Long Game 85/Anonymous Game 12: Do Kandra Dream of Electric Sparrows?

[Mat he/him]

13 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

Kinda wish I didn't get voted out for my role, and hoping this is a lesson to the newer generation of  SE players .

Lesson learned >> Not voting Weasel there was my biggest mistake of the game for sure. Shame you didn’t praise the Ja though.

I also learned that I probably should use Illwei PMs more because that was sort of working.

10 minutes ago, Illwei said:

also i notice more and more people putting the "." after :P.

my influence is spreading

I definitely came up with that on my own smh :P.

Edit: @Illwei I definitely knew who you were at the time I PMd you lol

Other ID reads were fine I guess, JNV was a surprise (well done!), so was Archer and wilson, and Stick, and Araris… got Tani and Devo though 

Edited May 10, 2022 by Matrim's Dice

[Illwei]

19 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

I definitely came up with that on my own smh :P.

mhm mhm suuuure

19 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

I also learned that I probably should use Illwei PMs more because that was sort of working.

everyone should use Illwei PMs more

I mean. no they shouldn't? but also they should want to

18 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

Other ID reads were fine I guess, JNV was a surprise (well done!), so was Archer and wilson, and Stick, and Araris… got Tani and Devo though 

I got devo and wilson but that was it. The only reason i thought mauve was wilson was because of the tineye messages lol.

Edited May 10, 2022 by Illwei

[Stick. she/her]

Thanks Kas (and kel) for running the game despite dealing with RL problems and going the extra mile with the writeups, hope things get better! :[

My game-related thoughts are mostly in the Amber Vulture doc I'm pretty sure.

1 hour ago, Araris Valerian said:

Kinda wish I didn't get voted out for my role, and hoping this is a lesson to the newer generation of  SE players

Yeahh I don't know I think it was more paranoia for me than your role. The role was probably the cherry on top but what I kept going back to your use of the word 'might have wanted to protect myself from vote manip' from our PM when I inquired about you being smoked C1. The uncertain language there made me suspect you to be kandra who wasn't actually entirely sure about C1!Swan's thought process. Your C1 was great for a potential kandra target so that only reinforced my paranoia. I know the logic there isn't short of stupid but it got me in the heat of the moment  Plus Mat's desperation sort of coming off as village in our PM also kind of put me in a position where I confined myself to voting either you or him. I also had to make the decision quickly as I was out for dinner at the time plus I had to put my Soothe order in in accordance with my vote.

In terms of ID reads I think I got most of them. The ones I PM'd Kas about included: illwei, Araris, Wilson, Mat, JNV, Tani, Drake, (edit: and I identified Bort in my doc). The ones I didn't voice but highly suspected were: Devotary and Experience

Edited May 10, 2022 by _Stick_

[Ashbringer he/him]

Squeak

[Archer he/him]

Spoiler

First of all, I'd like to give Meerkat an AHHHHH nO, NO whyyy NO award for making this comment:

Quote

Pasting from [the elim doc] instead of Word works better.

Anyway, I really liked this game format. I love the dynamic where consistency of opinions is how you confirm people haven’t been converted, yet the kandra mechanic forced constant re-evaluation of reads. Thanks for running this, GM, IM. Good game, all.

Quote

I got devo and wilson but that was it. The only reason i thought mauve was wilson was because of the tineye messages lol.

according to Kas, you guessed me correctly, Illwei. You were just wrong a lot of other people in the process. :P. 

:P. >   4ever

Edited May 10, 2022 by Archer

[JNV]

Hi hi hi this was fun even if I died it was cool gambit fun times love you all and yes grammar is hard never doing that again or am I hmmm now to go read all those cycles I never actually read cuase I dropped off the map instead of existing very fun game until death ya know also Kasimir tell kel they did a great job GMing haha love all of you thanks for being great poeple ok bye now

[Kasimir he/him]

GM's After-Action Report:

The Experiment

I did an experiment this game. I'm not going to repeat it in every game, as it'd make my distros too predictable. Since players had to PM me to sign up anyway, I took the chance to ask them about their preferred alignment, and any issues they expected to face if they were to end up Evil this game. I also forbade them to discuss this, since that would ruin the whole point of me doing this  I was curious both about the distribution of desires, did want to see if I could grant some wishes (depending on the distro options RNGesus threw up), and wanted to see if I could mitigate serious team dynamics/balance issues but also player mental health issues in particular when rolling up an Evil team. (Interestingly, and anecdotally, there's a weak skew where it's possible to profile the players who expressed a Village preference and the ones who expressed an Elim preference. I was also unsurprised by the ones who didn't care.)

