Long Game 66: A Struggle for Power

[The Young Pyromancer he/him]

Aww, wanted to figure it out so I could bet it later.

[Ashbringer he/him]

For that matter, what were the other abilities of the spikes and medallions? My Nicroburst spike was the only successful purchase, and the Soulbearer role was conspicuously missing...

[StrikerEZ he/him]

8 minutes ago, Ashbringer said:

For that matter, what were the other abilities of the spikes and medallions? My Nicroburst spike was the only successful purchase, and the Soulbearer role was conspicuously missing...

Well, we never decided what all the medallions were since Pyro died and couldn’t buy one. And with the spikes, we decided what spikes were available about when you said you were going to buy one.

I think the remaining spikes were Steelrunner, Soulbearer, Pulser, Nicroburst, and the Connector spike that Mage made and then sold.

[Ashbringer he/him]

Just now, StrikerEZ said:

Pulser

Faleast: wait a minute...

Well, it would have been slightly hilarious to get a Steelrunner or Soulbearer spike that would be really powerful but impossible for me to use 

[Shard of Reading he/him]

Hmmm.... This game was very fun, even if I got killed the second round. I'm going to need to figure out why that was, but it was great playing with everyone!

Edit: It was because of PM's I had with matrin and ventyl. I need to stop trusting people just because they send me PM's.

Edited June 24, 2020 by Shard of Reading

[The Young Pyromancer he/him]

It was because we were trying to kill mat, and you knew they had claimed sparker to Ventyl, so we had to kill you first.

[Araris Valerian he/him]

15 minutes ago, Shard of Reading said:

Edit: It was because of PM's I had with matrin and ventyl. I need to stop trusting people just because they send me PM's.

PM Safety! Never roleclaim! (actually, it's fine to roleclaim, but generally you should do it as part of a strategy/playstyle, rather than just because someone PMed you).

[Mist she/her]

Great game, everyone! Pyro, that was amazing. 

I loved the write-up.

Against heavy odds, I tend to alternate between determined and despairing. 

Sorry to anyone to whom I lied. I will not be playing that way again. 

Edit: the Intern has now caught on fire! SHOUTY-SHOUT AGENCY!!! WHO HAS THE FLAME RETARDANT COFFEE?!? HELP!

Edited June 25, 2020 by Mist

[Lahilt he/him]

UH... I JUST DRANK THE LAST DROP SAYS THE INSANITATION OFFICER AS HE POCKETS THE BAN-ANA ON HIS WAY OUT THE DOOR, GOOD LUCK!!!

[Young Bard he/him]

Alright, time for my GM thoughts.

Overall, I think this game went really well. It was broken in a couple places, but any game this complicated always is. It seems like people had fun - the sheer number of times some bolt of fortune/misfortune hit someone was almost hilarious from a GM perspective (Matrim's already pointed out the biggest one - he nearly caught the Kandra N3, but got coinshotted that cycle, which was hilarious, and actually caused some relief for Striker and I who were kind of rooting for Ash, given how much of an underdog position they were in when they were converted.)

PM's such as the Shouty-Shouty Club were hilarious to watch, and I think they were one of the really accidental things that made the game great fun to watch as well.

From a mechanics point of view, there's a few things I could probably comment on - in no particular order:

Kandra - Ash did really well here, given what a poor starting position they had. Striker and Araris already talked a little bit about changes for the next round. Striker's said if/when he runs this game again he'd like to make killing the Kandra part of the Village wincon. I... am not sure this necessarily needs to be the case. Making the Kandra's death part of the Village wincon means there's more of a target painted on their back, so you'd need to make the Kandra stronger as a result, but that paints even more of a target on their back and so on... I feel a better alternative would be like the Carved Red from MR17 - the Village doesn't have to kill them to win, but if neither the Village nor the Elims achieve their win cons first, and the game gets to 3/4 players or less plus the Kandra, the Kandra kills the remaining players and wins. So they start out not a threat, and then steadily becomes more and more of one as the game heads into the late-game. Plus, that keeps the auto-balancing feature of SK's I really like, in that they essentially end up supporting whoever the underdog happens to be at that point in the game and bringing an unbalanced game back into balance.
Araris also suggested that the old Kandra get to talk and provide advice/support to the new Kandra after their death, which is a cool and unique idea I completely support.

