Sanderson Elimination: Questions & Answers and Game Meta Discussion

[little wilson she/her]

I would view Twei's roof collapse as being on par with the Jeskeri kill, actually. Of the same type, rather than indirect.

See, in LG 11, everyone was Twinborn. Twei had been charging a metalmind, and she happened to have a Feruchemic power that clearly stated in the rules that if you got 16 charges and you were in the rafters of a room, you could collapse the roof and that would be an attack to every player in that room. So that's what she did.

The Jeskeri used their own rules to redirect people, target one of their own in protection, and kill everyone who had targeted him.

Both used rules that were in the game from the start (though the Jeskeri rules were secret to everyone but the Jeskeri).

QF 14, on the other hand, had a secret mechanic that created a Serial Killer who was supposed to act like a normal SK and target actual players in the game. Instead, he targeted constables (who were really only targetable for the secret mechanic). A decision was made mid-game to make it so if all the Constables died, the people rioted and killed all the politicians. But even that decision was also kept secret.

I'd say that QF 14 could be considered a "special mention" of most kills, but since the mechanics that made it happen were entirely secret or created mid-game, it shouldn't be the actual award. That should go for games that have mass killing possibilities built in right from the start using known mechanics that, preferably, the GM doesn't help the players realize are there and can be used for mass killing purposes (because otherwise, a mass kill is kind of cheap since the GM helped you towards it).

[Magestar he/him]

So, what your saying is, I have to kill upwards of 4 people to make a one person kill record.

Cool!  Thanks.

[Ecthelion III he/him]

@Alvron

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to the Herald of Divinities and First Disciple of Meta,

Happy birthday to you!

[Alvron he/him]

Thanks Ec3.

[Kasimir he/him]

On ‎24‎/‎9‎/‎2016 at 2:28 AM, little wilson said:

I had recovered some of them, but I just hadn't updated the links in the spreadsheet. They're added now. Unfortunately, though, MR7 is gone. I highly doubt Kas has a backup of those docs anywhere. That game gave him nightmares.

I'm not back - I'm still gone for good, but I happened to come across this because of something Wyrm mentioned. Unfortunately (don't ask, it's a horrid story), I lost everything on my Google Drive, including the reports from my students, which I can tell you really drove the guy I'm working for up the wall. Basically, sorry, my bad - I tried to save the files but I couldn't recover any of them, and I don't have backups.

Cheers.

[Haelbarde he/him]

Hmph. I thought that I might have had a local copy of some of the MR7 docs, but alas, seems not.

@Kasimir You should come by the SE discord channel at some point, if you ever have the time. It'd be nice to chat again at some point.

Edit:

On 22/10/2016 at 7:19 AM, little wilson said:

4, actually, in LG24. Me, Mage, Jaime, and Elodin all targeted Aman and died. Araris was killed by Burnt and you were killed by Stink. So 6 deaths, but only 4 were caused by Jeskeri.

EDIT: And I've just checked the spreadsheet for LG11, and Twei only killed 3 people. One person was in the room, but was killed the action period previous to the room collapse, and one other (besides Twei herself) took damage but didn't die. So only 3 people died in the room collapse.

So LG11 is tied with LG12's Night 12, which caused 3 deaths from one kill action (Burnt, killing me). And Kipper's attack in LG24 is therefore in the lead.

Huh. So not only was it my second action period of the game, but I was one of only three victims...  More people died that night though, yes? 

Edited October 23, 2016 by Haelbarde

[little wilson she/her]

2 hours ago, Haelbarde said:

Huh. So not only was it my second action period of the game, but I was one of only three victims...  More people died that night though, yes? 

Correct. Sart was killed by Piff, who then died in the roof collapse, and Bort was killed in another room.

[AliasSheep]

Can I get added to the LG list? Thanks

[luckat she/her]

On 11/20/2016 at 9:15 PM, Haelbarde said:

@luckat I was going to respond to this post in the LG27 thread, but here is probably the best place to put it. 

Well, I'm finally getting around to responding to this. I'm still not sure if I should though.

I'm putting it here because I don't want to get in the way of people posting game ideas and this whole topic is only somewhat related to game creation, and focusing on the game creation aspect limits discussion on other important aspects of it. I think this thread is the closest thing SE has to a place for general discussion.

On 1/24/2014 at 3:27 PM, Metacognition said:

 

Sanderson Elimination: Questions and Answers

 

Here, as the name implies, is where to come to get all your questions answered. If you’re unsure about anything, feel free to ask. Whether it’s about the games, the sub-forum, the metagame, the schedule, when sign ups will be, game theory, signing up to GM a game, or anything in between, let us and the rest of the community help! This thread is open for anyone and everyone to help provide you with answers.

 

A few disclaimers:

• As usual, there is to be no discussing of currently running games. If you have a question about something occurring in a game that has not finished, please ask your GM or the Impartial Moderator for clarification.

• Feel free to debate and discuss topics and questions as you see fit, but just because you are not in a game does not mean that the Etiquette Policy is not in effect. Treat others and their opinions with respect.

 

If you are unsure if your question has already been asked, then ask anyway! If it has, someone will be able to link you to the relevant discussion/answer. If it hasn’t, then we’ll do our best to answer it. There is no such thing as a stupid question in this case. Even if your question has been asked before, new information may have come to light since the first time it was asked.

 

As this thread used to be the Original General Rules thread, if you’re looking for the true start of the Q&A, that is right here.

While it's framed as a place to ask questions and get answers, there's bits in there (that I underlined) that imply more complicated discussions fit here, even if they don't start as simple questions or have easy answers.

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I think you'll be missed if you were to stop playing completely

That's nice of you to say, although whether I'm missed isn't as important as if I personally am enjoying myself.

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And I think that to fix the problems you talked about, we need GM's who try and address those issues in the game they play, and we need players dedicated to actually playing the games properly.

