Long Game 74: You Want It Darker

[Condensation she/her]

That was the quickest flip I've ever seen. Wow. Just wow. 

[Illwei]

20 minutes ago, Ashbringer said:

Should of tried the three-suspicions thing a cycle earlier. That was actually surprisingly helpful.

I Still want to see what the three trusts does :P.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

 

Wow, thanks @Kasimir for this thrill of a game! Had a blast returning for this!

Congratulations to my fellow Spiked and thanks for putting up with the insanity I caused. I know some of these ploys were well outside your typical comfort zone, and I appreciate the trust. Fifth, Illwei, and I should never be on an elim team I think is the message here.  

Village, you also played really well and really had caught many of us, we just played off each other so much that it kept an exe from solidifying on any one of us. We also conveniently killed Striker, Quinn, and Mat who all suspected me quite a bit at various points.

@Gears and @Quintessential, it was a blast getting to know you and I thank you for the fun PMs, both game related and non-game related discussion. It was good to really interact with some of the newer players and make some new friends and these two PMs ended up being some of my top PMs ever. 

@_Stick_ , Always a pleasure, and I thank you for your ever-abiding trust. I kinda wished I had been village with you because working with you has been so much fun ever since our Mistborn team days. But alas, this was not that time. 

@Elandera , sorry… I’m not quite sure what it was that pocketed you though. I really didn’t put a lot of effort into that one. But again, I appreciated the trust when it counted. 

@Burnt Spaghetti, Twineyes forever, you even got to join us with a spike! Your messages were fantastic and I loved reading them, much better than mine this game. 

@Tani, welcome to the games, you had such a different style and I think it added a lot. That comment I made was always true. 

@Biplet, good instincts. I’m glad we killed you when we did. Thanks for the O7 I used it a lot.  

@Matrim's Dice , It was fun to go head to head. Also had some great instincts (aside from Illwei) and I’m sorry we killed you.  

Thoughts:

Claiming:

Spoiler

Kas shared most of my thoughts already. But here are some more. I’ve always been a fan of claiming, but I have seen the benefits to PM safety as I’ve aged. I think there is a balance to be struck, though I will always think that more info helps the village more. @Araris Valerian made a comment about PM safety and my claiming in the spiked doc that I don’t know how to go find easily but if he wants to share that, it’d be great. 

Essentially, there are ways to claim safely and help your team and there are ways to not claim and help your team. But as Wyrm pointed out, it’s kinda like a mask. It’s not for your sake, it’s for everyone’s collectively and if you’re the only one doing it, it doesn’t really matter. @The Young Pyromancer is the only person to claim to me in a way that I do. As a regular villager, he claimed Tineye and then Thug, attempting, I assume, to bait a kill on himself from the Spiked instead of us hitting a power role. This is a very valid way to fake claim as a villager. 

96 hours into the game(halfway through D2), I had 12/22 claims from villagers. By that point, with 3 dead, it was more like 12/19. Only two of those were lies. Bard claimed Thug instead of Lurcher, and Pyro was mentioned above. Thats it. So by N2, we had a pool of 7 people to seek. Made it real easy for us to eliminate threats when everyone else had already told me or possibly Illwei their role. Just some food for thought. It’s what really swept the game for us, allowing us to keep an eye on power roles (Quinn, Tani, Gears) and eliminate others (Bard, Bip).

I think Kas covered my thoughts on Smoking and how valuable it can be. See how we used Illwei and our Seekers for any evidence you need that Villagers can and should smoke themselves if not others. 

Gambits/Distancing:

Spoiler

Gambits are kinda my thing. And Fifth’s which I always forget. And so this game was a blast. I’ve been wanting to try a game where me and a fellow evil set up a false dichotomy and Illwei worked perfectly for that this game. I’m glad it worked as well as it did with almost everyone not thinking it was possible in the slightest for us to both be evil. This is one of the reasons I reacted so strongly to Quinn’s post about what spiked will and won’t do. Because I literally do things that are insane for the simple reason that they are. And because they are, no one sees them coming. 

I was genuinely ready to sacrifice myself this game. It’s why I went so hard on PMs and claims in the first two days. I didn’t expect to live much longer than that. If we hadn’t calculated a likely way to win when we did, I’d have one hundred percent advocated for bussing myself a day or two earlier. As mentioned, by the end, we were all pretty obvious because of my chull being saved twice in a row. But it was too late then. If there had still been a large chance for that to cost us, I’d have had myself killed when I was up against Gears. 

Playing this game with so many of us as top suspicions yet able to play off the suspicions of one of the other elims was so fun, yet risky. The best kind of gambit, in my opinion. I loved being able to have elims in my top suspicions continually and theoretically distance myself from them especially when I flipped. Illwei and Devo were up on my list most of the game. We intentionally split exes between us to determine our own exe. Thanks for the ride!

