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[Phalla] indie-series: Hot Potato - Village Victory | MrT is HoPo Champion
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Since the vote winner is removed from the game prior to the round starting, you will instead have to think on your feet quickly and will be forced to turn your Focus towards a random active player.
Yeah, that might actually be better as well. The game won't start till Monday at the earliest so I have time to decide which option is better.
RNG targeting is kinda crappy in general so avoiding that might be best.
That said, such a strategy also has the potential to cascade, where the mafia do nothing because they're high on the list compared to the vote target, and the block of villagers at the bottom of the list all die off as the potatoes hit the end of the line.
RNG foils this strategy, but also makes the game very hard to read.
If everyone knows when a potato has passed by them, then a circle strategy becomes viable regardless of RNG or nullification of passes. You can tell when the potato leaves the ordered sequence as people downstream fail to receive the potato, and assume that that person is either a mafia or just a villager who doesn't want to work with the town. RNG has the slight possibility of reforming the sequence by targeting the immediate downstream player from the deviant player, but considering multiple potatoes are going to be handed round at once, it's unlikely to hide all the errors.
If potato passes aren't known, then it becomes a bit trickier. If passes to the vote leader are annulled, then you can get a vague indication of where the deviant is in the cycle by how many players are eliminated from the end of the sequence compared to total deaths. The further down the order the deviant sits, the more potatoes are rerouted away from the bottom. It's also likely that such missing potatoes would then hit the leaders of the list just to minimise the chance of potato backfilling killing the rerouter. As potatoes are unlikely to all pass by the list leader, any of these potatoes thrown back to him would be passed down the list again, reducing the chance of his death and that of the person targeting him.
However, in the last scenario with RNG, potatoes just fly everywhere and no-one is safe.
1. Getting everyone to do something in phalla is almost impossible. All you would need is one villager targeting someone out of order and it could throw the whole circle off.
2. If specials are using potatoes, you'd run a very high risk of either exposing or killing them. Since it is unclear whether a special could also redirect, they'd likely be the place where a potato stops. This is even worse if the mafia have some sort of "killer potato"
3. It's a Saturday night and I just got home from the bar. I may be wrong.
With 2, I'd expect that everyone can always redirect, otherwise, special or no, they'd not have made it this far into the HoPo pro leagues. But it's still a good point.
This is why it wouldn't be a circle. It would instead be A->B->C->D->E->A where D is voted out beforehand. Then if there is no RNG, B and C die. E and A might be laughing, but the order would be set before the vote and at random. You'd have vote manipulation from everybody to prevent the chain ending just after them, for example B and C were probably voting A the prior day, but this shouldn't be that severe early game, and the tie rules discourage last minute shenanigans anyhow.
This is purely theoretical of course, and I wholly suspect that the match is going to just wind up being an uncoordinated potato slinging fest.
Let's also say that host PMs only mention if something affects someone and makes no mention of abilities that are bus driven off (aka the player is not told that F bus drove a kill on them and that they drove that to H). Also let's also assume in such a scenario, that no one is told that they were targeted by a bus drive. This leads to scenarios that allows people to lie. So E could be a baddie, and directly target B with a bus drive action that results in B dying a horrible death. A won't have the defense of saying that they never got a PM stating that someone bus drove onto them.
Even if we get a PM that states we were targeted by a bus drive, this falls apart if the mafia have a kill that doesn't eat someone's action for the night and can't be bus driven (quite common in phalla). D eats the mafia kill, well it turns out that C is also mafia, C could argue they wouldn't be that dumb and that maybe the kill wasn't something that could be driven and didn't originate with them. Now C knows that D is likely to die that night, so C targets H and it just happens to result in the vig kill be driven in such a manner that it gets J killed (maybe the kill can only jump from so many players or J was a nub and forgot to submit orders).
Originally I was thinking you could look at the dead zones formed by the potato kills and see what areas of the circle are likely to have be skipped and work out who shirked their target. But then I realised that whoever's at the end (C in the example) is unlikely to just lay down and die. So the vote leader would not even be a part of the circle in the first place, as C would aim at the top of the list to avoid having their target die from the first potato.
This means that, if everyone tells the truth and does their part aside from C, the people handed potatoes at the beginning of the round would die to them at the end of potato passing, and that information would be useless.
