little wilson

Heh. I did the same thing in the SE Discord. Ecth says he has a test Saturday morning and doesn't want to be out late tonight but I've no idea about @Elenion.

You should probably reread what El said, Yitzi. Because it looks like you missed some of her comments. Namely the one that said that Orlok never even used the second riot until the very last turn, when not using it still would've resulted in them winning, due to the two inactives in the game. For how Orlok used his abilities in the game, he was functionally just a single Rioter with a couple extra lives. That's all. If you want to complain about every game you lose, be my guest, but don't try to say that no one else has fun when it's really just you that isn't having fun.

She PAFO'd it, and it's not like the change was some hugely drastic role addition. It was a single role that duplicated abilities that were already in the rules, to make up for the lack of people on that person's team. Secret? Sure. A huge difference to what people were expecting? No. The known abilities in the game stayed the same.

I can get pizza. Is there anyone other than the four of us coming? (You, me, Orlok, and Elbereth) @RippleGylf @NightFury33 I ask because I've got a coupon for a $10 Papa John's large and I think I might use it.

This way of thinking - that there is a "normal" number of elims - and its natural follow-up - that there is a classic distribution that requires one (or two) "experienced" players, 1-2 new players, and the rest "normal" - is exactly what makes GM trolls like this so effective. Why should player number or activity in the forum be any less of something a GM can mess with than role distribution for the elim team? (A hint: it's not.)

Just to remind everyone, we're meeting again this Friday at 7 in the Wilk in the Cougareat.

Behold, the true visage of Joe:

If anyone is having trouble voting, I drew up a couple pictures to make things easier. A Joe in the Woods: A Joe in the Court:

Yeah. But since Meta probably won't be GMing this next AG, the odds of the village winning are much, much higher. So not really a challenge. LG eliminator win rate: 40% LG eliminator win-rate not counting games Meta GMed: 31%. So...yeah. Please note that those percentages have actually been climbing the last year. That second percentage was about 20% a year ago. (For comparison's sake, the MR and QF elim win-rates are 52% and 55% respectively)

Activeness should actually probably decrease over the course of the game. That's usually what happens. The eliminators generally kill off the super-active players and people go inactive over the course of the game and aren't killed off unless there's an inactivity filter or a vigilante willing to kill inactives (most aren't). I'll probably talk to you more about this in PM when I'm not at work because this sounds fascinating. I was skeptical of it when you first brought it up, but I know Meta set up the last AG trying to balance things more in favor of the village (not hugely so, but a bit), because the eliminators had won the other 3 Tyrian Falls games up to that point. So the fact that the simulation noticed that makes me a lot more curious about it.

Drake, could we try running your simulation on some other games? I'm curious how it would turn out... I'm also curious if it would be possible to program in specific types of players to see how that changes things. The generic works, but I'm thinking in like the future if a GM knows the player list and could be slightly more specific, just to get a slightly more balanced distribution.

The AG starts end December/beginning of January.

Editing out anything major is against the rules: If you're talking about this post right here, I've looked it over and can't find where the edit was, meaning it was minor grammatical and therefore just fine. If you think someone has broken the rules, please let a mod know so we can check it out. (preferably a mod not in the game and also preferably the IM, though I might actually be the only one who can see edit history, I'm not sure)

I'm in Provo and I'd be willing to go up to Salt Lake for something like this, but only if it's Friday/Saturday. I can't make a drive that far north for a late night in the middle of the week.

Winning over fun and also encouraging optimal play from all players. Magic: the Gathering has specific archetyes I think work well to show exactly what I mean. There are three basic types of players: Timmy, Johnny and Spike. Timmy plays to have fun. He likes things to be interesting and the game is less about the win than it is about how the win came about (note: I actually like this description of Timmy better than the other one, but the other one is at least a start). Johnny likes combos. He likes gambits and messing with the rules. He plays to get creative with the game. Spike plays to win. He plays to compete. He cares very much about if he's winning or if he's losing and that factors into his ability to have fun. My post isn't trying to say that we prefer Timmy and Johnny's and Spikes can just play elsewhere. On the contrary, we have a number of long-term Spike players. There's nothing wrong with Spike. The issue is when Spike players try to get non-Spike players to be a Spike. That's the whole bit with "optimal" play. Spike is really the only one that cares about optimal play in terms of winning. Timmy and Johnny have other ideas of what is optimal play, because it's different for them. This is why we don't want to ban any specific play style because some people are able to play them in a way that's perfectly fine for this forum, because they're not trying to pressure everyone else to play like them. And that's the important bit: play how you want (within the forum/subforum rules) but don't try to push for your playstyle above others. Let everyone else play how they want to as well, even if that doesn't include as much of a focus on winning as you might like.

