Mid-Range Game 63: The Outcasts of Tyrian Falls

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

2 minutes ago, _Stick_ said:

Nope. They'd be kinda OP otherwise huh  

smh we can do better than this

[Amanuensis he/him]

Araris Valerian ayo porch bro

[Stick. she/her]

2 hours ago, _Stick_ said:

If there’s only one Mobborn to begin with, they are almost certainly an experimental coinshot - their survival will be reflected in the write up and we will be able to tell that that’s the result of a failed mobborn conversion if there’s also another death in the cycle (which has to be the elim kill since there are no vigilante roles in the game).

BTW we can clear me based on this.  ty

It's also worth mentioning that the soother target selection is completely random, so it's actually harder to prevent conversions than I thought. @The Known Novel is the Soother informed of whose vote gets soothed if there's multiple players voting for them? 

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

2 minutes ago, _Stick_ said:

BTW we can clear me based on this.  ty

i got you

stik

[Stick. she/her]

3 minutes ago, Shining Silhouette said:

i got you

stik

you've got a twisted idea of what clearing is :0 

And here I was, planning to convert you

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

1 minute ago, _Stick_ said:

you've got a twisted idea of what clearing is :0 

Clearing you off the player list? *shrug*

But I digress

1 minute ago, _Stick_ said:

And here I was, plning to convert you

To be completely honest I was confued when I read this because I didn't select the whole sentence

I think we'd be great teammates tho like we could totally be under the radar and stuff

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

If I had any thoughts I’d put them here

Mat

[Stick. she/her]

39 minutes ago, Shining Silhouette said:

Clearing you off the player list? *shrug*

But I digress

To be completely honest I was confued when I read this because I didn't select the whole sentence

I think we'd be great teammates tho like we could totally be under the radar and stuff

 Absolutely

12 minutes ago, TheAlpha929 said:

If I had any thoughts I’d put them here

Mat

I'll be honest I've been feeling a little weird about that Mat post too. Is your vote just a random choice or gut suspicion? 

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

It sorta feels like he might be leaving room for himself to be distant, to help sort of influence people that he’s not suspicious, he’s just distracted. And I know alignments are random, but if they seem unbalanced TKN might switch Mat around to Elim, or even Mobborn. If you follow those thoughts, great! If you didn’t I can try to go in deeper detail later on.

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

Just now, TheAlpha929 said:

It sorta feels like he might be leaving room for himself to be distant, to help sort of influence people that he’s not suspicious, he’s just distracted. And I know alignments are random, but if they seem unbalanced TKN might switch Mat around to Elim, or even Mobborn.

[bold added]

What do you mean by this?

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

3 minutes ago, Shining Silhouette said:

What do you mean by this?

Okay, so, I still know basically nothing about GMing. But. I imagine, if by an RNG I end up as Mobborn, since I am very new to SE, I’ve never been to a game with another faction, I could see a GM switching me to a different alignment, and letting someone with more experience do the more difficult job. I don’t know, that was my weird thought process. 

[DeTess she/her]

12 minutes ago, TheAlpha929 said:

Okay, so, I still know basically nothing about GMing. But. I imagine, if by an RNG I end up as Mobborn, since I am very new to SE, I’ve never been to a game with another faction, I could see a GM switching me to a different alignment, and letting someone with more experience do the more difficult job. I don’t know, that was my weird thought process. 

Such things do sometimes happen in my experience, but they happen before the game starts. No switching once everyone got their alignment. Or are you saying your suspicion comes from being an augur and seeing you rolled mobborn?

[Mat he/him]

45 minutes ago, TheAlpha929 said:

It sorta feels like he might be leaving room for himself to be distant, to help sort of influence people that he’s not suspicious, he’s just distracted. And I know alignments are random, but if they seem unbalanced TKN might switch Mat around to Elim, or even Mobborn. If you follow those thoughts, great! If you didn’t I can try to go in deeper detail later on.

I'm not lying about being busy. I can bluetext if you want. I try to avoid doing that, but I will be more distant this game and that has nothing to do with my alignment.

I'm okay with ignoring the mobborn, but more for Stick's reason-- the alignments are nearly one and the same to us, except for that they want to kill each other. Right now I'd rather kill elims than mobborn but later on I could see a point where that's no longer the case.

