Long Game 67: The Road to Urithiru

[Ashbringer]

Technically the only inactive Radiant was Eternum the Skybreaker. Which wasn't ideal, but it was only one.

As opposed to the Dustbringer, Lightweaver, and Elsecaller, who just didn't exist...

[Araris Valerian]

9 minutes ago, TJ Shade said:

@Araris Valerian, I really didn't mean it when I told that we're losing the game due to the lack of active village power roles, rather than the work of the elims. It was sort of an attempt bait the elims to rile up. You did reply to that, but in a villager-y way, so I was left more confused than before xD. Hope you or the elim team didn't tak offense for that. You deserve this victory and the ease at which it was achieved. 

Thanks . Although I think in a large part the ease of our victory was due to general village inactivity. Striker getting lynched turned out to be rather helpful, and then after a couple of mislynches I feel like the village lost its confidence, since my proposal for the lynch was accepted (by at least enough villagers) basically through the end of the game at that point.

Thanks to @Straw for GMing! This game was very fun to play, and it was nice to be an elim again. I also greatly enjoyed playing with @Magestar, @Frozen Mint, @Lord_Silberfarben, @xinoehp512, and @Zillah, although we could have cleaned things up a little faster if the latter two had been more active.

My general comments on the game: First and foremost I think the activity levels were pretty awful. I know several people had IRL stuff going on, but some people sort of just vanished, and didn’t even put anything in blue text (some of that may have been due to IRL stuff too, and that is totally cool as well). I just find it slightly unlikely that so many people had so much life stuff come out of nowhere right after D2. The more players that are posting in a game, in general, the more fun it is for everyone. My team ended up killing off a bunch of inactives just to keep the game from going dead before we won officially, but that doesn’t feel very good to do as an elim, because you aren’t playing optimally (kind of the exact opposite). So I guess, if you play again, please try and post at least once per cycle, even if it’s just to say that you are still catching up. 

I think the game probably would have been balanced at 6 elims, but it’s hard to tell with the activity. With 7 and a double vote manip, I think we may have had a little too much game ending potential. I’d be curious to hear thoughts from others about this.

The village perception on the role distribution this game was also kind of weird, although I’m not sure it impacted the game. Several people assumed either all roles or all surges would be present, but that is the exact sort of role distribution that GMs try to avoid. My advice: if you can guess at a role distribution D1, it’s probably wrong.

Thanks everyone for playing, and I look forward to killing you all later!

[Straw]

So, first of all, special thanks to all of the following (among others):

• All the active players, for helping this game keep going.
• The spectators and dead players who helped the spec/dead doc grow to 86 pages. It was quite a fun doc, and had a bunch of game design stuff, so read through it if you like that stuff.
• The eliminators, for successfully winning the game.
• The village Knights Radiant, for only squiring villagers.
• TJ Shade, for creating a very dramatic moment. He roleblocked Araris, who put in the elim kill, and was barely foiled by the only use of Gravitation this game.
• shanerockes, for being willing to sub in.
• Illwei, for having a solid performance as a completely new player.
• Wilson, for checking over the distribution and being the IM.
• Orlok, for giving us a lot of fun posts as locke the tormented.
• Elbereth, for making a very nice role chart. Also, for sharing her suspicions in a PM named "aaaaaaaaaa".
• Ventyl and Gears, for writing their own deaths.
• Aonar, for originally making the rules for this game.

Now, on to the GM thoughts.

Distribution

The first big part of the distribution was the number of eliminators. I could have either gone with six elims or seven elims. With six elims, the elims would need seven lynches on villagers to win, and the village would need six lynches on elims to win. With seven elims, it would be reversed. I ended up going with seven elims, since I felt like a bigger team with fewer roles would be more interesting, LGs are usually pretty sided towards the village (38.6% elim wins), and the village had (in my opinion) a strong set of roles. The village’s roles all provided ways to gain an advantage. The Edgedancer, Truthwatcher, and Bondsmith all had access to some form of kill interference. Assuming they used their abilities to try to block kills, there would be an average of two protects flying around each night, for a 8% chance of blocking the night’s kill (this is the theoretical chance, and doesn’t take into account the fact that the elims probably aren’t going to kill people under suspicion). While some KRs would likely die, they would probably Squire, leaving the village with roughly two protects for quite a bit. The Skybreaker was expected to be killing players, which would probably help the village. I think that this distribution was balanced in favor of the elims, but I think the village would have had a decent shot if they were active. It probably would have been more fair if the elims didn't have a Windrunner. I think I underestimated how useful the Windrunner would be.

Something kind of funny about this game was that neither faction really got to use their big advantage all that much. Yes, the village had some good stuff with Squiring, Illumination, TJ almost blocking the kill, and TJ changing the vote to get Striker lynched. Yes, the elims did have an earlier ending due to their larger numbers. However, the village never really got to use their roles that much, since Eternum was inactive and Ventyl was lynched early, leaving TJ and Illwei as the two village Knights. The elims didn’t get to swing around their numbers all that much. There were three active elims, two semi-active elims, and two inactive elims. They never really used their numbers to change a lynch or control the thread.

