Quick Fix 53: Forging a Nation

[Mat]

Illwei

I'm so confused

You only had two people? What did the Forger role do? Is it a free kill or something? I didn't think ties killed both...

Edit: @Illwei

Edited June 11, 2021 by Matrim's Dice

[---]

3 hours ago, Matrim's Dice said:

Illwei

I'm so confused

You only had two people? What did the Forger role do? Is it a free kill or something? I didn't think ties killed both...

Edit: @Illwei

Ashs role was basically an arsonist + one convert.

I became a forger on c3, and i was supposed to be just vanilla. The role change was giving me the arsonist powers (tagging someone every cycle, having two chances to ignite and kill everyone who was tagged) because otherwise the game would have been called when we killed Ash tbh.

I had tagged Archer, Szeth, and liranil. Last cycle I was debating between liranil and you because i didnt know if they were going to look for a deepwolf, but i figured that if there was a confirmed villager i could get killed it was szeth, and they were already dead so it didnt matter much

[Mat]

41 minutes ago, Illwei said:

Ashs role was basically an arsonist + one convert.

I became a forger on c3, and i was supposed to be just vanilla. The role change was giving me the arsonist powers (tagging someone every cycle, having two chances to ignite and kill everyone who was tagged) because otherwise the game would have been called when we killed Ash tbh.

I had tagged Archer, Szeth, and liranil. Last cycle I was debating between liranil and you because i didnt know if they were going to look for a deepwolf, but i figured that if there was a confirmed villager i could get killed it was szeth, and they were already dead so it didnt matter much

Ah I get it, that's cool. So it started out as just Ash. Nice ruleset, Exp

Now it's up to chance  

[---]

13 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

Ah I get it, that's cool. So it started out as just Ash. Nice ruleset, Exp

Now it's up to chance  

Alas, that means you'll lose

[Mat]

Just now, Illwei said:

Alas, that means you'll lose

Smh you can't win every tie, right? Luck gotta run out at some point :P.

[Mat]

@Experience :P.

[Experience]

38 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

@Experience :P.

Ya, I fell asleep 5 minutes before the game finished somehow. sigh. Game's over in case ya'll couldn't tell. :P.

[Experience]

Illwei was killed! They were a Forger and had the role of Forger.

VC:

Illwei(1): Matrim

Matrim(1): Illwei

The Members of the Heritage Faction have won! 

Player List:

Spoiler

1) @Dannex Member of the Heritage Faction

2) @SummerSomner now @Matrim's Dice

3) @Szeth_PancakesMember of the Heritage Faction

4) @LiranilMember of the Heritage Faction

5) @Kings_wayMember of the Heritage Faction

6) @The Windrunner Supreme Member of the Heritage Faction

7) @ArcherMember of the Heritage Faction

8) @Ashbringer Forger

9) @Illwei Forger

10) @Azmine_king Member of the Heritage Faction

11) @StrikerEZ Member of the Heritage Faction

Thoughts:

Ok, first off thanks everyone for playing and thanks @Araris Valerian for helping when my wifi decided to kill itself.

You can see the hidden role in the rule doc below. 

So, there are definitely some things that I would change if this game were ever rerun. First, I would make it so that the elim has lynch immunity for the first day, so that they can't die on the first turn which almost actually happened. Second, when Illwei was converted she originally didn't gain the forger role, which I think needs to happen. We actually ended up doing this so that Illwei wouldn't need to survive 13 different lynches and have a 50/50 rng chance of death at the end (which turned out to happen anyway...). I think somethings that could be changed for that is have them gain the role if they are converted and the first elim dies before a certain number of turns, or if it's later they just gain the activations which would let them kill already stamped players. 

Docs:

Rules (with hidden role and order of actions): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a0tPChwolmFxRfHBpQcs8FEjlKRa4aihp-q_dwyBqmI/edit

Forgers doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IHC1sZ5sqt9JOSMzwe6NV1gDxAEa9Garzjf9mzrhihQ/edit

Spec/Dead doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vi0-8oiQ9NqMcdO0ywehkMpObMLE6AhPoowalrM1BPE/edit

[Mat]

LET'S GO xD

I can't really enjoy the victory outside of simply beating Illwei in a tie cause I subbed in C7, but still yay I guess :P. I get the sense Illwei could have won it if things had gone differently... and I did have fun following along beforehand.