Stick asking to be cleared feels like e!her and I feel like that's based on something but I cannot for the life of me think of what. In other words, it's not based on anything. Unless I can find something. But I'm probably not going to go look. I'd be interested in her elaborating on her vote as well.

Gut vil on Shining.

[Archer he/him]

Some self-corrections, based on what people have said and my re-reading the rules more closely:

-Soothing isn’t a targetable action, so it has limited use for preventing conversion. Soother would be a good Skaa role.

-“If one of the Mobborn tries to recruit an Informer, the Informer's kill will be redirected to that Mobborn, and the recruitment will fail.” This protects numbers of the Informer team (solidifying my 2-member guess), while pushing the Mobborn to recruit people they are confident are Skaa (limiting their options). Since the Informers also want to target the most villagey Skaa, they’re more likely to hit the same targets, either in the same round or over time.

-On the topic of PMs, they’re an action that shows you’re not submitting a convert order or NK, so I strongly recommend that you make them. I suspect that the Inefficient Tineye is an Informer to work around this form of clearing. The Mobborn workaround is that they get a PM for free out of the conversion.

-Depending on the calculated likelihood of conversion succeeding, I agree with the assessment that they are probably the Coinshot Role That’s Really a Thug to prevent early disasters.

*

These pinged me a possible cases of TMI:

2 hours ago, _Stick_ said:

Nope. They'd be kinda OP otherwise huh  

3 hours ago, DeTess said:

Doesn't a mobborn targetting an elim cause a redirect of the attack? So there would still only be one attack?

The Stick comment DeTess is responding too is also well informed. 

This pinged me as a case of not-TMI:

2 hours ago, Shining Silhouette said:

Edit 2: 

@The Known Novel Tineyes can see Mobborn Convert PMs right

I feel like a secondary edit isn't a planned misdirection from how much Silh knows. It feels like a genuine question that a Mobborn would rather not ask in public, lest they reveal a good way to trace them. Building off of my Informer Tineye guess, if this thought crossed the Informers' mind, I'd expect them to have made plans around identifying the Mobborn based on it, either concluding that it's a great idea they will secretly work towards, or learning that it won't work, so Silh wouldn't have that genuine question outstanding to ask. 

Also Silh is funny so they shouldn't die. :P.

4 hours ago, _Stick_ said:

I don’t really see how hunting the mobborn  is different to hunting elims. Both those factions share something the village doesn’t - TMI re: faction members. And once we get an elim/mobborn flip, standard association analysis should lead us to the other team members. 

While reading the rules I’d assumed the Mobborn do not start with more than a single member. To get as many converts in as they can, they’d wanna prolong the game  if possible, SK-style probably. So, uh, we should aim for a village sweep. i.e. focus on finding elims. 

I think association analysis is made harder by the fact that they won't have been associated for long. We can pick up on shifts in stances on people, but we'll have less of a track record to work with. 

When did you read the rules and assume the Mobborn was a one-man team? Before or after looking at the final player-count? 

Re: Mobborn needing to prolong the game: Lets say C1 is 2I:1M:6S. Mix a Skaa, convert a Skaa, NK a Skaa. C2 2I:2M:3S. Fail to convert, NK a Skaa, mix a Skaa. 2I:2M:1S. At this point it's more likely a Mobborn dies to the NK, and more likely an Informer is exed, and more likely the Mobborn dies of they try to convert, so lets say they hold off. 1I:1M:1S, leading to Informers NKing whoever isn't exed for the win probably. Alternatively, the Mobborn do convert and it's 1I:2M and the Mobborn win. I don't think they need to expend a lot of energy prolonging the game when, due to the low player count, they'd probably be fine with just two conversions. 

6 hours ago, DeTess said:

However, something I am unsure about is whether the village should even be trying to actively hunt down Mobborn. Obviously, the village loses if the mobborn have a majority when all the elims go out, but to what degree can we prevent that from happening other than racing to deal with the elims as quickly as possible? The recruitment action happens before the execution and elim kill does, so unless there are a lot of soothers the amount of Mobborn will only shrink if both the execution and the elim kill hit a Mobborn, and in any other case the relative amount of Mobborn will grow. The way I see it, unless there's a way to almost guarnatee through soothing that the execution of a mobborn will wipe out the faction, the village should be focusing on taking out the elims as quickly as possible.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on that, but I might be missing something here that would make executing suspected Mobborn make more sense, so I'd appreciate it if anyone else could chime in.

