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...that's brutal!
Sorry but as I said we knew you were blessed and it could have eventually caused problems for our side. If I had known that Panzer also was brutal I would have told him to brutalize you. Quite lucky there but I'm still glad you won, you deserved it!
RE: chains of brutals and whatnot.
In my next game I will clarify the rules on that, whatever they may be. Atm I'm leaning towards allowing chains of brutals explicitly in the rules, but I'm not sure. Either way I'll be clear on the issue.
Another thing to talk about: subs and no-voters.
In this game it wasn't a huge problem overall, but it is a bit of a headache for a GM to have to worry about. I'm wondering perhaps in future large games during the sign-up period we should encourage 2/3 players to sign up as subs instead of as players, to ensure there isn't massive no-voters. Of course in some games there will be enough dead villagers to compensate. In this game, even though information traits were quite scarce (more on that later) for whatever reason most people who were killed were no ideal subs.
I was also reading a thread Rysz started a while ago during my break when he suggested that dead players should not be allowed back into games at all. Which is in theory the ideal thing to do. But in this game I had no choice but to let dead players back into sub, including some which in theory gave away information. But I made the judgment call that any information gleaned was not that significant, and it was better than to have to auto-lynch zombies. And looking back I'm confident I made the right choice, I don't think TSP claiming snoop wasn't his rival made any difference whatsoever in the game, nor did letting gigau or nautilu with his used seer power (on punkbob) back in.
However, it may be best if we could start games with designated subs so these choices don't have to be made.
Also, most GMs have fixed on rules on missed votes and subbing, generally if someone missed three votes they're subbed out.
But I think it should be scaled on the time gone in the game.
If someone misses two votes on the first and third day of a 40 player game, it's really not a big deal.
Whereas if someone misses even one vote when there are less than 10 players left, it's a huge impact on the game.
So I propose introducing a sliding scale based on how much time has gone/how many players are left in the game. Players should be allowed a couple of missed votes in the early game, but not in the late game. This will probably have to be down to GM discretion (you could make some kind of equation for it I suppose).
In my next game I will clarify the rules on that, whatever they may be. Atm I'm leaning towards allowing chains of brutals explicitly in the rules, but I'm not sure. Either way I'll be clear on the issue.
Another thing to talk about: subs and no-voters.
In this game it wasn't a huge problem overall, but it is a bit of a headache for a GM to have to worry about. I'm wondering perhaps in future large games during the sign-up period we should encourage 2/3 players to sign up as subs instead of as players, to ensure there isn't massive no-voters. Of course in some games there will be enough dead villagers to compensate. In this game, even though information traits were quite scarce (more on that later) for whatever reason most people who were killed were no ideal subs.
I was also reading a thread Rysz started a while ago during my break when he suggested that dead players should not be allowed back into games at all. Which is in theory the ideal thing to do. But in this game I had no choice but to let dead players back into sub, including some which in theory gave away information. But I made the judgment call that any information gleaned was not that significant, and it was better than to have to auto-lynch zombies. And looking back I'm confident I made the right choice, I don't think TSP claiming snoop wasn't his rival made any difference whatsoever in the game, nor did letting gigau or nautilu with his used seer power (on punkbob) back in.
However, it may be best if we could start games with designated subs so these choices don't have to be made.
Also, most GMs have fixed on rules on missed votes and subbing, generally if someone missed three votes they're subbed out.
But I think it should be scaled on the time gone in the game.
If someone misses two votes on the first and third day of a 40 player game, it's really not a big deal.
Whereas if someone misses even one vote when there are less than 10 players left, it's a huge impact on the game.
So I propose introducing a sliding scale based on how much time has gone/how many players are left in the game. Players should be allowed a couple of missed votes in the early game, but not in the late game. This will probably have to be down to GM discretion (you could make some kind of equation for it I suppose).
Popularity has been brought to you by you constant vigilance against metagaming, perhaps?
Admit it; you are just happy your hated enemy pack didn't win.
re: subbing. Sometimes it's just necessary to get people to sub in so some flexibility ain't bad thing.
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Smart wolves, not trusting Panzer. He was feeding me a line that he was seer's apprentice...
Given that a seer had died on the first night, this did seem an unlikely strategy.
Given that the seer asked to be subbed in, makes it even more unlikely.....
By the way, the hit on seer was just random night hunt, right? Or was there also some sinister PM plot behind it?
I must admit I was rather mystified by Euro not subbing in. Stuff with snoopdogg explains it perfectly, though.
I must admit I was rather mystified by Euro not subbing in. Stuff with snoopdogg explains it perfectly, though.
