Well, from my point of you I really don’t like moderators handling participation on a case-by-case basis. (Or any interpretation of rules for that matter.) It leads to players playing against the moderator, rather than the other players. They’ll unconsciously push against the limits set by the moderator, who will then be responsible for making an important game decision–when to remove a player from the game.
Instead, I think it’s best to have rules with bright lines. In earlier games, I used a minimum post count or required voting. Some players expressed dislike to such hard rules. So, for this game, I removed all moderator enforcement of participation. I consider this the “pure Mafia” solution, in that it puts it entirely in the hands of the players. If a player wants to try lurking as a tactic, they have the freedom to do so. And other players have the means to discourage that.
In this game, I think the players came down to hard on the “lurkers”. But players should have the chance to play poorly.
My current read on the situation: storyteller0910 and tdpatriots neither one tried to smear the other based on that helm-passing thing, so they’re probably both the same moral alignment. There being more Good than Evil, that makes them both probably Town (also backed up by the lack of curse counterclaim on td and storyteller’s admission of the Helm in the first place).
MHaye’s watching of sachetorte and the agreement of their stories shows that it is not the case that MHaye is evil and sach is good, because if so, then MHaye wouldn’t dream of contributing unnecessary information to exonerate sach (if sach is indeed Good, then there’s nothing Evil would like more than to see him disintegrated). Most likely, they’re both on the same side, and again I lean Good.
Chucara is looking suspicious for not revealing the result of her investigation, in addition to her attacks on sach in the first turn. The only reason a Detective in a normal game doesn’t tell all every turn is that you don’t want to let the scum know who the Detective is, but that’s not a factor in this game. Ordinarily, I’d be hesitant to lynch her just because of her potential value if she’s good, but a known detective who won’t share her results is no detective at all.
sinjin obviously has a useful, non-passive item (assuming he’s telling the truth), or there wouldn’t be any reason to focus his chi. That may have been a good move, rather than just using his item two turns in a row, if he wanted to wait for more hard info before choosing his action. The action he ultimately chooses could be Good or Evil, though: I don’t have a read on that.
ZSophia is probably Chaotic, since she Watched (as confirmed by Hawkeyeop), instead of using Protocol. A Lawful would probably have regarded the information from Protocol as more valuable, but a Chaotic, not so much.
Boozahol Squid, P.I. is playing about as pro-Town as he can, given his role. He’s either Good or doing a good job of hiding.
ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies is talking a lot about Chaotic folks as enemies. She’s almost certainly Lawful, and possibly Evil (trying to stir up town-on-town sentiment).
I just wanted to get all my guesses on record, to see how close I come eventually.
A quick look only shows the Sword of Dancing and the rabid wolf from the Bag of Tricks have an even chance for success, the rest have a high chance or are passive. Not sure if his chi applies to the items chance of those, as they act on their own.
So focusing is only useful to boost a watching or stealing action.
He is actually a better at stealing from the hoard now then a Thief, with reduced chance to be detected. But then he wouldn’t have announced he focused his chi, but instead that he failed watching someone for example.
On the other hand, two times a even chance to watch is better than one high chance (21/2 vs 15/6). So seen like that stealing seems to be what he has in mind. Of course, that isn’t necessarily bad, town should get the Orb of Healing back, but he couldn’t have foreseen that. Maybe he anticipated a good item dropping, but then he should have announced that.
Pleonast, does the chance boost affect the Sword of Dancing and rabid dog? How are multiple steals from the hoard (or even player with multiple Thieves) handled? Everyone rolls and if more success than items, rerolling until enough steals fail?
If more thieves are successful than items in the Hoard (or more than one targeting a single item), I have to randomize the order they go in. The last thief(s) would be left empty handed.
Hmm, what if there are multiple increase chance/decrease chance effects working on something? For instance, an elf mage doesn’t normally get any benefit from his racial magic boost, since all of his powers are high, anyway. But what if someone else uses an ability that decreases his chance of success? Does it go high -> increase (and stay at high) -> decrease down to medium, or do the increase and decrease cancel each other out?
Or more apropos to the question at hand, if the monk has a high-chance physical item like the Sword of Slashing, he might use his chi one turn, and then his speed power the next turn to slash at three people. If he did so, would it be high chance for the first target, and then medium for targets two and three?
