French Revolution Mafia [Concluded]

[Renata]

(for manasi:) Best you could have done was a tie, and random chance. Zack had already lost, unknowingly; he had to play as if it was one of you or there was no point.

[Zack]

I was pretty sure our faction was pure, when after repeated attempts on my part to make a deal with the devil with any Royalists in our faction everyone kept saying "no I'm town, sorry."

Anyone who seriously thought Winston was a royalist needs their head examined tho.

[Manasi]

I was pretty sure our faction was pure, when after repeated attempts on my part to make a deal with the devil with any Royalists in our faction everyone kept saying "no I'm town, sorry."

Anyone who seriously thought Winston was a royalist needs their head examined tho.

Mhm.

Dunno, think that people thought the chances of a faction being completely pure was kinda statistically slim. I'm not really sure. Playing devil's advocate etc.

[Montmorency]

I have no regrets about the Montmorency vig. I wanted to take out the Committee's vig numbers if I died because I knew our faction was never getting another rep there and would naturally get the short end of the stick even absent Monty's regrettable biases :p -- choxorn would have been my third choice, there, lol. Oh well.

But why? I was prepared to rely on you to the fullest. It don't understand how you can be concerned both about getting killed and about Committee numbers. (And of course, Choxorn was your killer.)

[Zack]

also choxorn

why didn't you play like this when we were scum teammates? :(

[Renata]

But why? I was prepared to rely on you to the fullest. It don't understand how you can be concerned both about getting killed and about Committee numbers. (And of course, Choxorn was your killer.)

As long as I was alive and had a voice in the Committee it was at least hypothetically working for us. As soon as I died, that stopped being true. This is why I was pushing you to recruit Dp if I died, so we'd still have a presence there. But you kept pushing him and Csargo as scum and I didn't see you recruiting Manasi either -- that meant the vig was going to be used against us.

I mean, you wouldn't even listen to me about Dp -- you say you were going to rely on me, but you wouldn't listen to me. You were a liability to my faction.

[Montmorency]

As long as I was alive and had a voice in the Committee it was at least hypothetically working for us. As soon as I died, that stopped being true. This is why I was pushing you to recruit Dp if I died, so we'd still have a presence there. But you kept pushing him and Csargo as scum and I didn't see you recruiting Manasi either -- that meant the vig was going to be used against us.

I mean, you wouldn't even listen to me about Dp -- you say you were going to rely on me, but you wouldn't listen to me. You were a liability to my faction.

Actually, Manasi was intended for N5 (rotating factions), and I stopped pushing Csargo after D2. I understand your frustration over DP, but I really wanted him specifically flipped so if Khaan had been lynched town with DP as secondary wagon - you see? There wasn't an easy way out here. I did listen to you at the beginning of the day, but in the thunderdome at EOD...

Maybe I should have informed you in QT, but as usual I hoped history would vindicate me.

[Winston Hughes]

Starts D2 with all three of his buddies dead and eighteen town remaining.

Wins comfortably.

[Dp101]

Starts D2 with all three of his buddies dead and eighteen town remaining.

Wins comfortably.

Basically. I'm still shocked.

[Kagemusha]

Chox you are my new personal hero! You picked up the ashes of royalist´s and pressed a diamond out of it. Virtuous game good man,virtuous! And when you frustrated about talking to yourself in QT for my part. I was enjoying the insight for your game all the way.

[Jabbz]

GG folks. Sorry for the crap showing early on. I was really just lost on what to do and how to play a game with multiple factions.

[seireikhaan]

Whelp. Nicely done, Choxorn. Not a whole lot to say other than that. Just one person levelling the playing field by themselves after the disastrous first day/night. An excellent and well-deserved victory.

[Fenn]

A little late, but good game everyone, and congratulations to Choxorn for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. I don't have much else to say about the game having been bumped off so quickly, other than that it broke my heart to see my teammates turn against each other at the eleventh hour.

Would love to join another game...maybe in late April.

[GeneralHankerchief]

Okay, what follows are some of my thoughts with regards to balancing in terms of the pre-game stuff and the factions. Later on I'll go more into the happenings that went on during the game itself, but first things first. Commentary from you guys is encouraged.

General:
When designing this game, I was looking to accomplish three goals first and foremost: First of all, I wanted to offer a game that had a high degree of difficulty for all players and sides. Secondly, I wanted to create a game that was self-correcting; i.e. if there were any lopsided factional imbalances I wanted there to be a good chance of these being rectified. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted the (non-Royalist) players a real choice in how they would go about achieving their win conditions and accomplishing their goals, in a way that I had been trying to do for so long with the various installments of my Pirate Ship Mafia series but never quite getting there. I'll talk more later about these three goals, particularly the third, in my yet-to-come post about game events, but for now just keep these in mind as you continue reading.

