Kasimir

Petol is definitely my favourite too. I'm actually interested in what this year's M205 will look like because Edelstein Apatite looks pretty great.

Want to ask if this means that we are officially frowning on Lurker Elim / Lurker Power Role strategies. I can see grounds for it - filter dodgers are frustrating to deal with, especially on a Village front, and I was just talking to another player the other day about a filter dodger in QF7 who returned just in time to vig kill another, active player (rather than taking the filter) and then went back into inactivity, which was absurdly painful for the Village. I will grant there's a line there this rule wants to preserve: you can still lurk and engage minimally, rather than really just blatantly filter dodge, but I feel LG5 Khas and LG7 Fain could easily have skewed a bit towards filter dodging, and maybe I'd just like some clarity there. (To put it another way: some teams do encourage players to lurk in order not to have a power role or an Elim taken out. I think up to this point there has been some amount of community dislike for this strategy but also acceptance it is a valid strategy. How does this engage with the current consensus?) I am absurdly proud of being the person who motivated this through my cunning and extensive use of codes This makes sense, but I guess I have mild contextual concerns about this coming from the altercation between Archer and myself in LG79. I could have been Evil and legitimately frustrated at Archer's fixation on me being Evil for weird reasons that have to do with my playstyle - I feel that, as Archer pointed out, knowing about my frustration caused him to back off because he'd rather take the L than make things worse. He explicitly noted that if I was Evil, this was essentially very good for my team because he wasn't interested in going after me anymore. I also note there are similar player altercations in games I can't explicitly mention in the thread (happy to DM if you want to know) for confidentiality reasons where players express discomfort shrekking a player because they know the player will defend aggressively and emotionally and express significant frustration, and they don't feel they can carry on if the player is Evil. In all of these cases, it has washed out fine because the player was in fact Village, but I think there is a very powerful and worrisome counterfactual there. I guess this slightly ties into emotional manipulation talk insofar as that the mere fact of my frustration, communicated whether directly or indirectly, was sufficient for Archer to decide to back off. This had nothing to do with arguments we were making: his argument was that I was doing weird stuff, my argument was that this is pretty bog-standard for me and so NAI. We were fortunate that I was Village and so it was a V/V brawl anyway, but I feel as though this could very easily become a more complicated situation and I don't know what the correct move would be. I absolutely agree with talking to the IM, but in a way, I feel this just kicks the can up the road one step because the very conversation is supposed to be about the acceptability of such things, and I don't know that the IM has a better solution if there is no community consensus or conversation about this. The real question is who's gonna archive the meme-off in SEAcropolis :eyes: j/k I'm curious if this means that there is now a de facto presumption that a prospective GM will be doing a co-GM apprenticeship first, unless they are running a vanilla game or a Tyrian variant (that's how I interpret 'more than one non-standard role or mechanic' anyway.) I don't at all think this is a problem - in fact, while I wouldn't change the hard GMing lessons that MR7 bashed into me, I do wish that I'd had my co-GMing stints before MR7 made me realise I was woefully inadequate to the task, so I guess this is probably just a clarificatory question My players could have used a more experienced GM for sure. I've definitely also seen (historically) cases where the GM was struggling so this from a prospective GM perspective is actually reassuring/helpful. Can I has experienced co-GM please :sob: I am extremely grateful for this ruling. I've largely exclusively GMed clusterchulls and in a lot of cases, I felt like I was both running a game and having my classroom management skills sorely tested. This is not too much of an issue for me in that I'm used to proactively crying (often literally) for IM help thanks to the non-stop cycle fires of MR7 (RIP Moderation doc), but it is also immensely stressful when players expect me to do things that aren't always my problems to solve and continue to pressure me on them - precisely because I know I can't do anything about this and am just referring the issue on to the IM for resolution at the correct level. I'm happy to listen to player venting, and happy to use my TA classroom management skills to suppress fires until the IM can get to things (as was the case in a few of my games), but it's felt a lot as a GM like players are expecting me to handle - for want of a better word - disciplinary issues, and as a GM, that's frankly not my job, and I absolutely think a GM should not be making judgement calls on bad player behaviour - as a matter of fact, I really think that departing from upholding the rules of the game as written is already very murky territory for a GM. Okay I guess this is more a rant than a comment but 100% happy about this, I GM clusterchulls, I am used to this :| Edited to add: On top of this requirement, I'm curious if there's going to be a definite policy on whether pinch-hitters have access to PMs from the person they're replacing. This is de facto true in ANs because you are using an anon account, but I believe there was a discussion in LG74 about whether it was okay to just add the pinch-hitter to all the previous PM groups. I recall the eventual decision after talking to Wilson and you and STINK was to not do that on privacy grounds. Has this changed?

