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Post by Pleonast on Jan 9, 2012 15:10:30 GMT -5
PLAYERS KEEP OUT!!!
No spoilers in this thread, please. It's probably best for former players not to talk here either, since it may be hard to avoid spilling privileged information.
There's a spoiled discussion area for those who are interested. Send me a PM for access.
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Post by Paranoia on Jan 11, 2012 15:31:35 GMT -5
I'm just going to natter to myself here then. Seems for the best.
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Post by sachertorte on Jan 12, 2012 18:02:14 GMT -5
Devious metagamer checking in.
For the record, I never said that Special Ed was definitively a Wolf, only that he clearly eschewed all Town roles in his previous preferences. In this game, I'm not sure what I would have done regarding the 'evil tendencies' theory. Checking the previous game, I see Pleonast published the requests again and of the three 'evil tendencies' players. One didn't request anything at all, and the other two had Town roles in their list as well as scum roles. So I probably wouldn't be pressing for an Ed lynch at this time. I would suspect that Inner Stickler is putting himself in a vulnerable situation though for suggesting it. If I were scum, I'd be gunning for an Inner Stickler lynch.
I also feel that the role request offers a bit of an edge that probably should not be there. I hadn't thought of it before, but if I were to play again, I would probably list all the town roles in order of probably of NOT being in the game. Then based on the role I received, I might luck into non-zero information about what roles might be in the game. Let's say I lucked out and got my fourth choice. I would then have a deep suspicion that the first three roles I asked for were not in the game at all.
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Post by Pleonast on Jan 12, 2012 18:35:33 GMT -5
Yep, there is the potential to gain information about the roles in the game based on which roles players receive.
In an extreme example, if only one player requested roles and received their fourth choice, then the first three roles would definitely not be in the game.
But there's two confounding factors. First, because more than one player requests roles and they receive their roles in a randomized player-order, the players would need to figure out that order. That is a mathematically difficult problem.
Second, players would have to share information their role requests with each other. That could make for another level of metagaming. Of course, sub-groups of players (Witches, Wolves, Cabalists) don't have to worry about that, but they're also working with less information.
Until players actually manage to extract information, I'm not going to worry about this. I'm not sure how much damage it would cause anyway. There's always a large fraction of players who don't request anything and thus have random role assignments. I think the fun of picking roles is worth the slight risk here.
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Post by Paranoia on Jan 18, 2012 21:53:21 GMT -5
you know what can I just get spoilers.
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Post by sachertorte on Jan 26, 2012 23:44:34 GMT -5
So let me get this straight: Peeker says he's a mason. Silver Jan and peeker say Ed is not a mason. Ginger says septimus is not a mason. Ginger dies and is town for certain. Silver Jan says Peeker is not a mason, then says she misread her PM and says he IS a mason. Bill says he is a mason, and peeker is not a mason. Boozy says he is a mason, and peeker is not a mason. Peeker says he knows of another mason that can confirm he's a mason. Is that about right? What the heck is going on? I believe we have 2 mason groups. Kind of insane though as the number of extant mason claims is quite high, I count 5 explicit and one implicit from peeker. That makes 2 sets of 3 masons. Though masons are quite useless power-wise. If I recall correctly, one reason Town won C1 is because most of the early town deaths were Masons. Set One: peeker Silver Jan -someone else- Set Two: Bill Squid ?Ginger? I suppose the Bill/Squid set could be a lie, but that is some very strange claiming. It isn't something that will allow for high survivability. My current guess would be two mason groups as that is most consistent with all claims coming without pressure. If there aren't two mason groups, then I'll be fascinated to know what power prompted scum to decide to claim mason. ********** Other thoughts: Wolves finally got their shit together and are not killing at night. That would explain the single deaths. Too bad they keep getting lynched... speaking of... I wasn't buying Idle's claim, mainly because everyone else is right about Idle informing of their investigation of Guiri. Does not make sense, especially since 3 witches can protect, so SOMEONE has to be alive the next day to reveal it if needed. The Guiri data was nonvolatile, so could wait. I think that with 3 witches, at least one of them would have pieced that together. That said, I believe Pollux Oil even less. If he is a Witch, then he would know, instantly when Idle claimed Witch, that Idle was lying, and therefore NOT Town. No true Witch would investigate Idle. I kind of agree with peeker, that killing an outed wolf (assuming Idle isn't lying), is a bad move at this point. I disagree with him because there isn't much else to be done. While killing undead would be fantastic and all that, actually doing so without causing damage to the Town is significantly more difficult. Pollux is a done deal in my opinion. Even if I agree with peeker, there is no way to stop that train - especially with Pollux's poor choice in investigating Idle, WTF? I also suspect the possibility of a scum Coroner. It seems like a good secret power and something Pleonast would do. I don't especially like it, but I would not strongly object either. The main reason I reject a scummy septimus is because he puts himself in danger by claiming so early. Yes, now that I think about it, the not getting night kill results would be more consistent with septimus being on the up and up. Okay, no scum coroner. But on the other hand, the lack of getting night kill results could be a deficiency of the secret power. Something to make it possible for Town to figure out a lie. Intriguing. Still wouldn't explain the unpressured claim though.
