Yes, thanks to Poppy for hosting!

Also, a special mention goes to Littlerabbit, who planted the idea in my head that led to the conversation that seemingly led to this game happening at all. It's a pity you couldn't be here for the end scumbuddy!
Big thanks to all the replacements, both permanent and temporary!
Didn't my lack of hammering buy me any town points from you?

I hope you can forgive me!

Poppy sent me a message end of day 3 'if you're pressed for time you should just post your vote and explain yourself later.' GOOD, WELL-TIMED ADVICE I SHALL REMEMBER IT ALWAYS.

Oh yeah, I was one-shot and I wasted it on my dead boyfriend. I kept it ambiguous because I figured it's best to get myself nightkilled, but then bler claimed and all these powerroles kept turning up and I was like 'yeah i'm not a priority' but bookwyrm had come up with the plan and I didn't see how I could come clean without him turning against me again.

My goat but I frakked up day three...

One last thing before I return to studying furiously: Thanks to everyone for playing! You've been great. :)

So... a few thoughts.

Setup:
The recruiter is potentially very powerful. You could end up with a cop-cleared slot flipped in a fairly small game, plus as in this case, you end up with severe role confusion for town. And, as they did, you get the luxury of maf cherry-picking a slot that is town read going into D2 in a game that might end N3. This setup is just too small for that mechanic.

Given the miller and the potential for GF, and the recruiter the cop is fairly weak, at least two options to give bad reads, etc., it's not a strong cop, esp. in comparison to the recruiter.

The backup cop is quite weak in this setup as an actual function and added some mind-frakkery from my POV. I won't go so far as to say it had negative utility, but...it really ain't worth much seeing the whole setup. I would say, from the doc conversion mechanic, the backup cop's utility is basically that if the actual cop gets recruited and then claims, the backup cop knows that's screwy.

But flavor-wise that wouldn't make any sense. "You've been recruited and forgot to take your machine!" Plus it would've tipped off the backup that something was frakked.

Agree that, in sum, this looks like a fairly maf-leaning setup.

Town:
I mean, collectively we frakked up D1. We needed to resolve ZFR[fix] v. SPF there, one way or the other. The very late fire drill to cristi instead spilled over into D2/D3. I get that people were town-reading ZFR[fix], and leery of hitting a town PR, but it was a claimed role that is >randmaf over town, and sometimes ya just gotta lynch VT. I would have been more likely to cop SPF if ZFR had flipped, and [scum!SPF + town!ZFR] would've absolutely pointed to scum!Lift.

modding:
I do get that we were an unruly bunch and probably difficult to mod at times. And modding, I say from experience, isn't easy, so this isn't a personal slam.

We also do rely a bit to much on meta (guilty there).

I will say the flavour, while I get it, was intending to be fun, was a little confusing at times in terms of sorting out what was meaningful and what wasn't.

I said it in game, but I also think you just had to mod-kill Damnation there when you'd said you would. I still think town loses, but to set the bar at "substantive post" and then not mod-kill him for what he posted, I mean...that just HAD to be coming from maf slot - it just would've been BS for me as a player to have to mind-read the mod to make that play. Which is exactly what I said at that time.

But in no world is "I feel bad for not having more time to contribute" a substantive game-related post other than from maf!Damn. Which, it was. Because of the WIFOM, I think you still just have to make the hard decision and mod-kill there. And having mod-killed in a similarly hard spot, I know that it isn't easy to feel like you're putting a thumb on the scale, but you already have a thumb on the scale as the mod in that scenario.

From there Damn just ran out the clock despite having pretty critical information town needed for decision making. At the very least, that should've been a longer extension so town had time to receive and process what he later did post.

FWIW, on top of the "strongman is a thing?" slip, it was clear to me from how yogs responded to Damn's last post that yogs was Maf (staying on ZFR at that point vs., say, resolving Dam vs. Yogs AND Dam vs. SPF tension) which town!yogs in particular should have been all over, it was just too late (and I wasn't even online) to do anything about it.

So yes, I can be malleable as a player, but mafia was actually in a slightly tenuous position after I revealed, and just got to stall. So...I don't feel bad about losing the game from a setup or D3 POV. Both of those were maf-leaning realities.

The number of swaps was also a problem, though I don't see a way around it.

Do I feel bad and that I probably should have done better with the cop role? Yes, I do. But I was correct at the time I claimed that the game was a) probably lost anyway, and b) at a critical point to make a good decision, and that hey, lynching town!Joe would basically have locked it in.

So...I don't rate my own play highly, but ...I really don't feel bad about that loss at all.

I'll get back to this later, but the thing that stayed my modkill was Damnation stating that he would claim. Otherwise, he would have had an airlock accident.

Additionally, the reduced extension from 48 hours to 24 was due to objections from Mafia players.

