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[EFHW]

Almost anything we thought of doing was easily discoverable. Town just had too much information. We got three mislynches and didn't come close to winning.

We also made some significant mistakes, for sure. But it was pretty much doomed once everyone got belowdecks. It's fun to play this kind of game as town because you finally have information to work with after all the usual games of shooting in the dark (so to speak). Turns out it's less fun as scum! There were so many interacting pieces. That was neat - I like complexity - but it also meant any action we took or didn't take could be verified/detected in several ways - energy, cards, location, availability of an action for other players, status print out, tracking, lifts. Town made the most of the tools available to them. They played well.

[EFHW]

iguana - did you try to kill faust N4? I thought you tried to kill e.

[faust]

I think after seeing it played out there are a few changes that could be made to make the setup work.

scum fakeclaiming was impossible since it took an action to do the NK. Makes it hard for scum to say "I did X, Y, and Z" when Y was the NK and you will eventually be caught in a lie.  So, make the scum NK and factional rather than individual.  That or only allow town to do 2/3 actions and then scum can use the third as the NK action.  So, I did "X, nothing, Z" is a standard claim, but scum could actually do "X, NK, Z"

I enjoyed the setup after I figured it out, but I think town was always going to win (seeing how it played out)

I don't think it is too town-favored. If scum gets the first two mislynches, then town will never be able to effectively coordinate. But scum needs to lock in the game early; they cannot afford to bus. That all scum lynched gkrieg was an error in judgement. How good it looked didn't make up for the fact that it gave town more time.

[faust]

Though I agree that it would be better if things were harder to detect, and it would be better if scum had a comeback chance. This way the game is just locked after town gets an upper hand.

Still, creating a working open RMM setup is a huge challenge that I personally tend to shy away from and this worked out pretty well for that.

[faust]

Reading the mod QT: There should absolutely never be re-subs into a game when those players have additional information (which mcmc did, about their N1 actions).

[faust]

Oh, and giving scum orders in the personal QT is bad practice I believe. What was the reason for this decision?

[EFHW]

I don't think there was any way to save gkrieg. He made mistakes that hurt us, but damage control was our only option. It wasn't the bussing.

In no way did we play a perfect game, I just don't think that was the problem.  All three of the scum who were lynched made setup mistakes leading directly to their deaths. I made one too but covered it up ok. Many town also made mistakes, but they weren't as costly.

[EFHW]

Scum should be able to have enough choices to weather one loss. I really don't see how you can say the game didn't favor town.

You thought I was semi-confirmed town and I still had no option but to concede.

[EFHW]

How would two mislynches have prevented town from coordinating?

[faust]

Scum should be able to have enough choices to weather one loss. I really don't see how you can say the game didn't favor town.

You thought I was semi-confirmed town and I still had no option but to concede.

Scum starts out with really good numbers (4/14) to make up for the fact that they have limited options in the long run. It's just that they've gotta use this to decide the game early on. Like, if the first 2 mislynches are on town, I don't see town managing a win here. It's just that the required scum play here is to not play for towncred, and that was difficult to see from the beginning.

I would say scum would have needed daychat probably. Coordinating and discussing claims is super important for them here. I also think that setups like this require unproportionally more work for scum to play well than for town, and that is of course a problem. I actually drew a sigh of relief when I saw that I was town here.

[theorel]

Although I agree with faust that the set-up isn't necessarily unbalanced (just harder work-wise for scum), it might be too swingy.  I think a couple tweaks could help with that.

I think the set-up would be more fun, if there were only 3 scum, but the actions were tweaked to give scum more options and to make coordination more problematic.  In particular, it seems to me like scum's best options in the current set-up involve taking the pro-town powers in order to prevent town getting full value out of them...but then if scum fake-claims, they have to figure out some ineffective action they could have taken.  And even then, claiming ineffective actions can leave scum exposed if town's actions were largely effective.

I think the lower deck blocks night-kill is a bit overkill, and could be removed.
And then, say, lower blue Sabotage was "Cause a player's card action or movement to fail."  This would open up scum's fake-claim possibilities because if they claim a failed action (when they simply didn't attempt it), town has to allow for the possibility of sabotage.  It also really hinders full coordination because that tells scum exactly where to use a sabotage to hurt (and again scum that fails to take their coordinated action was maybe sabotaged out of it).

Some other thoughts:
-Lower Red/Blue could have A and C swapped, limiting town's monitor abilities.
-Another sabotage action (maybe lower-central C?) to "steal" cards from another player (maybe reduce that player's free card draw to 1 for that turn?  So it can't stack to lock someone out, but it really hinders town's options, and makes them want to use the card-draw as counterplay?).

Possibly offering sabotage options in upper A/B actions, still costing energy?  Like if, the cop-switch was a sabotage on upper Blue A...then scum can go for it, and then fake-claim that they've used weak visitor.  Status printout denies their fake-claim then, but that's no worse than the current situation, and if the only status printout is in scum's hands it really opens them up.

You could also do sabotage in the form of, say, "Strongman" so scum can force a nk through any possible protection with the right card-play.

I think daychat is a good idea.  It's tough enough to detect a lie, which means working out a good enough fake-claim is even tougher.  At least with daychat, if you have just one player that can work out the lies you can get a safe-claim for everyone.  Whereas, without daychat, you need each scum-player to be able to come up with their own safe-claim.

Although ultimately playing scum is going to take more work in a set-up like this (simply because of the amount of info potentially available to town), I think that work can have significant pay-off if scum has the tools at their disposal to frame town.

Final thought: near-unlimited nightkill protection for town is, I think, ultimately OP.  While letting scum "fail" any single night-action could help with that, some sort of ability to overcome it is probably ideal.  As it is currently, you can essentially force scum to help block the nk, and they can't do anything about it.  If scum has a power to pierce it, then you don't know whether someone failed to help stop the nk or if scum got in a pierce action somewhere.

[Awaclus]

If you're town then you should stop faking stupid townslips in the game that I am modding while making genuine townslips in the other we are playing together.

This is pretty crappy though, if you're actually trying to win both games and not just playing one for the sake of looking better in the other.

[EFHW]

If you're town then you should stop faking stupid townslips in the game that I am modding while making genuine townslips in the other we are playing together.

This is pretty crappy though, if you're actually trying to win both games and not just playing one for the sake of looking better in the other.

Does it violate the rule about not talking about ongoing games?

[O]

If a setup is only balanced if scum absolutely cannot get lynched in the first two days, it's not actually balanced. It definitely seemed from an outside perspective that scums hands were tied too much by energy visibility

[Awaclus]

If you're town then you should stop faking stupid townslips in the game that I am modding while making genuine townslips in the other we are playing together.

This is pretty crappy though, if you're actually trying to win both games and not just playing one for the sake of looking better in the other.

Does it violate the rule about not talking about ongoing games?

I don't think it does, and I don't think that rule is supposed to prevent this in the first place. The point is to prevent players from communicating outside of the thread while the game is ongoing, and that didn't happen here since faust didn't communicate anything until the game was over. You are allowed to follow other games and read into them, and even if you weren't, that rule would be impossible to enforce especially because it's hard to not read into something you've seen at least subconsciously. It just creates a conflict of interests where you can sometimes gain an advantage in a game by playing another game suboptimally.

I guess the only way to solve the issue would be to only play one game at a time.

[Skumpy]

In the heat of all the excitement about how unbearably atrocious the setup was, I forgot:

Thanks Space for modding! It was great fun, even though I got sabotaged and thrown to the scumspacewolves along the way