In my opinion, I feel this is a terribly shitty statement to make. You weren’t even in the game.
Thanks for introducing the game to the board, MentalGuy. I think that non-vanilla Resistance will be better for play-by-forum. In TT Resistance, you can try and read players reactions, but PBF allows them to be much more cagey about giving out information. If playing with Merlin (who knows who all spies are), there is asymmetry that can lead to more interesting first round votes. I think it was a mistake to reject the first proposed team, but I’m having trouble justifying any first round team until the fifth. 4 0-10 reject votes and one 10-0 pass vote still leaves the Resistance in the dark as much as a single 10-0 accept.
I think my favorite setup is Merlin, Assassin, Percival. With more than 7 payers, things get much harder for the good guys, so I’d add Oberon, which really screws up what the spies can assume about voting and failing.
I think the game will play well with 9 or 11, but 10 is a nasty spot for the Resistance. I think 5 is pretty easy for the Resistance and not very good either.
I’d be interested in at least looking at the Avalon version for forum play. What do the different roles do?
I disagree with this. You in particular, had you assumed one Spy on each mission, would have seen that there were two spies among (sinjin, me, you) and thus ID’d two Spies. Even convincing people that were two spies among the three of us would have got Resistance a lot further (but not far enough, given the WinCon).
What you did was stumbling in the dark. You could just as well have said “Suppose that the first four people on the list are the four spies. This might not be true, but if it is, it gives us a framework to move forward with. Therefore we should assume that.”. Surely, you see that that would be a terrible basis for any logic, right? But the assumption that there were two spies on mission 1 was not appreciably better than that.
sachertorte, it’s easy enough to say that conventions like that are against the spirit of the game, but the rules are such as to make it really hard for it not to happen. If you don’t want that to happen (and I agree that you shouldn’t), then you really need to find some way to change the game rules.
For that matter, something like that could happen even with a new group that hadn’t had time to develop conventions yet. People talk about the spies hiding communications between each other, but what if they don’t even try to hide? What if one of the spies were to stand up at the start of the game and just outright say “OK, I’m a spy, and whenever two or more spies are on the same mission, the first one clockwise from me around the table should be the one to vote fail”? Assuming that a convention didn’t already exist, I’m not even convinced this would be a bad tactic. It should be a bad tactic, but I’m not sure it is.
I seriously considered this. I couldn’t see a major downside. Outing myself meant that the odds of any given person being a spy fell from 40% to 33%, and solved the co-ordination problem. But it seemed like it might be more fun not to do that.
After a cursory look at the Resistance games on BGG, it seems most if not all of them are not the plain vanilla game but have some theme with special roles. The roles are often from Avalon or based on Avalon. Some moderators have also invented custom roles; I am especially partial to the Battlestar Galactica theme and roles.
I’m not even sure we’d continue playing if somebody in my RL group did this. It just sort of breaks the game’s conceit.
Assuming we did continue playing, I guess have fun sitting at the table and doing literally nothing for the next half hour? You’re not going to get voted onto any missions and nobody is going to listen to anything you have to say. It’s not like Battlestar Galactica where the revealed Cylon gets to continue screwing with the rest of the players (though that’s still less fun than being a sneaky bastard).
What does my lack of presence in the game have to do with anything?
septimus not only understood that the game was stacked against him, but also put forth a strong effort to play the game and play the game well. As an outside observer that was clear enough. I don’t think one had to be playing the game to see septimus as anything but a good contributor and a good sport.
Mocking his play is out of line.
I’m actually surprised I’m the only one bothered by this. I guess I’ll shut up now.
Oh. I hadn’t considered an overt coordination. I read your statements as some sort of a priori agreement. I agree that an overt discussion of coordination would be within the rules and not ‘cheating.’
Also, I think the benefit greatly depends on the composition of the teams. In the 10 player version, with 4 spies and needing only 3 fails to win, the spies have a clear extra that could set up the overt coordination. In games with only 3 or 2 spies, an overt spy would be giving up a lot more for coordination. In those cases, I could see coordination as being bad for spies as they would be giving up too much for too little.
:dubious: Mocking? You think I was mocking his play? On the contrary, I greatly appreciated the efforts he made to suss out a winning play for the Resistance, however misguided. As a spy, I knew his logic was based on faulty premises and did my best to take advantage to build my cover and sow even more confusion. Would that the rest of the Resistance had done the same.
I would like to think that septimus and I have, over the course of the game, built up some sort of rapport. We would politely disagree, within the context of the game. You, sachertorte, are just an outsider butting in on friendly post-game trash talk between honorable competitors.
septimus, I would gladly play another game with you. Maybe next time we’ll be on the same team.
This is the first statement of appreciation you made. Everything prior included:
(1) A statement to the other spies celebrating success
(2) A statement proclaiming septimus as spy MVP.
Nowhere do I see anything resembling appreciation for septimus’s ‘efforts… for the Resistance.’
Perhaps you do, truly, feel that way; but your posts did not reflect it.
I’m not as much of an outsider as you think. “friendly trash-talk” is just a euphemism for “mocking.”
And, perhaps, the fact that I am an outsider is precisely why I feel so comfortable pointing out that I think septimus was great in the game and that disparaging his play is tactless at best. I’m neither a sore-winner nor a sore-loser in this situation.