% votes isn't new - it's one of several mechanics that featured in QF29 so there is in fact a baseline. It's just muddled by some other mechanics as well. No further comment on anything else as I feel El will gut me if I contribute to further derailment of the sign-up thread and I like my guts inside my me

Should note this one has been partly trialed in QF29, where there was one cycle Lopen apparently just said 'screw it' and created a group PM to send us all the dead doc link It was the Red Wedding, that's for sure.

It's true this would make things more fiddly. That being said, I ran a playerbase survey in 2019 and RP proved to be a fairly popular draw in games. The issue is the demographics have changed substantially but minimally I think this is not insurmountable if you at least have some sense of interest levels - seeing as the recent AG featured a little less RP than previous points in SE. I think you will almost certainly be asked for examples of RP weaknesses and what's okay and what's not. This needs to be cashed out clearly pre-game in terms of your expectations from the Epics as you want to be maintaining a clear principled line in terms of your judgements on whether an Epic has or has not met the requirement. (e.g. do you just require them to mention it? If their weakness is onions, can you just mention an onion in part of the post and get away with it, or must they subtly RP some repulsion or dislike? And so on.) Guessing wrong killing both the Epic and a RNG Reckoner at first blush definitely seems to favour the Village a bit too strongly, though I suppose that's what invulnerability is for. And having a public outed Elim faction could be interesting as it'd more or less be openwolfing and maximum trolling from the get go.

You have exemplary taste! I picked up the petrol as well, and may slightly regret not getting that first one you have there

Not asking as I'm not in the US, but does this mean you use broad wet nibs? @Slowswift is disturbed by my commitment to thicc, broad, wet Pelikans

Keep your empire; the fact you have to post nothing but memes in the main thread of the next game is good enough for me Who knows, maybe I'll join you. We could turn the thread into the next prequel meme-off :eyes: (Also I really wasn't betting, I was just trolling Eiwlil so ) Oh, absolutely - I just wanted to make sure it was blatantly obvious kel didn't exist and then insist that kel did in fact exist This is true I admit I did laugh for two solid hours when certain players who shall remain unnamed thought kel actually did exist and that I was trying to be Kal Dell, and then it took on extra layers of loltasticness when Gamma actually did call Kal Dell 'Kel' wonderful =) u r strong & wise & i m very proud of u Edited to add: I maintain a lot of it was on people being obvious, to be fair. I feel like I could've given people a bit more of a chase if I hadn't been hit by the migraine though I was slipping back into my regular speech patterns in some PMs - maybe not you but some people at least had been confused by it. Orlok pegged me D1, which was pretty expected, sounds like you did as well, I'm going to assume Axl absolutely did, not sure about Scorp, Falcon did but I trolled her to the point she was screaming at me...IIRC Stick just called me Kas so I'm assuming she did too. Cham thought he did; I confused things for him a bit. So I did try But all around - Vulture and Hyena were dead obvious once they started posting, you were, because of our PM and your thread behaviour, Axl's voting philosophy was so uniquely identifying the only thing that confused me was his activity patterns, Scorp just gave powerful Devo vibes C1... Gorilla, Zebra, and Alb were the players who kept flummoxing me. A good number of people were pretty clockable by C2. Like people kept @ing me for spending more time guessing player identities than looking for Spiked, but at the same time, I wasn't going out of my way to do that, people were just really being this obvious about who they were and it really wasn't just me. Also yes since I'm on this topic - I really don't understand why that's supposed to be AI with Falcon @ing me for it D3. This is an anon game - at least some of the fun is supposed to be in identity guessing. And @Archer - legit the main reason I was more dedicated to the kel thing this time was I felt bad about our clash in AN10 and tried to be less obviously me. This...did not work out as well, but also as much as it was a bit of derailment, I feel like pretending to be someone else or using the anonymity aspect to swap playstyle and identity troll is part of the fun of the game so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I feel like an ameliorating factor could be to push it towards how Lotus ran the Honest tells in MR52, but from a player perspective, those are fiendishly hard to guess. Edited to add: So basically stylistic tells such as having to introduce spelling errors or use a particular sort of formatting, rather than requiring you to RP the weakness carefully.

