Werewolf XXXVII: Middle-Earth - GAME ENDS. Who Won? Check it out!

[Abe Sargent]

You guys were an island of calm amondst my amazingly tough day today. Thatnks. With that, I'm about to retires and I'll log back on tomorrow and check out the thread to see if there are other questions I can snwer.

[Fouts]

Thanks for hosting. I did enjoy the writeups and depth each of the roles had.

[Grammaticus]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

yeah. but being this was my first game as evil and up against several strong WWers I doubted that I could have made that work. But that would be the general idea, yeah.

lil help clearing me by LSG would have been amazingly helpful, but alas I didn't get that help!

I thought it was very odd that you kept asking LSG to scan you going into the last night. I think you asked like three times and you were not even really in line for serious heat. I just thought it meant you were probably bad, not that you had a special power going on. Of course I was dead at that point, so I was hoping the live rangers would consider that suspicious too.

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

that woulda been awesome

Yeah, one of the thing sI like to do when I host WW is to plan out the prose side of things ahead of time. How do I justify the game flavor-wise? How do I get a bodyguard in Bree in flavor? A beroning. I want the basic flavor of the pople already down. LSG had to focus every night on a diferent thing in her room in order to concentrate. Saruman agents hummed to use sorcery. The cool Sauman night kill was a mixture of foul herbs, fouler sorcery and good ol stealth, the use of weather and sun/moon/fog as metaphor for the game, etc.

Then, sometimes, I justify roels based on flavor. I have to use teh Barrow Downs that are righ next door, so I need a role that will use it. Hence the adventurer.

[Grammaticus]

Originally Posted by Alan T

That was a big day for us.. if I remember right it was also when the seers all revealed and swaggs revealed and such.. That day just from the reveales opened things up big time for us. It let us focus on only 5 or 6 of the remaining 13 or so players really.

Then the very next day Tyrith outed himself and me as rangers and things were not looking quite as good I was almost shocked the bad guys did not kill the real seer (LSG) or one of the two outed rangers that night. That was the time the bodyguard would have had the most critical targets to decide of which to guard.

BTW, who did you guard on that night Schmidty?

[Grammaticus]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Well I wasn't going to come out and say it was you who wanted to night kill her! But Im glad we didnt end up doing that.

Once we clarified the rangers leave the game on a night kill mishap, we quickly scuttled that idea and stuck to scouting. If we would have had a little better feel about LSG, I bet we might have considered night killing ThomKal after she outed him. But, I think we felt like we were doing good and just had too much to lose with a high risk night kill.

[Mr. Wednesday]

Anxiety, what was the method of resolving a conflict between the bad factions over who won -- would it have been who had more people, or would there have been more involved?

LSG, sorry for doubting you.

I think I was the only one who voted for DaddyTorgo on the last day.

[Mr. Wednesday]

@Blade in re my role, I told you so.

[DaddyTorgo]

yeah, you were onto me twice weren't you Weds? and no one would support you? despite alan saying that they were suspicious of me? sounds fishy

[Lorena]

So umm... when's the next game?

[Blade6119]

Originally Posted by Mr. Wednesday

@Blade in re my role, I told you so.

Not sure i follow? Told me so that you were good, or that DT was bad?

Either way, I TOLD YOU SO about thomkal, who you saved

I was dead on with thomkal and sublime, and dead wrong about Alan and izulde. Ill take it

[Mr. Wednesday]

Right about Thomkal himself, yes, although I don't believe I was arguing that point with you. Ultimately, though, we did just fine leaving him alive for a while... one wonders whether killing him quickly and confirming he was on Saruman's side would have triggered a run on the people that he (correctly) identified as good.

I wouldn't take being dead wrong about Alan and Izulde, personally, considering they weren't merely good guys but Rangers.

