Elbereth

Uh. Yeah. That's... eesh. Essentially, that removes any use out of the doc whatsoever - members would either not name themselves at all or not talk. The point of eliminators having a doc is unlimited conversation without the village seeing. It essentially removes all the use of that doc for them.

Clarifications Rule edit: There is a 2-cycle inactivity filter. If you do not post or PM for 48 hours without explaining your absence, you will die. This does not count for the Truthless win. PAFO on secret roles or alignments. Elsecaller is a passive ability. Skybreakers can have any role. Lightweavers may self-protect, but may not protect the same person two turns in a row. Player List 1. Elithanathile - Sebas - butler with dreams 2. Drake - Aaliyah 3. Mage - Damond 4. Eternum - Albion Kerenas - former officer 5. Jebus - Teralarin - overenthusiastic former squadleader 6. Flash - Johnny Quick - even faster than his name 7. Elenion - Albert Vospar - merchant and "former" revolutionary 8. Orlok - Highprince Locke Tekiel - very slightly arrogant 9. Megasif - Zirconidas - nervous brother of a Radiant 10. Winter Devotion - John - definitely normal 11. Roadwalker - Silver - exterminator, possibly a bird 12. Jondesu - Tzlim - mute (but talks in italics) 13. Paranoid King - Spiff 14. Stick - Dan - quiet and suspiciously sticklike 15. Sami - Aleta Nebrask - hiding in nonexistent curtains 16. Stink - Lazar - likes being in non-consensual relationships, apparently 17. Arraenae - Malnar - is not pleased at his idiotic surroundings 18. Lopen - Revali - might kill people in his sleep 19. Darkness - Belegaer - new to existence 20. Bard - Melinon - scared of shadows 21. Ecthelion 22. Yitzi - Brightlord Erethin 23. Sart - Ardent Sartal 24. Arinian - Alrin Spectators 1. Alvron (Impartial Moderator) - Naihar and Lorna 2. Seonid 3. Wilson - Kenara 4. Striker 5. Aonar 6. Brightness Radiant 7. Straw 8. Hael - Draen 9. Doc - Hithon 10. A Joe in the Bush Rollover will be ~9pm PDT, unless something changes. The game will start a week from when it began on Wednesday, August 2nd (Thursday for non-Americans).

Before the assembled squires stands a stern woman who has introduced herself as Brightness Kenara. “Welcome to Squadron Alpha,” she says. “You have been chosen as members of Alethkar’s first attempt to train Knights Radiant as warriors for the glory of the Almighty. A test group, as it were. You could become the legendary first squadron in a line of hundreds. “That, or you become a failure forever forgotten to history. Up to you.” There are murmurs. “Silence,” she says. “I’m not done. While you’ll be sent into the field soon enough, for now you’re only training. Specifically, rather than individuals, you have to learn to function as a single, coherent unit. “To that end, each recruit will step forward. List your name, previous occupation, and and anything else you think it’d be useful for the squadron to know.” She looks at the person at the end of the line. Welcome to QF25: A Sundered Sky! Housekeeping No minimum of votes to lynch; tied vote results in a coinflip. I will take writeup requests, both in the form of full completed writeups and anything the player wishes included upon his or her death. On a similar note, if you are certain that you will not RP, tell me so that I can use your character in the writeups at my discretion. PMs are completely open. They can be sent at any time to anyone, including group PMs. (The only rule is that you cannot add players to already extant PMs.) Rollover is tentatively set to occur at 9pm PDT / 5am BST. There is a 2-cycle inactivity filter. If you do not post or PM for 2 cycles without explanation, you will be killed. Factions Squires: Village faction. Must kill all Skybreakers to win. Skybreakers: Eliminator faction with a doc to communicate, and a kill each turn. Must kill or outnumber all Squires to win. Roles Lightweaver: You may protect one person from attacks every cycle, through changing their appearance to look like something else. Elsecaller: You may survive one attack or lynch, through transporting yourself somewhere slightly less dangerous. Stoneward: You may use your surge of Cohesion to make a player change their vote to any player who has already been voted on. Dustbringer: You may use your surges of Division and Abrasion to knock out a player for a cycle, rendering them unable to vote (though they may still take actions). New Recruit: You are too new to being a squire to have any powers which you can actually use yet, but you’re learning. You may be of any order (and I will accept requests), but have no other actions. Truthless: You want to die. Specifically, you want everyone else to come together to kill you, because that is what you deserve. Your win condition is to be lynched. However, anyone who votes on you the cycle you are lynched is attacked. Quick Links:

While that would be amusing, that'd quickly and obviously turn into a normal game where everyone realises what's going on. Also, eliminators not having a doc is a really tricky thing. Be very careful with that kind of mechanic.

