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Survivor: [Phalla]ppines - Reserves welcome!
Posts
Rysk really was just an honest mixup. He thought he had ordered to consume 2 of the units but actually ordered 3. That mistake should have been obvious to the people with the formulas, particularly because he had 55 energy, and how that worked was in the OP. However, because no one simply said "it sounds like you consumed 3 units, not 2" but said "you're lying that doesn't add up!" Rysk never checked his PM.
And yeah, I realized that comment was a mistake about an hour after I said it.
The thing I was super worried you would think about related to that was "Wait, why am I still alive?"
There were precisely three scenarios where the mafia wouldn't have killed at least one of us, I think:
1) We were both mafia, so duh
2) You were mafia, and you needed me for the F5 vote
3) I was mafia, and I needed you for the F5 vote
So then I thought that you had a reasonable belief that EITHER warban and Anialos were both mafia or smoove and I were (that post... did not make me happy; neither did your theory that the mafia assigned teams). I think in that situation, if it were me, I'd hedge my bets. Vote out publicly whoever one of the two sides was pushing for (either warban or myself) and then privately vote out a member of the other pair (smoove or Ani). That way, you at least get the game to the jury vote, and you hope the jury picks the right candidate.
The nice thing was that as long as we could keep the public vote on warban, we had a guarantee of at *least* rocks with the private vote. So in case you switched your vote to Ani at some point as I kind of screwed up in ways I figured would give me away today, I suggested this to smoove:
I figure T_A lied because of all the "KILL THE IDOL SEARCHERS/HIGH INT PEOPLE" pre-game talk from no less than three members of his team.
What I like about this is this is exactly what I would have done as a villager. Math dork/exploit hunter awaaaaaaay!
I got executed for a lack of posting, and I guess it was mostly from frustration leading to a lack of interest. I didn't really have much information to work with, especially since no one I was actually watching was mafia. I can understand the reason for not forcing the mafia to split up. However, it really makes it kind of disappointing to know that my guesses were not wrong in large part to the fact that it was a trick question.
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Mafia started with an idol.
I actually think that with some mechanics tweaks this game could be interesting with no mafia at all, just as a straight up survivor game. Coming in with only the most cursory knowledge of the show there seems to be some really interesting game theory elements beneath the surface.
I was thinking this too, and I know the show. The problem here is that the main thread would be totally barren until day 7. Also, it would take a two week commitment from the players.
Basically, what you'd need:
1) Re-work the gathering/energy/shelter mechanics to make stuff not quite so abusable. I have ideas on this.
2) Each tribe gets a proboard to sequester them from each other until the merge. And then a jury proboard.
3) Reward challenges as a way to gain bonus energy (pure food rewards), bonuses to food gathering (fishing equipment), shelter (tarp), or whatever. I would also add randomly distributed idol clues at the rewards which would give a significant (and increasing/clue) boost to idol searching.
4) Each day in the thread there would be some narration of general trends, but nothing specific and then challenge recaps and the vote recap.
5) You'd have Probsty questions on the proboards of the losing teams, who would be required to answer the questions directed at them, though they wouldn't have to be honest, obviously.
I'd be willing to work with MrT to refine it if he were interested.
On the show, do the stronger competitors start to get voted out towards the end? It occurred to me that if we had been more successful at finding mafia members, competitors who were motivated to achieve the secondary win condition might try to arrange the demise of people who they felt the jury would favor over them. That would have been an interesting wrinkle.
...Really? Why?
I mean, wouldn't having the mafia potentially look for an idol and then get caught slacking be one of the main ways of finding mafia?
Phase 1: Weed out the chaff. This is where you eliminate the old, the nerdy, and the people (usually interpreted by the cast as pretty young girls) who are just there to jump start their acting careers. Your goal here is to build a strong team so you make the merge with an advantage.
Phase 2: Purge out the unloyal. Anyone you've alienated must be removed before the merge.
(Merge)
Phase 3: The Pagonging. Where the team who enters the merge with more players annihilates the other team (named for the name of the team in the first season, Pagong, who was eliminated one by one by a still allied other team). This can be broken up by the people on the bottom of the pecking order on the strong team, idols, or irrational backstabbing by morons.
Phase 4: Wrangling for jury votes. Here you want to eliminate everyone the jury might like that is not you.
There are two super interesting things about Survivor as a concept: 1) The social part. It's a really extreme situation that causes a heightening of emotions. 2) The endgame. You need to end people's chances to win a million dollars in such a way that they then give you a million dollars. This has the nice side effect that assholes very rarely win Survivor. Cocky bastards, yes, but actual assholes? It's happened like once.
Because we're the producers, we made the damn things, we get to keep one.