Oh, I'd also like to point out to whoever doubted me (Alan, I think) that I was right about the dark adept.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Mr. Wednesday

Right about Thomkal himself, yes, although I don't believe I was arguing that point with you. Ultimately, though, we did just fine leaving him alive for a while... one wonders whether killing him quickly and confirming he was on Saruman's side would have triggered a run on the people that he (correctly) identified as good.

I wouldn't take being dead wrong about Alan and Izulde, personally, considering they weren't merely good guys but Rangers.

Oh, I'd also like to point out to whoever doubted me (Alan, I think) that I was right about the dark adept.

That seemed to be the biggest debated issue from this game .. the entire talk about keeping both of the seers alive, even when most people stopped believing that Thomkal had any shot of being the seer. In most games when you have a seer vs seer reveal, one dies then the other dies either the next lynch or next night and thats it. You then dissect what they told you and often go on wild goose chases thanks to them feeding you faulty info.

This game since we had such a huge good person voting block in a CoT mid-game and a way to at least validate some of the information received we just didn't want to go down that path. At the time that THomkal was saved from the lynch all we really knew about was ourselves, Jonathan, and a little info about Swaggs and DaddyTorgo. By keeping him alive we were able to clear swaggs, take Mr.W and Schmidty off of the table at least for a bit LSG likely stayed alive much longer than normally would which led to finding out about BrianD and ultimately clearing Schmidty.

The day we finally lynched Thomkal, Tyrith and I had a long discussion about the pros and cons of it at that point, and we measured out each side. We assumed there was 1 Saruman person left (Likely thomkal) and 2-3 Sauron guys. We saw these as the scenerios:

Thomkal was lying, he was a member of Saruman, and the 2-3 Sauron members were among Mr.W, ntn, DaddyTorgo or remote chance of LSG even though that was unlikely due to her already knowing who the rangers were (and we knew that she knew).

Thomkal was telling the truth, then we would be looking for 3-4 bad guys most likely among LSG, Ntn, DaddyTorgo and we just couldn't figure out a likely 4th person. This scenerio was very unlikely to us and in both scenerios both Ntn and DaddyTorgo were likely bad. (Even though we didn't run it for only one bad guy left after thomkal).

So we decided at that point it didn't matter who we lynched as long as it was one of that select group. If we lynched thomkal and he ended up good, we would have sent izulde to night kill Lonestargirl like he wanted to earlier in the game Either way at that point we felt like we had things in hand and my only concern was that either Jonathan or Tyrith could have been converted. We just didn't realize how close to victory we actually were.

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by Anxiety

Interesting - BrianD recommended not to disrupt or kill LSG ont eh night she scanned him, thinking that DT would. DT ended up offing DC choosing to stay far away from revealed seers. If the agents of Saruman has disrupted LSG and preevnted the Brain scan, or just killed LSG (Schmidty was elsehwere that night) BrainD is never outed and teh fall of Saruman's agenst is delayed for a while.

Actually we did discuss blocking her that night, and nearly did so if I remember correctly. Which made the next morning one of the first bits of pain in a very painful week.

[Thomkal]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Yeah.. we sat back most of the game trying to protect the numbers and be the base of a CoT.

That reminds me though.. what happened the night i was attacked.. why did it fail, or what exactly happened?

We used our quick death power on you Alan. You were leading the discussions as you normally do, and we wanted to disrupt that. Quick death were as Anxiety described them, an "emergency kill". So we knew from the description there was a chance of failure and/or being spotted, but we had no percentages and no way to know for sure how risky it was for us to use it. We failed the die roll. Sublime got the description of the attack, not me, since he did it, so he might be able to tell you more. Just another disastrous moment for the Agents of Saruman.

[Thomkal]

Okay all caught up now.

First off, yeah I guess I lied a little bit more in my parting message there. I was just trying to create as much doubt as I could in people's minds before I left the game.

Second, congrats to the good guys!

