[Khellendros]

Gnaw, on 29 December 2012 - 09:28 PM, said:

Path-Shaper, on 28 December 2012 - 03:52 PM, said:

Spite, on 28 December 2012 - 02:25 PM, said:

Nothing I did so far really works out as planned, really - defend/deflect from Liosan to be targeted by metal benders, this little bit. ...snip...I clearly am a bit of tune about what arguments people listen to nowadays, when I tried to tech-talk about Galain.

Missed this the first time through. Spite/Tapper wanted the attention so that metalbenders would kill themselves on his passive. That didn't work because I knew that Liosan was equalist, so I simply ignored anything Spite said that was even close to being rational and kept screaming "Kill Lio! Kill Lio!" (I wonder how that would have worked if I hadn't thought Spite == EM and therefore thought I could goad him into going postal?)

Moltke's "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy". First Ruse gets lynched on a silly day 1 'reason'. Then Fener killed OE, who would have been the logical day 2 discussion, leaving a vacuum on thread. And nobody can fill a vacuum with hot air and drivel better than moi.

Night 1 was almost a bigger disaster for equalists, besides the Ruse lynch.


Karosis (Feathered Hat Man - Bubba): Stalk - Galain
Spite (Lieutenant - Tapper): Kali Sticks - Karosis

Had Spite not incapacitated Karosis, my passive would have fried him.

And the Night 2 provisional changes of Osseric and I, at Tennes' urging, killed TS and left Lio alive.

So, D'rek I'm sorry I screwed you over with the PM dump. But it could have and should have been worse.

And I for one plan on blaming it all on Khell. Oh, and GH, for being so bend over backwards fair that it got him killed. But mostly Khell.

The reason I asked you guys to switch to a find is because I wanted to find out who Sato was, so I'd know who to target later on down the line, and I suspected that Liosan was either Amon or Sato. But I wasn't allowed to tell you anything about that unfortunately. Yes, I was using you and Osseric to try and fulfil my personal VCs, but hey, a guy's got to do what a guy's got to do

Vengeance, on 08 January 2013 - 10:13 PM, said:

Also why hasn't drek flipped Khell??? He is vocal and doesn't have a problem doing both sides....

Oh yeah I went there...

And you went there good

[Blend]

Khellendros, on 11 January 2013 - 01:54 AM, said:

Phew, got through the whole of the spoiler thread.


Team Avatar was awesomesauce for like 2 days and 2 nights, and then we steadily got dumber and dumber. I especially appeared to have gotten stupider with every succeeding day. There's no other way to put it. We were fucking lucky to win. In the end, I think it was Karosis' sneakiness about being scum (sometimes the HO tactic doesn't pay off!!) which undid the Equalists more than anything we did - if he had been more forward scum might have cottoned on about their number of players.


I'm very happy I managed to at least identify and kill Anomandaris - that was really my major challenge (and also the last bit of intelligence I used).


D'rek's act which suggested that she had 90% given up on the game really suckered me. It made me naively believe almost everything she was saying without thinking about it, simply because I thought, 'oh, she's not trying to play properly.' I'm a fool

I'm still confused by one thing though? Could or could not Amon re-direct any lynch, or just a lynch on them?



You might not know it from the thread, but when you actually come in and look at SH, this was a fantastically topsy-turvy game. Both Equalists and town looked like they could win easily any number of times before it switched again.

As ever, I really love the complexity of the roles, top notch Blend! I especially liked all the fail safes you built it, I thought that was excellent. Just when you think you have a character - BAM! An ability kicks in and they slide away And I think overall it seemed like a pretty fine balance (as demonstrated by the amount of swinging between faction superiority). The one thing I would have suggested is maybe comms between two of the Equalists to balance out the Team Avatar comms.

I agree. Were I to run this game again, Amon and Lieutenant would have comms. Incapacitates would mean people would not even be allowed to place a vote on thread. And I would take the VC of Mako and Asami having to survive off each of them.

[Osseric]

Wow... surprising how close the game was... coulda gone either way. Props to Blend. Thats why you never listen to people on thread I thought we had this game in the bag on day 2. Shoulda had more faith. Well done team Avatar!

[Tapper]

Lizradus, on 28 December 2012 - 06:44 PM, said:

Gnaw, on 28 December 2012 - 06:23 PM, said:

Uh, reference the whole "cannot vote" thing. I truly do not understand why Spite/Tapper!! is having such an issue with it. People on Day 2 who were told they could not vote did voted and their votes were not counted, question answered.

