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straws-and-stats · 1 year

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In light of both the announcement of The Magnus Protocol and the introduction of polls to tumblr, I thought it would be a good time to reintroduce the fandom to Ye Olde TMA Fan Survey!

If you weren’t one of the 3,500+ people able to take the survey back in the day and it sounds like something you’re interested in, I’ve got good news for you:

THE TMA FAN SURVEY IS STILL UP AND RUNNING!

Take the survey here (it contains spoilers through the finale!!!)

Read after the break for more context and for the results of the initial run!

Exactly two years ago, a group of us launched the TMA Fan Survey as part of the fan project Eye Love TMA to celebrate the podcast that means so much to so many. In the two months between survey launch and the March 2021 finale, we got over 3,500 fans (and a few cast/crew members!) to take the survey. I had a blast getting to examine such a large set of data and analyse how the fandom related to the podcast through items such as:

Favourite character

Favourite season

Scariest episode

Charisma levels of the fandom as compared to the Archivist

What the Admiral looks like

How the Admiral wears trousers

Which entity fans are most afraid of

Which dancing Theresa May haunts the Archivist in the gap between his nightmares

And so, so much more!

Now, since the fandom has only continued to grow since the finale, and that means there are even more people who are able to contribute to this project, I decided to readvertise the survey.

Through the launch of TMagP, I’m going to be running a drive to collect Even More Data for the survey and release an updated newsletter come October.

Look at the finale-era results here.

Tumblr post of highlights from newsletter launch by the incredible niksfake

Adorable comic by shanni used to advertise the survey

Just to note that, going forward, I’m only going to be looking at the multiple choice questions on the survey. I already read through 3,500 responses to each of the 6 short answer questions and I am not going to read through any more, thank you very much.

Also, the survey was written in between the release of MAG 190 and MAG 191 and updated relevant episode-centric questions with each new release, so please feel free to laugh at some of the more outdated questions.

#the magnus archives #tma #tma spoilers #tmagp #dataisbeautiful #data #tma fan survey #eye love tma #jmart #the eye needs your opinions and thoughts #do your part and help feed the ceaseless watcher's creative consciousness by taking the survey #those of you that took the survey in the two years since we last advertised it #firstly thank you for that #and secondly how the hell did you find it

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straws-and-stats · 2 years

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Rusty Quill Gaming Stats! (Part 3)

[part 1] [part 2]

As a tribute to the crew who made the show so special, I'd like to end the stats by taking a look at a statistically interesting tidbit for each of the 9 characters featured in the book.

Here goes:

SASHA - In the table below, I recorded when the party arrived in each location and compared that to when Sasha used the skill Knowledge (Local) for the first time in that location. Sasha acclimated to location changes quickly, using Knowledge (Local) within an average of 2.5 episodes after arriving somewhere new.

ZOLF - Since Zolf did the bulk of the party's healing across the campaign, below is a bar chart containing all 27 of his heal checks across his days as both cleric of Poseidon and cleric of hope. Overall, he does exceedingly well at it, which is part of why he healed the party for the most points.

BERTIE - Despite his insistence on his own greatness, Bertie was largely statistically uninteresting. However, as seen in the table below which contains stats on the saving throws in the campaign for character, he rolled the most saves per capita, averaging nearly 1 save per episode. This is likely due to a combination of James antagonizing Alex & Bertie antagonizing everyone.

GRIZZOP - I have zero idea how Ben pulled this off, but the spread of nat 1s and nat 20s for Grizzop is ridiculously beautiful. The tables below contain information on the crits for skill checks, saves, and attacks, as well as a combined total for all three metrics. Skill check & save crits were perfectly balanced as all crits should be, and there was only a 3 crit disparity in attacks. Plus, the total number of natural 1s and natural 20s was just about 10%. This is incredibly close to what you would expect to see using d20s in an ideal system, which our world patently isn’t, so wow!

HAMID - You might have trouble remembering, but Hamid used a little spell called "fireball" once or twice amidst other firey attacks. Here's a nice bar chart comparing just Hamid's fire damage, which was 71% of his total damage dealt, to everyone else's total damage. Cel is the only one whose total damage just barely eeks out Hamid’s fire damage, and that only happened in the last 3 episodes of the campaign!

AZU - A bar chart of Azu’s Knowledge (Religion) rolls. Of the 16 rolls, 3 were natural 1s, which had a 3.6% or 1 in 28 chance of happening. Understandable it did, though, Azu had better things to be doing than paying attention in seminary...

CEL - From Cel’s 28 Knowledge (Engineering) rolls in the bar chart below, we can see that they really know their stuff! Nothing was below a 12, and a decent portion of rolls hovered around 30.

WILDE - And for my next trick, I shall perform the most difficult of statistician's techniques I toiled for years to perfect: glaring in the vague direction of London and spamming memes.