Third, thanks very much to Anxiety for a great game! The role descriptions, power descriptions, death scenes, and night actions PM's were wonderful. One question about my seer (woman's intuition, ha!) power though. Was that just flavor about how I felt I was getting stronger doing them, but then getting weaker afterwards?

Fourth, I was a horrible wolf. I had never been a wolf before, so had never really been in the mindset. Then poor Sublime in his first game got me to partner with. Sorry about that Sub. But you did great once I got you to open up more. Thanks to Brian when he came along for some good veteran advice.

Fifth, Curse those darned die rolls! It was just a disaster for us with the kills, missing out on Alan and LSG, and then getting Brian and Sublime outed.

Sixth, Yeah I might have been a bad wolf, but I was darned good at figuring out who the other evils were. I got Brian on Night 1 with my scan so I was psyched! But what's this about him trying to kill me the night I converted him? As for Daddy Torgo, he was actually at the top of my list to scan after people reacting to things after the lynch on either night 2 or 3. And then events caused me to need to view other people-like Schmidty, and he kept getting pushed back on the list and back some more...to the point he was the only one I had not scanned, or figured I knew their alignment at game's end. I could have single-handedly wiped out the sauron faction by day 4 without any bloodshed. Argh. And I almost did a dark conversion of Daddy at the end there because I had run out of targets for potential evils.

Seventh, So Ntndeacon be comforted, you were scanned. And I purposedly kept it to myself because I had to give LSG some people to scan and targets for the rest of you to kill off. And you were a key factor in my last second seer reveal. The three people who were voting for you at the time, were all people either I, or Brian's old team, knew were good. So I think (or at least hope) that kept Jonathan, Mr. W, and Schmidty somewhat unsure of me.

Eighth, Another fun fact. The night we killed Blade, I had actually submitted a quick death action on Schmidty. I'm still cursing myself for using the silent death the day before-we couldn't use it for three more days. In the time in between my sending the action in, Schmidty had posted that he had protection against night kills again. We just felt it too risky to go after him with our lesser kill. So we went after blade instead, saving me from having to defend myself from his 23 pages of accusations against me. I really thought I would be lynched that next day...and the next...and the next. I was just hoping against hope to sway people or at least create a lot of confusion. Then LSG outed me. *sigh*

Ninth, we held on to our kills for the first couple days because we felt it was too risky to use the quick kill until we had a good target and alibi ready, and waiting to use the silent kill on a priority target. So we disrupted cronin's actions on night 1, and then got the dark conversion of Brian on night 2. Then we used silent death on Lathum, after debating using the quick death on him instead.

Tenth, a tip of the hat to the remaining goods, especially LSG, Schmidty, and Alan for their actions over the last few days. And DaddyTorgo too I guess, even though you didn't go after LSG the night we expected you too, causing us to have to go after her.

Eleventh, Okay a couple complaints here, sorry. I really think we should have had one completely unblockable kill to use, just one time only. Or at least one undetectable kill. It was all over for us when the kill on Alan failed and it just snowballed from there.

Twelth, Brian's conversion in some ways hurt us more than it helped us. He could tell us nothing about his old team when I converted him. That sucked. Yeah it would have hurt game balance to let him reveal who was on his old team, so that was fine. But in my opinion he should have been able to tell us about the other side's powers or something that we could use to figure out his ex-teammate. And Brian might think differently, but I think not being able to say anything handicapped him somewhat in the discussions we had about who was evil. He had to watch himself to make sure he didn't hint one way or another about who he knew was evil, making it tough for him to contribute at times.

Thirteenth, I was NOT lying about my migraine or forgetting to say who my view was that night. I would never do something shady like that to protect my position in the game. Shame on you to those who thought otherwise. I just knew I wasn't going to be able to post much for much of that day, and felt I needed to tell you why.

But overall it was a fun game with just a couple minor quibbles. At least now I know how NOT to act when I'm a wolf again.