I think it worked fine in that it helped me ignore disaster distros where a player couldn't handle an Elim rand for various reasons. Experience fell sick and dropped in activity but that was fine; this isn't meant to guarantee a high-activity Elim team, just avert some obviously bad distros.

The Mechanic

I think the kandra mechanic deserves a paragraph of its own. The kandra mechanic was first introduced by Bartbug in LG8, and proved to be problematic for a number of reasons: first, the base game was insanely complex, second, the kandra had unlimited hops and could hop at the same time, third, players whose bodies were stolen (this game pre-dated anon accounts) were obligated to check in with their kandra and follow the kandra's instructions - despite having no incentive to cooperate to the detriment of their win con! This led to players like Maili essentially posting in accordance with their kandra's wishes but writing posts that were basically 'blink twice if you need help' quality.

In the committee, Archer suggested rectifying the issue by swapping the converted player's alignment to Evil. This way, they had incentive to help their kandra impersonate them. I also think limiting the number of hops is the correct move, as is allowing the GM to run a partial kandra, partial non-kandra Elim team. Forcing the kandra to lose their current role when bodyhopping is logical, and adds a new layer of decision-making: does the kandra want to give up their current role? Or do they want to keep it? Making it such that an unsuccessful hop burns a conversion attempt is in my view also the right move. Conversions are challenging because they threaten to reset Village information, and I don't like just limiting them numerically. I think it's a good thing to build in incentives for the player to be very careful about using the conversion. 

The kandra proved to be more hop-happy than I'd anticipated. This likely emerged from their playstyle choices. Drake's fake Seeker gambit, for instance, scored a free kill and allowed him to hop away to avoid the backlash from the fake scan. I don't know if the Village really adequately considered that bodyhops shift the risk-reward calculus: I think thought on that aspect of the game happened too little, too late.

I liked the dynamic that resulted when the kandra were vulnerable to the lynch. Having further body hop attempts left incentivises the Elim team to be more blatant about protecting teammates, which can be a double-edged sword, because a kandra who body hops will still leave behind a definite flip result, allowing for vote analysis to be done. Furthermore, the Village then is able to use the knowledge that the kandra survived for the hop to relook at suspicious vote movements during the Day. I think that the kandra mechanic does in fact provide the Village with other avenues of investigation: consistency of opinions, of timezone, and of voice. As I noted, Dragonfly was distinctively Hael for me at the start (this was in fact a mistaken ID read but this happens) and then made a strong shift to being unmistakably Drake. 

I think the Village was a bit too thrown by the conversion element. Some of this may just have been inactivity. But it's surprising to me that little analysis happened, given the potential avenues of inquiry. 

I am not surprised that players ended up trying to exploit their Taken to produce reads that were pure. I think it's hard to specify the exact degree of involvement the Taken should have, but I think the correct way to go is to stipulate that the kandra shouldn't become a front for the Taken, with some sort of effort rule of thumb that the content has to be largely produced by the kandra. 

Taken shouldn't be discouraged from strategising with their kandra - I think the point is to simply avoid an uneven distribution of labour.

The Distro

I went for a pared down Tyrian distro that wasn't particularly extraordinary. Three kandra with two hops each was risky - my initial impulse had been two kandra with two hops each, and a Smoker. I don't think it mattered significantly since the distro was functionally two kandra with two hops each and a Smoker, but I also think I underestimated kandra willingness to hop. Some of this was bad luck (good luck, I suppose, if you were Evil.) The main considerations:

• I felt too many Thugs would slow the pace of the game down. Two Lurchers threatens to run into the immortal Lurcher problem. But one Lurcher felt very necessary: he would provide a real reason to be careful with conversion attempts, and to burn attempts off the Elims. On a standard play level, he would try to keep the Village alive, particularly power roles.
   
• I wanted to make sure PMs were securely occurring, due to the increased interactions between players. Due to the need to put in kills, Tineyes can be softcleared near endgame on a Village success landscape. For that reason, two Tineyes seemed fine. Ultimately, I wanted to secure PMs more than I worried about softclearing.
   
• I think dividing the Tyrian Seeker into the role scanner and the alignment scanner makes sense: alignment scanning is more or less necessary in a conversion game and I badly wanted to give the Village two but couldn't quite justify it. On reflection, I don't think it would have unbalanced things too much but it would have been fiddly. The problem is that in a game with aggressive hops from the kandra, the power of the alignment scanner is weakened. But in a game where the kandra play more conservative with hops, the scanner's power can become quite strong because you can get fairly robust credences in your scan results so long as the Night kill flips green. Role scanning is a double-edged sword: I think it can help unmask Elims who aren't claiming roles of death (e.g. Elim Seekers), but at the same time, you absolutely want to be cautious of rolelynching >> And being able to identify existing roles is helpful for kandra shopping for an opportunistic convert, or to ensure the kill goes through.
   