Boxings/Items - probably the majority of my job for this game was checking to see how many boxings people had earned, so that they could buy things at the Black Market. For how much the Black Market was used (4 Bulletproof Vests, 2 Steel Traps, 1 Charged Spike, 1 Uncharged Spike and 1 Lerasium Bead), I'm not really sure it was worth it. In a future edition, I'd say you have 2 options - either get rid of boxings and items entirely, or do the exact opposite and make them a more central part of the mechanics of the game. You have the Steel Trap as a one-time roleblock item - you could easily add to that and have one-time vote manipulation items, and other cheaper goods people can buy as well, for example.

Protection - the amount of protection in the late-game was slightly out of control - there were more players who were protected from attacks than not. That's bad both for balance (it's hard for the Elims and the Kandra, since they lose their kill for the cycle and it could soft clear a player going forwards.) If that could be toned down a bit, probably by making the Bulletproof Vests a bit more expensive, that would be great.

Regular roles - It's strange, but we had so many strange and unusual roles that it seems like we missed out on a few of the basic ones. We had 3 different Feruchemy roles that essentially started with "If roleblocked, then [x]", but the only actual roleblock role was the Leecher (which is why we had so many of them this game). The only vote manipulation I can remember was vote cancellation from storing as well (admittedly, I think that one was more due to inactivity/early lynches rather than the distribution or ruleset). You could easily have more roleblocks, redirects, rolescans and vote manipulation in this game for a future run, I think.

Irregular roles - I think the roles worked really well - I can't really think off the top of my head of a role that I look back on and go "Oh, yeah, that role was broken." Maybe a couple like Spinners could be spiced up slightly, but they frankly worked better than they had any right to without more testing.

Thug Elim - There was a phase during the early AG's when people said "There's no way the GM's would put in a Tineye Elim, it's not a useful role for them, since the Elims generally want PM's to close." So, the GM's, curse their trollish hearts, started putting in Tineye Elims into their games left, right, and centre.
Thugs, IMO, are the new Tineyes - "The GM's would never put in a Thug Elim, it makes the game unbalanced." A note to all players: Don't ever, ever try to guess what the GM's will do with the role/player distribution for the sake of balance - they can and will use that against you just for the lols.

Twinborn names - Pyro gave their Twinborn name a nickname - I think it was Lookout? The moment I saw that, I remember thinking "Oh, yeah... I wish we'd done that." The extra flavour/immersion would have been worth it for the effort it takes to come up with the names, IMO. Especially since other Sanderfans already came up with a list of every possible combination of Twinborn somewhere, apparently.

So... yeah. Sorry for the rambly mess, but those are my various thoughts on different parts of the game.

Edited June 28, 2020 by Young Bard

[Ashbringer he/him]

I kinda like not having the Kandra need to die for the Village to win. My plan was to try and get it down to 5 players - 2 Villagers, 2 mostly-outed Elims, and then Kandra!me outed and just messing with the lynch and causing chaos. Any hit on me would break the Vest stalemate. Giving some other advantage would be nice though.

Plus now Faleast can just just be immortal 

 

[|TJ| he/him]

I agree the Bulletproof vest was too low-priced. I mean, I did attempt to buy it twice, (and technically should have got them since there was no rule stating we couldn't buy multiple no. of the same item  ) I would have been alive for a loooong time. 

Edited June 28, 2020 by TJ Shade

[Magestar he/him]

6 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Boxings/Items - probably the majority of my job for this game was checking to see how many boxings people had earned, so that they could buy things at the Black Market. For how much the Black Market was used (4 Bulletproof Vests, 2 Steel Traps, 1 Charged Spike, 1 Uncharged Spike and 1 Lerasium Bead), I'm not really sure it was worth it. In a future edition, I'd say you have 2 options - either get rid of boxings and items entirely, or do the exact opposite and make them a more central part of the mechanics of the game. You have the Steel Trap as a one-time roleblock item - you could easily add to that and have one-time vote manipulation items, and other cheaper goods people can buy as well, for example.

Someone bought the Lerasium bead?

What.

