The following actions have been added to the Court's docket:
In re Bluecyan (civil action)
Index number 01-04
Writ of Mandamus
Petitioner seeks a Writ of Mandamus compelling respondent Bluecyan to speak only in quotes from court-oriented television shows.
I don't swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should all the words we've got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands.
The following actions have been added to the Court's docket:
In re Bluecyan (civil action)
Index number 01-04
Writ of Mandamus
Petitioner seeks a Writ of Mandamus compelling respondent Bluecyan to speak only in quotes from court-oriented television shows.
That was me. Just something goofy to try and sneak in day one. But noooo, the judges just wanted people to be useful, and try and win.
In all honesty that would have been pretty much impossible to maintain. There can't be that many episodes of law and order where kime is accused of being mafia.
Edit: Not that I ever recommend playing it, but has this forum ever done a version of nomic?
GreenStick around.I'm full of bad ideas.Registered Userregular
This was one of the most intricately designed games I think I've ever played on these boards, and I'm legitimately upset that I didn't have the time to invest in it that I initially thought I would. Great job @Locus !
In case anyone still cares, here are some random thoughts on things that happened in the game:
1. I was not particularly concerned that two mafia might have died on Day One. I’m glad they didn’t, because I think the remaining mafia might have fallen into despair. But sometimes things happen, and one of those things is the village (or mafia) getting exceptionally lucky on Day One.
2. I anticipated that the two DA criminal actions would be granted every day. More death = more information, which the village needs to win. That being said, the Judges had the option to acquit and I would not have included that option if I didn’t want them to use it. My biggest fear was that the Judges would simply always acquit until they had a “confirmed” villager as DA. Then the game would last for 15 days, which would be no bueno.
3. I anticipated more variety in who was elected as Judge and DA, if only because there would have been no reason to trust any particular Judge or DA (at least at first). Obviously that never panned out, which was somewhat disappointing, but at least made our job easier on the hosting end. Austin and I tossed around the possibility of adding term limits, but ultimately decided not to. In retrospect, I would have included term limits to force the village to make harder choices.
4. I anticipated that people would submit “jokey” civil actions, at least on the first day or two. I have an affinity for post restrictions, so I was kind of looking forward to that making a (brief) comeback. The Judges, however, decided to actually play the game, and absolutely made the correct move in declining to hear those actions.
5. In retrospect I would have cut the serial killer (federal prosecutor) role, added one more member to the mafia, and given the mafia a kill. @MamaWolf did the best job she could as the serial killer, but I don’t think the role added anything to the game that giving the kill to the mafia would not have.
6. When assigning roles, I toyed with the idea of giving the mafia one more member. The sixth mafia would have been @SaberOverEasy
7. In addition to considering giving the mafia the kill, I also considered giving the mafia an ability that would have altered a player’s revealed alignment (kind of like a death miller). Austin and I agreed ultimately that such an ability would create far too much uncertainty (and frustration) for the village.
8. When designing games, one of the things I like to do is give the players meaningful choices. In most games, a regular villager only has one real choice per game: who to vote for. But I like to give everyone—villagers, specials, mafia—meaningful choices. I think it leads to more investment in the game, as there’s real weight behind every choice. Extra things to vote on is the easiest way to achieve this, but I also like to give players choices as to other things. So villagers could choose between multiple civil actions. Specials could choose who to target with their abilities, or to use a civil action rather than an ability. The mafia had to choose from their suite of abilities, and if they did they had to forgo their civil actions.
9. The mafia never used their appellate attorney ability, and I am curious as to why. I think it could have created even more confusion for the village, especially when some of the more complicated writs started coming down the pipe. I think it would have taken the heat off of some of them, but we’ll never know for sure.
10. The defense attorney ability for the village was weaker than I had anticipated. It still would have had its use under the right circumstances, but as it was there was never really an opportunity for @Brody to use it.
11. I spent a lot of time on the OP, because I knew the game was complicated and having a clear rule set was important. So it was gratifying that the players (generally) found the OP understandable. (It’s especially gratifying because, in my opinion, my greatest lawyering skill is taking complicated topics and making them understandable. It’s nice to actually see that in action). But if you thought this game was complicated, you have no idea. The original version—which was still lawyer-themed but had very different goals and mechanics—had a set of rules that was six single-spaced pages long (and was not even complete at the time I abandoned it).
12. If and when I run a game again, it will be considerably less complicated and way more lighthearted. I do have something in mind (that possibly involves a trip to Flavortown), but I need a break for now.
