@MrT, I was being honest about wanting to endorse you. I want to give a shout out to anyone that can logic the entire mafia on Day 3 and then continually back up your reasoning for getting there. I obviously couldn't just give in to you, so I had to often times argue absurd things to try to shed whatever bad light I could manage. I actually put a lot of thought into my archery list. It would have been quite nice if someone hadn't submitted a damn good list late in the day that ruined things a bit. Even still, I didn't think it would give you that much information. I didn't realized that everyone in the damn list was going to get to know what place they got. I thought gold, silver, bronze would know due to the medal and the rest of the people would have to guess correctly to know how far behind that they were.
Thanks for running this saber. I know that a lot of work went into everything. I still maintain that you are a masochist
I'm really not too sure how we ended up winning this one. I understand the inactivity and what not, but most of the medals could have been counted out. In fact, it should have been public knowledge that I had a gold if you were paying attention. Most of the events, we didn't know the entire medal order because of infiltration the other teams. Most of the events, we knew that because one of us on the cheater team spent several hours tabulating the event itself.
I think that would have been possible with every event besides marathon. I think that was the only event where we used our inside information to know the medal orders.
Now combining that with MrT's list and also spreadsheeting for who had already done which event.... not only should you have been able to figure out the true standing for your team, but you might have had a good guess who the participators for the marathon were. I remember one such "oh this person has only competed in one event that we know of, he is prob a marathon person"
Now then. There should have been a better way to deal with cheaters. The public vote was not enough. Since there was only one kill for non-cheaters, people had to treat the vote like their faction kill.
The testing should have been a true public seer. All it did was late game give us a cheap way of guarding ourselves from the vote. The flip side of that however, is that 4 kills or 4 public seers, or both in this game might have made the cheaters underpowered. I think that could have been fixed with a cheater special ability that isn't; a seer or kill (or a way of obscuring one of the seers)
I had a blast though, but I really gotta hand it to my fellow cheaters. They did a lot of work to make sure we had a lot of information about the events and could choose kills appropriately. I really only spreadsheeted the vote a few days and ran the archery lists. They did a lot of deep thread scouring.
Kilnaga gets my vote for MVP for counting all the thread mentions and figuring out we could up BL to two of the medals
Also saber this was one of the most dramatastic phallas I've ever seen
Phalla Awards inc?
I think I have too many structural issues with it to consider it Phalla Award-y. I think teams needed a way to clean their own ranks somehow (like every other day the testing would have been honest or something). Obviously, then, archery would have had to be altered (like... moved to day 6). The marathon was just a dumb event overall, I think. All of the events should have been public.
I think the public events were actually what made this not very phalla. This really was a game of diplomacy with unbalanced teams. As Alegis said, everyone (myself included) underestimated the value of the mafia kill, and underestimated them in general because of the huge inactivus early in the game. In reality, they were way overpowered, but that would have been fine if everyone were smart about it because it's a faction game.
This was essentially a full-information game (or at least it would have been if anyone would listen to me), which is really against the heart of what phalla is about.
Yeah, as I was telling inantp, the public nature of the events directly contradicted the need and purpose of secret names. There was no guessing on anyone's part about who won, because the events were easy to tally and track. If the events had been all private, it would have gone a long way to being more phalla-y.
Was Team B:L the only team that actually kicked the cheaters out of their proboard? >_>
In fairness, days 4-7 I kind of downplayed the potential accuracy of my list, thinking that if no one else believed me that would be an advantage we could exploit. Not until the last day did I really push people to vote out a cheater because I knew we had to (just didn't know that it was already too late).
Erin The RedThe Name's Erin! Woman, Podcaster, Dungeon Master, IT nerd, Parent, Trans. AMABaton Rouge, LARegistered Userregular
I didn't do much. Just contributed a bit of the narration for a few days. This was saber's monumental undertaking, and I commend him for all of it. Post counting and all that is enough to make my brain bleed.
Thanks to saber and TRV for running, to egos for shepherding team infidel to an almost victory, and damn jdark for his dulcet lying tones. Much apologies to ahava for likely aggravating her further, I will have make it up to her at PAX with some sort of supplication.
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
Thanks to saber and TRV for running, to egos for shepherding team infidel to an almost victory, and damn jdark for his dulcet lying tones. Much apologies to ahava for likely aggravating her further, I will have make it up to her at PAX with some sort of supplication.
Hey! I did much of the coordinating, just sucked at the actual event winning.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Thanks for hosting Saber. A lot of good ideas in this game, and hopefully the next phallimplics will be improved on this game.
If it were me, I would have masoned all the teams at the start, then randomized the days people did events. That would make it more difficult to ferret out golds, and kept people guessing till the end. Maybe change balance board so its not so reliant on spam tactics.