I guess Tapper planned to hide in the "I cannot vote" crowd. That possibility was taken from him, when the votes were simply not counted, as his vote would have counted.

That. But also you could push a player who's not allowed to vote into saying he doesn't want to vote because he's symping that person.
Now they could just vote and show they couldn't have their vote counted. The entire symping bit is gone from the ability.

[Shinrei]

Good game everyone but me! As I said to PS in a PM, my "in if you need the numbers" in the sign up thread should have been an out.

Apologies everyone!

[Tapper]

OK, now that I am here: pretty good design. See below for comments.

I'll have to admit though that SH was a lot more entertaining than the game has been for me as a player. I had an enhanced symping role, which was more powerful the more I was targeted, part of the reason why I saw no reason to not come out all guns blazing - also because I figured it would reveal metal benders who targeted me so I could then kill them, but I was dwarfed in all ways by town.

Regarding my role, I have 2 gripes. One major, which I already explained (the way the ability was handled, which has a really nasty effect on the symping potential of it), and one minor gripe: I could kill just 3 people with Kali Sticks, one of whom could become untouchable, none of them essential to town/scum victory.

In general:

I like your idea of turning the game upside down by reversing town and scum mechanics, but there's a reason why this in general doesn't really work. If town has info from the start, it is harder for scum to hide - a distinct minus. Second, town is always superior in intelligence gathering as the game progresses, even if it is by CF only, or secret info (finds). Scum by contrast is secure in the knowledge they won't have to gather info, apart from symp-spotting, maybe.

In your game, the information creep that is traditional for town was accelerated by the following things:

- 3 finders (~20% of the thread), 2 of whom in one team and with lover connections, meaning they won't do inefficient double finds of the 12 people left that are unknown to them. One of those had the Police Radio which means TA would have always known 1 Equalist by night 1 (Police Radio), a different one by night 4, and so on. This is increased by having another town finder who has no beef with Team Avatar and will go out of his way to keep them alive.

- The non-TA finder was lover-paired to a guard, allowing them to try to nullify any Equalists they found if they didn't manage to present a lynchable case on their find target.

- A quarter of the thread had off-thread comms with each other/through each other and shared victory conditions, leaving only 3/4 as their potential enemies, through which they could quickly rifle with finds and CFs, even in a climate with so many Incapacitates. The info spread between them was near absolute in theory - Police Radio night 1 would always have found an original Equalist, on whom then kills could be used.

- In a faction/cult game, lies are key as recruits need to obfuscate their shifted alignments. Finders do not go well with lies, especially since people will generally believe the revealed finder over any lie - and if the finder turns out to be a liar, he will be lynched and the damage he does, is limited to only 1 lynch. In this case, going against a reveal would have also have invited a plethora of night kills from TA.

- Finds are not even on the Reflect list so I expect they go through Reflects. This allows a town player with reflect to shelter behind it, secure in the knowledge that he won't cause friendly fire by his own actions, while his finders compile a picture of the thread with no negative effects for the air-bender himself.

- Town + Super-town had more kills than team scum (Iroh; unconditional kill, Korra; unconditional kill, unconditional passive kill (Mako), unconditional active super kill (Mako) vs Sato (unconditional kill, Lieutenant; conditional kill on 20% of thread). Combine the kills with the finds, and TA becomes super efficient in removing (minor) threads.

All in all, in return for the info-superiority of town and the ability to co-ordinate info-gathering and NA (in which TA was strong, too), scum got two things: an untrustworthy recruit ability that could be 100% undone at the same pace late game, and a higher survivability which could be by-passed. It was too much of an uphill battle, imho: Anomandaris as killer lacked information who was on his side/ added to his side, allowing a very big chance of killing a recruit/ fellow scum, adding a hurdle to achieving victory. As good as Amon was, he could also not carry the team by himself - even with D'rek going about her business as she did.

More general:

- the Mako CF should imho NEVER have happened, especially not since you had role name finds in the game: it immediately pin-pointed the new Amon instead of throwing the game wide open if it happened to a TA player, and there was always an (admittedly smaller) chance for other mishap/ back firing.

- Amon becoming an independent would basically have reduced any winning chances for the Equalists to zero, even if they were all still in the game. They simply would not have enough reliability to take opponents out.