13. I just want to say that, from my perch up as a host, I thought everyone played the game really well. There was a lot going on and a lot to keep track of, and all of the players really did a good job of keeping up (even the players who were otherwise busy with real-life things). It really made me appreciate the caliber of player we have here.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
5. In retrospect I would have cut the serial killer (federal prosecutor) role, added one more member to the mafia, and given the mafia a kill. @MamaWolf did the best job she could as the serial killer, but I don’t think the role added anything to the game that giving the kill to the mafia would not have.
It added a lot of confusion paranoia and uncertainty. Never a bad thing.
@Locus@AustinP0027 I loved this game, thanks for not letting me balance check it so I could play it!
Oh and before I forget, than you Locus for letting me help out. I’ve had two bad runs hosting on my own, so it was nice to finally shake the stink off my hosting past
Having run a disaster game in the past (thankfully it ended quickly), I know how it feels. I'm glad you could have a positive hosting experience @AustinP0027 .
Edit: Also shit hiding alignment but letting dead people talk is such a great idea everyone should do that if at all possible. It just solves so many problems simultaneously.
Agreed generally but I think the village still needs to get information about the dead at some point. Otherwise they're just shooting blind.
I swear to god, when the robot uprising comes, I'm going to find the spam filter on this board and just go apeshit on it. I spent more time waiting for that 60 seconds to roll over than most anything else I did.
I used the stopwatch on my phone. When it hit 30 seconds I sent the next PM.
Edit: Not that I ever recommend playing it, but has this forum ever done a version of nomic?
I am fairly sure there was a game of Nomic some time in the distant past.
Locus on
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
Oh that reminds me, I wasn't actually made when my DA target got moved, I was just joking around. Sorry if that wasn't clear, I know it can be very stressful as a host when the players find out things don't work as they think and text isn't the best medium for joking around.
Oh that reminds me, I wasn't actually made when my DA target got moved, I was just joking around. Sorry if that wasn't clear, I know it can be very stressful as a host when the players find out things don't work as they think and text isn't the best medium for joking around.
Can't speak for Austin, but I did not think you were genuinely angry.
Didn’t think you were mad either. That’s why I lobbed the shitty intern Eric line back. If I had thought you were really mad, I probably just wouldn’t have responded.
Besides, what could you really charge Carmen Sandiago with other than stealing all our hearts? I guess maybe for all that missing art and stuff but that’s just Carmen being Carmen!
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
edited May 2018
I just wanted to see criminal charges Carmen Sandiego added to the docket. Because nothing shows the village that you are treating this game seriously and deserve re-election like being a moron.
I'm thinking the bench was too hard to infiltrate.
You're probably right. I think the mafia needed to have some way (as in an ability) to make it easier for them to get elected.
It's like Gizzy said; The bench was playing a game of Resistance/Avalon but if the betrayers did anything untoward on the Bench, the rest of the village could vote them out.
If the SK kill had been the mafia kill from the start, there may have been increased throughput in the Bench.
But Mamawolf was hitting people well anyway.
Perhaps the kill needed to be a group action that could not be writ controlled too.
I think trying to rebalance in light of how the game actually played out one time will lead to overcorrection. I don't think the mafia was significantly underpowered at all, we just got really lucky to start, and in the mid-game with the Sir Fab/Green day. It very easily could have gone the other way. Mafia also had a great way to mess with early game info between the block-the-DA ability and FOIA-blocking without giving themselves away at all.
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Sir FabulousMalevolent Squid GodRegistered Userregular
Very fun game!
Very complicated game! Huge props to @Locus and @AustinP0027 for running. That takes a lot of work.
In the end, I don't think the mafia were hugely underpowered. There was definitely a bit of bad luck that hit us hard, but we also made some mistakes in play. I had a couple ideas for how to try to mess with the village, but I didn't end up being around enough to initiate them (also they probably wouldn't have worked since jdarksun had the same bribery power as the mafia did and so he knew how it worked).
I probably would have given the mafia a kill to start off with, since it quickly became apparent that we needed to have a judge on the bench in order to have a chance of winning. Without a kill, there was almost no way to jostle for position. It would have been an interesting addition to the game to try throw suspicion on the 4th place judge vote as a potential mafia member abusing the game mechanics.
