apathy takes away a lot of information.
[ol]
[li] Werewolf (The game that started it all (for our group, anyways)!) Town[/li][li] M2 (A.K.A Werewolf a game part 2(this time with mafia)) Scum[/li][li] M3: Kinder and Gentler Town[/li][li] The Cult of Sekham Town[/li][li] Conspiracy I Town[/li][li] You Solve It Scum[/li][li] The Mafia is Recruiting Town[/li][li] Simpletown (A back to basics game) Town[/li][li] Doperville (A newbie friendly game) Scum[/li][li] Cecilvania (A veteran players only game) Scum[/li][li] Conspiracy II Town[/li][li] T2: Behind the Scenes Town[/li][li] SDMB Mafia Scum[/li][li] Evil Dead Town[/li][li] Munchkin Mini Mafia Town[/li][li] The Split Town[/li][li] Simpletown II (4 faction game) Cabal[/li][li] The Crimson Glyph Scum[/li][li] Lost Scum[/li][li] Weird Wild West Town[/li][li] Mutiny on the SS Insipid Scum[/li][li] Screamers Scum[/li][li] Colorless Scum[/li][li] Cecil Pond Scum[/li][li] Random Mafia Scum[/li][li] Harry Potter Mafia Scum[/li][/ol]
Since I started playing here (Evil Dead), I’ve noticed a drop in participation. It make it much easier for Scum to hide. But it is true, 8 out of the last 9 games went to Scum.
Town hasn’t won here in a while:
Screamers: Scum
Colorless: Scum
Cecil Pond: Scum
Random: Scum
Harry Potter:Scum
I wasn’t playing around the time of screamers so I can’t really comment on that game.
Colorless, town had a very “positive” vigilante.
Cecil Pond, Town wasn’t playing pro town.
Random, Scum had a heavy lurk potential, plus a large team.
Harry Potter, Town was following strong opinions and being led around. There wasn’t a whole lot of theories floating around, and a disproportionate number of one sided lynches.
Yeah. Duriing Night 1. There were 3 cover roles available, not 4. I couldn’t have picked mine Duing Night 0 since I was subbed in at Day 1.
Screamers we lost because too many Town roles came out early and the SK and scum were killing 2 semi-confirmed Town every night. That, and having a death-miller killed on Night 1 threw off all the calculations about how many scum were left in the game. We lynched scum on Days 3, 4, 5*, and 6 and lost when we mislynched on Day 7.
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- well, sorta
Refresh my memory: What was the sorta?
And I think part of the reason for the long Scum winning streak is that we’ve got some flawed notions of game balance floating around. I’ve done some analysis that shows that the conventional wisdom is flawed, but not enough yet to be able to fix it.
S. S. Insipid, incidentally, was pretty much unwinnable for Town. We effectively only made 1.5 mislynches (not counting the last one, because by that point everyone knew who the Scum were, but we were powerless against them).
Ah, I understand now. I think the simplest solution is a rule “A townie mod-kill takes the place of the next town lynch; a scum mod-kill takes the place of the next scum kill”. Hence, not only does a mod-kill take the violator out of the game, it further punishes their faction by removing their choice of actions. I will include that in my standard set of rules.
While leaving it to the moderator’s discretion might seem desirable, discretion forces the moderator to make a decision based on what she thinks the players are likely to do. That puts the mod in the position of playing the game instead of the players. I don’t want to do that as a mod and it would peeve me as a player (frankly, I don’t trust anyone else to play for me as I would). (This is why I no longer enforce participation levels.)
The other problem with mod discretion is that it leaks information to the players. Take the situation of 2 confirmed town, 1 unconfirmed and 1 scum during the Day. If the unconfirmed town tries to suicide via modkill, actually executing the modkill wins it for the town. So the mod doesn’t do the modkill. But by not doing the modkill, the mod has signaled that the player trying to suicide must be town, because otherwise there’d be a modkill. If the mod tries to outguess that by simply not modkilling anyone in this situation, then the rule is in effect not being enforced. That is not desirable.
I didn’t pay attention to Screamers or Colorless, but I feel the Cecil Pond, Random, and Harry Potter were all tilted pro-scum.
Screamers: death-miller? That doesn’t sound like a good idea at all. Sounds like a lying Mod.
Cecil Pond, pro-scum due to numbers and the lack of a detective.
Random, pro-scum due to the late realization that scum power doesn’t scale linearly with numbers. Also, the bad luck of putting a strong town player as the detective who got killed (predictably) early.
HP, too many scum power roles, possible 5th scum.
Hmmm. I smell an overpowered Town game in the future.
We lynched AllWalker, who was the Serial Killer but had an extra life. tiltawhirl, who was scum, happened to be hiding behind him at the time, and thus died.
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Congrats, Death Eaters!
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I think this game was very well balanced with the help of JSexton, Peeker, Oredigger, and Natlaw.