If C were more willing to die, then you could look at who died and how many potatoes hit that area of the list. So if you had 6 potatoes going around and only 2 made it to C (and B ), then you could guess that someone about 2/3rds of the way down the list diverted potatoes to another player, assuming a random distribution. If the potatoes are put into the circle by players however, this distribution need not be random at all. The player wouldn't need to divert all the potatoes though. A player diverting potatoes 1/3 the way down the list would be camouflaged by the player diverting 2/3 the way down the list. You might be able to figure out which potatoes landed roughly where by the people they eliminate (someone lower in the order would die to potatoes that started lower in the order as people who started higher than that potato in the list would still have their bus driving power available for that potato), but it seems like a long shot.
Actually only C would die in that case because B would still throw to C. The kills will always end up either hitting their target, or at the end of the chain, to back to themselves (assuming a simultaneous resolution where all potatoes are thrown before exploding)
I'm inclined to believe that all kill abilities will drop potatoes, and that potatoes will therefore not stack, as otherwise all the potatoes are liable to wind up on the same target each and every round. Not much fun being a SK if the only target always dies regardless of what you do.
Im not a part of your system!
So look for an initial narration and PMs tonight.
Or being a mafia.
Or Prime throwing away his life recklessly.
It's when two potatoes get passed to them twice that stuff happens.
"Welcome to the Hot Potato World Championships Pregame show on ESPN 8, THE OCHO! I'm Russet Stevens."
-"and I'm George Idaho!"
"And wow do we have an amazing event in store for you today. The most physically and mentally skilled players from all across the globe have gathered today to show their Hot Potato prowess in an attempt to take home the coveted Golden Masher and title of HoPo Champion of 2013."
"That's right Russet. Right now we can see kime warming up on the court. And of course he is known for always claiming to be the Heater."
"Its worked out well for him in the past, as he has a Hot Potato throw rate of nearly .698, one of the highest in the sport!"
"And there's TheRoadVirus, one of the most talkative players in the game. Known as one of the great distractors of our time, his ability to make other players laugh and smile generally keeps the potatoes from flying his way. "
"An all time low targeted rate shows he knows what he is doing. Although I'm not sure how effective it will be around all the other top players in the game."
"Speaking of, it looks like all of our players have made it to the court. Lets go over the rules for those at home."
"Will do, George. Hot Potato is played over a number of rounds until either one player is left or a game state is reached where there would be no players left in the next round, at which time we would have co-champions. The game starts with every player having a stash of Potatoes in front of them."
"Well, they aren't actual Potatoes."
"No of course not. Two decades ago the game went electronic. So the stash of Potatoes is actually a basket of digitally controlled RFID units made to look like Potatoes and act like the different types of potatoes used in the original game. With some new types thrown in during the past decade or so."
"I'd like to see someone take a bite of those."
"I bet you would. As I was saying, every player starts with a stash of Inactive Potatoes in front of them. When the round starts, some of those Potatoes will glow red, marking them as Active. Its the job of the player at that time to get rid of every Active Potato in their stash by throwing it at another player. Each round has a randomly determined time limit. All players left holding an Active Potato revealed as HOT when the round ends will be eliminated. Pretty simple."
"Russet! You left out the most important parts. What about the Heaters? The Coolers? The Splitters? Or the Nodes?"
"Well that's the fun part of watching Hot Potato, I think. Learning about the roles that may or may not be in the game this time. No two games have the same types of potatoes in the same distribution. Its a puzzle for everyone involved and watching. I wouldn't want to take that away from the viewers at home. I will tell them that the digital armbands the players are wearing are for more than just tracking the movement of the Potatoes and ensuring an accurate Hold status when the time ends. There are tricks given to specific randomly chosen players. See if you can figure out who is doing what!"
"We are going to do our best to help you do just that. We will be giving you a very detailed play-by-play of every round."
"Exactly, George. Speaking of, it looks like the first round is about to begin!"
____________________________
Day 1 ends at 10pm MST on Tuesday. Vote to remove someone from the game with a red vote
All actions should be submitted in the same PM that you received your role.
Role PMs are going out now
The vote winner is an invalid target for all powers. It will be as if you didn't use your power that round.
Based on the villager power "Focus": They would throw each Potato they haven't already thrown.
No.
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Day 1 starts now and ends tomorrow at 10pm MST.
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