The last thing I want to say in this section is that, regarding the factional abilities that were tied to each player, there was a fairly significant correlation between their naming and the player who was secretly attached to that ability. For example, the Montagnards' "Pose For Portrait" ability, their 3x Jailkeeper, was attached to seireikhaan - whose role was Jacques-Louis David, the famous painter. Obviously the entire faction didn't know about this, as there was incentive to keep role names secret, but khaan might have been able to put two and two together and if he was in danger of the lynch, might have subtly hinted to his Montagnard colleagues that he was tied to a power.

Montagnards:
Factional abilities:
1x vigilante shot - each faction has access to this ability
Proscription: 1x additional vigilante shot - assigned to Jabbz (Saint-Just), later reassigned to Lewwyn
Pose for portrait: 3x jailkeeper - assigned to seireikhaan

The Montagnards were the only faction that thematically did not have a "hat". Considering that, historically, they were in power for the greater part of the Reign of Terror, I decided to make them the sort of jack-of-all-trades faction. Their powers weren't sexy, certainly not compared to those of the Populists or Militarists, but they got the job done. In addition, they had Robespierre, the single most powerful non-Royalist role in the game (with two passive bulletproofs the first two nights), on their team, and I generally figured that whoever randed Robespierre would at least add one other Montagnard to the Committee early on.

Populists:
Factional abilities:
1x vigilante shot - each faction has access to this ability
Orator of Justice: 1x jailkeeper - assigned to autolycus
Enemies list: You submit a list of five players during the night. One full day phase later, the political faction of these five players will be publicly revealed (example: If you submitted this list on N1, it would publicly be revealed at the start of D3). You also have the option of waiting an additional full day cycle in order to see how many of the players on the list are Royalists. The person submitting this factional order must remain alive for the duration of the ability’s activation in order for it to work. 1x. - assigned to Arakhor
Wrath of the sans-culottes: This is a fun one. You unleash the power of the peasantry upon your enemies. 1x vig, with a chance of side-effects: 33% chance of an additional random kill (small chance of two additional random kills), 33% chance of additionally killing someone either visiting or visited by the target at night, 33% chance of a random jailkeeping of a variable amount of players depending on how many are left in the game (anywhere from 3-7). - assigned to Zack

The Populists' abilities were designed to be powerful, but scattershot, reflective of the anarchic qualities that the sans-culottes of Paris possessed at the time. They had their 1x Jailkeep just to ensure they didn't only have access to two total unique abilities, but their big two did not have much in the way of precision. The Enemies List ability, if used on any Royalists, would not point precisely to who in the group was the Royalist - if it scanned 5 people and there was only one Royalist in the group, the result given would have said "of these five people there is one Royalist among them" and that would be it. In addition, it had a huge delay, implemented out of paranoia by me that a lucky scan would break the game. In hindsight I think the delay was exactly right in terms of timing.

As far as the dreaded Wrath of the Sans-Culottes, I regret nothing.

Girondins:
Factional abilities:
1x vigilante shot - each faction has access to this ability
Sanctuary: 3x Doctor, cannot use all three protections on the same target (two is fine). - assigned to Kagemusha (later reassigned to atheotes)
Introspection: 2x Watcher (see who targets a person). Target must be a member of the Gironde faction unless there are less than three Girondins remaining. - assigned to NotACop

I always meant for the Girondins to be a defensive faction. They had almost nothing in the way of offensive abilities, but, with proper application, would be dynamite at protecting their own, or, at the very least, taking down their attackers with them. This was nice in theory, but in practice the Girondins were perceived to be underpowered relative to the other three factions, and I can't say that I disagree. I think a part of me knew this and increased the number of times they could use their abilities to compensate, but it wasn't enough. I still like the idea of a "defensive" faction, but in a game with this many vig attempts flying around, I probably would have added a jailkeeper or something, and maybe split their protections between people so they weren't screwed if the member attached to the protections died early.