A minor remark: in the OP, you provide a series for resolution, in which Block/Reflect comes after Incapacitate. Yet Reflect works on Incapacitate, per the wording of Reflect - despite Incapacitate being resolved already - for future reference, switch the two.

[Tattersail_]

I was winning this game no matter what team I was on ha ha, I made it my goal. I wish I won as an equalist because I thought D'rek played outstanding. Information on thread is what was their downfall, if Karosis joined in we could have had them.

[Tapper]

- the Mako CF should imho NEVER have happened, especially not since you had role name finds in the game: it immediately pin-pointed the new Amon instead of throwing the game wide open if it happened to a TA player, and there was always an (admittedly smaller) chance for other mishap/ back firing.

Why this was a tiny bit worse: the ability was an escape hatch - Amon doesn't die by accident due to all the protection he has. The ability doesn't advance scum VCs like a normal FM jump would (as an equalist still bites the dust). So when Amon is lynched, team Scum is already on its way to losing the game - jumping to a recruit doesn't mitigate that (numerically), but it opens up the game again as he could be hiding amongst X players. In the current version, he was still a known factor as long as someone had previously name-investigated/ lover contacted the person Amon jumped into.

[Khellendros]

Tapper's points make it seem as if town should have won overwhelmingly. And yet, as we saw, that was anything but the case. Town was one lynch away from losing several times. Although it did not seem like it in the game because town (outside of D'rek) completely dominated discussions, SH suggests that the game (due to its see-saw nature) was more balanced than these points suggest.


Yes, that was also down to how well/badly players played their roles - and luck also. Tapper's points are logical (and I entirely agree with him about the can't vote thing), but since when has logic ever survived impact with an actual mafia game?


As I said before, I do think the relative level of comms was the one big advantage for the good guys (although you have to remember even this was cut partway through the game). More than that, though, from a game perspective, a high level of comms tends to take discussion away from the thread, makes the thread less interesting and reduces the availability of clues sometimes. I would like to see in a game, if there has to be lover comms, some form of limited use ( either some kind of penalty if you use it, like no NAs that night or you can't vote, or limiting it to only being able to use it on certain days). I think that would help reduce or alter the effect (both gameplay-wise and thread-entertainment wise) of having lover comms.

[Blend]

Just as an FYI, I didn't actually give Asami the police radio ability, so there were only two finds. I had originally given town even more finds than that, but Venge kiboshed that right away when he was giving me advice about my game. Otherwise, thanks for advice Tapper!

[Blend]

Khellendros, on 11 January 2013 - 01:11 PM, said:

As I said before, I do think the relative level of comms was the one big advantage for the good guys (although you have to remember even this was cut partway through the game). More than that, though, from a game perspective, a high level of comms tends to take discussion away from the thread, makes the thread less interesting and reduces the availability of clues sometimes. I would like to see in a game, if there has to be lover comms, some form of limited use ( either some kind of penalty if you use it, like no NAs that night or you can't vote, or limiting it to only being able to use it on certain days). I think that would help reduce or alter the effect (both gameplay-wise and thread-entertainment wise) of having lover comms.

I like that idea, it's vewwy interesting!

[Tattersail_]

Khellendros, on 11 January 2013 - 01:11 PM, said:

Tapper's points make it seem as if town should have won overwhelmingly. And yet, as we saw, that was anything but the case. Town was one lynch away from losing several times. Although it did not seem like it in the game because town (outside of D'rek) completely dominated discussions, SH suggests that the game (due to its see-saw nature) was more balanced than these points suggest.


Yes, that was also down to how well/badly players played their roles - and luck also. Tapper's points are logical (and I entirely agree with him about the can't vote thing), but since when has logic ever survived impact with an actual mafia game?


As I said before, I do think the relative level of comms was the one big advantage for the good guys (although you have to remember even this was cut partway through the game). More than that, though, from a game perspective, a high level of comms tends to take discussion away from the thread, makes the thread less interesting and reduces the availability of clues sometimes. I would like to see in a game, if there has to be lover comms, some form of limited use ( either some kind of penalty if you use it, like no NAs that night or you can't vote, or limiting it to only being able to use it on certain days). I think that would help reduce or alter the effect (both gameplay-wise and thread-entertainment wise) of having lover comms.

Or for every post you do in a lover thread you have to post in the main thread?

[Blend]

Tapper, on 11 January 2013 - 09:43 AM, said:

OK, now that I am here: pretty good design. See below for comments.

