So this game, I think, displayed my strengths and weaknesses as mafia pretty clearly. My major strength as a mafia, I think is seeming to be village while guiding discussion in a mafia-helpful way, and I think I did that this game. Much of my analysis in game was actually directed at trying to pull attention away from TRV and Auralynx while also being true, and I think I did pretty well there.
Things I am bad at, that this game showed:
1. figuring out who specials were. Insofar we were bad at killing specials, that is definitely substantially my fault, because I was doing a lot of directing the kills.
2. No feel or taste for the big bold move. This game was winnable yesterday, and all I had to do was, instead of writing that big long essay in defense of me, say "yo, guys. Jdark's been seered mafia. Time to vote with the village." I think, given what I know now, that would've been a game-winning move. And I considered it! but relatively quickly turned it down in favor of the more cautious move. Urrrrrrrghh.
@CesareB one thing you may not have known is that the mafia kills were aimed via knowing family names and signs. So knowing those things was pretty important to us. Also, I definitely missed that point about facetious in our conversation; I think you definitely got the better of me there.
I was actually trying really, really hard not to think too hard about what you guys needed the signs and names for other than just general knowledge. Otherwise I might have felt bad about passing it on to you. I'm not sure if he ever mentioned it, but I told Auralynx that the mafia were pretty clearly getting rid of "known factors" and I later told TRV that keeping his info secret was probably keeping him alive. I suppose I could have followed that line of reasoning a little further, but luckily I didn't really NEED to know how people were aiming their kills... and I lied about my sign the whole game anyway. :P
Given that you needed information, though, I'm kind of surprised you didn't reach out to me more. You knew I could get that info for you; probably not as quickly as you could get it yourself, but I would have been a really useful resource.
Oh also I didn't really "get the better of you" all that much. I mean I did suspect facetious but I honestly didn't put it together that you had accidentally given me that bit of info until much later.
Had premium not done the work he did, mafia would have one kill a night.
Or one of us would've had to. TRV and me being tied up afk-ish and you going down early was a real problem for that. Invictus might've snaked us some signs, too.
Saber really put a hell of a networking / impersonation burden on the mafia this game, tbqh.
Honestly, I love that shit. I really enjoyed the game and that part of it, though I appreciate the way it went down @premium did a lot of the heavy lifting : ).
Yep. Observation, not complaint. Would have been very pleased if I'd been less out of it!
Fun fact about this game: I was borderline inactive for the last couple days before dying thanks to Real Life Shit. On the day that I died, I intentionally didn't name an heir because I was happier with losing a guard for a day than I was with accidentally giving it to the mafia.
What was not intentional was forgetting to put orders in at all. Oops. So @SLyM, you know how you thought you were guarded that night? Oops.
The thing I liked the most about this game was how the rotating village powers let me in the network when I otherwise wouldn't have gotten in. I really like being networked (it's probably my favourite part of the game) but I don't have any idea how to get into one other than a) shooting off a pm to someone who's known for starting them or b) being mafia. So when I got a pm informing me that I was the new guard and another one saying I had been seered as green, that felt pretty good.
All in all, I had a lot of fun with this game. Thanks for running it, Saber
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I want to point something out. Just because someone dies a special doesnt mean that we need to kill everyone on their fucking dunlist. I know what vert is feeling right now. You guys wasted 3 days crossing off discrider's list.
I want to point something out. Just because someone dies a special doesnt mean that we need to kill everyone on their fucking dunlist. I know what vert is feeling right now. You guys wasted 3 days crossing off discrider's list.
In the village's defense, I was actively trying to get this to happen.
Generalísimo de Fuerzas Armadas de la República Argentina
Mafia needed signs and family names for their kills. We needed to learn them somehow.
This is why handing out private info is insane. It's in the game so bad guys can use it.
In fairness it appears to also have let you guys find ZH.
ZH was me trying to find a rider who I could verify and put down as my successor.
I KNEW that was a seer call in disguise!
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MegafrostLeader of the DecepticonsRegistered Userregular
Oh god. Mafia killed by knowing family name and sign? Premium reached out to me day 1 and I flat out told him "I'm not telling you anything." If I had lived past day 1...