[Swaggs]

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Daddy could have somehow given Brian, after he was converted, up to the villagers for a lynch. If he had, he probably would have been in the circle of trust and could have advanced AND he would have had the orb still.

[ntndeacon]

See I told you Alan that I was good. Would I lie in a WW game

Great game Anxiety. It was interesting to be on the block day after day after day. never a dull moment.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by Swaggs

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Daddy could have somehow given Brian, after he was converted, up to the villagers for a lynch. If he had, he probably would have been in the circle of trust and could have advanced AND he would have had the orb still.

i thought about this for a long long time, but frankly Brain had stayed UTR enough that I didn't think it was possible...there wasn't that much to key on him besides a hunch and i didn't think a "hunch" play would have gotten far at that point.

[spleen1015]

Originally Posted by Swaggs

This game was strange because both Spleen and Tyrith made full reveals, both of which ended up being 100% true, at odd times. Both of those (obviously Spleen's, especially) really threw me, because neither seemed to be on the chopping block at the time.

Good game, Abe. A lot of interesting roles.

I wanted to reveal to try and gain some trust with the good guys. I screwed up by getting my name wrong. I knew there was a Nob and Hob. When I typed my first message, I didn't pay attention to what I was typing. I was trying to move too quickly.

The second time I type the name wrong was the same thing.

I wasn't 100% truthful with my reveal. I had even odds that I could be found every night. I said there was no way I could get night killed because I wanted to baddies to think there was no way to kill me. I was hoping they would leave me alone.

Screwing up my name was my ultimate undoing. The sad thing is, I was killed because my name didn't match the books. I was disappointed that I had put myself in that situation. Up until that point, I had been playing all of my games really well, IMO.

Good game everyone. I'm glad to see the good guys win. I didn't do a whole lot to help win this game, but I am still 6-0 in WW.

LSG, I would really like it if we can put all that has happened behind us. I don't want it to keep coming up and potentially get in the way of other folks enjoying games that we play together. I apologize for my comments and hope that we can move beyond them. Just for the record, I only insulted you in the RE game. I never did in the Football Tryouts game nor this one. So, your statement that I've insulted you in every game we've played together is inaccurate.

[st.cronin]

I am thinking about using the majority lynch rule for my own game (which is coming up!)

[SnDvls]

Great game Anxiety.

congrats villagers I though for sure you all had lost it when 3 players died in one night.

Question for the baddies...why kill me?

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by SnDvls

Great game Anxiety.

congrats villagers I though for sure you all had lost it when 3 players died in one night.

Question for the baddies...why kill me?

we felt you were crafty and knew you were either good or on the saruman side, so thought we'd take you out early.

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by st.cronin

I am thinking about using the majority lynch rule for my own game (which is coming up!)

That was one of the spins of this game, and to me, it worked really well. It also makes sense from a reality perspective. In real life, you would not kill someone because three out of 18 people voted for that person or whatnot.

Another spin I personally liked was adding the actual names and roles for every person, even if that role did nothing. I liked that from a flavor perspective and would do it again.


I am about to make a general post in the WW forum about another issue from this game, however, so check it out!


-Anxiety

[Jonathan Ezarik]

I don't care what Abe says, I'm still planning on voting for ntn tonight.

[Jonathan Ezarik]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Just a note to Jonathan, I already told Tyrith, but we never told you about Tyrith and never told Tyrith about you just in case of the small chance one of you two got converted along the way. We wanted a safe guard to protect the good guys from corruption on the inside. I know my PM messages to you got rather uninformative about midgame.. we just got to a point where we were working on figuring out which seer was which and trying to bring Tyrith over to our side.

There at the end the messages had me scratching my head. "No news is good news" and "Thomkal is farmer, Lonestargirl is Onieromancer". I wondered why you were telling me stuff I already knew. I figured that you guys didn't have any new info and that we were screwed.

