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[Mini-Phalla] of Brass: The Philosopher Kings (God Save The Queen: Cultist/Templar Win)
Posts
The rules are very clear that tanking debates is not cool.
Skyrim
GT/Twitter: Tanith 6227
I feel so normal now
Also isiah was rend in the phalla of brass
You can't
Since there isn't a debate color, I'm choosing Limegreen.
ATTACK:
I'm against ghost players from talking because of one thing. THEY NO LONGER HAVE WIN CONDITIONS. They died, game over, they lost. There is nothing stopping them from going "Hey, Mrs. Mafia, since we were friends in that last game, and because of the lulz, here are the names of the specials!" While I know that it can be argued that this works both ways, right now the mafia have the advantage and this just gives them one more tool they can use. And as the village vig, I don't want there to be anymore tools for anyone else making my job that much harder. Petty and selfish? Maybe, but that's my option.
How do you know what I can and can't do?
What if my philosophy is "FALLACY"?
Well then you could I guess!
hey
let the debaters debate
we don't need no back seat debaters
I am under the impression commentary from the peanut gallery is, if not precisely encouraged, very much in play. the quote from the rules:
"Those two players will be the only posts considered for the purposes of the debate – while the rest of the players are free to comment on them, players cannot ATTACK posts made by those not in the debate."
You mention no thralls, but does that include thrallvigs? ie can we trust the colors of the cause of deaths?
premium
BradicusMaximus
As am I, of course
Excellent! Thank you.
I'm trying to let you do your thing, yo, but "The rules don't say I'm wrong, so I'm right" is perhaps not the best basis for an argument.
I'd rather play safe then sorry.
EDIT: See, Geth agrees with me.
THESE KITTENS ARE CUTE! YOUR OPTIONS ARE INVALID!
Not always! Typically factions win together, but not always
If dead villagers did not win with the village, half of the things that villages do would not happen. It doesn't make any sense because it is all up to luck as to the mafia targeting you etc.
Phallas where you don't win through death are the exception, not the rule.
The win Condition says "eliminate all threats" not "eliminate all threats and also survive" that would be a different role.
It's a team game. Like hockey.
If your star forward takes a big hit and gets to sit out the finals with a concussion, he still gets counted as part of the Stanley cup winning team.
Do the dead still win with their faction despite their deadness?
I think it's a good answer
Look, I'm still going to argue against it because it gives somebody plausible deniability.
But to begin, let's be clear about what I need to show. As Phyphor has already agreed, we share the end of returning Skybarrow to the state it was in before the current crisis, under the good King-Headmaster's rule. Therefore, showing that this rule would make it less likely that the village will win this game is sufficient to show that Phyphor should agree with me, and that therefore I should win this debate and we should reject this rule change. Note carefully, friends; I do not say that I need to show that the village will lose this game if we pass this rule and will win if we don't. I need merely show that the outcome of the vile Vice-Chancellor achieving his goal of killing the loyal students would be more likely because this rule change was passed.
There are two independent reasons that this rulechange is bad for the village.
The first independent reason is that it will give the mafia more significant control over what rulechanges get implemented. As it is, in order for a rule to be debated, a lot of people have to agree to it. The major advantage the village has over the mafia is the simple fact that there are more villagers than mafia. Currently, the threshold for turning any particular rulechange into a debate is quite high, requiring many votes. By moving the threshold down to four, the mafia's lower numbers are much more significant in bringing any particular rule to Argument.
Of course, one might easily think: Invictus, yes, certainly, the mafia will be able to bring more rule changes to Argument, but the village, too, will bring more rule changes to Argument, and so retain its advantage. A clever thought, and true, as far as it goes, but it neglects a critical truth about phalla: the mafia are the Informed Majority. There are undoubtedly powers and mechanics operating of which we villagers are ignorant. The mafia is in a much better position to judge which rules will further their goals than we are, not least because they certainly have ways of affecting the process. They get fewer rules passed, but the ones they do choose are undoubtedly more informed than ours. While the village is passing many rules, some of which won't help the village due to mafia interference, others of which won't help the village because the village has picked the wrong rules to push, the mafia is carefully raising a garden of focused rulechanges that further their wincondition.
But of course, the mafia's resources don't end at just being better at writing rules in virtue of being more informed. They also are likely in a better position to win debates. I would find it incredibly surprising if the mafia didn't have methods to help determine the outcomes of debates. That means that the mafia are in a position to pick the villager rules that actually would make a difference and make sure those debates go the way they need them to. This might sound speculative, and it is, but that's because we don't know. That's the point.
Similarly, one might think that if the mafia passes mafia-friendly rules, that will thereby show us who the mafia are. But that assumes that we will be able to tell which rules are mafia-friendly and which aren't, and my point is precisely that the mafia is in a much better position to make that assessment than we are. If this rule passes, mafia-friendly rules will be pushed by some mafia, and quite possibly gain some village support too, simply because they don't seem to be mafia-friendly, and as a result this will help us discover mafia not at all.
The major check the village really has on the mafia's ability to affect rulechanges is the degree to which rulechanges making it to Argument are dependent on winning a vote, over which the village has much more control. But this is precisely the check that the rule in question would abolish.
