Mid-Range Game 27: Quarantine

[Kynedath]

Good game everybody! It was truly a pleasure fighting and dying with the eliminator team. I just want to say a couple things.

@Orlok Tsubodai, thank you for your concern about the balance and the enjoyment of all players, including the eliminators, however I still hold firmly to the belief that since we signed up for the game, we should be willing to play it as it was designed. Plus, the balance wasn't really bad at all in my admittedly limited opinion. We were very confident in winning for a few cycles there, and it ended close anyways.

I will going to admit, I am a lot more invested in a game when I'm an eliminator, but it turned my stomach to lie to all of you. It's part of the game, I know it, but I really felt like I was betraying you guys, something that hasn't happened in any of the other games I've played as an elim. It was a great game experience and I'd like to thank each and every one of you for making this one of my favorite games of SE that I've played. @Sart especially, thank you for GMing, this was wonderful.

My fellow eliminators, I am sorry that I had to leave your ranks so soon. The mistakes I made were my own, leading to my untimely demise. Monster, I do not blame you for not saving me as you have stated in the doc that I read over that your reasons were IRL. Thank you for not just rolling over at the end and deciding to have fun while you still could, that's the kind of spirit I respect.

Well done soldiers, your victory was hard-earned, revel in it.

[Elenion]

Good game villagers and villains! This was a really close one, and had the coinflip gone the other way I would not have been surprised had the game been an elim sweep.

I especially want to commend @Caesura for a great first game.

My one regret is that Mr. Klenien wasn't able to get home and marry his fiance , but given the state of the soldiers after the final write-up that might not have been possible anyway.

Also I'm stealing Kynedath's quote from the elim doc, "Only if Len doesn’t convince the village to kill me out of pure unadulterated passion," for my signature.

[Kynedath]

Just now, Elenion said:

Also I'm stealing Kynedath's quote from the elim doc, "Only if Len doesn’t convince the village to kill me out of pure unadulterated passion," for my signature.

Oh my gosh yay! I'm going to be in someone's signature! This is a happy moment.

[Alvron]

A very fun game Sart.  Thank you for running it and for giving me a fitting death.

Village, you all fixated on an Elim being the one that stole the Map to the point that it clouded your judgments and analysis.  Remember to consider all possibilities.  Especially if I'm playing.   

Monster, well done on fooling the village with your analysis about the killing elim not taking an item.  It kept the focus on the 6 where the village odds were much smaller for an evil lynching.  I can tel you will be a player to keep an eye on in future.

Ronald may or may not return at a later date......

He's just dying to tell you some more jokes.

[Steeldancer]

ALVRON STOP TORTURING ME WITH YOUR CLOWNSS AGHHHHH. 

That was really fun guys. Probably one of my better eliminator games. I look forward to stabbing you in the back again.

[BrightnessRadiant]

Yay GG everyone!! Dang i've never had to defend myself for an entire game before LOL. It definitely made me a lot more invested and thanks @Sart for such a great game!

This is only my second game to survive to the end iirc and I'm actually very surprised haha. 

@Orlok Tsubodai thanks for being my only friend in pm for a while lol

@Elenion Thanks so much for doing the analysis to finally turn the tide and get the village to listen

I think people give me more credit then I deserve when they think I'm an elim haha. (Ofc I greatly appreciate the compliment xD)

[Steeldancer]

I would like to address an issue before it becomes an argument. Namely, my attempt to get Orlok killed despite the fact that he was sick. 
First off, Wilson has a point. I care about strategy. I'm not always the best at it, but given my front I was putting on, I thought trying to kill Orlok was the best option at that point. 
Second, my caring about the individuals in the community, I try to keep apart from my strategy for a game. So when I wished Orlok well, I was completely genuine. I also found him to be a threat. I was planning on trying to get him lynched before he ever said he was sick. As bad as I felt about it, I still felt like it was important to keep going with what would help my team the most, and Orlok was getting dangerously close to identifying the team. Sure enough, he was the one who had the tie vote in the lynchpin cycle. 
So, Orlok, I understand if you are upset with me. I already talked with Little Wilson about how I approached my strategy. But I honestly would expect to be stabbed in the back in the same way. I apologize if my strategy came off as two-faced, and for any additional stress it may have caused. 

