Kasimir

Current direction of thoughts after another re-read: TJ: Positive meta read off C1, mostly off the slip about the converts. Feel that sort of mistake is less likely to come from E!TJ who is more on the ball about these things. Have gone back to look at his LG83 posts and feel TJ is a bit more thread engaged. He does do the catch thing, cf. against V!Steel that game, but he doesn't like to do it live in thread. Stick: Positive meta read off C1 small engagement style. On rereading, wonder if JNV/anti-Fadran push comes from E!Stick having TMI that the train is a bad one. Call for a switch off Fadran at EoC just feels odd. Did suggest Ash but Ash CW was instigated by Fifth, which feels very hands-off given it was another Village train. Off-train voter. I don't disagree with Stick pushing on JNV, but also feel that JNV tends to be a LHF train when Village, which means that I pay more attention to people who push them. Fifth: EoC Yagami Taichi stress response is more characteristic of V!Fifth, and also I was this guy's lawyer. Mat: Nothing strong. Liked exchange on D1. Side-train voter, and liked Fadran CW but remained hands-off which is potentially indicative of TMI. More a profile issue than anything. TKN: Positive C1 where developing suspicions are concerned, votes C1 and C2 otherwise appear to be convenience votes and side-train. Runs closer to TKN's E!meta of coasting once he feels he has secured a Village read. Dislike. Aman: I can see E!Aman worlds, but lean V for now on the basis of PM interactions. And probably a healthy amount of NOPE. Araris: Liked the direction of his thoughts in this thread, acknowledge that I always want to V!read Araris; probably nulling out of wariness. Biplet: Don't like the tone of her response, admit that I have commented on multiple occasions that Bip has that sort of pressure response. Vote comes in an odd place for E!Bip, possible in a Fifth/Bip world but not sure that's consistent with how Fifth was working the thread. JNV: So, forcing myself to move past the guilt and focus on the game, my problem is this. I don't disagree JNV had that Fifth vote, on the basis of PM Buddy. Wonder if JNV hmming Stick but not voting on Stick is indicative of distancing since there hasn't been much of a JNV train, and despite Stick pushing for JNV at points, nothing much has come out of it, which seems fairly non-committal. But at the same time, I note JNV is a player I categorise as having takes they get overly fixated on, and they are thrown off by certain types of playstyles. So I don't find this as AI as Stick does. My one tipping point is that I feel like E!JNV would at least make a token attempt to pocket me, and I'm not sure JNV actually has. (Literally everyone else: "You're defending them, Kas, of course they have.") I'll leave the North Americans to sort this mess out. Edited to add: I guess I will say this as well. I am not sure E!JNV has a reason to save Fifth despite PM Buddy, knowing the attention this would draw to them, barring an E!JNV/E!Fifth sort of world. With my current V!Fifth credences, I don't really put much weight on this.

I refuse to defend all three of them. I only have so much RP energy... >:(

No, it really would not be. He can be Evil on his own time and not drag other people into suffering with him. Leave me out of it! >:( Honestly, I don't remember that, I just remember most of your solving process from LG92 I will admit 'can read them later' is new for me as a solving MO, and it might be over-confidence from QF64 (yes we botched it but I got some players right via meta reads) and AG9. I just find it weird that you don't remotely consider "I could solve them later" to be a reason to prioritise one player over another if they're both in your suspect pool. Hmm. At the moment, this will be ironic, but: Mat.

This Guy Gets It But maybe that's why we gamebuild together a lot. I'd further say that I expect in a non-blackout setting, it would be easier to fakeclaim roles early, which might help the Elims. But it does limit what they can claim, cf. Archer. Fair enough. We didn't want to be counting the number of trolls, but this also makes sense in order to prevent easy trolling coordination.