Whew! Did anyone else just have a crazy week? There's a lot of comments and suggestions for Phallympics, and I really appreciate everyone taking some time to offer up some constructive criticism. I also wanted to share what my goals were in designing the game and go through what I thought was successful and what I thought did not meet my expectations.
My overall goal was for the players to enjoy themselves. When I play phalla, the things I enjoy are the interpersonal interactions, analyzing the game especially other players and game mechanics, and feeling like what I had done mattered. As I was designing the elements, I tried to keep coming back to those three things when deciding what I wanted to do.
My overall impression is that while I had some success with the first two, my expectations regarding how the third would play out (especially in regards to the vote) were quite off. I think this really led to a lot of people feeling that what they accomplished did not matter, and I think that's a major reason why many (most?) of the players did not enjoy Phallympics. I'll touch on that in detail, but first I want to talk about social interactions.
Social Interactions
By far, my two favorite experiences playing phalla have been Obifett's Phallance in the Force and INANTP's Phalla of Cables. Both of those games had three mechanics that I thought strongly supported robust social interaction: all players having abilities (with those abilities being low powered and similar to one another), some arbitrary assignment of groups that then needed to work together, and limited seering. When I first began sketching out Phallympic games, I knew that I wanted to include these three elements.
All players having abilities increases social interaction because you always have something to tell and give in conversations and whoever you are talking with does as well. Incidentally, this is also true of factions, which I'll talk about in a sec. Everyone with abilities also increases the chance that people will feel like they can do something that matters, but that's also something I'll discuss a little later on. Since I knew I wanted competitions with medals awarded, this became the easiest way to give everyone an ability: give them an event to compete in. I anticipated this helping with the social interactions within teams, because it gave an opportunity for players that didn't necessarily know what to say to have input in what to do that day. I wanted some of the quieter and newer players to feel like they had a say in what their team did. The original design was for everyone to have one event, but I didn't like the idea of people dropping out and feeling inactive just because their event was done. I also knew several events were going to be tilted towards the cheaters winning, and I didn't want players to feel they had just been set up as for the cheaters to beat. Ultimately, I ended up giving everyone two events and liked how it played. While we discuss the event specifics in a follow-up, I think giving the events randomly to players worked out well and ended up being a success.
The arbitrary assignment of factions was something that I had learned a lot about running Camp Phalla Lake. I liked a lot of the small group discussion that went on in Phallance and Cables and really tried to promote it. In Camp Phalla Lake, letting players pick their own groups led more to people feeling left out if they didn't find a group early. I wanted to avoid that by just assigning players to pre-existing factions. Both Phallance and Cables had gone that route (not to mention almost every other faction game ever), and it seemed the right way to go. I feel that unmasoned factions also make day 1 much more interesting, which I'll talk about a bit more in the analysis section. I think Factions increase make the social experience better because it shrink the playing field a bit. While some players are fine with jumping in and debating courses of action with the entire thread, for new players it can be very intimidating. It's also very easy to have what you say get lost in the discussion. Factions provide a place to talk with fewer players, lessening the effects of both intimidation and having what you say get lost. My design philosophy was that they provided a much more inviting place for newer players to interact and form the relationships they'll need for future phalla games. For the louder and older players, factions provide a great means of interpersonal negotiation. Using the relationships you've already built up, you can work to position your team in a better place, offer different advantages and generally wheel and deal to your heart's content to help your team win. I think this negotiating and dealing is interesting and fun phalla play. With the events, constantly changing medal count and the need to get rid of the cheaters, I anticipated a lot of inter-team negotiations going on. As it turns out, while there was some, there was not nearly as much as I thought there would be. Part of that is due to the nature of constantly changing conditions. Negotiation is tough and takes time. The reality of phalla is that people often don't have the time to negotiate with new teams each day for their best advantage. That causes them to stick with the people that they had negotiated with before, even if there are much better plays available. It also causes the other teams that want to be part of those negotiations to feel like what they are doing doesn't matter. I feel the factions were also a contributing factor in some of the negativity that really spilled out into the thread. Normally, I think we all need to at least pretend to work well with one another. The pure factional element took that away. While I don't think the negativity and harshness was all related to the factions, it definitely didn't help. I know that the harshness in the thread was also a big reason for a lot of people not enjoying themselves during the game.