Werewolf CLVIII: Infernal Affairs - The Game Master's After Action Report
Part 1: Setting up the game
Believe it or not, I had the template for the theme of this game stored in google docs for 3 years.
The reason I chose the theme was the following:
With a detective/police theme, I thought it lend itself to good roleplaying opportunities.
The title sounded cool I thought, and that was important to me; you may not think consciously about the title of a game but "Infernal Affairs" I think, in two words manages to suggest and convey a lot of what makes a good werewolf game. It suggests evil, and hell, and the struggle with it. As it is a pun on the phrase 'internal affairs' but with a sinister twist, it suggests backstabbing, politics and paranoia. Also, I think the rhythm of the phrase is nice, it rolls off the tongue. Overall quite a dark theme, about the right tone for a werewolf game.
Now to the actual set-up.
1. I am just about the most passionate opponent of strong JLs in games, quite frankly I think most games in which there is a strong JL are quite boring for the rest of the players.
So what I what I wanted to do with this was neuter the chance of any powerful JL forming, but make sure there were at least some potential ways some kind of JL could set up, but not a very powerful one.
The first thing I did was to more or less remove protection. No Doctor, no GA, no padres or padreous powers. The only element of protection I put in was the Guardian Council. However, I didn't really want it to work, at least not very well. It was intended as somewhat of red herring, if you will. In some fortunate circumstances it might, and if certain villagers take initiative and play really well they can get it to work, but overall I wanted it to be a lot weaker than a Guardian Angel.
Next I thought about the scanners and how they would affect the game. I decided I did not want a lot of JL outings so I didn't want the seer to be impregnable, the lack of protection partly accomplished this, but I also decided not to start him with an apprentice, and to keep a low number of unclaimed apprentices in the game - 1 to be exact, although I decided to tell the apprentice that he was one, as I thought this would add another potential layer of strategy for him if he saw a JL forming, or a Sorcerer get outed.
I pondered for a while whether to 'bless' the seer. I came to the conclusion that if the seer got hunted within the first four nights (approx), a bless would be better for game balance, and if he didn't get hunted within the first four nights, having a bless would tip the balance in the village's favour, as it would give the seer too much of a head-start to form an alliance against the wolves. As I figured the chances of the seer getting hunted within the first four days was less than 50%, I decided not to give him a bless. However, to partially compensate for a possible lucky wolf hunt, I gave him One-Eye Open.
To compensate for the lack of protection the Seer was getting, I gave the Priest an apprentice. This was so that there would be at least some chance of a weak JL forming. The seer is still more powerful, but there would be several baddies the priest could scan as well.
I decided to have two out of six baddies in the GC, to help completely diminish its capabilities. However, I didn't want to put one in each pack, as if both packs always had an idea who was being protected from the start, then there would be almost no chance of the GC ever pulling off a save, and I wanted to keep that chance.
Given the greatly reduced ability of goodie scanners to protect themselves, I gave the game three witnesses, as a balancing mechanism, so that late game they could pick up a little bit of the slack for the scanners who I imagined would be dead by that time.
2. I decided early on there would be two packs. I wanted big enough packs to really create a dynamic that allows for vote analysis in the late game, so at least four wolves in each pack.
When I finally closed sign-ups and there were 39 players, I decided to have 13 baddies. This meant 4 wolves and a cultist in each pack, the sorcerer and his apprentice, and to make the round figure, I put in an unattached cultist, as I was interested to see how that role would develop, and whether he'd get in touch with a pack first or the sorc. If he got in touch with the sorc, it would be interesting as his role could effectively be another of the sorcerer's minions instead of the wolfpack, and only decide to throw his weight behind one pack when it was clearly the stronger. I think giving the High-Sorc an apprentice and allowing this possiblity created the potentialy outcome of really have 3 distinct baddie blocs - the two packs and the sorc's group, and the High-Sorcerer, with his ability to curse as well, would become very influential in the game. I always like to have the possibility of backstabbing between evil roles, and I thought this might help that. I also gave the HS a hunter power as well because I don't like the complacency of villagers when they assume hunters are likely to be cleared.
I decided to add in the High-Sorcerer variant to shake things up a bit, and to give wolves more incentive to try find the sorc than they usually do. I kept WD's limit of only cursing once per two nights as otherwise it could be potentially unbalanced.
I gave the unattached cultists a few traits as well to give him something to think about it, as being an unattached can be disheartening at times.
I also gave cultists the ability to scan, something I've always liked. I didn't make it so that cultists died when their pack died, so there was a chance they could betray their pack. This often means wolves ignore cultists so giving them powers hopefully would mean that wolves are forced to work with their cultists.
I gave cultists the ability to scan for the High_Sorcerer, and also for the traits Cursed, Blessed, SA and One-Eye Open. I was hoping this meant the wolves might decide to "scout out" their targets in advance, before hunting them.
