Long Game 92: Process of Elimination

[Mat he/him]

1 hour ago, Araris Valerian said:

Best part of the elim doc:

Legitimately that was the only thing that could have messed that up, yeah >> And I said before that it cost us the game, I say that because Steel would have been cleared which means Sart wouldn’t have gotten himself killed as well— and who knows what Ash would have done with his double kill, it could have been a four person swing if you’d just actually checked Randby

Soooo good job but also like cmon man action accountability  

[|TJ| he/him]

Look at that, beautiful red and green :')

This was kinda awesome tbh, I liked that we had to coordinate and use roles to find out elims rather than vote analysis or looking for connections. I do think there was one too many detriment to scans. Trolling had a nice balance as there was a Troll scan, but the Confirmed Villager role was a tad too difficult for us I feel. 

And hey, I blocked 3 elims in my given time so I'm satisfied. Good job getting us across the finish line Ash, Wiz, Drake, Aman and Araris! And Kas, as always, a wonderful game.

[Amanuensis he/him]

Yay we did the thing! And I managed to finally block a kill all by myself too

[Kasimir he/him]

After-Action Report

The Concept:

This game was inspired by a similar-but-different social deduction game and a few flipless games on Mad's Cracked forums. By and large, the idea was to have more information-generating roles than usual but total and utter fog-of-war. Drake said something in the last cycle that cut to what the heart of this game was: that this game had a lot of if X, then Y relations and the job of the Village was to really make sense of that barrage of claims. Yes. The upshot was the Elims got to fakeclaim aggressively, and the Village often would struggle with what would be considered 'ground truths.'

The Distro:

I am by and large fine with the distro, minus a few tweaks I would have liked to make. I think not giving the Elims a Troll was fine, if not so expected. I think we should have made the Terminal Seeker Evil instead and given that to the Elims - this would have somewhat discouraged claiming with impunity. We did intend for the Village to have to infoshare and massclaim, but a lot of that happened pre-death and in my view, took away some agency from the Elim team. With the fact players didn't permanently die, this subtly watered down the power of the E!TS anyway.

Not giving the Village a PH might have been good too, with the Elims and Village being split between living and dead scans. It was something we toyed with, and we had given the Elims one Stab Voter actually but that sort of went away after we added one more member to the team. No PH would also remove Village ability to resurrect lost scans, which helps the Elims out a little.

In terms of team composition, Fifth and I were a lot more selective. We felt that since we were rejecting the 'easy' E!Aman distro, with a significant number of active and noisy Villagers, we wanted to make sure there was an Elim team that could withstand thread pressure and had a substantive thread control niche. For that reason, Mat and Archer were locked onto the team. 

I do think the Elim team fared generally well, given this went to 4-1. That being said, they were also superbly lucky and unlucky: the early JNV scan that went right, and the rolls against other Trolls and roleblockers that went in their favour. Araris not scanning the one cycle Mat figured he would  Tani's claim. Sart panic-claiming. It would probably have been a less hostile game landscape otherwise, I think.

We did in fact select certain roles  But also broke the pattern here and there to avoid players gaming us. Prime instances include Araris being a Porch-Sitter and Mat being a Tunnel Constructor. Roles like Tie Guy and Analyst, we tried to ensure would go to players who were unlikely to actively coordinate.

The Design:

• I like Archer's thoughts on making the dead disappear once they cast their vote. I had also, that being said, considered a sort of exorcist role that could silence a player but felt it could be very nasty, especially if the same player gets silenced all the time. Maybe targeting limitations, or the ability to send the dead on? Not sure, Abhorsen vibes there.
   
• The PM Spiders were thematic, and meant to strike a balance between ability to send PMs (we didn't want spam, or too much coordination) and to obtain facts. Perhaps they should obtain two facts at once. Not sure. Wiz and JNV were very lucky to roll alignment at endgame.
   
• I am actually okay with the scan volume. In general I don't feel it was leveraged in a very devastating way. Veteran and Porch-Sitter were meant to mess with the scans, and there was just one Analyst who could be roleblocked. Trolling and Confirmed Villager reduced Village confidence in scans, just not enough to make a difference, which is one place where I do wonder if giving the Elims a Troll could have helped. I think two Discussion Leaders would have been too swingy, but we really could have been fine with an additional Stab Voter.
   
• No perma-death plus flipless was deadly for the thread. I feel like this might have worked better in a MR or QF format; speed things up a bit, discourage clutter. Not sure. 
   
