D&D.Sci June 2022: A Goddess Tried To Reincarnate Me Into A Fantasy World, But I Insisted On Using Data Science To Select An Optimal Combination Of Cheat Skills!
This is an entry in the ‘Dungeons & Data Science’ series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
“So I expect you know what this is about . . .” says the strange woman, as you both float gently in the void between worlds.
You find yourself tongue-tied, but your expression successfully communicates that you have no idea who she is, why you’re here, or how her hair manages to keep that shape.
“You know, the thing where someone dies, then a goddess gives them superpowers and sends them to another universe to defeat a Demon King?” She examines you quizzically. “It’s pretty common.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” you say, uselessly. “I was just cycling to the office . . .” You trail off as the implications of everything she just said hit you like a series of trucks (a comparison which, as your recent memories return, you realize you’re extremely qualified to make).
The apparently-goddess looks at you with a little sympathy and a lot of impatience. “I know you’re going through a lot right now, but like I said, there are a bunch of other people in your situation. So how about you just pick your cheat skills, let me move on to the next hero, and process all this later?”
As most of your mind continues to bluescreen, a hardcoded habit from your dayjob assumes control and starts running on automatic. “A . . . bunch of people, you say?”
“Yes. So I-”
“How big a bunch? Hundreds, thousands?”
“Hundreds of thousands. It’s a big multiverse.”
“So in other words, you have access to a data source from which we could plausibly derive statistically significant results, and thereby inform my decision?”
“. . . huh?”
After some explanations, some pleading, and a promise to share any insights she might find useful, the goddess leaves you in the care of one of her lesser angels, who has been taking notes on her previous heroes’ characteristics, choices and successes.
(As she departs, she expresses surprise that you’re making your decision based solely on win rates, and not considering how fun the various abilities could be or how well they match your personality. You reply that while you might have taken fun into consideration if you’d been more confident in your success, right now you’re just doing whatever gives you the best odds of winning: leaving a Demon King undefeated seems like it could be really bad for the world you’ll be reborn into.)
The angel provides you with a dataset detailing the goddess’ first 307641 champions, and clarifies some key points:
Every hero gets two cheat skills. (He patriotically informs you that most reincarnation goddesses provide just one, but his patron believes in going the extra mile.)
You can’t pick the same skill twice, pick fewer than two skills, delay the decision until after you reach your new world, take the goddess with you, or do anything like that.
Early in her career, the goddess needed to partner with other gods in order to provide two skills per hero. Her collaborators were an eldritch abomination (who agreed on the condition that every hero it helped with can only have Monstrous Regeneration and Anomalous Agility), and a chaos deity (who agreed on the condition that every hero he helped with have their cheat skills selected randomly instead of chosen by them). Rows where she was supported by each of these entities are marked as such, and the only thing a collaborator changes is which cheat skills are taken.
The goddess’ experience of time is orthogonal to that of the worlds she summons her champions from and to; as such, there should be no relevant time trends aside from changes in collaborators.
In his taxonomy, you have the following traits[1]:
NOT a Sociopath (worried what would happen to strangers if the Demon King was left undefeated)
NOT an Otaku (needed the isekai premise explained)
A Nerd (knows how to do Data Science)
An Office Worker (had a job in an office . . .)
NOT a Hikkikomori (. . . which required a cycle commute)
The abilities on offer are as follows:
Shapeshifting
Barrier Conjuration
Enlightenment
Uncanny Luck
Temporal Distortion
Hypercompetent Dark Side
Rapid XP Gain
Mind Palace
Monstrous Regeneration
Radiant Splendor
Anomalous Agility
Which skills will you select? And what thoughts will you share with the goddess on her return?
I’ll be posting an interactive letting you test your decision, along with an explanation of how I generated the dataset, sometime on Monday the 13th. I’m giving you nine days, but the task shouldn’t take more than an evening or two; use Excel, R, Python, prophetic dreams, or whatever other tools you think are appropriate. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about the scenario.