Limited seering is a route I think more game should take. Especially when a secondary objective/ability is present that can help identify the mafia, seers are always necessary. On the other hand, they sure do help balance things for the village. A lot of times I find that seering makes it tougher to have good social interactions. The village tends to coalesce around the seer and whoeever is in contact with them. In order to break into that circle, you need often need to be seered. Since seering tends to focus on those with a special ability or people who are suspected to be mafia, it can be very difficult for normal vanillagers to get inside. Limited seering also helps promote analysis (when you can't just point at someone and say “tell me if he's mafia” there is a much higher need for analyzing everything you can) and the feeling of accomplishing something (when you know that your analysis, attention to detail, long con has caught someone, not just that person being seered by someone else). Additional analysis and need to pay attention also spur on more conversation, since others need to debate your ideas and the mafia needs to discredit them. The archery event was the first one I thought up and I really liked how it interacted with this idea. I knew that someone really good was going to come along and be able to get most (if not all the cheaters) based on the lists that were posted, so I tried very hard to balance the cheaters around being able to win with only half their members. That meant that I couldn't have removing the cheaters as an objective, which I also liked because it didn't interact well with the medal mechanic. I liked where seering ended up (the cheaters had 4 people at the end and two other teams were within a gold medal of them), though I would need a different idea to limit seering in a different game.
That took a long time. I need to run for a bit, but I do want to address the other two main ideas, as wel as some of the event stuff. I'll probably be back later tonight.
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GumpyThere is alwaysa greater powerRegistered Userregular
The identities of those that put their own teams in front of the village (By which I mean, the G Teams) victory have been noted
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Thanks for running this saber. I know that a lot of work went into everything. I still maintain that you are a masochist
I'm really not too sure how we ended up winning this one. I understand the inactivity and what not, but most of the medals could have been counted out. In fact, it should have been public knowledge that I had a gold if you were paying attention. Most of the events, we didn't know the entire medal order because of infiltration the other teams. Most of the events, we knew that because one of us on the cheater team spent several hours tabulating the event itself.
I think that would have been possible with every event besides marathon. I think that was the only event where we used our inside information to know the medal orders.
Now combining that with MrT's list and also spreadsheeting for who had already done which event.... not only should you have been able to figure out the true standing for your team, but you might have had a good guess who the participators for the marathon were. I remember one such "oh this person has only competed in one event that we know of, he is prob a marathon person"
Now then. There should have been a better way to deal with cheaters. The public vote was not enough. Since there was only one kill for non-cheaters, people had to treat the vote like their faction kill.
The testing should have been a true public seer. All it did was late game give us a cheap way of guarding ourselves from the vote. The flip side of that however, is that 4 kills or 4 public seers, or both in this game might have made the cheaters underpowered. I think that could have been fixed with a cheater special ability that isn't; a seer or kill (or a way of obscuring one of the seers)
I had a blast though, but I really gotta hand it to my fellow cheaters. They did a lot of work to make sure we had a lot of information about the events and could choose kills appropriately. I really only spreadsheeted the vote a few days and ran the archery lists. They did a lot of deep thread scouring.
Kilnaga gets my vote for MVP for counting all the thread mentions and figuring out we could up BL to two of the medals
I loved these btw, totally wearing mine for awhile
Confusion will be my epitaph
Yeah, as I was telling inantp, the public nature of the events directly contradicted the need and purpose of secret names. There was no guessing on anyone's part about who won, because the events were easy to tally and track. If the events had been all private, it would have gone a long way to being more phalla-y.
In fairness, days 4-7 I kind of downplayed the potential accuracy of my list, thinking that if no one else believed me that would be an advantage we could exploit. Not until the last day did I really push people to vote out a cheater because I knew we had to (just didn't know that it was already too late).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_Summer_Olympics
EDIT - I signed up as Thomas Hicks
what was your name?
Lousy cheaters!
The Black Hole of Cygnus X-1
Henri Emmanuel Gratien St Pierre in Where No Man Has Gone Before
Lord Augustus Cumberbatch in Eclipse Phase
Hey! I did much of the coordinating, just sucked at the actual event winning.
No Editting! Cheater.
Thanks for hosting Saber. A lot of good ideas in this game, and hopefully the next phallimplics will be improved on this game.
If it were me, I would have masoned all the teams at the start, then randomized the days people did events. That would make it more difficult to ferret out golds, and kept people guessing till the end. Maybe change balance board so its not so reliant on spam tactics.
My overall goal was for the players to enjoy themselves. When I play phalla, the things I enjoy are the interpersonal interactions, analyzing the game especially other players and game mechanics, and feeling like what I had done mattered. As I was designing the elements, I tried to keep coming back to those three things when deciding what I wanted to do.
My overall impression is that while I had some success with the first two, my expectations regarding how the third would play out (especially in regards to the vote) were quite off. I think this really led to a lot of people feeling that what they accomplished did not matter, and I think that's a major reason why many (most?) of the players did not enjoy Phallympics. I'll touch on that in detail, but first I want to talk about social interactions.
Social Interactions
By far, my two favorite experiences playing phalla have been Obifett's Phallance in the Force and INANTP's Phalla of Cables. Both of those games had three mechanics that I thought strongly supported robust social interaction: all players having abilities (with those abilities being low powered and similar to one another), some arbitrary assignment of groups that then needed to work together, and limited seering. When I first began sketching out Phallympic games, I knew that I wanted to include these three elements.
