The Wolf Game - SS Black Swan - Day 6 - Everybody Dies, Traitors Win

General
522

Dude, in all honesty I feel like we should have lost this game. I don’t think I was particularly sneaky, just more played on people’s trust. I also somehow managed to argue my way out of being lynched like 3 times and being killed by the med bay. EDIT: Which, by the way, I still dont understand how that happened. Like, wtf. lol

Soooo… Are you saying we were sneaky? lol

I don’t think it was a bad idea D: I thought it was legitimately a good idea for humans. Meh.

I blame keith.

I’m pretty much always ready for another game, I think this is one of my favorite games ever since I played for the first time.

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523

Giving CQ a desperate protective role made sense to me as it would make a wolf attack on the occupant a risky option. Unfortunately you started the game off saying that it was not protective, and ended up having to go back and stick to that decision despite suggesting otherwise on night 5.

Damage vs repairs does need some tweaking. The fact that repairs were instant this time around and the system was usable the same night made any form of damage trivial. While I don’t have any good suggestions on how you can limit repairs I do think damage should send a system straight into a critical failure countdown.

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524

I’m game for another. :wink:

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525

Having survived to the end 3 times in a row I kinda hope next time I get killed off earlier! Playing one of these can be quite time consuming… I’ll still sign up to one even if there’s only a small break.

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I’d be up for another one, but given that the kickstarter will be happening soon… IDK. But a more traditional role approach would be favored by me personally.

I’d tend to agree. I think there was never anything solid to go on except for this last night where we discovered Ark had been a traitor, only for the game to end immediately.

The fact that Cybercritic did something he hadn’t warned us of was enough to abandon working with him from my point of view. As different players mentioned I was trying to play as neutral as possible, although that probably hurt more than it helped.

527

It helped us… just saying.

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What didn’t I warn you about @xamino?

Last night, Lysk put me in contact with Enginish, who offered to take me up in the chopper, I wanted him to arrange a CQ scan instead since I was the primary target, he came back with an offer to use CQ desperate action instead, which rose my suspicions about Sane, after which I insisted that I wanted a scan instead. The reason for the flip vote in med-bay was so that the CQ scan was as clean as possible.

You would have known all this, if the game was not over, with me dead or alive. Reason I didn’t discuss it with you, is that your neutrality was staring to border on wolf territory.

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I was referring the whole “stole a gun” thing. Given that I didn’t fully trust you the warning given by Lysk made me a bit too worried, thus I removed the vote to inject him. It just all seemed very fishy to me. :smiley:

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530

dude i told you martin wouldn’t let the wolves have a gun, you didnt believe me. tsk tsk!

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Lots of mistakes made this game, the biggest one was allowing myself to believe that Lysk could be careless in a wolf game. I forgave a lot of stuff that, in hindsight, pointed to him being a wolf.

Locking down my system, he would never do as a human. Not immediately looking up the phrase ‘loyal crew’ when the magic words were mentioned for the first time. Not collecting the gun, etc, etc.

Still, the wolves played exceptionally and deserved the win. Great job guys.

Game balance wise, I’ve got a couple of things to say. As usual, Martin did a great job introducing creative new mechanics. A real standout is the interaction between the helicopter, radar, and AAA (and the CIC!). Great material for conflict, right there.

My opinions on crew quarters have been… forwarded… by Lysk already. I understand the difficulty in balancing it though. A change I feel may have balanced the game a little bit better: Possibly consider revealing the function of all the systems before the game. That would have promoted some crazy planning on day 1 instead of the usual milling around, as well as getting people onto the important systems (med bay, helicopter hangar) much sooner. We could piled people onto med-bay, repaired it every day, and had 2 lynches per day at the cost of the use of other systems, for instance.

Final remark: Subsystem games are interesting and fun but I think they’re inherently skewed towards wolf victory. The incredible ease with which the wolves can become aware of plans in this game-type makes it very difficult to catch them in traps, and without knowing what the systems do ahead of time it’s tough for the humans to formulate any kind of effective plan.

Also please no RNG in the future. :confounded:

I’d be down for another game even if the signup were tomorrow, tbh. I have faith in our great leader Martin. Since exams are temporarily over, I’ll be able to devote an appropriate amount of time to this next game :stuck_out_tongue:

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Or you could add a special role for seer the next time. Make him something along the lines of secret agent or so, which gives him the the abilities of the crew quarter…

533

Fine I’ll admit it. I was lazy. The whole subsystem mechanic made me even more lazy. It killed humans in ISS and now this game.