Had he not collapsed in AG3, he would've single-handedly destroyed the eliminator team in that game. He had just about all of us pegged. I've known he was someone to fear from about that game on. Perhaps now his rep will increase accordingly.

We don't really do the game nights anymore, but maybe we could pull something together for this. @Rubix @firstRainbowRose what say you two?

Depends. When I was a teenager, that's what happened. But one of the symptoms of depression (doesn't happen for everyone, obviously) is a loss of interest in things that used to bring you enjoyment. I think the type of depression might also be a factor here as well. I've had two different types: one stemming from bad situations/thoughts and one stemming from chemical imbalances in my body. It makes sense that if you have bad situations in real life, to seek to escape, and books are great for an escape. I always had a book on me then. But when the depression is coming from within your own body, escaping isn't really an option because you can't escape your body. It's just there. Sometimes, you don't even realize you're depressed, because if life is going great, why would you be? That's how it was for me. I liked my life. I had no reason to be depressed, yet I was horribly drained of energy all the time, had no interest in being around people (I'm an extrovert), and couldn't even dredge up the desire to read books I knew I'd been waiting for for years. Turns out I not only had a thyroid autoimmune disease, but I was also terribly iron deficient, which is basically a double-whammy for depression. They compound. It's bad news. So, yeah. There are certainly types of depression that make you less likely to do what you enjoy. And it's brutal. I would take the kind I can escape with any day over the other. Hands down, no hesitation.

Just haven't purchased (or read) Heavenly Fire. Fallen Angels and Lost Souls didn't pull me in as much as the first three did, so while I want to finish the series, it's more just to see how it ends than because I have any real drive to. I really enjoyed Infernal Devices though (Clockwork trilogy). Also haven't read Lady Midnight, but from what I've heard of that, it sounds just as good. Really, I just haven't been reading much fantasy/urban fantasy the last 3 years (depression is a great killer of things one is interested in ), so unless I needed to read something (like Shadows of Self, Bands of Mourning or Secret History)...yeah. I still haven't even read Firefight or Calamity.... Or Arcanum Unbounded...and I had to force myself to finish Bands, and it took me forever after that to read Secret History. Anyway. Yeah. I'll get around to finishing Clare's published works eventually. I like her and I really like that world.

My book collection is pretty small. My Sanderson books: I loaned the YA copy of Mistborn to my sister, so it's not in there. The Firefight lenticular is hiding behind the Steelheart lenticular. And the two papers along the back of the bookshelf are the broadsheets that were given out at the SoS and BoM release parties. The rest: I like knick knacks if you couldn't tell. And that piggy-bank contains all of my foreign money.