(thanks to serhawke (@cityelf) for the Dragon!Alex Dice Hoarder doodle)

SKRAAK - A bar char of Skraak’s 8 stealth rolls. These checks themselves rolled a natural 20 on stealth. They look deceptively poor until you remember to look at the scaling on the left (how are none of these values below 25?!?!).

And now, weary, my labours completed, I shall impart upon you all one last tidbit:

WHY SKILL CHECKS PER MINUTE (SCPM) IS THE SUPERIOR UNIT FOR CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS

So I’m sure you all can hear the voice of my PhD supervisor in the background shouting “Straw, skill checks per minute (scpm) is an utterly meaningless measurement for evaluating episode content across a large campaign since the small amount of interesting information it could give you is in a format that is difficult for humans to conceptualize, what could you possibly use this for? What are you even trying to say with this unit, Straw?!”

And, well, to an extend, he (and literally all of us who are thinking this) would be correct. However, and hear me out on this:

- You can pronounce scpm as “skip-uhm” and that’s just the kobold’s knees - Anything above 1 or really close to 0 is an obvious outlier and should be easy to spot in the mass of data. Sure, you could find them just as easily in other formats, but this range is fun and perky. -It’s just a really neat unit and you can pry it from my cold, dead claws.

In all seriousness, to all who worked on RQG - thank you. If not for you, we would not have had this fun sandbox of numbers to play with, nor this wonderful adventure to all embark on together.

Thank you.

If you liked this post, friendly reminder to check out “LOLOMG - A Performance Review by Oscar Wilde”! It contains more stats, and elaborate maths joke I made with “loads of hitpoints” as the punch line, and tons of really cool art, some tailoring notes for each character, and really funny text ghostwritten by Oscar Wilde from my friends! My friends did such a good job, y’all! Seriously, go check it out!

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straws-and-stats · 2 years

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Rusty Quill Gaming Stats! (Part 2)

[part 1 here] [part 3]

Going back to characters, there was a lot of interesting data on combat, including how often each party member hit their foe, what their kill counts were, and more. Here’s a table with that data - numbers will vary from other similar counts due to the fact that I focused on what happened mechanically during combat, and these values were different from what happened mechanically within the plot. Shout-out to Sasha and Hamid for being knocked out the most. Cel and Azu need Piccolo to teach them to DODGE

The book contained a chart of total damages and heals of the party through the whole campaign - I took that data and normalized each character's stats against the number of episodes they appeared in to get a per capita analysis of who had the most bang for their buck.

Cel and Grizzop do the most damage across their episodes, leading to the conclusion that in order to become a hard hitter in Erasing the Line, you need 3 things: 1) Be your player's second PC, 2) Not be around for the full duration of level development, and 3) Use a crossbow

Additionally, since Zolf has the highest per capita values for "damage taken" and "healed others for", we can see that his raging hero complex is statistically accounted for.

Finally, Sasha gets healed for the most HP, as is befitting of her sovereignty over getting knocked out.

Stats nerds like me will be happy to know that I compared normalizing by episode against normalizing by a rough approximation of time due to the variation in episodes across the podcast, with episodes getting shorter on average as the crew hit their groove. There was no major statistical difference between the two, and normalizing by episode corresponds exceedingly closely to by runtime

Since I looked at this, I discovered that time-based stats that stand on their own. Here's some data on episode times.

Bertie was around for 69 hours; Zolf for 69% of both episodes & runtime. Nice.

Next, here's how much the party dealt & took damage by episode. 2 highlights:

1) One of the few times where damage taken is greater than damage dealt is 39 & 40. Party visibly got rekt by an old man 2) The biggest bar is in 216. Cel dealt 265 of that 453 damage, or 3/5 of the combined bar size

Editors and producers do a lot of magic behind the scenes to make the final product that reaches our ears. Here's a table of who edited/produced both RQG campaign episodes and specials.

Cathy's edits have a release runtime of 0.69 days. Nice.

Alex’s edits have a release runtime of just over 9 days; Lowri’s edits have a release runtime of just under 5 days. Please someone get them to nap.

[more stats in part 3]

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straws-and-stats · 2 years

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Rusty Quill Gaming Stats! (Part 1)

Hi. If you run in Rusty Quill circles, you might remember me from that big ol' statistical fan survey for The Magnus Archives that will outlive us all. Well, I am here today to deliver unto you statistics of a different sort - this time in celebration of Rusty Quill Gaming!

I examined nearly every die thrown during the campaign for the project "LOLOMG: A Performance Review by Oscar Wilde". Designed w/ the PHB in mind, the project aims to thank those who produced RQG & celebrate the characters who brought us here. Check it out here!