• 50-50 on the vote manip. I'm okay with vote manip roles, but given the player group size and activity, it has an outsize impact on the results. It didn't help that the Elims lucked into both vote manips early on and lucked into the Lurcher. Three Village Smokers and one Elim Smoker was meant to give some protection against both the two vote manips and the hostile role scanner, but ultimately, volatility really came into play here and everything that could go wrong went wrong for the Village.
   
• Essays have been written on Smoking and incentivising it. I think there was a decent amount of Smoking and vote manip endgames tend to showcase the importance of Smokers. I still think Wyrm's version of Tyrian Smokers are about as friendly as you can get. Araris has suggested making Smokers only interact with role scanners rather than alignment scanners. I think that's another possibility given that kandra can bodyhop in this game anyway.
   
• I think that at this activity level and given the mechanic, the distro I'd favour instead would be to go more scanner heavy - information roles, potentially one or two Thugs and/or protects, Smokers, and kandra. I think this way, players are incentivised to treat the game as a regular+ game and to focus on analysis instead. The base game should enhance the mechanic and I'm starting to think that the kandra mechanic is odd enough that one shouldn't build too much on top of it. The flip side is how Gamma balanced for Padan Fain in LG6, with both Darkfriends and the Village having access to scanners and no Smokers. Not sure. But I do like the idea that a kandra game should be even more pared down, where possible.

Activity

I don't want to say too much about activity or the lack thereof as I think enough has been said. Simply put, low activity makes things hard for the Village, and can play merry hell with game balance. This is even more so in what is functionally a conversion game. I don't know if a more aggressive activity filter would have helped: I think at some point, the GM just has to make the call to run the game during a highly active period. As Araris said, the clash with finals probably didn't help, but it still generates a problem for the GM and for the way the game shapes up.

GMing

Word of advice for GMs who might struggle halfway through GMing a game - sometimes, crem happens so try not to hate yourself too much for it, and have contingencies. I had backups (GMing-wise) lined up for if I really couldn't make it, though I felt bad. I compromised significantly on write-up standards and basically went into energy conservation mode, as there were points where I just stared at the empty page and felt like I was trying to force words out through a numb blank fog in my head. I think if things had been worse and determinator mode had failed me, I'd just have had to accept zero write-ups.

Running an anon game takes a bit more admin due to the need to secure the passwords and to keep changing the passwords and setting up docs every time a bodyhop happened. Set-up for this game took a lot longer than usual - a GM running an anon game for the first time should probably be aware of that.

Choosing to troll as <kel> for an anon game was appropriate, but led to poor Kel being added to a number of PMs. I was half wondering if they would just join SE or comment somewhere out of morbid curiosity at being repeatedly added to PMs by mistake, but I guess not. RIP Kel

Anonymity

Anonymity-wise, shout-out to Elandera, JNV, and Archer for being particularly hard to identify.

I liked what some players did with the guestbooks: AG8 Stick setting the challenge for future Penguin to get Swan to praise the Ja, or AG8 Drake asking Crocodile to steal Meerkat's salmon. It was a fun diversion, and a thread of continuity across games.

That's about it from me, I think.

Probably going to join Orlok in SE timeout for a while. If I'm this tired and struggle this hard to GM, I'd hate to see how I'd fare in an actual game.

In any case, I really need to polish and tighten up my scout rush  

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

Thanks for running this Kel!! nice write ups

Contrary to what I said as Dragonfly, IIRC all of the answers I gave while openwolfing as Ostrich were technically true 

Anyways it was fun, my SynthKandra compatriots. I appreciated both of your general outlook on weird plays and gambits 

Sorry JNV for getting you voted out on false pretenses.

Shout out to Stick, you were really very quick on the draw about some things.

Although I lol'd when I got the message about people doing fakescans too much recently for my scan claim to be a gambit 

I certainly grew a little laxer about imitating og Dragonfly as the cycles went on, beyond the really obvious indicators that I was instructed in. I banked on the transition being gradual enough and the original post count of Dragonfly being shortish enough that it wouldn't stick out enough to make the top of anyone's priority list. I've never been great at obscuring my particular diction and style but I did make some effort to in this game, so well done to those of you who ID'd me correctly.