From my personal perspective, the biggest impacts on the game were SPF slipping away from a Day 1 lynch, the Doctor getting recruited, and flubbucket's avatar shenanigans. The latter hasn't been mentioned yet, but flub's play with that ended up a lot more anti-Town than he'd likely anticipated, particularly when he changed his avatar to a toaster - the effect of that was akin to out-of-phase communication. Watching it from Joe's perspective, it had a substantial impact on the rest of the game. He'd flipped a coin to decide who to vig, flub or Lift. The flip came up flub, but Joe wasn't happy with it. After seeing flub's avatar change, Joe went full in on it. Otherwise, I would have expected him to switch his answer to Lift which was what his gut was telling him.

(Incidentally, I had absolutely no idea how to handle the same player getting killed twice. I did a few searches and came up with nothing, so I decided that since a night kill was an inherently visible action, both kills got announced through flavour.)

bwahahahahha

Got that right on the money!

Good game everyone, thanks for letting me sub in.

Thanks to Poppy for some top-shelf flavor. The game's balance is certainly up for debate - wouldn't be the first GOG game to come under such scrutiny - but it was really well-written.

I want to give some special recognition to trent. Once again, he had the best reads all game - just wasn't able to convince anyone else. The only reason I fooled him was because he stopped looking for scum at three.



hahahahah I TOLD YOU TO KILL HIM

I have no idea!!! Really, the plan was "unbrig SPF" and anything after that was going to be "make (bleep) up as I go along"

Sure thing, chief.

bler is always cop; yogsloth is always...

[edit for personal]

First "I will claim...later" is not a substantive post in the face of just running out the clock. It just isn't.

Second, at risk of going all Avon Barksdale, you're the mod, they are not. Their teammate is crucial to resolving the game, no frak they don't want town to have time to actual hear what he has to say and process it. Of course they are going to take that position.

But your job as the mod is to determine what the point is of what's fair/what's correct. As a point of fact you had a key player in the game not making any actual contribution until roughly 24 hours to deadline.

Scum object to town having time to process completely absent teammate is a given. But imo it's neither fair nor correct.

Now, if you were taking that position because YOU deem it correct, ok, then argue that. But honestly, from my perspective it's completely unfair.

No decision I could make in that situation would make everyone happy. The Town needed an extension, and adding extra time negatively impacted the Mafia players. I chose a compromise position instead.

Ok. I just don't see it as much of a compromise, personally and think it was more like 80/20.

But I respect that you made a call you felt you had to.

I got two out of three/four scumz. Go me!!!

Thanks for hosting the game PoppyAppletree.

Yes! Thank you for hosting, Poppy! The flavour tasted really nice.

And congrats to yogs and Damnation for a nice distancing game!

The recruitment mechanic is very diffictult to balance and turned out to be a bit too powerful. Perhaps it would be an idea for a re-run of this setup to replace the Miller with a PGO. Would also fit the setting and would make the recruitment a bit more dangerous.

I believe I already ate toast N3. So I'll pass.

No, I think you yourself were toasted.
I had to look that up, but yes that sounds like a good idea. I was actually half expecting something like this but didn't know what it was called.

With regards to the setup, I agree that it ended up being skewed towards the Cylon faction. I underestimated the effect of the fourth Cylon player, and failed to balance appropriately to accommodate. Given that there was no doubt about there being three Cylons, I also would have bumped the player count to 14 or 15 to introduce uncertainty, but I didn't feel confident that I could get that many players - I wasn't even sure I was going to get 13.

The recruitment power definitely needed greater restriction for balance. In hindsight, I would have made it so that the Cylons couldn't use the recruit action on the same night that a nightkill was performed. As it stood, there wasn't any incentive for them not to recruit Night 1, since they would lose the power if the Recruiter died. Forcing them to choose between recruiting and killing would have added a strategic decision to the equation.

If I was revising the setup, I don't think I would have used the Deputy role. It introduced too much screwiness, such as the flavour weirdness bler notes, as well as the fact that if the Cop had been recruited the Deputy would be activated without knowing why. Instead I'd probably use a Watcher or Tracker or another type of Cop role, but I didn't feel I had sufficient experience with those roles to feel comfortable including one.

One thing that I am satisfied with was that the sleeper was sufficiently telegraphed. I'd been concerned that it would be too much of a surprise, but when several players started talking about the possibility of such a thing in the sign-up thread, I felt reasonably assured about its use. By the end of Day 1, I think more than half of the players had voiced serious considerations of a sleeper. Having a Cylon sleeper was always an integral aspect of the game, and if I ran another Battlestar GOGlactica game I would include one again. I don't think I'd use the same mechanic for it, mind.

I have a lot more thoughts about the game, which I'll probably add later.