In what has to be the second-most absurd clarification I've had to make since Wyrm in LG74: I entered AG8 without much of a game plan except to chill and have fun. I had a sort of weird concept of Kellehrt as a guy who basically worshipped a Wormmon expy, because I thought it would be loltastic to play it straight: a straight-up paladin type, but local farmer (sort of like Erik from LG6.) That didn't really work because I finally finished reading Solar Bones and the writing style more or less sank into me and wouldn't let go for a decent chunk of the game. One thing led to another and I kind of just decided to run with that stream of consciousness writing style even for OOC posts. I had a few weird side ideas too, like that I'd pretend to be Jerric, a returning player who last played in LG6. (As it was, Wyrm said it was a bad idea - anyone who saw 'Jerric' and 'player from forever ago' would basically just assume it was me. But this was the game plan early on: even in my GM PM, I was talking about how to sign my Tineye messages to leave open the possibility I was Jerric, and I'd started to adopt Jerric's signature =) emojis.) Somehow from that I figured - hey, why not just pretend to be this returning player called kel. (Kel because by old school SE rules, your character name had to be closely derived from your player name, so I worked backwards and got kel from Kellehrt.) Because if players were going to go, "Hey, I've never heard of Jerric, it's probably Kas", then I might as well milk it and see if I could troll players into accepting the existence of a non-existent SE player :eyes: This led to a bunch of hilarious but also absurd PMs where players would accuse me of being Kas and I would insist I had no idea why they thought I was Kas, and I was very clearly kel, a player of Fifth's gen who had returned to play SE. Axl absolutely did not buy this and the layers of PM trolling were glorious and the GMs just loved it Of all the players I approached and attempted to scam, Axl was the only one who called me on it by actually checking the player spreadsheet ("FINALLY!" Fifth was yelling in the GM PM.) To which my response was, obviously, that I knew I'd gone on a trolling rampage in MR32 but the mods actually purging my records from the Archive memory was a step too far Blatant kel erasure. Of course, kel wasn't on the spreadsheet - I'd checked too, to make sure I wasn't impersonating an actual player. If it wasn't obvious, I really just had a bunch of shifting ideas and was winging everything. Who needed a CR when I could just go and troll everyone anyway? At some point, Fifth suggested I take the trolling up another notch by inventing games or play histories that didn't exist and if I did that, he'd back me up. So I invented a bunch of weird games, including MR38 in which I was a Senate Guard who'd gotten sussed heavily while trying to convince everyone Fifth was a Sith Lord because I'd yeeted Yoda D1. And some games with war pandas. And blatant kel trolling, I don't know, I'm sure I got very creative in my lies, RIP Fifth But at least we successfully trolled Stick. Thing was, I discovered close to the end of the game that some people had gotten confused and thought I was trying to impersonate a player from LG6 - Kal Dell. This was extremely hilarious to me and made all the suffering worth it But then when I was backreading old games to enrich my personal play records, I discovered that in LG7, Gamma had referred to Kal Dell as Kel. No idea why - maybe it was a typo, because Kal Dell's characters before that had been Dellan and Kaldin, so there's not much room to derive Kel here. Does kel exist? I don't know anymore :eyes: I thought kel was supposed to be just another adventure in trolling and now I myself am confused But it was probably a typo. Probably. And the accidental victims of kel trolling, who believed kel was real, and that kel was Kal Dell... Well, RIP to them too Because kel isn't real. Right?

Objection: Kal Dell played and distinctly went by Kel. Would have thought it was very obvious See the post linked here as evidence. @little wilson can also confirm this. His D1 was a bit obvious but his activity patterns blurred things for me a little. But as Araris says, family >>> SE posting

Finally done with having to avoid punctuation? RIP you, Bev'ika. Oh yeah, kel and I shared the Meerkat account. Anything vaguely chaotic or kasyana, he did. I talked to El and the IM about it but as kel last played in LG7, he didn't feel confident playing the game on his own so we shared. A lot of this game was me thanklessly cleaning up his mess, TBH

Pinch-hit write-up brought to you by a lot of tea, concern about how much there was for El to do, and Rise from the Dark Knight Rises OST on loop, so I guess you have a soundtrack if you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ kel out for the last time.