I don't see the downside of making this a Skaa vs Informer battle by eliminating the Mobborns. Conversion means we lose a member and one is added to the enemy faction, whereas NKs just mean we lose someone. Plus they can be blocked. Sure, recruits can be killed, but we have to assume they'll make smart choices to avoid that happening very often. You seem supportive of a healthy-sized Mobborn team and I don't follow your reasoning about why that's better than making this  just S vs I, minus the possibility of the Informers sniping us while we deal with the Mobborns. 

22 minutes ago, TheAlpha929 said:

Okay, so, I still know basically nothing about GMing. But. I imagine, if by an RNG I end up as Mobborn, since I am very new to SE, I’ve never been to a game with another faction, I could see a GM switching me to a different alignment, and letting someone with more experience do the more difficult job. I don’t know, that was my weird thought process. 

Alpha, would it be fair to characterize your argument thusly: you are a newish player with an unpredictable persona. DeTess is a returning player who doesn't have a recent track-record to judge. If the Mobborn team only has one player, it's very important for the balance of the game that they make reasonable decisions in line with how the GM expects them to play eg. they need to submit a conversion order every round, they need to fend off attacks in thread fairly competently in the early stages. You believe that a GM seeking predictability to maintain the integrity of the game balance would avoid selecting one of you two to be the Mobborn when deciding alignment distribution for the game.

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

41 minutes ago, DeTess said:

Or are you saying your suspicion comes from being an augur and seeing you rolled mobborn?

Let me check the rules real quick—

Oh, I forgot about that ability. No, it’s not that.

13 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

I'm not lying about being busy. I can bluetext if you want. I try to avoid doing that, but I will be more distant this game and that has nothing to do with my alignment.

I believe you, I still think you might be elim.

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

58 minutes ago, TheAlpha929 said:

Okay, so, I still know basically nothing about GMing. But. I imagine, if by an RNG I end up as Mobborn, since I am very new to SE, I’ve never been to a game with another faction, I could see a GM switching me to a different alignment, and letting someone with more experience do the more difficult job. I don’t know, that was my weird thought process. 

Yeah distro happens before games start

How many games have you played?

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

12 minutes ago, Shining Silhouette said:

How many games have you played?

This is number four, though two of them were a little untraditional.

EDIT: 

Quote

Alpha, would it be fair to characterize your argument thusly: you are a newish player with an unpredictable persona. DeTess is a returning player who doesn't have a recent track-record to judge. If the Mobborn team only has one player, it's very important for the balance of the game that they make reasonable decisions in line with how the GM expects them to play eg. they need to submit a conversion order every round, they need to fend off attacks in thread fairly competently in the early stages. You believe that a GM seeking predictability to maintain the integrity of the game balance would avoid selecting one of you two to be the Mobborn when deciding alignment distribution for the game.

Sure, I guess 

Edited April 18, 2023 by TheAlpha929

[Stick. she/her]

1 hour ago, TheAlpha929 said:

It sorta feels like he might be leaving room for himself to be distant, to help sort of influence people that he’s not suspicious, he’s just distracted. And I know alignments are random, but if they seem unbalanced TKN might switch Mat around to Elim, or even Mobborn. If you follow those thoughts, great! If you didn’t I can try to go in deeper detail later on.

I think my main problem with this post is that it starts with a v!Mat presumption. Why bring up distro adjustments at all? Why couldn't Mat have been elim based on the RNG distro? 

1 hour ago, TheAlpha929 said:

Okay, so, I still know basically nothing about GMing. But. I imagine, if by an RNG I end up as Mobborn, since I am very new to SE, I’ve never been to a game with another faction, I could see a GM switching me to a different alignment, and letting someone with more experience do the more difficult job. I don’t know, that was my weird thought process. 

This feels more like a V!Alpha thought process though.