In order for that to happen, I think there would have to be considerable discussion, cooperation, and willingness to change things from everyone involved, not just one or two people. Honestly, I haven't seen much desire to really address issues.

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But I totally agree with what you were saying. It's why I've opted to run 2 games with basic rules now, and why I imposed an inactivity filter last game. (This game I've just put a warning. I don't know if that's what scared people off, or if it's the fact that the LG just started). 

That's great for any games you run, but unless those ideas filter to other games it doesn't help people who want to play but don't want to have to only play the few games that are under certain GMs or certain rulesets.

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But I do think we need to work out how to deal with inactives. Providing motivation is obviously the ideal, but I think inactivity should at least be specifically addressed in any games that a run - a GM should have some strategy to deal with it, whether reserving pinch hitters, implementing an inactivity filter, or something else. Or there be a way of restricting players who habitually go inactive from playing some games, or something.

Most of my thoughts about inactivity problems have made their way into various docs, and I really don't feel up to restating all my thoughts on it. I feel like I've probably wasted my time and energy putting my thoughts down in docs since most people don't read them and even if they did any discussion on the topic would be scattered everywhere. I honestly am tired of talking circles around how to deal with inactives and seeing nothing improve.

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Re: Complex games. I'm not sure about the best way to deal with that is. They can in theory be done well, but historically have tended to be the more broken games. Possibly GM's should be restricted from running complex games until they've run a simpler game (standard elimination, with a few roles) first, before slowly moving into more complex things. I also think that GM's have to pay more attention to what SE is about at its core - it's about deception and perception, trying to catch the hidden eliminators. As games get more complex, that focus seems to drift, and the problem with role madness is that everyone has something that they can do which could help them win, without posting in thread. Which ends up with nothing happening in thread, and then people going inactive because all they've ever done is role stuff, and when they can't do anything useful, they don't know what to do. I don't know.

It wouldn't be quite as bad if there were only a couple of complex games or event games per year, even if all of them ended up being broken, because at least then it wouldn't be all the time, although it still wouldn't be fun for someone who didn't play many games and ended up playing one of the broken ones, and it might compound the problem where more players than usual sign up for a particularly interesting looking game and inactivity and game breaks become more likely as a result. Getting the general mindset back to the core of Mafia could help. There's a lot of games that really stretch the Elimination/Mafia part of Sanderson Elimination, where other goals than elimination take the spotlight or it becomes a faction game rather than village versus mafia. Sometimes it seems like, for example, the lynch is just there because it is supposed to be there, not because it fits the game. While it would be interesting to explore other games, a subforum that is put together to play Mafia seems like the wrong place for that, unless the community as a whole wants to have plenty of games that aren't really Elimination just as several aren't Sanderson.

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I feel like maybe the mods should moderate what sort of games are played, like make sure that there aren't too many crazy complex games at the same time, that there are always more standard games, or something.

That is one thing that might help, although I doubt the mods would be happy to have to take the extra time for that. Games probably should be vetted to some extent or other before a group of 20+ people spends weeks playing them, but from what I've seen of how it is chosen which game is next, that would be really hard to implement.

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While I think of it, a relevant idea would be that of 'breaktank' games - 3-4 day games with 24 hour cycles, designed to run complex games through their motions so that problems can be found in an environment where it doesn't matter.

That's a decent idea, although there's problems with it. I'm not sure how many GMs or players would even be interested in a test run that isn't even a game, although it's seemed like some actual games have been prototypes rather than finished products anyway. A test run like that might catch some problems, but changing the parameters like cycle length and the number of cycles it runs could make some problems not appear or even introduce different problems, and it might be further complicated by differences between who (and how many people) is interested in trying a test run and who wants to play the final game. Still, it could be a good thing to try as long as the limitations are kept in mind. It's hard to tell how effective it would be without actually trying it.

 

On 11/22/2016 at 1:04 PM, Kasimir said:

1. I don't know if this is quite the place for this either, but we did speak of this privately, and I thought it was well-worth adding the same clarifications we mentioned. I left this community some time ago, so obviously my comments are a little dated, but perhaps it also gives me a bit of perspective, since I'm a stranger returning to somewhere foreign. It's well-worth distinguishing between several types of phenomena that we lump under inactivity:
 

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-Unexpected inactives: People who have, for unexpected RL reasons, gone inactive. Maybe their Internet went down for a week. Maybe they got into an accident. Etcetera. We can't do anything about those sorts of inactives, and as you pointed out, these cases tend to be more rare. As far as I can tell, everyone's on board with this kind of inactivity. If it happens, ouch. Life's like that.

 

-Habitual inactives: People who sign up for a game, and for whatever reason, effectively log out of the game and just forget about it. They never post, and they never send in any actions. Sometimes, they do this halfway through a game. We've speculated about the reasons for habitual inactivity: overestimating RL commitments, forgeting about the game, getting bored because you're a Regular... Either way, we agree it seems to be a pretty complex phenomenon, and I'm hardly going to offer a dissection of it here. These seem to be the people we're primarily concerned with. (I should note that this also matches up with the people luckat was referring to.)

-Lurkers: People who sign up, but just lurk in the background. Perhaps sometimes they do send in orders. They just don't say very much in thread. Ironically, while I think from a GMing perspective, these kinds of inactives don't really cause problems (especially if they send in orders), they do get targeted a lot by others. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. I recall Meta once mentioning he felt lurking was a valid playstyle. (Probably a bit boring for Team Evil, but eh.) Still: from a Village perspective, it makes sense to discourage this, because you need information. But then, it boils down to a collective-individual clash. Either way, I distinguish these people from habitual inactives because it seems to me that poke-voting doesn't do anything about habitual inactives. If they forget about the game, then maybe poke-votes remind them. But maybe not. Maybe PM reminders do. But poke votes seem to be more effective against lurkers, or people who are at least partly invested in the game. And that's the point of my distinction: I think habitual inactivity appears more to a GM, while lurking appears more to players. I would honestly say that if someone is obviously lurking, i.e. reading the threads and just not posting (or not sending in orders, although that bit stretches plausibility a bit), as a GM, I'm not inclined to think that's a problem. The point of creating games is to allow people to engage with them in their own way. As a player though? I can see why that would worry me.