I actually am really fond of the boxings and items mechanic.  Even if you ignore the fact that items are awesome, having a reward for posts of a certain length and quality definitely encourages activity and analysis.  Sure, it lead to a couple rather rambly posts and a couple of people splitting their posts into 200 word blocks, but overall I think that it was worth is and conceptually is a good idea.  I also sold my charged spike, so that's another time it was used.

6 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Kandra - Ash did really well here, given what a poor starting position they had. Striker and Araris already talked a little bit about changes for the next round. Striker's said if/when he runs this game again he'd like to make killing the Kandra part of the Village wincon. I... am not sure this necessarily needs to be the case. Making the Kandra's death part of the Village wincon means there's more of a target painted on their back, so you'd need to make the Kandra stronger as a result, but that paints even more of a target on their back and so on... I feel a better alternative would be like the Carved Red from MR17 - the Village doesn't have to kill them to win, but if neither the Village nor the Elims achieve their win cons first, and the game gets to 3/4 players or less plus the Kandra, the Kandra kills the remaining players and wins. So they start out not a threat, and then steadily becomes more and more of one as the game heads into the late-game. Plus, that keeps the auto-balancing feature of SK's I really like, in that they essentially end up supporting whoever the underdog happens to be at that point in the game and bringing an unbalanced game back into balance.

I sort of agree that the Kandra needs some work, but I liked the element of difficulty playing the Kandra had in this game.  I don't think the Kandra should have to die or anything  for the village to win though.  Maybe adding something like you said, where the Kandra wins at 2-4 players left besides the Kandra would work.  But the fun for me would definitely come from how difficult it is to win as the kandra.  There could definitely be changes, but I think that should be the core.  It shouldn't be too easy to win as an SK. 

Roles... I liked that there were so many possible role distributions in this game.  This game could easily be run a dozen times and be different every time, because of how many different roles there are.  With twinborn, the possibilities only increase.  Some of the Feruchemy roles could probably be re-worked; I agree that spinner is a little lackluster, and a few of the self-target scanning roles could probably be altered slightly.  There just seemed to be a lot of them. 

The bulletproof vest was probably too powerful rather than too low-priced.  I think at most it should be the thugs ability in item form.  A guaranteed night of being unkillable is super strong.  Usually two nights and the possibility of three nights is kind of ridiculous, especially for roles which already have protection, like mine.    

[Mist she/her]

@Magestar, I bought the Lerasium bead. I'm a Slider and a Thug now.

[Magestar he/him]

4 minutes ago, Mist said:

@Magestar, I bought the Lerasium bead. I'm a Slider and a Thug now.

...

Well, I suppose Reginald is glad he ended up killing you then.   

[Ashbringer he/him]

If it was 4 players left with the Kandra, then I would have won this game Mage  it ended with me and 4 villagers.

I think the Kandra is fairly balanced, but Araris dying D2 definitely threw a big wrench into it. Plus me having mostly no idea what I was doing. If we got switched with me being the first Kandra and Araris the second, he may have pulled it off better. Or if he could have self-destructed onto Pyro - now THAT would be an interesting.

In my opinion, knowing who the Elims are at the beginning would have made my job much easier, although it would probably be far too potent in the hands of Araris. That or having a third life I could fall back onto.

That's what I love about this game: there's so many things that could have gone slightly different that would have completely shifted the outcome.

[StrikerEZ he/him]

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Kandra - Ash did really well here, given what a poor starting position they had. Striker and Araris already talked a little bit about changes for the next round. Striker's said if/when he runs this game again he'd like to make killing the Kandra part of the Village wincon. I... am not sure this necessarily needs to be the case. Making the Kandra's death part of the Village wincon means there's more of a target painted on their back, so you'd need to make the Kandra stronger as a result, but that paints even more of a target on their back and so on... I feel a better alternative would be like the Carved Red from MR17 - the Village doesn't have to kill them to win, but if neither the Village nor the Elims achieve their win cons first, and the game gets to 3/4 players or less plus the Kandra, the Kandra kills the remaining players and wins. So they start out not a threat, and then steadily becomes more and more of one as the game heads into the late-game. Plus, that keeps the auto-balancing feature of SK's I really like, in that they essentially end up supporting whoever the underdog happens to be at that point in the game and bringing an unbalanced game back into balance.

