Long Game 19: Twinborn City

[Elbereth]

You're... only kind of welcome. If only you hadn't gone after Hael... >>

Would have been fun to see what you did with it, though.

[TheMightyLopen]

Hah! Nice, Araris. I was hoping you'd manage it.

 

This game was so crazy. I somehow ended up on the winning side. I guess I'm not quite as unlucky as I thought.   Even though I didn't get to use it, I'm glad I was able to finally find an item. 

 

Thanks for running the game GM's! I had a blast even with my unluckiness.

[Haelbarde]

I like the Hamilton reference. 

 

Thanks for the kill role, El. I only wish I could've gone fully ballistic with it though.

In another reality, we could have been murderous village buddies...

 

Edit: And that also makes this my second win... Does this game count as broken for stats purpose?

Edited April 28, 2016 by Haelbarde

[TheMightyLopen]

Does this game count as broken for stats purpose?

 

What makes you say that? I mean, sure there were 4 beads of Lerasium found, a Warhammer of Destruction used and 3 conversions, but it was probably all part of the GM's elaborate schemes! 

 

Oh, and remind me to never sign up for a game that has "Spiked" as an alignment. I will undoubtedly be lynched after 48 hours of being Spiked, regardless of circumstance.

Edited April 28, 2016 by TheMightyLopen

[Haelbarde]

What makes you say that? I mean, sure there were 4 beads of Lerasium found, a Warhammer of Destruction used and 3 conversions, but it was probably all part of the GM's elaborate schemes!

Oh, and remind me to never sign up for a game that has "Spiked" as an alignment. I will undoubtedly be lynched after 48 hours, regardless of circumstance.

I'm not saying it was broken...

The reason I ask is I've never won a nonbroken game. And the only other game I won was LG12.

[TheMightyLopen]

I'm not saying it was broken...

The reason I ask is I've never won a nonbroken game. And the only other game I won was LG12.

 

Fair enough. I guess it was mostly the GMs' RNG that was crazy. 

 

Seriously?! I knew you died a lotalways, but I didn't realize that. And here I am complaining about being unlucky...

Edited April 28, 2016 by TheMightyLopen

[Araris Valerian]

So what exactly happened? I love the writeup, but did I actually manage to win? Since shards are supposed to survive?

Edit: I read the spoiler notes, which imply that I converted and that is why the spiked won. But then SD should have converted to villager.

 

Anyways, thanks a lot for running the game Elbereth and Phatt. I had a whole lot of fun, and the writueps were beautiful after each cycle. Apologies to the village team, but I felt like I was too powerful to just end the game as is with double lerasium, so I decided to see if I could win as spiked.

Edited April 28, 2016 by Araris Valerian

[Elbereth]

Yeah. You were converted to a Spiked, then Ascended. You definitely won.

[Arrae]

So that's what Harmonium was...

[Elbereth]

Indeed. I intended to include it in the final writeup, but kind of forgot by the time it rolled around. Oops.

[Haelbarde]

So what exactly happened? I love the writeup, but did I actually manage to win? Since shards are supposed to survive?

Edit: I read the spoiler notes, which imply that I converted and that is why the spiked won. But then SD should have converted to villager.

 

Anyways, thanks a lot for running the game Elbereth and Phatt. I had a whole lot of fun, and the writueps were beautiful after each cycle. Apologies to the village team, but I felt like I was too powerful to just end the game as is with double lerasium, so I decided to see if I could win as spiked.

In the Spiked doc at least, the GM's decided that losing ones spikes would not change one's alignment. The only way for a Spiked to change their alignment was to become Koloss. 

 

Oh, other than the fact that:

1) I died action 1 of the game, and

2) There were no Kandra

If there had been, because I was a nicrosil compounder, we were going to do a double-enhanced iron pull action 2 of the game, likely removing any Kandra who didn't move immediatly right at the start of the game. The other spiked move out of the room, and my own spikes were immune to iron pulls, so it meant we'd have powered up Stink with a few blessing! 

[Elbereth]

In another reality, we could have been murderous village buddies...

 

Edit: And that also makes this my second win... Does this game count as broken for stats purpose?

I know the original LG11 counted as semi-broken, and I don't know if this was any better.... Then again, the Spiked did win.

I am so glad we didn't put Kandra in, though, Hael. Double-enhanced Ironpull plus Kandra would definitely have been bad for the balance. Assuming there was any balance to begin with...

[Arrae]

The spiked started off badly this game, but were able to win because of conversions and the fact that Araris wanted to win as a SPiked, not a villager.

 

I like conversions. Adds an extra touch of paranoia to everything.

