Personally I just want to know why in God’s name Hardly was reading the forbidden thread in the first place.
Nominally I’m with Storyteller on the rules of that being vaguely silly, since it’s unspoiled anyway, but the rules are the rules after all.
OK. Fair enough. But that would have allowed us, as players, to manipulate the rules to create an outcome beneficial to us. Breaking the rules, essentially, would have moved us closer to winning. To me, that’s an intolerable condition, which is why I’d prefer the Moderator retain some degree of autonomy when it comes to rules and enforcement thereof.
neta:
i just think that you go down a slippery slope if the mod starts having to decide whether a described offense deserves a penalty different than that which is prescibed. especially if the decision is based on how it affects game state.
or potentially that would be outlined in the rules set. this begets that unless it really hurts or helps a certain faction, based on my own opinion and then i will just kind of try to figure out something.
that kind of attitude would piss me off as a player.
I was assuming it was an accident of some sort. On a few occassions, I’ve accidentally stumbled into Forbidden Threads while doing post histories in previous games (I’ve always notified the Moderator, by the way, and have never been modkilled for it). Do we have reason to believe it was done on purpose?
but that’s exactly what i did when i “broke” sach’s game regarding minimum posts per day.
those were the rules we were playing under.
are you suggesting that there be no rules and the mod just kind of make up stuff on the fly? i don’t think that would be fun to me.
I’ll need to run the numbers when I have more time, but I don’t think that this game was balanced. Scum had a roleblocker and an investigator, while Town had two roles that combined to cost the Town an extra mislynch(Harry Potter and the Weasley twins), with Town not really getting any really good roles to compensate.
Scum were ridiculously lucky, by the way. They killed the cop Night One and investigated me either Night One or Night Two. I self protected the Night I was killed, knowing that I was the obvious kill choice, but they roleblocked me.
and i think all of us have done searches and have accidentally ended up someplace we weren’t supposed to be. but once i get there i get out and don’t peruse. and you are right that when that has happened to me i let the mod know.
anyone else want to add some additional data.
IIRC, one of those was in the game I moderated. I did not, however, state up front that I would modkill for it, the way that Mahaloth did. This might be an argument that reading the forbidden thread should not be a capitol offense, but if it is, then it just hurts the game even more to not enforce it, or to enforce it selectively.
My personal view is that, if a game is set up correctly, the moderator should not have to make any decisions from the moment he visits random.org to assign the roles until the moment the game is over. Now, obviously, none of us are perfect, so there will be occasional flaws in game design that have to be fixed on the fly, but such should be avoided as much as possible.
Possibly, but I don’t know the contents of the PM that he sent to Mahaloth. He did however bring an idea from the forbidden forest into the game. But if he was reading the thread on purpose or on accident, I don’t know.
Well, OK, if Hardly was reading the thread on purpose, with full knowledge that it was against the rules… well, I still think the existence of a Forbidden Thread is silly (especially in a game with multiple subs who all had exposure to that thread at one time or another), but I entirely withdraw my philosophical disagreement regarding the rest.
peeker, you already have played in games like that. Every game I’ve moderated since I think Evil Dead has said this:
I don’t know. I kind of like it that way. No one gets to game the system, plus there’s room to relax enforcement of the rules in cases where it’s warranted (someone stumbles into a thread where they don’t belong, someone loses power and can’t post sufficiently, and so on) while remaining fair and keeping the game fun.
I investigated you night one and pedescribe night two, so the whole song and dance about the other mason staying in the shadows was very funny to me.
If the game hadn’t ended and guiri had been lynched, I probably would have killed OAOW or chip. So yeah. Storyteller was safe as long as he thought I was town.
This is true, but it is not something that most players think about. The idea that intentional suicide can benefit town seems wrong, but in endgame it becomes a very powerful tool. I agree that super-strict enforcement of modkill rules is not something we can implement because it gives a tool for town to use. Since Simpletown, I note that modkill is an automatic loss, not that anyone really pays attention to it. In other words, Had OAOW gotten himself killed, he would be handed a loss anyway so as to prevent motivation for such manipulations.
I agree with Rysto that the game seems tilted pro-Scum.