In all honesty, Terminus, I thought your comment came over as mocking and a little unnecessary too. It would be one thing to say that after a close game, but given that septimus was dealt a losing hand and played it with enthusiasm and commitment it seems harsh to crow about how his efforts only helped us more.
Congrats, spies!
Fun game, but I’d like to try it again with a smaller group.
Interesting read in the Unspoiled thread. I liked the idea of seeing the 5 options for teams before voting to accept/reject which we had started to implement somewhat. I didn’t feel like I got any information from the votes. Should we have been able to figure out that mission 2.1 and 2.2 had 2 spies and that’s why they were rejected? Those that rejected both of those missions were Terminus, Stanislaus, and Hooker. In hind site, it looks like a good clue.
Merlin is a good guy who knows who all the spies are. Merlin is always played with the Assassin.
The assassin is evil and functions as a normal evil character until the good guys win their third mission. (If evil wins three, the assassin wins as a normal evil player.) The assassin then names one good guy to assassinate. If it’s Merlin, evil snatches victory from the good guys. (He prevents Merlin from being totally obvious about being Merlin.) The duo of Merlin and the assassin is fairly well balanced in my opinion and is the core difference between Avalon and Resistance.
Percival is a good guy who knows who Merlin is. In general, his job is to protect Merlin, though he has to do it without either giving away who Merlin is. He is a weak benefit to the Resistance.
Mordred is evil and is not known to Merlin. He is a moderate boon to evil.
Oberon is evil, but he does not know who is evil and is unknown to the other evil players. He is known to Merlin. He is a major help to the good guys.
Morgana is evil. Bother Morgana and Merlin are known to Percival, but it is not revealed which is which. Morgana is a benefit for evil.
Lancelot is good and evil. He can change as the game progresses. I don’t care for him at all and don’t think he’d be any good for PBF.
Avalon also adds a mechanism, the Lady of the Lake, who is not a player. After the third mission, one of the players gets to ask another player if they are good or evil. The player responds in secret. This is a moderate to strong benefit to the good guys.
Avalon also adds the Sword in the Stone, which is given by the leader to any other player when a mission starts (i.e. a team is approved). It can then be used by the chosen player to flip fail/success card of one player prior to revealing that players choice of fail/success. In my very limited experience with the Sword, I find its balanced.
This is why Resistance meta is important. If your group always has the shortest spy fail if two spies are on the mission, is Jim the Giant really Resistance, or did Tiny Tim fail the mission to cover Jim? In my group, two spies usually means the mission passes in Missions 1 or 2, but after that all bets are off. We also kind of downsell the game. “You’ll like the game. Well, you won’t like the first game, but you have to play it twice. It only takes 15 minutes.” Three hours later, they’re wondering how tall Jim is and whether they should throw the fail.
As long as the communication is above table, it’s fair game in my opinion. Secret signals, trading cards, or flashing cards should be considered verboten. Likewise, communication outside the thread except PMs to the GM should be off limits.
This was my last message to Mental Guy:
I did’t feel any winners glee at the end of the game. It seems obvious to all, now that it is over, that it wasn’t balanced correctly. That happens when a new game is tried. I would play another iteration of the game.
As a non-spy I would have suspected Mahaloth as a spy, but then again I always think Mahaloth is scum in mafia, ahahahahaha.
Thanks Mental Guy for a first iteration. Onward and upward!!!
I decided to start a new thread for the new game. It is here. If you would like to play, sign up in that thread.
Keep the thoughts coming, though, in this thread. I have found this discussion interesting.
I don’t see how this ever becomes relevant. For any given accepted convention for which spy fails a mission, the result is exactly the same: Any mission with any number of spies on it gets exactly one fail vote and all the rest success. Absent a watcher-type role, or the Sword in the Stone you described, there’s no way to know who that one fail came from, so it doesn’t matter.
I think “convention,” which implies an a priori understanding of how to resolve spy collisions, falls under the cheating category. In order for an accepted convention to happen, there needs to be out-of-game communication, which is not allowed. I think we can agree that conventions exist that would thwart spy collision without revealing who is a spy or even that a collision occurred at all. However, to AGREE on a convention to use would require communication.
I do agree, that in-game communication and coordination publicly should be allowed (but as Chronos stated before, the game should be designed to make such a move painful for the spies).
I was thinking about the large group setup a bit more and wonder what would happen to a larger game if the mission sizes were smaller. I understand that the game scaling scaled up the mission sizes as well, which makes natural sense, but I wonder if game-balance would be better achieved with the same size missions as for the 5 or 6 player game with 10 players. I think those teams were 2 or 3 in size.
In any case, missions with 3, 4, and 5 people need MORE missions for the game balance to keep up with larger numbers of players. The downside is that the game would be very very long.
Also, in the unspoiled thread, we discussed the aversion of the players to reject teams. From what I’ve read, that is the natural tendency of new players. But also, I think the fact that in real life a team reject extends the game by a few minutes whereas online a reject extends the game by two days is also a deterrent. Had the game made use of 3 or 4 of the rejects each mission, that amounts to an additional 18-24 days of game (minimum). Yikes that’s a long game. But perhaps others are more patient than I am.
In which case, I sincerely apologize once again to septimus and all the opposing team. I hope the experience hasn’t soured you on the game too much and anticipate playing with you in future games.
Thanks to MentalGuy for running the game and all the players, resistance and spies alike, for their participation.