More on PMs:

Spoiler

I sent this to Stick after Gears saved me with his Soothing. “The advantages to PMing a lot and being open to lots of claims is that you start to build trusts with people in positions to help you.”

Kas mentioned this but yes, I asked three or four people directly to just save me from the exe when I was up against Quinn. I didn’t want my team to have to incriminate themselves at that point. 

PMs allow you to build trusts and more than trusts, relationships. Those relationships pay off often. Burnt and Stick and Gears kept me alive I think because of the PMs we had going and because of the trust I had previously gained in those PMs. Elandera kept me alive, I’m not sure why, but something to do with our relationship I assume. I always planned to use this same reasoning if I ever was coinshot when Stink was lurching me. Being active in PMs allows you a lot more influence over roles and abilities than you would have on your own. 

We almost always knew where vote manip was being used, at least right after the rollover, if not before, and sometimes we’re even able to affect it. I almost was able to direct Tani’s kill and even when it didn’t end up in a WGG, I still was able to affect it even with her suspicion of me. This all comes from PMs and building friendships. Gears and I barely talked game talk. I know some people look down on non game related talk in PMs, but friendships are a large part of what I enjoy about this game and they even have a strategic component. That’s all. PMs are great. I don’t know how Burnt became the Spider, but I'd like to contest that position.  in this game at least, PMs were pretty underused by the village from what I saw and I think they have a ton of use.

I rarely lied about my opinions on things in this game. Most of what I did was my real playstyle. I lie about a select few things, my role being foremost, but the rest is legit. 

I mentioned this in our doc, but this is likely my last game, if not ever, then at least for a long time. I no longer can afford the time needed for these even on an easy semester. I only know how to go all in on a game and can’t convince myself to go partly in and keep my RL how it needs to be. I enjoyed this so much and it was a great welcome back as well as a farewell. This just isn’t something I can spend as much time as I’d like to on anymore. I’ll still be around the community, especially the discord, just don’t expect me in any games. Thanks for being so awesome, everyone! O7

Edited March 17, 2021 by Mailliw73
weird formatting, sorry.

[Random Bystander she/her]

The Random Bystander ran up to the person she was looking for, and tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around, she punched him as hard as she could in the face. "That's what you get for trying to murder me." She then ran to the Pits of Hathsin, and worldhopped away.

[Araris Valerian he/him]

13 minutes ago, Mailliw73 said:

@Araris Valerian made a comment about PM safety and my claiming in the spiked doc that I don’t know how to go find easily but if he wants to share that, it’d be great. 

Quote

Mailliw understands the importance of role information as a commodity. So he understands when it’s worthwhile to swap around and when it isn’t. At least in theory. Like, I deal with PM safety by not roleclaiming. Mailliw does it by getting the greatest possible value out of his role knowledge. He’s acting safely, but he is actually acting.

I assume this is what you were referring to?

[Mailliw73 he/him]

3 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

I assume this is what you were referring to?

Exactly that, thanks!

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

Good game.

At the end Fifth was sounding psychopathic. I'm so annoyed that I died right as I started having suspicions, but that's how the elim kill goes.

[Mat he/him]

28 minutes ago, Mailliw73 said:

I mentioned this in our doc, but this is likely my last game, if not ever, then at least for a long time. I no longer can afford the time needed for these even on an easy semester. I only know how to go all in on a game and can’t convince myself to go partly in and keep my RL how it needs to be. I enjoyed this so much and it was a great welcome back as well as a farewell. This just isn’t something I can spend as much time as I’d like to on anymore. I’ll still be around the community, especially the discord, just don’t expect me in any games. Thanks for being so awesome, everyone! O7

O7

Twas a pleasure playing a game with you, Maill!

[StrikerEZ he/him]

Well, I just want to say that this game was a blast, even though I was dead very soon. Though who's actually surprised about that?

A lot of people have already given their thoughts about things, and I gave a lot of my thoughts about things in the spec docs as the game was going on. I just want to say that it would've been a blast to be on the elim team with any of y'all, and I would've so been on board for all of the gambits. The world will tremble the day when @Fifth Scholar, @Mailliw73, and I all end up on a team together.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

2 minutes ago, StrikerEZ said:

Well, I just want to say that this game was a blast, even though I was dead very soon. Though who's actually surprised about that?

A lot of people have already given their thoughts about things, and I gave a lot of my thoughts about things in the spec docs as the game was going on. I just want to say that it would've been a blast to be on the elim team with any of y'all, and I would've so been on board for all of the gambits. The world will tremble the day when @Fifth Scholar, @Mailliw73, and I all end up on a team together.

Fate would put Kas on that team just to torture him.

[StrikerEZ he/him]

Just now, Mailliw73 said:

Fate would put Kas on that team just to torture him.

Okay, you see, that sounds great. The absolute chaos of that doc, with us planning all sorts of wacky gambits while Kas is just going "oh god why?" sounds so incredibly fun.