Anyways misc postgame thoughts:

Spoiler

• The Taken shared doc mechanic was really cool, I hope games that do bodyhopping use this mechanic in the future. Just in general I think the kandra mechanics felt more polished than any of the earlier iterations of kandra bodyhopping I've seen attempted on the shard.
• As has been already mentioned, the newness of the kandra mechanics threw people. On both sides, but especially the village, not surprisingly. I think to some extent this is unavoidable when you change up something as fundamental as account identity. Anyways, future villages will potentially be a lot more prepared.
• While it is unavoidable, I do think this is always a slight consideration as a GM. I feel like I've run into this at least a teeny bit in the games I've ran: most players will not have thought out all of the mechanics as much as the GM has  And sometimes this can mean a particular role or a particular alignment has a tougher learning curve than anticipated. Or that some of your own balance considerations of "well if they do Y you can just do X" aren't always obvious in the moment.
• Ironically, this game did not see much pure analysis of game mechanics. And normally, I would say that posts about "here are all of my takes about the roles in this game" are kind of a big sidetrack, but this was a game where they would have legitimately been very useful 
• I do think this game could have turned out differently, even if the last turn or two was very nearly a foregone conclusion. Through like 3/4 sheer luck we took over literally the absolute best possible village roles (not to mention making one of those swaps the same night one of us got scanned). Even then we had some legitimate close calls with the lynch, and some... rather overt defenses of each other 
• Balancing the role distro of a game where the elims can claim the roles of existing villagers is harder than balancing the role distro of a game where that isn't a thing.
• Personally, I do think the kandra-hop felt a bit too reliable for us, or a bit too low on downside for using to escape after shenanigans. And yeah, that might be due to the fact that we killed the main role that deterred this playstyle N1. It might also be helped along by a general distrust of vote analysis or what have you  But yeah if the village had like a sharpshooter or a thug on top of the medic I don't think it would've necessarily gone amiss.
• Earlier in the game I totally expected a sharpshooter to deter the kind of fakeclaim shenanigan I pulled D2. I only proposed that idea in the doc bc we had a medic to block any potential sharpshooters.. But as the game went on and it became rather clear that there was no sharpshooter at all, it was in retrospect fairly apparent why this was the case: an already swingy role becomes quite a lot more swingy when it can be converted to the elim team. The potential for conversion really messes with the sharpshooter more than any other role, I think. And, hey, I don't think a sharpshooter is needed for a balanced distro. Nor do I think the sharpshooter as-is would be impossible to include in a hypothetically well-balanced distro. It'd just be hard, I think. But, if one wanted to make it a more viable possibility in a distro, I could see maybe "the sharpshooter always just dies instead of being converted." Or something like that idk. While this would technically be a departure from straight Tyrian roles it only affects how it interacts with the kandra, which itself isn't a normal Tyrian role 
• Given how many bloody smokers there were, and how all of the vote manips started out in village hands, I don't think it's easy for me to see any balance problems with that aspect of the distro, even if the kandra heavily benefited from it in this case.
• Inactivity was a thing in this game. It was felt more keenly bc it was a 15 player game. People were showing up to vote a decent amount, but the discussion was rather anemic in later cycles. And I don't have much that's new to add to that.

GG

[Ashbringer he/him]

I don’t really have postgame thoughts from my ~24 hours of life, besides that the Kandra mechanic is well done (if could use some checks like Sharpshooters or Thugs) and that being Illwei’s PM Buddy is officially a curse . Can kinda get why I got hit immediately but still kind of a letdown.

Also according to Kel nobody guessed I was me. Also nobody guessed anyone else was me, either… I guess people judged correctly my finals strain was outweighing my desire to play a Kandra game.

Speaking of which, might post something of Faleast and AraRaash once finals are stable. Idk how they’d play around Hauer but seeing the SynthKandra in action is definitely something they’d like to see. That and how good a replication they really are, if all it takes is a good shock to detect them  

[Stick. she/her]

5 hours ago, DrakeMarshall said:

Although I lol'd when I got the message about people doing fakescans too much recently for my scan claim to be a gambit 

Smh I must never again underestimate the persistence of scam result gambits

I've sent this to Kas in a previous game but it needs to be reiterated: 

Spoiler

 

 

1 hour ago, Ashbringer said:

Also nobody guessed anyone else was me, either…

Actually, for a very very short period of time I wondered if Penguin was you, but it quickly became clear that it was Mat. I also noticed Penguin commenting on how they think Swan 'sounds' like him and that was kind of a dead giveaway because AG8  

 

edit: Also, I updated my anon account's guestbook shortly before this thread was up but @Experience if you wish to add anything I can edit it in on your behalf

Edited May 11, 2022 by _Stick_

[Bort he/him]

It was a fun game, but 4 smokers, out of 15 players? That's enough to cover over half the starting players, and that percentage would only go up, unless it was the smokers doing the dying.