And now I can say that I've been the sole survivor in a game before, which is cool. And this is literally the first non AG village game I've survived in general, so...

Anyway, thanks Exp for running it

[StrikerEZ]

Can't say I was super surprised to die C1 again somehow.

It was fun causing sheer chaos over the course of that first 24 hours, and I probably would've acted similarly for the rest of the game if I'd managed to not die, since I was also running my own game alongside this one.

Anyway, I was really interested by the Forger role. I just generally like conversion roles. I think that the arsonist thing should be something that any elim can do, so it's not necessarily a part of the Forger role itself. So like, any elim can submit the action to tag someone once they've been converted, but only the first elim can do the conversions.

[Archer]

Well that's a pleasant pick me up. Good job, village. And elims. You two did well, for the situation you were in.
Looking back at it, if the elims delayed their arson and picked targets that wouldn't be exed, it would have taken five cycles to reach a 2v:2e scenario. That's fair odds.
Unfortunately, the way it worked out, I was blindsided by everything the Forgers could do and how few there were. As I mentioned in the doc, the game was frustrating to play because after one elim was caught, it was just village flip after village flip and nothing substantive to make reads from because there was no evil teammawork to spot. I could have guessed the conversion ability, which is actually what I pretended the role was, but there was little reason to turn on my trusts until the rest of the presumably two or three person team was killed. And by the time I got around to suspecting something was fishy, I was elim killed in a game where the rules specifically say there is no elim kill.
I don't fault Illwei at all for deepwolfing. They genuinely gained trust while a villager and I saw no reason to ignore my C1 and C2 reads. Turning on them would have been illogical, based on what I knew. I'm glad you used up all your luck in the MU game. 
I love the concept and think this game had potential. However, in practice, it wasn't the best player experience. I think it would have been funner if I'd known what to expect, like if the conversion had been advertised in the initial ruleset.
Thanks all the same for running it.

[---]

10 hours ago, Archer said:

Looking back at it, if the elims delayed their arson and picked targets that wouldn't be exed, it would have taken five cycles to reach a 2v:2e scenario. That's fair odds.

Ash left me with Az as the target, and then Az died.

again, I would have won, had I 1) not forgotten to dubmit an action my first day, and 2) actually switched to Mat from Liranil two days ago

this is so sad, I lost a tie? rigged :P.

[Ashbringer]

(I'll make a post after the LG ends (or maybe after I die there, idk) but suffice it to say I have thoughts. Most of which are expressed more eloquently in the Dead Doc or... slightly less eloquently in the Elim Doc, but my overall opinions tie into my LG behavior somewhat so I'll wait a bit.)

Suffice to say, I loved the premise, but execution could have gone better from both my standpoint, the rules standpoint, and a general meta (shudders) standpoint. More on that later.

[danex]

18 hours ago, Experience said:

First, I would make it so that the elim has lynch immunity for the first day, so that they can't die on the first turn

Then the village just wouldn’t vote at all D1.

Anyway, yay we won.

thanks for running the game Exp, it was certainly unique. 

[Szeth_Pancakes]

Yep, thanks Exp! I wasn't following after I was murdered, but I'm glad I won

Sorry we were so inactive... it was just a cycle of inactivity, spiraling in on itself... No one was saying anything, which provided nothing for everyone else to talk about.

[Experience]

On 6/13/2021 at 1:46 AM, Dannex said:

Then the village just wouldn’t vote at all D1.

Except its a secret role so they don't know that they survive.

[Mat]

3 minutes ago, Experience said:

Except its a secret role so they don't know that they survive.

Not for a rerun, which is what it would be at this point  

[Experience]

9 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

Not for a rerun, which is what it would be at this point  

Ya, it would be kind of hard to rerun this for a while without people just thinking it's this game.

[Ashbringer]

So, my main hangup with this game is that it was highly incentivized for me to just... stay inactive. My role needed to get charges in order to kill or get a larger pool of players to choose to convert from, and that essentially meant I needed to not get executed.