That one makes thematic sense, but gameplay I agree not so much.
It was a balance issue. I was going back and forth between 3 and 4 mafia, eventually deciding on 3 mafia plus an idol.
If people are interested in this, I would definitely put in the work to make the mechanics more relevant and balanced. As it was, it was basically just a way to give villagers something to do and try to have some kind of tribe rivalry going.
THB bought fully into the two mafia per side camp and we spent the entire game looking for our traitors. Oops.
"no they won't you're dumb"
*villagers lie and work towards their own goals*
I made post after post saying that a public vote wasn't going to be productive, and it wasn't. The only thing that came out of it was "catching fab in a lie", when actually, he wasn't lying. It was just a happy coincidence.
Chasing perceived liars just killed more villagers, while all the mafia had to do was exactly what ebum and smoove did - be very public and not do anything untoward against the village.
Except, it wasn't clearly the right move, and there were plenty of reasons that I was pointing out why it was not clearly correct.
And then when the village reasonably assumes mafia on each side, the public vote becomes a mafia kill too.
There was also very little reason for mafia to slip up with daily tasks. They started with an idol? No need to go searching. And food/shelter was a non-issue for them. Genuinely helping out their tribe worked entirely in their favour since they stacked the teams.
So the tools present to find mafia were never going to find mafia. The village would have been better served just forgetting about the mechanics and playing phalla, hunting through vote records and forum posts. Except even that was hard because everyone has their proboards to hide on.
Thanks for hosting, MrT! Was a fun game. Great theme.
If the villagers would not have lied or had managed to read their order PMs/remember what they wrote, we would have had a lot less issues with that and could have focused on other things, perhaps even finding ebum and Smoove.
And while I get the idea that "I lied to you for your own safety! to try and protect the idol from the mafia", it probably wasn't the best strategy, Anon. First, a clarification on what happens when you die would reveal if the entire thing was even worthwhile (which, unfortunately, turned out it wasn't). Then, you didn't admit that you lied, but instead just waited till you got caught. Imagine if someone came out to be the vig, and when the vote closed, they called their target on Bob. But when the results came up, Bob didn't die. Then the "vig" tells you "I actually killed Fred, who died, but I lied to you so the mafia wouldn't block it." You think anyone would believe him?
In general, lying, when everyone will be able to see if you are lying or not, is a good way to get yourself killed.
Oh yeah, thanks for hosting MrT! I had a good time
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I find it amusing that that early plan of "just kill all of Team Wilson!" would have worked
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Our team wasn't all high INT, actually. It was probably just that the few who did have high INT were with us. For all we knew, Wilson had a couple people with high INT, too.
no one knew this? based on what we knew, there was no reason to believe any of that was incorrect.
this...was my entire point? People will do things that mess up a public game.
The one gamebreaking thing that allowed ebum and I to skate through the game was the 2/2 split assumption. The only things we really had to do was (1) use our kill to ensure that Wilson had the advantage in the challenges, (2) keep Wilson with 1 or 2 more people than THB so that we didn't run out of THB vote targets AND it was still statistically preferable to vote out THB than Wilson, and (3) be good and helpful villagers. I thought it was strange that the assumption stuck around as long as it did, especially when the early theorycrafting seemed solid enough that folks wouldn't lean so heavily on that big of an assumption.
Teuc and JDark were both dangerous for us to keep around, but we knew that we needed someone else to "lead the village" for us. We kept JDark because he seemed to trust ebum fairly implicitly for most of the game. Also, @jdarksun, I knew that you would be looking really hard at me and warban when it came down to it, so I was trying any subtle ways I could think of to gently nudge you towards warban.
Also also, I really was juggling this game while dealing with contractors and moving the family to a hotel while our floors got finished. We're still at the hotel actually. I lie in-game, but I don't want y'all to think I lie about outside of the game stuff to make myself look less mafia-y. I'm not that shitty.
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If anything good came of it, its that the 2/2 mafia split assumption dictated that there was only 1 mafia left on our team, and so THB became the more fertile hunting ground.
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They had to have at least one person with high INT - Teucrian, if I recall correctly, as you and he went up against each other in the puzzle challenge where Kime died. You had a 4 INT and should have won that if Teucrian didn't also have a high INT - instead, we still lost.
Aidan Twosouls, Dwarf Shaman, in Vale of Buried Shadows
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In that challenge, everyone else's Dex was also taken into account, though less materially (mostly a kind of tiebreaker). The real killer was that Teucrian had 100 energy going into the challenge and Figgy didn't, making his effective Int actually lower than Teucrian's.
Aidan Twosouls, Dwarf Shaman, in Vale of Buried Shadows
That was the night we realized that didn't matter. Shelter was, like communism, a red herring.