Werewolf CXXVII - The First Crusade

[reis91]

It right there in the rules...

Randy says otherwise, and I assumed that by getting only a wolf contact that I wasn't into the pack, otherwise why not just tell me all the wolves's names?

[Eternaly_Lost]

Randy says otherwise, and I assumed that by getting only a wolf contact that I wasn't into the pack, otherwise why not just tell me all the wolves's names?

I don't honestly know, but according to the GM, you were attached to our pack. Gm rather trumps randy here.

[reis91]

That's a funny thing. I thought Boris and Jens were attached, since the pack PM I got basically said so, like EL's did. But during the last day the_hdk suddenly notified me that they still had to be formally attached.
Had I known that earlier (and reading the rules regarding this would have helped, I'd say ) I'd have asked Boris and Jens/slinky to formally attach themselves sooner. Now there was this last-second mad scramble to get them to do so.

I was referring to this...

[randakar]

I was referring to this...

Well, how it worked exactly in this case beats me, too. Don't forget that your death update has you listed as a cultist attached to the Fatamid pack..

[randakar]

He didn't need to be certain what you were, he needed you to be certain that you would be brutalised, because that forces you to be on his side if you are the sorcerer. If you are something else it doesn't make any difference to him, but it makes the difference between winning and losing if you are someone that can switch between packs.

True.

Its a bad rule. Just because the people who had it didn't use it effectively doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been horribly unbalancing in other hands.

The normal counter against brutals is normally hunters shooting them. If I understand your argument correctly you would like for that counter to still exist.
I agree with that idea in the sense that it sounds wrong to have someone get hit by this inescapable death sentence by someone setting his brutal on him, but other than that I'm not sure it's so terribly unbalanced. Whoever intends to use it needs to die to do so, after all.

If you were good you wouldn't have contacted me because, amongst other reasons, you would have been dead.

My hypothetical situation had me alive but good. In your world apparently death is the only alternative. But really, the whole discussion about contacting you or not contacting you would be impossible in that case so why even bring it up?

You were better off not reading them. That way you don't get upset at the end of the game when you find out the GM has conned you.

Maybe.

As a ghost? Really? Who dies first, the pack with the hunt order in on you, or the pack if you go after them when you are not turned?

Can we have a bit less straw-man argumenting please? First you say I was more effective as a baddie killing baddies than as a goodie, then when I try to argue against that by telling you what I would do in such a case you suddenly say I'd be dead in that case. Which obviously isn't what the whole argument was about in the first place.

You were going to die sooner or later. It was just a matter of time. Parity is going to come sooner or later. It was just a matter of time and not very much time at all by then.

It wasn't that Hearth had to die before parity, it was that Hearth had to die before you even at the cost of giving a tiny extra chance to the goodies and Fatimids.

I have no idea what on earth you're talking about.

Look, at that particular stage in the game we have 4-5 goodies all piling up on hearth from the word "go". What was I supposed to do? Save him? Just sit back and watch the entire thing play out, quite probably at the cost of more people in my team casting really suspicious votes that causes them to be on the receiving end of a bandwagon?

I simply wasn't going to let that happen. I told people we were better off cutting him loose at that stage, and I meant it. He had his chance to make himself look innocent by voting Rendap, and he didn't take it. The consequence was what it was. He was a festering limb, and trying to save it would have compromised the rest of the body.
Call that ruthless, if you will. But it wasn't just about me.

[Falc]

BTW, Arch Mede, you seem to be convinced that Randakar's ploy to contact Telesien meant he'd have to end up dead or evil.

I can see your point, but the fact of the matter is, Randakar never got a proper response. Telesien had asked to be subbed before the outing and he basically told Randakar he wasn't playing anymore and that he wasn't even aware of an outing and asked to be left alone. The GM even sent a message supporting Telesien's request to not be contacted.

I do believe that, if Randakar had made contact with Telesien's pack, I might not have acted the same with him.

[reis91]

I agree with Arch Mede regarding brutal. It is stupid to reward bad play so much. There should be something else to be able to use brutal properly than get killed in almost any possible fashion (dunno if it would include GM autolynch...)

