Break Tank 2.0: Such Delicious Lies

[Mat]

I thought this game was really fun and interesting— the factions weren’t really anonymous at all but I thought that was fine. Deadeye PMs are really fun! A clearer set of restraints could potentially be helpful but I think they worked. The Defectors seemed like an awesome mechanic as well and I’d be really interested to see how this game works on a larger scale. I didn’t notice any glaring problems.

I will say though that the elims getting to choose who wins, while losing themselves, probably isn’t an ideal outcome. I know as elim I wouldn’t want that responsibility :P. I don’t know how that would be fixed, though.

@Devotary of Spontaneity, thanks for running it!

[Archer]

First of all, I'd like to apologize for the state of the Cryptic doc. View at your own risk. :P.

-The benefits of both teams mass identity claiming and all voting for the other side C1 are pretty clear, but in this case, the need to maintain parity by NKing the other side actually discouraged that. Shoutout to Mat for reading the elim kill choice well.
-I think the situation where the village is willing to cooperate AND knows the last elim AND is confident in who the Defectors are led to an ending that wasn't Selfish at all, but was a little anticlimactic. But the odds of all those lining up again in a larger game are low.
-We shamelessly exploited the flaws that the low player count revealed whenever possible, including the POE to catch Xino, and getting the Symph isn't evil inactivity clear.
-I liked my role. I was trying hard C1 to kill a HS and then 'accidentally' be the most obviously Cryptic person so I'd get NKed, but the whole Mat confusion happened (sorry TUN) and so the role became a nice threat to anyone who would try and kill me. It's a pretty powerful role, especially with the screeching communications workarounds discussed, or even having a partner smart enough to go down the player list and say 'did X kill you? Did Y kill you?'. Especially with roles being revealed upon death.
-I thought Kas' role was cool. Well balanced for a vote manip. 

I want to give a shoutout to the new players, who all received unusual alignments and played them well. Hoid, you were admirably ruthless and used your PM well. Wizard, being a solo elim is always tough, and I think you came close to convincing your doc to kill me instead C3. Thanks for choosing my side for the win, I like the decision to kill the vote manip in that situation. And Symph/Books, good job being our ace in the hole! I wish I'd caught on to what you were doing sooner, but you helped us get the victory with your voting. I look forward to playing with all of you again in the near future.

Thank you for running this, IM, GMs. This game packed a punch despite its size.

[Devotary of Spontaneity]

Edited the initial post to include tags, a player list and doc links.

There's always going to be some amount of factions choosing which side wins, but in a larger game it will be more difficult to know for sure how many Cryptics and Honorspren are left.

What rules for deadeyes are preferable? In this game I ruled against punctuation, and I'm inclined against using color and formatting as well.

Roles didn't get used as much as I was expecting them to, were there any that people didn't like or wanted changed? I also don't know if faction specific roles should be kept as there wasn't much of people trying to prove their faction with their roles.

[The Unknown Ajah]

3 hours ago, Devotary of Spontaneity said:

What rules for deadeyes are preferable? In this game I ruled against punctuation, and I'm inclined against using color and formatting as well.

...You didn't stop me, but I wasn't using it too prominently and only messaged like four times, so that's understandable. I'm thinking either only yes/no or full communication, since if you're smart the latter is, if not easy, certainly not hard. Depends on which you want.

3 hours ago, Devotary of Spontaneity said:

Roles didn't get used as much as I was expecting them to, were there any that people didn't like or wanted changed? I also don't know if faction specific roles should be kept as there wasn't much of people trying to prove their faction with their roles.

I feel like my role was mostly useless. Having a faction mate die in your stead is highly circumstantial at best and useless at worst. Honestly, both of the same faction roles seem mostly useless. Like, protect your faction, good, kill your faction, bad. 

[Mat]

So I read the Cryptic doc (the fonts are amazing, by the way) and I still don’t understand what happened with me xD

Seeing my name that many times cracked me up though :P.