I'll have to admit though that SH was a lot more entertaining than the game has been for me as a player. I had an enhanced symping role, which was more powerful the more I was targeted, part of the reason why I saw no reason to not come out all guns blazing - also because I figured it would reveal metal benders who targeted me so I could then kill them, but I was dwarfed in all ways by town.

Regarding my role, I have 2 gripes. One major, which I already explained (the way the ability was handled, which has a really nasty effect on the symping potential of it), and one minor gripe: I could kill just 3 people with Kali Sticks, one of whom could become untouchable, none of them essential to town/scum victory.

As I said, I agree with the non-vote thing. It was a mistake on my part, and I really didn't think of the consequences the way that you explained them. By the time you did, it had already been done one way, and I didn't want to change a mechanic mid-game.

As for the Kali Sticks thing, like I said, the point of this game was that the Equalists needed to run the thread, not use NAs to win. So your ability was more to help Equalists be able to run the thread by taking voting powers away from a non-Equalist. The possible kill was just a bonus.

Quote

In general:

I like your idea of turning the game upside down by reversing town and scum mechanics, but there's a reason why this in general doesn't really work. If town has info from the start, it is harder for scum to hide - a distinct minus. Second, town is always superior in intelligence gathering as the game progresses, even if it is by CF only, or secret info (finds). Scum by contrast is secure in the knowledge they won't have to gather info, apart from symp-spotting, maybe.

You're letting your expectations of what a scum team should be. Like I said in the OP of the game, this was both a faction game and a scum vs town game. The Equalists started off with five members, which is big for a scum faction, for two reasons. 1 - town had much more abilities than a normal town faction, and 2 - Team Avatar had the lover connections allowing them to communicate openly and share information (at least until Mako was recruited/died).

Quote

In your game, the information creep that is traditional for town was accelerated by the following things:

- 3 finders (~20% of the thread), 2 of whom in one team and with lover connections, meaning they won't do inefficient double finds of the 12 people left that are unknown to them. One of those had the Police Radio which means TA would have always known 1 Equalist by night 1 (Police Radio), a different one by night 4, and so on. This is increased by having another town finder who has no beef with Team Avatar and will go out of his way to keep them alive.

As I said above, I didn't end up using the Police Radio ability, so town only had 2 finds. Furthermore, the people who had finds had at least one other ability. I didn't expect Team Avatar to find Amon right away, and I didn't expect that the two finders would spend the first few nights just doing finds. That being said, there was a finder on Team Avatar, and a finder on Republic City faction. Venge had warned me about having too many finds, and I really thought that 2 finds who couldn't communicate would be fine, and I think, in the end, that it was.

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- The non-TA finder was lover-paired to a guard, allowing them to try to nullify any Equalists they found if they didn't manage to present a lynchable case on their find target.

Yes, that's correct. However, remove bending and incapacitates went through before guards did, so majority of the time, they couldn't guard whatever abilities were being used, and if they were to attack the Lieutenant, they would end up incapacitated anyway.

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- A quarter of the thread had off-thread comms with each other/through each other and shared victory conditions, leaving only 3/4 as their potential enemies, through which they could quickly rifle with finds and CFs, even in a climate with so many Incapacitates. The info spread between them was near absolute in theory - Police Radio night 1 would always have found an original Equalist, on whom then kills could be used.

Though I agree that the lover comms were a little too much, your above assertion rests a lot on how much information they have. Only Korra had a find, so they could only get info that way. I screwed up on how Bolin's Fire Ferret ability was used (I treated it as a full control rather than just a confuse) so I ended up giving them more information than they should have had, which did affect the game. If I hadn't screwed that up, I think the game would have looked different after Amon managed to recruit Mako away, thus severing the connection between Asami and the rest of Team Avatar.

Like I said somewhere above, if I were to run this same game again, rather than take away these lover connections, I think I would give the Equalists a lover connection, either between Amon and The Lieutenant, or Amon and Hiroshi Sato.

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- In a faction/cult game, lies are key as recruits need to obfuscate their shifted alignments. Finders do not go well with lies, especially since people will generally believe the revealed finder over any lie - and if the finder turns out to be a liar, he will be lynched and the damage he does, is limited to only 1 lynch. In this case, going against a reveal would have also have invited a plethora of night kills from TA.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say here.