-Low-activity players: People who, for one reason or another, don't like to say very much in-thread and spend more time plotting or following the game and making sense of things. Occasionally they swoop up like a bat out of hell and suddenly deliver amazing analyses. Other times, they stay low-activity throughout the game, sometimes for RL reasons. Sometimes, they drop in occasional RP. This is a playstyle choice. Once again, from a GMing perspective, this is not a problem. As a GM, I'm not inclined to discourage this behaviour. As a player, I can see why this would worry me--again, because discussion and information.

 

 

It's probably helpful to have those definitions out there. I don't think it's helped anything that most discussion has been kept to private conversations and docs. That just I also think the difference between proactive and reactive players is important: some people are good at getting the conversation going, but if a lot of people's activity depends on how other people are acting (like mine does), inactivity problems compound themselves until players who might be willing and able to be active lose interest or can't make up for other people's inactivity. Habitual inactives are the most obvious problems, but all of the levels of inactivity contribute to a larger problem than just individuals.

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The points I am trying to make are as follows. Inactivity appears differently as a problem for a GM as opposed to for a player. On the player side, there are variants of inactivity that end up being really problematic for the village, if not outright frustrating for their teammates. On the GM side, some kinds of inactivity are really not problematic. And others, we try to counter with compelling game design, or at least to mitigate with inactivity filters (which my experience with MR7 has, at least, led me to endorse. I think that's an interesting case because it was one where people were signing out midgame. I had extremely high activity near the beginning but as the game dragged out, people got bored, and I started haemorrhaging players.) I think some of the other cases become legitimate worries of individual playstyle versus communal norms. I don't think that's an easy issue to resolve :/ And finally, I think low-activity should not be conflated with any of the above cases, because while we could very well say it was a mistake--akrasia, weakness of will, etcetera--for players to sign up for a game they have little time for, I honestly think that's just being a bit excessive: it treats activity as a completely binary thing--all in or all out. You shouldn't need to be completely all over the board/thread to be 'active'. A more nuanced position to hold is to a basic minimum of activity, pegged to the kind of game. 1-2 quality posts, daily, for a QF is not optimal or ideal. But it's trying. [But we both already agreed on this; I just wanted to point out the distinction here.]

I think that inactivity that is a problem from a player standpoint but not from a GM standpoint is still a problem and should be addressed, but probably not by GMs. Game design can't be the only way to combat inactivity. And yes, there are a lot of complications when it comes to activity. There probably needs to be more discussion about what is acceptable to the community as a whole for there to be any kind of improvement. Unfortunately, I haven't seen much desire for productive discussion about the topic, and most of what I have seen has either not been public or has been within games, where there are time constraints and other problems keeping discussion from being truly fruitful.

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2. I honestly think 'breaktank' games are a really good idea. I think the problem with running simulations as a GM (I'm using MR7 once again because it's the only one I've had experience with, from the GMing end) is that there's a limit to what you can predict, in terms of how mechanics interact with each other, or in terms of what players will do. All the test cases I tried had a limitation, because it was a role madness game. And I don't think any amount of personal wargaming would have helped me realise that the game could be easily broken if everyone ganged up on Discovery and decided to go Mega-Faction. All the scenarios I had in mind simply assumed Faction feuding since the win con was that way. So I think it would have immensely helped my broken game if I had a chance to run it for 3-4 cycles with actual players, just to see what they'd do. The usual stuff about how things break unexpected in the real world, and so on. This especially goes for if you have lots of roles and mechanics and are just not sure of how they might interact.

Yeah, having other people to try to stretch a game to its limits together would get better results than the GM just testing it on their own or even having other people read through the rules to find anything the GM missed.

---

Well, I'm still not entirely sure it was a good idea for me to respond here, but I hated leaving it hanging. I hope that you all can find some solutions to the problems that exist--or that those problems just aren't as detrimental to you as they were to me.

[Haelbarde he/him]

7 hours ago, luckat said:

Well, I'm finally getting around to responding to this. I'm still not sure if I should though.

I'm putting it here because I don't want to get in the way of people posting game ideas and this whole topic is only somewhat related to game creation, and focusing on the game creation aspect limits discussion on other important aspects of it. I think this thread is the closest thing SE has to a place for general discussion.

While it's framed as a place to ask questions and get answers, there's bits in there (that I underlined) that imply more complicated discussions fit here, even if they don't start as simple questions or have easy answers.

Thanks for your response! And you're right, this is probably the better place for this discussion

7 hours ago, luckat said:

That's nice of you to say, although whether I'm missed isn't as important as if I personally am enjoying myself.

Yeah, you're personal enjoyment is the more important thing. I just hope that we can encourage change that'll return SE to something you can enjoy.

7 hours ago, luckat said:

In order for that to happen, I think there would have to be considerable discussion, cooperation, and willingness to change things from everyone involved, not just one or two people. Honestly, I haven't seen much desire to really address issues.

That's great for any games you run, but unless those ideas filter to other games it doesn't help people who want to play but don't want to have to only play the few games that are under certain GMs or certain rulesets.

I agree that not enough people care. Most of the people who do are the players who started playing the earliest, and a lot of those have either already left, or are in the process of leaving (unless they're a mod). Which is why I thought changes would have to be initiated by the GMs, but both from what you've said, and my own thoughts since my post, I'm now of the opinion that change is only going to happen if the Mods create and enforce some new policies to push the community in a better direction. More on that later.