Inactivity

People got off to a very good start on cycle one and cycle two, but I guess people just got burned out. I'm glad I didn't have an activity filter this game, since I think that the deaths would have helped the elimsa lot. Breaking it down, there were seven people who would have qualified for a typical two cycle inactivity filter (minimum six days irl time in this game). Out of those people, there were two elims and five villagers. So, if you removed them, the game would have been 5 v 12. There were also two people who died one turn before they would have run into the inactivity filter. I doubt that they still would have been killed, since people could have just waited one more turn. I  really was surprised by the amount of inactivity, given the length of the cycles. There were four people who were inactive for over two weeks. Overall, I'd just like to remind people to not sign up if they don't feel like they have the time to play. I'd much rather run a smaller game with everyone active and having fun than a larger game with a lot of inactive players.

Striker's Lynch

It was pretty funny how much this ended up hurting the village. I remember hearing about it on the Mafia Universe podcast once, and over hundreds of games on their site, games when an elim died D1 ended up being worse for the village. It's a pretty weird effect.

Changes from LG13

• Illusion: Changing Illusion to a general open/closed PMs effect was something I'm very glad I did, and I think it should be left that way in a rerun. Making all of those PMs myself would have been a pain. The way it is now is also more powerful than how it was in LG13, which is good. It might be better to just change it to make PMs open for the next cycle, instead of having it be until the end of the next night.
• Gravitation: I'm glad I nerfed this. Gravitation is a strong surge, and having Progression be able to block it is a useful check on it.
• Cohesion: Cohesion in LG13 was a lot more messy, so I'm happy that I changed it to a swap. It'd probably be fine either way though. The way it interacted with the lynch in LG13 was more debatable.
• Stormlight Saving: I removed the ability to save Stormlight made it so Knights and Squires couldn't hoard Stormlight. I liked how this played out, since I feel like there would have been fewer actions otherwise.
• Information: Generally, people got less information about the results of stuff than they did in LG13. I feel like this could go either way, since it doesn't make a huge difference. Personally, I liked limiting the information more. The one thing that gave people more info than it did in LG13 was Progression (if someone was attacked and survived, their name was revealed). This was mainly to give Progression a boost, and I think it was a good change.

I'm not sure if I missed anything there. If you have a question or want me to comment on something, just @mention me.

Now, go sign up for Elbereth's game if you have the time!!!

[StrikerEZ]

Even though I got lynched D1 and had a lot of irl stuff preventing me from having the mental energy to keep up with this game super closely, this game was a blast to watch! It was really fun to see how my lynch caused so much chaos and confusion. As of now I have died in 75% of my elim games. In 67% of those games I was lynched D1 and my team won. Of the times I survived to the end, I lost once and won once. It appears that I have a higher chance of winning as an elim if I get lynched D1 than if I try to survive the whole time.

[Ashbringer]

I mean, it definitely threw us off big time. Elim dead for no discernable reason, TJ burning through 2 vote manips to save himself, 2 (Village) Radiants outed... it basically threw everything into TJ, Ventyl, or Gears and let Mage and Araris slip everyone’s minds.

Edit: 

*Reads Elim doc*

Great. So even the Elims are confused on why the Elims killed me...

Edited July 21, 2020 by Ashbringer

[The Young Pyromancer]

2 hours ago, Ashbringer said:

which means Pyro gets the distinguished award of being more suspicious as a Villager than as an Elim...

Well, I'm a better elim than village, so that should be expected

I actually tried to say that in-game, that I was acting a lot more like a stereotypical elim this game, which is atypical for me.

[Ashbringer]

Brightlord Faleast had a headache.

Truth be told, he was rather surprised he still had a head.

I see you've been busy, he thought at AraRaash. The kandra'd evidently been tapping gold very, very slowly throughout the past few days, and it seemed like he'd reattached any limbs lost in that freak highstorm. Faleast was still confused about that: one minute he'd been walking the perimeter on a clear day, the next someone had stuck a knife in his back and he was flying into the air. It was as if the Stormfather decided he needed to be removed from the area, in addition to those Diagrammists.

AraRaash took over their shared mouth. "Almost done with everything. But since they saw us die... I didn't move until I knew the caravan was long gone."

I take it no spren took much interest in a corpse, Faleast pondered.

Ah well. I have another place in mind for us to try.

I think you'll like it.

[Elandera]

Congratulations again to the Diagramists, nearly all of whom survived to the very end! Thanks to Straw for GMing this rerun of LG13. All the active players and spectators really helped make this fun for everyone both in and outside the game.

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, or myself, 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, Haelbarde, and Young Bard) 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!