Not really sure how you missed the Parshendi outrage when the Alethi were clearly targeting Parshendi (even if the Parshendi targeted ended up being Voidbringers).... Or, you know, the fact that Orlok was promoting the Sons win con really hard. Or Joe in your own doc saying how frustrated he was that all the Alethi were supporting the Sons win con.... But yeah sure, maybe I was misreading the sentiment. Who knows? Yes, because GMs are clearly supposed to see every single possible issue and find some resolution before the game starts and also before it's ever been run before. That's absolutely reasonable to expect of GMs. Yep. Also, a kingmaker from the start? There weren't any kingmakers in the start of the game. The possibility of someone becoming a kingmaker didn't happen until the end. If you're referring to a group of neutrals, well. There weren't actually any neutrals in this game. There were multiple factions. The unaligned Parshendi and Alethi weren't neutrals. They were more similar to a village faction, that was split between two different sides. They could win with the eliminator team on their side, or they could win with the village faction on the other side. That doesn't make them neutral. I can assure you that the Voidbringers did not view the unaligned Alethi as neutral and I'm pretty sure that your teammates in the Son probably didn't view the unaligned Parshendi as neutral. Did you ever bother to ask? Pretty sure Seonid would've said something if he'd been asked. Just saying. Ha. You think GMs want to do last-second balances in the middle of a game? I assure you, we never do. Sometimes, it becomes absolutely necessary to ensure that the majority of players have fun. Had Seonid not made the changes he made, the entire Parshendi team would've been destroyed, and I'd put 90-10 odds that none of them would've had really any fun. I'd put 70-30 odds that most of the Alethi wouldn't have considered that fun either. Hm. Perhaps "convinced" is the wrong word, but the point is the same, as is evidenced by you comparing your very advantaged faction to that of the extremely disadvantaged unaligned Parshendi. They had no reason to hope they could garner a win by themselves (without Seonid's intervention). The Sons, however, had a large faction that was mostly on their side, a kill ability, another role that was practically a second kill ability, plus two protection roles (since the Highprince counts as both kill and protection), and a vote manip. Yet you insist that you were not given a fair chance of pulling off a win. What did you want? The Highprincess to be able to protect all 4 of you? Lynch protection? Did you wish to be immune to everything? I can't really see what else you could've been given to make things fairer for the Sons. You guys were overpowered as it was. Oh, but you just didn't have a fair chance. Nope. I completely disagree with this, and completely agree with Drake. The Highprincess was absurdly powerful. Even just a single role that can protect and kill once is powerful and worrisome to a team of eliminators. The Sons benefited entirely from the Highprincess role though, because they never really had to fear hitting it, since it's an Alethi-only role. Nope, it was just the Parshendi and Ghostbloods that fell to the Highprincesses. Yitzi, how about you don't talk about game balance or running games until you run one of your own. Your comments are insulting to every GM we have.

