Five years late, but the behavior of water elementals does feel like a bit of an unfair gotcha here, at least if you miss the hint in the ship’s name that everything is going to be a clean, continuous distribution of the kind you saw in data science class. My prior on
Once the ship has taken more than X% damage in a fight with water elementals, the battle is lost, and the crew is done for. We don't have enough men to cover all of the breaches in the hull, so that's their cue to push through with everything and finish us off.
is at least a couple orders of magnitude higher than my prior on
Our defensive strategy is such that absolutely no attack by water elementals can destroy more than exactly eighty point zero percent of the ship's hull. Not a single candlestick will be knocked over past that point.
I intuited that oars+foam together capturing roughly the whole 10 percent of the missing ships was too simple of a solution, and that the long tails on a few of them would be longer than expected, but, in a real world setting, I’d be betting on the foam swords.
That’s pretty fair and useful criticism. If I was making this again I’d have Water Elementals roll +2d6 or +3d4 instead of +1d12; the uniform distribution is in retrospect suspiciously unnatural.
(I do however plead the mitigating factors that foam swords are cheap and “foam swords plus the stuff that ends up mattering” is one of the ‘correct’ solutions.)
((Also, I’m happy you played one of my older scenarios, and that you took the time to share your thoughts. Feedback is always greatly appreciated.))
Five years late, but the behavior of water elementals does feel like a bit of an unfair gotcha here, at least if you miss the hint in the ship’s name that everything is going to be a clean, continuous distribution of the kind you saw in data science class. My prior on
is at least a couple orders of magnitude higher than my prior on
I intuited that oars+foam together capturing roughly the whole 10 percent of the missing ships was too simple of a solution, and that the long tails on a few of them would be longer than expected, but, in a real world setting, I’d be betting on the foam swords.
That’s pretty fair and useful criticism. If I was making this again I’d have Water Elementals roll +2d6 or +3d4 instead of +1d12; the uniform distribution is in retrospect suspiciously unnatural.
(I do however plead the mitigating factors that foam swords are cheap and “foam swords plus the stuff that ends up mattering” is one of the ‘correct’ solutions.)
((Also, I’m happy you played one of my older scenarios, and that you took the time to share your thoughts. Feedback is always greatly appreciated.))
Thanks! These really are cool things, and they do help sharpen my awareness when running dataproc.