(man, that would suck for Good if Evil managed to pull that one off)
Once this game is over, I’m definitely going to have to do a rules rewrite. I tried to write the rules simply and clearly, but there’s always something that’s in my head that I forget to explain. The next time I run these rules, it will be much smoother.
There is an unfortunate consequence of a complex, open rules set. The rules need to be explained clearly and unambiguously. But the longer the rules are, the harder it is to do that.
By the way, I of course welcome any comments on how to make this game more balanced, fun, or improved in any other way.
That sucked. What a poor performance by Town so far - not just my own mislynch, but the stupid lynch-a-lurker twofer on Turn One and the failure to lift the Curse on tdpats. Horrific.
Look on the bright side: Now you get to read our witty commentary.
And I can take comfort in knowing that the first of my predictions in post 42 was definitely correct: You and td are indeed both the same moral alignment, and you are indeed both Good.
We now have 4 dead Good characters and presumably one in the pipeline means at best there’s 7 Good vs 3 Evil. And at worst Evil will win at the end of the Turn unless they kill more Evil than Good.
It looks like sachetorte just said that Hockey Monkey was his investigation last turn, but he lied about the results. If so, he just dug his own grave. Last turn, MHaye claimed to have Watched sach, and saw him fail to use a magical power. This is a clear conflict between what sachetorte said and what MHaye said, meaning that they’re opposite alignments. But I’ve already made my case ruling out the situation where sach is good and MHaye is evil, so if they’re opposites, then it must be the case that sach is evil.
My guess is that this mistake was a result of sach misunderstanding exactly how the Watch action works, which is plausible if (as seems likely) he hasn’t used it yet.
An interesting possibility: There is is at least one Lawful Evil player. All of the Chaotic Evil players (if there are any) die. At least one Chaotic Good player has an item (after all, why should he give it up when the scum are winning?). The Evil players gain a majority. Thus, no player wins since it’s a Chaotic Evil win condition and none of them are alive.
I suppose you could continue it, but what would be the point since the Evil players would have control of lynches, so Good cannot win (unless there’s an interesting set of one-shot kills available that the scum cannot counter with their own), and the Chaotic Good players have no reason to give up their items since they have no way to win and it would just hand victory to the Lawful Evil players anyway.
So, chances are, if you’d probably want to revise the win conditions for Lawful/Chaotic, or at least tweak the Chaotic Evil win condition.
In fact, on that front, I’d actually considered in times past some roles based on alignment. For example, Vigilante is Chaotic Good, SK is Chaotic Evil (maybe Chaotic Evil, depending on color), Vanilla is Neutral Good, Doctor is Lawful Good, Scum are Lawful Evil, etc. And I tried to come up with a way to make a True Neutral alignment work in mafia, and I couldn’t come up with a win condition, much less a set of powers, that would fit something like that. If you do update, it might be interesting to try to update the rules to include the full spectrum of alignments.
I already asked about that one. The game ends when there exists at least one player who has satisfied both of es win conditions. In this situation, nobody has both of their win conditions, so the game isn’t over. The Lawful Evils can win the game from that point by forming a voting bloc to disintegrate all of the remaining Chaotic Goods.
Edit:
Even if nobody else notices the slip, MHaye (whom I am now almost certain is Good) surely will, and once he points it out, it’s pretty blatent. So yes, I do think that sachetorte will be spending next turn inside a decorative urn, unless he makes a very convincing case that he meant something else entirely.
I’m reading so far, and note that sachertorte has been arguing vociferously for every lynch so far. He’s opening up with this Hockey Monkey thing, and I’m suddenly very suspicious of him.
If it’s even, then the current rules would result in both an Evil and Good player being lynched (since they’d tie), and then the Evil players would curse someone. Played out, Evil gets 2 kills per turn versus 1 for town, so Evil wins. That, of course, assumes that all the Evil players are completely revealed, which is unlikely, so the ability of town to form a voting bloc is severely limited.
That is, barring a very lucky set of one-shot kills, it is impossible for Good to win once the Evil win condition has been met. You MIGHT be able to end up with a Lawful condition if scum are sloppy with their curses, or the one-shots help balance out the curses so that everyone dies at the same time.
So, my point is, since it’s a virtually unavoidable victory, there’s no point in forcing it to be played out, and just update the Lawful Evil win condition to win regardless of where the items are (since they are in a majority and can just take them anyway) and find another way to make Chaotic Evil interesting like still requiring them to be alive, but get some sort of benefit like increased investigation resistance or a chance for deflecting a night-kill onto a different Evil player, etc.