All players having abilities increases social interaction because you always have something to tell and give in conversations and whoever you are talking with does as well. Incidentally, this is also true of factions, which I'll talk about in a sec. Everyone with abilities also increases the chance that people will feel like they can do something that matters, but that's also something I'll discuss a little later on. Since I knew I wanted competitions with medals awarded, this became the easiest way to give everyone an ability: give them an event to compete in. I anticipated this helping with the social interactions within teams, because it gave an opportunity for players that didn't necessarily know what to say to have input in what to do that day. I wanted some of the quieter and newer players to feel like they had a say in what their team did. The original design was for everyone to have one event, but I didn't like the idea of people dropping out and feeling inactive just because their event was done. I also knew several events were going to be tilted towards the cheaters winning, and I didn't want players to feel they had just been set up as for the cheaters to beat. Ultimately, I ended up giving everyone two events and liked how it played. While we discuss the event specifics in a follow-up, I think giving the events randomly to players worked out well and ended up being a success.
The arbitrary assignment of factions was something that I had learned a lot about running Camp Phalla Lake. I liked a lot of the small group discussion that went on in Phallance and Cables and really tried to promote it. In Camp Phalla Lake, letting players pick their own groups led more to people feeling left out if they didn't find a group early. I wanted to avoid that by just assigning players to pre-existing factions. Both Phallance and Cables had gone that route (not to mention almost every other faction game ever), and it seemed the right way to go. I feel that unmasoned factions also make day 1 much more interesting, which I'll talk about a bit more in the analysis section. I think Factions increase make the social experience better because it shrink the playing field a bit. While some players are fine with jumping in and debating courses of action with the entire thread, for new players it can be very intimidating. It's also very easy to have what you say get lost in the discussion. Factions provide a place to talk with fewer players, lessening the effects of both intimidation and having what you say get lost. My design philosophy was that they provided a much more inviting place for newer players to interact and form the relationships they'll need for future phalla games. For the louder and older players, factions provide a great means of interpersonal negotiation. Using the relationships you've already built up, you can work to position your team in a better place, offer different advantages and generally wheel and deal to your heart's content to help your team win. I think this negotiating and dealing is interesting and fun phalla play. With the events, constantly changing medal count and the need to get rid of the cheaters, I anticipated a lot of inter-team negotiations going on. As it turns out, while there was some, there was not nearly as much as I thought there would be. Part of that is due to the nature of constantly changing conditions. Negotiation is tough and takes time. The reality of phalla is that people often don't have the time to negotiate with new teams each day for their best advantage. That causes them to stick with the people that they had negotiated with before, even if there are much better plays available. It also causes the other teams that want to be part of those negotiations to feel like what they are doing doesn't matter. I feel the factions were also a contributing factor in some of the negativity that really spilled out into the thread. Normally, I think we all need to at least pretend to work well with one another. The pure factional element took that away. While I don't think the negativity and harshness was all related to the factions, it definitely didn't help. I know that the harshness in the thread was also a big reason for a lot of people not enjoying themselves during the game.
Limited seering is a route I think more game should take. Especially when a secondary objective/ability is present that can help identify the mafia, seers are always necessary. On the other hand, they sure do help balance things for the village. A lot of times I find that seering makes it tougher to have good social interactions. The village tends to coalesce around the seer and whoeever is in contact with them. In order to break into that circle, you need often need to be seered. Since seering tends to focus on those with a special ability or people who are suspected to be mafia, it can be very difficult for normal vanillagers to get inside. Limited seering also helps promote analysis (when you can't just point at someone and say “tell me if he's mafia” there is a much higher need for analyzing everything you can) and the feeling of accomplishing something (when you know that your analysis, attention to detail, long con has caught someone, not just that person being seered by someone else). Additional analysis and need to pay attention also spur on more conversation, since others need to debate your ideas and the mafia needs to discredit them. The archery event was the first one I thought up and I really liked how it interacted with this idea. I knew that someone really good was going to come along and be able to get most (if not all the cheaters) based on the lists that were posted, so I tried very hard to balance the cheaters around being able to win with only half their members. That meant that I couldn't have removing the cheaters as an objective, which I also liked because it didn't interact well with the medal mechanic. I liked where seering ended up (the cheaters had 4 people at the end and two other teams were within a gold medal of them), though I would need a different idea to limit seering in a different game.
That took a long time. I need to run for a bit, but I do want to address the other two main ideas, as wel as some of the event stuff. I'll probably be back later tonight.
Repercussions will occur in later games
Does being evil make me exempt from these repercussions? Repercussions would suck.
- Terence McKenna