45 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

Stick asking to be cleared feels like e!her and I feel like that's based on something but I cannot for the life of me think of what. In other words, it's not based on anything. Unless I can find something. But I'm probably not going to go look. I'd be interested in her elaborating on her vote as well.

Gut vil on Shining.

I hope you know that was a joke  I've certainly feigned rules confusion countless times and there's nothing preventing elims/mobborn to genuinely mistake the rules too. 

Agreed on the shining read

(EDIT:

forgot to answer your question about my vote - I didn't love this line from your post

10 hours ago, Matrim's Dice said:

*checks player list* woah 9 is less than I thought for some reason. I clearly didn't read Archer's post carefully enough

END OF EDIT)

32 minutes ago, Archer said:

These pinged me a possible cases of TMI:

3 hours ago, _Stick_ said:

Nope. They'd be kinda OP otherwise huh  

When you overlook a significant part of the rules it's only natural to go and refresh your memory  

32 minutes ago, Archer said:

When did you read the rules and assume the Mobborn was a one-man team? Before or after looking at the final player-count?

Back when I signed up for the game xD

Edited April 18, 2023 by _Stick_
added parenthesis AND GRAMMAR

[Mat he/him]

7 minutes ago, _Stick_ said:

I hope you know that was a joke  I've certainly feigned rules confusion countless times and there's nothing preventing elims/mobborn to genuinely mistake the rules too. 

I know it’s a joke, yeah. That doesn’t change my read though. The read was more that the joke felt like an e!you joke but again I have no evidence to back that up :P.

Also, it’s the asterisks and the way they show real time, isn’t it  

[DeTess she/her]

23 minutes ago, Archer said:

I don't see the downside of making this a Skaa vs Informer battle by eliminating the Mobborns. Conversion means we lose a member and one is added to the enemy faction, whereas NKs just mean we lose someone. Plus they can be blocked. Sure, recruits can be killed, but we have to assume they'll make smart choices to avoid that happening very often. You seem supportive of a healthy-sized Mobborn team and I don't follow your reasoning about why that's better than making this  just S vs I, minus the possibility of the Informers sniping us while we deal with the Mobborns. 

I think I'm not really following your argument here? Could you explain what you're saying here a little more?

[Stick. she/her]

8 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

I know it’s a joke, yeah. That doesn’t change my read though. The read was more that the joke felt like an e!you joke but again I have no evidence to back that up :P.

Also, it’s the asterisks and the way they show real time, isn’t it  

Maybee? xD Dunno how I feel about you being that self-aware though  

9 minutes ago, DeTess said:

I think I'm not really following your argument here? Could you explain what you're saying here a little more?

My understanding was that he's asking for a temporary elim/skaa alliance to get the mobborn out of the way first. @Archer IMO we continue hunting elims in-thread and maybe they'll be kind enough to off a mobborn or two for us using their NK. It's all the same to them as far as outnumbering goes.

[DeTess she/her]

@Archeris that what you're asking for?

Something that should be noted I think is that in a way, the Mobborn are  a bigger threat to the elims than the villagers, as they have an information advantage plus a semi-alignment-scan, so It wouldn't surprise me to see the elims taking out mobborn if one becomes obvious.

edit: to clarify, I meant to say the the elims would be more wary of the mobborn than the villagers, not that the mobborn are more of a threat to the elims than they are to the villagers.

Edited April 18, 2023 by DeTess

[Archer he/him]

1 hour ago, _Stick_ said:

 

(EDIT:

forgot to answer your question about my vote - I didn't love this line from your post

END OF EDIT)

That's a shame. I was reading your Mat vote as bait to test Alpha, not a serious attack - and was Skaa reading you for it. I'm Skaa-reading Mat based on him not realizing there was 9 players, since being a member of a minor faction on a small team should have been a dead giveaway. 

46 minutes ago, _Stick_ said:

Maybee? xD Dunno how I feel about you being that self-aware though  

My understanding was that he's asking for a temporary elim/skaa alliance to get the mobborn out of the way first. @Archer IMO we continue hunting elims in-thread and maybe they'll be kind enough to off a mobborn or two for us using their NK. It's all the same to them as far as outnumbering goes.