[johho888]

Regarding brutal, the reason I accidentally brutalized Slinky was because I hadn't read the rules and though it only worked with lynches. But also because he and two other voted me after I outed telesien, telesien showed up as a wolf, someone claimed he just put EURO far enough ahead so a baddie leader couldn't switch from him to me. And EURO had told me he was a leader/one eye open. So stupidly I suspected a baddie leader plot. And if I was leaderlynched I wanted to take someone with me and a JL spokesperson voter had it coming to him, I thought. Also I didn't enough stress that people shouldn't vote EURO in the EURO Hearth race. A one eye open guy openly attached to the JL wouldn't be all that bad from a goodie point of view.

[The Arch Mede]

My hypothetical situation had me alive but good. In your world apparently death is the only alternative. But really, the whole discussion about contacting you or not contacting you would be impossible in that case so why even bring it up?

You brought it up.

My hypothetical situation had me alive but good. In your world apparently death is the only alternative. But really, the whole discussion about contacting you or not contacting you would be impossible in that case so why even bring it up?
...
Can we have a bit less straw-man argumenting please? First you say I was more effective as a baddie killing baddies than as a goodie, then when I try to argue against that by telling you what I would do in such a case you suddenly say I'd be dead in that case. Which obviously isn't what the whole argument was about in the first place.

Its what happened in the game, not a hypotheses. They hunted you before you could get around to outing them in the thread. Or are you saying you expected you were cursed all along and if you hadn't known that you would have acted differently?

I am saying that in the game just completed, you were a goodie trying to survive as a goodie which you managed for 3 days and then failed. What you would have done as a goodie after that is irrelevant because your goodie strategy failed on night 4.

On night 4 you lose as a goodie because a pack has decided its time for you to die.

No doubt you had plans for what to do as a goodie if your strategy had continued to work, but it failed. Since it was already a failed strategy, its continuation is obviously also a failed strategy. This isn't a hypothetical straw man, its what actually happened in the game.

The GM has decided that if you fail to a wolf attack you get a second chance as a wolf.
Your strategy now changes. You are now a baddie trying to win as a baddie. Your baddie strategy is a success.

I observe that your failed goodie strategy killed no wolves and your successful baddie strategy killed 2 packmates. 2 is larger than 0. This is fact. You failed to convince the village to lynch any wolves while you were good, and you successfully persuaded your pack to sacrifice 2 wolves while you were bad.

I give as my opinion based on my analysis of what happened in the game and what I know now about what you knew of the setup at the time, that Rendap would have had a much better chance of a win if he had refused to be sacrificed, but at a small detriment to the chance of a Byz win and a rather larger detriment to the chance of you winning. However if Rendap couldn't see a way for the Byz to win unless he died, that's werewolf and he deserves his loss. I think he had options and lots of them were good.

I give as my opinion based on my analysis of what happened in the game and what I now now you knew of the setup at the time, that you would have had a slightly better chance of a win, and so would the Byz, if you hadn't outed Hearth. The only qualification is that I don't know what you and the Fatimids thought about one another at the time, and its possible that if a Byz wolf didn't die you would have had a much worse chance of victory because you would have been hunted.

I simply wasn't going to let that happen. I told people we were better off cutting him loose at that stage, and I meant it. He had his chance to make himself look innocent by voting Rendap, and he didn't take it. The consequence was what it was. He was a festering limb, and trying to save it would have compromised the rest of the body.
Call that ruthless, if you will. But it wasn't just about me.

Rendap was a sacrifice and an obvious one. You do not make yourself look innocent by voting for an obvious sacrifice, particularly if you are already suspicious. The people who would look innocent on that vote were those who had voted Rendap before. Anyone else would look dodgy.

Hearth might or might not have got lynched if you had done nothing. If he gets lynched, you don't need to save him but you have a small chance at parity that night and a very good one at parity the next and a virtual certainty the one after. Its endgame time. You can actually afford to save him, unless another Byz dying in that lynch is what you need to happen to keep the Fatimids from hunting you. What you do by sacrificing him and putting Tamius at risk the following day opened up the possibility that all the wolves die and even though the other baddies are a majority, its a goodie win.

So my opinion is that you badly miscalculated with Hearth if you did it to save the Byz from the village, but not if you did it to save yourself from the Fatimids. 4-5 goodies piling on him from the word go is complete fantasy. There were enough goodies that could have been put into the picture and lynched instead to get you easily to parity without the need to lose any other baddie. Day 2 with 10 days still to survive and a competent Seer on the lookout is one thing. Giving up an immediate chance to win while you have the JL completely under your thumb is another. You push parity back a day by lynching a packmate rather than a goodie and you only have a day or two to go! Its absolutely crazy for a pack to kill one of their own wolves in the situation you were in.