• Confirmed Villager and Gambit God in particular were roles meant to weaken scans just a little but with their own trade-offs. A Confirmed Villager is vulnerable to a Terminal Seeker, and can be found by the two Roleplayers the Village had. In addition, Fadran claiming as early as he did was probably going to create a certain credibility deficit for Mat no matter what. We wanted one Villager to be CV for that reason. Finally, CV could seem suspicious - why is there a single Regular Villager in a rolemadness game? The presence of the Trolling mechanic hinted to players that scans could be mistaken. Gambit God was immune to direct scans, but Lynchbait and Tie Guy would absolutely find that role anyway. 
   
• Trolling is a fun mechanic I think - this was modelled after the Corruption mechanic Ren came up with ages ago in an early MR. The point of Trolling was to subtly weaken Village scans but not in a way that made Trolling obviously bad. If Trolling only had negative role interactions, then any Village troll would feel obligated to hold fire. We didn't want that. So the point was that while Trolling had a corrosive effect on most scans (except Multiquoter), it had a positive effect on many roles. That way, there wasn't a clear answer on whether to Troll or not.
   
• Goalkeeper roletext was my mistake. They were supposed to be able to self-protect. Whoops.
   
• I am divided about whether to limit the protection abilities of a Trolled TS. Part of me feels it borders abuse if you can just do that. At the same time, you are burning two action slots players could be using elsewhere. It's a shrug for me but I could also see saying that the TS can't target the same player twice in a row (weird, but) to block that possibility.
   
• I am considering whether the 'we roll for priority in same OoA' rule caused more trouble than it resolved. Half the issue was we didn't want to have to differentiate between separate targets in a redirect-like scenario, though I think we could have. In that world, we argue they all resolve at once and only flip for priority if they conflict.

Thoughts:

• I don't think Fifth or I truly, truly grasped the extent of Villager fog-of-war. There were points I kept saying, "Ok, the Elims are screwed" or "Okay, the Village has scans locked," only for the Village to start questioning the scans they had received (last cycle being a case in point) and the alignments they'd worked out so far. It's not to say it had an absolutely epistemically corrosive effect, but it was a wilder trip than we'd expected.
   
• I had half-expected the Village to subordinate their Mat read to the scan and it was interesting to me that they refused to do so. I wonder if it would have been different coming from @The Wandering Wizard instead of @JNV.
   
• The no exe and zero vote threshold issue isn't some deep exestential issue. It's just about pacing and the fact I don't in general like games to resurrect the "well should we lynch D1 though" dispute, especially one that is flipless, so I set it up to rule that debate out since the game effectively says if you don't choose, RNGesus will choose for you.
   
• The number of times @Amanuensis blocked or near-blocked a kill was both insane and disturbing  I am also amused by the number of players who genuinely wanted me to have built neutrals into a flipless V/E game, and who felt a game celebrating SE would have football. Especially given Aman has, repeatedly, called himself the king of fake roleclaims  
   
• I think in general, the Elims were fairly stunlocked for a decent part of this game, especially early on. This allowed the Village precious organising time, and time in which to set up a chain for scan integrity. This is one reason I am mulling about the TS - there's a point I think at which one might admit that perhaps it's expecting too much to ask if the Elims could hold their own there without giving them another means of cutting off Village control. I think it's fair as not every player is into aggressive thread play by temperament.
   
• No one ever targeted me or Fifth, which was reasonable. It was my one tribute to the fact this was inspired by a Joe game spiritually and we didn't want the oneshot GM roles to be too swingy. But that's what the fact we could be voted on was hinting at.
   
• Mat's great plan failing because Araris forgot to send in an action and Mat's subsequent calling out of Araris in the Elim doc was hilarious as all hell.
   
• @StrikerEZ being the first to fall was strangely fitting  
   
• Thank you all for playing! Despite the insanity, I hope you all had a bit of fun. Thanks once again to @Elandera and @Fifth Scholar for IMing and co-GMing respectively. Fifth will be posting his own AAR soon. For anyone who hasn't, we recommend you scroll down in Dead-Spec as @_Stick_ had a nice awards list there.

