Kasimir

I feel your pain. And a friend of mine had that happen right smack in the middle of their GCE A levels. Friend was not a happy camper for those few weeks.

I stand corrected.

*rage* Why the blazes does every storming thing have to be due exactly in the same storming week? This is the time when I really, really would like to strangle cleaning-obsessed people. There are no major issues with ants, it's not going to explode, it's not a big deal. We can worry about it *after* the gates of hell have closed, by which I mean after the week of exams and all sorts of crem has come to an end. Major fires first, then the minor ones. What about that is so rusting hard to understand?!

Garth Nix's Old Kingdom Trilogy. I would also recommend Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, and Tom Lloyd's Moon's Artifice. (Some hesitation on Moon's Artifice--I wouldn't consider it to be 'depressing' but the main characters are investigating criminal activity. I wouldn't consider the violence to be gratituous, however.)

I'd say Ren. Only one action can be taken--killing or sending a message. Well, assume that no civilian would've been bored enough to do something like that--quite a waste of rations, actually. Luce confirmed she hadn't done that either, and it really didn't sound like her. Ryfe was the Gang Leader. His uninterceptable messages cost him--why would he play around by sending one to me when he should be contacting his fellow convicts? (Not impossible, but I'd say highly improbable.) We know now that Ash made the kill which means he couldn't have sent the message. So, Ren. P.S. Well, this breaks the trend of Civilian loss in QFs... Edit: If I'm referring to a different message, then my bad, Joe.

Echoing the comments; well-played, and thanks to the Great Lord Gamma for running it despite his busy schedule. Note to self: everytime King and I are on the same side, Ren is an Eliminator. Just look at what's happened so far And I think Aonar just conceded his long-term Dodo status to me. I've never actually survived a single game so far o.O

I would have to say I found it rather interesting, but at the same time, it raises a lot of questions. Sometimes, it feels as though it's not that easy to understand the magic system apart from the Aspects, though that might be just me. I generally enjoyed it, but I have to say that it seemed to hang there, in a sort of inexplicable way. Why are they fighting? Why is the Shi Master making her repeat the fight again and again? I feel like there's more to be filled in before it basically ends up a short-story of a fight, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself as I find this interesting, but at the same time, it seems more could be done with it.

That's really funny, Aonar, because a vote against Jain would simply not be a good option for an Eliminator. If I were an Eliminator, it would be awfully easy and a lot better to simply place a vote on someone who hadn't been yet voted for, urge slow play, and let my comrades (and myself) whittle away at everyone in the game and let people who are actually vocal generally take the aggro. Let people with the Silver Wards who save people from lynches do some serious explaining. I'm much of the impression that aggressive Eliminators are generally Eliminators with a short life expectancy (not impossible but certainly a counter-intuitive way to play.) Very simple, Maili: you assume my question is a sole one. That is a mistake. My question is a question of two parts. We could validly ask of everyone not King or Jain why they are still alive. I find it a more compelling question to ask of the player of the many diagrams that have done substantial work in past games, and who is playing, contrary to his words in the last QF, on a backseat exactly why he is still alive. In that regard, I do not endorse and I reject your flawed thesis that all experienced players are equal in strategic terms of reckoning. They are not. Players such as myself have a dismal track record of having rallied the village and rooted out Eliminators, no matter how many games we have under our belt. It doesn't mean we can't do it the next time (this is obviously not deductively certain) but storming straight it would indicate that a decision to go after us would be less rational and strategic.

Why I voted for Jain is pretty simple. First, given that this was a QF, I decided to push things harder and faster than I usually would've (see in a Long Game), especially since there is item scarcity. As you yourself said in a past QF, we don't have time to sit around and take things slow or let the Eliminators come down on us. Not to mention the presence of Silver Wards. It might've been interesting to see if someone was minded to use that on Jain early on. Second, I think it slightly disingenuous to simply say, "Jain is an easy target, he always protests too much." That is true, and must be acknowledged. At the same time, I observed that couldn't always be consistent with Jain being innocent (brilliant long game?), and at that point, I felt I didn't want to keep making the assumption that if Jain acted in accordance with past behaviour, then he must be good. Third, I asked myself who it would most hurt to lose, Jain or Raze (assuming horseplay.) I further assumed that what we really didn't want was more no-lynches, especially given Silver Wards. Then, my decision was obvious. King's death raises an interesting question, because for one, he had a pivotal role in leading the group the last MR. He has consistently high 'role' rates, as this game demonstrated once more. And more importantly, it interests me because of a simple question: Aonar, why aren't you dead? I'm still slightly suspicious of Joe, but I'm going to take his explanation for it for now. But I'm rather curious as you were urging us to play more aggressively in QF2, Aonar, and this time, you're taking a backseat. In addition, I'm also interested in why you aren't dead as an Eliminator going by threat would normally kill you early on (as we saw in QF2) and then King thereafter. But of course, an easy answer to my questions would be you being on Team Evil, wouldn't it? I'm going to place my vote on Aonar. I have to head out for the rest of the day, so if I'm placing it on current suspicion, this is where it stands.