I think the question at the heart of this discussion is rather “To what extent should games be competitive?” You also suggest that we should have rules in place to control the behavior of players, which I disagree with vehemently. I’m pretty sure I’ve answered the question, but just in case that’s unclear, let me reiterate. I do not think the focus of these games should be on competition and winning. It should be on fun, camaraderie, and the community. As for the second part, I already mentioned that the moderator team generally prefers a hands-off policy for most things. We believe that it’s better for the players to influence and change the metagame than for rules to force a change in the metagame. When the players bring about the change, it’s more likely to last, but rules not only limit player choices, but they also tend to be irritating from a player point of view, in having restrictions. Additionally, it’s difficult to enforce in grey areas, and even in the black/white, it can take a lot of work. The moderator team has three people on it, and all three of us are busy. We are also volunteers. While moderating the games is important for us, there are many other things that are just as important or more important in our lives that we have to deal with first. Like paying jobs or our mental health. As Meta already mentioned, the General Rules and Etiquette Policy should be more than enough to direct players in what is acceptable. The fewer additional rules we have to enforce to make the games run smoothly, the better things will be. Also, the question you say we should be answering implies that we’re not already making the games fun. But why would people sign up and continue to play at all if they didn’t find the games fun? All of our regular players are ones that don’t prioritize competition, so clearly competition isn’t the driving motivator to play SE. Yitzi, why do you think controlling players’ playstyles, and therefore limiting their options, will make the games more enjoyable? Speaking of control, let’s move onto mayors/dictators. There is a difference between a leader of a village and a dictator. Not all leaders are dictators. A leader who listens to other ideas, giving people information they need to make decisions, while giving suggestions for role actions, but ultimately letting each individual player play how they want to play is not a dictator. That is not a mayor. A dictator is someone who controls the village. Someone who expects everyone to roleclaim to them, listens to no one except their small cabal of trusted players, and threatens other players with death if they don’t follow them exactly. LG4 had a dictatorship. In one cycle, one of the players crucial to the village died, but there was a role, the Returned, who could sacrifice themselves to bring a very recently deceased player back (they learned the list of the dead 12 hours before the end of the night). The Returned in the dictator’s cabal threatened another Returned with death if he didn’t sacrifice himself for that crucial villager. So he did. Because either way, he was going to die. Moving on. Rand’s post reminded me of something that I think bears mentioning here, since it answers more about competitively-geared playstyles. I recently drafted Magic: the Gathering with Brandon Sanderson and six other people. Magic can be a very competitive game, but Magic with Brandon is very casual. Now, I haven’t played Magic for a good year, and I’m novice anyway, so I was pretty fuzzy on some of the rules, like if you look at your hand, you’ve basically said that you’re going first. Usually, this wouldn’t matter at all at Magic with Brandon, but one of the people there was very rules-based. He was also very loud about the rules. This is not how things generally are there, even though that’s how most Magic players would be when playing. Additionally, I have this irrational fear of playing Brandon in Magic, because I know he’s very good and like I said - I’m very novice. I worry that when he whoops me, I’ll have made an utter fool of myself, and he’ll think I’m an idiot - which would be the case if he were a generic Magic player. However, if Brandon plays and beats a novice, he takes a look at their deck, helps them fix it, and then gives them pointers to improve not only their general Magic play but also their game with that specific deck. He will never be like “You sucked,” and move onto the next person. Just because a game is generally seen as competitive doesn’t mean it always has to be played competitively. I personally feel like that casual play Brandon does with Magic is kind of the perfect example of how we should play mafia. Also, the problem isn’t one person playing over-competitively. It’s players in aggregate playing competitively. If it were only a single player, that one person is unlikely to have a large impact on the metagame, even if they’re being super competitive. But take a number of players all playing competitively - even if it’s not strongly so - and they will have a significantly bigger impact on the overall tone of the games. It’s like when I was trying to fix the metagame by myself a year ago and wasn’t having any kind of impact, but when 4-5 of us all joined efforts for the same goal, we made progress and things got better. I do not remotely believe we should cater SE around people who wish to play competitively, or group “suboptimal” players differently. Also, I don’t like calling players who prioritize fun (however they define that) “suboptimal.” They may be playing suboptimally from a competitive standpoint, but that does not make them suboptimal. Fun would be a better term. Fun players vs Competitive players. Our goal here in SE isn’t to play competitively. It’s to play a fun game of mafia with our friends, because killing friends is fun. I’d like to reiterate once again that if the games did become that competitive sanctuary some of you seem to want, they’d be shut down. You would no longer be able to play competitively here because there would be no more games to play. If you want ultra-competitive play, go to Mafia Universe, Epic Mafia, Town of Salem, or really almost any other mafia site. There are more than enough to choose from. This forum is a haven of civility and tolerance, where the members care about each other, and it would be a real shame if those of us who enjoy being Gentleman Killers were suddenly unable to play.

