Long Game 20: Warcamp Enigmas

[Zas678 he/him]

Yeah, for some reason, I've just got this nagging feeling that Wilson is a GB. I don't know why....

[little wilson she/her]

I shall name Zas my heir.

[Nyali she/her]

I was not redirected. Twei used a redirect. Wilson was hit by the Ghostbloods and my Shardblade. Wilson's Shardblade hit Twei.

My guess is that Twei redirected Wilson's role action to herself. Macen's pain knife would have been blocked by Wilson's plate. All of that scans to me. I honestly can't see any other redirect for a confirmed Twei to have used.

Wilson.

EDIT: ... oh, hey, maybe I should read the other posts before posting? <.<

Edited June 5, 2016 by Nyali

[Kynedath]

Makes sense. Wilson.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

Teialan, pre-death:

"DAMNATION WILSON

Role redirect Wilson -> Wilson

Zas got my stuff. But he knew I had painrial - how?"

[little wilson she/her]

Damnation has already claimed me, Twei. I'd apologize, but I don't feel anything down here.

[Zas678 he/him]

I guessed you had a painrial because you had protected Nyali from a GB attack earlier.

 

And yes, Twei gave me her stuff, which included a painrial and an emotion bracelet, but the painrial disappeared, so now I have the emotion bracelet. And now with Wilson naming me her heir, I should get her items to get in running to be King!

 

That being said, Stink probably has a lot better chance than I do.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

Aftermath: No Way Out

 

Failed. Kenara had failed. Her daughter's hand would forever remain missing and the nobility would remain control of their warcamps. Plate shattered, spirit broken, Kenara shuffled out to the center of the camp. "Do your worst," she said, revealing her true identity as a Ghostblood. Yes, she had killed. Yes, she had lied. Yes, she had done anything she could to help her daughter. And she wouldn't take any of it back for the world. 

 

The entirety of the nobility, even the stinky archer, surrounded her completely, cutting her off from any type of escape. Stormfather knew, she'd escaped capture enough times this month. But this was it, this would be the final capture. Kenara had no desire to even attempt an escape. Arisia had trapped her, completely and totally. 

 

Stink wanted to shoot her with his Grandbow, but Mace's suggestion ended up winning the vote. They drug Kenara to a narrow chasm, one deep and short. There was nowhere she could run. Nowhere to climb up. But the nobles weren't complete monsters, for Kenara's death would be short. 

 

---

 

Kenara sat at the bottom of the pit, utterly wasted. One by one, her compatriots had been felled. First Subadon with his strange accent had been taken by one of Ebony's lucky arrows. Then Loopen had been caught by a few of the nobles and taken Itachi's blade to the throat. Karnan had disappeared one day, only to have his body found by a scouting party a distance from the camps. Alv had stuck it out the longest. The salesman, who was also the deadliest killer of the group, had snuck around for days after Karnan's death. But finally, he had fallen too. Arisia's Shardblade had found him in the night. 

 

It was just her. For days, long, endless days, and sleepless nights, she had sat by herself in the tavern, trying to come up with one last, desperate play. One more thing to try. One last trick. But there had been no way out. Arisia and the engineer-spy, Teialan, had cornered her. It was over, and had been, since Alv's death. Her only success had been in killing Teialan, when she had achieved the Ghostblood's goal of obtaining both a Shardblade and a Soulcaster.

 

As Kenara sat, empty, a stone fell to the ground next to her. Then another. And another. One by one, the nobles up above tossed their stones in to end her life. But Kenara would never give them that last pleasure. When the first stone hit her, snapping her leg, she barely even whimpered. As another cracked against her shoulder, she almost fainted. 

 

She stood up. Leaning her bad leg against one of the rock piles, she stood. Despite the falling rocks, despite her injuries, she stood. It wouldn't be long now. She pushed through the pain and the threat of darkness that she longed to let herself dive into. But she compelled herself to stand for one last moment, finishing her countdown. Ten.

 

Her storm-blue Blade, a perfect match to her Plate, appeared in her hand. This was it. There was no way out, but she sure as storms wasn't going to let Arisia and the nobles choose how she died. Only she would choose. Kenara glared up at the nobles, locking eyes with Arisia, and shoved her Blade into her stomach. Damnation was better than this failure. 

 

---

 

Kaythar climbed out of the chasm, Shardblade in hand. It had been a terrible sight, Brightness Kenara all crumpled up down there, Blade sticking out of her midsection. Luckily Shardblades didn't leave any blood, or he might have vomited. "Fill it in,"Kaythar commanded. The others continued throwing the rocks down to bury Kenara's body. It was the least he could do for her. 

