The results are finished! Like last time, I've been quite lenient when it comes to the presentation of answers; there were quite a few that didn't actually present an answer to the question as phrased, that shuffled relevant information into the explanation bit (which, as it says in the rules, is not part of the actual answer), or that separated the explanation bit vaguely or not at all. The problem with this is that it ultimately leads to more arbitrary rulings and may subtly punish those who make an effort to be clear (not that there's many such people among you lot). It's not too much of an issue now with the number of contestants we have, but if there were, say, 50 participants then I can see that a very strict moderation would be all but necessary to keep things rolling.
A few things I've learned that might be helpful to other moderators:
1. It's easier to accidentally give a question too wide a scope than too narrow. Most questions shouldn't have more possible answers than the number of contestants.
2. Don't ask someone to substantiate an answer before the deadline, or at any rate before the time when it would be unfair to update a question anyway. If a question is changed, it will obviously make a difference if someone knows or suspects that their first answer is wrong. This hasn't happened so far but it would have been embarrassing if it had.
3. I would change the scope to specifically comprise fully (officially) patched versions of the games, that is, 1.1 or 1.2 for Fallout and 1.02 for Fallout 2. Including the unpatched versions only introduces a number of obscure minor differences that may be hard to properly verify, for no particular gain.
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0. Name a person you encounter that has a name starting with the letter L.<blockquote>2 - Lara
2 - Loxley
1 - Lou
1 - Lemmy
1 - Luke
1 - Lenny
1 - Lyle
1 - Lox.
1 - Leone
1 - Stuart Little
1 - Lloyd</blockquote>Wrong answer:<blockquote>1 - Lieutenant</blockquote>This is a rank, not a name. (Even if one assumed I was asking for what you see when you mouse over a critter, the full string is "Super Mutant Lieutenant".)
L may not have been the best letter for this (there are probably unnumbered possibilities beyond the ones chosen). My first idea was O, but then the only name I could think of was Orville. It's a type of question that should bear recycling, though. Stuart Little is slightly tricky since "Little" is implied to be an epithet and not a proper name, although it is seemingly adopted as a name and "Stuart Little" in its entirety references a proper name. The same word in "Little Jesus Mordino", by comparison, is more of a pure epithet and I would have been inclined to disallow that answer if it had been given, an apparent inconsistency which I will leave you to contemplate. If anyone's wondering I would also have disallowed "Lou Tenant" since that's only Harry's way of referring to the Lieutenant.
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1. Name a character you encounter in their home location who may tell you that they originally came from another location.<blockquote>3 - Katrina
2 - Ian
2 - Mrs. Bishop
1 - Talius
1 - Captain A. Ron Meyers.
1 - Painless Doc Johnson</blockquote>Wrong answers:<blockquote>1 - Madame Modjeska</blockquote>Doesn't tell you she came from another location (although to be honest, when I thought of the question hers was one of the names that popped into my mind).<blockquote>1 - Cassidy</blockquote>Doesn't tell you he came from any specific location.<blockquote>1 - Marge LeBarge</blockquote>Doesn't come from an in-game location. (The reason I removed the word "in-game" in the clarification is that it is redundant; "location" already means "game location".)<blockquote>1 - A New Reno prostitute</blockquote>These do have a float that goes "To think I came from the Den for this...", but this doesn't really fit the "tell you" part of the question; what settled it was the fact that they never say this when you click on them, only as random floats.
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2. Name a named character using the male, black, red-shirted character model.<blockquote>4 - Chuck
3 - Frenchy
2 - T-Ray
2 - Farrel
1 - Jules
1 - Kenji
1 - Jagged Jimmy J</blockquote>I had a feeling Chuck would be popular. On the other hand I hadn't anticipated Frenchy at all, so I thought that was a very clever answer until it shot up to number two.
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3. Name two named characters, one of whom directly and specifically asks you to kill the other.<blockquote>4 - Zimmerman, Razor
3 - Sheriff Marion, Frog Morton
2 - Decker, Jain
1 - Decker and Hightower
1 - AHS-7, Badger
1 - The Dragon and Lo Pan
1 - gizmo & killian
1 - Roger Westin and John Bishop</blockquote>Decker and Hightower was a bit of a close shave since Decker only barely gives you enough information to specifically indicate Hightower as the target.
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4. Name a quest whose PipBoy entry refers to an element of investigation.<blockquote>2 - Find Children Spy in the Followers
2 - Find the Water Thief
1 - Missing Caravans
1 - Find Woody the Ghoul for Percy. Try the Den.