7 hours ago, luckat said:

Most of my thoughts about inactivity problems have made their way into various docs, and I really don't feel up to restating all my thoughts on it. I feel like I've probably wasted my time and energy putting my thoughts down in docs since most people don't read them and even if they did any discussion on the topic would be scattered everywhere. I honestly am tired of talking circles around how to deal with inactives and seeing nothing improve.

That's a good point - it would probably be worthwhile finding and then compiling and/or summarising all the various discussion on the matter scattered in various docs. @Elbereth don't suppose you'd have screenshots of that sorta thing, before I start trawling through docs? @little wilson Don't suppose you'd recall any docs in particular to start looking at?

7 hours ago, luckat said:

It wouldn't be quite as bad if there were only a couple of complex games or event games per year, even if all of them ended up being broken, because at least then it wouldn't be all the time, although it still wouldn't be fun for someone who didn't play many games and ended up playing one of the broken ones, and it might compound the problem where more players than usual sign up for a particularly interesting looking game and inactivity and game breaks become more likely as a result. Getting the general mindset back to the core of Mafia could help. There's a lot of games that really stretch the Elimination/Mafia part of Sanderson Elimination, where other goals than elimination take the spotlight or it becomes a faction game rather than village versus mafia. Sometimes it seems like, for example, the lynch is just there because it is supposed to be there, not because it fits the game. While it would be interesting to explore other games, a subforum that is put together to play Mafia seems like the wrong place for that, unless the community as a whole wants to have plenty of games that aren't really Elimination just as several aren't Sanderson.

That is one thing that might help, although I doubt the mods would be happy to have to take the extra time for that. Games probably should be vetted to some extent or other before a group of 20+ people spends weeks playing them, but from what I've seen of how it is chosen which game is next, that would be really hard to implement.

Agreed. I wonder if requiring new GMs to have run at least 3 standard games first would help with that. At least immediately, it would cut down on the number of complex games, and possibly going forwards, it would give GM's a better appreciation of the work necessary to balance things when running more complex games. 

And your point about the lynch being there just because is very true - I know that sometimes I've brainstormed cool game ideas, and found the lynch has just been a pain. Which is why I canned those ideas. To a certain degree, people also just don't know how to deal with the lynch either, from not having had to.

7 hours ago, luckat said:

That's a decent idea, although there's problems with it. I'm not sure how many GMs or players would even be interested in a test run that isn't even a game, although it's seemed like some actual games have been prototypes rather than finished products anyway. A test run like that might catch some problems, but changing the parameters like cycle length and the number of cycles it runs could make some problems not appear or even introduce different problems, and it might be further complicated by differences between who (and how many people) is interested in trying a test run and who wants to play the final game. Still, it could be a good thing to try as long as the limitations are kept in mind. It's hard to tell how effective it would be without actually trying it.

Yeah... I know I'd be interested in doing that sorta thing, but I guess it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea. Trying would probably be the best way of finding out.

 

7 hours ago, luckat said:

It's probably helpful to have those definitions out there. I don't think it's helped anything that most discussion has been kept to private conversations and docs. That just I also think the difference between proactive and reactive players is important: some people are good at getting the conversation going, but if a lot of people's activity depends on how other people are acting (like mine does), inactivity problems compound themselves until players who might be willing and able to be active lose interest or can't make up for other people's inactivity. Habitual inactives are the most obvious problems, but all of the levels of inactivity contribute to a larger problem than just individuals.

I think that inactivity that is a problem from a player standpoint but not from a GM standpoint is still a problem and should be addressed, but probably not by GMs. Game design can't be the only way to combat inactivity. And yes, there are a lot of complications when it comes to activity. There probably needs to be more discussion about what is acceptable to the community as a whole for there to be any kind of improvement. Unfortunately, I haven't seen much desire for productive discussion about the topic, and most of what I have seen has either not been public or has been within games, where there are time constraints and other problems keeping discussion from being truly fruitful.

More standard games, with a better idea of how to deal with the lynch should help with getting conversation going. Because yeah, a lot of people just play reactively. But when the proactive players get lynched, everything lapses into inactivity. So the trick is working out how to get the reactive players to play proactively. Again, I think the best way of improving that is focusing properly mafia style games. Filters or the availbility of pinchhitters in every game should help with some. 

As far as a consensus on acceptable activity goes, the general rules do sort of state the expected activity. The issue is players not paying attention to them, and to a certain degree, GM's not helping either - the rules actually say to expect filters/warnings for inactivity in QF and MR games. So where are they? The GM's haven't paid any attention to them either. And if they don't, then that's where it falls to the mods to enforce their rules, or at least actively remind GMs about those rules.

And I don't think it would be all that hard for the mods to more actively encourage or enforce a few rules. Like, requiring GMs to have run a few standard games first before running a more complex game - if you've made that a rule, just let newer GMs know. If a GM isn't willing to abide by that, they don't get given the go ahead to run a game. That doesn't really create any overhead for the mods. Equally, getting GMs to include a strategy for dealing with players going inactive isn't that hard either. The main thing there is to have a list of options, with examples or recommendations for when to use them, and just require that the GM has included one in their rules. Once you've got that list made, and those rules implemented, it's not much work for the mods, it's not much work for the GMs, and then it's sent a message to the player base about the expected levels of activity, while also encouraging games that will help players learn to be more proactive in their play. 

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I may as well note here, while I think about it, that the other thing that could do with being discussed is RP in these games.

[little wilson she/her]

This thread is actually the perfect place for this discussion. Makes it completely public and therefore more likely to be contributed to by more, which isn't the case with docs.

46 minutes ago, Haelbarde said:

@little wilson Don't suppose you'd recall any docs in particular to start looking at?

Hm. I have some guesses but nothing certain. I know that there was a game where Luckat and Meta had a long discussion (or multiple long discussions) about inactivity, but I can't recall which doc that was. It was either a spec or dead doc and it was a while ago. But I'm not seeing a doc that both Meta and Luckat were in for the docs that are filled out on the spreadsheet. I think there might've been talk about it in the LG22 spec doc. Possibly LG23's spec doc. I'd suggest any dead or spec doc that Luckat shows as being in in the spreadsheet would be a good place to start.