 

Kenara had admitted to being the last of the traitors. Now, with all of them dead, the nobles needed to decide on a king. The highprinces had been decimated in battle with the Parshendi recently and four had died. The remainder had declared that whoever could discover and remove the threat of the Ghostbloods from the camps would be able to take their place. 

 

Stink was the first to jump up, claiming that he should be king. Arisia contested him, ending in a tied vote. Kaythar stood silently, offering himself in place. With Kenara's items, he was a full Shardbearer and held plenty of other items. Unknown to the others, Kenara had held both a Soulcaster and Shardblade when she died. He had found the Soulcaster on her body when he retrieved the Blade. 

 

The others agreed, Kaythar would be King. Ace lifted his glass in celebration. "Hail, King Kaythar."

---

 

I ended this a bit early, since it would be easier for me to post now and the vote was pretty conclusive.

Kenara was lynched by a unanimous vote! She was a Ghostblood with a Shardblade, Shardplate, Soulcaster, Alerter, and Spanreed. 

 

The Nobles have won this game! Kaythar (Zas) has been crowned King of Alethkar and Ace, Arisia, Stink, and Kayden were appointed Highprinces/Highprincesses.

 

Great job to both teams as well as the thieves! I will post my thoughts in the next couple of days, including my chosen MVPs of the game. 

 

Spec Doc

Braize/Tranquiline Halls (Dead Doc)

Ghostblood Tavern (Eliminator Doc, which, at a final count of just over 130,000 words, is now the largest doc in SE history)

El's Thief Doc (There's some great alternate death cries El wrote up in here)

Master Spreadsheet

 

Congratulations to the nobles and my deepest appreciation to all of you who played this game for me. Thank you! This game achieved the longest doc as well as the longest game in SE history, even without the extensions, I believe. It was also the only game we've had where it's following game(LG21) finished before it did.

 

To those of you who have not had your death writeups done, I promise, I will finish those in the next few days! 

Edited June 6, 2016 by Mailliw73

[Haelbarde he/him]

Would it be possible to link to part 1 of the eliminator doc?

[Mailliw73 he/him]

Would it be possible to link to part 1 of the eliminator doc?

Did it not merge together for you? It's having issues with it being so long. I'll try again.

[Haelbarde he/him]

Did it not merge together for you? It's having issues with it being so long. I'll try again.

The Table of Contents has Cycles 1 through 8, but first cycle in the doc is day 8.

[Master Elodin]

Wow. Just wow. This was just crazy.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

The Table of Contents has Cycles 1 through 8, but first cycle in the doc is day 8.

It should be fixed now.

[Kynedath]

I survived! Oh my good golly goodness. Every roll-over for the last four turns I would play this song, and I think that it might have helped.

 

Good game everyone!

[Mailliw73 he/him]

I survived! Oh my good golly goodness. Every roll-over for the last four turns I would play this song, and I think that it might have helped.

 

Good game everyone!

After four lynchings and a Shardblade attack, Kayden managed it somehwo.

[Kynedath]

"Go on now, go, walk out the door!
Just turn around now,
Cause you're not welcome anymore!

Weren't you the one who tried to break me with goodbye?
Do you think I'd crumble?
Did you think I'd lay down and die?"

 

Gotta love it when lyrics fit the scene perfectly.

[Elbereth she/her]

I must say that I immensely enjoyed playing as the Thief this game. Other than that, my thoughts are scattered throughout the various docs. I have regrets, but I think I played as well as I could, and I definitely had a blast.

Hope you all enjoy the Thief doc. I'm sure it'll clear up a good deal for you, Wilson.

Edited June 6, 2016 by Elbereth (Lomion)

[STINK he/him]

This was a confusing game.

Edit: apparently I was more of a threat to the eliminators than I thought.

Edited June 6, 2016 by IrulelikeSTINK

[Nyali she/her]

Thank you all for the game! It was fun. All arguments were part of the game / no hard feelings about anything that happened.

