I was constantly nervous that you were onto us and would set a trap to try catch us
@skyentist at last!
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I never suspected a thing.
I was so close to catching you. Really, I was.
But you all just had to lynch cyber. Cyber was one of the seers, and it was my plan to have cyber scan sky that night.
After that, I kind of gave up hope. I knew that if Sky was a wolf, there was probably nothing that could prove it in the future.
Oh wells. 
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This game there was one thing which dominated my game design: the number of players. With 17 players we usually have four wolves (I may mix this up in the future by adding special roles for wolves and giving them one less player). However this game we only had 15 players so I was forced to reduce the number of wolves to three. To counter this I experimented with giving the wolves special roles, something I’ve rarely done before.
Wolf Special Roles
Sorcerer (Skyentist)
The sorcerer is a role seer, but with wolf alignment. Additionally when the sorcerer dies he can drag someone down with him - effectively directly reducing the size of the human team by one.
Daemon Psyker (King_Cosmos)
This is a new role I was testing out and I quite like it. Each night the psyker could select any complete post in the thread and scry it - if it’s completely true then I reply TRUTH and if there’s even just a single lie then I reply FALSE. This sounds extremely powerful but it’s actually a very difficult to use and I’m not sure the wolves actually got anything useful out of it.
Countdown
Another obvious feature of this game was the exterminatus countdown. The idea was to keep up the pressure even if the humans felt they were winning (e.g. if they had a confirmed wolf kill through an autopsy). The fleet was controlled by two rules:
- Countdown is stopped every time a special role/wolf player dies.
- Countdown skips a day if two or more humans die in a single day.
Rule one takes precedence. This is why the fleet never made a lot of progress: you guys were killing off your own special roles left and right! I’m not sure anyone even noticed when the clock skipped a day after the slaughter in the barracks?
Human Roles
People requested that I try to encourage more role playing this game and this was an important factor in my role selection. I prefer subsystem style games as they encourage a lot more discussion about systems and how they interact as well as giving all players a chance to swap between multiple different roles (perhaps simultaneously). However, I felt that a simpler selection of roles with a larger number of vanilla players would limit the chaos in the game and give people more opportunity to roleplay.
Tech Priest (TerranAmbassador)
This is the jailer role which i have used before - a guardian angel which also acts as a role blocker. It’s a slightly nerfed guardian angel to go in line with having less wolves.
Psyker (Juno)
Targets another player and (if the player survived the night) gets a list of everyone who targets them. This one will never catch wolves, but does act as a good way for humans to find other special roles and make contact with them. This one never came into play since Juno died on day two.
Inquisition Acolyte (cybercritic)
Targets another player and spies on them. The role message contained no more information about this role… and that’s because it does nothing! This one was purely intended to sow a little confusion. I admit this may be a somewhat cruel/unusual role to give someone, sorry
I didn’t actually expect this role to have much game impact but it did generate a fair bit of discussion (based on the assumption it was a seer role) which makes me feel it was actually not a bad idea.
Transmechanic (Tjafaas)
Just a medic - dissects a player who has died in the last 2 kills (most recent lynch, or most recent murder) and then privately discovers if they were wolf or human. I’ve had to move away from the classic medic role I used to use (public reveal of dissection results) because if the medic ever discovers a wolf then the medic is almost guaranteed to be a confirmed human (it could be a wolf play, but I doubt anyone would ever do that) and confirmed humans ruin games! Of course Tjafaas was killed before he could conduct any useful autopsies so this role was lost the human team which was a serious blow to their chances!
Triggered Psychopath (Arkenbrien and Xamino)
This is another new role I was experimenting with. A psychopath is a third party which must kill someone each night (unless role blocked), their aim is simply to survive to the end of the game so they can choose to side with wolves or humans as they choose. A psychopath from the start of the game would annihilate the human team so I made this a triggered psychopath based on the vaguely lovers mechanic I have used before - two people have this latent role and when one of them dies the other is informed of the role they now have.
Voteless
As the name implies this role simply means that your daytime votes don’t count. Obviously I can’t give this role to someone for the entire game (I guess I could if they had some other insanely powerful role to compensate) so I made the role move around to a totally random player each night. The first two nights it went to dead players which is why no one could confirm the existence of the role when abystander2 claimed to have had it day 1.
