Well, no. Not at all. You say this NOW because we know the scum were all vanilla. But in the context of the game, we can’t make that assumption. For all we know scum had a powerful role or roles to ‘balance’ 4 masons and a detective. There could have been a redirector. A godfather. TWO godfathers. We can’t rule these things out. That they were ultimately untrue is NOT THE POINT.
Looking at the full reveal and assessing that the roles are balanced misses the point.
Not knowing that there was no detective hurts the town.
Not knowing that scum are all vanilla ALSO hurt the town.
The essential point I’m trying to make is that game balance isn’t all about points or roles, but information and gameplay. No detective is powerful for scum and not simply because of the power. As I said, its the lack of knowledge about the existence of a detective that really mucks things up.
(Again didn’t happen in this game by chance, but it really could and should have).
TO be honest, I was kicking myself after Day 5, when sach had started off by begging the Detective to claim in the loophole period. By that stage we’d almost worked out that there was no detective, and it would have been a winning play to stick my neck out and make the claim.
In fact, we prepared a number of role-claims (I really wanted to use my DNA-absorbing bacteria one) and we could have used any of them with a high chance of success. A detective would have been the most devastating, but the town didn’t have any way to defend against it, other than correctly working out it was a false claim.
On the other hand, the assumption that there would be a detective is just that - an assumption.
The other thing we’ve learned from this game is that low-posting town players hurt town. It’s not so much that they let scum lurk, it’s that they become a smokescreen - they’ll never be lynched, scum won’t kill them off, any vote for them is eminently defensible but guaranteed to go nowhere… I wasn’t consciously trying to lurk, and after sach picked me up I made a conscious effort not to, but that didn’t matter – just by hanging around, the low-volume posters gave us cover.
Meeko. You can say whatever you want to me. I’m not going to get upset.
I didn’t mean to belittle your experience. I meant it more in reference to your frustration with THIS game. That is, falling off a horse is not an experience thing.
Though I see why pairing you with KellyCriterion would make you think that way. It was not my intention. Sorry.
On individual vs team: yes, each person in the team has to play to the best of their ability. But their goal is to secure a win for the team. If that means they die early, so be it. If it means they don’t get to use their power, so be it. If it means they have to pretend to be vanilla when they’re really a mason, so be it.
If you ever find yourself thinking, “This move might be bad for the town, but it’ll be good for me” you have ceased to play as a team member.
As far as your play in this game goes, I know it’s frustrating when people don’t listen to you - especially when you turn out to be right. Especially especially when you’re confirmed town and they have no reason to doubt your sincerity. But remember - some of them are scum, who are going to reward your perspicacity by ignoring it, rebutting it and/or killing you and the rest are town who are beset with doubts. Not about your intentions, but generally, about what they should be doing. So they’re prone to go their own way not because they’re ignoring you or not trying, but because they’re unsure about everything. It is not personal.
But it happens, naturally, far too many times to overlook it. Especially in games (like this one) where scum can’t communicate during the Day it seems to happen during the first couple of Days.
As a townie, it often feels like an individual game because you can’t strategize or discuss as a team. You can’t trust any of the other players as teammates.
I won’t say that Town should have come to the solid conclusion that there definitely wasn’t a real detective. They should, however, have come to the conclusion that there might not be a detective.
As for the bulletproof role, compare it to a Doctor (nobody considers doctors overpowered, right?). A doctor can, if he wants, choose to self-protect every night, even in the late game, and thus effectively turn himself into a bulletproof. The only reason Doctors don’t usually do this is that it’s considered even better to protect outed power roles or confirmed Town. So a Doctor is actually more powerful than a Bulletproof.
That is true of any closed setup. Town speculation on the setup was generally correct. The number of scum was correctly determined, and the fact we didn’t have a blocker was guessed.
Only if town assumes there must be an investigator, which is not a safe assumption to make.
The points are only an approximation. The fact is, town came quite close to winning when Rysto was up for the lynch. It would have been tough to find the required number of mis-lynches if he’d flipped. Therefore, the game was well balanced.
After reading the spoiler board I just wanted to compliment Rysto on deciding to kill Story. I didn’t think he was gunning for you nearly as hard as he was. I think that kill Is what allowed us to win the game.
I agree OreDigger, that was a crucial decision. The thing that neither town nor scum knew was that Story got the results of his kills, and the contents of his stomach would be revealed on death. If Story had eaten Red then Rysto, there would have been no loss of information, due to Red’s claim.
By the way everyone, just to give you some idea how close the game was, the Summer 5 vote was 5-3 to lynch Diggit over Rysto. USCDiver was voting for both players, effectively no vote, he really should have taken one off to indicate his preference. Diggit didn’t make a self-defence vote. If Rysto had been lynched, his voters would have been a lot harder to get lynched (USCDiver, Sach and Diggit himself), and amrussell would have been under a lot more pressure. For me, that was the critical point in the game.
It was guessed only after storyteller successfully ate Red Skeezix. Deep into the game!
Town can’t assume that there isn’t an investigator either. That’s my whole point!
(1) you can’t look at the outcome of a game to assess its balance
(2) I already pointed out that the muffed cop claim negated the major bad juju of no cop in the game. The point it is it didn’t have to be muffed.
(3) the roles were balanced… it’s the game structure that was not.
@Alka, thanks for the compliment and the jibe. But just to be clear on the point, and I said this when I wrote up the list (and it was criticized as being useless at the point), it was just a configuration of data. And the fact that it happened to point out two scum was just coincidence that I was relying on a bit.
@Chronos, It has been mentioned that the survivor role does not reward good play. I would have to disagree with this. It does not reward good town play, but it’s not a town role (although it was an anti-scum role in this game, nk of me would have been a detriment to scum, a lynch of me would have been equivalent to a no-lynch plus information gain). It was a tough role to sub into I will admit since, a sub has to play more pro-town to avoid the lynch the sub bias that comes into play, but then that has a tendency to draw nks. Also I really enjoyed this game, kudos to you for putting it together.
@Natlaw, I know you had only one kill in Civil War, I was just making a joke since story asked about a serial killer who doesn’t kill, and he designed such a role.
Reading the spoiled boards, people thought that the riskiest thing I did was not bus Rysto on Day 6. I thought the riskiest thing I did was switch my vote to Alka on Day 5. Admittedly that was late and weak - I had decided to move my vote from Diver because it wasn’t getting any followers, and I just couldn’t think of a way to not vote for Alka. My fear was that if I either ignored the case against him, or rejected it explicitly, that would look much worse when he flipped. Even just leaving a vote on Diver without acknowledging the Alka case seemed to me to be fishy.
Similarly, by the time Rysto had three votes racked up, I didn’t think I’d get any credit for bussing him - in fact, people would be looking for scum bussing him when he flipped. I genuinely thought the safer play was to put together the best case I could on someone else, so that if Rysto flipped I could hand on heart say that I was pursuing a good case of my own.
Obviously there are cases like Kelly’s where there’s almost no way not to bus, but for the more marginal cases, is bussing still a good strategy, or are we too hip to it to let it slide past us?