I am quite pleased I managed to scan 2 elims in the first 2 cycles... Unfortunately, one was kandra and bodyhopped that very night, and the other was smoked.

And am I the only one who wasn't trying to work out who everyone was?

Thanks Kas

[Stick. she/her]

20 minutes ago, Bort said:

I am quite pleased I managed to scan 2 elims in the first 2 cycles... Unfortunately, one was kandra and bodyhopped that very night, and the other was smoked.

You scanned me C2 didn't you? I don't know if I was smoked, but I was definitely village at that stage  I only changed alignments starting D4.

[Bort he/him]

2 hours ago, _Stick_ said:

You scanned me C2 didn't you? I don't know if I was smoked, but I was definitely village at that stage  I only changed alignments starting D4.

Oops... I got you and Ostrich confused there in the list lol.

[Experience he/him]

Okay well...here we go

I hadn't been elim for a longggg while so wanted to try it out. It turns out that despite my bloodthristyness, I am terrible at being an elim. I was only able to stay alive because bodyhops were avaliable to me, and I did rely heavily on them. I don't know if I would fare better in a different game, but I just don't do well coming up with fake information unless I have a large (like 5 hour large) block of time where I can just do analysis. That's where my long post when I was weasel came from, but my voicing was different from them which I think also got me caught in both cases? Being elim was fun, but I'm starting to see where Kas is coming from with his village=life ideas.

Things were going pretty good, with me getting Weasel's protect and then Vulture's vote manip. But partway through the game I got quite sick, and my activity tanked. I felt pretty bad for scorp when they were left alone in the thread, as normally I would have at least given them fake analysis so they weren't just alone in the thread trying to solve a game that nobody else seemed to be playing. 

Even though I do suck at being elim, I apparently can pocket succesfully. I managed to pocket Mat and turn his suspicion mostly away from me for the majority of the turn, which allowed us to hammer onto him last minute :P.

Also, hammers. Early on, we were able to do them simply because village just wasn't all there, and was split on decisions. We would then just hop on last minute and place our votes. Later on, even when people were there, we had gotten the vote manip from hopping so we were able to hammer anyway. 

Sorry for killing everyone's PMs, I just couldn't resist trolling people, and had too much time on my hands. :P.

 

Thoughts on distro now

The fact that I started without a role def made us want me to hop right away from the start of the game, so I was free to do whatever I wanted so long as I didn't get lynched because I would hop and hopefully get a role. I think that the fact that all three of us had two hops might have been too much. We did end up only using three of the six, knowing we had more led us to deciding to go for more gambits. 

We got insanely lucky on snatching two village vote manips.

 

Anyway I think that's all. Thanks Kel and El for the great game

And kel amazing writeups as always (i personally don't care if you don't get them done on time)

exp out

[Mat he/him]

1 hour ago, Experience said:

Even though I do suck at being elim, I apparently can pocket succesfully. I managed to pocket Mat and turn his suspicion mostly away from me for the majority of the turn, which allowed us to hammer onto him last minute :P.

Just thought you'd repay the favor, huh?  

That's not quite what happened, though, if you meant Vulture during D4- it was less that you pocketed me and more that you just weren't there. Vulture was absolutely my most confusing slot for the majority of the game (in alignment and ID) but I ended voting you so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We don't talk about Weasel because I legitimately didn't catch the openwolfing until like a minute to rollover so good job there :P. Good game overall, I thought, I did village read you D1.

1 hour ago, Experience said:

i personally don't care if you don't get them done on time

^^^^^^^^^^

[Elandera she/her]

19 hours ago, Kasimir said:

Anonymity-wise, shout-out to Elandera, JNV, and Archer for being particularly hard to identify.

Spoiler

Fun game everyone! A special shout out to @DrakeMarshall for maintaining the writing style. I had enough variety in my own diction before that yours worked well.

Thanks to Kas for running this. Despite the struggles, I enjoyed having at least some small role to continue playing even after being taken by a Kandra.

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

You were the best teacher on how to be an Ivory Dragonfly that I could have hoped for <3

[Kasimir he/him]

4 hours ago, Matrim's Dice said:

ulture was absolutely my most confusing slot for the majority of the game (in alignment and ID)

Vulture is @Orlok Tsubodai. Never believe anything else.

Just ask Illwei.

:eyes:

[Devotary of Spontaneity]

Congratulations to the elims for winning, and thank you to Kasimir for running 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, Elandera, or StrikerEZ, 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, Archer, and Kasimir) 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!