If you want to investigate collaboratively and/or call your decisions in advance, feel free to do so in the comments; however, please use spoiler tags (type >! at the start of a paragraph to open a spoiler block) when sharing inferences/strategies/decisions, so people intending to fly solo can look for clarifications without being spoiled.
- ^
Spoilered in case you want to try deducing your character’s traits from the text.
I did some basic analysis to start this one off. I’m not a data scientist, but I’m curious how people’s optimisations compare to my baseline.
I wrote a quick Python function to filter for our specific combination of character traits, then wrote up a dictionary of how often each combination won. I treated (Skill 1, Skill 2) and (Skill 2, Skill 1) as identical for our purposes. The top three here were [‘Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor’, 0.943], [‘Anomalous Agility, Temporal Distortion’, 0.918], [‘Monstrous Regeneration, Temporal Distortion’, 0.9]. Our winner is Enlightenment/Radiant Splendor with a total win rate of 230⁄244 or 94.3% among non-sociopath non-otaku nerdy office working non-hikkikomori heroes. Looks good!
But then I thought—what if the 94.3% was “People who would pick these choices” and not the skills themselves? So I took a look at the results for our personality that were picked by the Chaos Deity. Enlightnment / Radiant fell to 50%, and the top 3 now were [‘Anomalous Agility, Temporal Distortion’, 0.95], [‘Barrier Conjuration, Mind Palace’, 0.923], [‘Monstrous Regeneration, Rapid XP Gain’, 0.917]. The problem is...now our sample size is vastly reduced! 0.95 is actually just 19⁄20.
The clear winner from this analysis so far appears to be Agility/Temporal, but I haven’t done any probability analysis on it, nor do I have the maths to confidently do so, AND the sample size is low. When picked at random, there’s a 95% chance that Agility/Temporal wins. When someone specifically selects it, it’s still 91.8%. This is still pretty high, and we’re not worrying so much about what kind of person we are since we intend to pick purely on the data, but I’m still curious if this matters. Does it matter that the kind of person who selects Agility/Temporal from the list loses more often than chance, or have we sidestepped that with our data science approach? We have selected for our own personality as best we can with the data available, after all.
So, it seems we have a strange setup here—do we pick the low sample size items that seemed to give us the most victories, or do we pick the thing that people like us were most likely to win with?
Even so, I gave myself only an hour or two on this problem, and that’s what I’ve come up with so far—Agility/Temporal should give us a 95% chance of victory with high error bars, Enlightenment/Radiant is 94.3% if we trust that we are sufficiently similar to the subset of our personality archetype that would have picked E/R without the data science approach.
I think Agility/Temporal is better. I think we should be taking both possibilities into acount. If the strategy of “Select the skills that won the most among our personality archetype” is correct, selecting A/T reduces our winrate from 94.3% to 91.8%. If the strategy of “Select the skills most likely to win if they are randomly assigned to you” is right, selecting A/T brings our winrate up to 95% from 50%. These are not equal payoffs. In the absence of more evidence, I’m selecting A/T, since I’m confident our win-rate with it should be above 90%.
Looking forward to see how people improve on this!
My Choices:
I feel like there’s too much data here. I can just filter only heroes with my exact traits and still get decent sample sizes to compare each possible skill pairing to find the one with the best win rate. Here’s the top of the list:
(230/240) Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor
(146/159) Temporal Distortion + Anomalous Agility
(126/140) Temporal Distortion + Monstrous Regeneration
( 95/110) Temporal Distortion + Mind Palace
(182/213) Temporal Distortion + Rapid XP Gain
Temporal Distortion is obviously very good, but Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor seems to have some combo effect and tops the list with a 94% win rate.
Other Notes:
Hikkikomori: Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor is probably best. Definitely don’t let Hikkikomori pick Mind Palace.
Otaku, Non-Hikkikomori: Shapeshifting is good, especially if also Sociopath (99.9% win rate). Pair with Temporal Distortion if Nerd. For non-Nerd, Uncanny Luck looks good.
Non-Otaku, Non-Hikkikomori: Shapeshifting + Temporal Distortion are still good for Nerd + Sociopath. Otherwise, back to Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor.
Does the order of the two skills matter? Of course, I can check this from data, but perhaps you’d be willing to just answer this straight away so that I won’t have to.
