DrakeMarshall

Lord Pending hollered bloody murder, swatting blindly with his cane. "Stop! Brigand! Poltroon!" "Somebody arrest that man at once. AT ONCE I say!" He looked up at the gallows with a start. He looked disturbed. Clearly more than arrests had been happening of late. "What in Duis' name is going on here? First shoe thieves and now dead bodies hanging in public places?! What kind of deranged township have I arrived to?!" "Is there a mayor I can speak to?"

The sun had set. Ordinarily, this would mean the mists had just begun to gradually stifle the world in their silent embrace, but today, they had never truly left. You couldn’t hardly see the sun in all that, even when it was there. You just knew it was there by the light filtered through the mists, and the warmth. Lately, a lot of folks had discarded any superstitions about going out in the mists. Not because they were safe, of course. On the contrary, there were rumors aplenty of people getting hurt out in the mists. Or sick. Or cursed. Maybe all three. Depended on who you listen to. But belief yields to necessity, most of the time. Sure, the first few days the mists didn’t go away, you could just lock your doors and tell yourself that would protect you, but the mists were everywhere. Eventually you had to draw water up from the well. Or make a harvest. Or go to the market. Or complete a journey, perhaps. A small carriage trundled down the road into Copper’s Bend. It had clearly once been nice, and it had clearly seen better days. The black paint was peeling in some places. The wood was dented. A pair of bony workhorses dragged it along. It stopped in the center of town. Just in front of the gallows. The door opened, and a man hopped onto the ground. He was short, had very slightly greying hair, and was dressed in a fine silk jacket that like the carriage had seen better days. “Sorry I’m late! Road was blocked. Something to do with clerics, I think?” “Anyways,” he beamed. “I am Lord Pending, the rightful heir of Copper’s Bend. I have finally returning to my ancestral home.” He balanced a lacquered wooden cane in one hand as he bowed with a flourish. “I will graciously accept all of your fealty now.” There was silence, interrupted only by the carriage driver making a polite golf clap.

no sorry I'm not trying to be ironic I genuinely approve of this inactivity policy all of the games I've run in the past have had very similar policies

unfathomably based

Well I think it could be fun Question - if you kill someone who hasn’t voted or been voted on by the rules does that mean you get all of your 4 breath back? If the answer is yes then in a way that’s kind of an inbuilt discount on killing inactives tbhhh it’s got a significant RNG element with the Returning 1/3 of the time that means RNG could have a pretty big impact depending on where the die fall but that can be alright just something to be aware of And I mean anyways in many cases if you Return you’ll still die after 2 cycles unless somebody gives you a breath or you’re an elim and you get one by submitting the kill but sometimes you’ll die after 2 cycles Note that I suppose the powerfulness of Returning is technically a function of how many players there are cuz if there’s only 5 players the game is only gonna last 2-3 cycles total so being alive for 2 extra cycles is basically the same as just never dying whereas if there’s something crazy like 34+ players the game will go on for ages and 2 cycles is a drop in the bucket :P. Those are the extremes but yeah, total player count affects things. Anyways I like Nalthis setups

asdfghjkl okay I have decided sign me up as... pending edit: I am, in fact, a pinch hitter

Ok have one more bonus graph, because I only just thought to chart this, and it's relevant: GMs are already taking complexity into account when deciding how large of an elim team to make. Great job GMs! However, the win rates suggest that we could stand to be doing it a little bit more. It's hard to say exactly, but I'm going to throw out that simple games should dip below 20%, standard games should sit at around 20%, semi-standard games are perfect as they are and should be somewhere between 20% and 25%, and complex games should be at around 25% and make sure the elims have options to counter widespread village shenanigans.

