Stars Aligned III - The Tenth Day

[VP Baltar]

In the future, if you're Cult, consider NOT Warding people who are being Stalked. (But consider Resuscitating them.~)

I don't know how sustainable that plan is.

*Townies who are being Stalked

Yeah I know, but then you still have unbloody cult getting bloody from rezzing plus your bloody cult from Ritualing. At some point you run out of cult members to make this work more than a couple times at best.

[Wraith]

Wow, this is over.

I'm rather glad I died. Saved me a lot of headaches later on.

I think I said it in the QT, but if we had let Benmage get away with murdering Fate N1 for spite I would have gone murderer. "Luckily" Fate kind of...solved the situation.

[Wraith]

Also, I'm surprised VPB was the last cult lynched. He was blazingly obvscum after VV's death.

[xvart]

No offense, xvart, but Furcolow was a terrible, terrible shot.

None taken. The decision was also marred by the desire to go Murderer and I admit that it was not a good town decision. I should have aimed for Baby Spice (I think she was the other person I was looking at at during the previous day) but the mismatch between Furcolow's Succession Mafia and SAIII play being different despite similar circumstances was staring me down the gun barrell. I might have mentioned this but I also wasn't using my 100% investigator mind set and told myself when I first started concocting the plan that if I did go through with it and Furcolow flipped town I would go the Murderer route.

I think I would have gone crazy if I was actually Cult.

[Fate]

Ah I re-read the parts of the game I was in, and LOLd to myself when at these progression of events:

"BABY SPICE WHY ARENT YOU VOTING BEN? THERE GOES YOUR TOWN READ!"-me
"Lol ok vote: benmage" -babyscum
"SPYREX YOU OF ALL PEOPLE??? YOU SCUMBAG!"-me
"FFfffffffffff Fate FINE vote: benmage" -spyscum

JUST GOES TO SHOW YA that Benmage lynch woulda been glorious.

BUT THEN HITOOOOOOOOOOO had to go wiuth his SUPERSCUMSKILLZ and detect that I left the Reaper wagon oddly. This made me feel so incredibly pressured (more so than in any game, even when I WAS scum...) because I DID have inside info... that I had no choice -_-

[SpyreX]

This one actually ended. Well I never.

Yea, once I looked over the murder plan the only negative would be people actually attempting murderer... which you hussies never did. Why I never.

As you can tell from the great american novel that is the QT I saw that early and really went "I think we're gonna be boned."

And we were!

Town played a good game AND did a great job controlling the setup. Kudos all the way around.

[SpyreX]

And I want the record to show that my cult wanted me dead from the very beginning. Hmmph

[Andrius]

Zachrulez, in the words of Iecerint, me being "Affable Evil" and "too cute for evilness" kept me alive as long as I did.
Murder plan killed us.
No murderers boned us.
Town won because no one had balls to go murderer.

xvart, I'm very disappointed. You were so fucking close. But you win MVP in my heart for killing asshole furcolow. Best kill EVER.

I'm done. This was long, painfull, and I'm proud to have fought alongside my scumteam.

[MagnaofIllusion]

ZTown won because no one had balls to go murderer.

Lies ....

Had VP Baltar not hopped on the fail VV "He's mean and nasty he can't be left for Town" wagon and actually made something workable out of it Day 2 I would have been around to screw the Town over more completely than I already did.

So

[Seacore]

It's not like the murder-confirm plan was designed ignoring the risk of murderers.
It was clear at that point of the game that scum were a bigger threat than murderers. The likelihood of murderers being around were low. Xvart took responsibility for the only unexplained kill, so all we had to do was watch him like a hawk. At a certain stage, it would have been smart to murder him to confirm somebody else, but the risk was significantly lower.