If you doubt the mafia doesn't have other, more obvious ways to interfere with good rulemaking by the village, consider this post by premium, a villager in my previous game, and compare it to this post by jdarksun, a mafia in the same game. Premium produces a well-written rule that could easily have virtually won the game for the village, and jdark slyly appears to support it while in fact rewriting it in a way that removes much of its bite. But surely someone noticed? Well, premium is a smart fellow; in fact, he did. No one cared. Why didn't anyone care?
The answer to that question is that no one cared because the village had been flooded with too much data, too much information, too many decisions to make, and if we pass this rule, we stand to step into the same trap. The second independent reason that this rule change will lower the village's chances is that it will decrease participation and engagement by the villagers.
The simple fact is that villages depend on good analysis by their vanillagers. Rarely is it the case that specials so totally dominate the game that good detective work is unnecessary, and good detective work requires engaged vanillagers. If players have so much to track, so much bookkeeping to deal with, they don't believe they have control over the game, and therefore lack motivation.
But you need not trust my analysis, scintillant though it is, that people will lose interest and won't be engaged. It turns out that we have a recent context that provides a significant amount of relevant (check the number of agrees on that one!) data (that one's jdark!) on precisely the question of whether people will lose interest. I am not going to be able to say this again in the context of a phalla, but this argument is empirically verified. People will lose interest, people won't be keeping track of what they should be keeping track of, and important clues to mafianess will fall by the wayside, and our chances will fall with them.
This second argument is a matter of degree. You need not believe that everyone, or lots of people, or even multiple people, will lose interest. If a single villager doesn't play as well as they would have if this rule hadn't passed, that lowers the village's chances. All I need for my argument is the likelihood that even one person would be likely to lose interest, and I think the data and my analysis shows that many more than one would fall quiet.
Everyone will have noted that I've emphasized that I have two independent parts to my argument. As we all know, this post will just count once, so there is a serious question as to why I have two parts. The answer is that my argument here will stand successfully unless Phyphor argues appropriately against both parts. If he merely argues against one, the other one still shows that causing this rulechange to go into effect will hurt the village's chances, and this argument is specifically about showing that the rulechange hurts the village's chances.
Awww, sad, I forgot another link: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/26498387/#Comment_26498387
annnnnnd here's the link to premium noticing jdark's shiftiness: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/26524970/#Comment_26524970
If you did not like my point, you could have just said so.
oOoOOOoooOooOOo
To address the first part: it will increase mafia control over debating
First of all, mafia winning debates doesn't directly help them win. They win by killing people and outnumbering them, that is standard practice; this is a phalla after all, certain constants exist. Mafia are only helped by debates if (1) they have special abilities such as a kill linked to debates or (2) they enact changes that favour them.
(1) If they do have abilities linked to debating then yes, it is possible that more of them will be activated. However, debates are public and (presumably) the way to activate these powers is by participating formally in a debate (otherwise they are irrelevant to this particular debate as they could activate on the currently restricted debates). We will know if say the mafia gets an extra kill when a certain person debates. It will also be noticed if a certain person is constantly attempting to debate, thus requiring themselves to be exposed more to the thread. This may be a small net gain for the mafia, however we don't know these abilities actually do exist, this is pure speculation, and we don't know if they are powerful enough to negate the inherent advantage of extra debates. I would argue that they are not, or at least the effects can be mitigated to the point where the advantage is nil.
(2) This is a 24 player game! There are (according to standard practice) 5 mafia! Even if they all supported a very mafia-centric proposal... they would have to reveal themselves completely to do so! That would be complete suicide of course, so they obviously won't do that, and (I would hope) that no member of this University would either. So let us discard the notion that the mafia will force through rule changes that are obviously advantageous.
Second, I directly challenge the argument that it will allow the mafia to control the debates. Both in the sense that it allows them to pass mafia-centric rules and in the sense that it controls what rules the village changes by proposing rules that secretly benefit only the mafia.
Obvious mafia changes are covered previously. However, there is the possiblity of rule changes that aren't obviously advantageous to the mafia, but secretly are. This is problematic, I admit, however since these debates are public we can analyze the proposed changes to determine if they have any village benefit. If someone is consistently trying to pass oddly worded rules that don't directly benefit the village, then that just raises suspicion. We can simply apply the criterion of "does this advantage the village" and at the very minimum force the mafia to come up with changes that provide a village advantage but a bigger mafia one in secret.
And I would like to point out that such a rule change can be passed in the customary two debates as well! In which case we lose one of our debates. altogether If the mafia can convincingly fool us, I'd rather have a bunch of non-mafia influenced changes than can also go through instead of maybe one. Besides, If a change is so good as to convincingly fool the village into accepting it, then I would expect it to get enough support so as to be in the regular debates. You need to show that is it likely that any such proposal would be likely to get through as a third-tier option only - any debate proposal popular enough to be in the regular debates is not germane to this discussion.
The real risk is the mafia may try to push a substandard village proposal to the top, bumping a better proposal down to the point where it gets ignored thereby reducing the value of the possible changes. My proposed rule change negates this scenario, provided it has met a minimum level or support to begin. This is a clear benefit.