Edited February 23, 2023 by Kasimir

[Amanuensis he/him]

Sorry again for the mid-game mayoring that I unintentionally fell into. I was very lost this game, as Mat could see by all the times his teammates died and I declared them village, which led me to being very desperate to make those beautiful Tie Guys work. I needed the foundation to keep myself from paranoia brain spiraling and stepped on toes along the way

Other than that, my only regret is not blocking Ash's kill N9 to see if I could Troll the NK, which turned out to be impossible (sad)

ED1T:

Also want to apologize directly to @Biplet since I read the e-doc and saw that this game was really hard on your mental; a lot, inevitably, because of me and my tunnel. I could just feel that you were an elim in my jellies and the more times you survived or others defended you, the more I dug my feet in. I promise this game definitely wasn't your fault. My instincts just be like that sometimes.

Edited February 23, 2023 by Amanuensis

[The Wandering Wizard he/him]

1 hour ago, Kasimir said:

I had half-expected the Village to subordinate their Mat read to the scan and it was interesting to me that they refused to do so. I wonder if it would have been different coming from @The Wandering Wizard instead of @JNV.

I would have defending him to the hilt probably, like I did with Araris the last cycle 

So it's a good thing that I didn't scan Mat and end up with that

I was so determined to believe that there was a convert in the game, Actually thought that the game hadn't ended because I'd be converted. Even though Aman would have been a higher choice than me 

It was a very fun game and thank you @Kasimir and @Fifth Scholar for running it! And to @Elandera for IMing it!

This game was fun when it wasn't a headache

My guess for the elim team

Spoiler

Mat, Archer, Biplet, Steeldancer, Tani.

 

[|TJ| he/him]

You know I only just realized the role is Tunnel Constructor and not Tunnel Constrictor... because you know... you're constricting the options to just you and someone else >>

[Random Bystander she/her]

Yay! We won! (I was very unhelpful, but still-)

[Biplet she/her]

2 hours ago, Amanuensis said:

Sorry again for the mid-game mayoring that I unintentionally fell into. I was very lost this game, as Mat could see by all the times his teammates died and I declared them village, which led me to being very desperate to make those beautiful Tie Guys work. I needed the foundation to keep myself from paranoia brain spiraling and stepped on toes along the way

Other than that, my only regret is not blocking Ash's kill N9 to see if I could Troll the NK, which turned out to be impossible (sad)

ED1T:

Also want to apologize directly to @Biplet since I read the e-doc and saw that this game was really hard on your mental; a lot, inevitably, because of me and my tunnel. I could just feel that you were an elim in my jellies and the more times you survived or others defended you, the more I dug my feet in. I promise this game definitely wasn't your fault. My instincts just be like that sometimes.

I appreciate that! Haha. Yeah things were a little rough out here but it was partially due to irl things too. Things are getting better over here soon I hope.

unfort for me you are very good at SE lmao, and I am not so good

[The Unknown Order he/him]

5 hours ago, Kasimir said:

We did in fact select certain roles  But also broke the pattern here and there to avoid players gaming us. Prime instances include Araris being a Porch-Sitter and Mat being a Tunnel Constructor. Roles like Tie Guy and Analyst, we tried to ensure would go to players who were unlikely to actively coordinate.

And somehow I got the protect? 

[Mat he/him]

16 hours ago, Matrim's Dice said:

And to all the villagers: Before clicking on the elim doc or master sheet, guess the elim team. Cause I’d bet no one gets it 100%  

I really ate these words, huh  

Edited February 23, 2023 by Matrim's Dice

[Amanuensis he/him]

22 minutes ago, Matrim's Dice said:

I really ate these words, huh  

Archer came as a surprise to me honestly. He did really well this game, I think partly because of talks with Kas after the AN/AG. That or he’s figured out to evade my vibedar

ED1T:

Also you know my Bip tunnel was strong when I began to doubt my v!Wizard read  even after he’d helped me block two kills

ED2T:

Also also would anyone else be interested in seeing a rerun of these game rules but obviously without the blackout factor? There’s a lot of fun distros that could be done with these roles and I’d like to see the ones that weren’t included in action

ED3T:

Also you are good Bip >:( the combination of huge thread volume and your lack of free time had the biggest impact, from my estimation

Edited February 23, 2023 by Amanuensis

[Ashbringer he/him]

More meta-games could be interesting, and there’s a lot of untapped Troll potential. Only real concern I’ve got is settling into a pattern of who gets what roles / roles specific for a player (ie Striker always getting a Lynchbait analogue) combined with new/newer players not really having that. 

