Woah nice rantIn post 5, xyzzy wrote: something i believed on some level before going in was that i would get a setup that i could fully parse once i had the whole thing available to me. and that's probably true for a lot of setups where you design it yourself: you may not figure out all the intentions beforehand, but you know broadly speaking how each role should function, and importantly, the precise wording of each role PM is a thing you had a hand in. once you get handed a bunch of roles that other people designed, you suddenly have to start asking yourself questions like, okay, this Amway recruitment ability doesn't say it targets a player, and it doesn't function in the way that a targeting action would, and the role has other abilities that *do* target, and those are clearly a thing where you're sending an action to the moderator. so i guess the recruitment isn't an ability that targets a player, which means if someone gets it who has restrictions on who they can target, then that ability ignores those restrictions? sure. that works. but then this other PM mentions that it can't be "recruited into the main faction." what's the main faction. like, i don't think Amway is a faction, but it's a judgment call, right? it turns out running a game like this involves making way more rulings on the fly about what feels correct.
my next game is gonna be a veiled committee mini theme, and i an appointing myself one of the designers. i have tentatively designed roles, and i look forward to potentially creating an enormous headache for myself. i also have a truly fucked up idea for how i might run a veiled committee upick. that being said, i do not want to claim ownership over this concept. there's endless variations on how you could have a setup designed this way, and i could not possibly do all of them in a hundred years, so if you're reading this and thinking "hey this sounds like a truly nightmarish experience, i'd like to try it out," then by all means run with it. that being said, i'm gonna work on figuring out a format that works for eliminating the issue around discussing specific formatting that isn't just "get a blanket approval every single time i run one of these," so lemme know if you have thoughts on that. personally, i am fully in favor of players trying to suss out which groups of roles match each other, and i think it's fun to let designers lean into that. like when i ran the original incarnation of this premise, non-reviewed game, one of the roles was "John, a town Shootsmith!" and the role PM started "oh man! you're John, a town Shootsmith!" i can't recall if there was any attempt to piece together the game using who submitted what, but that was also self evidently probably not designed by the person who just submitted "mafia 1-shot neighborizer encryptor: can only use 1 shot of neighborizing" as one of their roles. personally, i think that's a unique aspect of this that is worth leaning into, and i would love to receive a set of roles from somebody where one of them is super obviously intended to look like another one of the designers wrote it and for the players to have to deal with that fact
oh also: Bingle was not an Amway consultant yet when those alleged recruitments happened! for that sort of role change, i would always, always rule that you do not have whatever new abilities are being granted by someone else's actions until i personally confirm that you have them. i told Bingle this via PM, so i think this is all an elaborate ploy. once 24 hours have officially passed and i'm definitely in the clear to let Bingle in, we can finally get the full answer regarding any possible ploys. all that to say: Bingle was only ever in the one hood but did a pretty good job convincing everyone that that was due to mechanical reasons, and now that that's "disproven," it's probably gonna get weird
My main takeaway is I would love being in the next vailed commitee and/or veiled upick, because I have some cool ideas.
