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Day 1
Jul 14, 2009 23:29:11 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 14, 2009 23:29:11 GMT -5
Depending on:
a) The alignment and/or win condition of the Merc b) The benefit/detriment of having more (or less) money c) Foo Factors yet to be guessed or revealed, should the exist
The Merc may have to carefully weight if he'd rather take the highest bid vs hit the available target s/he'd rather kill.
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Day 1
Jul 14, 2009 23:29:52 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 14, 2009 23:29:52 GMT -5
That first "he'd" should be a "s/he'd".
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Day 1
Jul 14, 2009 23:47:13 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 14, 2009 23:47:13 GMT -5
A few words for the benefit of Spin (who has played Mafia, but not online) and other newbies. I am not going to define every term, so yell if you don't know what a term means.
This is a closed setup, so what you see in the Rules, posts and PMs from the Moderator is what you get. Unless you happen to be on the scum team or in a masonry (should such things exist, which possibly include access to another board where you might be able to discuss things outside of the game thread with other scum or masons), we're all in the same boat of trying to figure out what the Mod might mean or imply in the Rules, posts and PMs.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 0:23:42 GMT -5
Post by PrecambrianMollusc on Jul 15, 2009 0:23:42 GMT -5
Just letting your newbie scum buddies know that they should not let slip anything that is not explicitly stated in the rules, eh Cookies?
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 0:31:03 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 15, 2009 0:31:03 GMT -5
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 0:35:30 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 15, 2009 0:35:30 GMT -5
I don't know about you, but I'd already received my role prior to that, so make of my public explanation what you will.
He's never played online, he may or may not have received his role yet, and the game is already underway. Your welcome for helping to find a player so that the game could actually take place.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 0:42:20 GMT -5
Post by PrecambrianMollusc on Jul 15, 2009 0:42:20 GMT -5
Well I was talking about the 'other newbies' part, and it probably needed a smiley at the end of my post. All efforts to find the extra players are most appreciated.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 0:50:14 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 15, 2009 0:50:14 GMT -5
doh. I do speak fluent smiley and have developed a horrid inability to comprehend the written word without them sometimes. Tentative-psuedo-truce-that-could-errupt-into-mutual-deathwishes-at-any-moment?
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 1:02:23 GMT -5
Post by PrecambrianMollusc on Jul 15, 2009 1:02:23 GMT -5
doh. I do speak fluent smiley and have developed a horrid inability to comprehend the written word without them sometimes. Tentative-psuedo-truce-that-could-errupt-into-mutual-deathwishes-at-any-moment? ahhh trying to snuggle now eh, you just get scummier and scummier ;D As a smiley expert could you let me know what the methed out bouncing rodent is supposed to signify?
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 1:11:28 GMT -5
Post by Captain Pinkies on Jul 15, 2009 1:11:28 GMT -5
Evening all... Just checking my sorry arse in.... off to bed
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 1:16:23 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 15, 2009 1:16:23 GMT -5
Well, now that I have had a chance to observe the specimen in the wild for many months, it appears to be attempting to perform what I consider to be quite the modern and avant-garde version of the Lasso/Smackin' datmy own ass dance, followed by an attempt at going down on itself.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 2:34:22 GMT -5
Post by PrecambrianMollusc on Jul 15, 2009 2:34:22 GMT -5
Well, so it is, I didn't recognize the dance on account of all the fur and long ears on the performer.
Now to ask probably not my last utterly clueless question, what is the whole 'undying war' thing about? We have some element of politics (hell might even have an actual politician) but does Undying War reference some TV series or book series?
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 3:47:25 GMT -5
Post by BillMc on Jul 15, 2009 3:47:25 GMT -5
Depending on: a) The alignment and/or win condition of the Merc b) The benefit/detriment of having more (or less) money c) Foo Factors yet to be guessed or revealed, should the exist The Merc may have to carefully weight if he'd rather take the highest bid vs hit the available target s/he'd rather kill. I guess another possibility is that the Merc is a just a game mechanic and not anyone's actual role. And if the Merc's services go to the highest bidder - then unless someone started with a lot of cash, then it's probably going to be the masons (if we have them - in a game of this size, probably) or the scum who will be able to pool their gold first and control the merc.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 3:58:37 GMT -5
Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Jul 15, 2009 3:58:37 GMT -5
It is this statement that seems to rule out the possibility of the Merc being merely a game mechanic.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 4:15:22 GMT -5
Post by BillMc on Jul 15, 2009 4:15:22 GMT -5
It is this statement that seems to rule out the possibility of the Merc being merely a game mechanic. Yeah, re-reading it, I would agree with you. Given there is a thief, it does potentially give rise to the scenario where X has contracted the Merc to kill Y for some fee, and the thief steals from X, leaving them short of cash to pay the Merc.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 5:36:20 GMT -5
Post by Dfrnt Breign on Jul 15, 2009 5:36:20 GMT -5
Oh. My. God. What have I done? The mod description was something like "a mafia game like every other mafia game, but not". Sounds perfect for a first game, right?