I want to point something out. Just because someone dies a special doesnt mean that we need to kill everyone on their fucking dunlist. I know what vert is feeling right now. You guys wasted 3 days crossing off discrider's list.
I want to point something out. Just because someone dies a special doesnt mean that we need to kill everyone on their fucking dunlist. I know what vert is feeling right now. You guys wasted 3 days crossing off discrider's list.
The mafia was the only one who paid attention to discrider's list (go back and check, TRV and Aura were the cornerstones - both mafia), but you voting for me didn't give me any choice of an alternate wagon.
Oh god. Mafia killed by knowing family name and sign? Premium reached out to me day 1 and I flat out told him "I'm not telling you anything." If I had lived past day 1...
Oh god. Mafia killed by knowing family name and sign? Premium reached out to me day 1 and I flat out told him "I'm not telling you anything." If I had lived past day 1...
I said I was the vig, but unless the mafia had more info than I thought there was no way to know which sign that went to
Yup, looking back, we got that info some other way, probably by you trading it day 1. For some reason I had it stuck in my head you had revealed your sign publicly.
Generalísimo de Fuerzas Armadas de la República Argentina
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ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
Once again, thanks to everyone for playing! I'm glad to see that people enjoyed this one. A few thoughts from my end:
Origins - This game really has it's genesis in my info gatherer role in INANTP's phalla of cables. It's still one of my favorite roles and I'd been trying for a while to create a game where I could use it. We had a run of regenerating special games last year, which is where I got the idea to bring together information to gather with regenerating specials. As I kept rolling the thought around in my head, I really liked all of the other things that framework gave me. It took a while to get a story around the framework, but as I ended up reading about the mongols and the ottomans, I finally got things put together.
Goals - Everyone knows I hate seers (more on that in a bit), but I also really like to encourage soft networking and discussion. In this game, I also wanted to see if I could get a few other ideas in. The village is often focused much more on finding mafia than they are on finding villagers. I think both are important, and I wanted the inheritance mechanic to encourage villagers to prove their village-ness (hopefully with discussion!) and the village network to focus as much on who they trusted as who they didn't. I also wanted to give the mafia a good reason to kill players that wasn't "X is good at phalla." One of the perils of having success as a villager is that it will start getting you killed on day 1 or 2, and then you just don't get to play very much. On the other hand, killing the good people is a successful strategy for the mafia. By restricting their kills to people they could get information on and making specials a huge priority, I wanted to encourage the mafia to kill people based on their role in this game, not on their success in others. Finally, as a personal goal, I wanted to get better at writing narration. Story has been something my games have lacked before, and I think it's an amazingly important part of phalla. Ultimately, I think it's one of the major difference between playing phalla here and playing online mafia somewhere else.
Seers - "OMG! Saber hates seers!" While the death miller seer may yet make a comeback, I tried a subtler approach in this game. With inheritance, the seer really needed to focus on finding villagers to pass specials on to. Seering a mafia also had an opportunity cost for the village, because it meant that there was a special with an unconfirmed heir. With the natural turnover in specials, especially any that went public, that meant that the seer was always going to be scrambling to find someone to pass powers on to. At no point in the game did the village ever have more than three people seered, which I was happy with. Further complicating things for the village was the inability to verify seers after the initial seer died. The riders (seer sign) were by far the smallest group (5 initially, compared to 10 sky/guard and 14 horse/vig) and if the mafia focused on them, it would be fairly straightforward to whittle down their numbers. If the village focused on confirming riders, that meant not having confirmed guard/vig heirs. I wanted to village to have to balance what they knew and have a certain amount of uncertainty.
