Werewolf CXXVII - The First Crusade

Falc said:

Oh, it's over?

Okay, so, my point of view:

On night 0 I scan Johho, not a wolf.
On night 1, I scan Telesien, a wolf.

So yeah, okay, I take a chance and trust Johho to do the outing. I mean, heck, at some point I need to jump in and trust someone, no? Might as well go early.

What was the result of all this?

1) We got a number of contacts, most intriguing of which were three people all telling the same story: unclaimed apprentices who were told their role by the GM. Very strange, but since it was the same story 3 times, we trusted it.

2) Out of the blue, Randakar contacts me and Esemesas, informing us he'll contact Telesien to pose as the Sorceror. He also contacts Johho independently to inform him he's a hunter and that he's doing this undercover sting on Telesien.

3) In hindsight, probably the one stupid move that doomed the village: NO WORD FROM THE PRIEST!!! Not even after Telesien gets lynched, proven a wolf AND Johho survives the night! Nothing!

Why is that so important?

Because after Johho gets hunted, I'm all alone again and with Adamus' Priestly Powers, I'm seriously doubting if there even is a Priest. Well, alone except for Randakar, who's doing things I can't imagine a baddie doing.

So I decide to trust him.

Which I was right in doing at that time since he was still a goodie. Too bad he was cursed and got turned the very next night

Further notable occurrences: me stealing the Priest's apprentice the very same night the Priest gets hunted (and saved by the Doc). Yeah, that was a shocker, by then I had taken Steed as my Apprentice and told him everything.

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There is a bloody good reason why Marty didn't contact Johho. In fact, there are many bloody good reasons.

Well, you were right at the time, but it's still pretty reckless to trust someone just because he claims he is going to infiltrate the baddies.

reis91 said:

There is a bloody good reason why Marty didn't contact Johho. In fact, there are many bloody good reasons.

Well, you were right at the time, but it's still pretty reckless to trust someone just because he claims he is going to infiltrate the baddies.

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Starting with "Johho isn't scanned by the priest, and therefore could easily be a cultist", eh?
And of course the priest scanning Johho would have been pretty pointless because Johho was very likely to be killed very soon..

Yeah, starting... and the list goes on...

Gottfried von Bouillon was a holy knight who strove to serve the Church and to do good. When the call to save Jerusalem from the infidel was preached Gottfried picked up his cross (and his sword and his coat of mail) and joined the Crusade.

The Crusade was full of factions all squabbling with one another as many proud knights strove to position themselves to be King of Jerusalem when the Crusade was successful. Often their followers fought with one another rather than the Saracens. Such fighting among Christians sickened the godly Gottfried and he stood to one side, even at the risk of leaving the Christian camp and facing the Mohammedans alone.

Others among the Christians were impressed by him and followed him, urging him to take over the leadership of the Crusade, but he refused, for in his wisdom he saw that he would merely become another faction, and the other contenders would take up arms against him as well as each other. He had picked up his cross to march to Jerusalem and free it and, God willing, he would do so. There had been plenty of Frankish barons in France and if it had wanted to fight them, he would have stayed at home. He had travelled halfway across the world to reproach those that desecrated Jerusalem with their mosques at the point of his sword, but not his fellow Christians. And he had hope that God was indeed willing, for despite all odds and their vicious infighting time after time they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

And some of the fractious barons fell in battle, and some fell to disease, and some fell to each other, and some decided that ruling a minor city in Syria was sufficient to their ambition, and they too fell away from the Crusade.

And so the Crusaders that eventually stood before the walls of Jerusalem were few in number. But God was with them, and they had reached Jerusalem and they were not to be denied. None of the worldly barons remained. For they had calculated that the Crusade was now to small to invest Jerusalem, and they had taken castles on the coast and fortified them and now God had delivered Jerusalem into the hands of the Christians and they were not there.

Gottfried was there. Again the crusaders pressed him to accept leadership and desired of him that he be crowned King in Jerusalem. Again he refused. But there was no one else and they reproached him saying that they must have a leader or they would surely perish and Jerusalem would fall to the heathen again. So it was that Gottfried became the leader of the crusaders in Jerusalem, but he always refused to wear a crown.



Of course, every student of history rather than historical romances knows that the local Christians handed Jerusalem over to the Jihad 1300 years ago because they preferred to be ruled by those that were openly heathen and tolerated all Christians as second class citizens rather than the heretical Christians in Constantinople that persecuted them, and that it has been ruled by Islam ever since.