So how did I end up in a game with Greek heroes and Foo Factors, PFK's vs 3rd Parties, vampire zombies (or is it zombie vampires?) and grave robbers, grudges I know nothing about, rebels (but no Yankees, right?), methed-out lasso-dancing rats, a merc who may or may not be a real person and a nondescript bicycle thief? (Seriously, Bufftabby, sorry to hear about your bike. That sucks.)
And who's clyde?
Hello, I'm dfrntbreign and I think I'm in way over my head. This is gonna be so much fun. (Sorry I don't have any "First Day sucks" commentary, yet. Maybe by Friday.)
Thanks Cookies (may I call you Cookies?) for rounding up players and for offering explanations. I suspect I will need them.
I'm even newer at this than Spintari, so if I do something really dumb, nobody hesitate to point it out to me. I'll try not to cry. Or break Quontom (did I spell that right?)
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 6:07:31 GMT -5
Post by peekercpa on Jul 15, 2009 6:07:31 GMT -5
It is this statement that seems to rule out the possibility of the Merc being merely a game mechanic. Yeah, re-reading it, I would agree with you. Given there is a thief, it does potentially give rise to the scenario where X has contracted the Merc to kill Y for some fee, and the thief steals from X, leaving them short of cash to pay the Merc. and of course this whole merc discussion may just be a red herring that has little or no impact on actual game play. but i guess it's better than the usual Day one shit. so we can transfer funds. wonder if i could get someone to perform an action for promise of some sort of compensation (i.e. vote for xxxxx and i'll give you yyyyyy). also, wonder what happens if the merc gets stiffed, as in the above example. the color seems to read that the deed gets done and then compensation occurs. do you just have a pissed off merc or what? and could compensation not necessarily be sum certain. I will give you %%%%% of yyyyy as opposed to ##### &&&&&& ***** of !!!!!!. you know, that type of shit.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 6:32:33 GMT -5
Post by PrecambrianMollusc on Jul 15, 2009 6:32:33 GMT -5
Peeky the Mercs note said "with a requested mission and how much gold you are willing to part with" So I think it will be a cash transaction only. As to the Merc not getting paid, I suppose it is all down the night sequence of actions, anything is possible there.
Is there anything bad about coming out and saying who paid for what? Scum don't like information out there, if we as town want a better picture of what is going on, is it better if we come forward and say what we did and why with regards to employing the Merc?
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 6:44:04 GMT -5
Post by peekercpa on Jul 15, 2009 6:44:04 GMT -5
and i tend to agree.
just bringing up the what if stuff. don't know why but i can joust at windmills during these flippin' games. especially when they are really really closed.
not only do we not know what might or might not and how many or few of whatevers we don't even get some whatevers as some sort of freaking paramater. and i have no clue whether this set up is based on any type of canon whatsoever. i imagine it's something that hawk et al have pulled out of various orifices.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 6:49:40 GMT -5
Post by stanislaus on Jul 15, 2009 6:49:40 GMT -5
Hi folks,
Day One's always fun, isn't it? But here at least we've got something (or two somethings) meaty to talk about.
First of all though, a personal plea. If we have any Masons out there, can you please try not to back yourselves into a corner on Day One? I know from past experience how comforting it is to have a confirmable claim in your back pocket, but that doesn't mean that you should ignore a rising vote-count until you're "forced" to lay it on the table. Masons have huge potential as a block of confirmed town, and giving scum any information about them is letting an advantage slip away.
Now the good stuff. I'm going to guess that the Merc and the Thief have their own win conditions, based around earning the most moolah. If I wanted to stick my neck out, I might expect a mechanic similar to the Serial Killer contest in Evil Dead - two third-party roles who were competing with each other, not town or scum. But that's a guess - they may well be PFK who will win-steal if we don't stop them, and their win-cons may be completely independent.
We can only speculate emptily on that just now. What concerns me more is that scum seem to have a big advantage over town in their ability to hire the Merc. Because players can pool gold, scum collectively have much more purchasing power than any individual town player. (E.g., if there are 5 scum, and the average gold per player is x, scum will probably have about 5 times as much cash to throw around. It might be that the scum have in fact been given less cash per player than town, but I wouldn't like to count on it.) So unless town can co-ordinate their own bids for the Merc's services, they can expect to lose the auction, at least until the scum have succesfully hired him/her two or three times and so reduced their resources.