[Stick. she/her]

Well, good game everyone!  Safe to say that PMs were the village's downfall and that I have never been so pocketed in all the five years I've played SE - but it's good! Now I'm forever scarred going to be a lot more cautious when it comes to PMs but I love PMs so I'm not going to stop using them. To be fair, I was kinda aiming to get killed for my roleless claim to Maill because of just how suspicious it is to claim roleless C1 but I guess I didn't consider the idea that the elims had two Seekers >>

3 hours ago, Mailliw73 said:

@_Stick_ , Always a pleasure, and I thank you for your ever-abiding trust. I kinda wished I had been village with you because working with you has been so much fun ever since our Mistborn team days. But alas, this was not that time.

I won't deny that it was fun  But man was my paranoia about you off the charts like I'm pretty sure I asked each and every one of my PM contacts about what they think of you, because the ease with which you revealed other people's roles to me was really odd. Sadly though, I repressed the paranoia to focus on others Devotary but I guess it was too late by then  

@Fifth Scholar I have to ask...did the text editor really eat up as many posts of yours as you expressed? xD Also was this some kinda revenge for LG56??  Very well played!

Also why is Devotary always evil?? Tell me I'm not the only one noticing this?  

Also yall had insanely good distancing I would've probably never accepted an Illwei/Maill e/e but here we are  

This was a mad game to come back to SE through, but it was chaotic and enjoyable for sure. I really enjoyed having fun with my cosmetic role caking baking too xD That said, I probably won't be playing another game for a few months because life's getting busy unfortunately. 

3 hours ago, Mailliw73 said:

I mentioned this in our doc, but this is likely my last game, if not ever, then at least for a long time. I no longer can afford the time needed for these even on an easy semester. I only know how to go all in on a game and can’t convince myself to go partly in and keep my RL how it needs to be. I enjoyed this so much and it was a great welcome back as well as a farewell. This just isn’t something I can spend as much time as I’d like to on anymore. I’ll still be around the community, especially the discord, just don’t expect me in any games. Thanks for being so awesome, everyone! O7

Good luck! It was awesome to play with you!

@Kasimir thanks for being such a great and dedicated GM and blessing us with these amazing write-ups! This must've been hella time-consuming for you so thanks for putting up with us  

 

edit: @Illwei remember that time you brought up the fact that stink's rp name was an anagram and said that you weren't the one to find that out?? That was perhaps the closest I got to suspecting you and stink as e/e cuz I was like no way this conversation didnt happen in a doc xD Alas...

Edited March 17, 2021 by _Stick_

[Illwei]

4 minutes ago, _Stick_ said:

edit: @Illwei remember that time you brought up the fact that stink's rp name was an anagram and said that you weren't the one to find that out?? That was perhaps the closest I got to suspecting you and stink as e/e cuz I was like no way this conversation didnt happen in a doc xD Alas...

Lmao. This was actually a conversation with Matrim in PMs :P. He told me.  Also why would it have had to be in a doc? :P. PMs and group PMs existed...though...I didn't realize, otherwise I most definitely would have put together some awful group PMs the most people probably wouldn't talk in at all on D1 :P.

[Stick. she/her]

Just now, Illwei said:

Lmao. This was actually a conversation with Matrim in PMs :P. He told me.  Also why would it have had to be in a doc? :P. PMs and group PMs existed...though...I didn't realize, otherwise I most definitely would have put together some awful group PMs the most people probably wouldn't talk in at all on D1 :P.

I don't know xD I guess it was too early in the cycle and I was like hm I'm either underestimating her PM abilities or this happened in a doc

[Illwei]

5 minutes ago, _Stick_ said:

I don't know xD I guess it was too early in the cycle and I was like hm I'm either underestimating her PM abilities or this happened in a doc

I don't need PM abilities, I have friends :P.

[Stick. she/her]

1 minute ago, Illwei said:

I don't need PM abilities, I have friends :P.

Yeah I suppose not being familiar with half the players wasn't the greatest thing for me xD Didn't really know what to expect. It's great to have played with all of you though! I'm really glad

[Burnt Spaghetti she/her]

8 hours ago, Gears said:

 

To @Burnt Spaghetti: Lovely. Beautiful. Magnificent. I offer you another name, Etye. It's a pun of "T in eye" but also an alternate spelling of the name "Atiya", which means "Gift". You are a gift to us all, Bubbles. Post your Acu!Wei drawing in the SEAcropolis.

 

I accept this name. I will be sure to make use of this name in the future.  

5 hours ago, Matrim's Dice said:

 

@Burnt Spaghetti, I especially enjoyed your Tineye messages. Nice job!

 thanks! I had a lot of fun with them. I never really had a reason to use them for anything actually strategic but was a good chance to do some rp and play with insanity. I'm glad people enjoyed them

 

3 hours ago, Mailliw73 said:

 

@Burnt Spaghetti, Twineyes forever, you even got to join us with a spike! Your messages were fantastic and I loved reading them, much better than mine this game. 