The only other aspect of the game that I haven't seen people talk about too much is the fact that infinite ghost posts really helped the village a lot. It took a day to get death results back, which was appreciated. However, the mafia could only block the results of one death seer a day, which meant that 3 villagers a day could be confirmed. As those villagers became confirmed, it got harder and harder for the mafia to hide, since we needed to forgo submitting a civil lawsuit in order to use our abilities. We couldn't claim to have made civil lawsuits of dead villagers and there was no way to silence villagers who had sensitive information. They couldn't communicate privately, but it didn't really matter because they could spill sensitive information in public and face no reprisals. They were already technically dead after all!
9. The mafia never used their appellate attorney ability, and I am curious as to why. I think it could have created even more confusion for the village, especially when some of the more complicated writs started coming down the pipe. I think it would have taken the heat off of some of them, but we’ll never know for sure.
Personally, I felt we couldn't afford to use it. We needed to file a couple civil suits a day to at least try to avoid suspicion. We needed to use Defense Attorney every day or else the village would steamroll us with the amount of info they were getting every day. We essentially had to use Political Donor every day just because of bad luck that caused a lot of our number to be up for criminal lawsuits. Eventually we even had a kill that cost an action as well, and there's no way we were going to forgo a kill in order to drop a civil suit that wasn't directly harming us. The one day that the mafia was looking in a good spot was when I was a DA, but I needed to use my action to file a criminal case anyway, so we lost another action. All in all, I felt we just didn't have resources available to use all our abilities.
Anyway, it sounds like a lot of complaining, but it definitely felt like the mafia had a good chance to win if things had gone a little differently. Just some things to look at if the game were to be run again.
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
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Sir FabulousMalevolent Squid GodRegistered Userregular
Thinking about the infinite ghost post thing more, it's even more weighted to the village's favour than I realized.
Think about it like this:
Someone dies. Nobody knows whether they're village or mafia.
If they continue to contribute to the thread, some people may find them suspicious or they may not. Regardless, it's unlikely that their actions are going to change. After all, that person can no longer use abilities, they can't coordinate behind the scenes, and they usually can't vote. Their alignment matters in regard to still-living players, but isn't especially relevant outside of that.
Eventually the dead player is revealed to be village or mafia.
If they're village: They can provide automatically truthful information to the rest of the village. They can contribute (publicly) to plans and information requests. They can participate fully for the rest of the game, posting each day.
If they're mafia: It's like being dead in any other game. Everyone will ignore whatever you say. You can't contribute to the thread in the same way that the village can. And by being unable to use powers, you're not contributing much on the mafia proboards either.
With the above, this setup appears to work in Town of Salem.
But the counter to having all the information is that the game trends to be more deadly and more messy (with every villager having abilities, and the mafia knowing that and actively posing as a villager).
In this game, I think it would have been fine if the mafia had a 3-civil-action-a-day person to hide mafia in.
Thanks for the input, @Sir Fabulous, getting the perspective of the mafia is helpful. Specifically with regards to ghost posting, at least as it pertains to this game, requiring the FOIA to get death information was designed to slow things down (as you noted), and also to act as a limiter on the village as the game went along. As more villagers died, there were fewer people to perform FOIAs, and the village's ability to control things with civil actions would decrease over time. I think your larger point is definitely something future hosts should consider if they want to allow deadposting, and something I would consider if I ever ran a game like this in the future.
I thought mafia could do civil actions and their abilities.
They were limited by the number of players they had.
The mafia was probably slightly underpowered, and the balance was tilted towards the village. I think @discrider is right in that increasing the number of things the mafia could do per day would have helped them hide a little better, the inability to effectively hide being their ultimate downfall. It also might have helped if they could still use their maximum number of abilities, no matter how many of them died. I don't think it would have taken major tweaks to get things more balanced, but one or two things would have helped.
I don't have a whole lot to add except to echo the glowing statements about the caliber of this game, and how it was ran. @Locus and @AustinP0027 both should be exceptionally proud. This game tapped into (for me at least and I think most others judging by the comments and emotes on may of these posts) the things that I most enjoy about Phalla. A complex, but understandable framework, plenty of unknown (from the village POV) mechanics to speculate on, lots of village activity, even up until the last days, and something mechanical for everyone to do every day. The permanent ghost posting combined with delayed death results was inspired and played out amazingly.
I'd say this is easily one of the best games I've played in a good long while, and in fact a top ten game all time (of the ones I've played, obviously).
Also, apologies to the hosts, especially Austin, for having to deal with my attempts to push civil actions beyond the bounds intended for them.
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I don't swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should all the words we've got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands.