I'm confused why you think that's where I was heading. I don't see any form of alliance being viable.

DeTess seemed to be downplaying the threat level of the Mobborn in comparison to the Informers. They questioned why we'd want to hunt them down. I'm saying that our goal is to outnumber them, and in a SvM battle we'll care worse than a SvI fight. The NK and conversion both make us lose a player, but conversion also adds a player to the opposing side, so it's scarier. Ideally, killing a single Mobborn today before they can spread is the best case scenario, but in practice, I'm inclined to shoot members of either faction if they're identified. 

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

8 hours ago, DeTess said:

So, the trickiest bit of this game I am trying to wrap my head around is the Mobborn. The informers are a pretty standard elim faction, but the Mobborn will blend in quite well with the village, at least to start with. They are also looking to deal with the elims, though they want the game to last long enough for them to get a majority. Going by Archer's analysis (which seems somewhat sensible), then the Mobborn might try to pump the breaks a bit if an elim gets lynched C1 which might make them easier to tell apart from villagers. There is also the fact that as the game goes on the Mobborn should have a growing network of confirmed evil players which should make it easier for them to identify the elims, but will also result in behaviour that might make them easier to identify.

However, something I am unsure about is whether the village should even be trying to actively hunt down Mobborn. Obviously, the village loses if the mobborn have a majority when all the elims go out, but to what degree can we prevent that from happening other than racing to deal with the elims as quickly as possible? The recruitment action happens before the execution and elim kill does, so unless there are a lot of soothers the amount of Mobborn will only shrink if both the execution and the elim kill hit a Mobborn, and in any other case the relative amount of Mobborn will grow. The way I see it, unless there's a way to almost guarnatee through soothing that the execution of a mobborn will wipe out the faction, the village should be focusing on taking out the elims as quickly as possible.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on that, but I might be missing something here that would make executing suspected Mobborn make more sense, so I'd appreciate it if anyone else could chime in.

@The Known NovelIf there is more than one Mobborn to start out with, do they start with a PM/some other information about who the other mobborn is/are? If they don't the above analysis might change as there is a bigger chance that there are two mobborn factions that don't know who the other one is, increasing the chances of recruitment actions getting wasted.

They do not.

4 hours ago, Shining Silhouette said:

Been a minute since I've played a game. Good to be back

These roles are wack and I love them

ED1T:

nah han

speaking of palindromes

did you know that mobborn is a palindrome if you combine the "rn" into one letter?

 

Edit 2: 

@The Known Novel Tineyes can see Mobborn Convert PMs right

Nope. Only PMs made with the PM action.

3 hours ago, _Stick_ said:

BTW we can clear me based on this.  ty

It's also worth mentioning that the soother target selection is completely random, so it's actually harder to prevent conversions than I thought. @The Known Novel is the Soother informed of whose vote gets soothed if there's multiple players voting for them? 

Yes.

[DeTess she/her]

5 minutes ago, Archer said:

DeTess seemed to be downplaying the threat level of the Mobborn in comparison to the Informers. They questioned why we'd want to hunt them down. I'm saying that our goal is to outnumber them, and in a SvM battle we'll care worse than a SvI fight. The NK and conversion both make us lose a player, but conversion also adds a player to the opposing side, so it's scarier. Ideally, killing a single Mobborn today before they can spread is the best case scenario, but in practice, I'm inclined to shoot members of either faction if they're identified. 

Okay, so I didn't mean to seem like I was downplaying their threat, but rather, what I am unsure of is how much the village can actually do about that threat. It seems to me that the more feasible approach would be to try and focus on the elims, as the faster we take them down, the more likely we can do so before the Mobborn get a majority. The reason I am not so sure we can prevent that is, as I said, because the mobborn can convert before dying, so only in the case of the elim kill also hitting a mobborn or conversion getting blocked do the number of mobborn in the game decrease on a mobborn getting executed. In every other case the amount of mobborn remains the same while the total amount of players decreases, bringing them closer to victory.

So what I am saying is that I think that the only chance of victory the vilalge has is to try and get the elims as fast as possible, deos that make sense?

But as I said, I am having trouble getting my head around the mobborn, so I could be missing something here, but this is where I'm at regarding my thoughts on them.