<snip>

PMs are great. I don’t know how Burnt became the Spider, but I'd like to contest that position. 

 

<3 Twineyes forever. I'm glad you enjoyed the messages. And thanks for letting me hijack yours as well  I had fun blind trusting you when I had no good reason and it was great to see the original master phisher back in action   Twas a good reminder of why back in the olden days pm safety was such an important thing. Twas cause of folks like you

You are welcome to the position of pm Spider. I don't have the energy to do that reliably  I had a few games where I was able to phish the roles out of everyone and be problematic, so I've proven to myself i can do it if i wanted to, but I'm now old and lazy so, please, take the responsibility from me I just wanna chill and have fun with friends

 

----

 

And finally, @Kasimir. Dude. Great game. There are reasons i will sign up to any game you run if i have the chance  You are a really engaging gm and you pour your heart into these games and the writeups and it shows. You did a fantastic job even with all the pressures you are dealing with. I am proud of you. You got through it! NOW YOU BETTER MAKE USE OF THE NEWLY FREED TIME TO GET SOME SLEEP BETWEEN YOUR WORK CASES OKAY??? AND DONT FORGET TO HYDRATE.

 

Also @Wyrmhero it was great to see you again. Has been a long time, and I hope you've been well.  Thank you for the cycles of entertainment of pestering our gm so we didn't have to and risk suffering consequences  

[Kasimir he/him]

5 hours ago, Mailliw73 said:

I mentioned this in our doc, but this is likely my last game, if not ever, then at least for a long time. I no longer can afford the time needed for these even on an easy semester. I only know how to go all in on a game and can’t convince myself to go partly in and keep my RL how it needs to be. I enjoyed this so much and it was a great welcome back as well as a farewell. This just isn’t something I can spend as much time as I’d like to on anymore. I’ll still be around the community, especially the discord, just don’t expect me in any games. Thanks for being so awesome, everyone! O7

I get this, my dude. O7 

Glad to have GMed you, or at least, strangely appropriate to have been the last GM (if at least in a long while) for my first GM  Now the circle is complete.

I understand this as I often talk about having a chill game but for one reason or another, end up going ham. We saw this from me as Azure Mouse, and as Duncan Kerr more recently. And as we spoke in the Spiked doc, this is likely to be my last stint in SE for a long time as well, though for different reasons. Definitely also feeling harder to juggle these with my new responsibilities. Anyway, I'm still committed to taking MR50 if the players before me aren't going for it as the game I have planned is way easier than that and I may want to join TJ and Wyrm in the 'I GMed a X50!' club so I'm saving my official "I'm leaving" thing for either that game, or for the way I'd planned to deliver it here. Probably the latter.

4 hours ago, Mailliw73 said:

Fate would put Kas on that team just to torture him.

Sir, are you sure you're not Spiked? That's just too Evil to - oh, wait  

I'm quite sure Wyrm would get a lot of PMs from me because I have to seek a reasonable person somewhere thanks to that team, and God help me that I've determined Wyrm to actually be reasonable :/ Sometimes.

1 hour ago, Burnt Spaghetti said:

NOW YOU BETTER MAKE USE OF THE NEWLY FREED TIME TO GET SOME SLEEP BETWEEN YOUR WORK CASES OKAY??? AND DONT FORGET TO HYDRATE.

More cases came in today to be honest so it looks like another late night. I may or may not have wept into my case files to discover my new temporal real estate was rapidly consumed.

What is hydration, can you eat it 

I've been asked to share a bit more on my civility thoughts and Fallion's Four. I will do so in a while.

[Wyrmhero he/him]

4 hours ago, Burnt Spaghetti said:

And finally, @Kasimir. Dude. Great game. There are reasons i will sign up to any game you run if i have the chance  You are a really engaging gm and you pour your heart into these games and the writeups and it shows. You did a fantastic job even with all the pressures you are dealing with. I am proud of you. You got through it! NOW YOU BETTER MAKE USE OF THE NEWLY FREED TIME TO GET SOME SLEEP BETWEEN YOUR WORK CASES OKAY??? AND DONT FORGET TO HYDRATE.

 

Also @Wyrmhero it was great to see you again. Has been a long time, and I hope you've been well.  Thank you for the cycles of entertainment of pestering our gm so we didn't have to and risk suffering consequences  

Kas can't sleep, I've given him 100s hours of shows to watch and games to play :P.

Nice to pop in a little, though Kas is no doubt very glad I didn't sign up - Not because I was going through stuff with him first and therefore knew what was happening, not because I would have signed up at 2 minutes before game start, but because I was considering doing the game as a parody of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. My RP would have been Wyl (author, actor, director) and Kast (second main character) giving interviews about the game. But Kas ruined that idea by being so damned good at writeups that parodying them would have been an insult .

[Kasimir he/him]

Ninja-ed by Wyrm, thanks for the save there, Chief

So anyway, I've been asked to say a bit more about the civility issues and Fallion's Four.