The SE moderator team has been discussing this, because we recognize that there's a problem with inactivity and GM's tackling games that are too complex for them to handle at that point in time. And just too many complex games in a row. But it's a hard thing to moderate without being too harsh.

For example, we could implement a rule that anyone who goes inactive in a game for a certain amount of time gets a warning. But if we did that, it would mean that normally active players who just had something bad happen (like losing internet access for a week or whatever else) would get warnings as well as the inactives. There's also the problem that some people who might deserve a warning wouldn't get one because they're not completely inactive. They just refuse to contribute in any meaningful way. Most inactivity problems are things that are going to affected best through the metagame.

However, we have talked about giving warnings to players who never even contribute to a game at all, from signup to end. No posts, PMs, doc discussion, or actions. Nothing. And then leaving the metagame to catch the other problems. Or inactivity filters implemented by the GMs themselves. Does this sound like something that might help?

 

The complex game problem is also an issue that's hard to solve, though we've discussed that as well. See, no one wants to GM a game they're not interested in. And that's the problem. If we say that people can't GM a complex game until they GM 3 standard/basic games (or even just 1), a person who's interested in GMing might not ever sign up to GM because they don't want to GM that standard/basic game. Or if they do sign up, they don't actually care about it, so they might get lax about turnovers and clarifications and PMs and all of that. Which would create more problems than it would solve (for both the moderators and the players in the game).

That said, I do think that people should have experience GMing before tackling a more complex game. Because part of the problem is that not only do you have the complex mechanics to juggle, but if you're a first-time GM, you're also learning about role distribution and game balancing, and juggling PMs, docs, and rule clarifications and all of that can easily get overwhelming in big games. If you've already GMed, then you don't have to learn how to juggle the PMs, docs, and rule clarifications because you've already done that. You have a little bit of experience with role distribution as well, so you don't have to worry quite as much about that. You just have to pay attention to the mechanics and making sure those are balanced. And since you can pay more attention to that, you're more likely to see a potential problem early and then talk to the impartial moderator to implement a fix for that mechanic before it breaks the game (like in MR10 when I realized early in Cycle 2 that there was a massive communication problem for the village, so I worked out the limited PM system with Meta to help mitigate that problem before it blew up completely and broke the game).

We as a moderator team haven't been able to decide on a good fix for that, so I think discussing it here and getting more opinions on it is a good idea. Then, hopefully, we can come up with solution that everyone can agree with and causes the least amount of issues for our GMs.

[STINK he/him]

12 minutes ago, little wilson said:

However, we have talked about giving warnings to players who never even contribute to a game at all, from signup to end. No posts, PMs, doc discussion, or actions. Nothing. And then leaving the metagame to catch the other problems. Or inactivity filters implemented by the GMs themselves. Does this sound like something that might help?

This definitely sounds like something that needs to be added, 'cause well, nothing is nothing, and Inactivity is when you do nothing. So if they're really active in other parts of the site but not doing anything SE-wise, then yeah they're still inactive for sure.

14 minutes ago, little wilson said:

The complex game problem is also an issue that's hard to solve, though we've discussed that as well. See, no one wants to GM a game they're not interested in. And that's the problem. If we say that people can't GM a complex game until they GM 3 standard/basic games (or even just 1), a person who's interested in GMing might not ever sign up to GM because they don't want to GM that standard/basic game. Or if they do sign up, they don't actually care about it, so they might get lax about turnovers and clarifications and PMs and all of that. Which would create more problems than it would solve (for both the moderators and the players in the game).

That said, I do think that people should have experience GMing before tackling a more complex game. Because part of the problem is that not only do you have the complex mechanics to juggle, but if you're a first-time GM, you're also learning about role distribution and game balancing, and juggling PMs, docs, and rule clarifications and all of that can easily get overwhelming in big games.

Surely this is where co-GMing especially helps? People are already co-GMing to try and get some experience for their first game to GM, which shows them just how much PMs are involved in a game (the constant ding ding, unless it's a closed PM game), effective role distribution (after all, they're gonna be like an idea bouncing board for the GM, and can still contribute if they want) and game balance (the co-GM has to look out for stuff going wrong still). As for the rule clarifications in docs and PMs and the thread and stuff, it's up to the GM if they want the co-GM to do rule clarifications, but even if the co-GM just reads the questions they can still have a look at how complicated some questions can be when you just have simple roles in a game. 

That looks kinda hard to read, so TL;DR: Co-GMing is useful, helps people learn stuff.

And as for the whole 'you have to be interested in GMing' thing, again that's an issue that can be solved by co-GMing, as co-GMing isn't something where you have to spend hours trying to set up the game and the fundamentals and all that stuff, but instead you come in at a later stage for some fine tuning, which isn't that boring 'cause you do it with someone else. So yeah, just a continuation of the whole co-GMing is good and stuff.

And also, it's pretty much already a thing but it could be made a rule anyway, that first-time GMs have to have an experienced co-GM who can help them with the role distribution and balance. 

So yeah, not gonna add on much original thought for now 'cause I'd have to go hunting for it in the archives of FB, but just bringing up the fun that is co-GMing

[Jondesu he/him]

I'm on mobile so it's hard to quote just a portion of the posts, but I'm definitely agreeing with the general ideas here. I'm fairly new to SE, and I love the complex games, but I can see how they make it tougher to really be engaged sometimes.

On that note, I'm going to postpone the game I was planning to run, and run a more traditional Mafia game when it's my turn. I'll still run the Reckoners game at some point, but I think you're right about needing to get some experience running standard games to appreciate the effort needed to balance other factors (I was probably being overconfident in wanting to just run a really cool idea first). 

I'll be watching this thread with great interest.

