Published on July 5, 2024 8:53 PM GMT
This is a D&D.Sci scenario: a puzzle where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
Intended Difficulty: Average
Good news! After an interminable period of waiting for lawyers to finish arguing over the will, you’ve inherited your great-uncle’s sprawling country estate.
Bad news! As you might expect, the estate is super haunted. And from the results you get from applying your (perfectly reliable, standard-issue) Paranormal Phenomenon Evaluation Kit, several of the twenty-three(!) malevolent entities making the place unlivable seem like they’re on the more troublesome end of the spectral spectrum.
Good news! Your new grounds aren’t in the territory of any specific exorcist group, which means that – unlike the hoi polloi – you get to choose which of the six nearby organisations you want to hire to banish each creature, without running afoul of their intricate web of mutual non-compete agreements. While it’s a given that every exorcist eventually gets their ghost, being able to choose the cheapest still matters: your liquid assets currently total only 70000sp, and you’d really rather have some money left over for throwing lavish parties.
Bad news! Another thing all the exorcists agree on is not quoting prices in advance; apparently, the quantities of resources expended in exorcisms are sufficiently unpredictable that their practitioners uniformly insist on only naming their fees after they’ve done the work.
Good news! You’ve successfully pulled records for all the local exorcist groups detailing what PPEK results they got from each of their targets over the last few years, as well as how much they ended up charging for each job. And because things change so slowly in the exorcist world – and spirits in one territory tend to be no more (or differently) troublesome than those in another – you can be confident that trends deduced from these will apply to the horrors haunting your new home.
Bad news! In addition to their (literally and figuratively) arcane rules about territory and prices, several of the exorcist groups have all-too-human arbitrary constraints: the Spectre Slayers and the Entity Eliminators hate each other to the point that hiring one will cause the other to refuse to work for you, the Poltergeist Pummelers are too busy to perform more than three exorcisms for you before the start of the social season, and the Demon Destroyers are from far enough away that – unless you eschew using them at all – they’ll charge a one-time 400sp fee just for showing up.
Good news! Your noble blood and scientific acumen definitely[1] qualify you to select the best[2] banisher for each wayward spirit. Whom shall you call?
I’ll post an interactive you can use to test your choices, along with an explanation of how I generated the dataset, sometime on Wednesday 17th July. I’m giving you twelve days, but the task shouldn’t take more than an evening or two; use Excel, R, Python, Spider Senses, 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 choices in advance, feel free to do so in the comments; however, please use spoiler blocks or rot13 when sharing inferences/strategies/decisions, so people intending to fly solo can look for clarifications without being spoiled.
Discuss