Well, if you ever want to run it, put it on the list earlier rather than later because games take a while to get to the top. ~15 months give or take, depending on the format. But I'd agree it's certainly not ready yet. Princess Bride also isn't Sanderson. You'd have to pick in that case, or just not run this one and hope for another CR later on, or for one to pick your game. Anyway. That isn't anything to do with the game itself. I'm just saying be really careful with unique roles because they're irritating as a GM.

So... Drake already covered the conversion issues here. Best way to do it, in my opinion, is limited number of conversion, but if you can find another way that's fine too. I agree that a public rough idea of roles could be interesting, certainly. I highly recommend being very creative with what character corresponds to what abilities - if you do the obvious, the eliminators will have an advantage in knowing who to target because of likely kill/protect roles. (On the other hand, the village already has an advantage in knowing more roles and thus having more information, which is usually the eliminator team's thing.) Two notes, I think. One, this is a non-Cosmere game. You'd have to get approval from Scar/Sart/Hero to run it, or win this year's competition for them. Secondly, do you have any idea how difficult individual roles are to create/balance? I can tell you from experience that they're really, really annoying. The only game we've done with those to my knowledge is LG26, Nyali's game. And she spent weeks beforehand preparing and creating those roles. To be fair, they also each had individual win conditions (I do not suggest trying this), but even so, it was a broken game and really difficult to handle as a GM. Keep in mind that most of these roles you would be creating and balancing against each other in a single week. With conversions thrown into the mix, which makes balancing much harder. And then during the game, it'd be much more difficult than most games - role madness is always harder, and these would all apparently be unique. So... think hard about how you want to do this, because as it is it feels like to me it'd be broken and really difficult as a GM to do at all. Also, this feels more like a LG to me at this point. Could theoretically be a MR, but I think as is it'd be better as a LG.

Depends on the format. Those labeled as Quick Fixes usually last about a week to 10 days. Mid-Range games last roughly two weeks, and Long Games are a month or longer, generally.

Sure. There have been others - LG14 had a fun role distribution with the Lifeless, as I recall - but you're correct that role distribution isn't played with as much as player distribution. That's partly because when people want to play with roles it tends to be through new ones or an interesting set in the rules themselves, but we definitely shouldn't leave out that aspect. Thank you for pointing it out.

And I had literally nothing to do at all. Orlok did literally everything of importance while I was asleep. The reason that's broken, though, is because the point of a game is that players are invested in it. We still were, because we're going to be regardless, but most players won't be invested once they've won. They just go inactive - like I mostly did - because there's no reason them to play, at all. And that's a broken mechanic.

Here’s a few quotes (from various posts in this discussion) from Yitzi about game balance, which caught my attention: One thing that hasn’t been addressed, which I consider important, is the GMing aspect laid out in the points above. The main assumption being made here is that GMs don’t already balance games based on playstyle. I’m… not sure where you got that impression. I’ve balanced/distributed 8 games by my count (soon to be 9), which I believe is equal to the most of any other GM on this site. I’ve done a lot of balancing. You’re underestimating how difficult balancing is. It depends on the game (QF11 with three roles total was a lot easier than LG26 with each player having three win conditions all of which interact), but it’s not exactly easy. The most obvious place that playstyle is balanced for, naturally, is people who are typically inactive. Eliminator teams full of those players are never a good idea, which is why they never happen (except in cases where someone is unexpectedly inactive - QF16, for instance, had Joe, Aman, Cloudjumper, and Winter Cloud. Aman was lynched before he was able to get online D1, and Cloud and Winter were basically inactive, leaving Joe the only active elim. If Aman hadn’t died, there wouldn’t have been an issue there at all.). We also balance for other types of playstyle. (Side note: you’re also assuming that GMs need a list of players who play suboptimally. Almost always, they’ve played a number of games (and often have also co-GMed) before they GM - simply because it takes so long to get up one of the GM lists and run a game. They know the playerbase already. They don’t need to be told that kind of thing.) People who are likely to go wild with them are less likely to get kill roles, or if they do that’s accounted for. People who don’t have issues with dictatorships are less likely to be seekers (at least in my games). Et cetera. Eliminator teams always have at least one experienced player on the team, or enough good middling players to make up for that (except in AG2, which was a larger team of almost entirely the newest players in the game, because Meta is a troll). When you say, then, that we don’t balance for suboptimal playstyle, we most certainly do. And that’s in addition to balancing roles (which is annoying in itself), experienced players, and so on. Furthermore, looking through the SE Stats Spreadsheet, you’ve never played a game broken through distribution. We have had those, although they’re unusual (13 of 87 games, though about 5 games aren’t yet marked). In fact, of the completed games you’ve played, only one has been broken at all - LG35, through mechanics, and that only affected the neutrals, not you. So it makes sense that you would take the good balance of recent games for granted. Individual games can have balancing problems, yes, but I don’t see that as such an issue that it needs special attention to be solved. Please don’t. Balancing is hard and annoying. Until you’ve balanced one yourself or played through a game that wasn’t balanced properly, try not to presume that you know how balancing works, because it feels to GMs (at least, to me) like you’re not appreciating a lot of the work we put into making games fun for everyone. Kolo? That’s the entire point of action restrictions. Forcing you to choose which to use, giving you more options so that you can figure out which is best to use each turn. The optimal action, as it were. No action restrictions can be more fun, yes, in games where there are lots of roles, but I disagree that action restrictions are bad. They force you to make sacrifices. They give you choices so that each player when given a set of actions could play the game differently because they prioritise differently. (Also, if someone has a number of powers and others only have one, it makes the first much less OP compared to everyone else.)