 

EDIT: I've been reading through the docs and have finally made sense of this Harmonium thing. Elb, you know what I said about wanting all my clarifications to come from you? I retract that statement.

Edited April 29, 2016 by Arraenae

[Elbereth]

Hey, I was honest. I never lied to you.

There's a reason I said I was a Sidhe GM. I always tell the truth. Technically.

Also, I feel like you missed when I added this:

This is why I want ALL my clarifications to come from Elbereth. :/ Aww. You trust me.

Edited April 29, 2016 by Elbereth

[Haelbarde]

The spiked started off badly this game, but were able to win because of conversions and the fact that Araris wanted to win as a SPiked, not a villager.

 

I like conversions. Adds an extra touch of paranoia to everything.

 

EDIT: I've been reading through the docs and have finally made sense of this Harmonium thing. Elb, you know what I said about wanting all my clarifications to come from you? I retract that statement.

Hopefully you'll enjoy my MR then, if I get the rules together by the time it's my turn.

[Arrae]

Hey, I was honest. I never lied to you.

There's a reason I said I was a Sidhe GM. I always tell the truth. Technically.

Also, I feel like you missed when I added this:

This is why I want ALL my clarifications to come from Elbereth. :/ Aww. You trust me.

 

Oh, I saw that. I just thought that out of the lying troll GM, the troll GM, and the Sidhe GM, I had the best chance of getting an honest answer out of the one that technically always tells the truth. 

[Elbereth]

Depends on how you define honest.

[yafeshan]

Thanks for awesome game. It was still enjoyable to watch even after death.

[Burnt Spaghetti]

RIP the longest PM I've ever had. Those 32 pages of greatness were great fun. With 9 counts of Elb telling me to go to sleep. (Only 9... I was sure there were more than that... Ah. I think you may have told me to go to sleep in another pm at one point though. idk.)

 

Anyways, this game was great fun I got to experience what it might be like to be a villager scanner for once

[Elbereth]

I definitely told you to go to sleep at least once in MR13, yes. And that's my longest PM, too. I am sad to see it go.

[Mark IV]

So, the last remaining spiked is in fact Araris. How ironic, in a sense.

My props go to the GMs, for running such a complicated game (sort of). Very well executed, I must say, and I look forward to playing again.

[Arrae]

I was the seeker in Operation Windwhisper. I think being a seeker who knew a sparker and a windwhisperer made me lazier in my analysis, because at the peak efficiency of OW, we had two PM scans and one bronze scan a night. Then Wonko died, but I cleared the role Burnt had claimed, so OW just replaced the PM scan with an alignment scan.

Now I understand why the GMs were unhappy with OW...

There was a moment where Burnt privately PMed me to say she suspected Lopen, who was cleared. I trusted him more than her (despite all of us being "cleared"), so I thought she might be an eliminator casting suspicion on Lopen. I died and Lopen was Spiked that Night, but OW would have fractured if that hadn't happened.

[Elbereth]

Final Thoughts

First off, this game was an absolute blast to GM, as the GM doc attests to. There were so amny crazy shenanigans and things going down that it was simply amazing, and Phatt and Kipper were both awesome. Props to both of them, definitely. We had a ton of fun this game, and I look forward to working with them again.

Operation Windwhisper

Operation Windwhisper... well. A lot of my thoughts are in the spec doc already, but I'll summarize.

First off, if we ever reran this I would say that the GM PM counts towards Feruchemical tin, and niz it right there. But this game it was a clever use of the power, so we let it slide.

The main problem with it wasn't really the plan itself, honestly. It was how early the plan was created. At that point in time, there had been two PMs. Two. So only four people couldn't be cleared. That's pretty problematic right there, for the eliminators.

The eliminators could have bypassed the plan fairly easily. If they'd said they'd made PMs before the plan was announced, it would have been fine, in all likelihood. They also could have claimed Kandra (although they didn't know there were no kandra) and been fine. And once Yafeshan was going to be revealed anyway, it would have been easy to just PM everyone and nix the plan right there. So it's not like the plan was completely game-breaking in that sense.

The other problem with it was that... well, everyone allowed it to happen. No one decided that they just wanted PMs and didn't care about the plan anymore. It's like... It was a plan that could win the game. But it wasn't fun. And when something's not fun for you anymore, it doesn't matter if it's the best strategy or not. Don't obey someone else's orders if you don't want to, regardless of whether what they say is the best strategy or not. So that's why I really didn't like this plan. Because it was intelligent, but it wasn't fun.