Originally Posted by Alan T

There were a few times that LSG made a move that left us scratching our heads and doubt her again, but in the end the big thing for us was i knew that she knew izulde and I were rangers.. and the fact neither of us had been killed while she knew that information left us feeling she most likely was good. Alot of what we said about distrust on her and trust on thomkal was somewhat smokescreens and a small part wanting to be absolutely sure before making a move there.

I caught her dropped hints, too. That's when I figured out Izulde was a ranger (I had no idea about Gramm, though). I wanted to trust LSG because she knew who you guys were but didn't do anything about it, but so many of her actions confused me. I wasn't sure what to make of her.

[BrianD]

A couple of notes:

First, it felt like the dark teams were severe underdogs in this game. We did poorly finding rangers, but even though we were rolling early, we never got very close to winning.

Second, the names in the roles did add nice flavor, but it was a little tough to remember who was who. After the writeups I had to go to the first page to see who really had been killed.

Third, I can't believe DT never converted me back to his team. I expected to be converted back the night after I was converted the first time. Every night I kept waiting for that conversion message, but it never came.

Fourth, I may have hurt my final team a little by trying not to out my old team. Part of it was trying to play by the rules, and the other part of it was that I didn't want to give them too much information since I assumed I'd be converted off of the team. I was so convinced that they wanted to kill me off early that it took a number of days for me to finally trust my new team. It was also interesting that I alone knew how many bad guys were in the game.

Lastly, DT not killing LSG the night she scanned me was very painful. I believe we already had orders in to block her scan, but I was sure DT would kill her to put heat on Thomkal. Not wanting to waste our move, I convinced our team to go for a kill instead. I don't know if things would have been much better had we killed her, but it would have been different.

[Jonathan Ezarik]

Originally Posted by Thomkal

Seventh, So Ntndeacon be comforted, you were scanned. And I purposedly kept it to myself because I had to give LSG some people to scan and targets for the rest of you to kill off. And you were a key factor in my last second seer reveal. The three people who were voting for you at the time, were all people either I, or Brian's old team, knew were good. So I think (or at least hope) that kept Jonathan, Mr. W, and Schmidty somewhat unsure of me.

Good job, there. I was constantly torn between who to believe between you and LSG. Even though you offered me up as a sacrifice when your neck was on the line, I admired your play. I thought it was a very gutsy call and you pulled it off (at least to me). I wasn't convinced you were evil last night until you came out with your last second revelation.

Thirteenth, I was NOT lying about my migraine or forgetting to say who my view was that night. I would never do something shady like that to protect my position in the game. Shame on you to those who thought otherwise. I just knew I wasn't going to be able to post much for much of that day, and felt I needed to tell you why.

Yeah, I felt bad about that. Especially after others came on saying how when they get migraines how bad it can be. I honestly don't know jack about migraines, so I'm sorry I doubted you.

[Jonathan Ezarik]

Originally Posted by BrianD

First, it felt like the dark teams were severe underdogs in this game. We did poorly finding rangers, but even though we were rolling early, we never got very close to winning.

Funny, I felt that us good guys had no chance of winning. We seriously overestimated the number of bad guys and if we hadn't gotten lucky last night, I think evil would have had a good chance of winning (kudos to DT for that).

I wonder how the game would have played if the evil factions could have communicated like I thought. Especially since there were only four of you (five if Scoobz had lived).

[Tyrith]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Ezarik

Funny, I felt that us good guys had no chance of winning. We seriously overestimated the number of bad guys and if we hadn't gotten lucky last night, I think evil would have had a good chance of winning (kudos to DT for that).

I wonder how the game would have played if the evil factions could have communicated like I thought. Especially since there were only four of you (five if Scoobz had lived).

Nah, Alan and I talked through the scenarios before the Thomkal lynch and we were fine unless either you (or myself, in theory) were fine because we still had three rangers, you'd become a ranger, and if came down to it the rangers could just start murdering people at night.