The true story of Gottfried is a sadder one. He did indeed go on crusade, but he met the Devil on the road, and the Devil promised him glory in Jerusalem if he just did a few things the Devil asked and let the Devil get on with arranging it. Gottfried was dazzled by the fair countenance of the Devil, and believed that God had sent him an angel to guide him so that he could lead the crusade to everlasting glory, and Gottfried did as the Devil asked, and supped with the Devil and the Devil made soup of him and all the holy crusaders too. And thus it is that even today, when Gottfried has long been forgotten, Bouillon is known as a soup.

Amongst the many martyrs was Saint Gellert. Such was the holiness of this redoubtable saint that none of the evil ones dared to take responsibility for killing him, and so they placed him in a barrel and rolled the barrel over a cliff. And even today, though many have forgotten him, the hill where he was martyred is named for him.

randakar said:

Hey, I don't particularly blame you for that. There have been situations in the past where I've trusted people with information baddies shouldn't have.

I'm not sure I would have done that in your particular set of circumstances, though. You had an apprentice, and a bunch of unclaimed apprentices in the wings. If you had had a little more patience you could have slowly build up a group of people that were cleared without risking giving other people more information than absolutely necessary. Yes, there was no contact with the priest, but there was very little you could do about that.

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Except that it turns out I couldn't trust my apprentices either. So, as long as I had no contact with the Priest, who could I possibly trust without taking a risk? Who could I possibly clear all by myself? No-one. Your actions in that early stage of the game were those of a goodie (you didn't know you were cursed) and I have no regrets about the judgment I made then.

One more thing I'd like to note about the Apprentice thing.

When I scanned Taklagarn, I was clearly told that I had just stolen the Priest's apprentice, while Marty had 0% chance of being informed that he'd lost his apprentice. Not quite balanced, IMO...

the_hdk said:

sigh..... Big games are never perfectly balanced as its too much work to calculate t all and nobody has done it.

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WD did.

However the really criminal thing isn't the set up. Its telling one lot of players you are playing by one rule, and another set of players you are playing by a different rule. The set of players you give the correct information to has a big advantage over the set of players that has the false information and you should not be helping one set of players to win at the expense of another set.

Falc said:

3) In hindsight, probably the one stupid move that doomed the village: NO WORD FROM THE PRIEST!!! Not even after Telesien gets lynched, proven a wolf AND Johho survives the night! Nothing!

Why is that so important?

Because after Johho gets hunted, I'm all alone again and with Adamus' Priestly Powers, I'm seriously doubting if there even is a Priest. Well, alone except for Randakar, who's doing things I can't imagine a baddie doing.

So I decide to trust him.

Which I was right in doing at that time since he was still a goodie. Too bad he was cursed and got turned the very next night

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You want to know? Several reasons come to mind:
1) I hate powerful JL's. They literally ruin the game for every villager that's not in them. Since I always complain when I'm a villager, it would be hypocritical of me to do that very thing as the priest.
2) The village was going fine without our co-operation. Very fine indeed. We had got several baddies killed and more were in the pipeline even without any further seer scans. This game was perfect for vote analysis but nobody really tried it AFAIK, except for wolves who done some token analysis that, if anybody had cared to closely scrutinise, would have been shown to have several inconsistencies. I'm pretty confident I could've got a couple more obvious wolves lynched just by looking at the votes, so could anyone else who might've been bothered. I inevitably got hunted and so couldn't do that, but once I die it's no longer a concern of mine.
3) Johho was not cleared. Remotely. He was unlikely to be a baddie, but easily possible. No reason for me to potentially throw away my life when, at the time, the village looked favourites to win. If the village was in dire straits, then I would've, but no we were going better than fine at this stage.
4) I did get in contact with you a couple of days afterwards anyway, by which stage the village was still doing great.
5) You clearly had already people in the JL that you chose to trust. If there's a tight knit JL I understand the wisdom in double scanning someone to absolutely clear them (although they can and sometimes are turned on the very same night anyway), but you had given away your role to two unscanned people and so there was no reason to actually co-ordinate our scans in that way. I still do not why you told randy you were the seer...even if he was good, why was there any reason to tell him? Couldn't you have said you were part of the JL or something? Maybe an SA villager?

And no, you still weren't right to trust randy, even if he turned out to be a goodie at the time. In the same way that it's not a good idea for a small child to accept a lift from a stranger, even if they are in fact just being helpful. The point is it's an unnecesary risk - You had no need to trust him! You only need people in contact whenever you have wolves to out, and even if you have one wolf that can wait a while.