[Archer]

11 hours ago, Devotary of Spontaneity said:

What rules for deadeyes are preferable? In this game I ruled against punctuation, and I'm inclined against using color and formatting as well.

In retrospect, I think the easiest workaround for players would be to do the add an e for every subsequent letter thing, then c/p it out and get Excel to count the number of e's in each cell. Then do find and replace each number into letters. 

But at the end of the day, unless you have a PM or a compulsive secret keeper, the only helpful things you can communicate beyond general advice would be your targets. No ciphers required for that. So intensely gatekeeping this doesn't seem super necessary. 

1 hour ago, Matrim's Dice said:

So I read the Cryptic doc (the fonts are amazing, by the way) and I still don’t understand what happened with me xD

Seeing my name that many times cracked me up though :P.

I think TUN guessed you were in the doc, but I took that as fact, assuming they'd clocked something I missed. Then got salty that you weren't helping our team, which led to a lot of personal confusion. I should have realized you'd have been more recognizable if you had been in the doc. 

Also I pegged Hoid immediately because their doc and thread openers were the same. 

To follow up on some HS paranoia, I probably would have asked for a HS kill to keep things balanced if I wasn't confident about our elim based on Hoid's claim and knowledge of my own alignment. In a larger game though, I'm not sure we'd have been a good position to demand that. If we start with balanced teams, even if the elims are NKing opposite the exe, if the NK is blocked, the larger team controls play going forward and should be able to maintain at least a one man advantage in perpetuity. 

[Mat]

14 minutes ago, Archer said:

In retrospect, I think the easiest workaround for players would be to do the add an e for every subsequent letter thing, then c/p it out and get Excel to count the number of e's in each cell. Then do find and replace each number into letters. 

But at the end of the day, unless you have a PM or a compulsive secret keeper, the only helpful things you can communicate beyond general advice would be your targets. No ciphers required for that. So intensely gatekeeping this doesn't seem super necessary. 

@Kasimir should post his code

Unless he wants to keep it secret for future runs of this game  

[Kasimir]

1 hour ago, Matrim's Dice said:

@Kasimir should post his code

Unless he wants to keep it secret for future runs of this game  

Nothing much to keep secret - I did say I shamelessly plagiarised/adopted the code Aonar, Maili, Meta, and myself created in QF6

But I'm current prepping for an exam due in under half an hour so I'll drop by later to comment on things and code-dump.

I feel you suffered more, Mat  All the screeching...

Edited to add:

I asked Mat if he preferred a tedious or complex code. Tedious would've been smuggling the alphabet into screeches. Complex would be a bit more involved, but meant to convey more info. We also did a couple of yes/no questions here and there on top of this. Mat picked complex. So this is the first iteration (had to change it later when punctuation was ruled out.)

The Code:

Spoiler

Section 1: Is the code in use?

SCREECH - a single lone SCREECH in the first paragraph indicates the code is in use.

lorem ipsum hdgdel jhegfe

Section 2: Question or statement?

Before each line/para, the formatting of 's' determines whether you are making a statement or asking a question.

s = statement
S = question

Section 3: Player format codes

This is used to refer to a player within the screech.

cr = xino
cR = Mat
Cr = TUN
CR = Hoid
crr = Wiz
cRr = Archer
cRR = Kas
CRR = Bookworm

Section 4: Disposition

This indicates your disposition towards the player indicated.

ee = null
EE = Elim
eeee = Village
E E E = Cryptic-aligned (including Cryptic defector)

Section 5: Actions to be taken

If making a statement:

ch = null - just making a statement, no suggestions.
CH = exe
cH = leave alive

If answering a question:

ch = cannot be answered Y/N
CH = no
CH = yes

Remember that whether you are making a statement or asking a question in the first place will be indicated by Section 2.

Section 6: Reasoning

(Note that this info will be conveyed by a second, additional screech.)

gut = sc
PoE = SC
voting habits = sC
roleclaim = Sc

Section 7: Strength of claim/belief

If you feel very strongly about your statement, add !s behind the appropriate screech in proportion to how strongly you feel, with 1 ! being very weak, and ! being very strong.

