MR 69: Aftermath - There are only Three MuskeTators

[Araris Valerian he/him]

Writeup to come later (or to be written by players, if they so desire)

-

The Inception Faction (Kas, Cadcom, Coffee) has been destroyed by the Reckoners!

The Three MuskeTators (TUA, Ash, Kidpen) have won! RBM was an Independent Epic that failed to remove another faction (and was killed as a result).

Thank you everyone for playing! I'd love to hear thoughts on the rules. I've put some into the spec doc (which is short and mostly my own ramblings), but I'll post more comprehensive thoughts here later.

Vote Count:
Cadcom(4): RBM, TUA, Kidpen, Ash
RBM (3): Kas, Cadcom, Coffee
 

Player List:

Spoiler

1. @Kasimir - Arsonist - Standard Fire Epic - The Inception Faction
2. @The Unknown Ajah - Johan A. Samith - Sound Manipulation - The Three MuskeTators
3. @CadCom - Richard Johnson - Unknown Powers - The Inception Faction
4. @Mat - The Dwarf - Shrinking Power and also Short - Independent Epic
5. @Aeternum - Fish - Incorporeality - Association of High Epics
6. @Aeoryi - Electro - Flight, Shoot Electricity, Deluded - Association of High Epics
7. @RoyalBeeMage - Helios - Lightbending - Independent Epic
8. @Kidpen - Welder - Sticks Stuff - The Three MuskeTators
9. @Ashbringer - Disperse - Telepathy - The Three MuskeTators
10. @Coffeecat - Slimey - Shapeshifting - The Inception Faction
11. @Sart - Pinch Hitter - Baseball Battery - Association of High Epics

Docs and Spreadsheets:

Spoiler

Faction 1 (The Inception Faction)

Faction 2 (The Association of High Epics)

Faction 3 (The Three MuskeTators)

Mat's Doc

Dead/Spec Doc

Master Spreadsheet

 

Edited June 24, 2024 by Araris Valerian

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

Sorry RBM, wish you could have won with us.

Thank you @Araris Valerian for this wonderful game and ruleset. Thanks to @Elandera for IMing. Good job to all the other teams, you foiled my plans to end this game much sooner.

Something something about truth being the only path to victory. 

I'm looking forward to all the docs.

As for the rules, I think they were pretty dang balanced.

IEs should probably be able to take each other out for the win.

The actions felt pretty good, though I hesitate if that would have worked with 4 person factions. Having to decide which of Redirect, RB, Mark and Protect to not do was such a hard choice every round that 4 player factions would make much simpler. 

Vote Manip was kinda eh. Could have been simplified to a Sooth for the same affect, or could have removed the loss of your own vote to make it actually swing a 1-vote difference. A Riot isn't really necessary here.

Roleblocks and Redirects were better balanced than we ever realized. Good job on those. 

The Mark Scan might have gotten some us with a 4 person team, but it was very underwhelming. Maybe as a free action? An interesting idea I had was give the Scan to IEs in addition to the Mark. It would help the knowledge gap and give them some additional leverage in alliances.

Overall really liked this game and would play a re-run even as it is in a heartbeat. It was right up my alley. 

[Araris Valerian he/him]

7 minutes ago, The Unknown Order said:

I'm looking forward to all the docs.

Docs are posted now.

[Mat he/him]

Signed up looking forward to a fun doc game, but it was probably good I randed IE as I’m apparently prone to chronic inactivity these days >> I requested a doc anyway though which was fun even if I didn’t really use it. Also fun to simultaneously win and lose lol

Thanks for running the game, Araris!

I’ll probably play one more game before I leave for real in a month, but it’d have to be a QF that starts in exactly two weeks so we’ll see if that works out  If not, well, it’s been fun. Thanks to all of you for being the best mafia community on the internet

[RoyalBeeMage he/him]

23 minutes ago, The Unknown Order said:

Sorry RBM, wish you could have won with us.

ehh its fine. you win some you lose some. i really thought that Kas was unmarked... 

thank you for hosting an amazing game @Araris Valerian!