I don’t think the moderator should be hampered by the rules that they lay down. But on the other hand, I support moderator’s right to fully interpret a situation and make the best call. I personally prefer other punishments to modkills since modkills have the greatest effect on overall game balance.
However storyteller, in the game I ran on giraffe (spaghetti western) I was struck with the exact situation that you described a player breaking the rules which would have benefited his team had I enforced them.
Situation:
Tied Lynch, sudden death overtime. Peeker starts posting his role pm, but is town and is one of the lynch candidates. the other lynch candidate is the last scum player. I chose to ignore the rule violation, since the it would result in an overall reward for breaking the rules. Town ended up lynching scum anyways, but I didn’t think that I should award town the victory simply because a single player chooses to flout the rules.
So, had you voted guiri and one and only had edited, I would have stalled the game and put the question up for review to be decided by peeker, since the appearance of bias could have been present on my part being a scum team member. However had I not been in this game previously, I would have simply given OAOW a penalty vote.
Whoa, wait, what?
So, godfather, investigator AND roleblocker!
4 scum
13 town
1 undecided.
Yeah, very tilted.
The undecided role is problematic to me. Storyteller likes these kinds of roles and every time he tries to put one in I tell him that it’s way too swingy. If a role can tip Town or Scum and as the game designer you don’t know which, there has to be a balancing force. If Normal Phase had gone scum, there is no way Town wins this game. None. In storyteller’s games, there is usually something that evens up the new alignment via bonus to the team that didn’t get it. Maybe there was something in this game for that too, I don’t know though.
Even with Normal Phase going Town, the game balance is arguably too strong for scum. Scum powers are by definition more powerful than Town because they know who to use it on and who NOT to use it on (esp. roleblockers!). But putting investigator and roleblockers on the scum team really increases their powers due to the ability to coordinate and share information. The game started with 14 non-scum. Scum had 3 actions to target town: kill, block, investigate. WOW! No one could expect the Doc or Detective to be effective in this situation.
As it is, I think Town did a bang up job in this one. The deck was very much stacked against Town and they managed to get quite far.
You were so hypothetically dead.
This is awesome. So you knew who the other Mason was before I did.
Somebody shoot me.
Don’t forget that the undecided had a one-shot kill, sach.
You didn’t know! How did that work - there was a mason board, and pedescribe never checked in, and you weren’t told?
So you’re telling me that not only did scum get an extra kill after the detective dies, but they also get an extra kill if they get Snape on their side?
Uh… Okay.
Rough Pointing:
1 Cop = 4
1 Doc = 3 (I think 3 is high for a doc, but whatever)
cop+doc bonus synergy 1 (though it is arguably zero due to the scum roleblocker)
2 masons = 4
1 multi-one-shot = 3 (I think this is generous, but I’m not sure)
8 vanilla = 8
extras: 0.5 point for bonus day kill
Town Total = 22.5
1 godfather = 7
1 investigator = 6
1 roleblocker = 6.5
1 basic = 4.5
bonus kill = 3
investigator+roleblocker synergy = 1
Scum Total = 28
I can’t believe Town did as well as they did. And with TWO town modkills!
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There was a Mason board. In my initial PM, I was told to report there and introduce myself. I did so. Signed in under my character name and said, “hey, what’s up, I’m storyteller in the game thread, how do you want to play this.”
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Someone signed up under my brother’s name, but never posted.
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Time passed. I kept asking the other Mason to give me his/her identity, but (s)he would not. I asked Mahaloth, and Mahaloth said it was up to the other Mason to share. I kept thinking, every time a player dropped out due to nonparticipation, that this would be the one. I spent two Days or so completely paralyzed by the notion that literally any player in the game could be a Mason. I got more and more and more and more frustrated. I almost quit the game myself. Finally, I posted to the Mason board that I would be claiming the following Day, no matter what happened, just to piss off whoever it was that was screwing me over.
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Shortly thereafter, pedescribe dropped out of the game - having never said a word to me on the other board. Little Plastic Ninja arrived almost immediately thereafter as the other Mason, but multiple Days and Nights during which we could have used our Mason-hood to our advantage had passed.
To describe me as “furious” over this sequence of events would be an understatement. pedescribe has not bothered to explain himself in any way, shape, or form, leaving me to think that he just decided it would be fun to screw with me and then leave LPN to clean up after him. So it goes.