This actually surprises me too. Thought you were doing a deliberate tribute. I mean: I believe it's called playing to my CR on a meta-level I too have a meme: Thanks for the game. I enjoyed it and it really means a lot to me to see the curse has finally been broken after being part of two successive Villages that threw themselves against it to no avail. I haven't been around for LG1, but I think I've been around early enough that it felt like the curse was a fixture that was never going to be moved. Apologies for stealing Fifth's thunder here I had a bit of RP to post reflecting my thoughts after the game was done and anonymity lifted, but the urge to do so has kind of left after pinch-hitting the write-up which I think hit some of the emotional notes/thoughts I'd wanted to anyway. I dunno. I think I just really need sleep right now. Be back later. And thanks for the pass, I appreciated it. I don't usually embark on lying sprees, gambit sprees, or trolling sprees this elaborate in my regular playstyle so it was nice to get to mess things up a bit as kel and let my chaotic/trolling side loose. @Elbereth @Fifth Scholar Oh good Lord thank you for not picking the E!Coinshot me distro it's disturbing how close I came to damnation :sob: Edited to add: For anyone who wants the story on why @little wilson has the award for best unexpected late trolling pay-off, I did it by accident Good night/day y'all I need sleep.

I'd like to request a QF slot please I might regret this but I have a rerun of an old classic in mind Edited because I accidentally implied I have a QF slot and I'm pretty sure I don't and didn't want to cause confusion

it's not stockholm the team that murders 2gether stays 2gether etc

thanks bro u best bro i mean wyrm is best bro but u r best bro too =p

People who want to purely RP are fine, this is just not the path I have chosen, and the Village has reminded me several times that if I ever dare to try to do nothing but RP again as in LG5, I will die very quickly And also, just trying to suppress my thoughts and lurk and not be allowed to say stuff was very frustrating in my first game (and my first Elim game), even if it was for the greater good of the team that I did it So no, I'm not going to stop myself from doing that which sparks joy. I just seek help in preventing overcommitment. Edited to add: Bah, I really will say it all because I worry people are getting the wrong idea. Ideally I'll be getting a happy medium of my current, usual playstyle - but I'll be venting a lot less stress, frustration, and uncertainty into the thread. I don't expect to become more closed off, but I do expect to be slinging less raw emotion around. While this is very good for Evil Kas since I wouldn't be venting emotion anyway, the problem with venting emotion is I tend to get locked down in a guilt spiral or an overcommitment spiral due to a bunch of factors, partly because it's all running through me unchecked and feeding on my other complexes. And then I end up short on sleep and low on SAN and still analysing. I don't expect to become completely unemotional. As I said, happy medium. But I do expect to be more calm and balanced, and hopefully more decisive as I accept my limitations and just move on. As I said in a PM to another player, "Best effort basis." If the pattern I'm spotting in the data is right, I tend to have more accurate reads in games when I'm not tying myself down with stress, anxiety, and pressure, and retreading old paths. So while the trade-off is that Evil Kas will have a bit of an easier time hiding, if my hypothesis is correct, Village Kas will be more on point without needing to continuously tie myself in knots of secondguessing, anxiety, and panic, or guilt. Either way, that emotional mix is just not healthy for me in a game in the long term. So even if this hypothesis is proven false, I think it's worth it. Ideally, I'll be playing like I usually do, I just won't be very attached to the result. Or if I do feel the emotion, I will let it go. I do need you guys to help me notice if I'm losing that dgaf mode/Zen. And I need you guys to not make a big production of it for my sake, because I can and will fixate on not disappointing you guys, and then I'm back to a stress spiral one level up and potentially more guilt as I feel I'm failing. 90% of the work on this has to be done by me. I think that's as much as I want to say on the issue, but cards on the table and all that. @|TJ| - Appreciate a character name update, please

