I need to go check myself into a mental institution for a day or two to come back to reality after that.
I know what you mean. Don't let getting "deceived" by Dire (and Tristan) mess with your head, though. It's like Survivor, only that the Spies are
forced to play like the "villains" in order to reach their goal. They need to play the cards they've been dealt and really have no other choice but to trick you in order to play the game.
As for beta, there are a couple of functionalities I'd like to see in the form of user-locked forums - one forum where spectators can chat about what's happening and make bets on who they think is who, and another for spies/other roles. Forum conversations do fulfill this role but they aren't open for general users to peruse.
It'll take some organizing at first, but setting up forums for the spies and spectators shouldn't be a problem.
Beyond that, however, it might get too complicated: This game alone had at least five conversations happening on the side - Kel/Kismet, Tig/Dire, Kismet/Tristan, Kel/Tristan, Kel/Kismet/Tristan, etc. (my inbox is a mess right now...)
Managing forum read/write privileges to go with each possible conversation would be horrible.
I'm curious how many people actually followed the game, aside from Fox.
If you're reading this and were spectating: Leave a message!
I think this game is VERY hard for the resistance to win, comparative to Mafia. This game was designed for tabletop play - where there are a great many more 'tells' to look for. In this game spies can pre-fabricate posts and take as long as they like to proof them. In Mafia you can go back and see who voted to kill someone else and thus deduct who is a spy much more closely.
This game is hard for the Resistance to win either way - even in face-to-face games, the Spies win at least two out of three.
I'll post a few possible "addons" later on today for us to discuss. They should balance the game out a bit.
Honestly, I never used the spreadsheet. It was something I wasn't used to, so I forgot about it.
Yes, I think Tig may have been the only one who had a quick look at it. The spreadsheet is probably not needed when there are only five players, but I'm guessing that it could be quite helpful when there are more players/votes to keep track of.
I think your moderation was fine, though you may have given me a little too much information than you thought you did (but nothing Tristan wouldn't have caught, I expect).
Yea, you made me aware of that when you called it out in the Spy conversation. I figured I had written something that you had already considered, but slapped my head when you pointed out that I was being too chatty.
Surprisingly, moderating is not as easy as I thought it would be. There are plenty of ways to unintentionally give away information.
One thing that I needed to be careful of was the votes. Most of the time I knew what people were going to vote, especially on the missions. It may seem terribly redundant for me to wait for the Resistance members to PM me their desired mission outcome, when "success" is really all they can vote. But it's a necessary step in order to keep everyone's identity a secret.
One solution to this problem would be sticking to a given time frame - i.e. I wait for 24 hours after the mission is a "go", and only then do I post the mission outcome (provided that the Spies send me their votes within those 24 hours).
Another solution would be having the team members send me both their mission team vote and their mission outcome vote in one PM.
For example:
I vote "yes" for Tig's team!
If the mission is a "go", I vote succeed!
I don't know. I'll have to give this some more thought.
There are a lot of strategies for this game, and I chose one that greatly affected the way the game was played from the start, and it paid off. This game may well not be indicative of a 'normal' game. Would you agree Jia? And how would you have played differently?
I can't really tell you what a normal game looks like, since the forum version is a whole new game. In face-to-face games, you have absolutely no chance to strategize as much when you're playing a Spy. You can only hope that your fellow Spies can read your body language when you're trying to signal them "You vote yes, I vote no!" without catching the attention of the Resistance.
I'd have to be in the shoes of a player to know how I'd play the forum version. One thing that I can say is that I usually wait for someone to put themselves in an awkward position, and then I exploit the hell out of the situation they're in. I rarely come up with a strategy right at the beginning, I look for openings.
In the last game, I would have sunk my teeth into Kismet's decision to pick a "fail team," especially since she did not pick herself. You could say that she gave the Spies an easy win, without putting her own reputation on the line. That's a nice strategy for a Spy.
