Araris Valerian

Yeah, this, plus you being a Lurker, made me rather annoyed at the first missed NK, which was targeted at you. I probably switched too suddenly into “solve mode” and also had too much confidence in xino as elim. I was also deliberately ignoring discussions of the convert, such as not addressing you directly at all. I’m kinda glad nobody asked me about the role I claimed to have back when I pulled my gambit with Verdance. That might have gotten me picked out at the convert, since a bit of analysis would have revealed I had vote manip, which the elims would definitely want to prioritize. One of my potential endgame gambits was to use your Lurker role as a justification for you being the convert. But that was always scary because if I didn’t sway enough folks, the fact you actually has vote manip would have ended poorly for me, especially since I needed to be able to use the NK.

The first one was an accident. They picked Striker to kill but nobody sent an order in their GM PM. Once I was converted I made the call to deliberately skip a kill, primarily to reach an odd number of players, since my vote doubling would guarantee a win at 1-2. I was also working under the assumption that everyone just thought xino was the mole, so I thought I would be flying solo for 3 cycles rather than just 1, which played into the timing of when I skipped the kill.

I mean, I was pretty annoyed at first when I actually got converted . I'd gone to all that work to expose Verdance on accident (sorry about that @Verdance, btw, you caught me at a bad time when you asked for a thread summary), and then I get pulled into a team that's been almost entirely outed.

It was a lot more common back in the early days of SE, since it went hand-in-hand with the heavier RP nature of those games, but I still like to note anytime I end up with something significant. The best item I have is definitely a Shard of Preservation that came from a game that wasn't really supposed to have any shards in it. And it wasn't too long ago that I won a duel against Aman for (nearly) all of the Honorblades.

Thanks! I appreciated your support in both of the last two cycles, as well as how effectively you pushed back the xino execution .

I'd also like to remind everyone that I am a Silly Old Bear, and that nobody should be concerned when I survive to the end of games. My first preliminary thought is that the pacing seemed a bit weird, in the sense that we could solve the game faster than we could act on our solving. A lot of our metacycle exes were determined in previous pseudocycles. I think a future run of this game might work better as either a 24/24 MR, or some combination of 24/48 (still a LG).

Yeah, but I was a Lurker, so that wouldn't have helped. I just wanted to kill both of you, and vote doubling would have stopped my NK.

Good game everyone! Props especially to @Hoid Slayer for fighting on to the end. And a big thanks to @The Unknown Medallion and @Through the living Wahr for running the game, as well as to @Jo and the Bush for IMing. I have some thoughts about the game mechanics that I'll collect in a later post, but I think the general concept here was a success. The pseudogame was extremely high-impact in determining the outcome of the metagame, both because the original elims had to be somewhat bold to win their bet, and because the conversion ultimately led to a win. I guess I can add the 17th Shard (website) to my list of SE collectibles, since I'm the only person left alive after this game .

Yeah, I think I'm going to go with my first impression here, which is you as the last elim. I could spend a lot of time second-guessing that, but I don't think it's worthwhile.

This is false. We know the latest the conversion could have happened is the cycle where we exed Qian (metacycle 6), since xino was inactive for metacycles 7 and 8, but there was a NK on metacycle 8. And there wasn't one on metacycle 7. So whoever the convert is, they + xino didn't send in a kill on metacycle 7. 1. The three of us have all been active, so that doesn't help sort things out here 2. If I had been an original elim, the consideration for converting you would be a stealth thing, rather than thread control. The elims were pretty exposed after the pseudogame ended (coco+Qian+mole), so they could have just been concerned with survival 3. You could have been converted after going after xino That's mostly to say that you don't have a foolproof alibi. The main thing in your favor, at least in my eyes, is that you voted for xino pretty easily last cycle, in contrast with Hoid, who was trying to get me killed all day against solid evidence and without any good reasoning of his own.

Yeah, I’ll see what Divergence has to say for himself. I’m not 100% settled on you as the last elim, but I’m definitely leaning significantly in that direction.

I’m in a similar boat, and I’m sure Divergence will say the same as well.

That is a valid point. I’m not sure that tying the vote like that would be been a certain win for you though. Kit Kat had vote manip, and you have no way of knowing if Divergent or I also have some. Also, Kit Kat could herself gotten on at the and of the cycle like she has in previous turns. I’m not sure why e!Divergent would not just join you in voting on me though. That seems like it would have won him the game as well.