Similarly to the acolyte I didn’t expect this to have much game impact but it did bring the heat onto abystander2 and generated a fair bit of discussion in the early game.
The Good
I quite like these new roles. None were brokenly overpowered and none were uselessly underpowered. The scryer probably needs a little more work, but I think it’s definitely a concept I can bring back in future games.
The Bad
I chose the WH40K universe as one that I assumed everyone would be somewhat familiar with and has plenty of opportunity for a variety of roleplay. Obviously that didn’t really work! We did have a little more RP this game, but it kind of fell off late game. What do you guys think about the RP - was this enough? Should I do more to encourage RP?
The Ugly
Low player numbers and low activity from a fair few players crippled the start of this game. I think the first three kills were on players who were almost entirely inactive and then the humans were very unlucky to lose their medic when he hadn’t had any useful bodies to dissect yet. I could take a much harsher line on inactivity, do you think I should?
Opinions?
Do you have any suggestions for my future games? Even if they’re not concrete ideas feel free to throw out things you like/dislike about the game and I’ll see what I can do in the future 
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This may be risky, but how about a game where everyone has to play via RP? That may lead to quite a bit more interesting discussion and make meta gaming a bit harder to sell. Not sure if the interest for that would be high.
Otherwise: interesting roles, even though I never got anything from them since I… fell. Accidentally. Thanks for the game, fun as always!
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Couple of things I’d like to air as far as this game goes.
As a preface, I’m not mad about the outcome of the game, I had fun, and as always I will gladly hop into the next game with no hesitation. I hope my criticisms will be seen as constructive and not hostile.
As usual, the wolves put forward a great showing, and their victory is deserved. I wish we had seen more activity from most of the players (myself included) as I feel that would have made the game a bit closer.
On to the roles!
Some really neat new roles this time. Cosmos’ Daemon Psyker was a real standout, an excellent take on the traditional Seer. It would have made a wonderful human role I think, with his (admittedly fabricated) caveat of being unable to determine wolf/human alignment. The potential for plotting was strong with this role, trying subtly to convince people to put information into the public thread is a super cool idea I think.
…Kind of bad as a wolf role though, in my opinion. Humans rarely have a reason to lie publicly, and it’s difficult to think of a situation in which it would be useful for the wolves.
Skyentist’s role was too strong. As a Seer he was already a very powerful wolf, and I feel the extra kill was just too much.
I agree with your sentiment that Cyber’s role was semi-cruel and very useless. It was a huge distraction that totally derailed humans’ efforts. He almost would have been better off with no role, and that is not a good thing.
The Psyker role saw no use, so I can’t really comment on it. Ditto for Medic.
Psychopath was fine, but maybe give the players a hint of some sort that there’s something special about them? The role came totally out of left field, and after Arkenbrien had claimed that he had no role earlier in the game, being outed as a psychopathic murderer was a death sentence. Even something like ‘Arkenbrien, you have a mysterious psychic connection with Xamino. Things may happen if he dies,’ would have been okay.
The Voteless role genuinely confused me. Similarly to the Acolyte role, I felt that there was no way anyone claiming to have a role so useless could possibly be telling the truth. The role is random, and even worse, pointless. I think including it was a bad idea.
In summary, the wolves were very strong this game. Their two Seers were each stronger than the one we had, and every human role with the exception of the Medic and Psyker (which never got used) had crippling downsides. The efforts to buff the wolves to compensate for their lowered player count went too far in my opinion.
As for suggestions, I’ll quote myself a bit.
No more RNG please 
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I don’t see any way I could ever do it as a human role. The sensible play would be to tell everyone to publicly state I am not a wolf (via a trusted third party) and scan these messages over the next few days. Anyone who is even slightly evasive about doing this gets lynched.
There are usually some humans with something to hide, for example if Arkenbrien had known about his role from day one I suspect he’d be lying to everyone if asked if he had a role and then wolves would have known he was hiding something.
Overall I think the role probably needs some kind of rework (maybe a few more limitations bolted on to make it into a human role).
Agreed, I completely overdid the rebalancing and I think I was very lucky a wolf died day one to bring things back into balance!