I think there were only 4 people that it would have been immediately suspicious to make a case against. You could have had the goodies fighting over which of their number to lynch with Hearth in 3rd place. You could have saved Hearth and lynched the Seer on parity day if you wanted to.

[randakar]

You brought it up.

I'm pretty sure I didn't.

Its what happened in the game, not a hypotheses. They hunted you before you could get around to outing them in the thread.

The hypothetical here is what would have happened if they hunted someone else, not what would have happened if I hadn't been cursed.
I have this distinct feeling we keep talking right past each other.

Or are you saying you expected you were cursed all along and if you hadn't known that you would have acted differently?

No.
I might have figured that one out at some point, mind, but that wouldn't have changed my behaviour much, I reckon.

I am saying that in the game just completed, you were a goodie trying to survive as a goodie which you managed for 3 days and then failed. What you would have done as a goodie after that is irrelevant because your goodie strategy failed on night 4.

On night 4 you lose as a goodie because a pack has decided its time for you to die.

And that is completely irrelevant to the question: Would I have been more effective as a goodie after night 4, or not?
Are you trying to answer some other question here?

Let me be absolutely clear here: As a goodie, I don't care about getting hunted. My goodie strategy is to find wolves and get them killed. Full stop. Getting hunted is just a merit badge. If I get hunted, I did what I was supposed to be doing.

No doubt you had plans for what to do as a goodie if your strategy had continued to work, but it failed. Since it was already a failed strategy, its continuation is obviously also a failed strategy. This isn't a hypothetical straw man, its what actually happened in the game.

.. but I don't consider it a failed strategy. I pinpointed 2 wolves from the byzantines and a cultist and a wolf from the fatamids before I died. That is a pretty decent success rate in my book.

The GM has decided that if you fail to a wolf attack you get a second chance as a wolf.
Your strategy now changes. You are now a baddie trying to win as a baddie. Your baddie strategy is a success.

I observe that your failed goodie strategy killed no wolves and your successful baddie strategy killed 2 packmates. 2 is larger than 0. This is fact. You failed to convince the village to lynch any wolves while you were good, and you successfully persuaded your pack to sacrifice 2 wolves while you were bad.

That's silly. Comparing before with after doesn't really work. You don't have much information to go on in the first few days. You can only start doing the real work finding wolves once the game has been going on for a while.
If you really want to compare my performance as a goodie versus my performance as a baddie, pick some other game and compare that with this one, or some other game that I was evil in.

I give as my opinion based on my analysis of what happened in the game and what I know now about what you knew of the setup at the time, that Rendap would have had a much better chance of a win if he had refused to be sacrificed, but at a small detriment to the chance of a Byz win and a rather larger detriment to the chance of you winning. However if Rendap couldn't see a way for the Byz to win unless he died, that's werewolf and he deserves his loss. I think he had options and lots of them were good.

Marty was about to wake up. I had given him the name of someone to scan and claim - humancalculator - and he would get the other name soon, too, unless I did something about it. If I hadn't stopped him from claiming more of them the apprentices might not have been so easy to convince that the byzantines had the game covered and might have been tempted to tell on us once the sorcerer came in. We didn't even *have* any contact with the sorcerer yet at that point.

Rendap did a good thing. It helped his team a lot.
If he hadn't done that, I had been highly tempted to just sacrifice myself instead and shoot marty. I know I discussed the option with them, at least.

I give as my opinion based on my analysis of what happened in the game and what I now now you knew of the setup at the time, that you would have had a slightly better chance of a win, and so would the Byz, if you hadn't outed Hearth. The only qualification is that I don't know what you and the Fatimids thought about one another at the time, and its possible that if a Byz wolf didn't die you would have had a much worse chance of victory because you would have been hunted.

Maybe. The hearth outing was a bit much, I grant you that. Boris really wanted to do something useful though and I kinda thought I'd give him a free hand.
And it worked out pretty well. The main thing there was that it denied the village an opportunity to find more of us through the vote cycle that day.
There may have been ways to save him but there was a significant risk to it at that point. Especially with the Seer eating out of our hand.