After-Action Report The Concept: This game was inspired by a similar-but-different social deduction game and a few flipless games on Mad's Cracked forums. By and large, the idea was to have more information-generating roles than usual but total and utter fog-of-war. Drake said something in the last cycle that cut to what the heart of this game was: that this game had a lot of if X, then Y relations and the job of the Village was to really make sense of that barrage of claims. Yes. The upshot was the Elims got to fakeclaim aggressively, and the Village often would struggle with what would be considered 'ground truths.' The Distro: I am by and large fine with the distro, minus a few tweaks I would have liked to make. I think not giving the Elims a Troll was fine, if not so expected. I think we should have made the Terminal Seeker Evil instead and given that to the Elims - this would have somewhat discouraged claiming with impunity. We did intend for the Village to have to infoshare and massclaim, but a lot of that happened pre-death and in my view, took away some agency from the Elim team. With the fact players didn't permanently die, this subtly watered down the power of the E!TS anyway. Not giving the Village a PH might have been good too, with the Elims and Village being split between living and dead scans. It was something we toyed with, and we had given the Elims one Stab Voter actually but that sort of went away after we added one more member to the team. No PH would also remove Village ability to resurrect lost scans, which helps the Elims out a little. In terms of team composition, Fifth and I were a lot more selective. We felt that since we were rejecting the 'easy' E!Aman distro, with a significant number of active and noisy Villagers, we wanted to make sure there was an Elim team that could withstand thread pressure and had a substantive thread control niche. For that reason, Mat and Archer were locked onto the team. I do think the Elim team fared generally well, given this went to 4-1. That being said, they were also superbly lucky and unlucky: the early JNV scan that went right, and the rolls against other Trolls and roleblockers that went in their favour. Araris not scanning the one cycle Mat figured he would Tani's claim. Sart panic-claiming. It would probably have been a less hostile game landscape otherwise, I think. We did in fact select certain roles But also broke the pattern here and there to avoid players gaming us. Prime instances include Araris being a Porch-Sitter and Mat being a Tunnel Constructor. Roles like Tie Guy and Analyst, we tried to ensure would go to players who were unlikely to actively coordinate. The Design: I like Archer's thoughts on making the dead disappear once they cast their vote. I had also, that being said, considered a sort of exorcist role that could silence a player but felt it could be very nasty, especially if the same player gets silenced all the time. Maybe targeting limitations, or the ability to send the dead on? Not sure, Abhorsen vibes there. The PM Spiders were thematic, and meant to strike a balance between ability to send PMs (we didn't want spam, or too much coordination) and to obtain facts. Perhaps they should obtain two facts at once. Not sure. Wiz and JNV were very lucky to roll alignment at endgame. I am actually okay with the scan volume. In general I don't feel it was leveraged in a very devastating way. Veteran and Porch-Sitter were meant to mess with the scans, and there was just one Analyst who could be roleblocked. Trolling and Confirmed Villager reduced Village confidence in scans, just not enough to make a difference, which is one place where I do wonder if giving the Elims a Troll could have helped. I think two Discussion Leaders would have been too swingy, but we really could have been fine with an additional Stab Voter. No perma-death plus flipless was deadly for the thread. I feel like this might have worked better in a MR or QF format; speed things up a bit, discourage clutter. Not sure. Confirmed Villager and Gambit God in particular were roles meant to weaken scans just a little but with their own trade-offs. A Confirmed Villager is vulnerable to a Terminal Seeker, and can be found by the two Roleplayers the Village had. In addition, Fadran claiming as early as he did was probably going to create a certain credibility deficit for Mat no matter what. We wanted one Villager to be CV for that reason. Finally, CV could seem suspicious - why is there a single Regular Villager in a rolemadness game? The presence of the Trolling mechanic hinted to players that scans could be mistaken. Gambit God was immune to direct scans, but Lynchbait and Tie Guy would absolutely find that role anyway. Trolling is a fun mechanic I think - this was modelled after the Corruption mechanic Ren came up with ages ago in an early MR. The point of Trolling was to subtly weaken Village scans but not in a way that made Trolling obviously bad. If Trolling only had negative role interactions, then any Village troll would feel obligated to hold fire. We didn't want that. So the point was that while Trolling had a corrosive effect on most scans (except Multiquoter), it had a positive effect on many roles. That way, there wasn't a clear answer on whether to Troll or not. Goalkeeper roletext was my mistake. They were supposed to be able to self-protect. Whoops. I am divided about whether to limit the protection abilities of a Trolled TS. Part of me feels it borders abuse if you can just do that. At the same time, you are burning two action slots players could be using elsewhere. It's a shrug for me but I could also see saying that the TS can't target the same player twice in a row (weird, but) to block that possibility. I am considering whether the 'we roll for priority in same OoA' rule caused more trouble than it resolved. Half the issue was we didn't want to have to differentiate between separate targets in a redirect-like scenario, though I think we could have. In that world, we argue they all resolve at once and only flip for priority if they conflict. Thoughts: I don't think Fifth or I truly, truly grasped the extent of Villager fog-of-war. There were points I kept saying, "Ok, the Elims are screwed" or "Okay, the Village has scans locked," only for the Village to start questioning the scans they had received (last cycle being a case in point) and the alignments they'd worked out so far. It's not to say it had an absolutely epistemically corrosive effect, but it was a wilder trip than we'd expected. I had half-expected the Village to subordinate their Mat read to the scan and it was interesting to me that they refused to do so. I wonder if it would have been different coming from @The Wandering Wizard instead of @JNV. The no exe and zero vote threshold issue isn't some deep exestential issue. It's just about pacing and the fact I don't in general like games to resurrect the "well should we lynch D1 though" dispute, especially one that is flipless, so I set it up to rule that debate out since the game effectively says if you don't choose, RNGesus will choose for you. The number of times @Amanuensis blocked or near-blocked a kill was both insane and disturbing I am also amused by the number of players who genuinely wanted me to have built neutrals into a flipless V/E game, and who felt a game celebrating SE would have football. Especially given Aman has, repeatedly, called himself the king of fake roleclaims I think in general, the Elims were fairly stunlocked for a decent part of this game, especially early on. This allowed the Village precious organising time, and time in which to set up a chain for scan integrity. This is one reason I am mulling about the TS - there's a point I think at which one might admit that perhaps it's expecting too much to ask if the Elims could hold their own there without giving them another means of cutting off Village control. I think it's fair as not every player is into aggressive thread play by temperament. No one ever targeted me or Fifth, which was reasonable. It was my one tribute to the fact this was inspired by a Joe game spiritually and we didn't want the oneshot GM roles to be too swingy. But that's what the fact we could be voted on was hinting at. Mat's great plan failing because Araris forgot to send in an action and Mat's subsequent calling out of Araris in the Elim doc was hilarious as all hell. @StrikerEZ being the first to fall was strangely fitting Thank you all for playing! Despite the insanity, I hope you all had a bit of fun. Thanks once again to @Elandera and @Fifth Scholar for IMing and co-GMing respectively. Fifth will be posting his own AAR soon. For anyone who hasn't, we recommend you scroll down in Dead-Spec as @_Stick_ had a nice awards list there.