Then again, IDK why I got to be the Thread Master when RPer was right there 

[Amanuensis he/him]

32 minutes ago, Ashbringer said:

More meta-games could be interesting, and there’s a lot of untapped Troll potential. Only real concern I’ve got is settling into a pattern of who gets what roles / roles specific for a player (ie Striker always getting a Lynchbait analogue) combined with new/newer players not really having that. 

Then again, IDK why I got to be the Thread Master when RPer was right there 

I mean, I’ve never had a successful Lurcher game and I’m definitely not a troll, so clearly my roles were random too  I think it’d need to be the standard for a rerun and maybe no or fewer hybrids

Edited February 23, 2023 by Amanuensis

[Araris Valerian he/him]

55 minutes ago, Amanuensis said:

Archer came as a surprise to me honestly. He did really well this game, I think partly because of talks with Kas after the AN/AG. That or he’s figured out to evade my vibedar

Yeah, I really only got onto him because of Tie Guy and the fact that we caught Steel. He was pretty convincing as a villager in our PM.

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

9 hours ago, Kasimir said:

After-Action Report

To be fair on your distro, I think a lot of the gaps you are describing in the elim team would have been filled by Tani, and don't necessarily indicate that the distro was tilted.

An elim RPer would have been an effective deterrent to players massclaiming while they were still alive.

An elim RPer would have potentially gotten a terminal seek every-other-night after the village massclaimed.

An elim RPer would have potentially picked up an extra troll or roleblock if the elims needed it to help counter village power roles on a critical night.

It has been brought up that the elims got fairly unlucky with Araris behaving unexpectedly (I think Matrim is quite right that the elims probably would have won if D5 had gone differently, though I'm not so sure I would've definitely backed off Steel even if Araris had done what he was supposed to), but I think we might be overlooking how the elims also get pretty unlucky by losing Tani so early.

Stick really saved our bacon there

To a lesser extent, Steel and Sart dying had a similar effect, which is part of why D5 was a big pivot. We could never have pulled off the ridiculous troll-coinshot-protect trick, let alone two nights in a row, if the elims had Sart to roleblock or Steel to become a roleblocker in a pinch (get it??? because pinch-hitter ). In a role madness game, the elims having a roleblock or similar ability to throw a wrench in specific village roles becomes pretty important. Maybe important enough that I now kind of want to design a game where the elims get two faction abilities, one their traditional NK and the other a roleblock, so that they will always have access to a roleblock and the game is less swingy based on the living or dying of a single specific player. Optionally with a "can't tap the same person twice in a row" feature if it seems necessary. This could be fun to experiment with.

That said, I do think we killed all of these important elim roles fair and square, thank you very much Even if some of it was definitely lucky.

 

This game was not a normal SE game.

Certainly, many of the skills for playing a regular SE game were also useful here, but I believe it called for a fairly different approach, from both teams.

Village

For the village, I don't think it's a stretch to say the game was about juggling a ton of uncertainties. Since the game was flipless, since we knew there could be trolls and confirmed villagers, since we knew that the scanners and troll-checkers could straight-up lie and potentially get away with it without any flips to prove them wrong, and since this game was often too bloody chaotic and fastpaced to reread and carefully analyze what happened after the fact, all of this contributed to 1) not feeling like we knew a whole lot most of the time and 2) second, third, and fourth-guessing everything we did actually know .

We don't usually think about it very much, but a lot of the analysis villagers do is necessarily contingent on other things. You can analyze that two players seem more likely E/E or V/E; you can analyze that that two claims seem incompatible; you can analyze a player in light of a fact you believe to be true about the eliminator team as a whole. These are all cases where one thing depends on another thing.

Analysis is usually like a building. You start with a ground truth, knowledge of the alignments of all the dead players, knowledge of all the roles that might be in play, et cetera. Then you make reasonable deductions based on what you know. Then you make deductions based on the deductions. You build up, story by story, until hopefully you have a working model of how the game is functioning. Or your reasoning is shoddy and the building collapses, so to speak.

This game didn't work like that. The foundation was insubstantial, or perhaps it would be better to say there were a multitude of different and conflicting foundations. Deductions built on top of blind assumptions weighed against different deductions built on top of different blind assumptions. Or reasoning where the things we guessed at reinforced each other like some kind of eldritch non-euclidean leanto that propped itself up . The only way to arrive at conclusions was to look at how everything was interconnected, to hold all of the X implies Y relations at once and make a picture of who to believe and who seems dubious.