Militarists:
Factional abilities:
1x vigilante shot - each faction has access to this ability
Ballot stuffing: Can designate two secret votes on any target the night before that will be tallied during the day. Both votes are allowed to be made the same day or separate days. Votes may be rescinded (only by the person who submitted the order) during the day, but may not be changed to a different target. - assigned to Dp101
Conscription: Override a target’s night actions and have them vig, roleblock, or protect a different target of your choice. 2x ability, may not repeat actions. - assigned to Csargo
Secret police: 1x day vigilante shot. First come, first served. Post must be made in the public thread with bold purple text and may not be made in the first two hours of a phase. - assigned to Manasi

Before the game started, I was most worried about the Militarists being overpowered compared to the other factions. Indeed, they had an impressive collection of abilities, but the mitigating factor I put in was that there was a sinister element to each of these abilities. The ballot stuffing, which was never used, would naturally be looked upon with suspicion by the rest of town, and would most likely cause tinfoiling. Much the same with conscription and the overriding of someone else's action. Most prominently, there was the dayvig, which I meant to make as nakedly open as possible - it had to be done in public, and there were no checks and balances in the form of a second Militarist signing off before the action was initiated, etc. The end result was that while the Militarists mechanically had probably the best set of abilities, they came with allowing paranoia to set in both amongst the other factions as well as themselves. A poisoned apple, if you will. Considering the final day's vote came down to two Militarists, this goal would appear to have been achieved on the surface, but I'm not entirely sure it was successful.

Royalists:
Factional abilities:
Factional kill, 1 per night.
Roleblock, cannot target same player consecutive nights.
Additional roleblock, 3x usage.
(Note: Multiple actions cannot be taken by the same player unless that player is the only Royalist remaining)

There was a lot of speculation based on how many Royalists there were, but I had always designed the number to be four. While this number seems light in a 24-player game, there were three things that would make it a more even fight: First, the Royalist infiltration of most (if not all) of the factional Quicktopics - even if they couldn't hijack orders at the last minute they could still report on the goings-on and give their teammates a clearer picture than anybody, thus fulfilling the definition of Mafia at its most basic: a knowledgeable minority vs. an in-the-dark majority. Second, the factional design of the game - since it was hardcoded into people's win conditions that there was no town, per se, people always had other targets at night and were able to justify it as well. Third, the roleblocks. These had priority over all other actions at night (save for the Committee recruitment, which was automatic), which meant that, properly applied, the Royalists could always ensure that one action failed. Choxorn predominantly used his to sideline an entire faction that he happened to target at night, and then, most effectively, blocked Zack from tracking Csargo the very last night, which kept Csargo firmly in the town's crosshairs. All things considered I think the number of roleblocks I allowed the Royalists was right about in the proper range with everything else going on.

Committee of Public Safety:
The Committee's first and foremost goal is to safeguard the Revolution by weeding out and killing the Royalists. Political preference (ostensibly) does not matter. Obviously, the goal here is to keep it free of Royalist infiltration.
Each night, you choose one person to join the Committee. This is an automatic action and is not affected by roleblocks, jailkeeps, having already performed a factional ability, etc. The seniormost member of the Committee has final say on recruitment.
Other Committee factional abilities are:
- Nightly tracker upon 3 members
- Nightly vigilante upon 4 members
The Committee has a maximum limit of five members.

The Committee was, in my opinion, the keystone to balancing the game. I said earlier that I wanted to create a game that was self-correcting; the Committee was my primary tool for achieving this. If the Royalists were dominant and killing off people left and right and avoiding the lynch, the Committee would be a last-ditch weapon for the town to get their act together; for them to pool information and gain an extra track (and maybe vig) and maybe even band together against the threat. If the Royalists were decimated early on (as we saw here), then the Committee would be the primary battleground in the factional game, especially with seniority deciding who gets to submit the orders. If the game state was more even, then the Committee would be somewhere in between.

All things considered, when you strip away the fancy mechanics and the factional politics and everything that made this game what it was, I still wanted it to come down to how well the Royalists could infiltrate and gain the trust of the town, just like in any other mafia game. Choxorn did this successfully and was rewarded with a Committee invite, and used his knowledge of its inner workings to further manipulate the situation to his advantage.

As far as the Committee mechanics go, I think getting a tracker at 3 members and a vig at 4 turned out well - the Committee was only able to get over the hump and get to 4 near the very end of the game. Early on in the development cycle I had them getting a vig at 5, which would not have been as exciting.



So that's the meat of it, the first part anyway. Again, any commentary is greatly appreciated, and I'll go more into the actual gameplay stuff (the added vigs/protections I gave everybody, the Committee in practice rather than theory, etc) in a later post. Possibly tonight, maybe tomorrow.

[Monstrdude]

choxorn goat

[Dp101]

I must admit, really the only part of this game that truly frustrated me was my lynch. Sure, I was nowhere near lock clear. But, I was middle of the pack at worse on the towniness scale, and there were multiple people scummier than me, who were all ignored. Now, those people happened to be town, but the point still stands. I just felt like there were processes behind the scenes that I could do nothing to disrupt or fight against, and that my death had very little to do with my own play.