[Jonathan Ezarik]

Thanks to Abe for GMing this game. I had a lot of fun. The large number of players made it difficult for me to keep up with everything as a first-timer, but I really enjoyed it. I lucked out in the role I got. Being a ranger sympathizer got me in good with the rangers and I feel like they did a lot to protect me. Otherwise, I probably would have been lynched early on.

[Swaggs]

I think the fact that the Rangers would have all left if they had nightkilled an innocent was a nice touch. That would have been a serious backbreaker. Imagine the swing if they would have done that the night that three other people were killed... we could have potentially lost 7 light people in one night (1 Sauraman, 1 Sauron, 1 suicide, 1 ranger night kill, 3 rangers leaving).

[BrianD]

Originally Posted by Swaggs

I think the fact that the Rangers would have all left if they had nightkilled an innocent was a nice touch. That would have been a serious backbreaker. Imagine the swing if they would have done that the night that three other people were killed... we could have potentially lost 7 light people in one night (1 Sauraman, 1 Sauron, 1 suicide, 1 ranger night kill, 3 rangers leaving).

I missed that in my initial read, but it would have been pretty powerful. Weren't the Rangers talking about almost night-killing LSG? That could have ended the game in favor of the dark side.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by BrianD

I missed that in my initial read, but it would have been pretty powerful. Weren't the Rangers talking about almost night-killing LSG? That could have ended the game in favor of the dark side.

The night that THomkal revealed as the seer, and Tyrith and LSG came off gung-ho in super-pro-lynch him anyways to us (or at least to me but I think Izulde and Gramm shared the thought) as very wolfish. We had no idea LSG was the seer at the time and had not seen any such hints of it. We had no reason to understand why she was pushing so hard for it. Izulde was already super suspicious of her anyways and this just pushed it over the edge for him. I think he was convinced LSG was bad.

We talked about it for a bit, but after a bit of discussion, we all agreed that a move like that was way too risky since hunches are good, but not ones that could potentially lose the game. The next day answered everything for us however as all of the reveals came out that day (including my own fake reveal I did) and we were able to start finally putting together the pieces. Thomkal's fake reveal there in one sense was the thing that helped us get the game going in a direction in some sense.

[SnDvls]

once I got the neckless I had pretty much made up my mind that if I had the chance to be bad I would with the neckless showing me as good. however I was also killed on my way back from exploring and never got to that point.

in my original PM Anxiety told me it was one of his favorite roles this game. I responded "that means I'll be dead by night 2" and thus I was.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by BrianD

A couple of notes:

First, it felt like the dark teams were severe underdogs in this game. We did poorly finding rangers, but even though we were rolling early, we never got very close to winning.

Second, the names in the roles did add nice flavor, but it was a little tough to remember who was who. After the writeups I had to go to the first page to see who really had been killed.

Third, I can't believe DT never converted me back to his team. I expected to be converted back the night after I was converted the first time. Every night I kept waiting for that conversion message, but it never came.

Fourth, I may have hurt my final team a little by trying not to out my old team. Part of it was trying to play by the rules, and the other part of it was that I didn't want to give them too much information since I assumed I'd be converted off of the team. I was so convinced that they wanted to kill me off early that it took a number of days for me to finally trust my new team. It was also interesting that I alone knew how many bad guys were in the game.

Lastly, DT not killing LSG the night she scanned me was very painful. I believe we already had orders in to block her scan, but I was sure DT would kill her to put heat on Thomkal. Not wanting to waste our move, I convinced our team to go for a kill instead. I don't know if things would have been much better had we killed her, but it would have been different.

i didn't have a conversion ability Brian. I was well and truly alone once you were converted away.

And as for killing LSG...i was happy to let the villagers chase off after you sarumaners, especially cuz i had the amulet.

i did feel like dark was a definate underdog in this game, what with the rangers and the bodyguard and the seer and the large #s.

