Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
[Phalla] Time Wars: JUMP 1 - DAY 1
Posts
All of them... but when?!
World's Largest Dungeon 4E as Torbera
BSG Exodus Game 17 as Tom Zarek
Twilight Imperium Game 7 as Muaat
Votes from permanently eliminated players will be locked in for all future JUMPS as long as the player they voted for is also not permanently eliminated.
I always CD this because if it exists in the game I wouldn't want people to know and if it doesn't I still like the threat of it to inform decisions.
I had hoped that this game would at some point occur in a time and place where you'd overcome that silly opinion.
Worth a shot. Thralls and millers are the worst.
silly?
Silly as in I disagree with (part of) it.
Explain please. It may change my mind.
imo:
Thralls and Millers make vote analysis incredibly difficult to do, and make vanillagers almost unable to do the only thing that the game allows them to do: vote off mafia. Basically, with thralls and millers the game comes down to village specials using their powers correctly. If the villagers had a heads up about thralls and millers maybe they could deal, but without that knowledge vanillagers may as well just phone in the whole game.
This is why I despise cyclists
Do you think there's a similar argument against conversions?
I think this sentence is grammatically flawed, and at least partially as a result, I don't understand it.
This is why I despise cyclists
Of course, they also set up situations where the village mason, village guard, and two neutrals conspire against the village vig and open up a bloodbath...
On review, I think this is a good argument, but it's an argument against having thralls and millers, and not an argument for announcing that there are no thralls and millers.
ZH, do you think the argument you've given means that thralls and millers will never be a good addition to a game? If the answer is no, and I think the answer is no, then in order to preserve their effect in those good contexts, you need to not announce in the regular cases.
At the same time, this state of affairs means that the village ought to be comfortable making the normal inferences from voting history, etc, because the cases where it's a good idea to bring in thralls and millers are extraordinary cases where the village likely has other capacities that combine with thralls and millers make them a good idea, because of how important it is to emphasize the significance of vanillagers.
Now let me get clear on why I think conversions aren't as bad as thralls and millers.
I think it's a decent argument against both. The idea that there might be thralls and millers (or at least death thrall/millers) poisons the record even if they don't exist. TBH I just assume that there aren't any and if there are I don't really care that I lost because "meh, there were millers, what could I do?"
Thralls and Millers don't make vote analysis any different. They'll still likely vote as mafia or village. They do affect seer analysis. And odds are even if there are thralls or millers in the game they likely will not get seered, unless there is a very high amount of seers in the game or they are a high profile person. Unless you mean death thralls and death millers.
Forums acting up for anyone else?
I'm not going to go so far as say they should never be included, but I think they are powerful enough that if they are included in a game with vanillagers, that you give the villagers some warning about their presence, otherwise its nothing but a frustrating exercise for the mafia. This could be done by: announcing in a clarification, having some role disseminate that information somehow. If not, you get away from the core game of voting and vote analysis, because you make vanillagers and their analysis so unreliable that they may as well be guessing.
I also don't think millers and thrall add any real fun to the game, (My opinion is that most passive abilities are less fun than the active ones) so im not sure its worth priming the game balance to be able to include millers and thralls
I think this is a good point. The arguments that've been made are entirely about death thralls and death millers. I think undermining seers is not nearly as bad, because I like to focus on vote/post analysis, and undermining that hurts vanillagers, whereas undermining seers just hurts the play of seers. Though I can see an argument the other way, and I imagine the post ZH just made in this thread was about that other argument.
I imagine that this is clear from my play, but this core game of voting and vote analysis is why I play phalla, so I take arguments about hindering that very seriously.
Well... an infinite combination, especially when you start counting differing timestreams.
Well... there's a limit to the number of timestreams.
And some points in time are static.
Anyway... what was I saying?
Oh! Right! This isn't the debate thread. Both are static points in time. They don't touch. Not now, not ever.
Amazon Wishlist for any secret santa hintings
Ashe Swiftclaw in Jdarksun's World's Largest Dungeon 4e Campaign
This is why I despise cyclists
From a practical perspective, how do you do this while not gutting the network if/when you die? Or does this assume that you are sufficiently well-guarded that your death is pretty unlikely?
This is also how I play.
A seers B, gets B to pretend to be the seer and then seers C who is network head, etc. If you're more scared of thralls limit it to one, if you're more scared of conversions you want as long a chain as possible so the actual seer is hard to find. Whoever is at the end of the chain is the network head and a set of passwords is established within the network (which must be point-to-point, not one big thread or proboard) to let the new head identify themselves. People in the chain of seer -> network head are generally trusted as the network head will become the point of contact when a seer call occurs
Would people be happy with that answer?
I think that's a fantastic way to handle the issue.
I mean, I remain the relatively-new guy, but given our discussion about white noise post-Deadlands and the excellent idea behind the Mortician roles in that game, even if they didn't work out as planned, this is a reasonable statement.
That said, the impression I've had as I've been jumping into this is that you guys are collectively making the fun roles (Mafia, SK, cult, some specials) fun at the expense of the not-fun villager / village special roles more often than not in your game design.
World's Largest Dungeon 4E as Torbera
BSG Exodus Game 17 as Tom Zarek
Twilight Imperium Game 7 as Muaat