For example:

Quote

SCREECH

scrEECH !!!!!!! sCreECH !!!!!

This indicates the code is in use (first para lone SCREECH), and indicates that a statement is being made. (1) Also that the writer thinks xino is Evil and feels very strongly about this. It also indicates the writer suspects xino fairly strongly on the basis of voting habits (seen from being in the same para as the 'suspect xino' statement.)

Section 8: Express confusion or agreement

Add a final, additional screech if necessary to express confusion or agreement as follows.

(screech) - confusion
(SCREECH) - agreement.
[screech] - disagreement

I don't know if I'm missing something. The idea is you can repeat and make multiple statements/ask questions, just using a separate line, so:

Quote

SCREECH

scrEECH !!!!!!! sCreECH !!!!!

ScRrEEch sCreeech

The additional line is a question. It asks about my views on whether Archer is Evil.

I worry this is too complicated. Let me know if it has to be simpler. (screech - simpler please, screech - nah we good.)

In my view, there's no significant difference whether colour and formatting is or isn't allowed as I think the same info can be conveyed regardless - Mat and I swapped so that the ! was replaced by H-count, and confusion/agreement/disagreement was replaced by:

Quote

ssscreech - confusion
SSSCREECH - agreement
SSSCREech - disagreement

The three-s-es being distinctive as no other screech uses that. I'd like colour/formatting for QoL but it's clearly really possible to not bother with that at all. I actually tried to go formatting-lite - the original code was formatting-heavy - in order to spare Mat. I do think that the colour/formatting issue might be a bigger deal at larger player counts, perhaps. We were blessed with eight players so it didn't really matter.

Comments I've already shared with Devo - in general, I don't often play faction games because I dislike the backstabbing but having an active doc with Mat was fun. I feel the kingmaker issue isn't too big a deal as it tends to materialise in faction games - cf. QF46.

Probably maybe more thoughts later. Tired rn.

Edited June 19, 2022 by Kasimir

[Mat]

I just thought it was fun  Though that last message took me awhile to write. Maybe I can c/p that after you c/p the code

And best of luck for your exam!

[Kasimir]

2 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

I just thought it was fun  Though that last message took me awhile to write. Maybe I can c/p that after you c/p the code

Already edited in 

I'll grant I was more worried it would kill your sanity since I could always translate and Y/N you.

And to think we did it just for one cycle 

[Mat]

Quote

SCREECH

 

SCRREEEch

 

scrrEECH

scRrEEEch sCRREEEch sCReeeech scRReeeech scrrEEch

scRrEEEch sCRREEEch sCReeeech

 

sCRREEECH

scRrEEEch sCRREEEch sCReeeech scRReeeech scrrEEch

scRrEEEch scrrEEch sCReeeech

 

sCRREEECHHHHHHH  scrrEECHHH
sCRReeeeCH scrrEECHHHHHHHH

If anyone figures that out, kudos to you  That’s what I sent to Kas near the end of the last turn 

[Devotary of Spontaneity]

Congratulations to the Cryptics for winning!

As always, if anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, please get ahold of Wilson, Devotary of Spontaneity, Elbereth, Araris Valerian, Elandera, or StrikerEZ, or post in the GM Signups & Discussion Thread. Not only will we get you added to the list, but we'd also be more than willing to help out in any way we can. 

You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone in our Art of Game Creation thread. With all the games that we've run so far, we have plenty of experienced GMs that can help you refine any game you're thinking about. If you would rather keep some detail secret, or are self-conscious about posting in thread (there's really no need to be; while we do slaughter each other, we are very polite about it), then I'm sure one of our fantastic committee members (Amanuensis, STINK, Sart, Fifth Scholar, Straw, Archer, and Kasimir) would be more than willing to help you out in private.

Thanks again to everyone that played, and we look forward to killing seeing you in future games!