[Elbereth she/her]

7 hours ago, Haelbarde said:

That's a good point - it would probably be worthwhile finding and then compiling and/or summarising all the various discussion on the matter scattered in various docs. @Elbereth don't suppose you'd have screenshots of that sorta thing, before I start trawling through docs? @little wilson Don't suppose you'd recall any docs in particular to start looking at?

I'm afraid I don't remember much more than Wilson. I have, however, just taken a look through a bunch of docs, and the LG17 dead doc has a great deal of inactivity discussion. So start there? 

I don't have screenshots, though.  I don't take screenshots of that kind of thing. 

6 hours ago, little wilson said:

 The complex game problem is also an issue that's hard to solve, though we've discussed that as well. See, no one wants to GM a game they're not interested in. And that's the problem. If we say that people can't GM a complex game until they GM 3 standard/basic games (or even just 1), a person who's interested in GMing might not ever sign up to GM because they don't want to GM that standard/basic game. Or if they do sign up, they don't actually care about it, so they might get lax about turnovers and clarifications and PMs and all of that. Which would create more problems than it would solve (for both the moderators and the players in the game).

That said, I do think that people should have experience GMing before tackling a more complex game. Because part of the problem is that not only do you have the complex mechanics to juggle, but if you're a first-time GM, you're also learning about role distribution and game balancing, and juggling PMs, docs, and rule clarifications and all of that can easily get overwhelming in big games. If you've already GMed, then you don't have to learn how to juggle the PMs, docs, and rule clarifications because you've already done that. You have a little bit of experience with role distribution as well, so you don't have to worry quite as much about that. You just have to pay attention to the mechanics and making sure those are balanced. And since you can pay more attention to that, you're more likely to see a potential problem early and then talk to the impartial moderator to implement a fix for that mechanic before it breaks the game (like in MR10 when I realized early in Cycle 2 that there was a massive communication problem for the village, so I worked out the limited PM system with Meta to help mitigate that problem before it blew up completely and broke the game).

 

5 hours ago, STINK said:

This definitely sounds like something that needs to be added, 'cause well, nothing is nothing, and Inactivity is when you do nothing. So if they're really active in other parts of the site but not doing anything SE-wise, then yeah they're still inactive for sure.

Surely this is where co-GMing especially helps? People are already co-GMing to try and get some experience for their first game to GM, which shows them just how much PMs are involved in a game (the constant ding ding, unless it's a closed PM game), effective role distribution (after all, they're gonna be like an idea bouncing board for the GM, and can still contribute if they want) and game balance (the co-GM has to look out for stuff going wrong still). As for the rule clarifications in docs and PMs and the thread and stuff, it's up to the GM if they want the co-GM to do rule clarifications, but even if the co-GM just reads the questions they can still have a look at how complicated some questions can be when you just have simple roles in a game. 

That looks kinda hard to read, so TL;DR: Co-GMing is useful, helps people learn stuff.

And as for the whole 'you have to be interested in GMing' thing, again that's an issue that can be solved by co-GMing, as co-GMing isn't something where you have to spend hours trying to set up the game and the fundamentals and all that stuff, but instead you come in at a later stage for some fine tuning, which isn't that boring 'cause you do it with someone else. So yeah, just a continuation of the whole co-GMing is good and stuff.

And also, it's pretty much already a thing but it could be made a rule anyway, that first-time GMs have to have an experienced co-GM who can help them with the role distribution and balance. 

So yeah, not gonna add on much original thought for now 'cause I'd have to go hunting for it in the archives of FB, but just bringing up the fun that is co-GMing

I was about to say basically what Stink just said.  It might not be a bad idea to require a new GM to either co-GM with someone more experienced or to request a more experienced co-GM to help with their first game. I know that I have in my profile page that I'm willing to co-GM any game at pretty much any time, the only requirement being that I know the background or have time enough to watch/read it before the game begins, and it's not as if there's a dearth of other volunteers. Several times before LG27 began, I very nearly offered to help with that game because I was worried about two first-time GMs. I don't know how much I would've helped with the bigger issues, but I know that at least a couple of the problems (the PMs getting sent out 24 hours into the Day, etc) could've been pretty easily solved. And there are a bunch of little tricks and such that aren't really written down anywhere (like, sending role PMs ahead of time and adding players at turnover, and that kind of thing) that an experienced GM could help with. 

Interesting stat - 7 of the 11 games marked as broken in the past year, on the spreadsheet, were run by new GMs.  So I would say that something being put into place would be a very good thing. 

I, also, think this is an excellent place for this sort of discussion, and look forward to continuing it in the future. 

[Sart he/him]

There's another way to work on the problem of overly complex games. We need to be able to review the rule-sets before they are made into sign-up threads. I know the game creation thread is supposed to be for this purpose, but we've gotten away from that. The index of games listed on the thread is more than a year old. Some games are just created privately in docs. That's a huge problem, especially if the GM is new. There's a column on the GM list called Link for a reason. We need to get into the habit of when people sign up, they should include a link to their rule-set so it can be peer-reviewed. Unless there are hidden mechanics, I don't see why this would be an issue, and it indicates that GMs have put some thought into their game, instead of just having a vague concept.

[Metacognition he/him]

The Co-GMing option is one of the ones on our list; along with a few other options. 

EDIT for Sart's bit: That was another idea we had- where we get new GMs to use the Game Creation thread for their games more and that they can't run it until the game has been "vetted" by at least 3 other more experienced GMs. 

We've been looking into a lot of the "problems" that have been brought up here, as well as a few that haven't been mentioned. We have a few ideas of our own, but please remember that these things also take time. We consider every change from as many angles as possible. What could the consequences of doing ______ be? What else could we do? How would that affect this thing over here? For example, before Wilson brought it up, no one really considered the ramifications of stipulating that GMs aren't allowed to run more complex games initially. But, that's something we need to consider before we just modify things. To do otherwise would cause us to constantly be reacting to new problems that our solutions created rather than trying to improve everything. 

