Quick Fix Game 7: Living (and Dying) Rough

[Lightsworn Panda]

Good Game All! 

 

I'd like to publicly congratulate Haelbarde for his incredible performance, despite being a new player. You managed to nail 3 out of the 4 Eliminators in your first analysis, and also drew the bead on me later.

[Haelbarde]

Unfortunately for me, my first analysis was built on the premise that I could extract information from the write up. It just happened that the lot of you voted on the person to get lynched (actually being the majority... yay for lawmen controlling lynches, I guess). My final analysis was better though. Apart from Clanky. Bother Clanky. Gut feeling did not help me that time.

 

But thanks. You were all worthy opponents (well, obviously. You won), and I enjoyed the game.

 

Also, Kas. Were you trying to imply anything by calling me M'Hael? I didn't feel like I was (WoT spoiler)

a backstabbing traitor

.

[Mailliw73]

Bravo to the Evil Team. Most of my comments can be found in the dead doc (particularly my anger at being killed right when I was. ). Hael, yes, you did great for a new player. I look forward to playing with you again. Thanks Wyrm!

[A Joe in the Bush]

Just finished reading the spec doc. Wilson will never trust me again apparently. XD

Edited April 25, 2015 by The Only Joe

[Surgebound Rainspren]

Great Game, I was very inactive throughout though.

In the entire game I had one action: shooting Winter with the smoking game.

[Kasimir]

Also, Kas. Were you trying to imply anything by calling me M'Hael? I didn't feel like I was (WoT spoiler)

a backstabbing traitor

.

I have to admit, I just liked the pun

[Haelbarde]

I have to admit, I just liked the pun

Fair enough. I just made it my Member Title though.

[little wilson]

Just finished reading the spec doc. Wilson will never trust me again apparently. XD

Can you blame me? You're a pathological liar in these games.

[A Joe in the Bush]

I'm only a liar to the people I don't trust. Do you tell the truth to everyone in these games?

[little wilson]

I'm only a liar to the people I don't trust. Do you tell the truth to everyone in these games?

 

I tend to be generally honest even with those I don't trust. I just use that honesty to spark up conversation so I can catch them if they're actually an eliminator. I've never outright lied in the thread (or a PM) about my role or how many people are on my team (like what happened in LG4). I'm not saying lying is a bad way to do things. It's not. It's just not something I would do, and when I see someone who doesn't hesitate to lie to the whole thread, it makes me far less likely to trust anything they say.

 

EDIT: I just remembered LG2, where I staunchly held to the "fact" that I was Unsnapped, when in fact I was a Spiked Coinshot, but that's the only game I've done that on. For the rest, I mostly refrain from saying anything about my role in the thread.

Edited April 25, 2015 by little wilson

[phattemer]

Excellent job lawmen! If only Feligon (I think?) had checked the thread. Oh well, at least he got my money. 4 coins. But it is money!

[Wyrmhero]

The GM's 2p

So, it's time for a little analysis. There are four areas to focus on here, with two of them being 'new' mechanics: Money, and the Smoking Gun. After that, I'll look at Roles, and then Role distribution.

Money
There were three reasons for the existence of money. First of all, it was to limit players when it came to throwing around messages, it give people more things to do, and finally, it was to provide a target for Lurchers as a Cop-Role. Now, it probably won't surprise those of you who played to learn that Money actions were basically unused.

Gambling went pretty perfectly, but then it wasn't too difficult a thing to get right. People gambled, and some won and some lost, but the average number of coins in the game increased. As intended, the expectation return was always positive. I wouldn't change this mechanic in future games unless I wanted a more carefully controlled money influx.

Auctioning votes was a pretty lame duck of a mechanic. We had two vote-sells at the beginning of the game only, and it's not really hard to see why: It's a nice idea in theory, but it is basically an anti-Village mechanic, as it benefits the Eliminators more, and allows them to make pseudo-secret votes. I think that idea was actually discussed on the Eliminator doc. Its intended use was for information-gathering rather than gathering money. I'm of the opinion that it could work in a more team-based game (such as a House War game such as Winter's that's currently gearing up), but not in a two-sided Village vs Mafia game.

Messaging surprised me. It's a very powerful ability to create secret discussions between the Village, and I'm still trying to figure out a way to limit it enough that it's not too strong but is still useful. In this game, I think it swung too far to the useless end. End-of-Cycle PMs, and only one per Cycle were way too weak, as you couldn't discuss the results of that Cycle, so you would always be one behind. The financial and opportunity costs involved were sufficiently negligable though that it could be used, in theory. I think it might work better if you simply charged players 1 coin per PM they sent in a Cycle, but it may get a little fiddly. It was also intended that the Eliminators could offload excess coins onto other players, and make them targets for Lurchers. That didn't come up, for obvious reasons

Overall... I'd say this version of money wasn't a success. There weren't enough interesting actions to choose from, and while they were always meant to be small, they had too little (or too detrimental) an effect to bother with. Without using the other actions, this made Gambling actually potentially harmful as well. As such, I'd probably scrap it entirely from the game unless I could rework it and add more actions.

