

Short and very interesting scenario! The fact that the most useful subset of the data was so small (929 people like us getting truly random skills) made me rater afraid that I was fooling myself with random fluctuations. With some very dirty probability I reasoned that the p value for our results for Anomalous Agility + Temporal Distortion was a bit less than 1%, so I went for it.