I don't disagree it's a question that needed to be asked, to paraphrase an exchange I had with one of <Mat, Fifth> about Bookwyrm in QF64. Just one of the thoughts that cropped up in my re-read, and if you were aware of it, that'd probably be more interesting Edited to add: Coloured in for rough and dirty: Minus a vote, so we know that Fadran did in fact Soothe a vote off him. Not sure I believe Fadran train is really that pure.

Current Thoughts: Did a recap of last cycle, and some this cycle stuff. Trains stayed fairly stable minus the hopping on and off with regard to TKN and the EoD flurry of activity. Assess low likelihood that Fifth or myself were converted - we were viable trains for too long and I kind of doubt the Inquisitor wanted to mess with that. With three kills, I think contra Fifth that we basically have to postulate a CS (possible, depending on padding - a single Lurcher down does indicate we got unlucky or possible prevalence. Just hard to say off the bat) or two Mistborn. Or I guess the Duralumin case works too. Two CSes stretches credulity. The issue is that based off actions economy, one way or another, especially if you think the conversion gun fired C1 (I don't think so, but I think Mat at least felt the conversion would go off early), then there's just no way to account for all the kills as being Elim. Add the fact that claiming was unnecessary and targeting, and well, there you go. I was sort of operating on the assumption they were vigkills anyway, but there you go. TKN votes on me to pursue the matter further. Curious to know if he got anything out of that pursuit. Noteworthy that Ash states he doesn't want to tunnel TKN Want to note this part of the cycle has been low tempo so far. Potential complacency? Stick votes Ash for not being in his Village meta and acknowledges it might be D1. Given that Ash became another flogged CW later, I'm flagging this. @_Stick_, I guess maybe this is a methodological dispute between us that reared its head over JNV as well, but I'm struggling to understand why you don't consider players who are readable a problem for later, so as to speak. What's your thought process here? TJ votes Bookwyrm, feeling Bookwyrm's post was too generic and sheeped. @|TJ| Question - were you considering Bookwyrm's history of sheeping here? JNV votes in defense of Fifth. @JNV - To be clear, is this just PM buddy reasons? Fifth @s Fadran to go to Ash. Fadran does so. @Fifth Scholar Any reason why you did train negotiations with Fadran when you also listed him as someone you wanted dead? + Why back to Fadran? Bip/Fifth team doesn't feel as likely. Move should have been talked over in the doc first, plus doesn't feel consistent with Fifth's defense strategy, barring an Inquisitor!Fifth world or so. Feel that if conversion went off, we can probably split the pools based on profile: <TKN, Stick, TJ, Mat, Aman, Fifth, me> for disruption, <Araris, Bip, JNV> for concealment. Hard to tell at this juncture but worth keeping in mind if we can get a future flip.