Ren: Perhaps, but I believe the point about the Murder Hood should stand. We've like as lost our ability to retaliate, to be sure, but I'm not exactly sure I'm comforted by the notion that the Murder Hood was in Jain's hands. In addition, I am going to reveal to all that I have received a message. I don't know if I'm allowed to paste it in this thread (Gamma, could you confirm this, please? I'd also appreciate clarification about whether our PMs include a notification of how many rations we have as I didn't get anything of that sort.) I was asked to keep the message secret, and I am vascillating about revealing the identity of the purported sender, who I am currently going to refer to as X while I think this through. However, here's what makes me awfully suspicious of this: 1. The last time I checked, Joe was the one who had issues with capitalising words. To be sure, this could be someone else pretending to be Joe pretending to be X (what a levels clusterstorm! Just Aonar's thing!) As such, I find it rather interesting that X was capitalising odd words mid-sentence like "Money" and "Message". Granted, many players have capitalised 'Message' because of the game mechanic, but nonetheless, we all know that Joe's verbal tic is his consistent capitalisations. I'd like some answer about that. 2. Something strange in how I was asked to respond to the given message. I was asked to offer a delayed response. I see no purpose in that. In short, it seems I've been asked to respond to a message that effectively said nothing, and therefore to do nothing except confirm that I have received the message. Why then keep it secret? It helps no one. More importantly, I want to take this at face value for now. The odd way the message was spelled (the capitalisations and so on) leads me to have to bring this up: why message me, Joe? Why pretend to be X?

TBH, Ren, I'd say that losing the Murder Hood was a serious blow, but then I'm a bit more concerned about the Silver Wards. Considering the kill-judgements Jain had a tendency to make (no, I'm not bitter, why do you ask? ) I'm not sure I'm particularly big about it. As the items can't be transferred, I can't say which I am more immediately worried about losing. Either way, we're down a player with a Murder Hood and a player with Silver Wards, so Team Evil's gotten pretty lucky on the first cycle. Throw in some players who tried for an intercept or messaging stuff, on top of not having voted, and they could be hungry. I'm going to quasi-vote for Navor at the moment. And as we can quasi-vote for more than one person (I guess?) I will also note that I'd like to hear from Snipe about stacking that second vote on Raze. Surely that seems rather dangerous, even if you needed the rations. He was one of the players being actively useful and attempting to encourage discussion: why endanger him instead of tying the votes by putting the vote on someone who hadn't been very vocal yet and hadn't any votes on them at that point in time?

As the innkeeper silently carried down the body of Wern, ex-hunter and ex-trapper, glaring at the gathered people, Kasir sighed. "Alas, poor Wern," he said, mostly to himself, raising the glass of gillywater in a silent salute to the body. "I knew him, Seris." The knife tucked away at the small of his back was silent; unamused, even. "The silver did protect him after all," Kasir pointed out. "Just as I told you. Less than one percent silver, and he didn't die from a Shade. And I don't even have to give him a refund!" More silence. Kasir stared at his glass. "Seriously, it's hard to get anything without alcohol in it on some of these worlds," he told the knife. "Think about it. You'd think they'd at least care about people who can't take alcohol without feeling miserable for days." Seris hummed disapproval. "I really meant to go back to Nalthis," Kasir groused. "Or Sel; there's so much interesting things to be done there if you have a few MaiPon contacts. But no, that storming noble had to rush me and I didn't even notice where I'd fled to. It's hard to do good business here, what with that pickpocket who thinks he knows what he's doing, and the scholar and..." Just as well he'd kept most of his goods somewhere else. "It's awfully storming hard to go sell things to people who are more interested in killing each other," he grumbled. Or maybe there was some coin to be made there: the spheres would surely come in handy--some Stormlight yet lurked in their depths. Perhaps he could tell them all it helped to keep Shades off, or let people do some glowing and regenerating...