Well, based on those results I’d say it’s pretty obvious that Hoid Slayer is the convert. @Through the living Wahr @The Unknown Medallion could we shorten the cycle to 24 hours if Hoid and Divergent agree? I’m not sure that we have 48 hours of things to discuss here.

That's not Shallan, she's Isana, the main character's aunt (who looks young for in-world reasons). I'd strongly suggest reading the books for yourself. It's easily one of my favorite completed fantasy series.

Araris Valerian is from the Codex Alera series, and in that series he is a knight ferrous, which just means he can manipulate metal in various ways, mostly during combat. Nope. They have to get rescued by a different dragon.

It's something of a parody on both taking down Smaug from the Hobbit and possibly the Death Star in episode 4. The Watch thinks that only a "million-to-one" chance shot can kill the dragon, so they deliberately sabotage their own setup to make their arrow less likely to hit.

Yeah, this was the pragmatic case I was trying to make. Your approach to this cycle is reminding me of the Watch's approach to killing the dragon in Terry Pratchett's "Guards! Guards!".

Your analysis of Kit Kat indicates she is village. The only world where Kit Kat is village and you win the game is the one where you exe xino today. Was your analysis worth anything? Like, why bother saying Kit Kat is village if you are just going to act like she isn’t?

If I'm elim and Xino is village you lose, because my teammate and I vote xino, you and the other villager vote for me, and nobody dies. I NK you and then exe whomever the next day. If I'm village and xino is village, then we've lost because you've convinced yourself that I'm elim. So in both worlds where xino is village, you lose the game. Not to mention that you think Kit Kat is both an original villager and not a convert. So you think Divergent and I, the only two other active players, are elims. I'm not sure how you're going to convince Divergent to vote with you when your whole argument hinges on him being elim.

Well, I'm not going to bother convincing you, since you seem to be tunneling pretty hard. But how about a pragmatic argument, which I should have brought up earlier? If xino is village, we've already lost the game. He's not going to show up and vote, so we have 2 voting villagers against voting 2 elims, which is a tie, resulting in no execution. After the NK, we'd be down to 2-2 and unable to force an exe even if xino shows up. So let's exe xino. If he does show up and vote, and you are convinced he's village, join his vote, or convince him to vote for me or whatever.

xino was literally not on the Shard during either of the turns where the kill didn’t happen, according to his member page “last online” stat. Though he was actually online about an hour ago, so you can’t verify that. My point is, it wasn’t a deliberate choice to “holster his kill”, whatever it was, since he was just unable to submit it. I’m still not going to go into detail about my convert suspicious, because after we exe xino the convert will NK someone, and I don’t want to tell them who to not kill if I’m wrong. I was actually kinda suspicious of Striker, and he got NK’d, which makes me glad I never mentioned that. You realize we would have gotten 2 elim flips if we’d won the bet, right? Unless they were exactly coco and Qian, we’d have won by now. Also, there’s absolutely no way we had 3 starting elims with 17 players. Conventional wisdom is 25% if the elims don’t have access to strong roles. This game has an alignment scanner but no defense against it, which is why I was considering 5 starting elims a while back. I have to say, your frantic defense of a totally inactive player is really not doing much for me. It’s clear to me that you believe that exeing xino will make you lose the game. What’s not clear is why you believe that. All the evidence I have points to him as being elim. You realize that since those early cycles, there has been a conversion?

If by some coincidence the elims managed to guess Star’s identity (in other words, if Xino is village) then yeah, Kit Kat is almost certainly elim. I just would rather not bet the game on a coincidence.

Well, that “other logic” is exactly how I’ve won games as an elim before; create a reasonable POE, kill all the villagers in it, then shift gears and leave your teammates alive. Has xino done anything to make you think he’s village? Do you have an alternative explanation for Star getting coinshot during pseudocycle 5? Do you have an alternative explanation for the 2 missed NKs? If you are answering no to these questions, you should be voting xino.

This seems a bit hypocritical, since this was the kind of reasoning everyone was using to exe Lettuce over xino (meta-elim coinshot is supposedly too strong) a couple of turns ago. We just spent 2 turns working our way through the list of potential moles, and now that there's only one left, we stop? What kind of crazy logic is that?