And sometimes we just spiraled and generally wasted discussion or did things that in retrospect made very little sense

In particular, this game had an interesting mix of encouraging the village to rely heavily on scans (in some ways our only initial source of information) and encouraging the village to doubt scans (trolls, confirmed villagers, lack of role flip making it easier to fakeclaim, lack of alignment flip making it easier to fake scan results). This reminds me of some of the driving philosophy in some other games I've discussed with Kas (the game with 1/3 of all players as modified alignment scanners that destructively interfere with each other, the game with all players as informational roles and true flips on death but nobody knows their own alignment at game start). Games that heavily involve information-gathering power roles and teamwork, but which also heavily encourage the use of more critical thinking than just "follow the cop."

Elims

I would not have played this game the way the elims did. This is not a criticism, the elims played well and in ways I really didn't expect, but I think I should say this up-front, because I am about to explain what I personally think the approach this game encourages for the elim team is. And it somewhat differs from what the elim team in fact did.

Simply put, I think this game allowed the elims to agressively troll, in ways that would just be impossible in other games.

There are 3 unusual things about this game:

1. No role or alignment flips. If you tell a lie, inventing a role or a fake scan result, your death will not immediately disprove you. If you tell a lie to help get a villager lynched, their death will not immediately discredit you. If you have multiple elims corroborate each other's stories (in the same way Striker/Bookwyrm for example had corroborated each other), one of them dying will not immediately damn the other. You can be the Village Trust Group* you want to see in the world!!!
2. Unreliable scans. If you make up a scan and something else later casts heavy doubt on it, you can try to slither out of it. You were simply trolled. Or some other role must have messed something up. Ideally, you have time to think up a good excuse before going out on a limb.
3. Dead players can still talk. If the worst comes to pass and you get outed as a dirty liar, all is not lost. Even if you get executed you can keep talking. Maybe you can convince the villagers to second-guess your evilness so that there are knock-on effects, or maybe you can just troll them openly and feed the flames of paranoia. The village is especially vulnerable to doubt and paranoia in this game, so even if you're openwolfing and already dead you can potentially do a decent amount of damage.

* Very few actual villagers are included in the Village Trust Group™. And mostly the real villagers are just there as convenient NK targets so the village at large doesn't wonder why nobody in the Village Trust Group™ is ever getting targeted by the NK. If it seems like there are too many village power role claims to be reasonable, well obviously that's correct and well-spotted, so obviously somebody is lying, and obviously the liars are probably the unscanned people outside of the Village Trust Group™.

That's my two cents, anyway.

However, you guys played it differently! I'm not really gonna say you played it "wrong" because I think it's fair to say you almost won with your way When you expect a game to encourage a certain playstyle more, you shouldn't be too surprised when occasionally a team just... Comes to a different conclusion about it than you did. After all, people don't all agree on what the right way to play bog-standard vanilla SE is

There is one thing I think the elims struggled with though.

On the flip side of "the elims got to fakeclaim agressively" is "the elims needed to come up with good roleclaims." Multiple factors in this game encouraged widespread claiming, and while I'm still somewhat surprised y'all did a full mass claim before I pinch-hit in (seriously? what's with all these games where I join after the coinshot decided to claim and then try to keep the coinshot from dying smhhhhhh), it was always going to be a claim-heavy game. In some respects, the meta was turned on its side to be more Town of Salem than Sanderson Elimination: roleclaims were a major part of solving, the pacing was fast, and sketchy or delayed roleclaims were just innately suspicious. i havent played ToS in a really long time and cant really make any authoratative claims about its current meta but probably there are other mafia games where roleclaiming is a big part of the meta too

Part of it is you could have coordinated claims more in your doc imo, but part of it is that SE just doesn't usually emphasize claims as much. When you change how the game works, it can take time to adjust. And while the village arguably had the whole game as time to adjust and even make a comeback from an 8v5, the elims were expected to come up with roleclaims quickly. By the time Sart claimed on D5, at least part of what worked against him is that it was basically just too late to claim such a major role, where it wouldn't have been quite as weird in an ordinary SE game. In a game with a heavy bias towards roleclaiming, there will also likely be a bias towards believing those who roleclaimed earlier over ones who roleclaimed later. As with all "new mechanic" induced impacts on the game, I would expect this part to be downplayed if the game had an exact rerun, with the elims placing a higher priority on planning out their roleclaims. But in this game it was a bit of a factor.