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Post by Renata on Feb 2, 2012 10:13:20 GMT -5
Can I haz spoilers?
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Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Feb 2, 2012 18:40:00 GMT -5
I haven't ready anything. Who's winning?
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Post by Pleonast on Feb 3, 2012 0:14:27 GMT -5
I haven't ready anything. Who's winning? Well, besides the Wolves apparently in last place by getting three of themselves lynched in the first three Days, it's hard to say who's ahead at this point. There's a lot of confusion about Freemason claims. And there's accusations of Cabalists and Vampires. Let me know if you want spoiled. Or read the game and try to make unspoilt guesses.
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Post by ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies on Feb 5, 2012 17:58:43 GMT -5
Yeah, I think I just need to be spoiled.
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Post by sachertorte on Mar 1, 2012 21:07:21 GMT -5
taken individually, most of the game rules look fine, but in combination, I think we can see evidence of being bad together.
(1) No mod kills (2) No substitutions (3) Required Lynch threshold
Individually, these aren't so terrible, but together they completely borked the game.
The Cabal situation looks very strange. I don't understand why there are so many Cabal. Then again, I don't actually know the actual set-up, but it seems that Hoopy is telling the truth or at least is telling the truth that all masons became Cabal since if one didn't, there would be an argument. From my perspective Cabal, as described, were insanely swingy. There was a small chance that Cabal would die out super fast (Single Cabal dying quickly), but a larger chance that they would grow to the full complement of Masons. The middle ground is quite nonexistent.
Too bad the game got scuttled by non-participating players. I'm amazed that Town essentially worked their way to a win (they have a majority and essentially worked out who everyone else is), but can't win due to too many Nonparticipants and wayyyy overpowered Cabal.
I've always had a problem with the Cabal win condition.
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Post by sachertorte on Mar 1, 2012 21:22:06 GMT -5
Thinking about it more, town can't win. Way too many Cabal. Given cabal's extremely favorable win condition, it is quite unbalancing to allow cabal to be such a large voting block. They are very close to controlling the lynch! And they all know who each other are right? Wow! I'd be bitching big time if I were in the game.
But in the current (presumed) game state only Cabal or Undead (presumed deon) can win. And Town has to choose which one. I say let them vote on it and be done with it.
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Post by Pleonast on Mar 2, 2012 12:37:18 GMT -5
taken individually, most of the game rules look fine, but in combination, I think we can see evidence of being bad together. (1) No mod kills (2) No substitutions (3) Required Lynch threshold Individually, these aren't so terrible, but together they completely borked the game. I agree completely. I like all of the mechanisms, though, so I will work around them. I thinking, for each Day a player ends with no active vote, they get a "penalty vote". The penalty vote counts towards lynching them in the future (for the rest of the game). It effectively lowers the lynch threshold for that player. Also, I'm thinking that if the number of penalty votes on a player ever reaches the lynch threshold, they are automatically lynched, separately from the usual lynch. Yes. Insanely swingy, by design. Wait until you read the Undead setup. It's even worse. They're Town, except for a slight difference. It's hard, but so are all the other win conditions. I mostly concerned that the Town's win condition is too easy. Either that, or I simply never account for how badly the scum factions hinder each other.
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Post by sachertorte on Mar 2, 2012 14:11:36 GMT -5
They're Town, except for a slight difference. It's hard, but so are all the other win conditions. Actually, I think the Cabal win condition is relatively easy compared to the others. The fact that there were so many Cabal and they all knew who each other were, kind of makes them 'super town.' Obviously something is wrong with my perceptions though, Town is undefeated! WTF?
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Post by Pleonast on Mar 2, 2012 17:51:15 GMT -5
I feel the same. I don't think anyone can accuse me of setting things up to overly favor Town. Once you get a chance to read the actual setup, any comments on the balance? It is swingy, but not unfair, I think. Each side had control of their destiny at some point. Wolves failed by getting lynched to easily (note to future scum: always false claim something), Undead failed by choosing the wrong targets (partially, but not entirely, due to bad luck), Cabal failed by not getting any of themselves to pass as Town. Town generally did well, with a bloc of mostly confirmed Townies figuring out secret powers and sides fairly well. They got lucky too (Witches living, secret-power Warlock surviving). That was enough to win.
