A bastard game where the mod makes up the rules as he goes along doesn’t work very well. It’s neither practical nor fun to play or run a game that relies on strategy when the goal-posts keep moving. IME, bastard games usually have one or more tricks, but they are all applied consistently within an unchanging framework.
The two Bastard games I’ve run (i.e. Godfather, Mook, 3 Detectives, and 4 Millers mini and the all Serial Killer false flip mafia) were straighforward once you knew the mechanics. I also announced ahead of time that they were Bastard.
In the mini, it really was just a complex version of 3-handed mafia. The reason scum won was that BillMC and Texcat worked together very well. (And it doesn’t take scum very long to figure out the gimmick, which is why I let BillMC write most of the color.) Props to Ed though for putting up a great townie fight.
In the false flip serial killer mafia, the gimmick was that every one had a false flip corresponding to one of the roles described in the opening, except the serial killer itself, which was what everyone really had. Rather than killing, the SKs were actually conducting a secret ballot based on who they targeted that night. So the mechanical gimmick was that everyone was just secretly lynching the top two (give or take depending on the current numbers) vote-getters at night. The entire game was railroaded into a final Night of 3 SKs, who if they circle voted would kill each other off and all players would win, otherwise one person would end up not voted for, and that person would emerge a solo-winner (since the SK win condition was to be the last man standing or have everyone dead). Oddly enough, even with normal phase revealing that everyone was a serial killer by accidentally posting a comment to the game thread rather than the spoiler board a couple days before end, it didn’t really change much. Mainly because at that point everyone had figured out the flips were suspect (since someone actually claimed serial killer and flipped otherwise). And with the cat out, the final 3 actually elected to do a circle kill that night, theorizing–rightly in this case–that if it worked, they would all win. But one of them decided to get sneaky and vote someone else, resulting in only one person winning. Between that action and the fact that everyone was coming up with wild theories throughout as to how the game was bastard and in much eviller ways than I ever would have, I realized something that became my signature at Idle’s board: the bastardness that players inflict on themselves is much worse than anything mods can do to them. (On a side note, this also applies to LARPs in the Lovecraftian universe of Cthulhu Live.)
The thing that was annoying for me, though, was by some dumb stroke of luck, the first seven flips revealed were all Vanilla Town, and there were only 10 vanilla town flips in the setup. People actually began to think there were no power roles or scum. Now I could have “cheated” and choose the order flips came out, but I wanted to give the players a little bit of control over who they “killed”, so the cover flips were predertemined randomly before the game started.
Yes, but on people with ADHD, it targets the specific part of the brain that needs stimulating (i.e. the part that allows your attention to focus) with only a slightly stimulating effect to the rest of mind and body. On people without ADHD, it pretty much acts like speed.
I actually prefer calling it ADHLAS myself (Attention Deficit…Hey Look! A Squirrel!) My girlfriend has it in spades. And I have a touch of it as well, though, mine is actually a compensation mechansim for my real learning disability. In other words, mine is a symptom rather than a cause.