1 - Find the water chip
1 - "Jo is suspicious of the Slags..."
1 - Find out who cut the whore
1 - 'Find out who was responsible for Richard Wright's overdose'
1 - Something strange is happening at the farm northeast of Modoc. Investigate and report back to Jo.
1 - Finding little Johnny.</blockquote>Wrong answers:<blockquote>2 - Find out how Becky can sell her booze for such low prices.</blockquote>The relevant PipBoy entry in the officially patched game reads "Sabotage Becky's still" and has no specific entry for this stage of the quest.
In hindsight I should probably have narrowed down the field a bit more, say, by excluding the pure locating of people, places or things, although it might have been tricky to draw the line clearly.
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5. Name an item that is necessary to complete some quest and that is non-unique in that game.<blockquote>1 - Wrench
1 - G.E.C.K.
1 - Rope
1 - Junk
1 - Flint
1 - laser pistol
1 - Pliers (tools)
1 - Firewood
1 - Power armor.
1 - Money</blockquote>Wrong answers:<blockquote>1 - Systolic Motivator</blockquote>Not used for a quest (and not the name of an item).<blockquote>1 - Radio</blockquote>Vic doesn't need just any Radio, but Vic's Radio, which is unique.<blockquote>1 - dynamite/c4</blockquote>These are two items, and even if the answer is cut short after "Dynamite" there's no quest that requires Dynamite specifically.<blockquote>1 - Plastic Explosive</blockquote>See above (beating the Temple of Trials is not a quest).
Another question that had a little too many possible answers for its own good. "Money" was a good one. I think some popular mods may be responsible for a couple of rejected answers.
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6. Name an item that may raise or lower your chance of passing a First Aid check.<blockquote>4 - Psycho
2 - Rot Gut
2 - Mentats
1 - First Aid Kit
1 - Fruit
1 - Healing Powder
1 - Jet</blockquote>Wrong answers:<blockquote>1 - Monument Chunk.</blockquote>Doesn't affect First Aid.<blockquote>1 - Glasses</blockquote>There is no item called Glasses, and neither Mirrored Shades nor the Spectacles have any such effect. I'm guessing someone didn't read the rules carefully.
Other possible answers include Beer, Booze, Gamma Gulp Beer, Roentgen Rum and Field Medic First Aid Kit. "Fruit" was a clever answer that I hadn't thought of myself, the logic being that radiation can lower IN and/or PE in much the same way that chem after-effects do.
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7. Name a perk that is in both Fallout and Fallout 2 but doesn't have the exact same effect when or after you take one rank of it, and which does not merely add skill points and/or apply a fixed skill modifier; prerequirements are not part of the effect.<blockquote>3 - Faster Healing
2 - Healer
2 - Scout.
2 - Night Vision
1 - Pathfinder
1 - Quick pockets.
1 - Rad Resistance</blockquote>Wrong answers:<blockquote>1 - Lifegiver
1 - Dodger</blockquote>These don't work differently. The Lifegiver perk description is different, but the Fo1 patch notes spell out that it gives you extra HP each level.
The first clarification of this question, from "how it works" to "what effect it has", was meant to exclude differences in prerequisites and thereby the uninterestingly large number of perks which only had their level and/or skill requirements shifted up from Fo1 to Fo2. The second clarification specified what "taken once" meant; I'm not sure that was necessary, but I took the opportunity to spell out the significance of the first change. There were two resulting resubmissions, one of which ended up shifting a 3/1 scoring to 2/2, and one which changed a slightly dubious but ultimately correct answer into an incorrect one.
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8. Name a real-world species of animal that is referred to in dialogue.<blockquote>3 - Dog
2 - Cat
1 - Rat
1 - Chameleon
1 - cow
1 - Beetle
1 - Donkey
1 - mole rat
1 - Horsefly.
1 - rabbit
1 - Human</blockquote>This ended up working a little differently than I had expected, since I soon realized that many if not most everyday words used to denote animals actually refer to orders, families, genera or subspecies, and furthermore, the division between species and subspecies is sometimes in flux. Only one answer, "Malamute", missed the taxonomical dartboard entirely, and I had been all set to go "FAIL", but the way things went I put it among the dogs. "Human" was a slightly jarring answer and I'm not sure whether it should be characterized as a gamble (as in, everyone might have gone for it). The "cow" answer included a reference to a dialogue which is not about cows but brahmin, but there's also cow talk (e.g. Curling at the Enclave) so I allowed it. I was also dubious towards "mole rat", since in the Fallout world arguably that refers to a mutated rat variety (real mole rats are not indigenous to North America), and the context doesn't indicate otherwise, but in the end I felt it would be (more) arbitrary to disallow it. Oh, and there's no R in "chameleon", you damn dirty Pokémon fiend.