Nope; cheats are commutative.
Can I choose to get a god partner?
Nope. But (I’ll edit the op to clarify this) the only effect a collaborator has is on which cheat skills are provided, so you could get the same effect as the Eldritch Abomination by choosing MR+AA, and get the same effect as the Chaos Deity by choosing randomly.
Some initial rambling on what I’ve been doing before reading aphyer’s (and everyone else’s so far) comments; skip to TL;DR to avoid rambliness, I also request more time if possible:
This has been a fun problem so far. I expect that the inclusion of the Eldritch Abomination and Chaos Deity data are intended as Data Science Cheat Skills—though, the Eldritch Abomination so far doesn’t seem that useful, in contrast to the awesome Chaos Deity Cheat.
At the start, I thought to myself that the Eldritch Abomination data was probably intended to be used to learn about trait interactions in order to debias the no-collaborator data. (Though you could just use Chaos Deity data). I figured that in order for that to work, there had to be not much in the way of trait-skill interactions. But, in that case, the ordering of skill combos shouldn’t depend much on the traits, so the Chaos Deity data ignoring data should be about right.
So, I found the best skill combos according to Chaos Deity interactions and started by looking at what was best ignoring traits in the Chaos Deity data. I also noted some skill synergies and anti-synergies, noting that . Well, easy problem, now I just have to check if it works taking into account traits, then switch to just getting observations for the goddess right?
Wrong. I check all the data with the protagonist’s specific traits, and the skill combo relative win rates are very different.
But, now I think almost done though, because there’s so much data that even a single trait+skill combination has a decent number of data points, enough to be strongly suggestive of what’s best and while not enough to really be sure, but I’ll just have to check some “nearby” combos to see if it’s likely a fluke and then I’m done, right?
Wrong again. Because before I did that, first I wanted to just check to see if some hidden variables (which affect skill selection but also win rates) were affecting the result. So to do that I compared the results with Chaos Deity (for the protagonist’s traits) and they look—kind of different. Maybe not for sure different, but enough to be pretty suspicious.
So I look for more evidence of hidden variables, by (eventually) making a list of all the trait+skill combos and sorting by how unlikely[1] the chaos data (or a more extreme deviation from the Chaos+None data) would occur, assuming that the true distribution is given by the Chaos+None total data. And—holy crap, there is a freight train’s worth of evidence for hidden variables. Lots of outliers where specific skill combos show up consistently. In order to try to make sense of it, one theory I come up with classifies the skills into three groups—which I’ll discuss below. It is still seems flawed though, and I’m running out of time so I checked out the comments in this thread.
1 The formula I used was a cumulative binomial distribution with a conditional to determine which side I check. I am not confident this is the correct way to do it and it feels like it could easily be off by a factor of two or something (because some two-sided test might be more appropriate), but I guess it should give a reasonably accurate ordering of unlikeliness.
Further rambling about after reading the other comments:
I see aphyer’s made a detailed set of observations, and he and Yonge have both noted the Chaos Deity/no collaborator discrepancies to some extent.
What really excites me about aphyer’s comment though is a classification of the skills into three groups—Mental, Defense and Utility. Because these groups have a lot of similarity with the (flawed) classification I came up with from looking at discrepancies between the Chaos Deity and None data. (they also jive with my much more limited initial notes on synergies, which I had slipped out of mind).
My first group was Enlightenment/Radiant Splendor/Uncanny Luck, because for the trait/skill combos with the first 14 most unlikely discrepancies, both skills were from this group (and they all did better with no collaborator than with Chaos Deity). I called this these “light side” skills and, apart from the omission of Mind Palace, they correspond to aphyer’s “Mental” group.
My second group was Barrier Conjuration/Hypercompetent Dark Side/Monstrous Regeneration/Anomalous Agility. That was because, in the list of most unlikely discrepancies, up until spot 136 where these skills showed up they always did better with Chaos Deity than no collaborator. I called these “dark side” skills and, apart from the inclusion of Hypercompetent Dark Side, they match aphyer’s “Combat” (or “Defense”) group.