This post (and subsequent parts) will comprise of stats I found interesting but was unable to fit into the book. The data covers numbered campaign episodes, Bertie's Sidequest, and Ancient Rome. Data collected by myself and Oddly Specific using the RQG wiki & relistening. Thanks to the wiki contributors.

If you want to take a look at all the raw numbers that got us here, this linked spreadsheet has them. Feel free to copy whatever data you like for your own purposes. If you want to know something not included or if you spot an error, contact me about it!

Thanks to serhawke (@cityelf), Dubious Gem (@regulationblues), Sumi, nik (@niksfake), Nix (@scatteredheroes), Oddly Specific, and Lowell for being such fun people to work with on this project.

Thanks to NotusLethe, Booksquirm, and cuewulfir for additional support.

Finally, massive thanks to Lowell for turning all of my doodles, rough charts, and data into the beautiful infographics contained herein. They’re the one who’s made these stats sing.

And now, after 6 months of work, I present to you: Rusty Quill Gaming as told by statistics.

We start with an animated scatter plot detailing the values of every skill check stated in the campaign that wasn't a natural 1 or natural 20. I like how clearly it shows the growth in power of the party (can’t figure out how to embed it, so we’re going with an imgur link for now).

https://imgur.com/cgPkrXV

Up next, a line chart containing skill check overview for how many skill rolls each character had accumulated at each episode of the campaign. I was surprised by how pretty and overarchingly linear the accumulations were.

Here's yet another skill check overview, this time divvying up all 2,818 skill checks rolled during the campaign (including natural 1s and 20s this time) by character. From this pie chart, we can see that Sasha emerges with the most rolls at 617, despite being around for only 57% of the campaign.

Next is the same pie chart as before, but player-based this time. We can see that Lydia carried the team with a whopping 870 skill check rolls, which is almost 1/3 of the d20s tossed for skills in the campaign. That's a lot of dice!

Another player-based skill check chart, this one averaging skill checks per every 10 episodes for ease of reading. I like how this one smacks you upside the head with a visual of how the pandemic move to remote recordings altered Alex’s GMing style - once remote recordings were the standard, the average number of skill checks per episode decreased slightly, and the party started rolling skill checks more as a unit more than individually, unlike before the pandemic.

[part 2] [part 3]

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straws-and-stats · 2 years

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Rusty Quill Gaming might be ending, but the time we’ve spent with these characters and players has been very dear to many of us. Since this wonderful show has meant so much to so many people, a few of us got together to make a book celebrating it!

The work in this book is by Dubious Gem (@regulationblues), Lowell, serhawke (@cityelf), Nix (@scatteredheroes), nik (that’s me!), Sumi, Oddly Specific, and Strawcup (@straws-and-stats).

If you’d like to see the whole thing, you can view it here, and keep an eye on @straws-and-stats on tumblr for a full breakdown of the stats they discovered!

(part 2)

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straws-and-stats · 2 years

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OKAY, here we go!!! the survey that you have all been taking and sharing has been thoroughly analyzed by our darling data gremlin!

this massive fan survey has been just one part part of the @eyelovetma project, a collaboration between around 130 fans of The Magnus Archives. the survey closed with close to 3,500 responses, and the results can all be seen right here.

if you’d like to see the other aspects of the project, please go look at the ELT website (which can be found on the tumblr linked above)! there you’ll see art, poetry, three separate sets of data, music, and an entire fanmade website for The Magnus Institute.

thanks to everyone who made this possible - i’m very emotional about all of the work behind this and i hope you all like it!!

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straws-and-stats · 2 years

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oh my god, folks, we are having so much fun with the responses for the tma fan survey! some answers have moved us, many have made us laugh extremely hard, and some have been very surprising. but no one (except jon, obviously) was surprised to see that these two were overwhelmingly the favorite characters.

we have 1,853 responses to the survey right now and we hope to get to 2,500 by the time it closes on mar. 15, 2021. if you haven’t taken it yet, please do! we really want to see as much of the fandom represented as possible.

this art is by the wonderful shanni!

[alt image id: martin is a white man in a hoodie and round glasses. he walks into jon’s study enthusiastically and says, “hey jon! apparently there’s this survey of the most popular characters in TMA.” jon, a dark-skinned man in a large sweater with his hair in a bun, looks at a sheet with a pie chart, showing both of them taking up around 40% of it. he says, surprised, “you and i take up so much space on the chart… hold on- i can’t be that popular?!” martin hands jon a mug of tea, and kisses him on the forehead while saying, “well… i’m only surprised there aren’t more people who see what i see in you.” jon smiles warmly and replies, “thank you, martin.” they look at the chart again, and jon notices that elias takes up space on the chart too. he asks, “but- what do they see in elias?” they both look at the reader with a deadpan expression. the next panel shows a running tape recorder with a spider perched on top of it. jon instinctively attempts to hit it with a book while martin yells “jon NO”]

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