[Abe Sargent]

You did have the conversion ability as the leader of Sauron's faction, you just didn;t have the seer ability that an itial leader would have.

To be fair, if the unaffiliated darkness role had survived past the first day, that would have increased your strength significantly.

-Anxiety

[Abe Sargent]

What did you guys think about the game size. Was 25 too many? I thought it went well as a GM, but I saw all of the behind the scenes stuff.

I'd also like to hear from our new or newer players like Sublime 2 and Jonathan Ezarik about how they thought the game went.

-Anxiety

[BrianD]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

i didn't have a conversion ability Brian. I was well and truly alone once you were converted away.

And as for killing LSG...i was happy to let the villagers chase off after you sarumaners, especially cuz i had the amulet.

i did feel like dark was a definate underdog in this game, what with the rangers and the bodyguard and the seer and the large #s.

Actually, you did have a conversion ability. Check the primer again (or the one on page 54 (55?)). The agents of Sauron had the Dark Conversion ability which could convert a dark agent. It could be used twice in the game. I half-expected you and the Saruman guys to each convert me twice.

The LSG non-kill really messed me up. Not knowing about your necklace made it pretty sure that we were going to handle that situation wrong. I almost tried to get a message to you in-game that you should take her out (knowing that Thomkal was going to die anyway), but I couldn't figure out a way to construct the message to make it clear to you without making it obvious to everyone else. As it turns out, it wasn't in your interest to kill her anyway, so it didn't really matter.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by Anxiety

You did have the conversion ability as the leader of Sauron's faction, you just didn;t have the seer ability that an itial leader would have.

To be fair, if the unaffiliated darkness role had survived past the first day, that would have increased your strength significantly.

-Anxiety

aaargh? seriously! i didn't think that i did!! oh well, guess i should have asked. then i could have recruited another to my side and i might have got along better. DARNIT!

[Jonathan Ezarik]

Originally Posted by Anxiety

What did you guys think about the game size. Was 25 too many? I thought it went well as a GM, but I saw all of the behind the scenes stuff.

I'd also like to hear from our new or newer players like Sublime 2 and Jonathan Ezarik about how they thought the game went.

-Anxiety

I thought it went well and had a blast playing. I had a difficult time trying to keep everything straight at the beginning since there were so many players and I was afraid I was going to get overwhelmed with everything, but by the end I liked the large aspect of it. I will definitely be playing in the future. In fact, I'm kind of going through withdrawal today. Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that I lived till the end. If I'd been killed on the first day (like Scoobz), my opinion might be different.

One thing I really noticed, though, was how much people place on past performances of other players. I don't know if this is good or not, but I did find myself leaning against certain players because they were supposedly playing a different game than they normally do.

[BrianD]

It is probably a little unfair to claim that Light had an advantage. We killed our unaffiliated Dark member, and there were ways for Dark to make some strides. I do think we needed a little help though. Schmidty was going to be a big problem for us since we couldn't night-kill him (unless he forgot to guard someone) and counted as 3 of us. We would have had to convince people to lynch him.

I also initially thought that Alan Ranger skills foiled our attempt to kill him. I see now that it was just a bad die roll. Having the possibilities of all of the Rangers leaving was some potential help for us. Basically we needed Light to screw up, or we needed to lead them into some poor moves.

Thinking about it more, I like the setup. It was certainly a challege and we failed to overcome.

[BrianD]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

aaargh? seriously! i didn't think that i did!! oh well, guess i should have asked. then i could have recruited another to my side and i might have got along better. DARNIT!

You could only convert a Dark person though, so your choices were limited.

[BrianD]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Ezarik

One thing I really noticed, though, was how much people place on past performances of other players. I don't know if this is good or not, but I did find myself leaning against certain players because they were supposedly playing a different game than they normally do.