Depends on your objectives. I find it uninteresting to win by just having your team win. That is not skill. Like when as a human you make a great judgement call on day one being sure of who the wolves are. Get one or two lynched, but are sure to be killed by the wolves at night. Making them choose not to kill you, that is a skill.

534

I kinda de-facto did that this game (deliberately) by re-using the exact same name as the CQ system from ISS Relatively Fast.

I had thought that I’d rather not do that for all subsystems as that would lose lot of the of the chaos which makes a wolf game fun. However, perhaps this is really the fundamental difference between subsystems and roles - roles promote secrecy by individuals to create chaos, whilst systems promote behind the scenes arguments between groups who don’t really trust one another to create chaos. In that case the secrecy of what systems do is not important!

Agreed. Revealing all about the systems would probably help with this, as would some more powerful human aligned systems. Currently I’m unhappy with how most the systems are kind of ok for humans, and have a game winningly awesome desperate action for wolves! Really I’d like desperate actions to be more of a grey area exploitable by both teams.

That said… I think a lot of the problem with subsystem games being wolf biased so far is that you guys keep misplaying them! In my opinion the whole thing of randomly distributing people around systems reduces the information available - i.e. the wolves no longer have to defend why they repaired {powerful system} because they can just point at the RNG - and lack of information is what kills humans! But hey what do I know, I’m just the GM I never actually play the game xD

My role games (almost?) never have RNG, conversely subsystems were actually introduced initially as a way for me to experiment with RNG in games. I’m not sure how I’d implement a damage mechanic without some kind of RNG. I’m totally open to suggestions, as I don’t think damage mechanics do enough to promote switching around systems. Perhaps each player can only be in control of one system at a time?

Oh boy, roles and subsystems. Be careful what you wish for :smirk:

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Everyone who played in the first game knows about the power of third parties. I don’t know if we should walk down that road again…

coughs @LucasFIN

I’d be down for another game whenever you’re ready with it martin. I’m an addict at this point. I followed the entire game even though I was dead.

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I think Dekaku meant a classic role mixed into a subsystem game, rather than a third party seer alignment. I’ve mentioned before (possibly just to the wolves) but I’m pretty sure after the vampire game you guys would lynch me if I tried to run another game with a secret third alignment :confused:

537

Didn’t we have such a one. The one on the mining outpost? That was more with items though and more of a general “everyone has a vote on everything”.

I think the “Repair it/Controll it” mechanic could be change a little.

538

I don’t recall running one on a mining outpost. Are you sure I was the GM?

I think mine are:

  • Welcome To Eliseni
  • ISS Relatively Fast
  • Panic Station
  • SS Black Swan
539

The GM was Lysk. Here’s the link:

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540

I don’t believe you :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t think this is a game you can allow yourself to be fed up by. Sure, if the GM is consistently being a dick, then that’s a problem, but in this case, it’s fine for a few things to go wrong, because we can talk about it and hopefully the next game will be designed better.

Yay! I’m in

Agreed. Though I think this metagaming stuff is more a symptom of having a subsystem style game. When players have the roles themselves, they have extra information, the primary currency of the wolf game. In the subsystem games, the only players with extra information are the wolves (by virtue of being a wolf and knowing the other wolves).

I think an interesting idea would be to have a wolf game where the wolves are unknown to each other at the start. That might make it a bit too hard for the wolves though.

Yeah, it was a bit strange not to have any systems go critical this game.

Soon works for me. Some people might have to deal with family over Christmas.

I forget, was the generator still functioning when I got lynched? Because the whole reason I didn’t go for you whilst we were on the generator was because I’d be the prime target the next day if I didn’t get night killed. Didn’t help with Enginish being all suspicious and everything either. Don’t know why they’d let you have the generator alone…

The only strong argument in favour was to prevent the wolves getting a majority on any system on the first night. However, the reasoning didn’t hold up based on the number of players active, and it all went to hell when not everyone followed the plan anyway.

Well, yeah. It still sucked. By the time I’d learned the bandwagon had turned on me, I had two hours left in a day that’d gone on 2 days longer than expected. I knew I wasn’t going to stop it. Still sucked.

I might be the only one that actually enjoyed that game. Though I did end up winning when I should have lost, so there’s that.

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Retrospectively it was a lot of fun, but at the time… But what a game it was! :smiley: I’d never lynch the GM… mostly.