I've been doing some data analysis on the mighty spreadsheet of past SE games. I think there are takeaways. I've analyzed a total of 158 V/E games from the past decade: First of all, let's get it out of the way and talk about player count. It likely doesn't surprise you to know that the average player counts of games have been clearly declining over the years: You really don't need a fancy graph to tell you that, just open any 5 random games from page 1 of the subforum and any 5 random games from pages 2 or 3 and you can see it clearly enough for yourself. But just in case you wanted a fancy graph with hard numbers in it, now you have one. I think the declining player counts is a bit of a shame, and I'll have more to say about the whys and wherefores later. But whatever you decide to think about it, the fact is what it is, and we'd best plan for it. Recent pushes to create games that accomodate lower player counts are entirely justified. The average player count also varies considerably based on the type of game: This is as it should be. It's part of why we have the different categories in the first place. There isn't really much to say here except that the categories are working as intended, so, that's cool. While our player counts have declined, I want to stress that I don't actually think player engagement has declined. If anything, it's actually increased. The number of posts-per-game has basically held steady, which is actually fairly remarkable. We've been posting just as much with significantly fewer players. Likewise, the number of inactivity filter kills has if anything slightly trended downwards. Which, if I'm being quite honest, was not what I expected to see, but it's a pleasant surprise. So, in conclusion, our playerbase is shrinking, but those who are left aren't becoming any less active on average. This is the part where we take a brief intermission from cold hard mostly objective numbers and I take a bit of time to talk exclusively about my opinions on the declining player count issue. My sense is that we aren't losing old players any faster, what's happening is we're drawing in new players to replace them more slowly. My sense is that a lot of the more recent new players came from off-site or had RL connections to existing players. That is to say, we've gotten fewer newcomers from the forum at large. I believe there are two reasons for this: The SE community has grown more insular. Fewer SE players are active in other parts of the forum. I can at least say that this is anecdotally true of myself - I'm nowhere near as active in other parts of the site as I used to be. IIRC, I originally found SE by following a link in somebody's signature, so (anecdotally again) I think this impacts our ability to draw in new players at least somewhat. The 17th Shard Forum as a whole isn't growing as much these days, not just the SE subforum. A lot more people actively use the 17th Shard Discord than the 17th Shard Forum, and they are pretty mutually exclusive, as evidenced by the results of this survey. For various reasons that are complex and probably above my pay grade, Sanderson Elimination doesn't have a presence in the 17th Shard Discord. We do have our own SE Discord server, and it's quite a nice server in my opinion, but folks inside it are by definition already SE players so it isn't exactly bringing in new players. I don't really have an answer to the first point, since I have little interest in ramping up my own activity in other parts of the site at this time, and if I don't want to do anything about it then I won't expect anyone else to. The second point is something I feel potentially is in my wheelhouse. If all the young'uns these days are using Discord to socialize, the next step seems pretty simple: why don't we try running a game or two over Discord and see how it goes? It can't hurt to at least experiment with it. I've honestly been slightly interested in trying something along those lines for a while now, if it's something the folks of SE would be amenable to trying. Okay intermission over! Back to sacred numbers. In a different mafia community, in the wake of a game with remarkably low village engagement, I once heard a player say that being roleless makes it harder for players to feel invested in the game. Well, the explanation sounded plausible at least, and I don't know if they were right or wrong about their community. But I can conclude that they were probably wrong about my community: Apparently, the number of roles you hand out has just no correlation at all with overall player engagement. And honestly? That makes me really happy Apparently, players of Sanderson Elimination don't really feel like they need to have the spotlight to care about the game. And I think that's a very healthy approach to have in a team game! One of the many things that makes Sanderson Elimination a good time. The final thing I will say about activity and player counts is that getting more players to sign up does not necessarily mean getting more engaged players: One thing that I think we should not do in response to lower player counts is constantly beg for more players during signups. I get it, I really do. Right now, I have setups in the forge that I really, really, really want to have a good player turnout when I run them. I'm excited about the mechanics. I want to be able to actually use them all. I want people to enjoy them. I still dream of getting to run a 34+ player game But you can't conjure players out of thin air. If you try, what you will instead succeed in doing is convincing players who do not really have the time to play to sign up against their better initial judgement. People who are on the fence about signing up are generally on the fence for a legitimate reason. I will reiterate that I feel designing games to accomodate lower player counts is the best short-term response to our situation. It's not actually the worst thing. There are some games that I've really enjoyed playing that've had low player counts. Moving right along, we should talk about the number of elims. Conventional wisdom is that the appropriate number of elims in a game is about 25% of the total player count. I'd contend that the evidence suggests conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, the average proportion of elims in SE games is about 22%. The exact proportions favored by GMs depends slightly on the total number of players, with smaller games tending to have a slightly larger proportion of elims: If 25% was really and truly the ideal proportion of elims for a balanced game, you might reasonably expect that our village win rates would be pretty good, since our elim team sizes are often less than 25%. Meanwhile, the average village win rate in SE is somewhat less positive: While the village has done better in some years than others, the win rate averaged over all time is only around 40%. The last two years of SE have been pretty close to that average. It's possible that the village just needs to get good. But we can only always work with what we have. I believe the fact that the village only wins 40% of the time means we should change something. If nothing else, a game that's closer to 50/50 is just plain more fun. Of course, a skilled GM can correct for unusually large or small elim teams in other ways, by altering the role distribution or mechanics of the game. But we should still aim for a good understanding of what the starting point should be. You can't nudge the distro to account for a larger than usual fraction of elims if you don't know what the usual fraction of elims ought to be. And for that matter, you can't nudge the distro at all if you're running a roleless game. For these reasons, it's important to have solid criteria for choosing the size of your elim team. Which begs the question what percent of elims should we be using, if we want things to be balanced? Using linear regression based on past games, I can predict that the right amount is 15%, but there simply isn't enough data for that prediction to be confident. (The light blue area shaded around the dark blue line is the confidence interval -- it's pretty large, which means it's not very clear where precisely the line should be drawn.) Conservatively, though, I can say that the right proportion of elims is probably something less than 20%. This is a very surprising result, I think. Aiming for 25% of players being elims is a pretty well-established guideline in SE. And an elim team that's only 15% of the total player count seems just really small to me. But several other things independently cast doubt on the 25% rule. For one, there's what got me started down this whole rabbit hole: after running thousands of mock SE games, my simulator is convinced that 25% is much too large a fraction of elims for an all vanilla game. Admittedly, my simulator is kinda jank, but it's yielded legitimate insights in the past. For two, there's just a bit of simple math you can do to estimate it. If 25% of all living players are elims, then in order to just get a tie, you need to average 1 elim killed per 3 villagers dead. Assuming no fancy roles, this means the village needs to successfully execute an elim 50% of the time (over 2 cycles you'd expect 1 elim and 1 villager to get exed on average, meanwhile 2 villagers would be elim killed, for a grand total of 1 elim dead to 3 villagers dead). Anything worse than that and the village is going to run out of players before the elims. The thing is, a 50% hit rate is insanely good. Our actual hit rate for executions is much worse than that. So, if there aren't any roles putting a finger on the scales, it's pretty clear that an elim team sized to 25% of the total player count is in fact pretty strongly elim-sided. So now that's 3 totally different methods of arriving at the conclusion that 25% is significantly too many elims. At this point, there isn't much I can do but just show my work and say what my findings are. Switching gears, the mechanical complexity of a game is surprisingly impactful. Earlier I established that the village has a lackluster overall win rate. But in really complex games, the village actually dominates a bit. This kind of makes sense, I think. Complex games tend to give more abilities to everyone, and everyone consists of more villagers than elims, so if you aren't careful you are going to tip the scales in the village's favor. It's easy to create mechsolving potential, or for power creep to accidentally nerf the standard elim powers. I think this is a good reminder to give the evil team some love in complex setups. It's also a case where 25% is probably absolutely a reasonable amount of elims to have. Apparently, the approximate complexity of your setup should be one of the main factors you take into account when deciding the size of your elim team. Complexity also seems to generally get more player engagement. (Although it goes without saying that players can get tired of complex setups if we run too many in a row. Complexity is wonderful and it can spice things up nicely but it's still possible to cook with too many spices.) Higher complexity increases player engagement during the game but it doesn't really get you any more players at signups. Or at least there are diminishing returns. At some point it's less a question of interest and more a question of availability. While complexity significantly improves village win rate, it doesn't have quite as pronounced of an effect on village voting: I suspect seekers are part of the reason why standard setups achieve the best accuracy. Basic setups likely contain no information roles, whereas more complex setups tend to make seekers unreliable or more nuanced somehow. Standard setups are the most likely to just contain straight alignment scanners. This also hints that the village is rather bad at catching elims without the help of info roles We're nearing the end I swear Have several graphs about voting accuracy. I find these results mildly fascinating. Villages that ultimately win still get the D1 vote wrong almost as much as villages that lose. The difference is in the next few cycles, winning villages have a much clearer pattern of improving with much lower variance, whereas losing villages just sort of flounder. Luck certainly plays a big part in these games but it's cool to see how at least in villages that won the benefits of learning and analyzing from previous cycles is something pretty clearly represented in the numbers. (Minor Disclaimer - Take the averages calculated at around cycle 12 and later with a grain of salt, because there's like probably only 4 games in the entire dataset that went on for more than 12 cycles so the sample size is miniscule at that point.) Conclusions: Our player counts have been going down, but our activity levels haven't been going down. In the short term, we should scale back to smaller games. The correct proportion of elims in a game generally depends on the complexity of the setup. While 25% is a very reasonable starting point for many complex setups, most simple setups should have significantly fewer elims. Very probably under 20%, maybe even as low as 15%. I stayed up too late making all of these charts and should get some sleep >:P If you want to see my code and even more graphs that didn't make the cut, I've made it all available here. You should be able to actually run the code and reproduce my results if you have much knowhow in that direction and of course if you have the interest, but let me know if you run into any difficulties doing it.