Hmm, I'm not completely sure about this idea, but I could totally see it working. I'll think about it. 

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Araris also suggested that the old Kandra get to talk and provide advice/support to the new Kandra after their death, which is a cool and unique idea I completely support.

I really liked this idea. It's something I will probably implement in a rerun of this game. The dead original Kandra probably shouldn't be allowed to have the spec doc in that case though, right?

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Boxings/Items - probably the majority of my job for this game was checking to see how many boxings people had earned, so that they could buy things at the Black Market. For how much the Black Market was used (4 Bulletproof Vests, 2 Steel Traps, 1 Charged Spike, 1 Uncharged Spike and 1 Lerasium Bead), I'm not really sure it was worth it. In a future edition, I'd say you have 2 options - either get rid of boxings and items entirely, or do the exact opposite and make them a more central part of the mechanics of the game. You have the Steel Trap as a one-time roleblock item - you could easily add to that and have one-time vote manipulation items, and other cheaper goods people can buy as well, for example.

I wish I'd made more items. I was thinking about adding a bribe to the black market, where you can either change someone's vote or redirect their action (because redirects are so much fun ). Would it make sense to have the bribe be able to do both of those things, or should I just pick one? Maybe make something else for a redirect, which I really wish I'd had more of in this game.

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Protection - the amount of protection in the late-game was slightly out of control - there were more players who were protected from attacks than not. That's bad both for balance (it's hard for the Elims and the Kandra, since they lose their kill for the cycle and it could soft clear a player going forwards.) If that could be toned down a bit, probably by making the Bulletproof Vests a bit more expensive, that would be great.

Oh yeah, I definitely regret the way I did the bulletproof vest. In a rerun, the vest would absolutely be just a one time use. Way too many players had them at the end, and it would've made it near impossible for Mist to win, even if she hadn't been lynched. I think the price relative to the other items is fine as it is if it's just a one time use item.

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Regular roles - It's strange, but we had so many strange and unusual roles that it seems like we missed out on a few of the basic ones. We had 3 different Feruchemy roles that essentially started with "If roleblocked, then [x]", but the only actual roleblock role was the Leecher (which is why we had so many of them this game). The only vote manipulation I can remember was vote cancellation from storing as well (admittedly, I think that one was more due to inactivity/early lynches rather than the distribution or ruleset). You could easily have more roleblocks, redirects, rolescans and vote manipulation in this game for a future run, I think.

Yeah, I do think I'll want to try and spice up some of the roles we've got right now for feruchemy. I was on a bit of a time crunch when I was making those, so some of them aren't really as good as I would like, but they're alright. One thing I would like to do is either find a way to make iron and copper work with the tapping/storing mechanic, or go through and make some of the other feruchemy roles just basic role actions. 

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Irregular roles - I think the roles worked really well - I can't really think off the top of my head of a role that I look back on and go "Oh, yeah, that role was broken." Maybe a couple like Spinners could be spiced up slightly, but they frankly worked better than they had any right to without more testing.

I do like how most of the roles turned out. I definitely wanna improve on the Spinner, and I think make some changes to the Gasper as well. But otherwise, I am really glad with how all of these roles turned out. I was really nervous about a lot of them, and they turned out great!

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Thug Elim - There was a phase during the early AG's when people said "There's no way the GM's would put in a Tineye Elim, it's not a useful role for them, since the Elims generally want PM's to close." So, the GM's, curse their trollish hearts, started putting in Tineye Elims into their games left, right, and centre.
Thugs, IMO, are the new Tineyes - "The GM's would never put in a Thug Elim, it makes the game unbalanced." A note to all players: Don't ever, ever try to guess what the GM's will do with the role/player distribution for the sake of balance - they can and will use that against you just for the lols.

This. I learned from Mailliw for my first game I ran, and one thing I really liked that he taught me was to be extra weird with role distribution. Never, ever, make your reads based on distribution of roles in a game, especially if I'm the GM.  

8 hours ago, Young Bard said:

Twinborn names - Pyro gave their Twinborn name a nickname - I think it was Lookout? The moment I saw that, I remember thinking "Oh, yeah... I wish we'd done that." The extra flavour/immersion would have been worth it for the effort it takes to come up with the names, IMO. Especially since other Sanderfans already came up with a list of every possible combination of Twinborn somewhere, apparently.

