Haelbarde

On 7/28/2019 at 9:57 AM, Sart said:

Question for the GM: If a Misting is converted, and gains the role of the lynched Misting, do they lose their original role?

@Sart, what had made you wonder about this? Sart

While I think it could be nice to get an early Inquisitor conversion to get the game moving along, this is the only cycle I'd care to actually do anything to help that, and definitely wouldn't want to be waiting for them to get all their conversions off. Regardless of what we do, it's be a good discussion to have had though.

I feel reticent to lynch Aman day 1 - village/spiked/future convert, I feel like I'd prefer to keep his level of activity alive for at least the next cycle or two. Fifth, Brightness, Rand, and maybe Devotary I'd also put in a similar position. Obviously, if any are exhibiting suspicious behaviour, lynch away, but I've not seen anything that I'd call suspicious from them yet.

El and Alv are playing? Sign me up.

Dying worked wonders for cleaning up Assistant Constable-General Dr Rab Heatherlocke corrupt tendencies. Leaving the force forcefully, once he was once again breathing fresh air, he figured he'd try his hand a politics. He'd spent enough time working with senators, he was pretty sure he could do the job too, right?

8 hours ago, Straw said:

The following players have not given themselves an RP name: Haelbarde, Snipexe,  BrightnessRadiant, and Sart.

Fine, name and shame...

Spar is a skaa who grew up on the streets of Luthadel, fortunate enough to be apprenticed to a cobbler. 

Some thoughts.

In LG2, the enhanced powers the Inquisitor had were: 

Quote

UberThug - Ruin has blessed you with exceptional strength and endurance. You survive three attempts on your life instead of just two. After the first attempt, you appear as a Thug in the write up, but still scan as a regular villager.
UberTineye - You can listen in on any conversation without the other person knowing. This includes PMs. If all the other Tineyes die, your ability does not allow for PMs to continue.
UberSmoker - While this ability doesn't protect you from emotional Allomancy like a regular Smoker would be, you register as a Regular Villager during any attempts to seek you.
UberSeeker - Gives you the ability to pierce Copperclouds as well as the typical Seeker role abilities. Smokers who have their Copperclouds pierced will lose their protection from emotional Allomancy, as well as their target.
UberCoinshot - Without this ability, you cannot kill. You'll have to rely on your converts for kills if you lose this one.

In LG32 the enhanced powers were:

Quote

UberPewter (Thug) - Can survive two kills on me. First kill gives a Thug message. Second reveals me as the Inquisitor.

UberIron (Lurcher) - With UberIron, you may target a player and redirect their action to another player of your choice. They will not be informed that the redirect occurs. 
Someone snapped!

UberCopper (Smoker) - This is a passive power. If you are scanned, you will scan as a Regular Crewmember. You are not protected from emotional Allomancy, however.

UberBronze (Seeker) - You have a choice. Either you may target a single player and learn their role, regardless of whether they are protected by a Smoker, or you may sense more generally and discover what actions were used and how many of each (not including those clouded by Smokers).

UberSteel (Coinshot) - This is your ability to kill. If you give this up, you must rely on your converts to put in a kill action. 

Keep in mind that they had 29 players (as did LG32), and we only have 18. I'd imagine the Inquisitor has at most 4 spikes, or if we're lucky they may only have 3. If there's a really weird role distribution, then 2 is I think possible (meaning only one convert), but I reckon that's unlikely.

Anyways. Assume 4 spikes, then we've 3 conversions to worry about, and the inquisitor will have 4 abilities. Note that between the last two games, 4 abilities were the same type, although the Seeker ability was changed between games, and instead of the UberTineye, the second game had an UberLurcher ability. Maybe this time we'll see Uber Emotional Manipulation (in other words, Uber Vote Shenanigans).

Anyways, I think it's fairly safe to assume the Inquisitor will have UberPewter, UberSteel, and UberCopper, plus probably one other. Maybe we'll get lucky with village seekers, but I'm not expecting that we'll get much luck finding the inquisitor (though that's not a reason for any seekers to not scan - find allies, and any spiked once we get conversions).

@Straw I assume that any converts do not get the normal version of the UberPower the Inquisitor gave up to spike them, only a chance of whatever misting ability was used to spike them?

Now, to read thread:

Ah, I see others have already brought up the powers. I think I added a little detail though. I do feel like 4 is not outside of the realms of possibility. It's still ends up being under 25%, and again, depending on village roles, could probably work. 