The Smoking Gun
A few months ago, I realised that the Smoking Gun was effectively a second lynch if used correctly, rather than a pseudo-random kill. I revised my evaluation of this game to consider one question - How powerful were two lynches? It strengthened the Village, but it was difficult to judge how much by. Effectively, if used as a lynch (as it probably should be), it was only as good as the Village lynch discussions. I hoped however this could be tempered by people having different ideas about who was guilty (as it did not require a majority vote or anything) and the fact that an Eliminator could use it. In this game, it seemed to manage to not be overpowering. I would probably this was a successful test, perhaps hinting that it's not quite as strong as I think due to the Village loss.

Of interest though is that it didn't encourage activity. Surgebound Rainspren was inactive from Cycle 1 onwards, came back for Cycle 4 when he had the Smoking Gun, and then went inactive again on Cycle 5. Arguably, it would have been better for him to bite the bullet, let the Smoking Gun kill him, and let the game continue. I find his return to inactivity to be curious, and I'm not sure what can be done about it on a larger scale - Particularly since I was also messaging each player every Cycle already with the number of coins they had, even if they didn't earn any. Maybe Joe's suggestion for inactives may bear fruit.

Do I think the Smoking Gun must be changed? That's a good question. The Smoking Gun is a relatively simple mechanic, after all. I'm not sure what I would change about it on its own. I might consider, however, changing the game rules so the identity of the dead player remains hidden, by doing what I did in my House War game - Lynched kills reveal Alignment, Kill Actions (and the Smoking Gun) would not. This would weaken it a bit more and potentially encourage more discussion about the results of it, which would be nice. It may not even be a real nerf due to the discussions it could bring about. But weakening it is probably a good thing, to make sure that the game is a bit easier to keep balanced.

Roles
My thoughts on the Roles was that I should mitigate the speed of the game a little. Koloss-Blooded and the Archivist were intended to reduce the possibility of mistakes (or successes, arguably) being made by the lynch and/or Smoking Gun, to provide a little bit of a buffer to stop either team losing too quickly. I think I might have added an additional Koloss-Blooded to the Village side if I was running this game with hindsight, again to slightly prevent the Village hunting itself down. Overall, as these are pretty much standard Roles, there's not much to say on them. I might remove the Archivist though, as it's a bit too defensive for what is meant to be a faster-paced game.

The Spinner was a Role I was interested in testing out - The Two-Shot potential-killer. Essentially, something you couldn't defend against, something to add an inevitability to the game, as it were. They were also meant to be a failsafe against the Pulser, as Roleblocking is very powerful if used right. However, by weakening the Pulser as I did to only target in the future (a change I don't really regret in this game), I weakened the Spinner quite a bit as well. It was also a Role that didn't really do much for the Village side while being ridiculously good on the Eliminator side. I'd probably remove it if I removed money from the game. Certainly it needs to be made less variable for each side.

The Rioter is kind a Role I'm not sure about. It's kind of a standard Role in the games we play, but it always feels lackluster to me. I'd like to buff it a little, and considering Auction-bonuses were not valid, I'm not sure what could be done about it. I could perhaps allow a secret additional vote rather than changing a vote? It's something that could work, at least.

The Tineye is a standard tracking Role, able to find both killers in this game. It's rather weak when the kill can be passed around, but that's fine in this game. Other games have it so that a single Mafia player must make the kill each time, which could be a way to make it stronger if I wanted to. I might also consider informing the player of a random action instead of a kill, weakening and strengthening it. I'd fold it in with the Seeker in this case, who is another Role we always have.

The Lurcher was interesting. It was a third Cop-Role, but not one people picked on until after the Village managed to lynch all their Lurchers. It was meant to be a response to the ability to stack coins up. Stealing coins was only a side-effect of finding out how many coins a player had, as the more coins meant the more likely the player had killed someone. Again, it's not a definite, as it could've been a Smoking Gunner who had that much money, but that was fine. These would obviously disappear if there was no money element to the game.

Role Distribution
I gave the Eliminators four players this game, as I wanted to have ~25% of the players as Eliminators, rather than ~20%. The fact that we had two players either inactive or massively inactive meant that in practice it was more like ~30%, which is obviously too much. I can't account for that when distributing the teams, but in hindsight 3 Eliminators would've been more of the right number, I think. Distribution was done pretty simply - I picked four players at random, and rerolled if I didn't get at least one experienced player on their team.