So please do discuss and help us brainstorm ideas. But don't expect those ideas to be put into place tomorrow or anything. We need time to not only implement those changes, but to go over them in great detail as well. Think of it kind of like trying to balance a game within a game within a game; because that's pretty close to what we have to do. If we break something, it could break not just the subforum, but the GM's games and thus every players' experience as well. 

Besides, the most powerful force of change in these games is not the addition of new rules or us. It's you guys and the metagame. If everyone decides that they don't want to deal with something (like inactivity) or want more of something (like RP), to the point that they put it ahead of winning, then those things happen. If you want more RP, don't kill people for writing just RP or even give them a little more leeway when it comes to voting for them. Trust me, you give the Elims a reason to do something that would help them, they'll probably take you up on it, so you'd at least get more RP from them.  Don't want a lot of inactivity? Make it a point to kill off those that aren't contributing or don't kill those that are talking. Granted, that won't stop some of the habitual inactives, but those are areas where, as Wilson pointed out, that we can step in and help with. 

Point is, we can make hundreds of rules. They can have addendums and subclauses and reprecrussions and be hundreds of pages long. But that pales in comparison to what you guys can do to shape the games. And that's how it should be, IMO. These games are all about you, the players, after all. 

Edited December 8, 2016 by Metacognition

[Sart he/him]

Um... Quick question Meta. What is Eyewall? It's apparently the setting for your next LG, but I can't find anything about it online.

[Metacognition he/him]

That's cause I haven't revealed it to anyone yet.  Partially because I like to keep things a secret as long as possible and mostly because I haven't finished it yet.... 

Alas, I'm going to have to set it aside for now as is.  I've got the AG to build first and foremost and after that, classes will be starting back up again. If I get it built before I go back, then maybe I'll be able to run it. 

[Haelbarde he/him]

15 hours ago, little wilson said:

The complex game problem is also an issue that's hard to solve, though we've discussed that as well. See, no one wants to GM a game they're not interested in. And that's the problem. If we say that people can't GM a complex game until they GM 3 standard/basic games (or even just 1), a person who's interested in GMing might not ever sign up to GM because they don't want to GM that standard/basic game. Or if they do sign up, they don't actually care about it, so they might get lax about turnovers and clarifications and PMs and all of that. Which would create more problems than it would solve (for both the moderators and the players in the game).

There is a difference between running a massive faction game, or a dozen totally custom new roles, or trying an item shop with money, or whatever else has tons of moving parts, and taking the basic mafia formula, include a few regular roles that work well thematically, and add in 1 unique role that is new but very thematic, and easy enough to balance with the other few included roles. Like what about LG22 - most of those roles are fairly standard mafia roles. You had a slight variation, with the forsaken providing an extra kill, while having some confirmed village players. It did have a fair about of different things going on, but most of them were fairly straight forward, and I wouldn't imagine would be terribly hard to balance. It still had some level of complexity, and was delightfully thematic. Going more complex than that is where it more becomes a problem, and has made up the majority of games, from at least since LG18. I think it's plenty easy enough to come up with interesting games that aren't too far astray from standard elimination while still being unique.

8 hours ago, Metacognition said:

Don't want a lot of inactivity? Make it a point to kill off those that aren't contributing or don't kill those that are talking. Granted, that won't stop some of the habitual inactives, but those are areas where, as Wilson pointed out, that we can step in and help with. 

But that is not a workable solution, unless you maybe have a village vigilante. I mean, maybe the eliminators can clean out inactives with their kill, but then you're asking them to ignore their win con to do a public service. Or the village is wasting their lynch on people not engaging with the game, while the eliminators gain an advantage. That's just providing further distraction from the game. That's where a filter just automatically deals with that. 

8 hours ago, Metacognition said:

Point is, we can make hundreds of rules. They can have addendums and subclauses and reprecrussions and be hundreds of pages long. But that pales in comparison to what you guys can do to shape the games. And that's how it should be, IMO. These games are all about you, the players, after all. 

I agree that that is a nice idea. And that's probably the way it should be. But thus far, I've not seen much evidence to suggest that that is at all likely to occur by itself. I think we need to take a leaf out of Nohadon's book (although strictly, it'd more be Words of Radiance, I think), and force the change from the top. Make a statement by implementing some rules and guidelines, will filter down to the GMs, and send a message to the players. Once the players get used to it, I expect it would sustain itself. New players will emulate the existing players, and increased activity will encourage activity.

[little wilson she/her]

First of, LG 22 was a rerun by Gamma of another game Gamma had run so I'm not sure it's the best example. Almost every first run game (and even most reruns) since LG 18 have been complex games. Yes, it's ideal for the games to be more like LG6/22, which is a standard game with a little added flavor, but a person who's built a game with all the things might not be interested in GMing if they're told they need to cut 5 of those things and drop all the secrets. Or GM/co-GM simpler games before their big game (waiting through the list 2-4 times just to get to the game they really want to run). We try to be as accommodating as we can to GM's, even if it might make more sense to just put mass rules in place to limit what GM's can do.

And Hael, there's one very big problem with that solution: you're asking three volunteers who are busy with school, full time jobs and other real life things to take even more time out of their schedules than the forum already entails to do something just because the players refuse to. I'm not your personal slave and I have other things I need to be doing. I cannot be on SE every hour of every day making sure that everyone is following a rule that is implemented, and that's what implementing a ton of rules would force for the moderating team. Would that be easiest for the players? Absolutely! But you don't pay me and my job that does wants me working while I'm there. Let's find something that doesn't require a ton of rules.

EDIT: I want to be clear that I fully expect some rules to need implementation. But every rule that goes into effect for this ongoing problem is going to require more time from us to enforce them and dole out punishments for them. Which takes more time. If there are 10-15+ rules, that a lot of time. I would prefer a solution that takes everyone's help--moderators, GM's and players--to change the forum. Because in the end, that's what's going to have the most effect: something that everyone contributes to. Not just the moderating team forcing everyone to follow.

