Araris Valerian

Thank you to Sart for running the game and giving us another take on the item supply mechanic! As always, if anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, please get ahold of Wilson, Devotary of Spontaneity, Elbereth, Araris Valerian, Elandera, or StrikerEZ, or post in the GM Signups & Discussion Thread. Not only will we get you added to the list, but we'd also be more than willing to help out in any way we can. You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone in our Art of Game Creation thread. With all the games that we've run so far, we have plenty of experienced GMs that can help you refine any game you're thinking about. If you would rather keep some detail secret, or are self-conscious about posting in thread (there's really no need to be; while we do slaughter each other, we are very polite about it), then I'm sure one of our fantastic committee members (Amanuensis, STINK, Sart, Fifth Scholar, Straw, Archer, Kasimir, and the above moderators) would be more than willing to help you out in private. Thanks again to everyone that played, and we look forward to killing seeing you in future games!

Thank you to TJ for running these games! As always, if anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, please get ahold of Wilson, Devotary of Spontaneity, Elbereth, Araris Valerian, Elandera, or StrikerEZ, or post in the GM Signups & Discussion Thread. Not only will we get you added to the list, but we'd also be more than willing to help out in any way we can. You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone in our Art of Game Creation thread. With all the games that we've run so far, we have plenty of experienced GMs that can help you refine any game you're thinking about. If you would rather keep some detail secret, or are self-conscious about posting in thread (there's really no need to be; while we do slaughter each other, we are very polite about it), then I'm sure one of our fantastic committee members (Amanuensis, STINK, Sart, Fifth Scholar, Straw, Archer, Kasimir, and the above moderators) would be more than willing to help you out in private. Thanks again to everyone that played, and we look forward to killing seeing you in future games!

I'll be the IM for this game unless it comes out short on players.

It sounds like Stick would prefer to hold off until later, so go ahead and send your rules to the committee.

Yeah, I'll lock/hide the thread for LG100 for now, and we'll try to get something else off the ground. @Sart, @Szeth_Pancakes, @DrakeMarshall, and @Stick. are the active players on top of the QF list. The last non-LG game was a QF, but I'm fine with running another one, just to have something for folks to play. I'm also happy to run my MR rules, but I'd need a minimum of 9 players, and it's a "more the merrier" kinda game anyway. Stick, if nobody ahead of you on the list responds, when do you think you'd be able to post your rules? I'll be happy to IM a QF for whoever runs it.

I can, but with 2 caveats. I’m not sure I”d get an IM (though given current numbers I could probably be my own), and my game really wants 12 players. If nobody else can take it I’ll probably write either a patch for less folks (and will want input on that), or have a backup set of rules.

Okay, I'm closing the poll. @DrakeMarshall will be our rep for champs this year! It is customary for us to send our representative off with whatever tokens we've come across during our games. I will lend you the slain heart of the Awakened House on the Hill, as a reminder that no evil is too great to overcome* *If you have a Shardblade, which hopefully someone else will lend you

If signups for TKN's game don't hit a number he can work with by next week, I think we should put that game on hold and see if more folks are able to handle a MR instead. With that in mind, would either @Ashbringer, @Kasimir, (or @JNV) be able to post signups for a game in just over a week, aiming to start in around 2 weeks? If not, we can dig a bit further in the list. Gonna ping @The Unknown Ajah so he's in the loop as well. We can re-announce your game in the Discord with a new start date if you want. I'm also down to chat more in the approval PM if you want to workshop your rules for a smaller player count that may be more realistic (~8 or so).

I'd forgotten that I've played several games with this many folks. LG12, MR10, LG26, LG28 (this was the House on a Hill game), AG3, LG37, and AG4. Of course, there were plenty of inactive players in these, but aside from the KKC games they were decently well-designed.

I'm going to put this in a separate post since it's a different thought, but I was brainstorming and came up with this outline for a game: The idea is to have a semi-blackout game by not telling the village which of the 3 scenarios they are in. And each of the scenarios is supposed to handle information differently, so not knowing the scenario is a significant handicap. It's just a skeleton without concrete rules, but I'm curious if anyone has feedback on the concept. Also I was thinking of this as a LG by default because this is loosely based on the original Awakening game by Wyrmhero, but another format might work better.

What's the problem here? Well, if you look closely, the eliminator kill has a default of a 50% chance to fail, and the execution doesn't even kill the eliminators half of the time. In other words, this setup is fundamentally the same as the 50% survival chance setup. So there will be the exact same problems with both. I know the lurcher doesn't really count as protection, but you get the idea. Don't try and make a smaller game larger by extending the duration through protection. Most successful small games work because they aren't a large game optimized for a low player count. They succeed because they use the player count to their advantage. Drake basically brought up the same point about artificially inflating game length, and I agree with both of you that it's bad. But I like his suggestion about adding extra substance to the game in a way that makes it longer (his example was finding Epic weaknesses before being able to kill them). This question was getting at something you partly addressed in one of your earlier points about using "vials" as flavor for limited charges for a role. Hence Mistborn makes a good setting if you were going to use this mechanic. I hadn't aimed that question just at mechanics, however. If we have a, say 9-player game, one story to tell that fits would be a skaa thieving crew trying to root out ministry spies while pulling off a heist. But that same story doesn't work as well with 20 or really even 15 people. Basically, folks can go anywhere on the internet to play mafia. But our mafia is Sanderson flavored, and with some variation we tend to like to lean into the flavor when designing mechanics (in fact, I think plenty of folks go the reverse direction, starting with a cool Sanderson story and getting mechanics to match it). So I think any discussion of how we design our games should keep that in mind. Thanks for leaving your thoughts!

I like the idea of having extra information to solve for. My next LG is a semi rerun of the PM Unsafety game, and I think I’m going to retool the locations mechanic to be like a mini One-Night game every cycle. Then take away most of the other roles and require knowing location for votes to go through. One thing that might be worth considering adding to games is some kind of anti-hammer mechanic. In large games, hammering is fine (though it can problematically compound with vote manip) because 7 cycles versus 8 isn’t a huge relative difference. But dropping from 4 cycles to an effective 3 is a lot more impactful, and in my opinion cuts out a bunch of otherwise fun solving/gameplay.

I've added a poll which will close on the 19th, so get your votes in!

Given the low player counts we’ve had recently (TKN’s game is at 4 right now, though I’m guess that’s partly end of semester syndrome), I was thinking about what kind of mechanics make for a better game with 8-10 players. Some general question that may be food for thought: Are there things we can pull off with smaller games the would be relatively infeasible with more players? A game with 8-10 players would typically last 3-4 cycles. What mechanics should we avoid to keep from pushing this lower, and what ways could we boost game length without frustrating players or otherwise compromising play? Are there any previous rulesets that would be suitable (possibly with minor modification) to our current player counts? Since we are a Sanderson forum, what settings might be particularly suitable to the sorts of mechanics/game lengths/game sizes that come from the above? I have my own thoughts on some of these but am curious to hear from y’all.

Here are the rules: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-6F8d9LW9q8lSaZQawfGEwB-Skp5TPA5USZmbudNqI0/edit?usp=sharing I have already posted these rules a ways back in the thread, but the idea is that "dead" players aren't removed until their entire faction has been killed (or notified that they've been killed). There's plenty of vote manip and no official vote tally.