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- Finds are not even on the Reflect list so I expect they go through Reflects. This allows a town player with reflect to shelter behind it, secure in the knowledge that he won't cause friendly fire by his own actions, while his finders compile a picture of the thread with no negative effects for the air-bender himself.

That was the idea, and why there was only one air bender (reflect) at the start of game. I wanted Tenzin to have a good chance of surviving to at least Day 3 in order for him to help Korra unlock her next level of abilities. That being said, Reflects did not reflect incapacitates, so the player could be neutralized in a different way.

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- Town + Super-town had more kills than team scum (Iroh; unconditional kill, Korra; unconditional kill, unconditional passive kill (Mako), unconditional active super kill (Mako) vs Sato (unconditional kill, Lieutenant; conditional kill on 20% of thread). Combine the kills with the finds, and TA becomes super efficient in removing (minor) threads.

Yes, the point of flipping the game on its head is to make it so town has to rely on NAs to win, whereas scum had to rely on leading the thread. Thus, town had kills, scum had less. I would, however, give Amon a once every three days kill ability were I to run this game again.

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All in all, in return for the info-superiority of town and the ability to co-ordinate info-gathering and NA (in which TA was strong, too), scum got two things: an untrustworthy recruit ability that could be 100% undone at the same pace late game,

Two things regarding this: 1 - Korra was not able to re-recruit until at least Day 5. 2 - Once Amon did his FM jump, he had 2 potential recruits per day, so 4 potential per 2 days. Korra could only re-recruit 3 over 2 days time, and had to find those that were recruited. Granted this didn't work out quite like I wanted (by the time Korra got this ability, basically everyone knew who everyone was) it could potentially have been confusing for everyone involved.

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and a higher survivability which could be by-passed. It was too much of an uphill battle, imho: Anomandaris as killer lacked information who was on his side/ added to his side, allowing a very big chance of killing a recruit/ fellow scum, adding a hurdle to achieving victory. As good as Amon was, he could also not carry the team by himself - even with D'rek going about her business as she did.

Amon survived through most of the game, largely because of Drek's guile. That was the point to the character. Hiroshi Sato was basically invincible for the first 5 days (nothing could kill him until Night 5, and he had a LP). The Lieutenant had a regenerating BP. I dunno, like I said, I agree that there should have been a lover connection on the Equalists' side, but in a normal town vs scum, town aren't given even close to as much power as this team got, and this was a flipping of the town vs scum paradigm.

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More general:

- the Mako CF should imho NEVER have happened, especially not since you had role name finds in the game: it immediately pin-pointed the new Amon instead of throwing the game wide open if it happened to a TA player, and there was always an (admittedly smaller) chance for other mishap/ back firing.

What should have happened instead? Someone dies, a CF is provided. If someone dies from the FM jump, they CF as their original faction. That was the rule I had made. What do you think I should have done instead?

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- Amon becoming an independent would basically have reduced any winning chances for the Equalists to zero, even if they were all still in the game. They simply would not have enough reliability to take opponents out.

If Amon had used Desperation, and Karosis had kept quiet, the last few days of the game would have been very interesting. No one even suspected that Karosis was an Equalist, to the point where they all figured he MUST have been recruited.

That being said, the Amon going Independent thing was a very last resort put in there to stir the game up during end-game if it was used. I had seriously hoped that Drek was going to use Desperation to redirect the lynch train from you during Day 8 to Osseric. That would have flipped the game upside down, and killed off Team Avatar's star player. She didn't, though, so them's the breaks.

Quote

A minor remark: in the OP, you provide a series for resolution, in which Block/Reflect comes after Incapacitate. Yet Reflect works on Incapacitate, per the wording of Reflect - despite Incapacitate being resolved already - for future reference, switch the two.

Reflects do not work on Incapacitates, which I spoke to Tenzin about via PM to clear it up. That was a mistake on my part in the game design. Someone incapacitates Tenzin, he gets incapacitated, he can't reflect it.

[Starling]

Whew, some definite ups and downs in that game, but it was fun at the end!

I knew Osseric was Korra, and I still managed to miss two hints aimed at me...

I think, as others have said, the game suffered from too many breaks. The Republic City faction never really felt like a faction, we had no leader, I didn't know anyone else in my faction, and I followed Korra's lead because we had complimentary VC's. It was interesting though to play a game with so much information floating around. I still think as a group we tend to rely on reveals, and I personally hate revealing, but it was awesome to see the maneuvering going on once lines were drawn.

All in all, nicely done, Blend!

