Mid-range game 52: Guard Duty

[Archer]

Oi! You did pretty well, GM. Just gotta work on being more cryptic with your public posts.  Although knowing the tie rules probably would have led to some different decisions. I was fairly sure Kas would have played his self protect C3 anyway, so maybe not. 

Good game, all. Drake and Ashbringer particularly had some card plays that hit like a semi truck. And Kas, good on ya for keeping your vote stable in the final round. 

Apologies to Striker and Elandera for sussing you in bad faith. No apologies to Mat, a C1 NK is what you get for being right with your first two votes. 

Looking at the dead doc:

-me saying 'village problem' wasn't a perspective slip, it was me trying to go a single post without lying. Turns out I lie a lot  as an elim because I took a adopted a broad interpretation of what lying is. As a player, it was a fairly difficult thing to work with just because you had to be hyper conscious of everything you said. I'm glad it was never abused by the other players though; even if you had guessed my tell, I got the sense no one really wanted to force the Honests to role-claim to confirm their alignments, out of politeness. 

-y'all really thought Drake was a very dedicated Honest? XD 

-getting so many cards and having to submit the NK instead sucked 

-I think I understood cardblocking correctly. V!me would have used it on Ashbringer (most likely to submit the kill) exactly the way I did, because an NK block tells you who is village instead of potentially telling you who is evil, which is way more valuable. Then saying I did it on Drake was just me needing to claim something that had no tangible effect. I almost claimed Ash's Shardblade kill, but I thought Drake cardblocked me and I needed the Xino kill to go through to have a chance

Anyway, thanks GMs, IM. Maybe someday I'll be evil with Araris not in the elim doc  But seriously, I had fun

Quote

The thing a number of us can't talk about.

Can't wait for that sub-plot to come to the forefront of the SE season finale. You're foreshadowing it really well

Edit: people really wanted to see Kas' hand C1, huh

Edited August 11, 2021 by Archer

[Araris Valerian]

Well, my evil streak is up to 6 now. I think that's a record, if 5 wasn't. @Lotus and @Illwei, thanks for running the game! I greatly enjoyed it, and the distribution turned out to work out wonderfully for our set of players.

I think I might have failed to insert my tell (misspelling a word) into a few posts where I lied. I think the issue was that I was trying to think as village!Araris when I wrote those posts, or at least pretending to think that way, so I never considered that they would be lies from elim!Araris's perspective. But I think I could justify them all away in the end, and the village won regardless, so no matter. But I did feel bad watching Kas trying to work through all that, knowing that I hadn't done the best job on my end.

[Mat]

8 minutes ago, Archer said:

No apologies to Mat, a C1 NK is what you get for being right with your first two votes.

Fair enough I guess. Though it also was a poke, the one on you. I’m really kicking myself for not staying on TUO but I mean it didn’t end up mattering :P.

8 minutes ago, Archer said:

y'all really thought Drake was a very dedicated Honest? XD 

Yes  

I’d like to ask the Honests what their tells were (besides Araris), I’m genuinely curious.

Thanks for running this Lotus, you did a great job. I had fun even though I died early  

Edit: Looks like the elims RNGd really bad Honest role reveals. Yikes.

Edited August 11, 2021 by Matrim's Dice

[Archer]

1 minute ago, Matrim's Dice said:

I’d like to ask the Honests what their tells were (besides Araris), I’m genuinely curious.

 

Spoiler

using an emoji

 

[Kasimir]

16 minutes ago, Archer said:

Edit: people really wanted to see Kas' hand C1, huh

That's why I kept theorising the Elim team had a Clever. I initially thought Drake was Evil - that the reason I was being left alive was to soak suspicion, but then I started to think it was because someone saw my cards C1, realised I had One of Guard, and decided it wasn't a IKYK they wanted to roll for.

...As it turned out, everyone and their chull saw my cards C1 

16 minutes ago, Archer said:

I was fairly sure Kas would have played his self protect C3 anyway, so maybe not. 

Yeah, that's what I did. But there wasn't any point in admitting it  

Edited to add: Drake, while I did think you were Evil C2, it wasn't really a strong suspicion. I pushed back very aggressively because I was hoping to incite you to keep your vote on me, maybe attract one or two more votes. My thought was that the Elims wouldn't waste a NK on me, allowing me to save my One of Guard for when it was really needed, as long as it seemed there was a decent chance I'd get caught in a tie and lose the extra life that way.

Edited to add 2: 

11 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

But I did feel bad watching Kas trying to work through all that, knowing that I hadn't done the best job on my end.

It's a logic puzzle involving truth conditions. I was more likely to get sense out of that than the voting patterns, and as a trained philosopher, how could I not want to engage with it

Edited August 11, 2021 by Kasimir

[+Lotus]

Everyone scanned Kas C1 and me and Illwei were laughing so hard because he had nothing intresting at all

[Kasimir]

7 minutes ago, Lotus said:

Everyone scanned Kas C1 and me and Illwei were laughing so hard because he had nothing intresting at all

What can I say, my cards bring all the scans to my yard...

Hang on a second - if Drake used Two of Pens, and Archer One of Pens, don't we get a double lynch? Archer voted Drake, so peeling off one vote should leave us Archer:Drake 2:2.

[Ashbringer]

Well. I did exactly one thing this game but I did it really really well 

@Araris Valerian, because you mentioned this in the dead doc - my main reason for voting you was because you voted for me based on something Archer did, with Archer still alive. I thought that was at least worth pursuing, and then you didn’t bring it up.

TUO was mainly because everyone seemed to suspect them at least a little but nobody seemed to want to go after them, after two rounds of villagers trying and then promptly vanishing.