This is something that I wish I'd done. I didn't think of it while I was putting the game together, but it would've been so much fun if I had. Also, I'd be interested to see that list!

2 hours ago, Magestar said:

I actually am really fond of the boxings and items mechanic.  Even if you ignore the fact that items are awesome, having a reward for posts of a certain length and quality definitely encourages activity and analysis.  Sure, it lead to a couple rather rambly posts and a couple of people splitting their posts into 200 word blocks, but overall I think that it was worth is and conceptually is a good idea.  I also sold my charged spike, so that's another time it was used.

I really liked the boxing and items mechanic too. I think one thing I would do differently is change up the ways that you can get boxings. For example, Drake suggested something like if you reach x number of words of discussion/RP in a cycle, then you get an amount of boxings based on that number. Would make it a bit easier to format the Gasper role around that, which is one I was really excited about. It's sad that both of our Gaspers died pretty early too.

2 hours ago, Magestar said:

Roles... I liked that there were so many possible role distributions in this game.  This game could easily be run a dozen times and be different every time, because of how many different roles there are.  With twinborn, the possibilities only increase.  Some of the Feruchemy roles could probably be re-worked; I agree that spinner is a little lackluster, and a few of the self-target scanning roles could probably be altered slightly.  There just seemed to be a lot of them. 

I really love that this game could be run in so many different ways depending on the way I distribute the roles. It's part of what makes me want to rerun it as much as possible.

You are right that some of the feruchemy roles would need to be changed to at least add some more diversity to the roles. If you have any ideas for what to do with some of them, feel free to let me know.

2 hours ago, Magestar said:

The bulletproof vest was probably too powerful rather than too low-priced.  I think at most it should be the thugs ability in item form.  A guaranteed night of being unkillable is super strong.  Usually two nights and the possibility of three nights is kind of ridiculous, especially for roles which already have protection, like mine.    

Yup, it was definitely way too powerful. Like I said above, I would absolutely be changing it to just a one time protection instead of up to 3. That was just way too overpowered.

1 hour ago, Ashbringer said:

I think the Kandra is fairly balanced, but Araris dying D2 definitely threw a big wrench into it. Plus me having mostly no idea what I was doing. If we got switched with me being the first Kandra and Araris the second, he may have pulled it off better. Or if he could have self-destructed onto Pyro - now THAT would be an interesting.

Hey, I think you did a really good job as the Kandra, especially for your first game. Don't sell yourself short! It was so much fun to watch you play. I was rooting for you the whole time.  

1 hour ago, Ashbringer said:

That's what I love about this game: there's so many things that could have gone slightly different that would have completely shifted the outcome.

It's one of my favorite things about SE, and especially running games. It's so much fun to see things happen and see how things could've played out differently if things slightly changed.

Now for some thoughts of mine that aren't prompted by other people's posts.

First off, I'd like to give a huge thank you to @Elbereth for helping me with the spreadsheet. You and Bard built that thing and managed to keep me from breaking it too much and helping me when I did anyway.  This game would not have gone as smoothly as it did without your help, even if we did have a few hiccups at the beginning.

Also, I'd like to give a huge thank you to @DrakeMarshall for rambling with me in the spec doc for hours, which ultimately led to us coming up with an entire new game that we're hoping to run someday. That night was so much fun, even if I stayed up several hours later than I should've.

I've already given a lot of my thoughts about the game and the balancing in this thread, this post, and in the doc already, but I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who played and helped me run this game. None of it would've been possible without you guys, and I had an absolute blast running this game. It was so much fun to see everyone enjoying themselves while they were playing, even if things didn't always go how they wanted. It was so much fun to see players that haven't been around for ages come back and also to see a bunch of newer players join and do really really well. I'm excited to play games with all of you again someday, and even more excited to be your GM someday.

[The Young Pyromancer he/him]

Re: Lerasium, I was trying to get TJ to sell his vest to try and buy it, leaving him open for a kill. 

Yes, my Twinborn combo is Lookout. It's the one that makes the most sense. Or maybe Watchman. One of the two.

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

Sup.

This was a fun game. I gotta say that for a game this complicated our GMs did an unreal job of keeping on top of things and making it work.