[Khellendros]

Starling, on 11 January 2013 - 02:47 PM, said:

Whew, some definite ups and downs in that game, but it was fun at the end!

I knew Osseric was Korra, and I still managed to miss two hints aimed at me...

I think, as others have said, the game suffered from too many breaks. The Republic City faction never really felt like a faction, we had no leader, I didn't know anyone else in my faction, and I followed Korra's lead because we had complimentary VC's. It was interesting though to play a game with so much information floating around. I still think as a group we tend to rely on reveals, and I personally hate revealing, but it was awesome to see the maneuvering going on once lines were drawn.

All in all, nicely done, Blend!

I agree about the break, that was just unfortunate.

With the reveals, many of those were actually involuntary, as Gnaw did that fake PM post where he outed pretty much all the good guys. So I agree that I too dislike mass reveals, but in this case that was largely a result of one person's play.

I think overall the game mechanics played out well. We got to see pretty much everyone's special moves (missing out only I think Amon's Desperation), and that was cool.

I do think the game would have been quite different had Liosan not been chosen for a find on night 1. But that wasn't just dumb luck - we genuinely thought that Liosan stuck out, which is why we didn't just do a find on them, but I also incapacitated them that first night. And then when Spite jumped to the defence we knew we had a biggie, so we did another find. I do maintain that the first two days and nights Team Avatar did play very well, it wasn't just a case of luck or being over-powerful. It was only after we got over-confident and complacent that we started slipping up.

[Tattersail_]

Starling, on 11 January 2013 - 02:47 PM, said:

Whew, some definite ups and downs in that game, but it was fun at the end!

I knew Osseric was Korra, and I still managed to miss two hints aimed at me...

I think, as others have said, the game suffered from too many breaks. The Republic City faction never really felt like a faction, we had no leader, I didn't know anyone else in my faction, and I followed Korra's lead because we had complimentary VC's. It was interesting though to play a game with so much information floating around. I still think as a group we tend to rely on reveals, and I personally hate revealing, but it was awesome to see the maneuvering going on once lines were drawn.

All in all, nicely done, Blend!

I don't know. I often play to win. If by revealing, this helps my faction/team win AND there are no restrictions to revealing then I don't mind getting that information on thread. I did hold back for two days though knowing Ano was an Equalist. By revealing this about Ano when Galain recruited me no one was the wiser. This actually helped me fit into the Equalists quite well. Then I was re recruited by Osseric, my game was full of ups and downs.

[D'rek]

re factions vs town game - even though TA and RC were seperate factions, they both needed to eliminate the equalists to win and the equalists were presented as big bad evil dudes. Plus you have members of republic city and TA knowing each other and depending on each other for abilities. So other than for semantics, they are essentially one big town, at least until the equalists are all dead. You can say that they're seperate factions in the OP as much as you like, but they're setup as being mutually dependent and the scenes/meta content is all portrayed like they are all the "good guys" against the equalist "bad guys" so they are always going to consider each other one big town.


re finders and scum leading the thread - I'd argue that town had 4 finders. Lin and Korra both have the direct find ability. Yes Korra has other abilities, but if you give someone in town a find and a bunch of vigs and say "You need to kill this guy!" they are always going to do the finds, then vig when they find him, which is far more helpful to town than seperated roles where the vig might fire early before the finder can find the villain and signal the vig, or one might die. Then there's both Bolin and Tarrlok, who don't have direct find abilities but can pretty much do soft finds with their blood bending and fire ferret abilities. Since all the abilities were flavour-texted with the theme, most roles would easily be determined from getting their ability texts via these two methods - if you get any bend ability, you know your target is not an equalist; if you get remove bending you know it is Amon; if you get Kali sticks, a simple google search tells you it is the Lieutenant, etc. The same applies to Lin's evolved super earth bend that can give them a mass soft find of everyone who targets them.

Those finds, plus the TA group all knowing 5 of their own, was always going to mean that much of town would quickly know almost everyone's role. That in and of itself might not be too bad, since in a cult game someone who's role and even faction you know can be turned and you don't know. BUT, then we had every night scene saying explicitly which roles were recruited AND if they recruited a major role there were obvious signs like the lover bonds breaking. So if, for example, Lin Beifong gets recruited, there is a scene explicitly telling town this, and Lin will already be one of the many roles they know about or easily deduced as being within one of the handful of roles they don't yet know.