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Post by Suburban Plankton on Mar 2, 2012 20:32:59 GMT -5
I can't say whether it was 'well balanced' or not, but it seems that there were several points where a single choice being made differently (an investigation here, a kill there) might have resulted in a vastly different game...so it doesn't seem that things were too heavily weighted in any direction. In any case, most of us had no idea what the likely outcome was going to be right up until the final Day, so that was good.
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Post by sachertorte on Mar 3, 2012 12:20:00 GMT -5
I feel the same. I don't think anyone can accuse me of setting things up to overly favor Town. Once you get a chance to read the actual setup, any comments on the balance? I think the strength of Cabal was underestimated and the strength of undead overestimated. Part of the reason undead was overestimated was tied to the underestimate of Cabal. With cabal recruiter able to target AND passively recruit when targeted, that pretty much guaranteed all masons would be recruited/dead by day 4 or 5. I was in the Catinasuit camp and decided that all masons getting recruited was ridiculously unbalanced. I figured there was an active recruiter and that recruitment was number limited (three seemed like a good number). I didn't accept that all the masons were recruited until 4 showed cabal and they stopped reporting results. Blah blah blah, anyway... Because undead could not kill cabal AND undead lost a zombie on the fail AND the cabal recruitment mechanism was overpowered, undead were set up to fail. How the game played out is pretty much what the rules dictated. It seems nice to the necromancer upon reading the rules, but the hidden aspects of the game pretty much screwed her. Since witches, wolves and cabal were out, that left a small set to target and of that set 50% were a trap. On top of that, everyone was playing under the expectation that undead were the early threat. Even when they weren't. In this case, the hidden number of zombies HURT undead. Knowing all the rules, it is hard to view the game from the uninformed perspective. That makes balancing the game doubly difficult. Drain Bead played the game exactly as her role should have. The hidden parts were not things that she could have taken into account, nor should she be expected to take them into account. As for why Town keeps winning, I'm honestly baffled. In the last conspiracy I played, undead should have won. Town won mainly because the wolves were hamstrung by bad luck and decided to actively help town. In this game, cabal should have won. Their position was incredibly strong. The main reason they didn't was because wolves kept killing in the mason/cabal pool which was not entirely reasonable. The witches were unlynchable. Septimus was nearly unlynchable. Inner stickler and Catinasuit became unlynchable late so not killing them makes sense. Finally, the one balancing thing for the cabal was the recruit accept mechanism. I didn't like that posting to the night thread constituted an acceptance. I found that clumsy. The side effect that was good was it prevented cabal from properly planning what each former mason should and should not say, which led to mistakes. It was a confusing mechanism that ultimately led to town's ability to figure out the lies. I guess that's good, but my personal opinion is that 'trip up' mistakes by scum should not be engineered into the game. Scum must lie, but actively making those lies more difficult kind of defeats the purpose of the game. That's why I think things like fake PM supplied by the mod are good, especially so players don't use style and wording to catch scum.
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Post by Pollux Oil on Mar 3, 2012 14:15:32 GMT -5
Yeah, I think the biggest problem with the Undead this time around was the lack of being able to kill half the people in the game without detriment to their own wincon.
On the other hand, without peeker coming out on Day One saying he was a freemason for no reason, Hoopy may not have had such an easy time converting all the Cabal and there would have been a bigger pool for the necromancer to kill.
I think, though, the biggest problem with this particular set-up was the game was going to swing in a particular direction very early on. If the lead Cabalist got killed early, Cabal were going to be a non threat and town would have a huuuuuuge advantage with all the Freemasons. On the other hand, the Cabal were really hamstrung with the Wolves being the only scum with the ability to kill the Witches.
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Post by Høøpy Frøød on Mar 3, 2012 18:06:46 GMT -5
Odd thing is, we likely would have one had boozy been around to help us save peeker and lynch Inner.
Because Inner would have died. And even though the wolves would had targeted us, we probably could have had enough control of the lynch threshold that even with them killing us we could still lynch a witch.
Plus, with that knowledge, we can block the wolves. We don't need them to kill the witches for us at that point. We had sis and deon pegged by then. Heck, we'd probably lynch sis first. Then a witch. Then deon.
Though, finding out Inner really was a warlock and not a vamp would have been an interesting wrench. Wouldn't have changed the strategy, though.