This was the conscious intent of the role. I’m not sure how I feel about it now, I mean it definitely worked but I kind of feel like an asshole for it - like maybe it comes too close to lying by omission and the GM never lies.
Again, I kind of feel like omitting something like a role is running the line of lying by omission and I doubt I’ll do this again without some kind of warning as you suggest.
Do you think negative roles are, in general, a bad idea? I’m undecided as they bring a lot of opportunities to the table for me to design roles which could make the overall game more interesting but they kind of suck for the player with them. I thought voteless was probably ok since it moved around and thus didn’t make the game suck for one player the entire game!
I kept it to a minimum! I think the only RNG this game was voteless player assignment.
TL;DR Roles Suck
I think my main takeaway from this game is a reminder to myself that the subsystem way of doing things is way better - There can’t be an overpowered wolf only role because all roles are available to all alignments!
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@martindevans Great game, enjoyed it!
Inactivity from players days one and two really didn’t help out. This equated to 4 players being knocked out of the game with zero info for humans.
Just spit-balling an idea out there, but how about incorporate inactivity somehow? It’s going to happen, as the last several games have shown, it seems pretty unavoidable.
Let’s say that for the first day of the game, no votes are allowed. Purely roleplaying day one.
Furthermore, the wolves aren’t chosen until the end of the first day.
Based on the activity of the players during the day phase, the inactive players are killed by the wolves on night one (no input from wolves).
That way, all the inactive players are weeded out day one, and the wolves don’t get basically one or two free kills, which is what happened this game.
The game then starts normally day two.
Thoughts?
EDIT:
So going along with the subsystems, ‘roles’ could be decided by the subsystems usage on day one.
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Kreydis suggested something similar to me in PMs, it seems like a very good idea. In fact it’s so good I’m gonna do (something like) that next game 
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Cosmos addressed this actually, and I included this in my post. He claimed that any attempt to scan a post that contained something like ‘I am/am not a wolf’ would return an ‘indeterminate’.
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Yeah I could put in a specific clause like that I suppose, just any assertion about alignment causes the entire post to be indeterminate.
Yeah, I was just super enamored by the method of scrying. If you want to learn something about somebody, you have to get them to say it out loud. By its nature it means that the Seer has to be more active and open than a traditional one, which is of course riskier. As a bonus though, it can do almost anything if you’re clever enough… except determine if someone’s a wolf with absolute certainty.
I did this with Abystander actually. Notice how he grouped together all of his info into one post? A conscious effort on my part 
I just really like this role.
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Yeah, I’d love to see scrying return for the next role-based game (might be a little harder with subsystems?). I like roles that make their holder have to think outside the box to make any use of them. At the same time, this is why it doesn’t really work for wolves, because a) they’re already at an information advantage, so the roles is somewhat less helpful and b) they’re already thinking outside the box to conceal their wolfiness (if they’re doing a good job).
The one thing I keep noticing in these games, but especially the role-based ones, is that humans are incredibly reluctant to talk to each other. I think moving scrying to a human role would actually help quite a bit if they play a good detective and manipulate a wolf into revealing a lie that they can publicly disprove, whilst at the same time working out which players they can trust as humans to create a human alliance after they inevitably get lynched.
That’s the theory, anyway. Not sure how you could get that to work in practice, and it’d have to be a fairly good player to get the most out of that role.
EDIT: I also wanted to add that I enjoyed the lack of metagaming in this game. It sucked the fun out of the previous games. And keep up with the ruthless treatment of inactives, because the way we won that train game sucked for everyone.
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@Enginish @TerranAmbass @LucasFIN @LyskTrevise
Maybe we should send @LyskTrevise to see if his luck holds and he always gets lynched on day one over there too xD
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Yo yo long time no see.
Do we nominate one person to represent us?
That’s the plan, let’s first do a head count, maybe it’s time for another game?
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I’ve been convinced to run another game by Topperfalkon and Cybercritic (unless someone else is keen to host?). Give me a few days to work out roles and settings etc.
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Enginish and I were just talking about TWG this last weekend. I’d be thrilled to get in on another game. I am so in.
Also this wolf game world championship thing seems cool. I need to read more on it though.
EDIT: also Martin, I could be convinced to host. You always have the best games, but you never get to play. However, I normally host irl so if I were to host I’d appreciate some tips and junk To get the ball rolling.
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