Just a reminder to be careful of roleclaims - if too many roleclaim honestly and it gets back to the spiked team, it can help them hunt down players like the tineye, or any potential coinshots, or say the mistborn. I'm not saying don't, but be careful.

Re: Aman roleclaim - sigh. This does not surprise me. It's an Aman thing to do. But I don't think it makes me trust him any more or less. He could easily pull off a publicly revealed Inquisitor, I'm sure.

I do probably agree with Aman though. While what gives us the most information is not lynching at all for a day or two and wait for information to come in from seeing what kills/protects/redirects happen, until we get a conversion, and then do something. But that's also incredibly boring, and the games being fun is more important. I'm not sure I care to lynch Aman though - I'd much prefer to lynch an inactive, given the choice. 

20 minutes ago, StrikerEZ said:

Guys it was just a simple question. 

Under Basics in the rules, it says rollover should be 4pm EST, so I'm assuming that is the timezone for the game start also. Plus, Straw only corrected me for the NZT link I gave, not the EST one.

Out of curiosity, if I'm reading the rules correctly, could the village all decided to visit the hospital and stay there permanently? Given it wasn't an action to visit, I don't see why they couldn't. 

Anyway, ignoring puppeteering, if the eliminators join the village in visiting the hospital, no one dies (no Elim kill, no sabotage, and no lynch), and the game goes on for ever, or the eliminators don't visit, get a kill and a lynch but then it's obvious who they are, for the village to then go and lynch. 

Sign me up.

I've got the time to play for once and I'm in the mood.

Character incoming...

(Watch this space)

LG58 commences

Can I vote Hadrian for having the most Heatherlocke name?

I don't know if this was true or not, but I felt like as an eliminator team, we on the whole were in the eliminator activity golden zone - not inactive, being active enough to post here and there, enough to seem superficially active, without being active enough to truly affect too much, and not enough to be posting so much as to run into problems with being getting caught by our words. When I was doing my player read/summaries, I did the eliminators close to last. That honestly wasn't to avoid focusing on my buddies. It was because they weren't the easy ones - they weren't so inactive so as to be really quick to review all their posts, but they weren't so active and loud as to warrant immediate attention for a summary. It actually worried me near the end of that process when I realized I hadn't gotten to my buddies yet. I was honestly quite concerned, with all the difficulty you guys were having, that someone would remember the old favourite strat of searching for that golden zone of eliminator activity and uncovering all of us.

2 hours ago, Arraenae said:

I have no idea if Kas celebrates Chinese New Year

Well, he made mention of it to me around the time you mentioned it in thread, not that he commented whether he celebrated it or not. So again, that was one of those details that gave me confidence to your Kasness.

Anyway, stuff about the game.

Making Diagrams was fun! I have a 12 page document with various iterations of the diagrams, plotting the different possible outcomes of the game, at each stage, for the last few cycles.

Cycle 10

Cycle 11:

As demonstrated in the second one, for these diagrams, the best chance the village had, assuming everyone was active on both sides, was to lynch me without having a useful role, and then lynch croc (or visa versa). But even then, you would still have to double lynch Sage, and after the first Sage lynch, only Chameleon would be left. So you have a coin flip - if it lynches Sage, then the village would win, if it lynched Chameleon, well, Chameleon would lose their second life, but then the night kill would take them out. So a 50:50 of victory for either side. The only other situation would be ending with Chameleon and Sage both having their extra lives, but that would give you guys only a 25% chance of victory - Sage would have to have lost two tied votes in order for us to lose - you guys had a 50% chance of getting the first lynch on sage, and then you'd have to win the second 50% chance to actually win the game. All other paths were just straight out Sympathiser victories.

