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Old 04-30-2021, 04:16 PM   #671
Legate of Amon Lanc
A Voice That Gainsayeth
 
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Legate of Amon Lanc is spying on the Black Gate.Legate of Amon Lanc is spying on the Black Gate.Legate of Amon Lanc is spying on the Black Gate.Legate of Amon Lanc is spying on the Black Gate.Legate of Amon Lanc is spying on the Black Gate.Legate of Amon Lanc is spying on the Black Gate.
G55, since you started about this - if we are talking infordrops, I actually think they are, by themselves, the most dangerous part of the game that can easily get out of hand.

Let me start with the Ghost though - I believe it works fine the way it is and this gameplay has proved it, I think. I would however not be opposed to limiting the quotes in some way like it was suggested simply in order to keep them fresh. It might become repetitive once we have discovered the best universal quote for saying X, and the creativity of the process - which I think should be the main reason for the Ghost to exist - would go out of the window.

But I also acknowledge that the idea to have the Ghost appear only every second day is actually pretty ingenious as limitation. Of all things, that sounds good (and if it is not as good for the village, that could be balanced somewhere else, like by what Gifteds there are etc.). Because having the Ghost appear three times, on an average game, anyway essentially means "every Day". Because:

-Ghost obviously won't appear on Day 1
-and on Day 2 it very likely won't have much information to add anyway
-which means that in most games, it would start appearing from Day 3 onwards. And most games hardly last past something like Day 6. So with three visits, the Ghost could appear nearly every Day.

***

My main problem however is with something else, and like I said, it is the infodrops. In retrospect, I think - despite the fact that the Wolves won - that the rules were strongly on the side of the village (I acknowledge I did not give the rules enough thought beforehand to imagine how it would look in practice; I probably would have said something had I realised it). But:

-while 3 Wolves in a village of 12 was certainly considerably imbalanced in favour of the WWs, and even with 2 Gifteds and the ability of the Dead to vote (which can be ambivalent, as we have seen) the village would still have been at a disadvantage,
-the Ghost returning essentially meant +1 dream conveyed for the Seer even after the Seer had died - that is a big bonus; though even that is arguably not necessarily balancing it (and for example in this game, we Wolves were lucky that the Seer dreamed quite a lot about people who died quickly after - though I guess that also had a lot to do with the numbers, in bigger village this would be less likely to happen.)
-but what in my opinion already went over was the ability of the Dead to decide a tie - I think the Dead's vote should have been counted simply as it was, as the last one cast, and the tie would be broken by whichever vote came first in the Living thread. This would btw also limit the dumping of responsibility on the Dead - while it was entertaining and somehow fitting, I still think it should generally be discouraged, and this would be part of it.
-and finally, what definitely went over, even if we argued that the former didn't, were the infodrops and I think they are problematic for multiple reasons.

Firstly, it puts a terrible pressure on the Mod, and somebody could still theoretically reveal too much to the Dead even by accident.
Secondly and more specifically, it works a bit like a sudoku in the sense that as you go, you crosscheck more and more information. By way of elimination your knowledge rises exponentially, and the longer the game runs, the less space for error there is. You eventually arrive at a point where the next info you'd reveal would simply say "X is a Wolf". We in fact ran exactly into that problem already in our game on, what was it, Night 4? I cannot belive one could possibly run a game that would last, say, six Days. Even with a large village, because information like "at least some Wolves voted in bandwagon for Greenie" may cut away like half of the village.
And thirdly, even the best Mod with the most careful plan not to reveal too much cannot control how the game develops. If you reveal that there is one Wolf among Legate, Morsul and Lottie, and then Lottie is lynched and Morsul Nightkilled, you just gave the village bulletproof info.

(Feel free to disagree)

***

In any case, even if we say that this system is unfair, it obviously poses the question what to do about it. I do not have an answer ready for that. Discarding the whole idea would eliminate 75% of the reason for the Ghost's existence in the first place. I don't want that. One possibility would be for example to limit how often the Ghosts get the infodrops (like also every second Day, or somesuch, starting perhaps with N2 so the first dead person has something to pass time thinking about). But I am not sure whether it is enough, or whether it doesn't have other problems (like making the odd Days uninteresting for the Dead).

The ideal solution of course would be to use the infodrop only in a game where roles of dead people don't get revealed upon death (however I loathe such games). There, either the Dead could get info about everything (ie about both living and dead) in this "sudoku" form and then send it back, or else the Dead could simply just receive the knowledge of everyone's roles after they died - so the roles would not be revealed in the Living thread narration, but in some Dead thread narration - and then they would have to just decide when to send it back. But the second option at least is perhaps somewhat boring and would make the content of what the Ghost is going to say fairly monotonous.

But that would disqualify the use of the Dead in "normal" games, and wasn't the idea to have the Dead in every game?

Anyway, these are my thoughts on future use of these rules. I think this game gave us a lot of input and I am hoping that we can discuss this before some next game where it could be implemented. To be sure however, let me say that despite the fact that I believe this was slightly tilted in the village's favour, the Mods handled it exceptionally, both by providing fairly balanced infodrops and also by modifying the rules ad hoc when it became clear that this would no longer work - I think that kind of common-sense flexibility is important, and it is good if the players can agree on that too, if some rule is discovered mid-game to be "broken" in some way.

***

TL; DR: I don't believe that the Ghost was too powerful; it was the infodrops that were too powerful. We should do something about those while making sure that the Ghost still has something to say. And I would also not have the Dead have a tiebreaking vote, also in order to further motivate the Living to make important decisions for themselves.
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories
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