I think the scum's biggest advantage was their ability to explain away things by saying "oh, I just didn't understand the rules" because there were enough town people actually doing that. I'm surprised town survived all the crap it had and I'm glad we won.
Fate screwed us over with his RC claim when he should have PM'd the mod and caused a double replace out rather than a double modkill.
Furc was his usual raving self.
And DGB-hydra and Plum's lack of engagement with the game caused some bad lynches.
I heard people in the Graveyard QT saying "why aren't you guys scum hunting, you shouldn't be doing murder confirmations, you should be using scum hunting skills"
That was severely limited in this game because so many people could just say "Oh, I don't understand this," and then lurkfest.
The murder confirmations placed the power into the hands of players who were engaged and understood the rules.

[Zachrulez]

I think the scum's biggest advantage was their ability to explain away things by saying "oh, I just didn't understand the rules" because there were enough town people actually doing that. I'm surprised town survived all the crap it had and I'm glad we won.

The setup was extremely complex, so a lot of people

really didn't

understand the rules.

Hell there were various aspects of the setup I'm sure we re-checked half a dozen times over and

still got wrong.

[Seacore]

I'm not saying they were easy, and I'm not saying we got them right every time. But there was definitely a lack of engagement in even trying to understand them from several slots. And it's not like this was the first SA game.
Some people decided, despite not understanding the rules, to ignore the advice of those who did. This allowed scum to hide, in my opinion, and also wasted our time mislynching some of them.

[VP Baltar]

I agree with seacore on this. I think the scum did so well early on because kunkstar7 and myself were here from the last game with strategy out of the bag and Feysal is a strategy maniac. We had the ins and outs of the setup working to our advantage early on and were snowing the town with WIFOM. It wasn't until the murder plan was put in place, which we couldn't effectively counter, that we were really put on our heels. Had that not happened, there were mislynches galore.

[Magua]

This was fun to read along with, though I only picked it up once the Seacore-machine had started running.

At this point the game as it has been run has been cracked. If this game comes up again, there will necessarily be a different mechanic to play with.

I recall noting this at the end of SA II: Cult needs people to go for the murderer win condition. Note only do they need this for the reduced number of mislynches available if 3-4 people die N1, but the presence of possible murderers is really the only way to keep the town from adopting a mass-kill plan.

I don't (personally) like the murderer-as-choice plan, though obviously other people do -- but as the games go on, fewer people will choose it for the novelty value. I really think the cult could be designed as stronger, and then weakened as the number of murderers increase.

Complaints about the game being overcomplicated are entirely warranted. It was just a bit too much for the mods to take care of, and it's not much of a surprise that the players got confused too. Granted, this is more a feature of the setup than a bug, but etc.

The mechanics are the draw of this setup for me. But, I'm a heavy mechanics guy.

Vote-based Insanities (except Suicidal) are terrible ideas from a mod-maintenance point of view.

One of the major reasons the game was cracked is because the Investigators held together and monitored every action. While this is within the spirit of how Percy envisioned the game, it wasn't in mine and it's in neither of ours at this point. Half the point of things like vote-based Insanities is that the scum want to try to slip it by the watchful eyes of the Town; organized testing defeats the purpose. I'm pretty sure the players didn't find it all that fun to go through, either.
To that end, I believe the best solution is to cut deadlines WAY way down to the point where keeping track of actions and ordering people around would simply be infeasible within the time limit. One can argue that that would push the balance back into scum's favor, but that can be worked with. I'm coming to buy into 10-day deadlines in general, because that's about when Days start stagnating even in other games. Two weeks for D9 and D10 were too much.

Insanities are an interesting mechanic. I keep coming up with designs that I think would work better for the cult, but not utterly screw over the town.

[Benmage]

Vi, you think the murdering plan cracked the game??? Or us just being meticulous with night actions?

[Seacore]

There will always be a difficulty in balancing a game in which (some) players are allowed to choose their win condition.

The game starts with only town and cultists. As it currently stands, cultists are weak unless there are murderers. But therefore it makes less sense to become a murderer because town has a strong chance of winning.
If you increase the cult's chance of winning, then it makes more sense to be a murderer, increasing the chance of cult winning even further and boning town.

You almost NEED people to 'strictly' Play to Win and go murdering when it's less opportune. Which almost happened here except one was caught early and one was unlucky in his stalk choices.