I also made a rule that unattached cultists can scan for wolves, but to avoid craziness, I added in that once they had scanned one wolf, they lost that power as long as that wolf was alive. This was a bit convoluted, but I wanted to give unattached cultists a method to get in touch with wolves, but I did not want cultists to be able to find wolves generally as I wanted to limit inter-pack hunting.
3. To balance the High-Sorcerer somewhat, I added in the van Helsing. Again, I thought this would be a refreshing return of a role and it would provide some interesting outcomes. There are several different rule variants of the van Helsing, I chose a moderately powerful one, but not too much, so that he had a one-time super-scan, a hunter trait, and One-Eye Open. I was hoping the super-scan would eventually be used late in the game, and that it might hit a baddie, giving the vH a chance to use his hunter trait.
As, however, there is a possibility of a JL forming around a certain goodie role, with one-eye open, I made him scan as a cultist to the Priest, I also thought this may give the scanners some paranoia whenever they scan a cultist, they'd first have to think whether it could be the vH or not, and consider holding off an outing.
I put a thief in the game, because I love the kind of havoc that this role can create, more or less by itself. In terms of entertainment value it definitely provides a great amount compared to the effort it takes to set it up.
4. I've noticed many games tend to run out of steam by the mid to late game, and I wanted to try and reduce that as much as possible. Therefore, I wanted a high number of deaths per day/night cycle, higher than most games have ever had before.
Therefore, I liberally spread One-Eye Open, Hunter and Brutal traits throughout the roster, giving them to normal villagers, wolves, sorcerers, cultists and scanners alike.
I also reduced greatly the number of blesseds/curseds. I don't like blesseds in a game much as they slow it down, and while curseds do add something, given the High-Sorcerer's ability I decided to have no curseds in the game at start. However, in the case the Sorc forwent his cursing powers in favour of scanning, or died early, I wanted to have the possibility of at least one no-hunt night, so I added in a couple of blesseds. One of them on a otherwise traitless villager, and the other on a witness as a I really wanted at least one or two witnesses to be able to survive until they could use their abilities.
5. I put in two sets of rivals, and made one of the rivals a wolf, and his rival a One-Eye Open, to see what would happen and to shatter the illusion that rivals are always goodies. I also added a Lover, who was also a rival, to cause a bit of havoc. I thought perhaps having a Rival might encourage the Lover to sleep around, to try and avoid a kill in the night.
6. I put leaders in the game, although I wasn't too enthusiastic about them. I only made three leaders, a 2nd in command, a 3rd and I decided to give the Leader trait to the winner of the day 0 voting. Due to a GM error I didn't send out the names of the second and third leaders with role distribution, so I decided to just wait until the first one died before informing them they had become leader. This isn't normal practice but as the rules didn't say chain of command had to be told I figured I'd get away with it.
I also decided to make all three leaders villagers, as this is one of those traits that people usually assume wolves will have, as opposed to rivals or hunters, so I thought it might be a bit of a curveball.
7. Lastly, I wanted quite a 'light' game in terms of role interactions and stuff. There was the High Sorc, the van Helsing, and the GC, of course, but apart from that I didn't want too much information. There were plenty of traits in this game, but you will notice that most of them were killing traits, and there weren't as many 'informational' ones: no priestly, sorcerous or padreous powers, no spies, no padre, no doctor etc. There was one seerish power, which I gave to a hunter as well, hoping it would be cool if they scanned a wolf and decided to go vigilante.
So all in all, there actually wasn't much in terms of results from nightly actions, as I wanted a game that wasn't too hard to GM and that people would focus more on analysis and behaviour, rather than complex trait powers.
So, here was the final set-up I had.
1. Seer One-Eye Open
2. Priest Brutal
3. Priest App
4. High Sorc Hunter
5. Sorc App Brutal
6. van Helsing
Winter Hill Gang:
7. Cultist Brutal
8. Wolf 1: Brutal
9. Wolf 2: Rival 1
10. Wolf 3 Cultist Master
11. Wolf 4
The Triads:
12. Wolf 1: Cultist Master
13. Wolf 2: GC1
14. Wolf 3:
15. Wolf 4: Brutal
16. Cultist: One-Eye Open
17. Unattached cultist GC2 SA Brutal
Villagers:
18. GC3 Sleepyhead
19. GC4 Punkbob
20. GC5 Alxeu
21. GC6 Teep
22. Rival 1 One Eye Open 2nd LEADER
23. Blessed
24. Hunter
25. Witness Blessed
26.
27.
28. Apprentice
29. Hunter Seerish Powers
30. Rival 2
31. Lover Rival 2
32.