The result of this, then, is that the town power roles all easily know who to trust. They can talk openly on-thread, can easily for voting blocks and don't need to be worried about being called out on little slips or weird behaviour because there's a group of them that KNOW they are together and still town. If scum tries to lead a lynch on one of the town power roles, that whole group knows the reasonings for the lynch are wrong, and will immediately flip it on the scum trying to get the lynch, because for the town roles there is no need to worry that they are turning it on a mistaken town power role - WCS it is a mistaken townie. And there's not much scum can do to mitigate this - they can try to lynch other players, but lynching minor townies is not nearly as helpful and they run the risk of hitting their own unknown scum partners. And of course it becomes very easy for town to keep the scum down by killing or decoding every recruit since they know who they are - as evidenced by the only scum being the starting ones for almost the whole game.

So, scum leading the thread, without knowing each other but with a big block of town power roles knowing each other, is not something I think could work (in this or almost any game).

Blend, on 11 January 2013 - 02:34 PM, said:

I had seriously hoped that Drek was going to use Desperation to redirect the lynch train from you during Day 8 to Osseric. That would have flipped the game upside down, and killed off Team Avatar's star player. She didn't, though, so them's the breaks.

I wasn't online at the time. If you re-use an ability like that in some future game, you might want to make it possible to pre-choose it (ie the player submits during the day provisionals for using it based on whether someone gets lynched, such as "If Spite or I get lynched, redirect it onto Merrid, otherwise don't use it")


General impressions:

It was a good game, and there's a lot of enjoyable parts and aspects in there. It may not be perfectly balanced, but it is hard to say for sure. At the very least, it's better balanced than my first complex game The theme and mechanics had pretty good synergy and thank god we didn't have to get used to a whole new set of avatars again!

The two biggest things I think to take forward for consideration when making your next game are:

{a} clarity of information - there seemed to be a bunch of abilities that didn't quite work the way people expected them to from their wording, and little unexpected glitches like the NA order or CFs. When it comes to complex abilities, giving more information to the player on how their ability should work is always good - draw them a flowchart if you have to. Don't expect players to know what you mean by a technical term - even "Find" can mean a lot of different things to different people. Likewise, don't be shy about putting lots of info in the OP.

Alternatively, be like Obdi and give far less information than you gave here, so no one has any expectations of being able to understand a damn thing.

{b} expectations/conveyance - the flipping-town-and-scum idea was certainly not a bad idea, but I think it faltered because no one had any inkling of it at first. For myself, I got told that I'm the head of some shadowy political guerilla group, that my main power is recruiting, and that my recruits will be powerless once recruited. As far as I knew, I didn't have any followers already and so there was no reason not to play like a traditional cult game - hide in the near-RIs and recruit until I am absolutely sure I have an overwhelmingly large number of followers. There was no reason for me to ever think that I should be trying to lead the thread, or that I had 2 guards and a pseudo-killer under me already.

If you expect certain teams/players to play a certain way and it is more beneficial for them to do so, you need to give them a big hint about it - both in your theme, your flavour text, and in their capabilities (ie Amon knows he has 4 followers at the start that know him, even if he doesn't know who they are, or give him a broadcast-a-message-on-thread ability). If a team/player actually needs to play a certain way to win, then you really, really, really have to hint and prod and push them into that.

[The Dude]

3 things that happened I believe completely changed the outcome of this game. 1 procedural and 2 as a result of play.

1. The night scenes were too informative. As D'rek said. It was easy for me to determine who to energy bend based directly on the scenes. Hell, I might not have energy bended anyone had I not known about the recruiting mechanism. Which leads me to ...

2. Giles getting Lio's PM completely changed the game and had we not received his (poorly conveyed ) list of Lio's abilities we would have been doomed. Almost 0 shot at winning.

3. Also, Our find/incapacitate of Lio on night one. As Khell said, this wasn't luck. We picked out D'rek right away. If we had floundered for even 2-3 days I feel the equalists would have run the table.


So even with the 3 things above, equalists could have won with a bit more aggressive play from Karosis. I really don't think there were as many balance issues as some are making there out to be. If any of the 3 things above don't happen, Equalists probably win. That seems like a decently balanced game to me.

[Gnaw]

Poor Blend.

Colonoscopy without anesthesia.

[Blend]

I very much appreciate all the input people are giving me. I rather enjoy creating the complex games, and hope to make more in the future, and stuff like this will help me make them better, so thanks again!