[Haelbarde he/him]

I know that I've usually had multiple ideas for games at any one time, with varying levels of complexity, and I was under the impression I'm not unique in that regard. If that's true of many people, I don't think people will mind too much if they can't run some of their wilder ideas. I guess that's more something which would need to be surveyed.

I'm aware that the mods are busy people, but I don't view the ideas I've suggested as anything you really have to monitor. If a rule is written out somewhere, there's a PM full of players who GM - they are just as able to say to someone who wants to GM "hey awesome. Have you checked out this link? It's got some helpful hints and tips for creating and running games, and some guidelines for how the game should work." If they choose to ignore all that, when it comes their turn to GM, you don't have to give them the go ahead to run their game until it's fine. I guess that last bit could be time consuming- curious, when people sign up to GM do most people keep to running the game they had in mind at the time?

The other time consuming part of the process is the designing and writing of rules/guidelines/articles. But that's what this discussion is for. And I would be happy to help work on writing drafts of that stuff, once ideas had been decided on, and it's quite possible others would to.p

[Elenion he/him]

1 hour ago, Haelbarde said:

I would be happy to help work on writing drafts of that stuff, once ideas had been decided on, and it's quite possible others would to.p

I would be more than happy to assist anyone with turning game ideas and rules into rule-sets and posts.

[Metacognition he/him]

On 12/9/2016 at 3:49 AM, Haelbarde said:

But that is not a workable solution, unless you maybe have a village vigilante. I mean, maybe the eliminators can clean out inactives with their kill, but then you're asking them to ignore their win con to do a public service. Or the village is wasting their lynch on people not engaging with the game, while the eliminators gain an advantage. That's just providing further distraction from the game. That's where a filter just automatically deals with that. 

You see what you just did here? You prioritized winning over everything else. This is why things don't change; not because there's not enough rules and regulations in place. People could spend more time RPing or other stuff, but instead, the focus for the majority of people right now is on trying to win the game rather than having fun. That's a part of what made a lot of the earlier games so much fun in comparison. Sure, people were still trying to win, but there was just as much of a focus on interacting with the setting that had been created. That's why there was so much RP in early games in comparison to now. Now, if you're not contributing to finding the Eliminators, then you're doing something wrong and are killed off for it.

You guys, the players, are dictating what kind of behavior and thus what kind of games you want via your actions.
GMs rarely receive much in the way of feedback when they write up end-of-turn scenarios and no one interacts with their settings and events. Thus, GMs become complacent about even doing write ups as much as they used to.
Everyone has to engage in the debates and investigation of other players or else be seen as suspicious and thus people that don't have much to say on that front (or are daunted by it) don't say anything at all; leading to more inactivity. 
The fact that everyone needs to be aggressively going after the Eliminators turns more passive players away; thus creating a breeding ground of only certain kinds of players.

This is the essence of what a metagame is; players influencing not only what kind of games they want (for example, the recent trend of complex games), but also how those games are played. Take the other forum I played at on Cracked. The goal there is still to win, but they prioritize trying to be as funny as possible during the process and it shows in the feel and the spirit of their games. The reason the Reckoners RPG is so lighthearted is because they prioritize the dramatic element rather than min-maxing their characters. 

So when people say things like that it is unlikely to occur by itself, what you're really saying is that you don't really want to prioritize those things above and beyond what you've already prioritized. And this is also why a bunch of additional rules and regulations isn't going to really help. It's you guys as players that need to shift the focus. That'll help far more than anything else.

 

Edited December 10, 2016 by Metacognition

[Haelbarde he/him]

I don't think I'm prioritizing winning there. I'm prioritizing playing the game, and wanting to not get distracted by people who have signed up, but aren't playing (RPing or engaging in discussion) and thus affecting the game balance. As far as RP goes, inactive are irrelevant though, which is why I had focused more on the game discuss / actions aspect.

I agree that it would be good, or maybe it is  even necessary, to have more engagement with the setting, and players doing RP. I noted in my initial post that we need to discuss that too (and would have written more about it if not for the fact I'd spent a good hour on the post already and it was now 1:30am and I wanted to be up early the next day).

Why I'm pessimistic about the change coming from the players is because thus far, not much has happened. It's not like it's a particularly new problem, and there have been discussions about it before. I'm happy to be proven wrong though, and maybe having this discussion here will be seen and people will champion change. I've just seen enough people say they are going to try do a better job at RPing/discussing and repeatedly end up not actually thinking about how much time they have available, and don't manage to change. I'm guilty of doing that. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. Getting yourself to change can be hard. So while people work things out to change the meta, I'd rather more rules to provide a helping hand, and provide some degree of improvement in the mean time.

[Metacognition he/him]

The reason nothing has changed before now is because no one thinks of themselves as the problem. "If we just had such-and-such rule, that would fix things." or "It's those other players that are the problem. They're not doing anything." Stuff like that. And then they continue to do what they've always done and nothing happens. 

That's why I brought it up like this. As you said, there have been movements before (the Contribution Crusade and my Spartans thing for example), but no one really backed them up. We could establish a rule tomorrow that requires a minimum of three posts per turn in a game or else you get a warning and, eventually, blacklisted. What do you think the outcome would be? Cause I'm pretty sure that after awhile, 90% of players would wind up being blacklisted and rather than having 20 or so people in a game, we'd be lucky to get double digits. New people wouldn't join up as readily because they're not sure they could meet the requirements. And, due to that, eventually there wouldn't be an SE anymore.

That's why it's not about the addition of more rules. It won't stop people from doing what they already do. If you want to change it, you've got to start with how you approach it. By all means, play to win. That's why it's a game to begin with. But that shouldn't be the only focus or even the most important focus. We need to prioritize stuff other than that and that's not something you can do with a rule. It starts with the players.