I'll say a bit more about the teams first, which is that we used to have a thing in SE where you'd actually look at team dynamics and synergies. I don't really want to think too much about personal assessments of a player's capacities. I used to think in those terms when I played SE, but now I'm old and cynical and in general, my view as a Villager is that it doesn't matter if I'm going up against Wilson, Wyrm, or anyone else - my job is still the same. In keeping with that, I do not suppress team distros unless I see there is, for instance, some reason the team is non-viable, or no way to ascertain that the team can fulfil the dead basic level of player competency. In this case, I felt that Team Village had a number of capable players, and two potential aces up its sleeve with Biplet and Tani holding down the Coinshot and Mistborn roles respectively. I was especially pleased when Biplet did in fact take to her 1337 Seeker powers by helping to terminally Seek in this game. 

I was fine with Elan and Daisy being Thugs as well, though I did wince a bit for Elan and her curse. New players often get jumped on for things that don't fit how the community plays, and I liked the idea Daisy got to have some durability. That part did not pan out so well.

On the Spiked team side, I knew that the Spiked team needed to be able to mobilise PMs well, and to have a decent risk appetite. Part of this was me coming from the AG, and recalling that Evil teams without players capable of fulfilling the heavy PM user niche can be in trouble in a game with PMs wide open. Part of this was just based off the fact that they had two Seekers, which opened them up to a lot of shenanigans. When this distro came up: Maili, Illwei, Devo, Fifth, Araris, STINK, I figured they were fine. STINK PMs everyone, though our PMs have generally remained light. Maili and Illwei, in my view, would give them decent PM coverage, which was the one criterion I had and would have otherwise suppressed the distro for. I'd generally forgotten that Fifth, Illwei, and Maili together were gambit demons, and Araris has that mad bussing rep. This would come back to haunt me later. (Sorry Illwei...) I also figured that Maili and Fifth might be rusty, coming back out of hiatus/retirement as it were, and that Araris had been attracting suspicion for his Evil stunts as of LG73, so I saw no reason for that to be excessively problematic.

Another thing I liked about this boiled down to TJ's comment about how the past few games had been about trying to find low activity Evil Teams. The idea that this team would have a mixed profile as a way of shaking things up for the Village was appealing to me.

Strategically, as I've already said, the two big problems the Village had were the poor PM opsec (rampant roleclaims, massive manipulation), as well as the spiking level of inactivity. But I'm also going to point out that the Spiked gambled very heavily, and Maili was playing on the assumption he would be dead soon and wanted to help his team as best as he could. Tani and Biplet both had Maili and Illwei in their crosshairs at points, and this could have backfired badly on the Spiked had either of the Village's 'Seekers' taken the shot. Eventually, they did not, but this goes back once again to the PM game, and who was on the ball in PMs, and who was not. Had Striker or Mat developed some trust or working rapport with either of the Village vigs, things might have gone very differently.

Fifth's gamble that defending Maili would work well for him, for instance, backfired a bit in that he started to accumulate some suspicion just for doing so. I think on that level it's partly because some players are just always going to bite down hard on the IKYK. 

Fallion's Four: I do think it was not a good tactical move on the Village's part, but I think it was essentially not an ethical problem. I was in on the PMs, and my general take on these tends to be as follows: first, that having any role capable of influencing the lynch on their own for their own reasons is itself 'fundamentally undemocratic' in that pushing a lynch away from the Village majority is about subverting the will of the people. If you think that four ostensible Villagers discussing and agreeing to push a Striker lynch is fundamentally undemocratic, then you had better also condemn every lynch-changing vote-manipulator who did not declare they were one, and did not declare what they were doing and their reasons to the thread before doing so.

Is the issue the fact it was a group PM? Would it have been any better if the Four had come to that conclusion and behaved the exact same was as the result of one-on-one PMs with each other? Well, then while doing so, you had also better condemn every time a player drops a bunch of one-on-one PMs to talk to other players on their views on the lynch and ends up changing the outcome.

I'm also not a fan of demanding reasoning and immediately condemning players who don't. I think it's fine to do it in the game for tactical reasons, but I'm less fine when it appears to be coming out of a position that this is the way to play, and a reification of capital-r Reasoning. Players often do have reasons: it's just that sometimes it's strategically better to withhold them. Fallion's Four also fails that test, because they did make their reasons clear in thread: it just so happened they persuaded each other in PMs. In other words, they were convinced by reasoning that they shared with the thread: the PMs were simply the avenue by which the reasoning first appeared.