I'll have other comments later that aren't finished yet, but one thing: this has never happened. The closest anyone has ever come to this is LG4 with Gamma, and he didn't do anything against his win condition except keeping the identities of elims a secret (and it isn't exactly fair to have someone tell you all the elims and you just out them to the thread - what fun is that?), and that game was horribly broken anyway. That's the only time that I can ever recall.

Note: Starting tomorrow (technically - though I haven't been around much this cycle either), I'll be going on my annual family camping trip until Sunday. I will still have internet, but likely won't be around as much, since there are slightly more interesting things to do while camping than SE. Apologies. One small comment - They did, actually. Orlok considered multiple times scanning other Alethi - Joe and Asterion come to mind, for instance. He ultimately decided not to, but he was also even more Sons-aligned than I am. And yet he still wanted to scan other Alethi. Small thing, but it irritated me.

I'll address this first, and respond (or respond through Wilson or Orlok, since I suspect one will get there first) to your other points later. Everyone gets something different out of SE. You, obviously, have fun playing competitively. Me? My primary goal is to ensure the game is fun for all players. My secondary objective is to win. But those are objectives. What I enjoy about the game is the people. The friendships. The matching wits against others, the parodies, the RP, the meta narrative. Learning about other people. I met my significant other through SE. That happened because he was interesting to talk to, and so I started talking to him outside games. My friendship with Wilson was similar. Orlok does play to win. He takes joy in playing the optimal way, in analysis and finding players through it, and in causing discussion as much as he possibly can. (If anything, I'd say that his main objective is creating discussion, actually.) He also, however, prioritises fun for other players over any potential not-enjoyable optimum play, because he highly values fun, tolerance of other playstyles, and player independence. Rather than telling others what to do or attacking those who aren't playing in a way he considers optimal, he just asks them what they think and makes the optimal actions on his part to win for his team without impacting other players’ enjoyment. Wilson, on the other hand, plays to have fun. “Fun” depends on the game and her mood. Perhaps fun is analyzing a player who's stolen her attention for all the wrong reasons, or maybe it's writing RP or a parody. Sometimes it's trolling. Other times it's just talking to people or helping newer players. She plays to interact with others, and perhaps learn about herself while she's at it (there's nothing quite like having self-realizations in the middle of an SE game). Winning is a nice bonus, but it's only a secondary motivation. At the end of the day, if the game wasn't fun for her, she feels like she played wrong, even if her team won. So there you have three different reasons for playing. Ask any other players and you'll get that number of players more reasons. But RP and competitiveness are most certainly not the only reasons for people to play.

Which is something the game shouldn't be. If you're actually legitimately stressed about a game, you need to take time to step back and realise that it is only a game and nothing more. Your personal health is more important. That's kind of Wilson's point here - if a game is stressful because you care too much about winning, something is wrong. No one wants to have that kind of stress or cause it, and the easiest way to do that is to make sure that the first priority in a game is having fun. Also, side note, a lot of that is what players with high experience feel all the time. Not all - Joe probably doesn't, and I'm not high enough that I do - but Aman and Wilson, for instance. They feel all eyes are on them to solve the game, to always be right, to be perfect, etc. Wilson's mostly changed that for herself by adopting a less intense playstyle, but that did occur for a long time. You can see why she got annoyed. Or look at Orlok - he solved AG3 completely. He collapsed and was hospitalised doing so because of how much he pushed himself for it. I'd rather not have that happen again, to anyone. So I'm rather a fan of not having stressful games, thank you very much.

