Long Game 94: The Call of the Forest of Hell

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

2 hours ago, Amanuensis said:

Woo! Mat and Alpha did the thing! I love a good comeback story.

RIP Village tho

Whatta rollercoaster haha

for real in so many ways

[Archer he/him]

What a game!

Full credit to the village for locking us out of PMs, glowpasting me, crossbowing me, C1 voting for me and Mat, actually exing two of us, and VitCing just enough to be annoying.

I had some notes prepared about the GMing, but I'll condense them into there was a mechanism for trouble (IRL health problems etc) and there was signs of trouble (missed giving info to Aman, bungled VCs), so the IM should have stepped in. I recognize that Striker was dealing with stuff of their own, so what happened was a gap in our net of supervision coverage.

My team didn't play this game the way I would have. Aman could have ensured DeTess went down instead of Mat C1, Mat jumped on me for voting TKN, and Alpha made unexpected kill and item passing choices. I think that awesome! On paper, they probably lessened our odds of winning, but the results speak for themselves. The variety of approaches we employed made it difficult to analyze us as a team. Alpha deserves enormous credit for doing so well in their first elim game. You and Mat did a lot of heavy lifting, so congratulations on the unlikely victory.

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

13 minutes ago, Archer said:

What a game!

Full credit to the village for locking us out of PMs, glowpasting me, crossbowing me, C1 voting for me and Mat, actually exing two of us, and VitCing just enough to be annoying.

I had some notes prepared about the GMing, but I'll condense them into there was a mechanism for trouble (IRL health problems etc) and there was signs of trouble (missed giving info to Aman, bungled VCs), so the IM should have stepped in. I recognize that Striker was dealing with stuff of their own, so what happened was a gap in our net of supervision coverage.

My team didn't play this game the way I would have. Aman could have ensured DeTess went down instead of Mat C1, Mat jumped on me for voting TKN, and Alpha made unexpected kill and item passing choices. I think that awesome! On paper, they probably lessened our odds of winning, but the results speak for themselves. The variety of approaches we employed made it difficult to analyze us as a team. Alpha deserves enormous credit for doing so well in their first elim game. You and Mat did a lot of heavy lifting, so congratulations on the unlikely victory.

was it the Devo mask pass and TKN kill?

[Araris Valerian he/him]

Well good game to the elims, especially Mat and Alpha for sticking through a really rocky start. I’m still scratching my head over Mat not getting exed after me. Or honestly, Mat not getting exed before me.

[The Paradoxical Phenomenon he/him]

25 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

Well good game to the elims, especially Mat and Alpha for sticking through a really rocky start. I’m still scratching my head over Mat not getting exed after me. Or honestly, Mat not getting exed before me.

Same. 

[Araris Valerian he/him]

7 hours ago, Alvron said:

Vig!Alv thinks there should've been more crossbows and he should get 3 of them.

Normally this would terrify me, but in this case I feel like hastening my death would have probably been a good thing.

And I forgot, but thank you @Elandera for running this game, and I look forward to the next iteration!

[Archer he/him]

1 hour ago, TheAlpha929 said:

was it the Devo mask pass and TKN kill?

Aye. But the mask pass is probably the only reason people didn't confidently go after you, so it worked out

Also I forgot to mention that I liked the three new players getting the Thief role. I just forgot Illwei subbed in for one, otherwise I'd have looked to exploit that guessable part of the distro 

44 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

Normally this would terrify me, but in this case I feel like hastening my death would have probably been a good thing.

Would have been very fun if Alv got exed and 3 crossbows were then randomly distributed into the mix 

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

3 hours ago, Araris Valerian said:

Well good game to the elims, especially Mat and Alpha for sticking through a really rocky start. I’m still scratching my head over Mat not getting exed after me. Or honestly, Mat not getting exed before me.

I point you to QF60, have fun. 

[Mat he/him]

A lot of it was banking on the village dropping off after we killed all the active people, which isn’t the most fulfilling strategy, let’s just say that. And VitC; VitC was a big part of it :P.

[Alvron]

15 hours ago, Kasimir said:

I didn't do anything about it. You're the one who voted and got me exed for not knowing how to play like a Villager, having come off...let's see, one Evil game, one Good Guy Fain game, and the game where Wyrm viciously stabbed me in the back, none of which are games that taught me how to play Village  I think that's just called 'having a conscience'?  

You didn't need to do anything.  Elan did very well in your stead.

For example:

Quote

Night Six: Begin the trek towards the closest stash I have in the forest.

Your action was successful. You located the stash, which largely appears to have been undisturbed. Though as night fell, a shade was lingering uncomfortably close.
You have gone insane! You cannot take action or vote during this day turn. You will be immune* to insanity through D9.

*swallows hard*
Does the Shade look familiar to me at all?

Vaguely, though it seems to be from a time of life you try to keep not remembering well 

*whimper*

Quote

Night Eight: Sell the loot I acquired and leave town, never to return.

You didn't quite make it out of town before the same shade as before blocked the path forward. It waits, but does not appear enraged.

Since I didn't have any Night actions to do, I decided to RP some and Elan was very accepting and played along fantastically despite the time constraints they had.
Once again Elan.  Thank you very much for indulging me.

