Although if you were lynched, it wasn't going to be endgame yet...? Not sure. Yeah, I pushed for you to be shot. Lurkers are my bane. I played SC2 Mafia for a long time before joining TL Mafia... In SC2 Mafia it was standard for scum to say nothing or at most talk very sparingly, while townies often spammed. Here it's more like... Townies are either very active or lurking. And scum are semi-active or semi-lurking, mostly semi-lurking the later the game goes on. But I always misfocus on the most inactive lurkers :/

I couldn't believe my vote for Onegu went pretty much COMPLETELY unnoticed. By then we'd decided the game was over if we got Onegu or Risen lynched, and were willing to risk what was an all-in scumclaim move.

But I honestly thought Xatalos, s0lstice, Risen, DI or well.. Onegu himself would take one look at that and yell "ACRO IS SCUM, SHOOT HIM DED". I had been calling Rayn scum all game. Suddenly, instead of rallying town (or doing anything) to vote for him or SnB I just voted alongside my scumread to lynch some guy I had not wasted more than about 5 lines on all game, under the very weak pretenses of saving my town read... about 8 hours before the lynch.

I was really surprised that that didn't instantly convince everybody I was scum.

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 20 2013 12:03 GMT

#4522

On August 20 2013 18:20 Dandel Ion wrote:
I'm very easy to read.
People just refuse to do it.

Both you and Risen were easily called town and then completely ignored in the rest of the game. That's not a good thing. You were calling me scum from somewhere halfway in D1 until endgame, yet nobody ever followed you. Nobody followed me on Rayn, because I didn't want them to. But as a townie you should want to convince other townies, not just be content looking townie.

Risen tried to push, but he was all over the place, and combined with his conviction that Sharrant was scum made it really easy to just discredit all his other reads as well.

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 20 2013 12:26 GMT

#4526

@hosts: thanks for hosting! I think you did an excellent job in a game with some complicated situations. I felt shitty that Ace basically needed to get modkilled for a simple misunderstanding where he really tried to help the hosts, but he would have been confirmed town because of the way he broke the rules. The Mocsta modkill was a bit harsh on town. It handed scum the possibility to control the lynch completely, but anything else wouldn't have really worked either. That one is entirely on Mocsta, and he should be banned for it.

I really enjoyed the PM mechanic. I think forcing the use of TL PMs only was a good idea, despite TL PMs being really cumbersome. Skype is too town-favoured: instant messaging is really really hard to work around as scum, and it was already pretty hard to keep my story straight in all different channels. QTs would have removed the asymmetry of information, which makes PM games so interesting.

Town was basically too trusting of the PMs and didn't use it to set up traps, except for the Oberyn/Onegu roleclaim, which I 100% believed and Koshi is a master ninja for sniffing that out and not giving in to all the pressure in the scumQT. This made it somewhat "safe" for scum to be rather active in PMs.

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 20 2013 15:51 GMT

#4561

That's not the feeling I got from s0lstice at all... except maybe at the end, when the whole town went into hardcore lurk after Mocsta got himself modkilled.

Iamp and Kita were obvious town leaders and it is why we targeted them. Iamp didn't even really have to do much except be his usual innocent child self and allow Xatalos to post without any inhibitions. Once they were dead, Clarity, Xata and s0lstice had to pick up the reigns, and none did it particularly effectively. It allowed scum to pretty much grab control of the game back, which was slowly slipping away from us with the Yamato and Vivax lynches. Even if Mocsta had not got himself modkilled, I really doubt the lynch would have gone onto a scum. Sure, we got lucky with the frame (we also got unlucky the first time when I wifom'd myself out of calling the frame on Yamato), and that helped, but by then Rayn and myself were happily leading our own distinct corners of town into nowhere useful, with Chrom and Koshi being safely categorized as probable town and leading the internal politics of Baratheon around in circles: they could grab power at any point as long as they were both alive.

@Xatalos: what was the very strong reason you had for calling Koshi town?

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 20 2013 19:41 GMT

#4571

On August 21 2013 02:49 s0Lstice wrote:
haha you guys were trading account info to log and and vote for eachother?!

so much seedy stuff in this game. strangely, that fits well with the theme.

Well, it was never necessary because the Starks ended the night leaderless, so we had control of 2 of the 3 houses with lords, but honestly, vote racing for a plurality lynch is the dumbest thing ever and the reason most games have the wincon that scum numbers = town numbers. In majority lynch it means no scum can ever be lynched again, and in plurality lynch it prevents voterace stupidity.

In this case, that wincon clearly wouldn't work, because of the two-step voting mechanics, so it had a situation where we would voterace.