The reason for the premature outing of most of our team came because of an unclear ruling of how actions work in the game. We had initially wanted to try leave a few players alive, if possible, including Heron and Dragonfly. When it turned out Dragonfly was the village bondsmith, and it was time for the end game play, there was disagreement over whether to kill Dragonfly or not. In the end, literally at the last minute, I changed the kill order from Scorpion to Dragonfly (I was flashing back to the various games where I've lost games due to sentimentality, or having players not turn up). The issue then was that apparently you only get one action across the whole day-night cycle, rather than one per turn. Action economy wasn't spelt out in rules anywhere, because it didn't really need to be. For the most part, anyone with an action only had one possible action, and it had very specific timing for either the day or the night turn. The only people with access to 2 actions were us eliminators, but even then, we assumed that you could only put in one action during the night turn, so when I had night actions, I wouldn't put in the kill, and say Seonid would always be scanning, so wouldn't put in the kill. Sage had been putting in the kills just because that was convenient, so the question of whether someone who had used a day action could also put in a night action hadn't come up. It just so happened that I'd been a vote manipulator that cycle, and had put a day action and night action in. When the ruling was made that that wasn't allowed, the decision was made to give the village back their Bondsmith, giving it to Scorpion, who would otherwise have been our night kill that turn. The problem was that messed with our ability to end the game.

So, after killing Ivory, the numbers were at 6 villagers to 5 eliminators. Now, up to that point, we knew that there was definitely one village bondsmith, and while we hadn't quite finished scanning everyone, we were pretty sure there wasn't much left for us to find. And so for instance, the day before, the numbers were 8:5, but taking into account vote manipulation, it was 8(9):5(6). I was under pressure that cycle, but we were able to pull a hammer, and by taking out the bondsmith, that 6:5 would now be 6:5(6), rather than 7(8):4, had I been lynched, and Dragonfly left living. And at 6:5(6)? The worst case scenario is that the coin flip killed one of us. But there'd also be a 50% chance of a clean sweep victory. But even if we lost the coinflip, as long as Croc stayed alive, we would be able to tie every single lynch, forcing that coin flip every cycle, and giving us victory as soon as it went our favour. And as long as I survived, there'd be the chance I'd get a useful role to just overpower the lynch anyway. Or, if you decided to lynch Sage early, we'd immediately win too. And so because of all that, the play of pulling a hammer to save me from the lynch made sense, because it wouldn't matter if we were all revealed. We could tie very single cycle till the end of the game, and the worst case scenario was Sage being lynched last. But he would be untouched, versus Chameleon, giving the village only a 25% chance of victory, if and only if none of the other tied lynches had gone in our favour.

Obviously then, when Ivory died, but the village bondsmith lived on through Scorpion, plans had to change.

Rather than at the expected 6:5(6), we were at 6(7):5(6). We could no longer tie the lynch unless the village didn't all turn up, and only if the whole team was online to vote at last minute. And since we now knew that there was a village protect role, we weren't willing to risk going straight for Scorpion in case they claimed in thread, or were randomly protected anyway. So we had to wait two nights to take out the village protect and vote manipulation. That was why we were a little more subdued and not voting so brazenly.

Anyway, that's a bit of context to what we were doing for those last few cycles, after randomly revealing ourselves in thread by saving me.

Which reminds me - Sage shouldn't have been lynched when they were - After we soothed away one of the votes, there wasn't 2 votes on either Sage or whoever Sage was voting for. And the rule change about the 2 vote minimum was only changed for the instance where there were only 2 players left in the game, which wasn't yet the case. So you weren't as close to victory as you thought you may have been. The GMs were aware of the error, but didn't think it was worth fixing if the game was about to end in our favour anyway. If things had turned around though, he'd have got his extra life back.

18 minutes ago, Arraenae said:

Heh, most of my research was actually reading Kas's old games and taking notes on his playstyle and writing quirks. I specifically asked to be a pinch-hitter to get more time to research him. Then he made a PM with me, so I got some impersonation tips from him. A few of my posts (mostly from the start of the game) are Kas's old posts with his content ripped out any my own plugged in, but as the game went on I didn't have as much time to do that anymore.

See, I was in contact with Kas at the time, chatting about other stuff. So details like posting when Kas was online, or posts that seemed to reference Kas being unwell or at least busy, meant that you could include details, intentionally or not, that fit with what I knew of Kas' current state, beyond the scope of purely a past game research based imitation. And that's what sold me on it, I think.

Edit: The spoilers actually have pictures in them now.

Also, I remembered - keteks! I still have a Tyrian Falls ketek to finish, but I wanted to add that the other nice thing with the potential cleansweep if killing Ivory meant no more village bondmsith was that that Day 14: 14 days ketek that I posted midway through the game would have come through. The ketek was posted on the start of the 15th day of the game running, I believe, and that lynch would have been at the start of the 14th day since the ketek was posted.

