[The Resistance] Statistics and General Discussion Thread

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Since this seems to have enough degree of staying power, I am going to tinker a little this week with the Faq & General Information thread, a brief description and basic rules package for me to copy/paste would be appreciated and your post would get quoted and your words live in sticky thread forever!
 
Since this seems to have enough degree of staying power, I am going to tinker a little this week with the Faq & General Information thread, a brief description and basic rules package for me to copy/paste would be appreciated and your post would get quoted and your words live in sticky thread forever!
This an ironically timed death post or something? :unsure:
 
Well, I would run one, but I'm not sure that I can guarantee that I have the time just right now.
 
I will probably have a game going before the end of this month if no one else has by then. If there's still interest. It's going to feature roles, at last.
 
As promised, new game coming either tomorrow or the next day. It will have roles, probably more or less adapted from the Avalon version because I'm too lazy to think of think of anything original. All that's needed right now is for me to write the rules to accommodate for roles and interest from at least 5 people.

In the mean time, if anyone has any thoughts on roles, etc, feel free to say so.
 
Why? Why?!? It's been weeks since the last game of resistance, but you decide to host one just as my exams are starting! How am I meant to revise when I'll be spending every waking second analysing individual posts and running through hundreds of spy combinations in my head?! At least make me a spy so I won't have to do much real analysis...
 
Why? Why?!? It's been weeks since the last game of resistance, but you decide to host one just as my exams are starting


But if, and this is a big if, I go with the Lancelot role, that means the 2 Lancelots have a change of switching allegiance each round! Players would have to be hyper-vigilant to see if something along those lines might happen and if anyone's behavior changes. (Sort of the analogue to a "cursed villager", but with the chance of flipping back and forth more than once.) But maybe we will put you in that role just to make things harder for you both in game and in exams.

Cliges: Crushing academic dreams since 2013.
 
But if, and this is a big if, I go with the Lancelot role, that means the 2 Lancelots have a change of switching allegiance each round! Players would have to be hyper-vigilant to see if something along those lines might happen and if anyone's behavior changes. (Sort of the analogue to a "cursed villager", but with the chance of flipping back and forth more than once.) But maybe we will put you in that role just to make things harder for you both in game and in exams.

Cliges: Crushing academic dreams since 2013.

Hmmm I suppose nobody really needs a 1st at university these days. Most people do fine with 2.1s or 2.2s, so I guess I don't need to study that hard...
 
Don't worry, academic degrees will be completely useless in the near future anyway. :(

(Sorry, terribly off-topic, and I really shouldn't be going around scaring people with the truth.)
Especially since the odds that anyone believes it enough to actually do anything are just about zero.
 
Don't worry, academic degrees will be completely useless in the near future anyway. :(

(Sorry, terribly off-topic, and I really shouldn't be going around scaring people with the truth.)
Especially since the odds that anyone believes it enough to actually do anything are just about zero.
Oh, go ahead. I've nothing else to do since uni starts.
 
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Don't you find it rather odd that your sources are crackpot websites and random blogs done by people who admit to not being experts? :p

Even if oil reserves have been massively overestimated (which I'm not that sold on anyway) and we are about to hit some peak oil point, once oil becomes restrictively expensive more and more will be invested into alternatives. The worst that will happen is another economic slowdown.
 
Peak Oil will merely provide the incentive needed for governments to stop being pussies and get back on nuclear. As to financial collapse, meh, I've been expecting it quite happily for a few years. And my degree will still be useful even in a nuclear holocaust :p

But anyway, what was the general player base's opinion on the Avalon variation? I didn't see much after game analysis in this thread, and I can't be bothered going back and reading through the old games.
 
I don't think we really have much of an opinion yet, as it hasn't been tried here. But some have expressed concerns that the assassin role is a bit over powered, because it could hand the baddies a victory on a random guess.

In any case, I will rename some of the roles, and have to decide how many many players would be necessary for the inclusion of which roles. Major candidates for replacement names are Ysbadddaen and Octa, for being actual proper names, a connection to broader Arthurian themes and, in the case of the first, because it's impossible to pronounce.

The game essentially has to have (otherwise you'd just have no frills Resistance with no roles, plot cards, etc) Merlin and the assassin (the latter of which will be renamed) . Keep in mind that there is still no PM, of course. The Percival role knows the identity of Merlin, but if the Morgana role is used, Percival would be aware of the real Merlin and Morgana, but won't know which is which. If the Mordred role is used, he is a baddie but not known to Merlin; the only villain who doesn't appear to him, in fact. If the Oberon role is used (and it will be renamed if it is), he doesn't know the identity of the other baddies, nor do they know him. For simplicity's sake, I shall forgo the optional Lancelot and Excalibur rules.