ohhh clever you I didn't notice that, cheers well if they claim to have roles when there actually aren't many roles then from the village's view at face value that implies the elims must have spent some of their points on having roles of their own, so people with roles will automatically be in a suspect pool and the elims will have just placed themselves in that suspect pool by pretending to have roles and then if one of them dies and flips without a role the sham will be rather ruined if they are good enough at powerwolfing to play the confusion and pull it off anyway, I'd say they deserve the advantage they get from doing so

I like option B slightly better in that the rules feel a little cleaner, but they both ought to work. Flavor-wise, is there a particular reason why the enhancement metals function as redirects? Is fine if not I know I can be weird about making all the roles more flavorful than sensible

Personally, I rather like redirects They can pretty easily fit into a lot of setups, I'd say. In terms of balance, redirects can be decently strong. The main thing I'd compare them to is roleblocks. Being able to turn an enemy's actions against them is just plain stronger than just being able to block them. That said, redirects can sometimes be a fair sight harder to aim than roleblocks, particularly if you aren't allowed to just redirect somebody onto themselves, or if it's something a little more complicated like a transporter type role. For instance if you want to redirect an elim kill back at the elims you've effectively got to find two elims, one to redirect from (and more specifically the one who is submitting the elim kill that night, not just any elim will do) and the other to redirect to. Potentially difficult but also rewarding. In a game with both roleblocks and redirects, you'll probably have to decide whether you do roleblocks or redirects first in the order of actions. (Or you could RNG it or something that works too ) It's largely a matter of personal preference tbh. I've recently been sold on doing roleblocks first since it means roleblocks are still sometimes better than redirects cuz they get higher priority. ...I think that's all I can think of to say about redirects and thus concludes my TED Talk

smhhh you guys these are back-of-the-napkin figures not sacred numbers (yet) !! I'd contend that Seekers are usually substantively better than Coinshots in any setup that isn't pretty mechanics heavy (in really mechanically crunchy games, I've been on both sides of situations where the village knows who the bad guys are but for whatever reason can't kill them fast enough using just the vote and badly needed a coinshot -- but in games that aren't brimming with shenanigans, you can safely assume that knowing who the bad guys are is a pretty short step away from beating the bad guys). Like sure a coinshot is clearly better if the person using it is endowed with flawless or near-flawless accuracy but when a coinshot misses it's not great for the village and when a seeker "misses" they still get a confirmed villager out of it which is still actually really really good. Seeing as there are in fact more villagers than elims the fact that a Seeker does something way more useful when it targets a villager is nothing to sneeze at. I could possibly arrive at the conclusion that removing a Coinshot should cost 5 rather than 4 points, however. Mistborns are basically gambling on stilts. As you've noted, you're getting a slightly better overall value by taking mistborn, but you're sacrificing the predictability of being able to do any one thing reliably. I do want the elims to be able to make the game nearly roleless if they decide to go that route. All-vanilla games are perfectly respectable! And assuming sensible team sizes, I'm not exactly sure how an all-vanilla game would qualify as very powerful for any one side. In any case, it is not all-vanilla, since the elims won't quite be able to afford that. And when you think about it, the few remaining village power roles will be essentially confirmed village once the village realizes what the distro is (mind, being "confirmed village" isn't quite as helpful when there's no Lurcher around to keep you alive after you claim, is it but it still lets those people claim and potentially avert an ML if a need arises). There are complexities but overall yes I do want the option to be on the table if the elims feel they want it. As all things should be How do you mean?