There are some pitfalls here however:
1) Who's holding the cash? 2) How do we decide what mission we want? 3) Aren't we just telling the Thief who's going to have the biggest stash? 4) Could the scum kill the bagman and take the money that way?
1) - Clearly this has to be confirmed town. Utterly confirmed. No potential Godfathers, no Masons who don't have a dead colleague. Someone we all know for a cold fact is town. 2) - One option is to treat it as another vote. Another is to let the money talk - the more you put in the pot, the greater a say you get. Either of these are of course open to manipulation by scum, just like lynch-votes are. Also, we'll be telling the scum exactly what we're trying to do, so if they have any protection capability they'll use it. 3&4) - I have no idea what the solution to this would be. In an ideal world, we would have a totally confirmed role who was also Thief-proof, while an unknown Doctor role gave protection from scum. But there's no reason to believe that's even possible, let alone likely.
Any co-ordination will have to wait at least until we've got someone confirmed, and really until we work out how to stop scum and/or the Thief from undoing our good work. The flip-side to that is that if we're not hiring the Merc, who is? On Night Two, the scum will have pooled their gold and be in a position to bid high.
In sum: I think the Merc stands to be a bigger asset to scum than town.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 7:00:46 GMT -5
Post by stanislaus on Jul 15, 2009 7:00:46 GMT -5
Is there anything bad about coming out and saying who paid for what? Scum don't like information out there, if we as town want a better picture of what is going on, is it better if we come forward and say what we did and why with regards to employing the Merc? I can think of two problems: 1) If we tell the scum what price we're paying, they know what the market rate is. 2) If we tell people beforehand, we warn the scum. If we tell afterwards, it's too easy for scum to fake the "right" information. (E.g. claiming to have picked the same target as town, but bidding a little lower.) Mod: if the Merc recieves two or more contracts on the same person, can he collect for all of them or just the highest bid?
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 7:38:36 GMT -5
Post by BillMc on Jul 15, 2009 7:38:36 GMT -5
1) - Clearly this has to be confirmed town. Utterly confirmed. No potential Godfathers, no Masons who don't have a dead colleague. Someone we all know for a cold fact is town. Well, to paraphrase Special Ed, the only folk we can 100% trust as being town, will be dead. Which doesn't really help.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 8:19:53 GMT -5
Post by Nanook on Jul 15, 2009 8:19:53 GMT -5
Neat start to this game. Way too little information available for me to be willing to speculate on the merc/thief possibilites/interactions. I will say this however, the description we've been given so far sure makes the Thief role sound PFKish. The merc strikes me as more 3rd party survivorish. Obviously both of those are only guesses though.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 8:53:00 GMT -5
Post by julie on Jul 15, 2009 8:53:00 GMT -5
Anyone amused at the thought that we could all transfer our money, naively hoping to hire the merc, only to find out later that the person we transferred our money to was the merc?
We do have a head-slapping smiley, I hope.
Anyway, I'm not sure we have to be all that confirmed and certain before doing any transferring. Yes, it's a risk to move any money out of our hands when we don't know who the others are, but how big of a risk is it versus how much information we'd glean?
If we know that scum can transfer funds, they can control the merc (assuming the mechanism works that way). We'd be pretty certain that whatever the scum did would suck for Town (with a couple of exceptions, but I'm guessing the merc won't off him/herself for cash, so the only exception we think we know of right now is probably the Thief). So, Town jumping into the fray could have the same bad outcome as scum-merc buying, or it could have a great outcome like nailing the rebel leader (or heck, just a rebel), the Thief, or just blocking whatever the scum wanted to do.
And it would be a test for whoever collected the moolah.
I think it's worth considering, even if it's risky.
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Merestil Haye
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Grudge Keeper
[on:Slumming it in the Middle-Earth][of:In the halls of Manw
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 9:09:03 GMT -5
Post by Merestil Haye on Jul 15, 2009 9:09:03 GMT -5
The obvious speculation is that the Thief's win condition is tied to the quantity of gold he or she has amassed during the game. If it is, then it's very possible that the Thief role is PFK.
The Merc role may not be a win-stealing role; more like a Survivor - they win with whoever, provided they fulfil a certain condition (more than likely the carrying out of a type of contract).