[|TJ| he/him]

Thanks for running the game @Elandera, it was probably one of the few games I actually wanted to last till the endgame instead of crying for death.

On 5/21/2023 at 10:38 AM, Elandera said:

Yes, however the village no longer had any ability to block the night kill. Your team has not missed a submission yet, so the night turn would have been a formality only.

Don't mind it, this is just be being salty over the loss , but couldn't the shades counter thing killed the person submitting the kill in the night?

[Kasimir he/him]

12 hours ago, Alvron said:

You didn't need to do anything.  Elan did very well in your stead.

Well, then I'm not doing anything other than being extremely dead and frustrated, so that checks out.  How convenient for everyone!

5 hours ago, |TJ| said:

Don't mind it, this is just be being salty over the loss , but couldn't the shades counter thing killed the person submitting the kill in the night?

Alpha had Silver Dust. It's on the spreadsheet. Turns out that when RNGesus supports you and when you're a Thief who actually submits actions, you can get things like immunity to Wrath of Shades. Who knew? Most curious indeed.

Edited May 22, 2023 by Kasimir

[Elandera she/her]

It's past time for some of my thoughts.

First of all, I want to thank all of you for playing. I know my GMing was a bit all over the place this time due to various circumstances, but I do believe the end impact was fairly minimal. It did, however, remind me how much I need a co-GM for this ruleset.

Now, on to other things.

The balance was WAY off, but it seems to have self-corrected (largely due to RNG and village apathy). As it was mentioned, I believe in one of the docs, the elims had a larger percentage chance that their first kill would fail. A few things that I didn't account for with that: the removal of free actions such as Listen at the Door and swapping the tracking action for Glowpaste in concert with the removal of Fenweed Poison, all of which helped negate the long-term impact of Pallid Masks. That led to Pallid Masks essentially only blocking the kill, White Fox, Glowpaste and the Spellbook. Of which, Glowpaste only got used twice and the Spellbook once.

In the same vein, White Fox was too powerful. I needed to make the Spellbook first in the OoA since it was relatively rare compared to White Fox.

The fact that it took several night turns before a successful kill went through speaks to how bad the protection/kill balance was, and how badly they needed a 5th member. But that leads me to the real problem this game.

The elims should not have won.

Everything was stacked against them. Crazy successful village accuracy in the beginning (Sart's crossbow shot, two elims being part of the exe options D1, TKN's glowpaste) led them to losing half of their players by N3. The only thing working in their favor was RNG. Yet the game lasted through D9.

Why did they win then?

Inactivity, low engagement, and not paying attention to key rules and roles led directly to the village loss. I get it. I really do. There's a reason I don't play very often any more because I just don't have the energy to engage enough in the game to do my teams justice. GMing is mildly easier, because I don't need to put extra critical thinking into it more than an hour or so around rollover.

But this is something we really need to consider. At what point does quality outweigh quantity? Yes, we need a certain number of players for certain games. This one in particular is better with a larger player base simply because of the number of roles and interactions. But when those roles/rules aren't used anyway, then what's the point?

I do believe we need to get better at really looking at the rules before we decide to engage in a game and consider if it's something we can properly handle. This was Threnody Lite, but that doesn't mean it was base Tyrian in simplicity. It's still one of my Threnody games, though (for reference, glance at the rules for LG60, which also included some secret conversions), and it requires some level of understanding your options. In prior iterations, I was disappointed in the lack of use for the actions anyone could use, so I simplified them. Only one got used (and it ended poorly for balance), so I simplified it again for this, bumping up the importance of the named roles. Yet the only ones that got used consistently were the Writer (and mostly DeTess and his PM orders) and the White Fox. I got more action orders from roleless Alvron ( @Alvron that was fun, btw. I will gladly take RP actions) than some players with actual actions available to them. And that really messed with the village's outcome.

The one role in this that made the most difference was the Thief. Those items can be key to helping either party succeed. It's a large part of why the elims won, because Alpha was consistently putting in actions to find items (and RNG really liked him (seriously, one failed items search in all of that is a bit absurd)). It got them the Shade protection they needed to win, Pallid Masks galore, and the Spellbook they used to get rid of Devo's Pallid mask, effectively mimicking a kill order when the actual order failed from a roleblock (which kept Mat alive another turn). 

And then having a couple of players hovering at the edges of inactivity (that probably should have been replaced sooner had I been tracking activity as I should have been), really didn't help at all. I know contribution crusade isn't a thing so much in our community anymore, but now there are no real in-game consequences for inactivity. Simply post once and you filter dodge. If we try to regulate the type of content that qualifies for avoiding the filter kill, then suddenly we demand the kind of content we want from players, which no one wants to have in our community. So it's up to us to encourage activity and actively fight against inactivity that harms the team.

This is a team game, after all. We need to consider those we're playing with as well as ourselves. Consider if your actions (or inactions) are harming your team and whether that's something you can actively change. If it is, then do better. If not, maybe it's time to bow out of that game and try another time when your situation is easier or the rules are simpler.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Elandera

[Elandera she/her]

Thanks again to everyone who played this Threnody game. It was fun, despite some of the problems. Congratulations again to the Cult of Cthulhu for their surprising 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, 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!