If you got an alignment fact, we'd reroll. If you got a role fact, you either get Regular Villager or Tunnel Constructor. If you get targeting, we RNG among the players that targeted Mat. If you get target, we roll for Turn and tell you there is no target because a Regular Villager wouldn't have one. Only fact that could override this is if Mat used TC. If you get action, same deal. He cannot be scanned as having put in the Elim kill or indeed, as having had any action at all because a Regular Villager wouldn't.

I mean, it does, doesn't it? I've been debating whether to point to it or not but you know, I try to believe the Elims aren't fools.

I think every PM Spider asked this at some point So basically CV is a passive that comes before anything and makes Mat scan as though he were a Regular Villager. You receive facts consistent with that. Suppose he lost it and you scanned him. You now basically receive anything since everything you got before was a lie. I can comment that one meta consideration was that I'd be putting Aman in a position where the optimal thing to do was to basically disbelieve Aman or distrust scans about him. Given certain meta concerns, it was not a position I was comfortable putting that particular player in. We did get more license with the distro because this was a blackout. But more on that in actual AAR. I also just really wanted to avoid an E!Aman team. It's an easy way to balance this but it also felt absurdly lazy and uncreative. Don't disagree, though the main change I would have made was actually to go E!TS and give that to you guys. I think that would have reduced claiming impunity quite a bit.

@_Stick_ - Now that the After Mat is posted, I can come out and say it. You yourself observed in LG92 that JNV's differential engagement seems like some amount of tell. And we watched JNV get sussed despite that tell showing up in LG92. So I'm not sure why you don't think it's worth going off here. Not saying I hope for it because in a way, it is a terrible thing to hope for, but I suppose "I can read you later" is a very pragmatic take to why preferring one player in PoE over another. Bip - why Fadran over Fifth?

What the hell? Do we know what went down?

Oh, and for reference, this is the PM that all DDoSed and Removed Players (orange?) received: You were DDoSed and are now a Removed Player! To be clear: -You are still Village-aligned and win with the Village. -You lose Pinch-Hitter and also Analyst. -You have one more vote, that's it, to be used any Day. -We no longer count you for parity purposes. Just as a slight in-game tangent meme, we've been sending this cat video to all dead players and would like you to make up one lie/embellishment about it. Fair warning, Wyrm thinks it is fairly cursed

You guys actually got very lucky with the dice rolls. But now I can explain how this works, and this is pre-AAR: PM Spiders had two levels of RNG: first, for which of the fact categories they got - <Alignment, Role, Target, Action, Targeted.> If they got a fact category that was poorly populated like Alignment, then they straightaway got the fact. If they didn't, e.g. Target, then we RNG for which targeting info they can receive. In addition, PM Spiders do not receive info already known. So Archer would never receive alignment info, because we take it as known that as an Elim, this player knows the alignments of other players. This does entail that specialising in a player gets you more info over time.

Files: Player List:

LG92: After Mat >>> Drake was DDoSed but survived! Mat was DDoSed! The SE Players have won! The subforum has been cleansed of the bot campaign! (Stand by for docs posting, player list update, and then AARs from both GMs.) Thank you to everyone for playing in this behemoth of a game, and thanks to @Elandera for IMing the clowncar, and @Fifth Scholar for calling shotgun and gunning it into the darkness of cyberspace with me

Very honestly, because I think they are readable later on - LG92 reasons, which will be clear very shortly. I think you even mentioned some of them to me in a DM so it's a bit odd to me you are not also taking a - not a tell, I suppose, a tendency you noticed seriously in this game. I will also say a significant part is guilt. I have MLed JNV or near MLed them a few times without hearing them out. I nearly did it in LG91, and indeed, do not feel I defended them sufficiently. I also MLed them in QF63 (Mat's game, if I've got the numbers wrong) and feel very bad about it. That's really it for me. I just want to be fair to JNV if I can. Edited to add: I'll acknowledge upfront that JNV, TJ, Fifth, Aman, and Araris are players I am not very good at being objective about for various reasons. I am working on tackling that since I know that exists.

Are you calling for a JNV exe?

>Continue? Y/N >Y >... >...

I mean if you want a duel, I'm sure @Fifth Scholar will be willing to make space in his calendar :eyes:

I like probability though. What's the point if you can't measure or quantise it? I for instance am 0.8 confident in a proposition about this game that I can't mention because to even utter it would break the game!

I see a meme and I must answer.

LG90 flashbacks?