Agreed with Joe. I think you may need to make it public, mail-mi

Agreed with the general thing about not focusing too much on messages. Interception might pan out being more useful, it might not. Discussion seems to be the best bet here. First, the list of actual votes to put on top of the rest: Jain (3): Raze, Joseph, Kasir Raze (2): Navor, Snipe Snipe (1): Jain Joseph (1): Wilim Navor (1): Araris Hopefully, this won't be horseplay because I'm going to throw my vote on Jain. Yes, I know: it's the guy who weeps and gnashes teeth everytime he doesn't get a (useful) role or evil. At the same time, he's never been evil before. Yet an understanding of probability tells us: A) his previous incidences of being good are probabilistically independent of this case, B ) he has exactly the same chance of being evil this time. Not less. It's a first day vote, so it's going to be somewhat blind. If Jain is evil, his previous trend would form a perfect shield to convince us that he is 'good'. And I don't like making too many assumptions based on past behaviour without comparing them to the reality of the game. Here we go. Let's see what comes of it. Edited for formatting.

Too tired. Just got back from a party. Midnight or so. Putting quasi-vote with Wilim. Make some noise or something.

And this will be known as the Lemming Game.

Winter came, killed, and left.

Kasir is a trader offering all sorts of trinkets--a second-hand Shardblade, reputedly taken from the hand of a dead assassin who once killed a king, and stolen from a king (not all at once!), a lump of scarred, cloudy glass with palpable evil radiating off it, an old dagger, reputedly taken from a slain Voidbringer, a sailor's lucky pet ferret, an ornate bronze earring and a series of obscure philosophical tracts--among other things! Whatever it is you want, Kasir can suit your needs! He can change your coins for all sorts of currencies! And he has silver, but he's sold off the last of his silver for a handsome sum, leaving himself without protection. Look at what a generous dealer he is! - Kasir chewed on the last of the chouta, wishing he'd thought to buy more from that street-seller. He'd long outworn his welcome on Roshar--what with that angry noble claiming that the Shardblade he'd been sold wasn't an actual Shardblade as it couldn't even cut butter and it didn't disappear on command. What did he think, Kasir thought, real Shardblades were hard to come by, and he'd had enough difficulty getting his hands on one, as it was. No, Kasir thought contentedly as he breathed the somewhat-fresh air, scenting new business opportunities. A new world, with people who'd pay dearly for silver. That was more like it. He'd just have to keep away from that hunter bloke when he realised that it was highly polished steel...with just the slightest trace of silver in it.

I've done it thrice before, and each time, despite crawling past the finish line, I've sworn never to do it again. This sem is pretty hectic so I think I'll pass, but I'll definitely cheer others on--possibly do a JulNo instead. I'll see.

Ah, but did we break Google Docs or King's browser? Can Google Docs actually be broken? We go where no Elimination doc has gone before... And if we keep this up, Bartbug's just gonna go, "Sorry guys, no spec doc."

Who says we care about catching up? Wilson: 200k, now that King's in on it as well and not constrained by being a GM. Of course, we'll refer to you by several different terms of reference, none of which are intuitively obvious, some of which are mispelled