[Araris Valerian he/him]

48 minutes ago, Mat said:

I’ll probably play one more game before I leave for real in a month, but it’d have to be a QF that starts in exactly two weeks so we’ll see if that works out  If not, well, it’s been fun. Thanks to all of you for being the best mafia community on the internet

I for one will be sad to see you go. Cadcom does have a QF he’s been wanting to run, so we might be able to set that up for you.

[Kasimir he/him]

1 hour ago, Mat said:

I’ll probably play one more game before I leave for real in a month, but it’d have to be a QF that starts in exactly two weeks so we’ll see if that works out  If not, well, it’s been fun. Thanks to all of you for being the best mafia community on the internet

It's been fun

Even if you had to hardcarry our one E game together  

[CadCom he/him]

20 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

I for one will be sad to see you go. Cadcom does have a QF he’s been wanting to run, so we might be able to set that up for you.

I'll be out of service the week of the 7th through 14, so I probably can't do a game rn, (possibility, I'll bring it up in the game sign up thread)

I enjoyed this game. Sorry RBM. We actually targeted you in an odd attempt to give us another cycle. It didn't work. 

[Kasimir he/him]

Just now, CadCom said:

I enjoyed this game. Sorry RBM. We actually targeted you in an odd attempt to give us another cycle. It didn't work. 

Thanks for being fun factionmates, you and @Coffeecat both. And thanks for running, Araris!

Honestly not sorry. Still don't feel we're obligated to let a hostile third party win in a faction game of all things. By the time they start acting against your wincon, it's a fair shout to push back hard. In fact, I'm glad they got screwed over - if anything, at least it's a good reminder in future that you know less than you think you do, and that screwing over other factions will mean they will do their damnedest to screw you over back.

[Aeternum]

Thanks for running the game, Araris!

My highlight of this game was video game discussion with Kas

[Araris Valerian he/him]

Honestly, the best part of this game was watching how confident people were in totally wrong assumptions .

[Coffeecat she/her]

Wooo that was fun! I'm sorry TUO I betrayed you;-;

Apparently I was the only person you could trust outside your team. 

We were kinda panicking in that last turn weren't we, I still would have preferred to vote for our wincon rather than make someone else loose, but whatever. It probably wouldn't have made a difference. Also I was half convinced everyone knew I was lying by C3, but apparently not? 

 

Overall, really really fun game, thanks araris

 

And my teammates are still the best.

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

49 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

Honestly, the best part of this game was watching how confident people were in totally wrong assumptions .

Hey, it worked out alright?

I told Kas once, but I'll say it again, I'm not cut out for this PM spidering. I've always wanted to give it a try, but now I have and its not for me. I'll stick to claiming to Kas and tinkering with my mechanics in the corner while he solves.

[Ashbringer he/him]

This was fun! I liked the setup a lot. I think there could probably be some tweaks to avoid the IE inevitability, but it made for an interesting set of intertwined abilities.

[Kasimir he/him]

6 hours ago, Aeternum said:

My highlight of this game was video game discussion with Kas

My highlight of this game was discovering:

Solar Power Charizard + Mold Breaker Excadrill 

Sunny Day -> Heat Wave + Solar Beam + Earthquake spam.

Wrecks.

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

4 hours ago, Kasimir said:

My highlight of this game was discovering:

Solar Power Charizard + Mold Breaker Excadrill 

Sunny Day -> Heat Wave + Solar Beam + Earthquake spam.

Wrecks.

My highlight of this game was devising increasingly more devious ways to beat Faction One while Kas posted about Pokémon on the discord.

Also, this " I absolutely do not buy for a single second he’s told us his real faction." Combined with me wholeheartedly trusting whenever Kas even implied someone was on his faction, is just beautiful. 