Third, I challenge the assumption that this necessarily lowers the bar for debating. For proof, I will cite this very debate! I believe there were about 3 people supporting it? That wouldn't even meet my criterion! Obviously, this doesn't make it noticeably easier if this debate wouldn't even happen under my rule change. Even the other debate only had around 5 or so. So, let's not pretend that there is some high standard, some high bar of approval that is now being disregarded. The number four was chosen arbitrarily, but not without thought. It will allow for extra debates as our numbers diminish, but is high enough that the mafia either have to get real village support (in which case they might be able to get in the standard debate set anyway with a bit more work) or reveal all of them (in which case we probably win).
Fourth, about the mafia having abilities that affect debates. That may very well be true! However, there are two very important points about this that were not brought up. First, by increasing the sheer number of debates, the mafia effects will be diluted - they will have to carefully pick their targets from a bigger pool, thus increasing our chances of getting through undiluted changes. By increasing the number of debates, we increase the chance that a village-affected debate goes through cleanly, without interference from mafia abilities. Second, no doubt the village has these powers as well, so having options in the debates is a good thing! Let us also consider the possibility of village-based EUREKA effects - which themselves may provide a strict benefit to us, at the cost of cancelling the debate. If there are extra debates, then that cost is nullified and we have a net win here. If a mafia uses one instead, then we may find a mafia, and still have the other debates to fall back on. That's seems like a clear cut win-win to me.
To address the second part on participation and engagement
To address it in a pithy one-liner: mains are not minis, 24 players are not 40 players and this game is not that game.
Point-by-point. In your game, rules could be subtly reworded trivially because changes had no authors. Here they do, one player challenges another, so there is always a source. This is important because if jdark's modified version was ruled to be the same as premiom's, then premium's version would be introduced, not jdark's modified version. Now it would be clear if the change occurred because the argument participants would change. Rewords become more obvious and traceable since you have to directly support the challenging post now. This issue is also vastly reduced with the lower player count.
The village was flooded with information in your game. But, part of that was your weird two-step restricted implementation of my rule change change*, and part of it was the creation of a completely new way to change the rules, so as to get around your fixed rules. This literally does nothing but change "At the end of the turn the two debates with the most support will progress to the Argument next turn" to "At the end of the turn the two debates with the most support AND all debates with at least 4 support will progress to the Argument next turn" - no new votes or mechanics. People will still need to track the support votes anyway to see what's going through normally. And they'll still need to track the proposals anyway to decide what to support. The only way this could possibly add complexity in a similar manner is if people start trying to optimize the number of debates going through, but I expect minimal behavioural changes since all it does is weaken the cutoff a little. Essentially, I contend that the extra complexity in your game comes not from the idea itself, but the implementation of that idea in your game.
Furthermore, keep in mind that the normal vote threshold will fall, over time, to a natural minimum. Interest tends to wane towards the end of the game, when 4 people may be a significant fraction of the remaining. We're not going to be flooded with changes to keep up with. Once we drop below a third of the population, we will be unable to trigger additional debates through this rule; thus the very portion of the game where interest tends to wane (the late midgame to the endgame) this rule will naturally have no or minimal effect on.
Finally, this game seems to be designed less in the "find a way around my ruleset" manner than yours was with a very simplistic set of fixed rules to preserve the phalla properties and none of that silly parenthetical can't-be-changed stuff or requiring changes to make basic things function as expected, or changing win conditions. Thus, I expect much less falloff as the game won't devolve into a chess match between the rulemakers - which is what happened in your game. Nothing the village did really mattered and they felt it. Having a taunting mafia who just won't die also doesn't help village morale. As I trust there will be no vlads in this game, that will not be a problem.
No, that is not sufficient. You can't just say that "oh this one aspect may be worse" you have to show that that aspect is not counterbalanced by potential improvements in other areas. Consider a hypothetical rule that would kill half the village but all the mafia - "oh well villagers will die therefore it's useless" is an absurd argument; effects must be considered on balance.
Besides, perhaps more people will actually participate since the draw of this game is debating and just maybe more than 4 people might want to do that? This could spur interest instead by letting more people participate in the game-within-the-game
Fundamentally, villagers get bored when
1) they don't get to do anything
2) when what they do doesn't matter
3) the only stuff that matters happens behind the scenes
Neither of those will be caused by this change
On balance
- I expect the extra rule changes will favour the village
- I expect the extra rule changes will mitigate the effect of mafia abilites to manipulate debates and provide the ability for village abilities to interrupt debates without "wasting" rule changes
- I don't expect the mafia's ability to manipulate which mafia-proposed debates proceed to be increased beyond a minimal amount, and that is offset by the extra village debates we will get
- I do expect the mafia's ability to select which village-proposed debates proceed to be neutered
- I don't expect a flood of information overwhelming people due to a very real set of differences between games
- I don't exepct this to negatively affect village morale or attentiveness beyond the usual "playing in a phalla" or "it's the weekend" or "the network is controlling everything" effects and the draw of the extra debates may actually negate some of this providing a net benefit
*
Your move