Oi, King, I see OOC-blue is creeping out of the Sanderson Elimination forums, too. Hmm. The first thing I'd really like to get clear on is what we mean here by 'justification.' Do we mean to say that there is an in-universe basis, 'proof', as it were, for a rational agent to say 'All koloss are violent'? Are we looking at moral justification for doing so? Are we, in fact, considering if the stereotyping of fantasy races makes the author responsible a lazy author? A bad (in what sense, again? Aesthetically? Ethically?) author? The prejudice and proof boundaries, IRL, are rather thin. An interesting exemplar of this problem, if highly controversial, is in examining the history of eugenics. I'll leave it at that, because it's a very thorny issue, and not one I'm prepared to tackle at the moment. How we should consider those and how we draw a principled boundary between them and if 'proof' even exists or if there is even such a thing as non-perspectival, neutral, non-prejudiced "objective" fact is another cluster of nightmares, and probably 2 and 3/4s of dissertations in critical theory, feminist theory, and the philosophy of science, so I'm not going there Is there a basis (proof, as you've said) for the way races have been typecast in fantasy? Perhaps, depending on your views of how genic* determinism works. I personally regard it as an interplay between the social and perhaps with an underlying biological basis, in many cases. You've brought up the example of races in the Cosmere, but another case I have in mind would be the Eddings in the Belgariad. The Arendians are bull-headed, rash, and not exactly the sharpest pencils in the box. The Tolnedrans are short and money-obsessed. The Drasnians just can't stop bargaining. Again, the idea of social construction at this point lends itself to nuances. In a society where money is divinely valued, can we expect a wide display of behaviour where money becomes the greatest good in that society? Perhaps. Members of that race could easily be socialised into such behaviour. The thing about typecasting races in fantasy is that it does give a strong idea of what to expect, from which deviation can be expected. It tells the reader about the country, from the perspective of the narrator (*note inherent problem with god's eye perspective here) in a way that can be tracked. I don't want to say it is impossible, but I think it is realistically going to be rather challenging to give the reader a three-dimensional view of the race that lives halfway across the world, and members of whom only appear as minor characters or as background within the book. More importantly, I think one benefit is that it reveals some of the epistemic limits of your viewpoint characters. A character who thinks the Race That Lives Halfway Across The World are primitives who commit blood sacrifices (when, perhaps, members of that race have amazing medical advances) is one whom we know is epistemically limited, and probably has one or two empathy (? Maybe not the right term) issues to boot. Cultures/races don't always know everything, and they can sometimes tend to tar things they don't recognise. That itself can be interesting to toy with. The more important question: can we do without it? Perhaps. Some ways to hint at a unitary race (I admit I've been playing fast and loose with whether we mean race in terms of ethnicity or race as in an entirely new culture; I'd also note fantasy sometimes says race when we probably mean species) could be less in terms of physical appearance but appealing to geographic boundaries and a shared culture. Perhaps the calling sign of the People of the Hawk (a Mongol import that I've just randomly come up with so it's not very good) might not be the fact that they are short, bow-legged and have slanted eyes, but the fact that they revere horses and love drinking powdered tea. That is, at least, enough to separate them as a culture. As a species? Hoo boy. What makes a species? You have issues of fertile cross-breeding, questions of descent...our species system is in itself the subject of major dispute. I don't think fantasy is going to have an easy time sorting it out. Still, your concern might be right, I feel, in that fantasy is most likely to use morphology to distinguish races in the sense of species. If it has horns, is generally bulkier than a person, looks half-bull, it's a minotaur. What might there be left for cases with elves? Generally taller than the average human, for one. Think homo sapiens v. homo floresiensis. Magical? Perhaps. Arrogance is a cultural factor, unless for some reason, sociopathy breeds true in elves, perhaps. The calling card as it were has usually been the ears. I believe that there's some element of defeasibility to the term of stereotypes: if something is tall, graceful, has pointed ears, and is humble, is it an elf? If it is short, graceful, and arrogant, is it an elf? If it doesn't have pointed ears, is it an elf? My intuitions on the matter, at least, would be: yes, no, no. For me, it's the physiology/morphology that is the determining factor, within limits, for fantasy races in the sense of species. (If it doesn't have Darkvision, it's not a Dwarf! ) What novels should do is yet another question, IMO. There's really a lot of unclarity and issues packed into that question. But I find it interesting we're conflating typecasting with speciation with stereotypes and with discrimination. The boundaries are very vague, I will grant that. It is just as diffficult to consider their real-life analogues as it is to sort them out in the context of fantasy. But all the same, it's a data point--nothing more. Anyway, there's a lot going on in your question, and I've toyed with some issues, raised some, and ignored others: all in what isn't really the most organised matter. I'm kind of exhausted at the moment, so I'll maybe take a raincheck and pop back in some other time. Still, it's an interesting question, for sure.

I've still been polishing the Scadrial MR that I came up with earlier in this thread, and at this point in time, I think I've made enough changes that I'd like some feedback on how they appear. Unalloyed Trouble At this current point in time, as I've previously indicated, my intention is to run this game for the MR I'm GMing. I've made some overhauls to the available roles by giving the Town a protective role, and have sought to enable people without roles to have more things to do using the currency system. And perhaps (in what I think is the most interesting set of possibilities), I've tried to do some tweaks with the Cosmetic Roles, giving people very minor buffs in exchange for taking on a role with their own little personal goals. Hopefully, this works out

Let me get this straight, guys. I present, esteemed Forum members, this, for your inspection: ...The Rebellion has begun. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Too long has King waited, disavowing all responsibility. Claiming that he did not contribute to the monstrosity that was the Urbain doc, the Darkeyes doc, and the Dead of Kholinar doc. No more. Insieme per la vittoria

Thirding/fourthing the spec doc request. Still don't have the time for a game as intricate as this, even though the kandra looks like tempting trolling... See what you've done, King? You've led a rebellion. Watch the speculation numbers grow...