My third group was the remaining skills of Shapeshifting/Rapid XP Gain/Temporal Distortion/Mind Palace. I called these “neutral” skills and apart from the inclusion of Mind Palace and omission of Hypercompetent Dark Side, they match aphyer’s “Utility” group.
I had attempted to use these groups to predict which combos would do better with chaos and which with no collaborator. My working hypothesis had been: if the combination includes two “light side” skills, or a “light side” and a “neutral” skill, then there will be better results with no collaborator, otherwise there are better results with Chaos Deity. This correctly predicts which of the 82 most unlikely discrepancies favor Chaos Deity v. None. But, that may not be that great in terms of implications for correctness of the theory since some skills and skill combos are not showing up very much in the outliers extreme enough to be confident of non-randomness. For example, it’s not until the 99th most unlikely discrepancy that a dark+light combo shows up. And at this point there’s a decent fraction of a percent chance of this happening at random in any skill/trait combo making it very likely this will show up by chance.
One obvious question is, what happens if I modify my groups to match aphyer’s? Keeping the same rule, this fails on the 24th unlikeliest outlier, where Temporal Distortion + Mind Palace favors Chaos, but ought to favor None with the shift of Mind Palace. There are several other added failures in the first 100 or so, and all are attributable to Mind Palace. (And a number of these are not with the Hikkikomori trait). So, I think Mind Palace has to stay as I originally placed it, for this particular purpose of determining outliers).
Putting both “Mind Palace” and “Hypercompetent Dark Side” as “Utility”, the same as my original grouping but with HDS moved to utility: this rule makes the same decisions as the first up to the no. 177 point, so there is relatively weak evidence to distinguish which group HDS is in. It does look a little worse for this purpose to have it as “Utility”/”Neutral” than as “Defense”/”Dark Side”, but it could be either way. But the case against Mind Palace being in the “Light Side”/”Mental” group for this purpose seems relatively solid.
So anyway, I am trying to figure out more about this discrepancy information, but don’t have time. I would like to at least investigate the relationship to traits. So far all my analysis of it has no effect on my decision apart from confirming the existence of hidden variables. I also haven’t gotten around to looking at “nearby” trait combinations to look for trends/consistencies.
Anyway, as others have noted, it may be best to avoid a combo that did badly with the Chaos Deity, since that suggests that there’s some hidden variable that leads to selecting that combo and also to succeeding it. On the other hand, maybe these variables might not be hidden to the protagonist? If I feel a strong urge to select Enlightenment+Radiant Splendor, might as well go for it. I guess Temporal Distortion+Anomalous Agility otherwise, as the second best scorer for the protagonist’s exact traits.
Also, while the goddess’s reaction suggests that data analysis is unusual, I should probably ask just to verify. If not, that could change the implications of the hidden variables.
TL;DR:
There is an enormous amount of evidence of one or more hidden variables affecting both win rate and skill choice (as evidenced by discrepancies between the chaos deity and no-collaborator data for particular skill-and-trait combinations).
This includes both skill combinations that do better if you chose them yourself, and skill combinations that do worse.
This seems to be in some way connected to the groups that aphyer found, except that in this case Mind Palace seems to count as a “Utility” skill and maybe Hypercompetent Dark Side counts as a “Combat” skill (I use “Light”, “Dark” and “Neutral” instead of “Mental”, “Combat” and “Utility” for these altered groups) . Light being associated with doing better if you chose them yourself, and Dark (or double neutral, or maybe light+dark) doing worse. This rule is imperfect and the real rule could be completely different than what I think.
All of the above hasn’t actually had all that much practical impact yet. For now I pick:
Temporal Distortion + Anomalous Agility
(Same reasons as Yonge)
But I would pick Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor if that’s what I was going to pick without doing the analysis.
Also, is it possible to add some time?
I would give you more time, but
you’ve already reached an optimal answer.
(Also, you can always just refuse to read the ruleset until you’re done with the data.)