Other than that, I think a lot of the elim strategy in this game boiled down to playing off the village fog of war, and forcing us to go down roads that seemed "more likely" even though they were the wrong ones. This is why Sart's play did a really good job of protecting Biplet. This is why roles analysis with Archer and Sart both seeming untargetable was effective. This was why I ultimately exed JNV despite village reading them (...if I had a nickel for every time I exed JNV on the last cycle of the game despite village reading them, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but weird that it happened twice right? RIP quokka). This is also, I assume, what your bid to roleblock Araris was intended to accomplish, if it had worked out (I'm amused by the fact that I at one point guessed the roleblock on Araris to make Steel look village but drew the wrong conclusion from it of evil!Fadran). This is where I think the elim team had some particularly good moments.

[Sart he/him]

I don't feel good about this game. I realized early on that role claiming was becoming increasingly effective in thread, because we hadn't jumped on early enough with fake claims. When it became apparent that I was the only one who hadn't claimed, I panicked. We were getting role analyzed hard on Day 3, which was causing me no shortage of grief. The issue wasn't the people inside of the Tie Guy result. The issue was actually the people outside of it. If the thread had assumed that there were 5 elims to start with (an underestimation), they would then assume that there would be 2 elims outside the pool. With a majority of the confirmed roles being outside the pool, the only people left were myself, Bip, and JNV, but JNV had a somewhat decent claim. That was causing issues, and I still hadn't come up with a good claim. I debated back and forth on Day 4 trying to bus Bip, by doing a bold claim of analyst. However, I started panicing, especially since another Tie Guy was on the table. At the very end of Day 4, I decided to say to hell with it, and just straight up open-wolfed to break what I thought was a tie. That didn't work, although Bip was saved. I went dead silent in the thread, because I knew my role was more valuable than Bips.

However, I don't want to use inactivity as a strategy. It encourages a bad meta, and was making my stomach hurt. That's why near the end of Day 5, I backtracked my bus claim, and went with a yolo play to really distract the thread from Steel, another one of my teammates. It was obviously super sus, and frustrated my teammates as well. I even got the role name wrong. It wasn't a surprise when I got killed, although I wasn't expecting the runner up to die as well. I suppose I should have just open wolfed at that point, but I was frustrated with my play, and ended up just ghosting the thread. Still not happy about the way it turned out.

This especially sucked because I love heavy role analysis games. It was just really bad for my team in this scenario, so I had to argue that revealing wasn't a good thing, when it clearly was. So frustrating, but it was fun trying to argue the other side.

If I had any problems with the mechanics, it was actually one ruling that I think tipped this game to the village. Double trolling should have negated itself. Because we got a trusted troll early on, plus the addition of other potential trolls, it became too easy to trust scan results. As long as Aman trolled a scanner, their results would be one hundred percent incorrect, which is very easy to logically negate. That's why I blocked Aman twice (Sorry about that). We couldn't instill enough doubt in the chain of claims, and that spelt our doom. If instead trolling canceled itself out, we could've played with a lot more doubt. Even though our distro didn't have a troll in it, it would've greatly expanded the claim space, and would've led to less mechanical clearing.

In conclusion, this game was still a lot of fun, especially in the early game. I'm disappointed in myself for how I acted though, and will try to rectify that in future games. Maybe I should've signed up for the Mid-Range game to redeem myself, but I needed to take a breather from this. I'll happily participate in the next one though.

[Amanuensis he/him]

53 minutes ago, Sart said:

I don't feel good about this game. I realized early on that role claiming was becoming increasingly effective in thread, because we hadn't jumped on early enough with fake claims. When it became apparent that I was the only one who hadn't claimed, I panicked. We were getting role analyzed hard on Day 3, which was causing me no shortage of grief. The issue wasn't the people inside of the Tie Guy result. The issue was actually the people outside of it. If the thread had assumed that there were 5 elims to start with (an underestimation), they would then assume that there would be 2 elims outside the pool. With a majority of the confirmed roles being outside the pool, the only people left were myself, Bip, and JNV, but JNV had a somewhat decent claim. That was causing issues, and I still hadn't come up with a good claim. I debated back and forth on Day 4 trying to bus Bip, by doing a bold claim of analyst. However, I started panicing, especially since another Tie Guy was on the table. At the very end of Day 4, I decided to say to hell with it, and just straight up open-wolfed to break what I thought was a tie. That didn't work, although Bip was saved. I went dead silent in the thread, because I knew my role was more valuable than Bips.

