French Revolution Mafia [Concluded]

[Monstrdude]

i believed in you the entire time choxorn

thanks for the carry

[Logic]

Choxorn, let me congratulate you on the win. I have never in my life seen a better wolf performance.

I'm curious Chox: besides the opening of day 2, what moments were you most unsure of?

[Al Sipsclar]

Good game, choxorn, well deserved win.
Thanks GH for hosting, the narration was top notch (still didn't have a chance to read through the last few pages ).

[Jabbz]

As an entertaining addendum to this game, I'm currently reading Discipline and Punish for my last grad class. Parts of it fit in well with this game, and even cite some of the events.

[El Barto]

I'd be a little insulted if I didn't get paranoia-lynched at least once for what I did in this game.

*evilgrin.jpg*

[GeneralHankerchief]

Okay, last bit of postgame commentary from me. Earlier I put down my thoughts on game concepts in theory (the factions plus the Committee), now here's my thoughts on the game in practice. Unlike in previous commentaries, I'm making no attempt to make these thoughts flow into a coherent essay; instead they will be strictly organized by section. Clearly I'm losing my touch as I approach my twelfth year hosting these things.

The general gamestate/flow:
So, time to be frank: I was not happy when at the start of Day 2, three of the four Royalists had already bought it. I know, you're supposed to be impartial as a host and everything, but you're always rooting for the game to be interesting - or, barring that, you at least want the damn thing you spent hours designing and balancing and lovingly crafting unique role PMs for to last longer than three total phases. However, after my initial shock and fear subsided, I took a more rational view: Jabbz was lynched because of perceived scummy behavior. Likewise, Kage and Monstr were targeted at night because the people taking the shots (Fenn and Pizza) thought there was a high likelihood of hitting a Royalist. That wasn't a design flaw on my part, that was just good town play. It's not like they were eschewing their win conditions either, since both of those shots were made out-of-faction.

Furthermore, the state of things on D2 allowed me to see if the self-correcting mechanisms I inputted would work - perhaps a little more dramatically than I would have liked, but nonetheless the opportunity was there. I figured that there was a high likelihood of the town putting the scumhunt on the backburner, since if they weren't in the factional lead when the last Royalist flipped, the game would end then and there with their loss. Meanwhile, in the public thread, Choxorn was killing it tonally. The veneer that people used to push lynches on the basis of scumminess but were also factionally convenient (atheotes, Dp101, etc) didn't apply to Chox.

What pleased me the most was that privately, each faction seemed to be taking a different approach to the game. On a sliding scale going from "beat the other factions" to "kill the Royalists", I perceived the order going Populists > Militarists > Girondins > Montagnards with the spacing between each pretty even.

Finally, the one thing I underestimated was how much the factional rivalries and various grudges that formed would play out. I figured that between the Committee, people posting in the thread, and the Populist "Enemies List" ability, who was in which faction would gradually become public knowledge, but I didn't anticipate how far some of the players would take it. Two incidents in particular stick out for me: The Populist/Montagnard (remember, on opposite ends of my spectrum) showdown over how to approach the game, and the Militarists taking up Renata's dying wishes by going all-out on a Monty vig even after he had already been revealed as non-Royalist. Still though, I found this "interesting" and not "perturbing", since this game was all about player choice. In the opening writeup I made for the game, in the "overview" section of the first post (not even under spoilers), I said that "maintaining a perfect balance between these two aims [factionalism and hunting Royalists] will be the key to obtaining victory." This sentence, something I first wrote in the fall of 2008 and lifted from my Pirate Ship Mafia overviews, nonetheless applied here far more and better than it ever did in any of the three Pirate Ship games. The town as a whole did not maintain this balance, Choxorn put himself in a good position to take advantage of it, and came out as the victor.

Montmorency and the Committee:
Monty gets his own section here. The Robespierre role was assigned randomly, but as soon as I saw random.org's decision I realized that I had given probably the most Montmorency role ever created... to Montmorency. Here he had explicit license from the host to network, to pool information, to try and do everything in his power to direct an overall town victory. The problem for him, and the main source of conflict in the second half of the game, was that there was no town in this game.

I feel like Monty's choices to join the Committee with him, while they made sense in theory (pick the player from each faction you most believe is innocent), were on the very idealistic end of the spectrum considering that only one faction could win out in the end. If we break this down further:
- The Renata recruitment on N1 was an obvious choice. She was trusted, capable, and from a faction that was one of his blind spots. In addition, he made this recruitment before Monstr and Kage flipped and while Monty was still under the impression that they had more than one or two holdouts to smoke out. No issues with this one.
- The Zack recruitment on N2 though was more questionable. He was in a different faction from Monty and Renata, and according to the Committee QT Monty thought Zack had a higher chance of playing ball with them than Askthepizzaguy (probably a misread of Zack's personality). The big thing with this though was that by this point the Royalists were on the ropes and the factional game was starting in earnest. I probably would have recruited another Montagnard here and fed Renata the line of "X was pushing hard for this Royalist to be shot privately, he can be trusted" - while in the meantime keeping my faction high on the seniority chart in what was designed to be the main battleground in the late game.
- Choxorn N3 was, obviously, catastrophic, but it removed Monty's last blind spot and he (like literally everyone else) sincerely believed Choxorn was town. It was the wrong decision, but he made it for the right reasons, though my previous point regarding a Montagnard still stands.
- By the recruitment of NotACop N4 and later, the Montagnards were never preserving control of the Committee if Monty died, so by that point it ceased to matter.