(Also, there’s a non-negligible chance AraRaash would have drawn the Shardblade card and then just summoned his Honorblade and stabbed someone. Fortunately Ash was the one playing this game )

[Araris Valerian]

3 hours ago, Ashbringer said:

@Araris Valerian, because you mentioned this in the dead doc - my main reason for voting you was because you voted for me based on something Archer did, with Archer still alive. I thought that was at least worth pursuing, and then you didn’t bring it up.

Yeah, that makes sense. I could have rationalized that vote based on activity levels, but you are right that the choice was alignment based.

[DrakeMarshall]

First of all I will preface this by saying I'm no longer speaking in opposites. Sorry for making things sometimes more difficult than they had to be. Was kind of fun, though. Y'all should try it some time* 

You know for a chill cardgames MR this was surprisingly eventful. Lotus idk if you have GM'd before or not but if not this was a pretty dang good for a first game, in my humble opinion. And also thank you Illwei for counting my votes 

Was almost hoping to actually be an Honest player who was cursed to always say the opposite of what they meant, but hey I'm not gonna complain about getting to be a Cheater. I was actually pretending to have a tell for a bit (which naturally I included in every post), which was making typos (normally a thing I avoid doing... habits from coding I guess). I kind of gave up on that once I revealed my actual role, though, since it was a bother to slip typos everywhere and half of the time I forgot and had to go back and edit something in  It amuses me greatly that the fake tell I came up with was actually a real tell in the game, and that Araris possibly repeated the "Voidbinger" misspelling for nearly exactly the same reason I made the misspelling in the first place.

Good game. Close games are usually more fun. I will call out Ashbringer for the same reason everyone else has; it's a rare treat to see a village pull back from the brink of LyLo. I will also say that even though I made plans in case of evil!Archer, I really was pretty dang sure it was Fabien/Xino who was the evil one, and you tricked me pretty good, Archer.

Speaking of Fabien/Xino, @Fabien you seemed cool and even if you had to leave during this one I hope you try out SE again some other time 

And Xino I'm sorry we welcomed you into the game by murdering you without hesitation 

3 hours ago, Kasimir said:

Guess trusting you was the right decision, Drake  Even if it took us at least four cycles to actually work together.

Trusting Drake is always the right decision 

Okay, maybe not, but hey thanks for doing it this time, yeah? Or at least for listening to your very intelligent fifty cent coin  I think the signs were there but seeing them was all you.

It really did take a while for us to work together, didn't it?  To all the doubters I will point out that elim!GC!Kas was in fact one of the possible setups Lotus had rolled up in the mod doc, but that is besides the point since I think by the end we were all sure Kasimir was village regardless of his role. Anyways idk if Lotus would have picked that distribution or not.

Anyways inciting me to vote for you on C2 kind of worked perfectly, in a roundabout sort of way. I figure it lowered the probability of an NK (although I haven't actually read the elim doc yet so don't quote me on that) and I realized pretty quickly that with a vote that everyone was calling "parked" and a vote manip up my sleeve, I could potentially do some damage with a last-minute swap only by then my only option to switch onto was Striker sorry Striker

*Ask your doctor if Opposites is right for you. Side effects may include: confusion, headaches, suspicion, difficulty making bets that both parties understand, difficulty formulating long sentences, and rarely death by misgrinch.

[DrakeMarshall]

Also sorry for the double post but I'm laughing at how the first conversation in the spec doc is basically the same as my thoughts about how to play with the Honest role.

Smh you guys were on to me from before I even started doing the thing that I did.

Edited August 11, 2021 by DrakeMarshall

[StrikerEZ]

I should absolutely be asleep right now, but I can’t fall asleep, so time to give my thoughts.

I really enjoyed playing this game for the little bit that I got to play. It was a blast, and I was definitely trying to play super chill and relaxed, and that’s what I got. I am proud that at different points throughout the game, 3/4 of my elim guessed were right. I apparently pegged TUO from the start, same for Araris. I thought he was way too amused in RP about the cards he got, and that Voidbinger comment. I suspected Archer at one point, though I can’t remember if that was before or after I died. But I definitely thought the team was Drake, Archer, and one of Araris/TUO. Even if I was a little off, I’m still proud.

Also, I think that, personally, for a game that can move really fast, limiting the Clevers to only every other turn isn’t the best limitation on their ability. I’m not sure what a better one would be, but it can be very easy to gain cards in this game if luck favors you. And not getting to play any of your cards because you have to wait every other turn kinda sucks.

Also, from a villager perspective after hearing about Archer’s stockpile of cards, I’d definitely say that the elim kill should take a role action, not a card action, in any future runs, in my opinion. 

Regardless, thank you @Lotus and @Illwei for running a really fun game. I am one step closer to 50 games now. 

[Kasimir]

@DrakeMarshall - given the way the Oops Incidents in this game panned out, I don't feel right taking your firemark  You keep that one!

[Steeldancer]

I kinda wish I could have messed with the main mechanic a bit more before I died... Haha if I hadn't been clever I could have used a card to protect myself. Well, somehow we still won. 

[Elandera]

On 8/11/2021 at 10:52 AM, Archer said:

Apologies to Striker and Elandera for sussing you in bad faith.

No worries. It's the life of an elim, really. Plus it was good I left early. I forgot I was going camping in middle of the game. 

This was a fun game. Good game elims. You did a pretty good job surviving. Just couldn't trick that coin of Kas'. 

Thanks Lotus and Illwei! It was fun to see the card mechanics in play.

[Ashbringer]

…how many of us went camping?

[Elandera]

A few at least. Last chance before schools start, I think.

[Mat]

I’m going next week  

[Elandera]

Thanks again to Lotus for this fantastic and unique card-based game! Congratulations to the Knights Radiant for securing a village victory!

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!