The Bucket Problem - Whenever you have a game where villagers are divided up into categories, you run into the bucket problem. ZH talked about this a bit on the mafia proboard, but it's something that I thought about a good deal while designing things as well. At it's essence, the bucket problem is this: when you can divide up the game into categories, you can use those categories to figure out how the mafia are distributed then take that information to easily find mafia/confirm villagers. Buckets come in a lot of flavors. Classes (such as in Dungeon Crawl or Unknown Armies) are one. Factions or teams (Phallympics and Survivor are two games that come to mind) are another. I tried to get around this in three ways: 1. Making really large bucket for the horse and sky, meaning the only bucket the village could use until the very end would be Rider. 2. Making it costly for seers and vigs to concentrate on a single bucket. I talked about seers in the item above. For vigs, eliminating players from a small pool also means killing back-up for your specials. 3. Allowing the mafia to counter-bucket. I figured the mafia could use their knowledge of signs (gained either through soft-network trading or from Cesare) to also narrow down the specials. Since they KNEW who was mafia, they would be shooting at a much higher percentage than the village. They also had more kills and had less of an incentive to keep back-up for specials around.
A few more general thoughts:
- I underestimated how willing villagers would be to share signs on day 1. In the other games I've run/played in, people have been fairly willing to give out information. I tried to make sure that villagers had a reason to share spelled out in the OP, but I think the value proposition just wasn't quite enough.
- That also made Cesare's job a lot harder. With people being unwilling to share signs, that made the most straightforward trade he could do (give me your family name and I'll tell you who else has your sign) a non-starter for most people. I think Cesare did a great job with the hand that he had, particularly in convincing the village network that he really WAS neutral and not mafia fishing for information.
- I wanted to keep the village network underground for the most part. Having a visible and public network is a quick way to kill conversation. Using double-taps to keep them from going public was my way of getting the village thinking, as well as encouraging the mafia to hunt specials.
Overall, I think the village strategy (hide who's a special, find trustworthy heirs) ended up being a bit more obvious and easier to implement than the mafia strategy (figure out specials, make sure they die a lot). I knew the village would have better sign info, but I expected the mafia to have a good deal as well. I mentioned before that I thought the village would be more willing to trade that information early, and when that ended up not being true, it hurt Cesare and the mafia. While I knew the village strategy would be more obvious (it's almost spelled out in the OP/Role PM), I expected the mafia's superior numbers and trust to balance that out. The village network had to constantly make decisions about who to trust and pass thing along to that the mafia didn't need to worry so much about. The mafia getting the guard or vig even once would have been a major game changer.
Once again, thanks for playing everyone! I hope you enjoyed it. I've got a few ideas for refinement, and we may be seeing a return to the world of Choregus in the near future.
So who was it that day one'd me anyway? I need to add another name to the list.
You were the only family name we had because you accidentally gave it to premium. So you were our only option on that side. I advise you blame Saber, for structurally requiring that we vig you.
Generalísimo de Fuerzas Armadas de la República Argentina
So who was it that day one'd me anyway? I need to add another name to the list.
You were the only family name we had because you accidentally gave it to premium. So you were our only option on that side. I advise you blame Saber, for structurally requiring that we vig you.
So who was it that day one'd me anyway? I need to add another name to the list.
You were the only family name we had because you accidentally gave it to premium. So you were our only option on that side. I advise you blame Saber, for structurally requiring that we vig you.
premium and Invictus... noted.
// PSN: wyrd_warrior // MHW Name: Josei //
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ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
I think you definitely met your goals for this game. Tight mechanics that facilitated all the best parts of Phalla without getting in the way. The narrations were amazing. And most importantly it was a blast.
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Sorry!
We had to kill someone who gave me info because of the way our kills worked
It wasn't a very big list to choose from
3DS: 1289-8447-4695
I was actually trying really, really hard not to think too hard about what you guys needed the signs and names for other than just general knowledge. Otherwise I might have felt bad about passing it on to you. I'm not sure if he ever mentioned it, but I told Auralynx that the mafia were pretty clearly getting rid of "known factors" and I later told TRV that keeping his info secret was probably keeping him alive. I suppose I could have followed that line of reasoning a little further, but luckily I didn't really NEED to know how people were aiming their kills... and I lied about my sign the whole game anyway. :P
Given that you needed information, though, I'm kind of surprised you didn't reach out to me more. You knew I could get that info for you; probably not as quickly as you could get it yourself, but I would have been a really useful resource.
Oh also I didn't really "get the better of you" all that much. I mean I did suspect facetious but I honestly didn't put it together that you had accidentally given me that bit of info until much later.