Hypothetically, all of these roles could be used in a game of at least 7, or even less, if the assassin were to have more than one role. However, I'm not sure what the right balance is. I'm thinking just Merlin and whatever I call the assassin for 5 players, add Percival (which I might rename Perceval just because it looks more elegant) and Morgana with at least 7. Then there's a question of if and when to add Mordred and whatever I call Oberon. If both were used, it would mean all the baddies get a role in a 10 player game.
 
Don't you find it rather odd that your sources are crackpot websites and random blogs done by people who admit to not being experts? :p

No, not really. Crackpots? Maybe. But over the course of the years I have come to realize that a) big news sites will print what they're told (and do not, in general, give a whit about getting information from the source) and b) none of the people at the top know what the hell they're doing.
I have evidence for a) from people who experienced things that have been massively misreported later, and evidence for b) in such enormous heaps it isn't even silly.

So look closer. All of these sites have one thing in common: Original research. People going to the source of the numbers rather than some intermediary. That eating fossil fuels article was written by a professor studying the subject, if I'm not mistaken. The wikipedia article - well, it's wikipedia. But King M. Hubbart clearly was not a crackpot - he was and is a rather respected geophyisicus who's predictions so far have been spot on.
The "wolf at the door" site actually takes most of it's numbers directly from the BP world oil reports - a rather respected source which according to some of the people on more pessimistic sites are actually very much on the optimistic side. And not a single one of these people has even the slightest reason to lie, misrepresent, or distort what they perceive as the truth: That our world is in deep, deep trouble.

And on the mass media side, the story they are trying to sell us stinks.
- Doesn't it strike you as odd that all of our political and economic leaders subscribe to this idea that economic growth is the one true saviour and the only way forward, when sheer logic dictates that such a thing is absolutely 100% impossible? Everything can grow only to a point. There are limits to growth. In fact, that was exactly the title of the famous report written by the club of rome in 1970.
- Doesn't it strike you as odd that the response to our economic crisis has been to print money in such vast quantities that the US actually has to double taxes just to get out of debt?
The model that the mass media present of our economy and what is really going on is clearly deeply flawed. If all that has been going on was truly just a few speculators and banks doing silly and outrageous things with the money people entrusted them then our economic crisis should have been over years ago. But in the meantime .. the numbers don't look good at all.

Even if oil reserves have been massively overestimated (which I'm not that sold on anyway) and we are about to hit some peak oil point, once oil becomes restrictively expensive more and more will be invested into alternatives. The worst that will happen is another economic slowdown.

And that is where you're wrong.

1) The basic problem is not mere "slowdown". The basic problem is that at some point it takes too much energy to create more energy. All energy sources have an EROI ratio - energy returned on energy invested. At the start of the 1900's, our global EROI was roughly 100 to 1. But over time getting energy has become more and more costly, because we have to dig deeper to reserves that are harder and harder to get to.
The reason why the US is investing in shale oil and tar sands is because they have better EROI ratios than classic oil. And where do these sources sit? at 5 to 1 and 3 to 1, or something along those lines. Solar power sits on somewhere between 6.8 and and 1.6, depending on what type of generation you're talking about.

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2) We have no true alternatives for fossil fuels. Electricity, yes, you can generate that with wind (oh wait, that's unreliable and polluting, though the 20 to 1 EROI is actually rather good), solar (much more expensive, and again unreliable and polluting due to the materials involved), nuclear (massively dangerous if left alone or without backup power too long), or via hydro (oh wait, we kinda ran out of places we can easily build dams..)
But all of the materials? (Including things like steel, which you can't make without coal..) And don't even get started on transportation - electrical cars aren't all they are cracked up to be, since a lot of electrical power is lost in the power lines that move that power, never mind that the current state of our power plants means that most of it ends up coming from fossil fuels again.

3) Our food production relies on natural gas and oil to such an extend that losing the fossil fuels means losing somewhere between 2/3rds to 3/4ths of our food production. Never mind the transportation, the packaging, the cooling, etc etc. Going back to a situation without fossil fuels would reduce production to a level where we can feed somewhere below 2 billion people -at best. And with the way we are treating our soil, that number may very well be lower. A LOT lower.

edit: Oh, and "at some point" - that has already happened. Classic oil hit it's peak in 2005, and all of the numbers I've seen clearly state production is falling.
Only shale oil and tar sands are keeping us away from the cliff - for now.

Peak Oil will merely provide the incentive needed for governments to stop being pussies and get back on nuclear. And my degree will still be useful even in a nuclear holocaust :p

With what money, steel, transportation, and workers, pray tell? Once that crisis hits true, what makes you think we'll have the means to do anything of the sort?
And oh, by the way, what generation nuclear power plant are you envisioning? Because the current crop cannot go without electrical or diesel based backup for more than 72 hours before overheating their cores and/or their spend fuel pools. Which will be rather inconvenient when you can no longer keep the power grid functioning due to fossil fuel shortages..
 
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You're not seriously telling me that the price of oil has risen in recent years.