I also wanted to give them a slightly larger team due to the presence of the Smoking Gun, which harms them quite a bit. That was very much in my mind when I gave them the players they had - A vanilla guy, an Archivist, a Spinner and a Lurcher. The Lurcher was meant to be a semi-vanilla player, but one who could harry the Village a little by stealing their coins and limiting their messaging capabilities. Obviously that didn't happen.

Now, the two more controversial decisions - An Archivist and a Spinner. I admit a part of me was rather pleased to deny the Village a Doctor Role, but that's not why I did it. As mentioned before, I did it to stop a very quick Mafia death to the Smoking Gun. I did not give them anything to interfere with the lynch, and left them vulnerable to it, but I wanted to mitigate the Village advantage a bit. The Spinner is due to how I saw each Village Role. Without an Archivist, I considered the Koloss-Blooded to be more about blocking lynches and the Smoking Gun, rather than defending themselves against the mafia. For that matter, there were so few defensive Roles that I thought it unlikely that the Spinner would have a large effect on the game. If someone less experienced than Mailliw got it, we may have seen no Spinning-related deaths all game.

To pair with this somewhat stronger Mafia team though, I gave the Village a strong set of Roles too - Two Koloss-Blooded to reduce them destroying themselves too quickly, and more important, four 'Cop' Roles of various flavours. The Lurchers, as discussed, were meant to check the amount of coins other players had, but died a bit too quick for that. The Seeker was meant to counter the Spinner - If they did manage to hit a Koloss-Blooded, they had a semi-confirmed Mafia Role to search for. The Tineye was, as mentioned, a somewhat more long-shot Role, but it played its part too.

Conclusion
It was a very close game at the end, but ultimately the Village did not discuss enough on at least one Cycle, in my opinion, to collect the information that was needed. It was a very quick game compared to most, and I think people underestimated how much discussion would need to happen to get the lynch and Smoking Gun to go off properly. The Village was originally going to lose (most likely on) Cycle 4, if it weren't for Alvron's excellent targeting.

I also think it was lost on the back of the inactivity, right at the end. It was still winnable on Cycle 5 by the Village if it was 2:3 instead of 2:1, regardless of votes being lost due to Spinning. If Feligon was lynched, then there would have been no Village deaths, and it would've been 1:3, which was more than winnable. If Clanky was lynched, then the game would have been declared a draw the next Cycle as long as each player voted for the other, as I wouldn't declare either side a winner on the back of a coin flip. That would've been rather fun.

So, what would I change when running it again? Well, there's two ways to go about this, I think. This game has a rather good potential for a Mid-Range game, I think, if the money aspect was extended properly. This is difficult though, as there's only a certain amount of different actions that could be used. I could probably also delay the Smoking Gun for a few Cycles to let it last a bit longer and let the Village get up to speed, but that might make the teams a little too unbalanced. It's something I would look at when team-balancing, I think.

The best thing though, I think, would be to simplify the game massively as a Quick Fix again - Remove most of the Roles, remove money, and run it almost vanilla + Smoking Gun. The Roles I would keep would probably only be the Koloss-Blooded and a simple Alignment Cop. That lets the Smoking Gun take center stage as the unique aspect of the game, while also making it a lot easier to balance. As Meta said recently, games don't need to be complicated to be well designed, and I think it's something that this game could showcase quite well.

Regardless of questions of balance though, it hit my usual goal for games - People seemed to have fun. Certainly I had fun running it, though there were despairing moments when I couldn't think up any tags... I also want to apologise again to spencer12347 for killing him without a coin flip. I feel really guilty about that.

People had fun, and that's what matters. I hope to see you all again when I run my next game

Edited September 17, 2016 by Alvron

[Emerald101]

It was me who killed you by not checking the thread phattemer, but it's not like i just chose not to - I had school, and couldn't get on to check till after the end of the cycle.

[A Joe in the Bush]

I've never outright lied in the thread (or a PM) about my role or how many people are on my team (like what happened in LG4). 

I do still regret my actions in LG4, since they were little better than cheating. 

 

And Burning Spaghetti, I'm so glad you took the time to decode my Signature.

[Gamma Fiend]

Looks like about a good time to wrap this one up! Many thanks and kudos to Wyrm for GM'ing what looked like a very wonderful game, and of course everyone for signing up and playing!
 

As always, if anyone would like to try your hand at running a game, please get a hold of Myself, Wilson or Meta. Not only will we get you added to the list, but I'm sure we'd be more than willing to help out in any way we can as well!

 

You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone over here in our Art of Game Creation thread as well. 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!

 

Sign-ups are also still open for the upcoming Mid-Range Game: A Venture in Atium for anyone who is looking to sneak in last minute to sign-up!