33. 3rd Leader
34. Brutal
35. Brutal
36. Witness
37. Witness
38. Hunter
39. Thief
Note: For the GC's, each member knew the two members after them: GA1 knew GA2 and GA 3, GA5 knew GA6 and GA1, etc.
Then, I started role distribution.
Distribution was almost entirely random, but there was one or two cases where people I weren't sure about being giving powerful roles, in which case I re-rolled. I re-rolled the packs once as first time one of them, can't remember which, was full of veteran players and the other was nearly all new players who I didn't know much about. Everything else was first time chance. Funnily enough, the two most powerful new roles, the van Helsing and High-Sorc, went to two of the most experienced veterans first time, Johho and THE_SPLIT, which I was secretly quite pleased about it as I wanted good value out of the roles.
Then I sent out roles.
After sham-voting, EURO won the Leader trait. The 2nd in command was tonkatoy5 and randakar was the 3rd in command, but due to the previous aforementioned error I decided not to tell them until if/when they became leader.
Here was the final set-up
1. Seer One-Eye Open: Ithvan
2. Priest Brutal: Arkasas
3. Priest App: Walrus
4. High Sorc Hunter: THE_SPLIT
5. Sorc App: Brutal Panzer Commader
6. van Helsing: Johho888
Winter Hill Gang:
7. Cultist Brutal Eternaly_Lost
8. Wolf 1: Brutal Madchemist
9. Wolf 2: Rival 1 Snoopdogg
10. Wolf 3 Cultist Master GreatUberGeek
11. Wolf 4 Vainglory
The Triads:
12. Wolf 1: Cultist Master The_hdk
13. Wolf 2: GA1 Comm Cody
14. Wolf 3: Citizen1oo1
15. Wolf 4: Brutal Hax
16. Cultist: One-Eye Open Steed
17. Unattached cultist GA2 SA Brutal Wagonlitz
Villagers:
18. GA3 Sleepyhead
19. GA4 Punkbob
20. GA5 Alxeu
21. GA6 Teep
22. Rival 1 One Eye Open 2nd Leader Tonkatoy5
23. Blessed Gen. Skobelev
24. Hunter OrangeYoshi
25. Witness Blessed Leksu
26. Leader EUROO7
27. Aedan777
28. Apprentice Falc
29. Hunter Seerish Powers Nautilu
30. Rival 2 The Super Pope
31. Lover Rival 2 Gigau
32. Tamius23
33. 3rd Leader Randakar
34. Brutal Esemesas
35. Brutal Najs
36. Witness Cliges
37. Witness Daffius
38. Hunter RepBentley
39. Thief J. Passepartout
My overall plan was not to be an obvious wolf. I think that worked, seeing that I didn't die.
Teep, I wanted you out so Wagon and I could commander the Guardian Council to protect the Triads.
There was someone on the Guardian Council, I don't know who, he sent out a PM to all of us. With the names exposed.
Needless to say, I turned it into the_hdk, and the pack used that to play hunt-a-council-member.
Teep, I wanted you out so Wagon and I could commander the Guardian Council to protect the Triads.
There was someone on the Guardian Council, I don't know who, he sent out a PM to all of us. With the names exposed.
Needless to say, I turned it into the_hdk, and the pack used that to play hunt-a-council-member.
I would have loved to see a hunter cultist in the game so he could fake being van Helsing and infiltrate the JL. That would have been really cool.
Shooting a packmate to infiltrate the JL as a vH claimant, only to find out there was no real JL.
Shooting a packmate to infiltrate the JL as a vH claimant, only to find out there was no real JL.
I was thinking more along the lines of contacting the JL spokesman, asking them whom they wanted shot and requesting a priest scan, then (hopefully) being in their counsels the rest of the way.
And we did exactly that.
:huh: I am pretty sure that I wasn't brutal; otherwise I would have sent in a brutal order. Not that it mattered though, since I was mugged and killed.
But as I mentioned many times before I died, we really didn't need to kill the other members; I controlled the council no matter what, so starting to kill them off would just attract unwanted attention.
I am pretty sure that was Sleepyhead. As mentioned I initiated the process of learning the names of all members, so we could protect efficiently. Sleepyhead at least provided alxeu's name and I also think he was the one who sent the first PM with all names; that also fits well with him proposing falc on the first day.
By the way I thought it funny how the village continously agreed on us council members only knowing two other members, when discussing the lynchings of council members. Didn't it occur to anybody that we could have shared the names we knew?
I don't know if he forgot to tell you that you were brutal, but he definitely told me I was brutal after I robbed you.
By the way why did you try to rob Teep? Was it to blow the pack? Since if you had been successfull you would have been a villager again.