Yeah. I'm basically aiming for non-attachment and to just sort of wuwei (无为)/Zen the whole thing. Guilt leads to overinvestment which leads to me doing potentially unhealthy things in a game which leads to self-destruction. I'm going to break that cycle. Or try to. You guys managed to break the curse of Tyrian Falls so I can try, right? It doesn't mean I'm not going to be doing analysis at all or just telling everyone 'lol too bad just read me from RP' because that's actively unhelpful in a social deduction game. (Emphasis social.) But I'm not going to be going Up To Eleven and I'm not going to be overcommitting or getting overly emotionally engaged in the results whether or not it's a ML. The guilt isn't going to be helpful and I think I've exhausted my self-destruction quota right now. I've noticed something happens in games when I actively dgaf. It's possible shifting gears like this will help Evil Kas, but I'm fairly certain that if my hypothesis is correct, there will be an advantage for Village Kas as well, so it cancels out. To cite a recent game, I'm looking at LG82 level of engagement, or LG80, but more detached. Going anywhere near the engagement or investment levels of certain AG8 players who shall remain unnamed is verboten.

thank u <3 Will be happy to talk about my hypothesis after the game. It's a wild theory I'm testing, but I also think taking a game easy and in dgaf/chill mode should help me deal with pressures and certain health issues stemming from previous SE games. So I'm willing to give this a go As I've told TJ and am happy to tell the IM, I am committing to this regardless of alignment, which is the point of making a pre-game commitment and soliciting help to stick with dgaf Except lylo. If it's lylo, I am gaf, y'all can deal with it >>

The curse on Tyrian Falls may have been broken, but together we can break the curse of Kas over-commitment!

I admit that's the draw If there are no rules I can just do anything and chill and RP, right? But no, I do have a bit of a playstyle experiment in mind for this game. I don't want to disclose it at the start (TJ, you can PM me if you're curious) but I want to see if it makes a difference Edited to add: Ah you know what I'm just gonna say it. I have a theory based on a pattern in my enriched previous games playhistory that certain things happen in games where I dgaf. (I'll explain after the game.) So I'm just going to go in and wing everything and dgaf. It's probably also better for my health (and mental health) given certain previous games. So if you see me getting upset/guilty about a ML or actually gaf, please remind me that my job this game is to RP and dgaf. Thanks guys P.S. If this is lylo, I will gaf so please don't tell me then or I will side-eye you. Have a Wormmon of gratitude!

[OOC: Alright, I guess Kam's going to be a tracker and an explorer who occasionally takes jobs for the Reckoners. I...have no idea why I'm doing this, except it'll make a great set up for a SAR joke I have planned which I may or may not be able to cash in on later in the game.] Antarctica. Mcfreakin' Antarctica. Kam hated the cold, and the news that they were meant to head down to Antarctica made him press the heel of his hands wearily against his eyes as he slumped forward in his seat, his bags packed and ready to go. One thing you could say about the Reckoners anyway: they had a deathwish, but they had the interesting jobs. There was that stint in Guatemela that had left him with puckered thorn-scars around his left ankle, and a healthy respect for keeping away from when Reckoners wanted to throw down with Epics. No heroics, he told himself firmly. He was here to get paid. The Reckoners, at least, also seemed to be well-connected, if their ability to send an expedition to Antarctica was any indication. Across from him, the radio was still crackling, droning on about how Cape Horn was now submerged. They were ants, Kam thought, living in a world of giants without conscience, the playthings of greater forces. Maybe that was why he liked their jobs. It got him away from people, and out into the wilderness. The last place that Epics - or people, for that matter - hadn't really left their mark on. He'd gone cave diving in Norway before, and there was something about seeing a part of the world that most people hadn't, something about the last corners of the world that were mostly unknown and untouched and unmapped and pristine that left a sense of wonder and smallness in him. Even in an age of Epics and maps, he thought, those were the things you couldn't circumscribe or control. Antarctica felt like a plunge into the unknown, and for all he hated the cold, he couldn't help that familiar rush of excitement burning through him. He sat there, and waited to leave.

TBH, no. When Evil, I get mad because I feel obligated to support my team, and can't chill as a result. It gets worse when I'm team anchor because if I do chill the thing collapses on everyone. As a Villager it holds until I mislynch someone, feel bad, and then go all out for the Village (okay, to be fair, I've never gone all out since that's a level of analysis that is tiring for me so I have not had the incentive to go that hardball for a very long time) Intellectually there was probably one game I had which was chill and RPful and quiet but I've looked at my play records to try to enrich them further and I honestly cannot name a single game where this happened. Maybe Araris's LG80, but I also died N2 so that was kind of necessary Put it this way, I'm thinking of a plot hook I suppose. I'll leave it as Kam for now and return with opening RP later, I expect. I'll work with what you give me, no worries.