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9. Name a type of vehicle you may come across.<blockquote>4 - Diesel truck
3 - Shuttle
2 - Flying saucer
1 - Vertibird
1 - Moving Truck
1 - caravan brahmin/trunk vehicle</blockquote>Wrong answers:<blockquote>1 - Tricycle
1 - Steam truck.</blockquote>These are referenced in dialogue but don't show up in the game.
One could perhaps discuss whether the Hubologist and Federation (space) shuttles should have been counted as two different types of vehicles, or more/less specific variants, but I decided that whichever terms you could use to set them apart mainly refer to specific manufacture and origin, not type. The diesel truck was also identified as "fuel" or "tanker" truck, and the latter reply could also have been read to refer to the oil tanker (and so could have been scored as a less specific variant), though it was clear enough what the submitter was thinking of. The "trunk vehicle" could more properly have been described as a "trunk cart" or something, since the brahmin is not part of it.
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Here's the top ten scoreboard:
Code:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Fred Jimberson 1 3 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 4 48
Ausir 1 WR 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 3 72
Jack The Knife 1 3 3 1 1 1 2 3 3 1 162
Jakub 1 2 2 1 1 WR 2 3 1 1 168
PlanHex 1 1 3 1 2 1 1 WR 1 4 192
Radwaster 1 1 1 3 1 WR 2 2 2 3 504
patriot_41 1 2 1 4 1 1 4 WR 3 1 768
Darek 1 1 3 2 WR 1 WR 1 1 2 864
zag 2 2 4 2 1 1 4 2 1 WR 2304
Harfold 2 2 4 3 1 WR 2 1 2 3 4032
Fred Jimberson sucked the least this time. Ausir had an impressive streak of 1s but was undone by a rejected answer. It might be interesting to note that the second-to-last finisher had "only" one wrong answer, reflecting an uncanny ability to pick the most popular answer each time, and that the "high score" from last time was indeed broken even with much lower scores overall.
I said I'd look at the penalty score, and ended up using the original, slightly more complex formula: the mean of the total number of participants, the square root of the total number of participants, and double the highest number of equivalent answers. This gives a bigger weight to the number of participants, but prevents it from scaling too highly; the alternative I considered, giving a bigger weight to the number of equivalent answers, wouldn't have made much of a difference. This was decided before I knew the outcome, of course.
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And here are the answers of the top three finishers so you can pick them apart:
Fred Jimberson
0. Lloyd (Pretty Boy Lloyd)
1. Katrina (Shady Sands)
2. Farrel
3. Roger Westin and John Bishop (this works both ways)
4. Find the Water Thief (not much investigation involved, but the name implies it)
5. Money (Collect money from Fred, for example)
6. Jet (does both)
7. Rad Resistance (10% in 1, 15% in 2)
8. Human
9 . Diesel Truck
Ausir
0. Lenny (the super mutant, not the ghoul).
1. A New Reno prostitute ("To think I came from the Den for this...")
2. Kenji
3. AHS-7, Badger
4. Find out who cut the whore
5. Deliver a laser pistol to Eldridge.
6. Healing Powder
7. Faster Healing
8. Donkey
9. Federation Shuttle
(If anyone had answered for instance "Lenny the ghoul" to question 0, I would have considered this a less specific variant of that answer. The answer to 5 is also slightly dodgy (which the contestant later tried to rectify).)
Jack The Knife
0. Lyle, Vault 13, Level 2
1. Katrina, Shady Sands, Raised in Vault 15
2. Frenchy, New Reno
3. The Dragon and Lo Pan, San Fransisco
4. 'Find out who was responsible for Richard Wright's overdose'
5. Pliers, 'Deliver pliers (tools) and a wrench to Valerie', Vault City
6. Rot Gut
7. Faster Healing
8. Dog
9. Moving Truck, Jay's Moving, West wall of Junktown
("Pliers" is not the name of an item, but it's clear enough what it refers to. The answer to the last question is dodgy because it piles on a specification which is irrelevant to the question, unless you regard everything after the first comma as just an instruction where the moderator should look for it if need be, which ought to be more clearly indicated.)