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Post by Pleonast on Mar 5, 2012 12:03:41 GMT -5
I think the strength of Cabal was underestimated and the strength of undead overestimated. Part of the reason undead was overestimated was tied to the underestimate of Cabal. With cabal recruiter able to target AND passively recruit when targeted, that pretty much guaranteed all masons would be recruited/dead by day 4 or 5. I was in the Catinasuit camp and decided that all masons getting recruited was ridiculously unbalanced. I figured there was an active recruiter and that recruitment was number limited (three seemed like a good number). I didn't accept that all the masons were recruited until 4 showed cabal and they stopped reporting results. No real disagreement, except to point out that there was no guarantee that the Cabal could've recruited some many so quickly. It was good luck on their part that one Freemason claimed early and then that the mass of Freemasons openly discussed how they were going to handshake with each other. It was basically an open map for recruitment.
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Post by Renata on Mar 5, 2012 16:56:10 GMT -5
I still always question whether a town that all has powers (generally strong, generally acting without confusion, and especially coupled with a scum team or teams which on the whole cannot convincingly pass as any town role for long) can ever be defeated absent some kind of fluke occurrence. It's not just this series, currently at 6 for 6 and counting. It's Gadarene's game at the Dope, easy town win. It's Heroes mafia at Giraffe, town cakewalk. And others I can't think of to name right at the moment. In my experience it is by far the most common outcome for town to win such a game (and win easily), no matter how much the moderator tries to soup up the scum team's powers or numbers in order to compensate. When you give the town tons of information and severely limit scum hiding places, scum loses. They just do.
Conspiracy, if anything, is worse for the scum than a generic all-power game, because each team is hypothetically balanced to do as much damage to the town as they do to each other; but in practice, the necessity each of them has to "act like townies" during the Day for the vast majority of the game means that they do more harm to each other than to the town.
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Post by Red Skeezix on Mar 6, 2012 0:23:27 GMT -5
I think in general more powers translates to more swing, and more town powers often drift into a more informed town, who are able to capitalize on the swing and control the lynch more effectively.
Not to mention that in conspiracy, no scum team really can benefit from the synergy of scum powers (which means that individual scum power roles are worth less than normal). The wolves have the NK, the cabal has the block, and the undead are an amalgamation of the two most common types of PFKs (tagger and serial killer) . But no team can effectively shut down multiple town roles to execute a plan. The wolves can only kill one person, the cabal can only block one person, and the undead cannot communicate to strategize.
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Post by sachertorte on Mar 6, 2012 12:36:04 GMT -5
I still always question whether a town that all has powers (generally strong, generally acting without confusion, and especially coupled with a scum team or teams which on the whole cannot convincingly pass as any town role for long) can ever be defeated absent some kind of fluke occurrence. I agree with Normal Phase. It is likely that the all-powers game is generally too pro-Town. I think the only way for scum to win is to put in egregiously powerful scum roles, but that winds up making the game far too swingy and far too unpleasant to play that we might as well simply flip a coin to see who wins. Vanilla Town seems like a requirement to make the game more fair for scum. The open setup regarding roles and powers in Conspiracy makes this even more important. There are very few claims scum can make that can't be disproven. That makes it difficult to hide.
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Post by Inner Stickler on Mar 6, 2012 16:36:02 GMT -5
A couple of people mentioned in the D1 thread for Arkham that Conspiracy would be a very different game if the scum claimed openly on Day 1 and worked together against town. I have a hard time imagining how that would work but now I'm intrigued. I'd also kind of like to know what some people who are better at visualizing than me think about it.
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Post by peekercpa on Mar 6, 2012 23:05:59 GMT -5
i think what happens is is that by default we are actually kind of a nice sort. so to some extent there is this freudian thing that kicks in along the lines of: well if my team can't win then i guess i'd rather have town win it. so you do have four blocks trying to win but you have also 3 of those four blocks willing to hand it to town if they perceive their faction is out of it. plus the fact that for whatever reason the wolves get decimated early on means that cabal can only win if they can get town to vote witches (ain't happening) or the undead get a pfk type win (a tough hill to climb). and as previously mentioned cabal would have won this if we hadn't had an awol. on top of that our different time zones meant that one of the last second vote switchers would have had to stay awake way past his bed time.
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Post by Høøpy Frøød on Mar 7, 2012 19:18:01 GMT -5
Actually, seeing as how town has won every single one, it's been my experience that in the more recent Conspiracy games, scum are more than happy to help out another scum team over town, once they actually figure out who the scum are.
Of course, our little necro was all set to out the cabal.
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