we routinely have games be flavored as the bad guys infiltrating the good guys and replacing some of them, I figured why not actually let them do that then role and distro analysis isn't an exercise of guessing what the GM would do, it's actually a part of solving and something the village can use and the elims get to choose their own team composition basically they basically get a heist planning montage before the game starts the costs and stuff is just so that it's balanced and there are actual tradeoffs involved

in Capitalist Tyrian Falls you have to pay subscription fees on your vials of metal to get access to power roles and if you want you can risk paying lower rates on the black market but in that case there's a chance you get metal poisoning side effects from impure alloys also u can bribe the elendel constabulary to kill everyone

Because there are never enough Tyrian with a twist setups The costs are back-of-the-napkin sort of figures and yes I might run simulations to fine-tune them in the event of actually running this. But if u think the value estimations of ur favorite and/or least-favorite roles is all wrong and u want to tell me so then go ahead i suppose >:P

Sorry but I got Hero of Ages from the library too Fair yes, alas game building is very very iterative I will argue slightly that roleblocks actually seem pretty okay from a village standpoint, because yes they do confuse and deadlock things but they might also block the elim kill, and sacrificing the usefulness of village roles to block elim kills is imo a pretty good trade actually. Supposing you inundated everything with roleblocks, the village still has the vote which is their main and best tool for making progress anyways, the elims are the ones who are stuck. (Of course, you have roles that grant roleblock immunity, and it would be fairly intuitive for the elims to have some access to them. In which case, yes one could argue that roleblocks are basically discouraged from a village standpoint, because it is bound to impact the village more than it does the elims... At least as long as an elim with that role is still in fact alive!) I think if you want targeting to be indirect in this game, then something that comes with the territory is abilities being a bit harder to use than what you would see in an average game, but some are certainly harder than others and it'd be fair to want things more consistent. Anyways. Have some more crazed ramblings about game design:

Yes the distro will be pretty important! I believe in principle these roles allow for multiple interesting distro options though. It's a small change but I like this iteration of malatium very much. Good question Just change the puncutation a bit and you answer your own question

I'd say the main thing to take into consideration when figuring out who gets what roles in something like that is that people will sometimes work together to avoid the deadlock. Something that affects your target's target is hard to aim under normal circumstances, but not if you PM your target and convince them to do you a solid and target the person you want. With a bit of teamwork you could turn Atium into a reliable scan. Or for Malatium you can ask somebody else to target you. Maybe you could even ask a second person to submit to an alignment scan by targeting the first person, and if they didn't it would be at least a little suspicious. These roles might be more useful and powerful than immediately meets the eye. Edit: You can encourage/discourage this kind of cooperation by allowing/disallowing PMs. Even with PMs players won't always cooperate and even without them they will probably sometimes find a way to cooperate, but it is at least one of the levers that let you decide how much of that sort of thing you want.

The former Although the latter is also potentially fun in the sense that role madness games do not always have to be high power games

It is a fun concept don't mind me I'm just meming

smh I for one would not consider doing that >:P (behold! this is the way to convince people not to expect shenanigans, by telling them that you would never do shenanigans! naturally, everyone completely believes me, on account of my superlative trustworthiness and reputation for honesty :))

Factional kills that aren't restricted by action economy? Strong anticlaim mechanics? Unreliable actions? Flips that only reveal alignment not role? ok nobody asked for that last one but still If only somebody would run a game like that sometime in the future!

Stick ftw you did incredible

Oh oop forgot about that part. Yeah so the good thing about that is that means this is an unusually unswingy faction game and it works well with lower player counts because people aren’t getting removed for longer. Might not always feel that way to the players since they can’t easily tell who’s marked, so on the ground they’ll just be seeing whole factions suddenly get wiped, but. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they do have tools at their disposal to check if a player is marked

Preliminary thoughts are that I approve of the approach to faction games where everything is based on factional powers instead of individual role powers, and I approve that the number of people alive in a faction still matters a decent amount due to action economy and voting. Overall I like this take on faction games. As an aside, it’s interesting to see the contrasts between this and a certain other Reckoners game that shan’t be named. I do not personally see a particular need for it to be anonymous except just if you like anonymous games in which case fair play. (Disclaimer: The Reckoners game that shan’t be named is in fact anonymous.)