This is one of the reasons I really like seeing new players in the game. A lot of people have been playing together so long that they have a good feel for everyone else already. New players are complete unknowns and can really shake things up. In fact, you shook things up enough in your first day that I scanned you thinking you were Dark. I feel bad for Thomkal trying to explain that scan (which I fed to him) later in the game. It made sense to me to scan you at the time, but nobody else seemed to think so.

[hoopsguy]

I really enjoyed following along this game. I am sure it would have been a blast playing along as well.

Here are my thoughts on a couple of topics that have come up in the post-game:

- Size. I think 25 is a manageable game size, but I would suggest that no matter how many people start the game that the moderator should look to complete it within two weeks. The couple of times a game has gone on longer than that have felt like a drag for the remaining players and participation seems to suffer. That wasn't a problem here with the multiple factions, as far as I could tell.

- Game Balance. One of the areas that I'm struggling with personally right now is putting together a balanced rule set for a big game (25 people) with a number of special villagers. My experience from reading other games here and on another forum is that the natural tendency is to give the good guys too many edges when you start adding more "named" roles and less "vanilla" players. After watching this game transpire, I think I may go back to my in-progress rule set and tilt it a little more towards the bad guys.

[Alan T]

My thoughts are that the 25 person isn't a bad number to start with, but like hoops said a game that large with the typical 1 lynch 1 night kill a day has a tendancy to drag on way too long, so having the ability for mutiple good guy kills and multiple bad guy kills a day helps speed this up some. You did this with ranger night kill ability (which we never used), and bad guys having multiple ways to night kill.

As far as how even things are.. I think the good guys played a very good game here. We kept our bodyguard and seer around long enough for both to make a difference and didn't pull any really bad moves that shot ourselves in the foot. I think the bad guys had some bad breaks with the die rolls and losing someone night 1 due to inactivity.

I think if the luck had balanced out some, it might have been a bit closer of a game, but I still think this likely was a tough game for the bad guys to win unless someone played an excellent game. I think thats true for most really large games. The more roles that are out there the more it seems to benefit the good side. In a large game you almost have to feel like you're giving an unfair advantage to the bad guys just to make it even at times.

I don't think this game was horribly unbalanced by design, I think like I said bad luck played a big part in it, but I do think it was an easier game for good guys to win than bad guys

[hoopsguy]

Jonathan, I enjoyed watching you play this game. Very nice first effort - always fun to see someone jump in with opinions and engage the experienced players their first time out. Looking back, I was completely wrong about your allegiance. Watching you react to LSG/Thomkal I was almost convinced that you were on the opposite bad guy team from Thomkal.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by hoopsguy

Jonathan, I enjoyed watching you play this game. Very nice first effort - always fun to see someone jump in with opinions and engage the experienced players their first time out. Looking back, I was completely wrong about your allegiance. Watching you react to LSG/Thomkal I was almost convinced that you were on the opposite bad guy team from Thomkal.

I agree, I thought for a first game you did well. I don't think everyone really understands what messages I was feeding you at nights, but I thought you did a great job. You didn't overplay or underplay your role and were a big part on trying to shape some of the votes during the game.

[Tyrith]

My main thing now is that I'm going to have to train you all to understand that me being crazy doesn't mean I'm bad, me being crazy means that my personality hasn't been sucked away and replaced by that of a zombie or actuary. Maybe one of these days; everyone seems to have gotten used to Alan and blade eventually

[LoneStarGirl]

Originally Posted by spleen1015

LSG, I would really like it if we can put all that has happened behind us. I don't want it to keep coming up and potentially get in the way of other folks enjoying games that we play together. I apologize for my comments and hope that we can move beyond them. Just for the record, I only insulted you in the RE game. I never did in the Football Tryouts game nor this one. So, your statement that I've insulted you in every game we've played together is inaccurate.

It was a joke spleen. directed at Alant to lighten a situation. You need to learn not to take things on this board seriously. But, everything that has happened between us is out of sight and out of mind and will never be brought up again.