I thought this was less speculative than its predecessors, not more. All of the distributions were reasonable. While there could have been unknown unknowns like another type of water elemental or pirates that either succeed or don’t do much damage, there in fact weren’t. There were known unknowns that were pretty much called out explicitly. This was all signaled by the title which I read as “explicitly not a black swan scenario”. The somewhat hidden second society of merpeople was strongly clued by having a very obvious two-humped pirate distribution. Altogether this felt like a good meld of data science and fair puzzle.
The one “GM modeling” that I think would probably be important for doing well on your subsequent puzzles is “usually the underlying model is decently simple; also usually it involves dice rolls like 10+2d6 or 1d8*1d8″.
I thought this was less speculative than its predecessors, not more. All of the distributions were reasonable. While there could have been unknown unknowns like another type of water elemental or pirates that either succeed or don’t do much damage, there in fact weren’t. There were known unknowns that were pretty much called out explicitly. This was all signaled by the title which I read as “explicitly not a black swan scenario”. The somewhat hidden second society of merpeople was strongly clued by having a very obvious two-humped pirate distribution. Altogether this felt like a good meld of data science and fair puzzle.
The one “GM modeling” that I think would probably be important for doing well on your subsequent puzzles is “usually the underlying model is decently simple; also usually it involves dice rolls like 10+2d6 or 1d8*1d8″.