In all honesty that would have been pretty much impossible to maintain. There can't be that many episodes of law and order where kime is accused of being mafia.
Edit: Not that I ever recommend playing it, but has this forum ever done a version of nomic?
I am pretty sure it is open now.
1. I was not particularly concerned that two mafia might have died on Day One. I’m glad they didn’t, because I think the remaining mafia might have fallen into despair. But sometimes things happen, and one of those things is the village (or mafia) getting exceptionally lucky on Day One.
2. I anticipated that the two DA criminal actions would be granted every day. More death = more information, which the village needs to win. That being said, the Judges had the option to acquit and I would not have included that option if I didn’t want them to use it. My biggest fear was that the Judges would simply always acquit until they had a “confirmed” villager as DA. Then the game would last for 15 days, which would be no bueno.
3. I anticipated more variety in who was elected as Judge and DA, if only because there would have been no reason to trust any particular Judge or DA (at least at first). Obviously that never panned out, which was somewhat disappointing, but at least made our job easier on the hosting end. Austin and I tossed around the possibility of adding term limits, but ultimately decided not to. In retrospect, I would have included term limits to force the village to make harder choices.
4. I anticipated that people would submit “jokey” civil actions, at least on the first day or two. I have an affinity for post restrictions, so I was kind of looking forward to that making a (brief) comeback. The Judges, however, decided to actually play the game, and absolutely made the correct move in declining to hear those actions.
5. In retrospect I would have cut the serial killer (federal prosecutor) role, added one more member to the mafia, and given the mafia a kill. @MamaWolf did the best job she could as the serial killer, but I don’t think the role added anything to the game that giving the kill to the mafia would not have.
6. When assigning roles, I toyed with the idea of giving the mafia one more member. The sixth mafia would have been @SaberOverEasy
7. In addition to considering giving the mafia the kill, I also considered giving the mafia an ability that would have altered a player’s revealed alignment (kind of like a death miller). Austin and I agreed ultimately that such an ability would create far too much uncertainty (and frustration) for the village.
8. When designing games, one of the things I like to do is give the players meaningful choices. In most games, a regular villager only has one real choice per game: who to vote for. But I like to give everyone—villagers, specials, mafia—meaningful choices. I think it leads to more investment in the game, as there’s real weight behind every choice. Extra things to vote on is the easiest way to achieve this, but I also like to give players choices as to other things. So villagers could choose between multiple civil actions. Specials could choose who to target with their abilities, or to use a civil action rather than an ability. The mafia had to choose from their suite of abilities, and if they did they had to forgo their civil actions.
9. The mafia never used their appellate attorney ability, and I am curious as to why. I think it could have created even more confusion for the village, especially when some of the more complicated writs started coming down the pipe. I think it would have taken the heat off of some of them, but we’ll never know for sure.
10. The defense attorney ability for the village was weaker than I had anticipated. It still would have had its use under the right circumstances, but as it was there was never really an opportunity for @Brody to use it.
11. I spent a lot of time on the OP, because I knew the game was complicated and having a clear rule set was important. So it was gratifying that the players (generally) found the OP understandable. (It’s especially gratifying because, in my opinion, my greatest lawyering skill is taking complicated topics and making them understandable. It’s nice to actually see that in action). But if you thought this game was complicated, you have no idea. The original version—which was still lawyer-themed but had very different goals and mechanics—had a set of rules that was six single-spaced pages long (and was not even complete at the time I abandoned it).
12. If and when I run a game again, it will be considerably less complicated and way more lighthearted. I do have something in mind (that possibly involves a trip to Flavortown), but I need a break for now.
13. I just want to say that, from my perch up as a host, I thought everyone played the game really well. There was a lot going on and a lot to keep track of, and all of the players really did a good job of keeping up (even the players who were otherwise busy with real-life things). It really made me appreciate the caliber of player we have here.
It added a lot of confusion paranoia and uncertainty. Never a bad thing.
@Locus @AustinP0027 I loved this game, thanks for not letting me balance check it so I could play it!
I think this was answered, but just in case, yes you guys had it figured out by the end.
No worries. These games can be stressful!
Having run a disaster game in the past (thankfully it ended quickly), I know how it feels. I'm glad you could have a positive hosting experience @AustinP0027 .
Agreed generally but I think the village still needs to get information about the dead at some point. Otherwise they're just shooting blind.
I used the stopwatch on my phone. When it hit 30 seconds I sent the next PM.