Anyway, good work village, great game Saber!
Why did I survive so long?
3DS Friend Code: 3110-5393-4113
Steam profile
Yep. Observation, not complaint. Would have been very pleased if I'd been less out of it!
What was not intentional was forgetting to put orders in at all. Oops. So @SLyM, you know how you thought you were guarded that night? Oops.
The thing I liked the most about this game was how the rotating village powers let me in the network when I otherwise wouldn't have gotten in. I really like being networked (it's probably my favourite part of the game) but I don't have any idea how to get into one other than a) shooting off a pm to someone who's known for starting them or b) being mafia. So when I got a pm informing me that I was the new guard and another one saying I had been seered as green, that felt pretty good.
All in all, I had a lot of fun with this game. Thanks for running it, Saber
Friend Safari: Fighting - Machoke, Pancham, Riolu | In game name: Jessica
Official Weather Gym Leader of the G+T Pokémon League. @me to try for the Climate Badge!
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
In fairness it appears to also have let you guys find ZH.
In the village's defense, I was actively trying to get this to happen.
ZH was me trying to find a rider who I could verify and put down as my successor.
Did you know he was a rider pre-seering? Seemed like you did.
As an aside, every single person that contacted me after I put out my sign was village.
I KNEW that was a seer call in disguise!
@obifett There will be words. Bold, red words.
I was so happy when this happened
Edit: Check it out:
Day 5
Grunt's Ghosts (7) - TheRoadVirus (1549), Gizzy (1555), Auralynx (1559), undergroundmonorail (1706), jdarksun (2226), SLyM (2326), Invictus (2350)
jdarksun (4) - facetious (1445), Grunt's Ghosts (1613), vertroue (2207), CesareB (2324)
Cythraul (1) - Invictus (1648), Preda (2208)
TheRoadVirus (1) - kime (1206), Gizzy (1435)
SLyM (1) - buddha73 (1528)
Preda (1) - TheRoadVirus (1240), Cythraul (1706)
vertroue (0) - Preda (0928)
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
heh, I was hoping it would make the mafia think there wasn't a seer or at least question it for a bit longer
hey man, the mafia got no info from me
stop being so suspicious!
False. You told us your sign. (you also told everybody else) We had to seer your family to double-tap you.
BTW, were you guarded that night? we assumed you would be.
and I had to start talking signs early since I was special. I needed to find another horse to pass it on to. What do you mean I "told everyone else"?
Didn't you publicly announce you were the chosen of the horse, i.e. the vig?
Yup, looking back, we got that info some other way, probably by you trading it day 1. For some reason I had it stuck in my head you had revealed your sign publicly.
UNLOCK YOUR PROBOARDS
though premium had already done it
on it now.
Origins - This game really has it's genesis in my info gatherer role in INANTP's phalla of cables. It's still one of my favorite roles and I'd been trying for a while to create a game where I could use it. We had a run of regenerating special games last year, which is where I got the idea to bring together information to gather with regenerating specials. As I kept rolling the thought around in my head, I really liked all of the other things that framework gave me. It took a while to get a story around the framework, but as I ended up reading about the mongols and the ottomans, I finally got things put together.
Goals - Everyone knows I hate seers (more on that in a bit), but I also really like to encourage soft networking and discussion. In this game, I also wanted to see if I could get a few other ideas in. The village is often focused much more on finding mafia than they are on finding villagers. I think both are important, and I wanted the inheritance mechanic to encourage villagers to prove their village-ness (hopefully with discussion!) and the village network to focus as much on who they trusted as who they didn't. I also wanted to give the mafia a good reason to kill players that wasn't "X is good at phalla." One of the perils of having success as a villager is that it will start getting you killed on day 1 or 2, and then you just don't get to play very much. On the other hand, killing the good people is a successful strategy for the mafia. By restricting their kills to people they could get information on and making specials a huge priority, I wanted to encourage the mafia to kill people based on their role in this game, not on their success in others. Finally, as a personal goal, I wanted to get better at writing narration. Story has been something my games have lacked before, and I think it's an amazingly important part of phalla. Ultimately, I think it's one of the major difference between playing phalla here and playing online mafia somewhere else.
