Dark Crystal Endgame

 

Roles: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qkrV9OId7HNfH3s9c4LiWnWZb7r9ES5GKpOWYk4sixw/edit?usp=sharing

Night Actions:

 

Thank you to everyone who played in this game! My main reason for choosing this theme was to advertise this new show on Netflix! It was fantastically made, and I hope some of you had a chance to learn more about this cool universe while researching roles etc. If you did share your thoughts on the dark crystal with me!

 

As far as the game goes it was absolutely crazy!

Day phase 1 Drafterman got really unlucky. Funnily enough, Drafterman had a solid claim. The podlings as a group of characters was actually a role that would have been included in the game, but was removed because of downsizing from 13 to 10. Then AROSE fake CC’ed him him as Hup (not sure that neccarily counts as a CC, but it would have hurt him). Not sure what AROSE was thinking there. If drafter was town he would have really screwed over his team there, he basically lied about his claim and CC’ed drafter over a strong gut feeling drafter was guilty. Well it would have turned out horribly for him if Drafter didn’t claim JOAT right after. That sealed drafters fate. Obviously drafter wouldn’t have had a way of knowing that there was a town role connected to his that was also JOAT so it wasn’t necessarily a bad play, just really unlucky on his part. I am really surprised that this worked in towns favor, and I seriously am not trying to be a dick, but I think AROSE plan (while successful) was a bad town play. It worked for him out of extreme luck. Draftermans luck worsened that night phase when he killed Warren. Warren’s role was designed to be a bit swingy, the original game just had 3 mafia and no 3rd party. I changed it when I was only able to get 10 and warrens role was made. I figured the best way to balance 3 mafia would be to do it the way I did, and have them not be able to communicate with warren or know who the ascendency was if he chose to join them. Warren did try dropping hints to mafia in Day Phase one when he first mention affiliation changing roles, but I guess that would be kind of a stretch for mafia to pick up on. Their night kill choice wasn’t a bad one, just unlucky again.

 

Day Phase 3 is where towns luck started turning around IMO. I don’t know why this Speed VS supa thing meant one or the other was town. Greyparrot did awesome staying undercover.

I had a feeling all that time spent deliberating a decision was gonna be ultimately pointless. At the ens of the day he still only had a 50/50 shot of hammering correctly and didnt even make a detailed analysis for his decision so overthinking might have hindered instead of helped. But supa had some bad play so I kind of figured he would have been lynched.

 

Thoughts on the game? How was the balance?

My feedback:

@AROSE

You did well. I went in for a overly complicated claim and you caught me. Recognizing how my group claim lined up with the info iny our PM was a good catch and you deserve kudos for it. But I think you only hampered yourself with the Hup/Vanilla stuff. It didn't help your case at all and in fact undermined the very reason why you went after me in the first place. All it did was create confusion. If you had come at me with your actual claim "I'm a group too, and my PM says the other group is my Skesis counterpart" that would have been a more effective case, more likely to get me lynched first, increasing Town's odds of winning.

Other than that, it was a good play and unfortunate for Town you ended up getting lynched DP1.

@Supa

I'm not really going to go in depth here, as you really aren't open to feedback or constructive criticism. So I'll just say you need to pace yourself. Your impressions and perception of the game aren't as good as you make them out to be, and I'd very much recommend scaling things back a bit. Calling other people idiots isn't how you win this game.

@Everyone

NEVER VTL YOURSELF. Again. NEVER VTL YOURSELF. It does absolutely nothing to help your wincon. Regardless of your faction you are better off stalling and letting the Phase end in a No Lynch than contributing to your own lynch. "I'll lynch myself if you're town" does nothing except give the Mafia an excuse to get two townies lynched for the price of one, which almost happened if Pie hadn't stopped it! (And well, ended up happening anyway).

Also, in this and the previous game I see a lot of concern and hand wringing over people "confirming" themselves: a hesitancy to lynch people if they can "confirm" themselves and focusing people who are "confirmed" scum and liberally lumping people into the "confirmed" town camp. In addition the fact that most instances of the term "confirmed" are used incorrectly, a lot of people really don't understand the distinction between character, role, and affiliation confirmation. They aren't hard linked. Character and affiliation, usually. Almost never role and affiliation.

People confirming or failing to confirm their role means very little. Mafia will only usually claim a confirmable role if they can, in fact, confirm it or will otherwise make excuses as to why their role has yet to be confirmed. If you make it a habit of lynching people for failing to confirm their role, then Mafia is just going to take efforts to focus on preventing Town from doing that (as we did with Supa) since Mafia usually has a ton of ways of interfering Town roles. Whether or not a person has confirmed their role is a piece of information, but it's mostly neutral at least until the person dies and their affiliation is finally confirmed, which allows Town to reevaluate their actions in that light. Mostly in terms of CCs and informative reports.

Lastly, a lesson for myself and Mafia in general: K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple, Stupid. Both me and Grey went for overly complicated claims which ended up working against us. For me, I generally have a tendancy to try and be as truthful as possible as Mafia, as to avoid the odd Lie Detector and to keep the lies I have to remember to a minimum. Indeed, I was a group (rather than a single character), and I was a JOAT (only lying about a couple of the abilities). This claim is the primary reason why I got lynched.

I deliberately left the Jen claim for Mharman/Grey, due to Mharman's inactivity. I was banking on my own abilities to stay alive and thought that the guarnateed claim would work better for the inactive Mharman. Unfortunately, Grey doesn't like main character fake claims, so this ended up hurting us in the long run, but not fatally so ;)