Notes:
-Traits:
Most nerds are otakus and vice versa. Nerds are great at time travel, otakus are great at everything except having a dark side. Postulating some underlying stats (and tentatively drawing the causal arrow stats → traits, because of the uneven and correlated distribution of traits), it would seem that anyone with enough points in different stats, probably including something we can call intelligence, has a high chance of being an otaku, while only intelligence contributes to the chance of being a nerd. A dark side just switches your underlying stats to something much-better-distributed than normal, which is why it’s often a good thing for non-otakus to take and bad for otakus, who already have good stats and have better uses for the skill slot.
Most office workers aren’t Hikkikomoris and vice versa. It would make sense for this to be linked to some sort of sociability stat, though curiously sociopaths aren’t part of this interaction. Office worker special power: The Grind (reliably gain power through XP gain), Hikkikomori special power: Death from isolation (high chance to get trapped in one’s own mind palace and instantly die (or something))
-Skills (most of this agrees with aphyer’s analysis):
If you want to stay alive, you’ll want to specialise in some way to defend. There are 3 ways of doing this: Shielding yourself from damage (works best at medium hp and tankiness), Lots of regeneration (works best at high hp and tankiness), or just Dodging everything that comes at you (works best at low hp and tankiness).
You’ll also want some way of gaining power and doing damage, otherwise you’ll never work your way up to defeating the Demon King. If your stats are bad, the best thing you can do is just swap them out for a powerful and mysterious dark side. Enough Intelligence and the power of time travel might work for you. With hard work and diligence, you can try to amass enough XP to get there all by yourself. If you don’t mind the opinions of others or if you’re into that kind of thing, you can turn yourself into a big and tanky dinosaur (which then means regeneration is the best defense to specialise in). It’s possible you can scrape by just getting more lucky than others would, but usually there are better options. Similarly, a Mind Palace can be sufficient for some people, but usually there are better options, especially for Hikkikomoris.
Anyone good enough or righteous enough or something to feel compelled to pick some combination of Enlightenment, Splendour or Luck should follow that impulse, everyone else should stay clear.
My choice:
Temporal Distortion, Anomalous Agility
Unfortunately, we lack any information about ourselves other than the two traits. We don’t know whether enlightenment/splendour is a newcomb-like or smoker’s lesion-like decision or whether we’ve lost our chance at goodly and righteously declaring that of course we’ll be taking enlightenment/splendour by just taking the time to look at the data.
As for the decision between Agility and Barriers, and possibly even between Temporal and XP or Mind palace, it seems to be down to what our underlying stats are, which we know nothing about, so we just have to go by the average from the data.
My solution:
I choose Radiant Splendor and Enlightenment simply because out of all champions with personality like mine, it had the highest win frequency. And it even has a solid number of samples − 244. Basically, I narrowed down the dataset to only rows with the same personality like mine. Perhaps I could get some more info from other rows, but that would require spending more time.
All praise randomization god.
Mediocre Colab notebook if you don’t want to make your own: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/10vcEVebOyal_znN3UuNTADABFS-3SYnu
Hmm, seems like something bad happens if you pick Hypercompetent Dark Side and Enlightenment.
A quick first glance ignoring interactions, in case the goddess gets impatient and comes back to demand an answer before I go to bed (look, getting hit by a truck really takes it out of you):
I ranked each possible trait and cheat by the effect it has on your win rate relative to not having it. From best to worst:
Otaku: + 40.6%
Nerd: +28.5%
Radiant Splendor: +15.7%
Enlightenment: +15.6%
Shapeshifting: + 11.3%
Sociopath: + 9.1%
Office Worker: +8.5%
Uncanny Luck: + 7.6%
Rapid XP Gain: + 3.2%
Barrier: −2.1%
Regeneration: −3.3%
Anomalous Agility: −5.4%
Temporal Distortion: −6.4%
Dark Side: −10.7%
Hikkikoh god i can’t spell this am I going to have to spell it everywhere in my code: −15.3%
Mind Palace: −34.2%
This doesn’t consider interaction effects—is being a Nerd good, or is it just correlated with Otakus who have a knowledge of the underlying world? Is Mind Palace bad for everyone, or only for Hikkikowhatevers who sit inside their Mind Palace all day and don’t do anything? Still, at a first glance, we should probably take at least one of Enlightenment and Radiant Splendor, and probably not take Mind Palace.