 

Sorry for slamming you so hard, Kynedath! I was actually really unsure about you, but had no better targets at the time, and after a while, it became a "WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE ALREADY OMG" situation <.<

 

Around the middle of the game when I started saying "If Wilson is an eliminator, well, gg, we've totally lost, so whatever, let's ignore that possibility" I wasn't being sincere or ignoring Wilson. At that point though, Wilson was in all my major PMs, knew everything about when I'd be vulnerable, and I figured making statements like that would lead to her trusting me more if she was a Noble, and to her putting off killing me if she was a Ghostblood. That seems to have worked. Though, I'm really not sure why she hit me with that Shardblade - she knew I had a half-shard and wouldn't die. The GB kill though would have killed me.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

So, as promised:

 

Post-Mortem Thoughts

• I think the evil team, being balanced as it was on the experience and skill of the players, was an interesting one to watch. It messed with the meta, as was evident during the game. I may have balanced it slightly too much for the village though, and think that I definitely gave them one too many kills until Burnt was "killed" and brought back without a Bow. 
• The Soulcasters were a bit too overpowered in this game. In LG5, it was the Pain Knives, which took only one action, and roleblocked all three of the target's actions. In this version, the Soulcasters allowing for role manipulation was almost a scanning role, which is how Twei used it. In another version of this game, I would make it so that they were like the Pain Knives and redirected a random action, or only allow them to select an action period to redirect.
• The Thieves. Boy, these two had it rough. I realized that Thieves need at least 7 cycles for them to win. Obviously, this game went way past that, but there are plenty of games that don't. That 7 cycle minimum also assumes they never miss a steal. Which is very difficult. With the items I started them off with, I think 9 cycles would've been good. 10 would've been the most expected. And that's the hard part. The game has to go so long for them to have a chance at winning. I still haven't figured out a way to fix this, but I would remove the Grandbow from the list of items they need to steal. 
• I want to say congratulations and commend the Ghostbloods for a job well done. They were on the low end of the spectrum, player wise and item wise, but they almost pulled it off so many times. Even factoring in Kas's unexpected dropout and Orlok's unfortunate early death, they almost had the nobles near the end. 

MVPs

• Nyali
• Wilson
• Elbereth

This game, I decided to pick a player of each alignment as the MVP for their team. 

 

First, the Village MVP, Nyali. This is probably fairly evident to anyone who watched the game at all, but Nyali's logic and deduction skills dominated the game for the nobles. Time and time again, the Ghostbloods' plans were frustrated or outright thwarted by her logic. Over and over, they were inhibited by her plans and her discussions. Well done, especially for your first game here!

 

Second, Wilson, the Ghostblood MVP. Another obvious choice, as Wilson manipulated and led most of the nobles by the nose for a good portion of the game. Many times, she was almost outed or lynched, but she kept on pushing and she pulled all the major suspicions off of her. With the heavy suspicions on her in the early game, I thought she'd be a goner by Cycle 6. But she pulled through till the end, fighting and pushing for what seemed like village goals, but really served her own purposes.

 

Lastly, Elbereth as the Thief MVP. She used her items for maximum information gain and managed to pull out information in PMs. She only missed two steals the whole time she lived. She created that doc linked in the OP and tracked items down and around and managed to almost reach her goal, thwarted only by a Grandbow. 

 

Well done to everyone involved in this game! There were so many times where I had no idea who would win or when the balance would shift sharply to one team, only to swing back the next cycle! It was very entertaining to watch. Thank you all for playing the last game I'll GM before I leave.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

Also, the last part of Kayden's saga is now up! 

 

Day 8's writeup is now up!

Edited June 8, 2016 by Mailliw73

[Nyali she/her]

My thoughts on how the game mechanics could be improved for a future run - 

 

 

My suggestion for how to make the thieves win condition more feasible is to remove whatever items they happen to start with from the list of items they need to steal. That way, the rest of the players don't know which items they need (or rather, which ones they don't need), and it would reduce the requirement from 8 to 5-7 (5 is possibly too few, but few players started with 3 items anyway). Yes, this does mean that the more power a thief starts with, the less they need to do to accomplish their goals. But, you can control how many items they start with and which ones, so you can mitigate that effect. You can also give them an item they already don't need to steal like a Soulcaster or Shard in addition to at least one item they do need to steal, but I think starting them with just two items they need to steal is likely the best balance. I personally feel that "steal 5-7 specific items and survive" is a perfectly reasonable win condition, but "steal 8 specific items" is a bit much.