In the end, I'm coming from the view that words have meaning. When we say mayoring is bad, or trust group dominance is bad, we mean a specific thing by it. Using words without care for what they mean results in us calling things what they are not. It blurs boundaries and it makes it difficult for us to clearly put our finger on what is wrong in a bad case. Referring to what Wyrm and I do to each other as targeted player harassment, for instance, grossly mutilates the word 'harassment' and what is meant by it. (Note that Wyrm consistently angsted to me out of game about what he was doing and if he was distracting the players. We also have a clear understanding of where each other's line is and we don't cross it.) It grossly misunderstands the sort of behaviour that's not acceptable in SE, and in extending that word to include our bickering, it trivialises what we mean by 'harassment.' In doing so, it makes enforcement of actual harassment difficult. You cannot properly condemn or report bad behaviour if you do not fundamentally understand what it is supposed to be. This is what I mean when I say words have meanings. We need to respect what words mean.

Is Fallion's Four anywhere close to what happened in the AG? No. Is it mayoring? God, no. Is it trust group dominance? If it is, then where does the ethical wrongness or badness of Fallion's Four come from? I point out that the above discussion has been me showing that if you think the wrongness of Fallion's Four stems from these places, then I also expect to see people agreeing on or condemning behaviour that also displays this very sort of ethical wrongness. The fact that we do not suggests that such attempts to locate the ethical wrongness of Fallion's Four generally fail.

My view is consistent with TJ's, which is that it's not an ethical issue so much as a tactical issue. Four Villagers bloc-voting generally just looks suspicious as hell and wastes Village energy chasing that (it did so happen Maili was not Village, but the point is we're talking about it from the tactical standpoint of the Village.) So yeah, I do think it's helpful to make it clear you were in contact with each other, but it doesn't really matter because Village is perfectly justified (in my view) regarding sudden coordinated lynch-changing shenanigans as being highly suspicious.

Civility issues. There have been a number of low level incidents across this game. As I mentioned, I don't want to go into too much detail about most of them. One thing I will say is that I somewhat regret picking Nordic Noir as the flavour for this game. I've certainly covered a number of dark subjects in the write-ups: stalking, serial murder, abduction, child trafficking, drugs, violence, and so on. None of this is PG-9, but SE has a history of being bloody careful about the line, because we're part of 17th Shard, and that means keeping this family-friendly. (Just look at the Bonestorm write-up in LG18.) I relied on the maturity of the players in order to ensure that content did not stray past the line, even as I was careful to keep most of the darkness to hints, or Kast and Wyl rambling about human nature. In this regard, I have to admit I have been disappointed in the number of players who regarded 'noir' as an excuse to get downright edgy and dark.

I think it's also important to be careful about the impacts our words have on others. I myself have crossed this line several times. As a player, I've been known to have a sharp tongue and I do not hold back when I go in on a player. I have tried to learn, and to apologise for my errors, though I make my mistakes still. The point I think is that mindfulness of others is always important. I don't want to turn this into a "if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen" discussion, because this sort of talk neglects the fact the kitchen could be less hot. With that caveat in mind, I'll note that as a player with a noted history/aggressive style, there's always an element of pressure to SE. People do press players, and put them under pressure. Spiked, too, automatically are under pressure by virtue of their role. Often, in SE, the ability to put pressure on another player for their reads, their reasoning, and just in general, what they say, is your power to elicit more information from them and to improve your reads. This is part and parcel of the game, on some level. As the Etiquette policy points out, it's important to be able to talk about when a player is making you uncomfortable, just as it's important to take a step back and realise that it's not always about you, but it's sometimes that the player is just doing their job because they don't know what you know, and so by their lights, that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask.

During the time check in the previous cycle, I mentioned the dead doc being nuked. This was not in fact to lock Wyrm out, as some speculated, but because one of the dead players thought it was a good idea to head into the anon dead doc and post a short wall of abuse in whitetext. I have done the needful with regard to that. I just want to say I am pretty damned disappointed that they thought it was okay, whether in the name of RP and being edgy, or whatever their reasons were.

Edgy does not excuse bad behaviour. RP does not absolve us of the need to be mindful of the others in the SE community.

That's all I have to say about that.

Edited March 17, 2021 by Kasimir

[|TJ| he/him]

*sigh* *insert some grumbling about claiming here* I still don't get claiming, I don't think I ever will. I get that some people like playing that way, all I'm trying to tell is that claiming for trust is not as good as claiming after trusting. As I said in the dead doc, all it did in this game was reduce the player pool for the elims to scan, and with 2 of them, they got through us quickly. If there's one thing good for the villagers this game, it's that it showed the cons of the PM game.

And I know Kas spoke about inactivity, but just to give you an idea, it was like we had essentially lost the thread majority as early as D3, because you know what the vote split up was? 8-6. In C3, where villagers do not have solid trusts or suspicions and will obviously split up, we had just 2 voting villagers more than elims. 

And another thing is we need to stopping pushing players away from here, man Kas has had to deal with crem upon crem in this game, and it isn't right. GM's work is so so overlooked and underappreciated and everyone takes them for granted. Engaging players are a gem because we get them rarely, so can we just be a little mindful and conscious of what we say, please?