I’ll continue the thread below when I have time for more analysis.
Current plan:
Temporal Distortion and
Anomalous AgilityBarrier Conjuration (Edited, see my final comment below in this thread).Most noticeable discovery:
The goddess has the ability to discern some traits of mortals that are not captured by the yes/no sorting system, and particularly likes to give Enlightenment to very impressive people who are already likely to win. It’s not a very useful trait at all, but she gives it out to people who are probably going to win anyway. Radiant Palace and Uncanny Luck might also show the same effect.
Comments on my approach so far:
The dataset is large enough that we can restrict ourselves to only people who have the exact same traits we do and still have a reasonably-sized dataset, so I did that and ignored everyone else. When we sort by pairs of traits, we can see which pairs of traits lead to good winrates.
The existence of the Chaos Deity lets us use that subset as a control, and check for which trait pairs have good winrates when picked by the goddess but not when picked by Chaos. This most noticeably flags Enlightenment as one we don’t want to bring.
After getting rid of Enlightenment, and requiring that the Chaos Deity heroes with these traits also do well, we’re left with definitely taking Temporal Distortion and then a lot of very close picks for our other power—Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration, Monstrous Regeneration, and Mind Palace all look like solid choices there. Anomalous Agility is closest to the top, but if I have time for further analysis my main goal will be trying to figure out what distinguishes these and seeing if I can make the pick between them more accurate.
I spent a while messing around in hopes I could boil things down to a simple underlying structure, but with no real success:
The two best starts I found to an approach were:
Barriers/Monstrous Strength both work very well with a Dark Side but work very poorly with one another. This suggests some possibility where e.g. there are two different types of challenge, and Barriers/Monstrous Strength both protect against one (defending against Demon Assassins?) while a Dark Side protects against the other (building your own power base?)
Nerds with Temporal Distortion do very well. This could suggest some kind of attribute system where Temporal Distortion gives e.g. a larger bonus the higher your INT is (to think out neat things to do with it?) and Nerds have high INT.
Sadly further digging seemed to falsify most of my pretty ideas:
A Hypercompetent Dark Side also works well with Anomalous Agility and badly with Radiant Splendour and Uncanny Luck, but those aren’t consistent with the two-different-challenges theory: Monstrous Strength/Anomalous Agility work acceptably well together even though they should be pointed at the same challenge, and Uncanny Luck does not work particularly well with the things a Dark Side works with.
Hikkikomori do very badly with Mind Palace and very well with Radiant Splendor, which could suggest some kind of CHA-based effect. However, no other characteristics show e.g. the opposite effect—if Sociopaths showed the reverse effect, I’d strongly update to ‘Sociopaths have high CHA and Hikkikomori have low CHA,’ but that didn’t occur. Office Workers do benefit more from Mind Palace, but don’t show the reverse effect anywhere else.
In fact, ‘Sociopath’ doesn’t seem to have any interesting interactions with anything, making me wonder if the angel’s classification of Sociopaths is not very good.
Update with slight current progress towards general ideas:
There are three-and-a-half categories of power:
Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration and Monstrous Regeneration are ‘Combat’ powers
Hypercompetent Dark Side, Rapid XP Gain, Shapeshifting, and Temporal Distortion are ‘Utility’ powers.
Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor and Uncanny Luck are ‘Mental’ powers.
Mind Palace, based on its name, should be a Mental power, but it doesn’t behave at all like the other Mental powers and does its own strange thing.
Having one Combat plus one Utility power is generally a good idea—any such pairing combines better than its two parts work individually.
Having two Combat or two Utility powers is not terrible, but generally less good than one of each.
Mental powers behave strangely, with some very strong interactions for no reason I’ve fully discerned. They seem in general to be weak but be given to/chosen by strong heroes. They might work well with Mind Palace or with one another.
Hypercompetent Dark Side is the most Utility of all the Utility powers: it shows the same kind of interaction effects as other Utility powers (good with Combat and bad with Mental) but to a greater extent.