Hearth might or might not have got lynched if you had done nothing. If he gets lynched, you don't need to save him but you have a small chance at parity that night and a very good one at parity the next and a virtual certainty the one after. Its endgame time. You can actually afford to save him, unless another Byz dying in that lynch is what you need to happen to keep the Fatimids from hunting you. What you do by sacrificing him and putting Tamius at risk the following day opened up the possibility that all the wolves die and even though the other baddies are a majority, its a goodie win.

You forget that there was a second in command out there and that seer might just grow wise on me any second. If we'd been too obvious about it we might have lost control of the lynch for days, at least until we had had a chance to hunt that leader. That might have gotten doc protection by then..

So my opinion is that you badly miscalculated with Hearth if you did it to save the Byz from the village, but not if you did it to save yourself from the Fatimids. 4-5 goodies piling on him from the word go is complete fantasy.

Go back to that day and check. I'll wait. The first thing that happened that day was 4 people voting Hearth.

There were enough goodies that could have been put into the picture and lynched instead to get you easily to parity without the need to lose any other baddie. Day 2 with 10 days still to survive and a competent Seer on the lookout is one thing. Giving up an immediate chance to win while you have the JL completely under your thumb is another. You push parity back a day by lynching a packmate rather than a goodie and you only have a day or two to go! Its absolutely crazy for a pack to kill one of their own wolves in the situation you were in.

I wasn't that certain of how much time we had. The fatamids were a complete unknown, and I'm not even sure we had our sorcerer contact yet by that point.
You may be right that given the benefit of hindsight we shouldn't have done this, but at that time it wasn't so clear at all.

I think there were only 4 people that it would have been immediately suspicious to make a case against. You could have had the goodies fighting over which of their number to lynch with Hearth in 3rd place. You could have saved Hearth and lynched the Seer on parity day if you wanted to.

That wasn't parity day. As I said before, the fatamids were complete unknowns to us at that point. We had to find them first..

[The Arch Mede]

I wasn't that certain of how much time we had. The fatamids were a complete unknown, and I'm not even sure we had our sorcerer contact yet by that point.
You may be right that given the benefit of hindsight we shouldn't have done this, but at that time it wasn't so clear at all.

You don't actually need the sorcerer. The sorcerer could just sit there gathering in the Apprentices, but yes I agree you have to play a longer game until you can actually count which ones he has. I had walrus as taking orders from you from the day after you turned, so I assumed you were in contact right away.

If I'd known about the apprentices, I'd probably have had the chance to have this discussion (naturally rather different without the benefit of hindsight) while the game was live and the deadline would have come, and that would have been the end of it.

I hadn't realised this was hdk's first game until today. I thought that since he had been around for ages, he must have GMed zillions of games by now and really should have known better.

Apprentices are tricky things to get right. I had EURO telling me what to do and didn't mess them up in quite the same way but I didn't get them right either. hdk put a decent game together considering he hadn't experience of how rules play out from the inside.

The reason they are tricky is that the generic term "Apprentice" is used to cover a whole lot of different roles and traits most of which are fine in moderation and one of which needs to be lynched on day 0.

Seer Apprentice and the like work as roles, but Apprentice doesn't. seer apprentice and the like work as hidden traits as does apprentice. Scans give information about roles, but don't change them. They may change traits and they may trigger role changes on being scanned but the scan itself reveals no information on the trait. A Sorcerer Apprentice with the seer apprentice trait could exist in a game but you wouldn't want the Sorcerer Apprentice to be told his master at game start if that possibility existed.

[Boris ze Spider]

The outing of Hearth was a bit much. We might have been able to save him with a little luck, but he looked so glaringly wolfish that I believed the best option was to out him myself, thus virtually clearing myself (especially with the priest dead) and more importantly, wrecking an entire day of analysis. Also, the second part of the outing was quite clever, as it gave us an easy target to bandwagon on as the village was grasping at strings.

[Najs]

Werewolf CXXVIII: The Fox and the Werehound

Somewhere in England, autumn 1948.

The most influential members of the British society is gathering at a secret location in the English countryside for the annual fox hunt. The highly exclusive event shapes British policy as politicians, businessmen and aristocracy meet for a few days of the bloody sport. The nearest village is far away and the peace and quiet at the manor is guaranteed when the hunt is off.

But a single question remain to be a answered; who is the hunter and who is the prey?