Lynching

The other thing that was very irritating this game was the lynch. You guys have 48 hours to lynch, and for the majority of the days you did not use those lynches. No one was even lynched until Day 3, and that was Yafeshan. Guys. I know that the mechanics and stuff are interesting, but seriously? The lynch is at the core of the game. It's how you catch the eliminators, even if you don't have any powers. But no one used it, and that was sad.

Tangent to that. There was also very little analysis done this game. No one was killed because they said something suspicious or promoted the wrong person or whatever. Everyone relied entirely on the Seeker roles to figure out who to kill. Don't rely on others to figure out who are the eliminators. Figure it out yourself!

Items and Chance

The amount of luck that went into this game was ridiculous, particularly regarding items. Lopen searched 17 times in a row before he finally found something. Araris found three beads of lerasium, which basically allowed him to decide who won the game. The only reason the Spiked won was because he decided to do a double-enhanced Ironpull at the end. (Although I would argue that the eliminators had a good chance of winning had Araris not lynched Lopen out of the mistaken belief that he was the most active and dangerous Villager.) The outcome of the game was based on pure chance. Which isn't exactly ideal, in my opinion.

Also, the sheer amount of lerasium in this game was insane. In theory, the 1 in 24 chance is supposed to deter lerasium from being found, so in this game lerasium had an equal chance of being put into a room as, say, a Wooden Shield. This would need to change, I think, if this were rerun. Lerasium should not only be more difficult to find, but more rare in the first place. Same with the Hazecrusher.

LG11

This game was much less confusing than LG11, I think. Part of that was because we simplified certain things (not having Kandra, for instance, which made the game much less complicated), and part because there were three of us and we had the 24 hour dark period in which to set everything up. I would say that we didn't even really need that 24 hour period a good deal of the time, and some minor adjustments to the spreadsheet would make it even easier to get everything ready. So while the game was still confusing and complicated, I'd still say that it was an improvement.

Eliminators/Balance

The eliminators had the game a little bit balanced against them from the start, I'd say. A good deal of this was because I didn't have the foresight to see that Maill would immediately attack Hael, taking out the main strategist of the four. That was... problematic. The eliminator team wasn't completely inactive for most of the game, but it got pretty close at times. It didn't help that three Spiked were taken out within the first 3 cycles. There were conversions later on, true, and Lopen talked a good deal for the 48 hours he was Spiked, but in general that doc was very quiet. That was a big problem, in my opinion, and why they got so close to losing the game.

Side note - props to Yafeshan. As an eliminator in your first game, you did very well. Nicely done.

Regarding balance, though, this game is basically unbalanceable, because of the sheer amount of chance that goes into it, and the complexity. We did the best we could (and that was mostly Phatt's doing), but this game isn't really meant to be balanced. It's a sandbox. That's okay, though, I think. It's meant to be that way, and it's really fun that way.

All in all, this was a very fun game to GM, and I hope you all enjoyed it. I have no plans to rerun it again, but it was fun while it lasted. Thank you guys for being so great, and I'll see you in the next game!

---

A battered and bloodied man stood outside the village where until recently, Twinborn had lived together in harmony. Now it was collapsing slowly, buildings torn to shreds by metal ripping through them or collapsing due to the absence of supports. The epicenter of the ruin was a massive whirlwind of metal objects, swirling around and coalescing in the center into an enormous ball of metal.

As Tilion watched, a bright light began to shine from the middle of the mess, and rose above all of the swirling metal. He couldn't make out what it was, exactly, but he guessed it had something to do with ArSel.

The glowing ball of light brightened into almost a second sun, then faded slowly. The metal stopped spinning, and the buildings had all collapsed. All that was left was ruin and destruction.

Tilion watched it all. Then, when day was drawing on into dusk, he turned and walked away. He didn't know where he was going, or what he'd do when he got there.

But then, Laurelin hadn't known, either. And he'd killed her, accident though it may have been. The least he could do was try to make her death worthwhile.

[Elbereth]

Realized I forgot to include the spreadsheet. Oops.

Edited May 16, 2016 by Elbereth

[Metacognition]

I think Elbereth's lengthy dissertation of this game pretty well sums up any additional thoughts I'd have about this game! So I'll just say congrats to the Spiked and Araris! I thought the inclusion of ascension in this game was really interesting and really well done. Thanks to Elbereth, Kipper, and Phattemer for running it! I was curious how three GMs would wind up working out and you three pulled it off succinctly.

Now, as always, if anyone would like to try your hand at running a game, please get a hold of Gamma, Wilson,  Alvron, or myself. 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!

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

Edited August 14, 2016 by Metacognition