Further:
Nerds, Otaku and particularly Hikkikomori do well with a Combat power, while Office Workers and Sociopaths do not. Perhaps there is a ‘Physical’ stat with diminishing returns, that stat is increased by any Combat power, and Nerds/Otaku/particularly Hikkikomori stay inside a lot and have a lower Physcial stat and more need for a power boosting it?
Hikkikomori do well with most Mental powers but badly with Mind Palace, while Office Workers do well with Mind Palace but badly with anything else. Perhaps there is a ‘Social’ stat with diminishing returns, Office workers have high Social while Hikkikomori have low Social, and most Mental powers boost Social while Mind Palace instead lets you use Social for something else?
While most pairs of Combat powers work badly together, Anomalous Agility/Monstrous Regeneration work acceptably well together. Perhaps this is why the Eldritch Abomination wanted those two?
Further refinement:
Mind Palace’s strange behavior is exclusively an artefact of its very strong negative relationship with Hikkikomori. When we filter out all Hikkikomori and repeat the analysis, it becomes clear that Mind Palace is in fact another Utility power, behaving similarly to the other Utility powers. Doing this also makes it appear that, in the absence of Hikkomori weirdness, Mental powers work well with one another, and the two generally-good strategies are ‘one Utility and one Physical power’ or ‘two Mental powers’. Office Workers’ apparent good synergy with Mind Palace was an artefact of Office Workers being less likely to be Hikkikomori.
I’m unlikely to put in much more time, so my presumably-final answer and a summary of findings for the goddess:
My powers: Temporal Distortion and Barrier Conjuration
(I see very little to choose between the three physical powers for my second choice. Agility has a n=20 sample of people exactly like us vaguely suggesting it might be better for us, Barrier Conjuration has a smaller effect in a larger sample vaguely suggesting it might be good for non-Sociopaths. Since some other people have done Temporal + Agility I’m letting hipster-ism steer me to picking something different. Monstrous Regeneration is also an equally-good pick, but has no real evidence towards being better, and if it involves getting hit and then regenerating rather than not getting hit it might be much more painful.)
Key takeways for the Goddess:
Anomalous Agility, Barrier Conjuration and Monstrous Regeneration are Defense powers. Never give someone more than one of these.
Enlightenment, Radiant Splendor and Uncanny Luck are Mental powers. These tend not to be very good, but Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor work extremely well together for a subset of people (the subset is not readily identifiable by your Angel’s trait system, but may be discoverable with more work). That subset of people already tend to choose to take them/you choose to give them. Keep giving Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor to anyone who you would have given it to before, but don’t try to spread it more broadly.
All other powers are Utility powers. Most heroes should take one Utility power and one Defense power.
When picking out Utility powers, you can do this based on personality classification (ask your Angel for his list of traits):
Nerds do well with Temporal Distortion. They should take Temporal Distortion plus a Defense power of their choice.
Sociopaths and Otaku do well with Shapeshifting. They should take Shapeshifting plus a Defense power of their choice.
Someone who is both a Nerd and a Sociopath/Otaku can either take both Shapeshifting and Temporal Distortion, or take one of those plus a Defense power, both seem okay.
Hikkikomori do appallingly badly with Mind Palace. Never let a Hikkikomori take Mind Palace.
Hypercompetent Dark Side does poorly with Enlightenment or Radiant Splendor—this shouldn’t matter if you’re following the ‘one Utility and one Defense’ plan, but keep it in mind if people request something else.
If you found this information helpful, are you hiring? Since it looks like my winrate is probably only 80-90% even with the best-chosen powers, I might prefer a position as your new Data Angel over being a hero, depending on what the benefits are like.
Some additional takeaways for me in my new life:
Otaku do extremely well (~30% better winrate than anyone else). This suggests that this world is going to ‘behave like a story’ in some way, or reward people for acting in story-like ways. Even if I’m not as good as an Otaku at identifying these things, I should try to behave like one. If I see a damsel in distress, I should go try to rescue her and not think too hard about it. Even if it seems like a stupid decision, empirically the Otaku who are likely to do that end up succeeding at extraordinarily high rates.