[Choxorn]

I guess my only redeeming factor this game is that Chox pinged me d1 so he was my top suggestion for the faction vig, though we settled for Logic instead. But after that he went of my rader and stayed there until game's end.

I'm glad you didn't vig me, partly because then I couldn't have won and partly because this game would have been a total letdown for everyone if it ended night 1.

I'm now ready to categorise choxorn among players where tone has little value in getting a town lean from me. Gimme something solid or you're a plausible lynch. This is why I was ready to lynch Winston despite his townieness. Cus he can fake dat sh*t.

Every time someone clears me based on tone or just "looking town," I break down in a fit of evil laughter.

Congratulations to Choxorn! I suppose that just goes to show that in a faction game, gamely insisting that you're only playing to your faction is a sure way to lose (unless of course you're the scum).

Well, I made sure to strike a balance between playing to my faction and playing to hunt Royalists (or at least look like I was hunting Royalists), and I was privately waaaaay more pro-Girondin than I was publicly because that was a good way to buddy up to Al and NAC. Going hard after atheotes on Day 2 probably helped me look a bit more trustworthy to some of the other factions, at least more so than the Populists' tendency to seem way more interested in protecting each other than scumhunting. And, to be fair, they legitimately were completely free of Royalists! But it sure didn't look that way to the rest of the town.

My willingness to hunt my faction mates one day might have also made me look better when I strongly insisted on not lynching NAC the following day, because at the time the Girondins were the smallest faction and us insisting on lynching someone else would only make sense.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I think not saying anything publicly was the correct play by Choxorn. As soon as he definitively claims a watch result implicating one of the other players, that day immediately becomes a binary "Choxorn vs. [player implicated]" choice. Granted, he was still likely to prevail in that scenario, but the alternative was him not being on anyone's radar and the day playing out the way it did: Csargo vs. Manasi, with Chox just eating popcorn on the sidelines and coasting to victory.

If I had to, my plan was to say something like "I watched NAC last night, and I didn't see anybody target him. Kind of strange, huh? And Zack couldn't track Csargo last night, for some reason. Also kind of strange, right?" And then I'd try to make it look like Csargo had immunity to tracking and watching powers. That would at least have the advantage of Zack's night actions being able to back up my story a bit.

Like you said, I didn't really want to make it "me vs. Csargo" or "me vs Manasi" if I could avoid it, because I wasn't sure if Csargo or Manasi would so easily turn against their teammate, even if Zack was almost certain to vote for one of them just because that was the only way he could win. And I didn't really want to leave it up to a tie and a coin flip if I could avoid it.

I think it also needs to be said that, IMO, Choxorn's biggest accomplishment wasn't making it through six lynches without the barest sliver of suspicion so much as him being able to successfully dodge all of the nighttime carnage. There were a lot of vig shots this game, and people used them on a wide variety of targets for a wide variety of reasons - suspicion, playing the factional game, general annoyance, revenge, etc - and yet Choxorn skated by. That's the most impressive part of his victory from my standpoint.

I just did my best to seem as cooperative as I possibly could, so that the factional game/revenge vigs would be against other people. When Zack and Monty got into a spat in the Public Safety QT, I was absolutely loving it and munching popcorns from the sidelines, and privately rooting for their factions to kill each other, and they more or less did.

I generally figured that whoever randed Robespierre would at least add one other Montagnard to the Committee early on.

Why would Robespierre start out by adding Montagnards, though? The Committee was more useful for providing cross-faction cooperation and contact, it made a lot more sense to start out by recruiting people outside the Montagnards for information.

In addition, it had a huge delay, implemented out of paranoia by me that a lucky scan would break the game. In hindsight I think the delay was exactly right in terms of timing.

And Autolycus got lots of suspicion early on and the Populists had to come up with ways to defend him without revealing what exactly he was up to. If I was in a better position had more teammates alive, I might have thought "Hmm, maybe I should kill Autolycus and see what happens if the Populists want him alive so badly," and it might have played out a lot different if there was a Royalist in the Populist faction, giving them a chance to influence the scan, know beforehand about it, and mess with the results. As it stands, I only knew about my own faction's abilities until I was recruited to the Public Safety QT, because SOMEONE, OR SHOULD I SAY TWO SOMEONES, DIDN'T BOTHER TELLING ME WHAT THEIR FACTION COULD DO BEFORE THEY HAD TO GO AND DIE ON ME.