I asked the hosts whether it was okay to share my account info, so I didn't have to stay up to 2 AM. And lets be fair: the scumteam should be allowed to act as a team when it comes to this kind of action. That's the whole point of being a team: you can coordinate this kind of nefarious plot.

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 21 2013 14:08 GMT

#4593

Kita obvious scum! He's calling kush scum after he already flipped town! :D

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 27 2013 18:25 GMT

#4654

Ooooooh, me! I don't really mind either way: they will both be interesting and highlight different aspects. Whatever you prefer!

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 27 2013 19:12 GMT

#4668

PM system seems pretty much perfect, which means you can't really mess around with houses either.

House powers and house-related wincons are something worth playing around with. Some things that might need balancing are the KP and voting mechanics.

Firstly, with one game played already, it will be obvious to everyone that the mafia has to be fairly evenly distributed among houses, or they have no chance of winning. 3 mafia to a house is completely stupid in any case, because there is no way that the lone town member would ever get a chance of doing anything: scum might decide to make him lord just to lurk in the shadows, but at a critical moment he will simply be outvoted and ignored. Unless all three members are obvious scum, it is really easy to do this without even looking particularly scummy.

Look how easy it was for Chrom and Koshi to maintain status in House Baratheon (although both played an excellent game, so that obviously helped). Now imagine that house with 3 scum members.

4 members in a house is an interesting idea, but the scum wincon would have to change: with an entire scum house, it would be really hard to get control of the lynch vote.

Plurality voting for the lynch didn't run into a problem this game, but it very well could have become a voterace situation, which should be avoided, imho. I feel it should probably be majority vote and this would not affect balance much at all. It would have forced scum to consolidate on JWup on the (second-)last day, making it harder for us to control the vote (although Clarity not voting would probably have sealed the deal anyway).

KP was pretty confusing. The lords having exactly 1 short of a full healthbar worth of KP seems strange, in hindsight. Variability in starting KP might also make things more interesting (albeit harder for scum). Maybe people with powerful abilities start with less KP, others are like a veteran and start with more KP. The vampire vigi was a good idea, and the medic giving bonus HP was probably a good solution. Scumteam having a fixed 1 1/2 KP might be changed to a variable number depending on the number of members alive (harder to balance, though).

Differentiating house powers, or doing more with flavour (WHY WASN'T OBERYN A POISONER

) could add a bit of colour for a second go around. House wincons could be extra wincons: you win with town, but get an EXTRA laurel in the endgame post if you manage to do Y. Can even be character-dependent. For instance, Oberyn Martell gets an extra laurel if Tywin Lannister is dead at the end of the game. Some of these can be somewhat 3p-ish wincons.

I disagree that an SK wouldn't work in this setup. He would need some serious tools (and the town and scum wincons would have to be rewritten to be more ambiguous about the status of 3P

), but a Littlefinger/Faceless Man 3P with some serious anti-everybody capabilities would be easy to add in, imho.

Other things to think about: marriages. Adds some extra PMs and needs to be done really carefully, but it's a fun mechanic that fits in the theme, and might be a clever addition. Can even tie into personal wincons: Sansa Stark, extra wincon: marry Loras Tyrell.

Loras Tyrell extra wincon: marry Renly Baratheon :D

Acrofales

Spain18331 Posts

August 27 2013 19:21 GMT

#4673

On August 28 2013 04:13 Clarity_nl wrote:
As for specific issues:
1 hp lord kp isn't very interesting, hp check seems to favor scum a lot... we probably were better off just burning them all d2 as someone suggested post game and anyone that had used his hp check was scum.
Although I really liked the pm mechanic it turns out people use it the wrong way (IMO) because I was unable to read quite a few people because they never posted their thoughts in thread. Maybe make all pms happen during the night? (you get elected n0 you get to talk to lords n1).

I dunno

I actually disagree. The HP check would have been really really strong lategame (for town): once you've figured out how much HP people start with (7), and you know who town shot, you can instantly see who in a house is being targeted by KP. While it won't be good to find scum, it is an awesome town check: Sharrant was so so obviously town once DI had checked the Tyrells. The closer you get to lylo, the more important it is to have this kind of town check.

Forcing scum to use their KP in a specific manner is a really strong tool for town to have. Yes, of course you can blow all the checks at the start, but all scum really needed to know was that everybody started at 7 (info which was given to us for free). Sharrant not dying after being shot by a full 7 KP was enough to give us an educated guess that he had been medic'd by Oats. We knew DI was almost certainly at 3 HP, and could easily have spent the rest of the KP on johnny without me using the HP check.