Temporal Distortion does much better than most powers for Nerds, but much worse than most powers for non-Nerds. It probably requires careful nerdy thought to get the most out of it, I should make experimenting with it a high priority and see if I can figure it out faster than most other Nerds.
The amount of benefit gained from having a single defensive cheat power rather than not having one suggests that I am likely to be at risk of death from early physical attack. Be on the lookout with Barrier Conjuration early on, in case the Demon King can try to assassinate me before I level up.
I’ve added a market on Manifold if you want to bet on which strategy is best.
For heros with our traits:
- Temporal Distortion and Rapid XP gain are the best 2 overall which seem to work well with anything. The best single combination however is Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor (94 percent win rate). Shapeshifting is just terrible and should always be avoided. The others work well with some traits, but not with others;
The following combinations are very poor (< 1⁄2 win rate) and should not be given to other heroes like me:
- Anomalous Agility + Barrier Conjuration
- Anomalous Agility + Monstrous Regeneration
- Anomalous Agility + Uncanny Luck
- Barrier Conjuration + Monstrous Regeneration
- Barrier Conjuration + Uncanny Luck
- Enlightenment + Hyper Competent Dark Side
- Enlightenment + Monstrous Regeneration
- Hyper Competent dark Side + Mind Place
- Hyper Competent Dark Side + Radiant Splendor
- Hyper Competent Dark Side + Uncanny Luck
- Mind Place + Uncanny Luck
- Monstrous Regeneration + Radiant Splendor
- Monstrous Regeneration + Uncanny Luck
- Rapid XP Gain + Uncanny Luck
When looking at records for all trait a different picture emerges. Here MindPlace is the ability that is terrible, and shapeshifting does reasonably well with anything except MindPlace. The only terrible combos (< 1⁄2 chance of success ) which don’t involve MindPlace are:
- Anomalous Agility + Barrier Conjuration
- Barrier Conjuration + Monstrous Regeneration
- Enlightenment + Hyper Competent Dark Side
- Hyper Compenetent Dark Side + Radiant Splendor
- Hyper competent Dark Side + Uncanny Luck
Radiant Splendor and Enlightenment still does best overall though.
In general our traits seem to be somewhat below average, but Radiant Splendor + Enlightment still looks like a very strong combination. This combination was noticeably less successfull (6/12 times) for heros with our traits when the Chaos deity was involved. The sample size is small, and the effect doesn’t show when all heroes are considered, so this might be a statistical fluctuation; however it may be an idea to avoid further dealing with this deity, just in case it is giving inferior versions of traits to heroes like me to spread chaos.
Provisional Decision: Go with Radiant Splendor + Enlightenment
As DM, I can confirm that skills provided with the help of the Chaos Deity or Eldritch Abomination are identical to those provided by the goddess alone.
* When Monstrous Regeneration and Anomalous Agility is assigned to every hero it results in a
* 36 percent win rate. When they are chosen there is only a 21 percent win rate. The sample
* size is to big for this to be dismissed as a statistical fluctuation. With the DM ruling out
* any difference in God assigned cheats or other time dependent effects it looks like heroes
* are making their decisions based on some hidden variables we don’t have access to.
*
* Many combinations of traits assigned by the Chaos deity also show substantial differences
* (sometime better, sometimes worse), than when they are chosen. This suggests the provisional
* decision to go with Radiant Splendor + Enlightenment probably isn’t optimal after all.
*
* The best set of traits chosen by the Chaos Deity for Heroes in our class is :
* Temporal Distortion + Anomalous Agility. (95 percent win rate based on 20 records)
* Barrier Conjuration + Mind Place (92.3 percent Win rate based on 13 records).
* Rapid XP Gain + Monstrous Regeneration (91.7 percent win rate based on 12 records)
* Barrier Conjuration + temporal Distortion (88 percent win rate based on 25 records)
*
* Temporal Distortion + Anomalous Agility does almost as well when these cheats are chosen as well.
*
* On balance I think it would be a good idea to change my cheats to:
* Temporal Distortion + Anomalous Agility.