Seers - "OMG! Saber hates seers!" While the death miller seer may yet make a comeback, I tried a subtler approach in this game. With inheritance, the seer really needed to focus on finding villagers to pass specials on to. Seering a mafia also had an opportunity cost for the village, because it meant that there was a special with an unconfirmed heir. With the natural turnover in specials, especially any that went public, that meant that the seer was always going to be scrambling to find someone to pass powers on to. At no point in the game did the village ever have more than three people seered, which I was happy with. Further complicating things for the village was the inability to verify seers after the initial seer died. The riders (seer sign) were by far the smallest group (5 initially, compared to 10 sky/guard and 14 horse/vig) and if the mafia focused on them, it would be fairly straightforward to whittle down their numbers. If the village focused on confirming riders, that meant not having confirmed guard/vig heirs. I wanted to village to have to balance what they knew and have a certain amount of uncertainty.
The Bucket Problem - Whenever you have a game where villagers are divided up into categories, you run into the bucket problem. ZH talked about this a bit on the mafia proboard, but it's something that I thought about a good deal while designing things as well. At it's essence, the bucket problem is this: when you can divide up the game into categories, you can use those categories to figure out how the mafia are distributed then take that information to easily find mafia/confirm villagers. Buckets come in a lot of flavors. Classes (such as in Dungeon Crawl or Unknown Armies) are one. Factions or teams (Phallympics and Survivor are two games that come to mind) are another. I tried to get around this in three ways: 1. Making really large bucket for the horse and sky, meaning the only bucket the village could use until the very end would be Rider. 2. Making it costly for seers and vigs to concentrate on a single bucket. I talked about seers in the item above. For vigs, eliminating players from a small pool also means killing back-up for your specials. 3. Allowing the mafia to counter-bucket. I figured the mafia could use their knowledge of signs (gained either through soft-network trading or from Cesare) to also narrow down the specials. Since they KNEW who was mafia, they would be shooting at a much higher percentage than the village. They also had more kills and had less of an incentive to keep back-up for specials around.
A few more general thoughts:
- I underestimated how willing villagers would be to share signs on day 1. In the other games I've run/played in, people have been fairly willing to give out information. I tried to make sure that villagers had a reason to share spelled out in the OP, but I think the value proposition just wasn't quite enough.
- That also made Cesare's job a lot harder. With people being unwilling to share signs, that made the most straightforward trade he could do (give me your family name and I'll tell you who else has your sign) a non-starter for most people. I think Cesare did a great job with the hand that he had, particularly in convincing the village network that he really WAS neutral and not mafia fishing for information.
- I wanted to keep the village network underground for the most part. Having a visible and public network is a quick way to kill conversation. Using double-taps to keep them from going public was my way of getting the village thinking, as well as encouraging the mafia to hunt specials.
Overall, I think the village strategy (hide who's a special, find trustworthy heirs) ended up being a bit more obvious and easier to implement than the mafia strategy (figure out specials, make sure they die a lot). I knew the village would have better sign info, but I expected the mafia to have a good deal as well. I mentioned before that I thought the village would be more willing to trade that information early, and when that ended up not being true, it hurt Cesare and the mafia. While I knew the village strategy would be more obvious (it's almost spelled out in the OP/Role PM), I expected the mafia's superior numbers and trust to balance that out. The village network had to constantly make decisions about who to trust and pass thing along to that the mafia didn't need to worry so much about. The mafia getting the guard or vig even once would have been a major game changer.
Once again, thanks for playing everyone! I hope you enjoyed it. I've got a few ideas for refinement, and we may be seeing a return to the world of Choregus in the near future.
You're not the only one Kaplar
You were the only family name we had because you accidentally gave it to premium. So you were our only option on that side. I advise you blame Saber, for structurally requiring that we vig you.
either I'm dumb or I don't have access to the settings to unlock the proboards.
I see what you did there Invictus!
premium and Invictus... noted.
I think you definitely met your goals for this game. Tight mechanics that facilitated all the best parts of Phalla without getting in the way. The narrations were amazing. And most importantly it was a blast.
Thanks for running this!