The bottom line is that I was expecting Monty to put another Montagnard on the Committee early, probably around N2. While he had good reasons for recruiting who he did, I think this had two major flaws: First, his perceived leadership style didn't match his stated egalitarian intentions, which obviously rubbed some people the wrong way. Second, he ceded the initiative to the other factions, and the Montagnards paid for it.

The Law of 22 Prarial and extra vigs:
Given the fact that the factions could lose access to their abilities at any time, plus human nature, I figured that the players would gravitate towards using their factional abilities sooner rather than later, and I was proven correct by this. However, this posed a problem: I didn't want a factional game to turn essentially vanilla midway through the game, where the only time they could gain an advantage or disadvantage was through the lynch or the Royalists inadvertently playing kingmaker just by trying to stay alive. The Committee's eventual track and vig would mitigate this somewhat, but in the event of the town gaining an early advantage over the Royalists (which was exactly what happened here) I wanted the Committee to be the main battleground between factions as they tried to gain control over it. The problem was, a battleground isn't interesting if nobody on it has any weapons to fire.

So I knew that at some point in the game I was going to have to do a partial refresh of night powers. However, I wanted to be fair to all sides (as well as the Royalists), and also reward those who did not entirely shoot their wad with powers and still had some in reserve. The conclusion I came to was the one that was eventually implemented: Each faction gets one extra kill and protection, to be used on one night only. If you didn't use it, you lost access to it.

The goal of this was to provide the factions with extra firepower, but also give them a way to defend themselves. By N4 (when I had always designed for this to go in effect), I figured there was a high likelihood that 50% if not 75% or more of the players would be aware of the Committee through its members leaking details to the rest of their factions, and that as a result what had previously been private information would be seeping into the realm of semi-public knowledge. People who were aware of thread dynamics, developments made in the Committee, which faction had what actions left, would be tested. If they read their tea leaves right, they could play the situation to their advantage. If not, then they would probably protect the wrong people, and it would blow up in their faces.

In all, I was not expecting six deaths to happen that night. That said, there could have been seven - Choxorn roleblocking the Montagnards meant that the Militarists did not need to use both of their vig attempts to kill Monty (though there was no way they could have known this). I was anticipating that at least one of the hits would not go through due to protection. It was this level of carnage that got some in the dead chat (Arakhor?) questioning this decision on my part and whether it was balanced.

I briefly responded in dead chat and touched on it a little earlier in the postgame, but let me fully defend myself here: First of all, this result was an outlier. There were definitely supposed to be more deaths than usual that night, but not six. Second of all, I wanted a lot in this game to come down to player choice and the N4 actions reflected this. The players had chosen. They chose by voting themselves this power in the first place without even seriously discussing it, knowing full well the implications since I was straight up with them. They chose their targets and they chose their protections; heck, they even chose to take the shots in the first place. The fact that no kills were doubled up or hit a protected target was just an outcome of the choices they had all made. Thirdly, and most importantly, had one of those shots hit Choxorn, the game would have ended. But once again, he was never suspected. In the end, he won because he played a damn good game, not because of any mechanics I cooked up.

Conclusion:
Thanks for bearing with me through everything. This was a different kind of game for me, but you all seemed to like it and I certainly hope you all had fun playing it! I must give one final congratulations to Choxorn for one of the most impressive victories I can remember - he not only pulled off an impossible comeback, but also made it look easy.

In the meantime, I've heard talks of people being interested in running this system in other games, which you're more than welcome to - just make sure to credit me. As for me, while I'm happy that my system was by all accounts successful, I don't think I'll re-use it again - not on this site anyway - as a lot of it depended on the players being in the dark. However, I will certainly take the lessons I learned with this one and see what I can do about applying them towards a certain game that may be hosted in September 2018...

Anyway, thanks for playing and reading, and I hope to see you around!

GH

[Dp101]

Personally, I loved the idea of the Law of 22. It kept the townspeople who had already blown all of their abilities from getting demoralised by not having anything they could do, and it also allowed for those emotionally charged vig shots that feel so good, you know, the ones where you hit the guy who you've been butting heads with all game in one glorious strike of vengeance.

I'm still not entirely sure though how the committee was meant to function effectively. The people within really don't have much of an incentive to help, especially when they don't control it, as they know very well that any and all information about roles can just lead to the leader of the Q/T going after them more. In addition, there's nothing stopping the leader from stuffing the faction full of their own people and using it purely for the additional shots, which would help them achieve both their win conditions better. I just feel that there should have been some way to negotiate a lasting peace via it, or at least some kind of long-term cooperation, as currently it feels about as useful as the main thread in terms of honesty of opinions and intentions. On the other hand, I do understand wanting to have the committee naturally tear itself apart over time, in which case feel free to disregard my suggestions.

[Csargo]

Using both vigs on Monty was definitely a huge mistake, and me revealing it was a terrible choice. If all things fell the same way, I would have wanted to vig Choxorn the last night for obvious reason. I don't know if Manasi would have went for that or not. He might not have blocked Zack the final night either had I not revealed it.

[Choxorn]

Choxorn, let me congratulate you on the win. I have never in my life seen a better wolf performance.

I'm curious Chox: besides the opening of day 2, what moments were you most unsure of?

Beginning of Day 3 also made me a little unsure- While I was firmly townread by most, my nightkill failed.

Beginning of Day 4 was a mixed bag- I was very displeased to see two of the most suspected players publicly declared not Royalist, but getting into the CPS QT was a major turning point in my favor. After that, I was at first a little unsure, because I might end up in a spot where other players were even more clear than I was and I'd be lynched by PoE, but over time, I got more and more confident in my victory- after the bloodbath of Night 4, I was pretty sure I could win this.