[Aeoryi she/her]

That was... 7 days of madness

I really enjoyed the balance of this setup, and the amount of deception in this game. I do with my faction managed to succeed in knocking Kas out but w/e

[Araris Valerian he/him]

Alright, my thoughts on the rules:

In general, things seemed to work the way I hoped. The original rules were balanced around 4-5 players per faction, so I removed PMs as an action to keep the action economy mostly the same.

19 hours ago, The Unknown Order said:

The actions felt pretty good, though I hesitate if that would have worked with 4 person factions. Having to decide which of Redirect, RB, Mark and Protect to not do was such a hard choice every round that 4 player factions would make much simpler. 

So in response to this, I'd probably revert the rules with 4+ player factions and have PMs only available through an action.

The scan and vote manip were the two least used actions. I'm a little surprised about the vote manip. During C2, The Association could have used it to try and save Aeternum, who they'd spent a protect on the previous cycle. And during C2, the Inception folks could have tried using it as well. I think I'd probably leave the action as-is in a rerun, though I suspect it would find more use in a game with more or larger factions, where the vote ends up being closer more frequently. 

I mentioned in the spec doc, but I think in a rerun the scan would have 2 buffs. It would be immune to roleblocks and redirects, and it would target 3 people (the user, a faction-mate, and an opponent), instead of 2. The last couple of cycles showed how damaging the lack of information could be, and the ability to trade an offensive/defensive action for info seems like it would at minimum create interesting decisions for folks.

Independent Epics seemed like they mostly worked. RBM only ever used the Mark action, while Mat used it only once on the turn he won/lost (in a rerun, I'd change so this counts as a win). Since there isn't any incentive for a faction to target an IE, there was instead an incentive for players to lie and claim IE.

19 hours ago, The Unknown Order said:

IEs should probably be able to take each other out for the win.

I'm curious why you think this. I wouldn't put more than 2 of them in a distro unless I had 19 players, so chances are it wouldn't impact anything. And I think it would make them less likely to try and buddy up with a faction, since the factions don't want to burn resources killing IEs.

And that wraps up my thoughts. I was kinda hoping folks would RP their Epics a bit, but I think everyone was focused on their docs, which were plenty fun to read. I've signed  up for another MR slot, so we can look forward to playing these rules again sometime. Thank you everyone for playing!

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

37 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

I'm curious why you think this

It was too easy for them to make a deal and have mutual trust I think. It didn't actually happen because both IEs were pretty inactive, but they could have safe. It seems kinda cross to the purposes of this game to have a place for such easy trust. It's definitely not necessary, but could be a consideration for a re-run. 

[Coffeecat she/her]

58 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

have PMs only available through an actio

I think I personally enjoy the free PMs more, restricting it to one PM per day per faction seems very restrictive, but I understand some people don't enjoy that as much.

[Ashbringer he/him]

I wanted to RP my Epic a bit, but I’ve been busy with other things (and also realized that “telepathy power that increases the more people are present” doesn’t work so well with a small, rapidly decreasing mafia population).

I think the only main issue with IEs is something I realized in the last cycle, which is one faction can shut them down and deny them a win quite easily. How much that’s a problem, I’m not entirely sure, but if a player is similtaneously Redirected and Roleblocked, it would take two friendly Redirects to counter (one to protect the player from the enemy redirect and another to redirect away the enemy roleblock). So giving them some extra action economy might help with that.

[Kasimir he/him]

On 6/25/2024 at 4:21 AM, Araris Valerian said:

And that wraps up my thoughts. I was kinda hoping folks would RP their Epics a bit, but I think everyone was focused on their docs, which were plenty fun to read. I've signed  up for another MR slot, so we can look forward to playing these rules again sometime. Thank you everyone for playing!

I was kinda busy:

Spoiler

Cleansing the Reborn region one battle at a time in flame

Edited June 25, 2024 by Kasimir

[Kidpen he/him]

Hello! I'm pretty late, but while the topic is still unlocked I just want to say thank you to Araris, and thanks to TUA and Ash for being great teammates. I'm impressed that you managed to carry us to a win despite my forgetfulness. It was a fun game.