If you remember a few games ago, I played two Elim games where I didn't get voted on the whole time until I was finally outed. I did that by, essentially, not playing. Never really making a huge impact on the game, not really putting myself out there, and generally keeping a low profile and post count. Flying under the radar, if you will.

I decided I didn't want to do that this game. I'd been playing a non-voting player for a long time, and I decided to change that up and vote for someone.

... didn't go so well.

I'm still not sure where... any of the reasoning for the votes on me D1 were. The bits I can gather would be faulty anyway, because I didn't have any teammates to be protecting. Which happens, but as the only Elim I was rather frustrated, and had a non-negligible chance of just letting the game end C1. Because yeah, the game would have ended D1 if I lost that exe tie.

 

I don't like ties, unless either 1) my vote is bringing someone I suspect more into the tie, or 2) I both actually suspect and equally suspect both parties. Or 3) I have ulterior motives to save/unsave someone. I guess I'll try to be more clear about what I want, but I decided to make a vote, found what reasoning I could for it, then nearly and eventually did get executed for it. Reason I didn't talk about it before is (surprise) I was an Elim in LG77, where the first real thing I did was vote to save fellow Elim Mat with the excuse of working to break the tie, which I was then called out on repeatedly. Would I have voted for Experience as a Villager? If I had decided to wake up for rollover and resolved to vote, then probably, but who knows. I'd probably have been more honest about it though.

(Side note - nobody pointed out we executed two GMs in the first cycle of each other's games )

 

So for this game in the future: some way of having the solo Elim survive at least one exe might be a good idea. An extra life, or a way to use the "charges" I had to use for kills as extra lives instead. Or perhaps having the Conversion ability not be tied to my Stamps, so I could convert anyone to my side instead of just who I wanted dead. The ability for me to pass down the Forger role to my conversion target (Illwei) was a needed change to prevent them getting forced into that exe tie... which they did anyway, but a decent chance of avoiding that fate is needed. The rest of the ability is nice for an Arsonist role, but having a game end D1 isn't really fun for anyone.

(For reference, the other main solo-Elim game was a full Mistborn player - they had a Thug extra life, a net +2 influence on the exe, and two night kills every cycle. Plus the rules meant there were no alignment flips. That's a little too strong without Village roles, but it left them with a large amount of control if they needed it.)

For the players: there is some level of an inactivity problem. But that's rather augmented by the fact the first two cycles executed two players who had good promise to be active (and I converted one of the others, and Illwei chose the under-the-radar path) leaving there being one active Villager (Archer). So... be active? And keep in mind that contribution crusades are a viable strategy.

[Archer]

1 hour ago, Ashbringer said:

And keep in mind that contribution crusades are a viable strategy.

Except when the elims use them to protect themselves. Such as by exing Randby over Araris in LG76 and exing TUO over Mat in LG77.

CC's are logically valid because generally villagers should be active and participating in order to help their team win. The NK will always hit a villager. Lowkey play increases your chance of being mixed, and increases the odds a more engaged villager will be killed instead by the elims. Both are bad outcomes, unless you're supremely confident in your ability to solve the game in the final round AND convince everyone in the village to listen to you. 

If anyone plans on increasing their activity next game, feel free to advertise it in the sign ups so you don't get exed for the change in playstyle. I'll even give you a shiiiiiiny upvote if you do. This game felt like a one-off, hopefully we'll all regress to the mean next time. I include myself in that. 

As for ties, they're often done for chaos. Sometimes that catches the elims off guard, but it usually just risks setting the village back a round because the mix everyone was tunneling didn't happen and they have to spend another cycle trying it. I'm okay with them under the same circumstances Ash is, and am now slightly more inclined to call people out for them. Preferably before rollover, because hindsight reasons are moot. Ties for ties' sake are more of an excuse than a reason. 

[StrikerEZ]

5 hours ago, Archer said:

Ties for ties' sake are more of an excuse than a reason. 

And it’s an excuse I will continue to use, regardless of my alignment.

[Elandera]

Congratulations for another village victory. The Heritage Faction did a great job sussing out the Forgers. This was a fun, mostly straightforward game by Experience. Despite some of the trouble he had along the way, it was still a fun game. Thanks to everyone who participated!

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!