Well done, all. Pity I didn't get to play more - I kind of didn't need to, when I woke up about 24 hours into D1 to find that Orlok had found and confirmed every neutral player, and won the game for half of them shortly thereafter. At that point there wasn't much point in doing anything. Props to him, though. Also props to Wilson, for the same reasons as everyone else. That last cycle was fantastic fun. Orlok and I couldn't stop laughing for a very long time. See you all in the next game!

Oh - Orlok. Sorry, Crimsn. Ish. (But also, no one takes Orlok from me. Mine.) Flash, because why not?

Here you go. QF will be mine, and doesn't yet have a setting yet but will be Cosmere.

... Convince me.

Rude. How could you? And after you betrayed me with Crimsn, too. *sniff* Drake. Orlok.

Oh, we're doing that, then? Okay. Araris. Drake.

Hey, why not? I never made any promises to either side. Araris.

Excellent. Sorry, Ghostbloods... rough couple of cycles there. How, exactly, did Cloud use up his protect last cycle and yet survive this cycle? In my mind, he's either the Shardbearer or the Voidbringer. Either of whom I'm interested in dying, thank you. EDIT: Also, attacking me again? Really?

Your loss, then. Perfect communication outside the thread is one of your main advantages. Also revealing the Shardbearer, thus allowing you to eliminate a potential Voidbringer. Or the Voidbringer themselves revealing. I do understand that, yes. Were I in your position I'd vote Jondesu, but that's up to you, and I do understand your reasoning.

It is actually in your interest, Drake - lynching him means you won't have a Ghostbloods spying on your doc, and the Voidbringer obviously has no reason to kill you. You'll be able to communicate with a lot more freedom, certainly. For instance, the Shardbearer could now reveal and you could actually discuss kills and share information freely.

...um? You're making some very conservative guesses there. Personally, my is more like 5 Sons (because the Sons should have roughly the same number of lives as the Parshendi or at least close, and if there's three Voidbringers that's nine lives). I'm also very paranoid still that there's more than one Voidbringer left, and potentially 4 Alethi Ghostbloods, but I'll ignore those for now. You're also making the assumption that the Ghostbloods are willing to vote to save Jondesu at risk of revealing themselves. In this case, though, even if there are significantly more Sons, it doesn't really matter. The numbers remain the same - 5 Parshendi/Voidbringer (of whom Dani is practically inactive), 3 Ghostbloods (one of whom is inactive, though he might be able to come on and vote) make 8, 6 active. Compared to 9 Sons/Alethi, of whom Straw is inactive. In theory Jondesu is lynchable even if another player votes somewhere else, but 7 do have to vote the same and be convinced that Jondesu is a better choice. Which... doesn't seem likely at this point. >> Not true. One, we won't take the same number of kills per cycle unless the Ghostbloods switch or we actually start using the lynch on Parshendi. Ghostbloods and Parshendi kills both hit us (and potentially Voidbringer), and only the Sons hit the Parshendi and the lynch goes who-knows-where. Secondly, we have 11 lives. This isn't counting Shardplate and protection, but I'm guessing most of it has already been used up at this point. You've 6 players. Jon only has one life, and Cloud, and Drake, and whoever protected Len, which makes 8 lives. Plus the Shardbearer and Stormform makes 10. And since we're apparently about to lose Brightness, that takes the Alethi down to exactly equal with the Parshendi (and yes, you can argue that Jon isn't a Parshendi. In which case neither are our two Alethi Ghostbloods). If we want to keep casualties to each side equal, then a Parshendi should be lynched every cycle. I can actually confirm they're currently in Voidbringer form, by the way. I was roleblocked last cycle. (Yay. >>) The scan will come through before they change, so this is one cycle on which you can be certain they'll be in a recognisable form. So Parshendi, if you truly want to catch the Voidbringer in your midst, this cycle is the cycle to do so. Disagreed strongly that Drake's a second Parshendi Ghostblood. It'd be interesting, but I doubt it's the case. Disagreed that the Sons are honorless - only one person made that agreement, and he's kept to it. (I don't know why it was made in the first place, honestly? Jon was getting lynched regardless because he needs to be? But it was.) He certainly doesn't speak for me. The Ghostbloods are more of a threat to us. I completely agree that they're less so to you. Because you're not the one getting killed by them. Very much disagreed that it's in the Alethi interest to kill BR so that the GBs stop going after us. Because one, I doubt they will regardless, two, it's in the Sons' interest to kill Jon just as much as it is in yours and for the same reasons (keeping him alive keeps one of you off the table), and three if she is telling the truth about her role it gives us a chance to find GBs by attacking them. Also, yay Jondesu. That was probably not strategically sound of you, but it's very helpful!