EDIT: Wait...

Also, when I got turned on night 2, I was already in contact with Falc the Seer, who gave me the name of his apprentice and two unclaimed apprentices.

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WHYYY?!!! Heck, even if randakar had been doulbe-scanned I still wouldn't have done that.


However, it was very unlikely for you to scan Taklagarn that night, I grant you. However it may not have done any worse. At least as your apprentice you knew him, whereas if he became the priest after I died, you two could only have got in touch through the unscanned wolf randakar.


@reis91: Yeah that was taking the piss. I did assume you knew I was the priest, not because of the SA claim, but because you outed yourself after I applied some small pressure (I did suspect you before you were scanned). The fact is, as an active goodie I just don't survive werewolf games no matter my role.


@the_hdk: I didn't read the rules and actually did assume apprentices could be re-took, but after reading them it's fairly clear that it shouldn't have happened.

marty99 said:

(although they can and sometimes are turned on the very same night anyway)

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:sad:

, but you had given away your role to two unscanned people and so there was no reason to actually co-ordinate our scans in that way. I still do not why you told randy you were the seer...even if he was good, why was there any reason to tell him? Couldn't you have said you were part of the JL or something? Maybe an SA villager?

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Psychology ftw.

@reis91: Yeah that was taking the piss. I did assume you knew I was the priest, not because of the SA claim, but because you outed yourself after I applied some small pressure (I did suspect you before you were scanned).

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Come on, you truly believed in that? Then I repeat myself, you are indeed more naive than I ever thought, at times...

I thought you were skeptic initially, and suspected this to be another "reis crazy villager stunt" but after receiving your PM, I became quite convinced that you knew.

Falc said:

Except that it turns out I couldn't trust my apprentices either. So, as long as I had no contact with the Priest, who could I possibly trust without taking a risk? Who could I possibly clear all by myself? No-one. Your actions in that early stage of the game were those of a goodie (you didn't know you were cursed) and I have no regrets about the judgment I made then.

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You had your apprentices. In hindsight you couldn't trust them but you didn't know that at the time. They were still people you had to confide in; as they knew you were the seer anyway, you had nothing to lose. One person is enough for you to be in contact with. You had one apprentice and two more if you needed them.

One more thing I'd like to note about the Apprentice thing.

When I scanned Taklagarn, I was clearly told that I had just stolen the Priest's apprentice, while Marty had 0% chance of being informed that he'd lost his apprentice. Not quite balanced, IMO...

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Agreed. Tak told me, but obviously if it was the sorcerer who scanned him I would have been none the wiser.

reis91 said:

Come on, you truly believed in that? Then I repeat myself, you are indeed more naive than I ever thought, at times...

I thought you were skeptic initially, and suspected this to be another "reis crazy villager stunt" but after receiving your PM, I became quite convinced that you knew.

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Naive how? What did I believe in?
Why did you do what you did, then? If you didn't know the priest.

marty99 said:

Naive how? What did I believe in?
Why did you do what you did, then? If you didn't know the priest.

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Because Randy sent me the chain PM. He didn't tell me only him and Taklagarn got it, so I assumed it was divulged as prescribed in it, and acted accordingly. It was not my intention to burn the JL source who kept feeding in the good stuff to my pack.

reis91 said:

Because Randy sent me the chain PM. He didn't tell me only him and Taklagarn got it, so I assumed it was divulged as prescribed in it, and acted accordingly. It was not my intention to burn the JL source who kept feeding in the good stuff to my pack.

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Yeah, sending that pm to randy was the only real mistake I consider to have made. But I didn't have much choice whenever Taklagarn completely ignored my pm and not only did not out reis in the thread, he didn't reply at all, despite the fact we were having a lengthy conversation...naturally I thought there was a decent chance of him being a wolf. I consider that moment a turning point in the game.

gigau said:

Forgot to say, thanks hdk for this game... even if it ended quite abruptly, me not even having time to use my traits (although, if i was high on Byzantine death list, it wouldn't have changed much for me...)

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You weren't on the byzantine death list. No need. We had a seer scan on you telling us you weren't a wolf

But ..what traits were those, exactly?
And who was the doc anyway?

the_hdk, what would you have done if esemesas had his hunter order on me and I had mine on him? I considered that.

:rofl:

Right.
No wonder you were totally invisible for much of the game