16 hours ago, Illwei said:

And TJ! we hit 50 pages in our PM even if a lot of that was Kas :P.

Yeah, we'll just...chalk off his involvement as trying to disqualify our PM from beating mine and Kas' from AG7 :P. Incoming "Friendship over" gif xD 50 pages I see, so 50 pages it is :P.

@Mailliw73, glad to have played in your retirement game (though I do hope you pop in for a game now and then rarely). I see my "Maill doesn't sound like an old player" has caused a bit of a talk in the elim doc. I just... felt you don't feel/sound an old generation player? Like you sound a lot different from how Kas or Alv or Aman does. You feel more like the current gen players, like Ash or Mat. I don't know how else to explain it, and now it's not the being polite thing either  I didn't get to see the chaotic side of you this game cause you were busy elsewhere but very well played to pocket so many villagers despite being under constant suspicion.

@Fifth Scholar, I was right to be wary of you from the start eh? xD Whenever Fifth feels extremely village right from the beginning, he's mostly likely an elim, got it.

@_Stick_, you were fun to PM with! Although....it was a leeeetle bit too late, trying to figure out how to escape the inevitable loss was fun xD Hope you join a game soon!

@Matrim's Dice, I swear every game I promise to PM you more and then I just... forget -.- We should work together more! (uh only when we're on the same side of course :P)

I feel like I should try mass PMing in just one game and see, but seems like a massive effort to me, we'll see

So, I spent quite a bit D1 trying to write an RP for the skeleton in the closet thing to submit to Kas, and I'll just put it under here. Trigger warning for very mild domestic abuse:

Spoiler

Sometimes I feel so alone, I just don’t know
Feels like I’ve been down this road before
So lonely and cold, it’s like something takes over me
As soon as I go home and close the door
Kinda feels like déjà vu
I wanna get away from this place, I do
But I can’t, and I won’t say I try, but I know that’s a lie
Cause I don’t, and why, I just don’t know

Loneliness. A heavy cloak of loneliness upon his shoulders is what he felt when he opened the door to his home.

That’s all Fleur has ever felt for a long time. He closed the door firmly and just slid to the floor, his back to the door, and started sobbing.

Marianna…

Not a day goes by without thinking of her. He wasn’t lonely then. The whole world seemed cheerful when she was alongside him. 

They were as close as any two people could be, more than just two peas in a pod. The ones, when everyone looked at them, they’d immediately think these two were growing old together.

They knew each other from a young age, basically grew up together. And when you spend a lot of time together, literally almost every moment of your life, it’s inevitable that you end up falling for each other.

She embraced that feeling. He shied away from it...he was scared. Cautious. 

We’re perfect right now as it is. What if the next step changes everything? Why can’t we remain like this? What if I lose this beautiful friendship that I have? 

When she confessed, he said he needed time to make a decision. And he really did try to think it all out, but he just couldn’t bring himself to take the risk. He was stuck between a place of causing her pain by turning her away or risking it all and possibly losing her friendship down the line. So he did the only thing he could. Nothing. He deflected and gave excuses every time she brought it up.

Marianna, on her part, was extremely patient, because she believed there was no reason why he wouldn’t want to be with her. It just didn’t make any sense, just like it didn’t make sense why he was hesitant either. But there is only so much patience a person can muster before they start doubting themselves and start questioning their self-worth. In the end, it was too much. 

She let Gaux into her life. Fleur didn’t exactly know how to feel about this, but he supposed he could be happy for her. Even though it hurt to see her with someone else, he could remain as her friend. Or so he told himself. He wouldn’t complain when he couldn’t bring himself to take the risk. And he was fine with it, or at least showed so, until the rumours began to float around. And the bruises started appearing. Only then did he realize just how far he had drifted away from Marianna. Gaux was one of the worst types of scum on the planet, and Marianna, who had shared each and every tiny detail of her life before, had not uttered a single word about it to Fleur.

He was devastated. He didn’t know how to help her. How do you help someone who refuses to acknowledge the problem? He tried so hard to get her to open up, but she wouldn’t. They would never be the way they were before, and only he was to blame for it. This was much, much worse than whatever stupid doubts he had about their possible relationship. Things in retrospect always seem so simple, doesn’t it? What the heck was he so worried about? He would’ve spend the rest of his life with his soulmate, for Lord Ruler’s sake.

And just like that, he received the news that she has no more. Beaten to death. In a drunken fit of rage.

My Marianna….by some random guy she let into her life because of me…

I killed her. I killed my Marianna.

He’d tell that to himself every moment for the rest of his life. He’d bear that burden. But he’d do that by making sure he wouldn’t regret anything else in his life. He truly knew what it meant to cherish every moment you have with a person, and he promised he’d spend his time bringing a smile on the faces of everyone he met.

Maybe he’ll learn to let down the guilt and find love one day, but till then, he’d grieve behind closed doors. He’d grieve for his Marianna.

After all, what is grief, if not the final act of love?