[Eternum]

I like how all of the elims tried to lynch me, lol.

This game was really fun, though! And, I'm slightly proud of what I did on the last cycle. Len's whole thing, with the items and whatnot, was my idea

Dang, but this is the first game where I feel like I did something of value. Maybe that's just part of the fact that this is my first win.

Catching Orlok stealing from Joe on C1 was pure unadulterated luck, and I wonder how the game would have progressed had I not done that. Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure Orlok thought I was an elim all along.

It's kind of funny, how the last bastion of defense was comprised of people I'd all suspected at one point or another. Just goes to show that SE is far from simple

Anyway, good game everyone! Again, this was very fun, and I look forward to playing with all of you again!

Edited February 16, 2018 by Eternum

[Elenion]

12 minutes ago, Eternum said:

Len's whole thing, with the items and whatnot, was my idea

To attribute the entire scheme out:

--BR and Eternum came up with the idea of BR blocking Monster independently

--I came up with the idea of collecting action claims in general before Eternum suggested it to me, but...

--Eternum extended that to having me coordinate item grabs in PMs

--BR was the first to call a Steel, Monster, Caesura trio IIRC

--I wrote the contingency plans and how to interpret the action results, but they weren't needed

[MonsterMetroid]

13 hours ago, Elenion said:

Good game villagers and villains! This was a really close one, and had the coinflip gone the other way I would not have been surprised had the game been an elim sweep.

Yeah this was unfortunately the vig turning point and if only RL work issues didnt come Elenion would have been dead sigh...

But now I want all of you to tell me honestly when did you figure out that I was an elim  besides teh dead doc gosh sart real shame you revealed me in there I wanted to see people guessing

[Elenion]

3 hours ago, MonsterMetroid said:

Yeah this was unfortunately the vig turning point and if only RL work issues didnt come Elenion would have been dead sigh...

But now I want all of you to tell me honestly when did you figure out that I was an elim  besides teh dead doc gosh sart real shame you revealed me in there I wanted to see people guessing

In the aftermath of the Kynedath lynch I got suspicious because you had been in agreement with Kynedath about a lot of points, such as suspecting me. Then BR rightly got on my case for not giving her a fair shake in analysis, and when I put my vote on you the cycle Caesura was lynched I was 75% sure you were evil, for the reasons I specified in your post.  You knew too much about the elims: how many there were in the abstainers, that they rotated the kill around instead of using a less-active player, etc. I took my vote off of you because I knew I could get more support and field better evidence in a Caesura lynch. Jon, Eternum and I had a trusted villagers group PM, and BR also PMed the three of us and told us she was aciding you because since she was village she knew you were evil, and so Eternum had me convince you into getting an item. That way you couldn't perform any actions, but on the chance that BR was evil your successfully getting the item would be proof that BR had lied. The second you complained that you had been acided, that cleared BR, and your own vote implicated you with 100% certainty of being an elim.

[Eternum]

13 hours ago, MonsterMetroid said:

But now I want all of you to tell me honestly when did you figure out that I was an elim  besides teh dead doc gosh sart real shame you revealed me in there I wanted to see people guessing

SE wizardry.

[Sart]

So, was this game balanced?

I waffled back and forth on this issue throughout the game, and have continued to do so even after the game ended. I can say that the game was close. The Thief ended the game with 3 Bribes, the Forgotten nearly swept the village, and the Village had a come from behind win. The game ended with only 4 survivors, and lasted for 6 Cycles. It should have lasted for 7 cycles, since MonsterMetroid blocked the gunshot, but the rest of the village had decided he was evil, so it was a foregone conclusion. That's a close game.

And yet, there were some elements in the game that were clearly unbalanced. Let me go over them:

• Revealing who took what item was a bad idea from the start. Yes, it made some interesting game play. I wanted players to be semiconscious about what items they took. I wanted players with the Gun to be feared. However, this created a major problem for the Eliminators. If they wanted to submit the kill, they had to not take an item, which would draw immediate suspicion. I tried some ways to lessen that burden.
  • The Forgotten started with new players, who could claim that they went inactive without sounding too suspicious.
  • I gave the village some items, to use instead of taking an item.
  • I made failing to take an item that was out of supply not appear in the write-up, to give the bad guys a different excuse for not taking an item.
  • I made a Villager Sneaky, so that they wouldn't appear in the write-up at all.
  • I also banked that a villager might not submit an action. It happens naturally.
• With all that being said, there were 6 people who weren't listed as taking an action. That gave the Forgotten some breathing room, which they used to great effect. If I ran this game again, I would cut the confirmation out entirely. The idea was interesting, but it would work just as well if no one knew who took what. There's still a danger that the good guys would be able to track item usage, but that risk would be diminished.
• Speaking of items, their usage was too easily tracked. If you Bribed someone, a vote would be removed. If you role-blocked someone, they would be told they were role-blocked. If you used a Crab, you could tell what item a person did to confirm your story. The only one you couldn't tell was used was Chalk. Even the Gun and Map were obvious when they were used. That's really annoying, and leads to a lot of information for the village.
• The map didn't work as I intended. First off, there was a huge loophole I didn't realize with the Order of Actions. One player could use the Map, then another player could grab the newly created Map in the same cycle. That would result in new items every turn, which would flood the camp supply, leading to a massive Villager advantage. Thankfully that didn't happen. Instead, the map traded hands a bunch, and was never used until very late in the game. Honestly, that helped keep the game from going lopsided, but it wasn't what I intended. I wanted items to appear roughly every odd cycle. That was enough to keep things interesting, while not be overbearing to the bad guys. In addition, the number of items should have scaled based on the number of living players. It should have been roughly half the number of living players. I changed it to approximately 10 to give the Thief a better shot at getting a Bribe, which was a mistake.
• Speaking of mistakes, let's talk about the Thief. The idea with the thief was to give them an obvious way to win, that they would have to convince the town to go along with. Unfortunately, everyone was paranoid about that win condition, which sabotaged it. The Bribes needed to get out of the Supply for the Thief to win, but they sat there instead. I considered making the Thief sneaky, which would have helped that problem, but it still would make them stand out like a sore thumb when items were taken. A better solution would be to change the Thief's win condition to be getting 1 of every basic item. That would be easily do-able, but it would still be challenging, especially if they didn't know who had what item.
• The Forgotten were pretty powerful this game, even though they lost. I gave them 4 members because I knew Cycle 1 was going to be difficult for them. I also gave them powerful roles.
  • 1 was just vanilla. Half of the village was vanilla, and didn't feel right giving all the Forgotten roles.
  • 1 started with Chalk. This was to protect from the Gun kill, and was an opportunity to do a WGG if desired.
  • 1 started with Acid. I disliked trust-groups, and was worried one was going to form with the Extra-Life item. I changed Acid to destroy Chalk to give the Elims an unblockable kill at one point in the game. That was an important advantage, and one I'm proud of.
  • 1 was Quick. If he could convince the Village to let him use the Gun, the village would be in deep trouble. In addition, he got first pick with the items, which was an important advantage.

So, there was a lot of things wrong with the game, but it still ended up being close. Each side was over-powered in different ways. Does that mean the game was balanced? No. The best way I can describe it is that the game was too swing-y. It was either going to end in a landslide for the village, or a landslide for the eliminators. Going back to Cycle 1, Steeldancer, a Forgotten, was saved by a coin-flip. If he died, I have no doubt the game would have been rough for the bad guys. At the same time, the village was saved by a coin-flip on Cycle 4. If Elenion had died instead, it would have been 4 Forgotten vs. 4 Villagers. I'm pretty sure the Elims would have swept at that point. If the bad guys hadn't been super-paranoid of Orlok, he might have been able to win, even after revealing himself to the thread. This game could have gone so many ways. It may not have been balanced, but it was a lot of fun to see it unfold. I'm going to tweak the rules, and I'll hopefully run this again in the future. I'm excited to see what kind of crazy stuff happens next time.

[Orlok Tsubodai]

This thread has been quiet for long enough that it's now time to close up this game. Many thanks to Sart for running this game with such short notice, and for providing such a fun game to play. I hugely enjoyed the mechanics, and would love to see something similar in the future. 

As always, if anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, just get a hold of Seonid, Alvron, Wilson or myself. Not only will we get you added to the list (and the GM PM group), but we'll be more than willing to help out in any way we can. 

You can also post game ideas, ask questions, and get feedback from everyone over in our Art of Game Creation thread too. 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 working on.

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