I still like the idea of a "defensive" faction, but in a game with this many vig attempts flying around, I probably would have added a jailkeeper or something, and maybe split their protections between people so they weren't screwed if the member attached to the protections died early.

Problem is, while the Watch might help catch a Royalist or two, catching the other factions in the act of vigging wasn't going to do much good- as the game revealed, the response wouldn't have been "You killed him, what the hell dude, time to get lynched" but more "Yeah, I killed him, what are you gonna do about it?" The Girondins having three protections was good, but the other factions had plenty of defensive abilities themselves, and the Girondins were alone in not having a second vig shot, so they had only defense, little offense.

If you wanted to give their defensive abilities something that could have achieved the desired "taking down the attackers with them" effect, you could have gone with something like an Elite Bodyguard, or something like Pizza's individual ability that would have let them hunt down specific people who were trying to kill them.

And the Girondins did lose the protections early, because they were tied to atheotes and he was the Day 2 lynch.

Choxorn predominantly used his to sideline an entire faction that he happened to target at night

I could have been more effective with my uses of this if I had some idea what the other factions were doing, but since I couldn't infiltrate them, I just figured "Well, I can block two people a night at the same time as killing them, at least until I run out of my 3-use blocks" and just went with the brute-force method of "block two people in the faction, kill 1, and hope it works"

It worked well twice, letting me kill seireikhaan despite his protection Night 4, and failed spectacularly Night 2, because I didn't realize that the Militarists could force someone else outside of their faction to protect Renata for them.

All things considered, when you strip away the fancy mechanics and the factional politics and everything that made this game what it was, I still wanted it to come down to how well the Royalists could infiltrate and gain the trust of the town, just like in any other mafia game. Choxorn did this successfully and was rewarded with a Committee invite, and used his knowledge of its inner workings to further manipulate the situation to his advantage.

I think my recruitment helped me more than anything else in the game, because suddenly I had tons of information about the other factions' nefarious deeds and could privately talk to the town leadership and learn what they were up to.

Also, it gave me another way to buddy up to my faction mates- from the moment I was recruited I was constantly leaking info about Monty and Zack's doings to the Girondin QT, because honestly, I would have absolutely done that if I was actually town. At least, I would have done that once NAC was publicly revealed not Royalist, which happened at the same time.

Getting to watch Monty and Zack's feud up close also gave me a perfectly innocent-seeming reason to push my faction to vig Winston Hughes, which was nice.

choxorn goat

[Montmorency]

It worked well twice, letting me kill seireikhaan despite his protection Night 4,

Actually, he wasn't protected. I changed to protect myself, not that it helped. I don't think Khaan surviving would have helped town, because

I think my recruitment helped me more than anything else in the game, because suddenly I had tons of information about the other factions' nefarious deeds and could privately talk to the town leadership and learn what they were up to.

I trusted you more than anyone at that point, and specifically requested that my faction hold you in esteem. So Khaan and Lewwyn surviving D4 to vig, they would have vigged Zack or the surviving Militarist, most likely. It was just too late for the survivors to re-evaluate you, especially with Manasi looking so evil. I think your victory was sealed from D3.

[atheotes]

Thanks for hosting GH. the flavor and details were top notch.

Well played Choxorn.

[Monstrdude]

i believed in you the entire time choxorn

thanks for the carry

[Manasi]

(for manasi:) Best you could have done was a tie, and random chance. Zack had already lost, unknowingly; he had to play as if it was one of you or there was no point.

Yeah, you're not wrong. It was close to impossible regardless without maybe keeping one of our vigs but that could have hedged on gamethrowing too.

And would have kept Mont alive.

[Winston Hughes]

when I'm a lone scum going against 16 townies, I'm going to have to take a few risks if I want to get anywhere

Voilà un homme.

[autolycus]

(for manasi:) Best you could have done was a tie, and random chance. Zack had already lost, unknowingly; he had to play as if it was one of you or there was no point.

Yes, the clear mislynch (even without hindsight) in this game was the day before. For Zack, Lewwyn's death that day could never win the game, and constrained his options. Given that NAC had a target on his back, a Mil was the clear choice. For Lewwyn, obviously, his lynch could never win. For an innocent Gir, a Lewwyn lynch removed any chance of an outright win (given NAC's status). The only way a Lewwyn lynch was better than a Manasi lynch was if Lewwyn was a scum with Zack, csaro, or choxorn.

That day had me almost sold on Zack's scumminess, because I couldn't see any reason. Turns out it was just fog of war.

[Zack]

honestly just wanted the montagnards to die off and didn't think I had a chance of winning