Pyro you did a quite impressively good job of elim-ing  I would be interested to see where things would have gone with our PM if I had survived 

Also a big shoutout to the shouty-shout agency  I probably shoulda done more PM'ing of more peoples but you guys were all great.

Other people probably have a lot better things to say gamewise since I didn't have a lot of firsthand experience with the different roles, but two minor points of feedback:

• The Gasper role was quite fun (and I'm so glad that the elims also thought of using the post restriction to fake having the role because I thought that sounded like a super fun idea ). It was also really interesting to change the style of my dialogue a bit, because I usually make these massive analysis posts that answers everything all at once, and I think I maybe learned some new stuff from being forced to communicate in smaller chunks. But at least to me, the store condition was also kinda fiddly in practice. The fact that I was limited to exactly 200 words (and not like 205 words or something) when the boxing reward only kicked in at exactly 200+ words meant that the actual amount of boxings I had was constantly in flux since all of our word counters were behaving slightly differently (heck, even using the same word counter, I sometimes got different results for some of my posts for some reason, which was really confusing). Also, this is probably mainly my own fault, but I had wanted to store cadmium for all of the 3 turns I was alive, and for various reasons I only was able to do so for 1 of them (and even in the case where it succeeded, it was only because Striker made an allowance and let me edit down a post I accidentally made slightly over 200 words). Idk I would be interested to hear what the other Gasper's experience of the role was. It's entirely possible that I am just too accustomed to being able to make larger posts and/or wasn't reading the rules carefully enough and/or was just plain unlucky, and that the other Gasper didn't have difficulty with it.
• I never experienced it firsthand, but I remember when I got the clarification that the bulletproof vest didn't take an action to use, I thought it sounded pretty strong. For one of the cheaper items in the shop, the fact that it didn't take an action to use, didn't get used up if you weren't attacked, and was still semi-reusable if you were, made it seem like a pretty desirable item to possess. It sounds like people are saying there was too much protection in the late game and this is probably why. Idk I think for many protective abilities you do need an action to use them, so maybe if it just took an action to wear the vest for the night that would help, since you would need to at least weigh whether you think you'll be attacked or if you want to do something else with your action.

But, overall my impression of the game is that it was improbably well put together for how ambitious this game was. Seriously I'm not even sure I can recall a game as complicated as this one that ran as smoothly, without it being a rerun that improved on a previous and similar setup. On that subject, I think a rerun of this setup would be spectacular, if you ever want to run one.

While sadly it was not my fate to steal everyone's stuff and moneys in life (I was so pleased to be the Thief and get a chance to start Drake's Mass-Murder Hedge Fund 2: Electric Boogaloo), I was determined to do so in death. Everyone who bet against me and Matrim gotta pay up

[|TJ| he/him]

Hey, I found this google sheet with all the names of all twinborn combinations. Now obviously, it isn't official, but it's fun to check the all the possible combination. I was, apparently, a Loreshot. A lot of these makes sense, actually. For example: Coinshot + Spinner = Coinfluke, an unnaturally lucky coinshot, which I quite like.

You can find it here. 

Edited June 29, 2020 by TJ Shade

[Mat he/him]

I was an Illuminator. Nicroburst/Sparker- Bursting other Allomancer's powers with storing mental speed. That's cool!

[Ashbringer he/him]

I was a... Pulser!

[Shard of Reading he/him]

I was a leecher pinnacle, so I was a vulture. I was thinking along the same lines for my name, and it is very cool.

[Mist she/her]

The closest for me would be Bender: Slider+Brute, rather than Slider+Thug, not naturally possible. 

[Magestar he/him]

22 hours ago, Ashbringer said:

If it was 4 players left with the Kandra, then I would have won this game Mage  it ended with me and 4 villagers.

Frankly, I think you did well enough to have won.    Idk if in that scenario the village would have won or the Kandra, though.  I was picturing 1-2 Elims and 2-3 villagers, not the 4 villagers: there, I think I personally would give the village precedence.  It would be a close one.

And dang, I feel like nearly everyone has commented that the bulletproof vest is too powerful.    

I've seen a couple of these Twinborn name charts.  I don't really like any of the names for Augur/Brute I've seen, but Augmenter is the most amusing.    Quite punny.