However, I don't want to use inactivity as a strategy. It encourages a bad meta, and was making my stomach hurt. That's why near the end of Day 5, I backtracked my bus claim, and went with a yolo play to really distract the thread from Steel, another one of my teammates. It was obviously super sus, and frustrated my teammates as well. I even got the role name wrong. It wasn't a surprise when I got killed, although I wasn't expecting the runner up to die as well. I suppose I should have just open wolfed at that point, but I was frustrated with my play, and ended up just ghosting the thread. Still not happy about the way it turned out.

This especially sucked because I love heavy role analysis games. It was just really bad for my team in this scenario, so I had to argue that revealing wasn't a good thing, when it clearly was. So frustrating, but it was fun trying to argue the other side.

If I had any problems with the mechanics, it was actually one ruling that I think tipped this game to the village. Double trolling should have negated itself. Because we got a trusted troll early on, plus the addition of other potential trolls, it became too easy to trust scan results. As long as Aman trolled a scanner, their results would be one hundred percent incorrect, which is very easy to logically negate. That's why I blocked Aman twice (Sorry about that). We couldn't instill enough doubt in the chain of claims, and that spelt our doom. If instead trolling canceled itself out, we could've played with a lot more doubt. Even though our distro didn't have a troll in it, it would've greatly expanded the claim space, and would've led to less mechanical clearing.

In conclusion, this game was still a lot of fun, especially in the early game. I'm disappointed in myself for how I acted though, and will try to rectify that in future games. Maybe I should've signed up for the Mid-Range game to redeem myself, but I needed to take a breather from this. I'll happily participate in the next one though.

I’m sorry you had a rough time. For what it’s worth, I think you, Steel, and Biplet just kinda got buried by the hyperactivity. A lot of it was, as the game was named, Process of Elimination, which as you noted was exceptionally difficult with all the info roles and scans that could be coordinated with others to ensure accuracy. TBH if you hadn’t fallen for my Vote Analyst trap, I’d have likely died on the v!Sart e!Bip hill.

Also looking forward to your next game

Edited February 24, 2023 by Amanuensis

[Kasimir he/him]

1 hour ago, DrakeMarshall said:

[stuff]

This Guy Gets It  But maybe that's why we gamebuild together a lot.

I'd further say that I expect in a non-blackout setting, it would be easier to fakeclaim roles early, which might help the Elims. But it does limit what they can claim, cf. Archer.

1 hour ago, Sart said:

If I had any problems with the mechanics, it was actually one ruling that I think tipped this game to the village. Double trolling should have negated itself. Because we got a trusted troll early on, plus the addition of other potential trolls, it became too easy to trust scan results.

Fair enough. We didn't want to be counting the number of trolls, but this also makes sense in order to prevent easy trolling coordination.

[Mat he/him]

My elim playstyle (as I mentioned at one point in the doc) revolves around the principle of lying as little as possible and having any lies be as small as possible— I’ve found that elaborate fakeclaims never last. Even in a blackout game, claims come with action accountability, and the village had multiple ways to check roles so I don’t think it was safer to fakeclaim in this game than any other. See: Sart, and why I had hoped he would claim Meme Maker. I do wonder what would have happened if this principle of mine hadn’t somewhat taken over my teammates’ claiming, but we weren’t actually in a place to coordinate serious fake claims activity wise, so I fully stand by how we played it.

As Drake said, different people play the game different ways and that’s a good thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Archer he/him]

1 hour ago, Kasimir said:

I'd further say that I expect in a non-blackout setting, it would be easier to fakeclaim roles early, which might help the Elims. But it does limit what they can claim, cf. Archer.