He’s easily able to talk his way out of it. He almost single-handedly got both me and zuma lynched Yesterday, and I seriously doubt that he’d make a move like that unless scum is in a very solid position (ie, probably no worse than 4-7, with whoever cursed). First, MHaye (or someone) has to notice it, then you have to concern yourself with what powers and abilities may have resulted in a read, and then you have to calculate whether MHaye may have lied and sachetorte didn’t say anything Yesterday because he didn’t want to reveal what he did.
The problem is, sachetorte is playing the dangerous game of being loud and too present for anyone to have a sufficient opportunity of building a case against him unless it’s glaring evidence. MHaye having said something contradictory could have enough holes poked in it to make 1-2 town’s people doubt it. If the scum can get 2 people to doubt it and pile on with one or both of them, then the worst that’ll happen is a tie, the curse likely goes off, they curse someone else, and use whatever possible powers they may have (possibly including a one-shot kill), and the worst they end up Tomrrow at is 5-3, with one more curse out there, so the town is in LyLo, and possibly a win if they use any one-shot kills, or they can avoid a tie.
Of course, if sachetorte is Evil, I’m that much more upset about how the game went and all the more reason for me to have a hiatus, but… oh well.
Not every Evil win is inevitably a Lawful Evil win. The scenario we’re looking at there is assuming that all Chaotic Evils are already dead. If there is still at least one Chaotic Evil with an item when the evil win condition triggers, then all surviving Chaotic Evils win, but not the Lawful Evils. This could happen from a Chaotic Evil being a jerk to his “teammates” and trying to go for a more exclusive win, or it could happen accidentally if the Evil win happens quicker than expected (for instance, a multi-lynch of Goods) and the Chaotic Evils don’t have a chance to dump their items.
Did I miss discussion of town grabbing the Orb of Healing and the Amulet of Reflection out of the hoard? Or has nobody payed attention to the fact that they’re missing? If Evil got a hold of them (and that might very well be the case), then that could be bad for Town. That orb is especially important for them to keep out of Town’s hands–moreso now that one of the clerics certainly seems to be Evil now.
It also makes perfect sense why Evil has cursed tdpats and Boozahol; they aren’t worth saving (not enough pro-town powers), so Sach has a very good excuse to not un-curse them and thereby help town. I’m trying to think of how Evil could use this ruse to curse or false-claim a curse on a player with arguably pro-town powers, and have Sach (or someone with the Orb of Healing, maybe) cure or claim-cure said player, in order to gain some townie cred. But I’ve watched enough mafia games that I know complicated plans get pretty risky, and the earlier this scenario could be played out, the better, before too much information is out there.
In fact, even if curing were unlimited-use, there’s good reason not to try to un-curse Boozahol: Anyone attempting to would face a 1-in-6 chance of getting killed by his traps (as sach pointed out).
Meanwhile: Boozahol is assuredly the least-powerful Townie, unless he’s got a really good item (which I doubt: Assuming he’s telling the truth, which is almost certain now, he didn’t try to use it on turn 1). But he’s also the least likely to be healed of the Curse. That tells me that, at this point, Evil is going for the raw numbers, rather than hunting power-roles. And that, in turn, tells me that Evil thinks the end is nigh. And if they think that, then the presumably more-numerous Lawful Evils aren’t worried about the Chaotic Evils stealing the win. Which means that the presumed one or two Chaotic Evils have already given up their items. But they didn’t drop them into the Hoard, and I don’t think that they had enough actions available to perform a give-accept. So that in turn implies that someone on the Evil side used a unilateral item-transfer power.
So the end of this long chain of inferences is that at least one thief is Evil, and Hockey Monkey is pretty much exonerated by being accused by sachetorte. Therefore, Darth Sensitive is probably evil.
But that might be too convoluted a chain of reasoning. I’m confident that each individual link is fairly strong, but there are enough of them, and only one needs to be wrong for the chain to break.
Meanwhile, I’m starting to see a pattern in some of the random chances… Boozaholstoryteller, and tdpats have now all been confirmed (or as good as) as good, and they’re all near the bottom of my list on page 1, while Chucara and sachetorte both look pretty scummy to me now. It’d be pretty ironic if the luck of the draw gave the Good guys all of the Evil-suited classes, and Evil the Good-suited classes.