I tend to prefer colors on the blue end of the spectrum. Maybe yellow would have been better?
I am fairly sure there was a game of Nomic some time in the distant past.
Besides, what could you really charge Carmen Sandiago with other than stealing all our hearts? I guess maybe for all that missing art and stuff but that’s just Carmen being Carmen!
It's like Gizzy said; The bench was playing a game of Resistance/Avalon but if the betrayers did anything untoward on the Bench, the rest of the village could vote them out.
If the SK kill had been the mafia kill from the start, there may have been increased throughput in the Bench.
But Mamawolf was hitting people well anyway.
Perhaps the kill needed to be a group action that could not be writ controlled too.
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Very complicated game! Huge props to @Locus and @AustinP0027 for running. That takes a lot of work.
In the end, I don't think the mafia were hugely underpowered. There was definitely a bit of bad luck that hit us hard, but we also made some mistakes in play. I had a couple ideas for how to try to mess with the village, but I didn't end up being around enough to initiate them (also they probably wouldn't have worked since jdarksun had the same bribery power as the mafia did and so he knew how it worked).
I probably would have given the mafia a kill to start off with, since it quickly became apparent that we needed to have a judge on the bench in order to have a chance of winning. Without a kill, there was almost no way to jostle for position. It would have been an interesting addition to the game to try throw suspicion on the 4th place judge vote as a potential mafia member abusing the game mechanics.
The only other aspect of the game that I haven't seen people talk about too much is the fact that infinite ghost posts really helped the village a lot. It took a day to get death results back, which was appreciated. However, the mafia could only block the results of one death seer a day, which meant that 3 villagers a day could be confirmed. As those villagers became confirmed, it got harder and harder for the mafia to hide, since we needed to forgo submitting a civil lawsuit in order to use our abilities. We couldn't claim to have made civil lawsuits of dead villagers and there was no way to silence villagers who had sensitive information. They couldn't communicate privately, but it didn't really matter because they could spill sensitive information in public and face no reprisals. They were already technically dead after all!
Locus said
Personally, I felt we couldn't afford to use it. We needed to file a couple civil suits a day to at least try to avoid suspicion. We needed to use Defense Attorney every day or else the village would steamroll us with the amount of info they were getting every day. We essentially had to use Political Donor every day just because of bad luck that caused a lot of our number to be up for criminal lawsuits. Eventually we even had a kill that cost an action as well, and there's no way we were going to forgo a kill in order to drop a civil suit that wasn't directly harming us. The one day that the mafia was looking in a good spot was when I was a DA, but I needed to use my action to file a criminal case anyway, so we lost another action. All in all, I felt we just didn't have resources available to use all our abilities.
Anyway, it sounds like a lot of complaining, but it definitely felt like the mafia had a good chance to win if things had gone a little differently. Just some things to look at if the game were to be run again.
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
Think about it like this:
Someone dies. Nobody knows whether they're village or mafia.
If they continue to contribute to the thread, some people may find them suspicious or they may not. Regardless, it's unlikely that their actions are going to change. After all, that person can no longer use abilities, they can't coordinate behind the scenes, and they usually can't vote. Their alignment matters in regard to still-living players, but isn't especially relevant outside of that.
Eventually the dead player is revealed to be village or mafia.
If they're village: They can provide automatically truthful information to the rest of the village. They can contribute (publicly) to plans and information requests. They can participate fully for the rest of the game, posting each day.
If they're mafia: It's like being dead in any other game. Everyone will ignore whatever you say. You can't contribute to the thread in the same way that the village can. And by being unable to use powers, you're not contributing much on the mafia proboards either.
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
But the counter to having all the information is that the game trends to be more deadly and more messy (with every villager having abilities, and the mafia knowing that and actively posing as a villager).
In this game, I think it would have been fine if the mafia had a 3-civil-action-a-day person to hide mafia in.
They were limited by the number of players they had.
The mafia was probably slightly underpowered, and the balance was tilted towards the village. I think @discrider is right in that increasing the number of things the mafia could do per day would have helped them hide a little better, the inability to effectively hide being their ultimate downfall. It also might have helped if they could still use their maximum number of abilities, no matter how many of them died. I don't think it would have taken major tweaks to get things more balanced, but one or two things would have helped.
I'd say this is easily one of the best games I've played in a good long while, and in fact a top ten game all time (of the ones I've played, obviously).
Also, apologies to the hosts, especially Austin, for having to deal with my attempts to push civil actions beyond the bounds intended for them.