Other questions about Gold that arise; is the amount of Gold fixed? If not, do living players get more at the start of Day, or do we have to rely on looting the Dead? Is there a gold miner, and/or do the dead get to keep their treasure in the afterlife (ie the gold of a dead person vanishes with them)?
I know these probably aren't answerable right now. Pieces of the answer are out there, somewhere, and some of the fun of the game will be putting it together.
I will also say that this additional twist gives us something to discuss in Day 1 other than the tired old subjects, which is A Good Thing. So even if it turns out to be a complete red herring with no significance whatever, it's still helping the game along.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 9:21:38 GMT -5
Post by Pleonast on Jul 15, 2009 9:21:38 GMT -5
Hi, everyone! I'm still digesting the information available.
I find it pointless to quibble over whether a role is "PFK"* or third party**. Anyone who doesn't have the Town's win condition*** needs to give us a very good reason for us not to lynch them. It's simply too easy for non-Townies to claim their victory condition is compatible with the Town's, even when it's not.
I'd rather discuss how many Rebels we expect to have. We have 27 players. If we assume we have two third parties and they don't skew the balance between Town and Rebel, we have 25 Town and Rebel players. That typically means five Rebels, more if we have more than the usual number of Townie power roles.
As for the gold and bidding, I'm tempted to say we should mostly ignore the mechanism. There's too many ways the Rebels and third parties can disrupt any open attempt to use it. They can screw up our gathering of gold and they deflect our attempt to target a Rebel. And we no inherent incentive to be giving our gold to a Mercenary, who's probably not Town.
But we can't ignore the mechanism completely, or risk giving the Rebels several cheap bids. I see two ways to prevent that. 1) hopefully our Mason group has enough gold that they can bid against the Rebels. Or 2) there may be one or two wealthy Townies who may be able to bid successfully alone. To these two groups I say: Make bids, but bid for "long monologues" instead of the more violent options. This will make it more expensive for the Rebels to get an extra kill via the Merc, but without the risk of killing another Townie.
* A term I dislike since we should all be playing for keeps. ** I use "third party" to mean any player who is neither Town nor Rebel, regardless of exclusivity of win conditions. *** Which better be publicly revealed soon, or we will be able to put non-Townies at a disadvantage.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 9:58:05 GMT -5
Post by stanislaus on Jul 15, 2009 9:58:05 GMT -5
To these two groups I say: Make bids, but bid for "long monologues" instead of the more violent options. I thought the "long monologues" bit in the colour was just a joke, but I am intrigued by the idea of using the Merc for other missions. Just as we wouldn't necessarily advise a Vig to go out killing on Night One, using the Merc as a Night Lynch could easily backfire on us. But if we could engage the Merc to go on Reconnaissance missions (e.g. Tracker) or to incapacitate people (Roleblocker) or even to kidnap them and viciously torture them for info (Investigator), that could arguably be worth more to us than an extra, uncertain, kill. Obviously, I'm reading a lot into the colour here, and it could easily be that the Merc is strictly a killer for hire, but I think it might be worth considering. (Another, more radical alternative, is to pay the Merc to sit on his hands - i.e. to make no kills. Either on a night by night basis or ideally, if permitted, for the duration of the game.)
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 10:12:42 GMT -5
Post by NAF1138 on Jul 15, 2009 10:12:42 GMT -5
Would anybody care to get the mandatory "I hate Day One" bitching out of the way early? I've actually always rather liked Day 1. Anyway, I don't have much new to add yet, but I am interested to see how things unfold. I am going to take a close look at color again to see if I can figure out if any of the third party are PFK (sorry Pleo but the term is useful) of if the win with town after the rebles are no longer a threat.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 10:29:20 GMT -5
Post by Nanook on Jul 15, 2009 10:29:20 GMT -5
Thinking about it some more, and reading the opening color again, I think we can safely go with the Rebels being the threat that we need to worry about.
Day 1 can go either way really. Sometimes it's really interesting, sometimes it's an exercise in frustration. Though there's nothing beating the excitement of logging into a new game and seeing that "You have 1 new message." up at the top. It's like Christmas morning.
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Day 1
Jul 15, 2009 11:05:00 GMT -5
Post by Pleonast on Jul 15, 2009 11:05:00 GMT -5
I am going to take a close look at color again to see if I can figure out if any of the third party are PFK (sorry Pleo but the term is useful) of if the win with town after the rebles are no longer a threat. Oh, I agree we need a term that means "a role that can win alone and thus prevent all others from winning". I dislike the usage of "PFK" as that term. Everyone should be playing for keeps, not just players with roles who can win alone. If you're not, you're being unfair to your teammates.
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