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I really think town played horribly, and I hate to be too harsh as a mod at the end. Minimal conversation + rule breaking really equals poor play. Not to mention Pedescribe REFUSING TO JOIN HIS MASONRY. He REFUSED to sign in to the Weasley board to play.
Tiltawhilr just up and quit with a “Thanks, I quit.” PM. Very weird.
And HARDLY KNEW GUIRI KILLED SHADOW AND WAS GOING TO SHARE HIS INFO RIGHT BEFORE HE KILLED HIMSELF BY READING THE FORBIDDEN THREAD.
Town had huge opportunities but a lot of townies blew it big time.
- I’m sensitive about the hours and days I put into making my games, sog uys, please don’t quickly overbash my game now its done. It doesn’t make me feel to appreciated about it. I think this game had a lot of cool stuff and was well balanced and I think a number of you have not yet seen the setup.
Balancing this game was hard work and I really want to run my next game when I get back home from vacation. I don’t want to hear any, “well, Mahaloth can’t balance a game.” or anything. 
Perhaps I’m overly sensitive, but I spent a loooong time making the game. A lot of people gave valuable insights.
Again, thanks to Peeker, Jsexton, Oredigger, and Natlaw for balancing advice…
Are you guys OK if I run my next game some time next week? I am signed up in the queue thread.
I’ll be back from vacation Tuesday and need a couple days to prep.
Again, congratulations Death Eaters! Well played!
Screamers was so off-the-wall that I’d call it impossible to say which way it was tilted. The death miller was also our investigator; we also lost a recruiting mason on night 1.
I just re-read my post and I want to qualify. I’m very happy to mod and appreciate everyone’s support.
Sorry, I’m just being too sensitive. Long flights and delays on my trip and having the game end in my absence is difficult.
I’m not sure if that is a good idea. While it negates intentional suicide as a strategy, it would severely punish the remaining players for something a different player did. In other words, accidental violations (editing a post), would be even more annoying than they already are.
I think simply stating that mod-kill = insta-loss for the modkilled player is okay. This is assuming that a player won’t sacrifice his own win for the team, but I’m hoping people would play to win for themselves.
Oh, and of course, thanks Red Skeezix for running the end.
I won’t start the sign-ups for the next game officially until next week, but please PM ME if you want to get on the list early.
PM, not sign up in this game’s thread, please.
Oh, and I confess my mistake in saying townie when referencing the edit. It was a mistake, but I got lukcy that the townie died in the night anyway.
My bad, for sure.
Next game, I will offer no warnings at all on rule breaking. Only way to be fair.
i am so going to remember this tonight.
I think the primary flaw in balancing is an over-reliance on JSexton points. That system works well enough in a mostly vanilla game, but it doesn’t take into account powers leveraging with each other for much greater effectiveness.
I don’t think there’s any substitute for simply working out how a game will play. Assume worst and best cases for each side. Look at how powers interact, either deliberately or coincidentally. It’s tedious and number-crunching. And there’s no substitute for experience.
I think SS Insipid was balanced, but the rules set was too unusual for the players to grok. Town played much worse than optimally. (Not because they were bad players, but because they didn’t realize the full implications of the mechanics.) In that game, because of replacement, the town’s power roles were unkillable, at least until endgame. They were also out in the open, so new information was available each cycle. The town also had a mechanism to temporarily remove players from the game, in effect a reversible lynch. Very useful to the town!
The optimal tactic for the town was to force rotation through the ranks, getting as many players as possible through each power role. Ideally, every townie would have some info he could trust absolutely (his own investigations) and every scum would be faced with a choice of lying or giving info to the town. Each lynch would confirm or falsify a significant bit of information.
In my mind, the major flaw with the game was the small number of players to start with. That gave the town less time to figure out how it all worked before reaching lynch or lose. I really need to run the game again, but with more players.
That’s not my intention at all. I think a dissection of all games is important for future games. Game balance is HARD. I think my Random game was unbalanced, so I use that information to improve the next one.
I encourage you to take a dispassionate look at the game setup. Think about what worked and didn’t work and why. I don’t think you can put the entire blame on Town for the loss. Town lynched scum on the first two lynches!
But you can very much bitch about how so many people signed up and dropped. That is a legitimate gripe, but has little to do with balance.
I agree, sach.
I am very tired and worn out from travel. Critique away, but please keep in mind the difficulties.
Really, folks, I’m glad to listen to all advice.
Apologies if that above post sounds “venty”, so to speak.
It feels like we got really close to a town win, even though in effect scum got 2 free kills on top of the expected game balance. That whole game just went pear shaped from the beginning, in ways that have basically nothing to do with how it was structured. No complaints from me about how it was modded.
I will also add this is better than my LOST and Wild West games. Worse play from town, I think, but a better design.
I took the critiques from those to fix this game.