And of course, the remaining lines from Fleur Tieste's dairy founf from his room, which he did not get to use because I always *sigh* seem to stop RPing a couple of cycles into the game, but they deserve to be put out here

1. Are you a Smoker, ‘cause you’re clouding my mind (my judgement?)
2. Are you a Lurcher as I feel a pull towards you (Damn you Kas -.-)
3. I'd stand in the way of a Coinshot for you, cause I'll take a Bullet for My Valentine.
4. I feel like a Tineye Savant, cause you blind me with your beauty.
5. Is everyone around me a Coinshot? They keep Pushing me away!
6. Are you Aluminum? You make me feel nothing.
7. I don’t need Electrum to see that my future has you in it.
8. I’m not burning Atium, but I can see a future together with you.
9. I don’t need Gold to figure out all you were missing in your past was someone like me.
10. Not even a Smoker could hide these Pulses beating for you.
11. Are you the Lord Ruler? ‘cause you look like you don’t age.

I aim to create a Roshar version of this character someday cause I feel like I really did not use these as much as I would have liked. xD

Edited March 17, 2021 by TJ Shade

[Stick. she/her]

3 minutes ago, TJ Shade said:

*sigh* *insert some grumbling about claiming here* I still don't get claiming, I don't think I ever will. I get that some people like playing that way, all I'm trying to tell is that claiming for trust is not as good as claiming after trusting. As I said in the dead doc, all it did in this game was reduce the player pool for the elims to scan, and with 2 of them, they got through us quickly. If there's one thing good for the villagers this game, it's that it showed the cons of the PM game.

Yeah...the claiming did get out of hand, huh? xD PMs can be helpful to the village though - people are generally very open in PMs as opposed to the thread, so it's relatively easy for villagers to discover any elim slips or other contradictions they might make in an environment where their guard is down. In fact, PMs could have potentially saved the village this game! xD If only Dannex had got onto the Shard and responded to the PMs during the night turn, we would've been able to successfully smoke one of us - and if that someone had been Elandera...well.  The rioting wouldn't have been effective. But I agree, truthful claiming is generally not advised. Especially not in the early cycles...

11 minutes ago, TJ Shade said:

@_Stick_, you were fun to PM with! Although....it was a leeeetle bit too late, trying to figure out how to escape the inevitable loss was fun xD Hope you join a game soon!

Yeah, too bad we didn't use PMs earlier  It was very short lived but I definitely enjoyed it. 

[Kasimir he/him]

6 minutes ago, _Stick_ said:

Yeah...the claiming did get out of hand, huh? xD PMs can be helpful to the village though - people are generally very open in PMs as opposed to the thread, so it's relatively easy for villagers to discover any elim slips or other contradictions they might make in an environment where their guard is down. In fact, PMs could have potentially saved the village this game! xD If only Dannex had got onto the Shard and responded to the PMs during the night turn, we would've been able to successfully smoke one of us - and if that someone had been Elandera...well.  The rioting wouldn't have been effective. But I agree, truthful claiming is generally not advised. Especially not in the early cycles...

You actually did some interesting and audacious phishing in PMs that might have been more helpful a couple Turns ago. Your hitting TJ with the Seeker scan bait was good, and I think an Evil player might have panicked for a few moments, though the immediate question is always: "Well, then why tell me in a PM, because if I were really Evil, you have no reason to do that." TJ's gambits were also extremely good, and I felt a bit like - guys, where was all this kayana earlier

3 hours ago, Wyrmhero said:

Kas can't sleep, I've given him 100s hours of shows to watch and games to play :P.

>>

We've established you're responsible for 70% of the backlog on my recs list since 2016, sir. Is this the real reason you keep suggesting I step out of SE as well?  

3 hours ago, Wyrmhero said:

But Kas ruined that idea by being so damned good at writeups that parodying them would have been an insult .

You say this like you didn't play MR7  

[Ashbringer he/him]

“Might have been more helpful a couple of turns ago” is probably the Village Motto for this game 

[Stick. she/her]

49 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

You actually did some interesting and audacious phishing in PMs that might have been more helpful a couple Turns ago. Your hitting TJ with the Seeker scan bait was good, and I think an Evil player might have panicked for a few moments, though the immediate question is always: "Well, then why tell me in a PM, because if I were really Evil, you have no reason to do that." TJ's gambits were also extremely good, and I felt a bit like - guys, where was all this kayana earlier

Yeah...like the village PM group’s name, it was all 2 little 2 late  I did try that seeker Thing with Fifth as well but Fifth was too adamant on PM safety >:[ Also I had guessed his role wrong so there’s that too xD Cuz realistically, if a supposed seeker does come to me with a claim of having scanned someone as evil, before taking it to the thread I would for sure PM the player in question first, because 1) who’s the say the seeker is telling me the truth in the first place? And 2) it would be a very fun conversation  Eventually I would tell the thread in the same turn but not immediately.