Before I get into this, let me reference a previous game. MR19 was a rerun of MR10. MR10 had some major issues due to the eliminators having access to a doc, but village communication being very limited. To fix this, MR19’s eliminator team didn’t have a doc - they could only PM. There was also a PM spy in the game - though the PM spy could only see what his target says and not who they’re talking to. Obviously, I knew there was a chance the PM spy would see an eliminator’s PM at some point, so I only put one in the game to reduce those chances. One of the eliminators forgot about the PM spy, and ended up mentioned all of his teammates in a PM with another elim. Even though there was only one PM spy in the game and even though there was only one elim who did not practice PM safety, that spy spied on that one elim, discovered all the team, and revealed them to the thread at the start of Cycle 2. Should I have foreseen this? Is MR19’s game distribution broken due to it? I don’t think so. I think there’s a difference between game balance - and therefore broken games - and a game’s robustness - the game’s ability to deal with really bad luck for a specific faction/team. While obvious robustness factors into game balancing, GMs cannot predict every single thing that could go wrong. It’s impossible. To help you understand, here are two obvious robust issues GMs can (and should) balance for: Balancing a team around a specific 1) person or 2) role. MR6’s eliminator team was balanced entirely around me being an evil Mistborn. I died the first turn. LG15b’s eliminator team required a specific role to make it to at least mid-game for the team to have a shot at winning the game. There were some other minor distribution issues that made things difficult for the team, but this role was absolutely necessary. That role died before D4. To contrast robust issues and broken mechanics, here’s a broken-mechanics example, using one of the most broken games we’ve ever had - LG4. In summary of the many mechanics of LG4, there were many safe roles - including one that was GM-confirmed - and a number of protective abilities and mechanics both which heavily favored the villagers over the eliminators. The eliminator team had very few kills that game because of the very many different types of protects in the game. Plus, there were 5+ unlimited use items that could spy on a person’s actions. With a GM-confirmed safe role, untouchable dictator controlling everything, I’m sure you can see how things could be problematic. By the middle of Cycle 5, we knew we’d lost the game. We knew there was literally nothing at all we could ever hope to do to win. This wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, except that the village was gloating about it. We almost quit. A few cycles later, I was the last elim standing, and my goal became just to get the number of living players to single digits before I died. I barely succeeded. And this is with the safe role alignment scanner going inactive by Cycle 3. Had they stayed active, me and my entire team would’ve died by Cycle 7. As it was, I was lynched Day 9. That game had serious problems. There’s a difference between bad luck and broken mechanics. There’s a difference between balance and robustness. And in the end, bad luck just sometimes happens. In LG22, the uber-big bad of the eliminator team who had his own individual kill on top of the team kill was lynched D1. Most of the time, though, really bad luck like that doesn’t usually happen. To play a game worrying about something that could happen that would screw your team over is kind of pointless. What if it doesn’t? You’ve just wasted time worrying about something you didn’t have to. In fact, in this specific game, had Striker been scanned and lynched early on (unlikely, given the unaligned Alethi's abhorrence of the peace route right from the start of the game), Seonid would’ve made the Blade transferrable. The only reason he didn’t was because by the time he realized there might be a problem there, it was so late in the game that it was too late to fix (I usually tell GMs that if you notice a break in the first 2-3 cycles, you can fix it if you really want, but if it’s later than that, it’s better to let the game play out). But he did acknowledge that as a potential issue. Striker didn’t die until after El (the Kingmaker) decided to go for the unaligned win. Had she continued going for the Sons win, Striker wouldn’t have died at all. You let a potential bad luck situation (that regardless wouldn’t have gone down how you thought it would) affect your view of the game, impacting the fun you were able to have overall, since you became convinced that you would lose. This is particularly ironic since the Sons had the advantage the entire game until El decided to go more neutral. In LG6, one of the eliminators decided right at the start of the game that there was no way they could win (I have no idea why; that game was very well-balanced). His influence infected all his teammates though, so instead of playing to win, they just played to screw with the village, because they believed they couldn’t win. While that game was super fun to play, reading through the doc later was actually kind of sad because they were so convinced they didn’t stand a chance, they lost. Unless a game is really broken (and you can generally tell if you’re on the wrong end of a bad break as an eliminator - there’s a tipping point where everything falls apart and you realize exactly how horribly and utterly screwed you are), you generally have a shot at winning. A defeatist attitude will only set yourself up to lose. And if you’re the type of person who can only have fun if you’re winning or believe you have a chance at winning, then not only are you setting yourself up to lose, but you’re also setting yourself up to have a miserable time playing. You’re compounding the misery, which doesn’t help at all. So, yeah. Fixating on a potential issue that might cause a problem, maybe, and letting that affect your overall view of the game probably isn’t the best idea. While this game had issues, the Son’s non-transferrable Shardblade was actually among the least of the real problems. If the game was broken, it was actually broken in favor of the Alethi and the Sons in particular. Not against you. Not even remotely.

It was mostly because in one of the games that had just barely ended, someone made a comment about no game ever having more than 6-7 eliminators, and I thought "oh? We'll see about that..." So when I got a 36 player game....well. I certainly had a bit of fun.

I did that with MR10. 36 players with 8 eliminators, 2 of which I was near certain would go inactive for at least half the game. I was right too. Not that it helped the village because even though they had 3 kill roles, they never killed the inactive eliminators and one of them came back on the last turn. (Though the village made a number of mistakes that game, like letting a publicly known elim kill role survive for a full two cycles after he'd claimed, which conveniently was just long enough for the elims to take control and beat the village >> )