Also, Magua, what is this "Seacore" machine you speak of? the murder/confirm were more Benmage than me if I remember correctly.

[Seacore]

I think cultists need to be able to murder, but not go murderer.
"Oh no, that'll horribly destroy the game"
Not when their insanities go through the roof and they are always covered in blood. Investigation kits and occult books would get way more use if that was possible. It would force town to play a much more defensive and information seeking game than the offensive game we played.

[Magua]

I started reading around the time that you were just getting more or less confirmed and starting taking charge and bossing everyone around.

Cult being allowed to murder isn't a bad thought, but needs balancing for the obvious reasons.

[xvart]

xvart, I'm very disappointed. You were so fucking close.

I know. If my work life/personal life hadn't imploded pretty much all game I think I might have still gone for it even after my Benmage stalk failed. If the Cult had been whispering in my ear what they were saying in the Sanctum that would have been all the motivation I needed to go for it. I shouldn't have taken Suicidal and been forced to claim then. My play all around was terrible and a comedy of whims, but I really couldn't focus on the long term game. I try never to make excuses for my play based on outside circumstances but I feel especially obligated in this game due to the necessity of town involvement.

But you win MVP in my heart for killing asshole furcolow. Best kill EVER.

Thank you. I think that murdering Furcolow was the single most satisfying decision I have ever made in all my mafia games ever. It was just soooo glorious.

I never had any intention of not Murdering him despite my pandering in the thread. I just had to throw the Cult off of interfering. The night I decided to go for it and the subsequent days up until my claim was probably the most thought I put into the game and potential outcomes. I wish I could have played that way the entire time.

And, vindication on Triglav on their push on me being Cult for trying to appear town for being the first to make the noise list.

[Feysal]

Feysal was caught by his weak BabySpice vote and some suspect actions.

For actions, if you're talking about the Nicodemus commune, I admit that. The plan was indeed to have Nicodemus mislynched that day. That was when the game really turned against the cult... We'd taken such care to leave Seacore out of the list of people to resuscitate, and along comes Nicodemus, ignores the fact that Seacore was not supposed to be resuscitated, and suddenly we had a huge problem. By the way, that was the only time I made a deliberate mistake with the rules. Everything else I said about the setup was genuine, though had I been town I'd have said quite a bit more.

As for the Baby Spice vote... since you never acknowledged my defense during the game, I pretty much have to shove this truth down your throat: you were wrong. Not about me being cult of course, but about the Baby Spice vote having anything to do with it. Look at my location, it says I'm in Finland, and it has said that since I joined the site. My time zone is GMT+2. The only reason I did not write a case on Baby Spice when I voted her was because it was 6 AM at the time, and I was too tired to start a fourth ISO read and write another case.

Just so you know. Next time I'm being accused of being scum because I'd rather sleep at 6 AM than do whatever it is people want of me, I'm going to scream bloody murder.

[Zachrulez]

Your defense was never acknowledged because we didn't buy it.

[Feysal]

You should have acknowledged it though. It was the truth.

Regarding Baby Spice, what was a scum move from me was not voting Baby Spice and pushing for her lynch on day one. I think I was the only one who spotted just how bad her ward claim of MoI reeked of scum, and I spent that day sitting on it, hoping no one else would see it.

[Iecerint]

I remember people going O_O at her Ward claim when I read through. It was just that people were distracted by scummy townies.

[Feysal]

The thing that saved Baby Spice I think was that xvart delayed claiming so long. That and the fact that no one dug deep enough. Had people looked at the reasons Baby Spice and xvart gave for warding MoI, it should've been obvious which one was genuine. I included that in my case the next day, but by that time the MoI wagon was securely established. I'm still amazed that it took the town that long to lynch Baby Spice, I thought the case I'd made was solid (not that I did anything to push it of course).

[Iecerint]

I'm amazed that it took town that long to lynch LITERALLY ALL OF THE SCUM. ALL OF THEM.

Except VP.