 

 

 

For Soulcasters, I think that redirecting a specific action period or a random action would both work. A random action is weaker and more in line with Pain Knives and Emotion Bracelets, but allowing for the redirection of a specific action period would mean the soulcaster would know if they were redirecting a detrimental or beneficial effect so they could redirect accordingly to someone you suspect or someone you trust. You can also limit their power by not allowing a redirect to force a self-target, so you can't redirect someone's T1A action to themself in an attempt to make them kill themself. If you do go with random redirection, I would have it automatically exclude items that don't target, like Spanreeds and Alerters, instead picking a valid target if there is one and failing if there isn't one. That means that failing to redirect someone doesn't mean they didn't do anything, just that they either didn't use an item or role that targets, or only used items that don't target.

 

Also, you can limit Soulcasters' power as deductive tools by masking who is performing the kills in the writeup. If you redirect X to Y and Y dies by the Ghostblood kill, well, it's pretty likely that X is a Ghostblood. But, if you redirect X to Y, and Y dies, you could have redirected the Ghostblood attack, a Grandbow, or a Shardblade. Doing that would make the RP aspect of the writeup less interesting, however, since you'd have to be ambiguous about the cause of death, and less realistic since it should be pretty clear from someone's body if they were killed by a giant arrow, a Shardblade, or some other means.

 

 

I feel like Shardplate was a little too strong in this game. That may be intentional, but I feel like it's a bit strong for an auto-self-protect. I would suggest one of the following nerfs, if you agree that it should be weakened:

1. Shardplate doesn't regenerate.
2. Shardplate has only one health pool - it can take two hits normally, but a Shardblade attack destroys it in one hit (so, a Shardblade + lynch = kill, Shardblade one night + Grandbow the next night = kill, Lynch & Grandbow one night + Shardblade the next night = kill, etc. If someone was hit by a Shardblade and Grandbow in the same night turn, then flip a coin to see who hit first. In all cases, the Shardplate is destroyed. If the Shardblade hits first, the Grandbow kills. If the Grandbow hits first, the Shardblade is still stopped by the plate). It just seemed weird that a Shardplate could be in a state where it would protect the wearer from a Shardblade, but not from a Grandbow.
3. Lynches completely destroy any protection remaining on the Shardplate, but if any protection remains at all, it still stops the lynch.
4. Shardplate regeneration starts counting from when the last hit was made, making it all come back at once, but only if five turns go by without being attacked.
5. Shardplate regeneration takes 7 turns instead of 5 (so you can lynch someone three times in four days and still kill them, unlike the version we had where you needed to lynch someone three times in three days to score a kill).

 

Also, if you wanted more duels to happen, I would suggest reducing the time window from 24 hours to 18 hours before the end of the day. 18 should be plenty of time for the rest of the players to learn of the duel, and it takes a while for incriminating information to propagate. The times I wanted to declare a duel with my Shardblade, it was too late by a few hours to do so each time.

[Mailliw73 he/him]

Those suggestions are really good, Nyali, thanks! On the Plate, yeah, it was intentionally strong, but I think it is stronger than it needs to be. It should probably combine 4 and 2(but I'd make 2 so that it could protect from one of each type).

[little wilson she/her]

I'd also suggest that items like the Pain Knife and Soulcaster can stop/redirect any targetable action, including giving items or thieving. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be the case. Especially in the case of thieves, since the thieving action is ridiculously strong right now, if they know where an item is. It can't be redirected or stopped, it can't be seen, you don't get the item information if the item is stolen from you, and you can't give the item away since thieving comes first. Sure, they have to guess where items are, but since every other role in the game has something that can block it or redirect it or something, thieving stands out as the one things that nothing stops. Which, flavor-wise, makes no sense. If a Shardblade-kill can be stopped or Plate prevented from protecting (through a double pain knife), then why shouldn't thieving be possible to stop?

[Mailliw73 he/him]

I'd also suggest that items like the Pain Knife and Soulcaster can stop/redirect any targetable action, including giving items or thieving. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be the case. Especially in the case of thieves, since the thieving action is ridiculously strong right now, if they know where an item is. It can't be redirected or stopped, it can't be seen, you don't get the item information if the item is stolen from you, and you can't give the item away since thieving comes first. Sure, they have to guess where items are, but since every other role in the game has something that can block it or redirect it or something, thieving stands out as the one things that nothing stops. Which, flavor-wise, makes no sense. If a Shardblade-kill can be stopped or Plate prevented from protecting (through a double pain knife), then why shouldn't thieving be possible to stop?

The problem comes down to an order of actions issue. I wanted to try having Item Gifting at the beginning so that people could use items they received that same night. That, by no means, has to stay there in a rerun. Thieving though... It's ridiculously hard as is, though with the less items they need to steal, you could probably move that in the Order of Actions too.