A Mid-Scummer Night's Dream - D.S. al Fine

[fferyllt]

Day 5 dreams were pretty treacherous for scum. The dream with the most votes at the end of the day was a hider ability, which I think would have blown LLD's hider claim out of the water. The 3rd dream was a gladiator-maker, which could also have been disasterous if it had made it into town hands. Though it was going into Regfan's hands, so who knows how that would have worked out.

Day 5 was also the only day where the scum team all voted together on a dream (the best dream for their faction, as it happens).

Between a combination of the RNG gods and player dream votes, the nights were not as exciting as we'd anticipated, for sure.

[fferyllt]

and what I heard about the mod

??

[fferyllt]

BTW I was going to have to start making up memorable dreams after today.

It was kinda fun to find images that evoked each dream, and I tried to sort of spiral around the key moment of each dream with the images. Clearly, there was way too much science fiction in my house during my formative years.

[fferyllt]

The one thing im mad about is still my role tbh.
It feels like the one thing i believed in that should never be done when making a game, concentrating all or most of the town power on a single role, happened anyway.
The lack of knowledge about dreams and what they could potentially do put a lot of pressure on me, thinking that a single correct or wrong action could heavily swing the game made me play more into scum's hands or subotpimally by targeting the obvious NKs.

Your role was a very late addition to the design. The other three dream-related PRs were in the design from the start. Originally the dreams targeting individual players were going to be randomly assigned. We spitballed several possibilities before settling on the Daydreamer. And we wondered if whoever got the role would do better than a random roll at hitting town.

I think you did better than a random roll in choosing town dreamers to receive the dreams.

I feel bad that the role was so stressful to you, and I wonder if one of the other possible dream-related PRs we thought about during the final days would have been better/less stressful for whoever got it.

[fferyllt]

to say nothing of the tone of it which is a whole other issue

And your post, which is clearly taking shots at the mods, has perfectly acceptable tone?

I agree that the lack of reward in relation to the challenge was a problem. The dreams were vague and difficult to decipher, but the mods also thought the dreams would be obvious to figure out, and that probably played into their setup's design.

On day 1, watching people figure out what that day's dreams probably were, we thought (and Vi agreed) that we'd made the dreams way too guessable, and if we'd had it to do over after Day 1, the dream text would have become less obvious than what we put together for this game.

I think The day one selection was a combination of fairly easy to guess dreams. The day 2 dream guesses were also pretty spot-on, and I'm not surprised Day 2 was the day the scum team decided to use the dreamspike global block.

By Day 5, even though the Hider dream actually had the word "hide" in the text, and the image was someone hiding in a box, town had lost interest in guessing the dreams. That day, more scum players voted than town did, and they voted as a block so they got the dream they preferred.

Why this happened? I'm not sure. It probably had something to do with the Monty-Hall style partial reveals. "Do you want the dream you know something about, or do you want what's behind Door #2?"

All in all, I'm a little regretful about the Monty Hall approach. Maybe we should have provided the pictures to go with the text for all three dreams each day.

Another thing we discussed a lot with the reviewers was whether discussion of the dreams would get in the way of scumhunting, or if players would get tired of talking about the dreams and start ignoring them. At one point the moonrise phase was going to happen with an open thread so players could put off talking about the dreams until after the lynch was accomplished. The Monty Hall idea won out.

But I think we were onto something when we worried that choosing dreams would become less of a priority as the game progressed.

There are some aspects of this design that we'll use again. The Dreamtimer worked as expected, and definitely penalized players for stuff we thought would be bad for the game. We'll consider possible tweaks, but that style of deadline battery will show up again in future game designs of ours. Fortunately, in this game there was very little posting behavior we wanted to penalize aside from a few really reeeeaaaallllyyy slow real-life days.

[fferyllt]

I would also like to know if my play has improved from where i used to flip out a lot due to scumreads, i mean, they still affect me, as it's obvious they did in this game, even tho i've been trying hard to improve of that, the scars of the past still haunt me and i get anxious just every single time i get scumread or voted, as much as i try to hide it. Tho i think it only showed with NMS, Desp and Drealz.

I thought your play has improved a LOT! I loved the way you played just enough on the back foot through most of day 1 for scum to assume you'd be lynchable. And your paranoia about Nacho not noticing you were hanging back was exactly the sort of paranoia that I would have read as town-Sakura testing Nacho, an I think he probably would have, too.