10 minutes ago, Steeldancer said:

Hael Hydra

Pretty sure that's been a thing since before this game

Well done Rae. Though, interviewing the people in question doesn't seem quite fair

*goes and compares the player list to my random lists of notes

3 minutes ago, Arraenae said:

What criteria are we giving out the passes for? Last year it was for cosmetic roles, but this year it hasn't ben specified...

From the signup post:

Quote

Unfortunately, 2017 also saw changes in our forum that have been less positive, with an increasing tendency towards inactivity. In the spirit of Cosmetic Roles last year, there will be a competition this game for three non-Sanderson game passes, allowing you to run a game not set in one of Sanderson’s works. This year, however, the competition will be based on activity, with a vote amongst players at the end of the game on which players have been the most active, and have done the most to encourage activity.

Last year, Meta mentioned we had a secret challenge for three more non-Sanderson game passes. That challenge was also based on activity. We will be awarding those after this game ends as well.

Thanks heaps for running this game Orlok. Really appreciate it. And my apologies if my PMs or messages in the dead doc came off as demanding in any way. It was not the intent, and I'm sorry if I made anything harder for you than it already was.

Going to have to go through the thread to pick out who to vote for. I already know a few players that I'd vote for, but not 5. Here's the wiki page on Single Transferable Voting if anyone is interested. 

Heh. At the start of the game, I thought that I'd be really into guessing who was playing the game, but after an initial attempt at taking down some notes and having some guesses, it didn't end up being something of concern. I'll be interested to find out who was playing the game. It was nice to actually be able to change one's play style without garnering suspicion for it. I didn't necessarily make great use of it, but I could see it being quite useful to experiment with a new style, and then once the game ends and all is revealed, you can then tell everyone that this is your new playstyle that you'll be taking back to play other games with. 

Edit: And thanks everyone for the very tense game!

Just now, A Joe in the Bush said:

Or is he faking? (Jack is)

Honestly, I don't have the time to play unfortunately.

3 minutes ago, A Joe in the Bush said:

You signing up?

But my character is dead... D:

I'll start you off with some of that RP parodying.

Who is this man, Lord Tormander just there
To have me dine at his table, and now this poison does share
It was his hour at last to put a seal on our fate
Wipe out the past and watch them clean off the slate
All it would take was a flick of a knife.
Instead of this, he has taken his own life.
 

On 2/10/2018 at 4:15 AM, A Joe in the Bush said:

After the dinner ended, when the House Lords sat at the long table, waited on by their Stewards. Jack Tormander. Wyrm Heron. William Zerrung. Claincy Ffnord. Rab Heatherlocke. Matthew Machmuller. 6 of the most powerful people in all the world. While smiling through their teeth at each other, they sipped their wines and ate their desserts. While watching for knives and arrows, they drank poisons. While screaming in burning agony, they fell from the benches.

Anyways, y'all better RP some Les Miserables parodies or I will be very disappointed in you.

I forget if the guidelines got changed, but all games are meant to have inactivity filters.

Also, bans are very necessary. There are no consequences for inactivity currently, so there's no incentive to change. The reality is, a lot of the time, you could probably look ahead and work out that yeah, I've got lots of homework in the next 3 weeks, I won't sign up. But often people don't give it any thought, or if they do, they know there's no consequences if they go inactive so sign up anyway. We've been talking about "nice" ways to discourage inactivity for the last 2 years, to no real effect. An actual hard rule that is enforced, like a ban, is very much what we need.

And yeah. You don't want to mess with distribution. Honestly, I'm sure that more often than not, GMs will naturally shy away from giving power roles to people who go inactive anyway, and giving them village vanilla roles is not going to stop them joining games and then going inactive.

Edit:

It's been awhile since I've complained about inactivity and measures against it. Feels good

The other thought I had was yeah, the 48 hours threw me as I had assumed that the game, both as a quick fix, and due to the nature of the rules (having no ability to explain votes or make arguments) would have only 24 hour cycles. Wonders if that would have helped with peoples attention span.

Voting for Roadwalker.

Removing vote from Kynedath.

Removing vote from Jondesu.

Voting for Kynedath.

Removing vote from Joe.

Voting for Jondesu

Voting for Joe.

Voting for Haelbarde (to play this game)

Nope. So far the only thing I've got from fRR was that I'm village roleless. I've had no moments of clarity.