I realized too late that my fake(ish) claim didn't match the style guide of the other roles and spent the rest of the game dreading having to explain that

3 hours ago, DrakeMarshall said:

 

There are 3 unusual things about this game:

1. No role or alignment flips. If you tell a lie, inventing a role or a fake scan result, your death will not immediately disprove you. If you tell a lie to help get a villager lynched, their death will not immediately discredit you. If you have multiple elims corroborate each other's stories (in the same way Striker/Bookwyrm for example had corroborated each other), one of them dying will not immediately damn the other. You can be the Village Trust Group* you want to see in the world!!!
2. Unreliable scans. If you make up a scan and something else later casts heavy doubt on it, you can try to slither out of it. You were simply trolled. Or some other role must have messed something up. Ideally, you have time to think up a good excuse before going out on a limb.
3. Dead players can still talk. If the worst comes to pass and you get outed as a dirty liar, all is not lost. Even if you get executed you can keep talking. Maybe you can convince the villagers to second-guess your evilness so that there are knock-on effects, or maybe you can just troll them openly and feed the flames of paranoia. The village is especially vulnerable to doubt and paranoia in this game, so even if you're openwolfing and already dead you can potentially do a decent amount of damage

On the flip side of "the elims got to fakeclaim agressively" is "the elims needed to come up with good roleclaims." 

Dead people getting scanned for their alignment/role was a problem for us. 

We didn't have any scans and felt that faking a scan role was a bad idea for reasons I'll explain later. Technically I was one, but I didn't think to ask Kas what results I could get. The GMs gave some odd clarifications this game, but that might be on me for assuming they wouldn't divulge information that wasn't in the role text. 

Our dead elims... seemed very evil. Except for the one we wanted you to think was evil who everyone refused to suspect. So we did lose out on the talking potential - trying to connect ourselves to a mix option would have been a good use of our voice, for example. Like we did with JNV, entirely unintentionally. 

 

I don't think the elims could reasonably fabricate roles in this game. It seemed like the usual mechanics were in play, but if we claimed one and someone else said they had a similar role, we'd be outed over not knowing the flavor. If we claimed one that was detailed in thread by someone already, people seemed inclined to interrogate us enough about the nuances that it'd be revealed as a sham. We could fabricate one we hoped was unique enough to not have a similar counterpart in the distro, but the role mimicry role would out that if it came to it. Outright lies of that nature were probably one of the few ways we could be caught, so why risk it. 

We should have fake claimed actions though. Eg Bip should have gotten the jump on SE Buddy since that was a predictable duplicate role. But again, why risk being scanned lying to either anger someone who will stick around to disparage you, or clear a villager, or tie yourself to another elim. There was enough we didn't know that taking a big swing seemed like an unnecessary risk. On balance I know more lies succeed than fail, but we had a healthy respect for the village verification of claims agenda 

Quote

Yeah, I really only got onto him because of Tie Guy and the fact that we caught Steel. He was pretty convincing as a villager in our PM.

-Araris

That PM is like 5 posts long :P. But I understand why

[Araris Valerian he/him]

34 minutes ago, Archer said:

That PM is like 5 posts long :P. But I understand why

That’s pretty long for a PM that involves me but not Kas .

[Biplet she/her]

5 hours ago, DrakeMarshall said:

There are 3 unusual things about this game:

1. No role or alignment flips. If you tell a lie, inventing a role or a fake scan result, your death will not immediately disprove you. If you tell a lie to help get a villager lynched, their death will not immediately discredit you. If you have multiple elims corroborate each other's stories (in the same way Striker/Bookwyrm for example had corroborated each other), one of them dying will not immediately damn the other. You can be the Village Trust Group* you want to see in the world!!!
2. Unreliable scans. If you make up a scan and something else later casts heavy doubt on it, you can try to slither out of it. You were simply trolled. Or some other role must have messed something up. Ideally, you have time to think up a good excuse before going out on a limb.
3. Dead players can still talk. If the worst comes to pass and you get outed as a dirty liar, all is not lost. Even if you get executed you can keep talking. Maybe you can convince the villagers to second-guess your evilness so that there are knock-on effects, or maybe you can just troll them openly and feed the flames of paranoia. The village is especially vulnerable to doubt and paranoia in this game, so even if you're openwolfing and already dead you can potentially do a decent amount of damage.

Unfortunately a lot of this comes down to what could've been coordinated in the doc. Which, if you read the doc... didn't really happen. We tried, though.

We had an open wolf the entire game, but that also didn't really go anywhere (re number 3)

[Stick. she/her]

You know no one figured out that the GMs were targetable by certain roles (e.g. RPer) kek 

Good play from both the village and elims. I had fun playing and then watching, because getting all the spoilers before anybody else was the best part :> 

[StrikerEZ he/him]

6 hours ago, _Stick_ said:

You know no one figured out that the GMs were targetable by certain roles (e.g. RPer) kek 

What would’ve happened if someone targeted them?