i procrastinated opening this dead thread

[xyzzy]

sorry it took one hundred thousand years. please feel free to discuss my crimes

[xyzzy]

spoiler: this game does, in fact, have a mechanic by which dead players can come back as treestumps. i keep thinking "okay it's definitely impossible for that to happen," but also there have been so many parts of this game where i have been like "i definitely know all the things that could happen here from a mechanical perspective" and every single time something weird happens

[xyzzy]

so. i procrastinated because i desperately did not want to fuck it up by giving someone early access

[xyzzy]

something i believed on some level before going in was that i would get a setup that i could fully parse once i had the whole thing available to me. and that's probably true for a lot of setups where you design it yourself: you may not figure out all the intentions beforehand, but you know broadly speaking how each role should function, and importantly, the precise wording of each role PM is a thing you had a hand in. once you get handed a bunch of roles that other people designed, you suddenly have to start asking yourself questions like, okay, this Amway recruitment ability doesn't say it targets a player, and it doesn't function in the way that a targeting action would, and the role has other abilities that *do* target, and those are clearly a thing where you're sending an action to the moderator. so i guess the recruitment isn't an ability that targets a player, which means if someone gets it who has restrictions on who they can target, then that ability ignores those restrictions? sure. that works. but then this other PM mentions that it can't be "recruited into the main faction." what's the main faction. like, i don't think Amway is a faction, but it's a judgment call, right? it turns out running a game like this involves making way more rulings on the fly about what feels correct.

my next game is gonna be a veiled committee mini theme, and i an appointing myself one of the designers. i have tentatively designed roles, and i look forward to potentially creating an enormous headache for myself. i also have a truly fucked up idea for how i might run a veiled committee upick. that being said, i do not want to claim ownership over this concept. there's endless variations on how you could have a setup designed this way, and i could not possibly do all of them in a hundred years, so if you're reading this and thinking "hey this sounds like a truly nightmarish experience, i'd like to try it out," then by all means run with it. that being said, i'm gonna work on figuring out a format that works for eliminating the issue around discussing specific formatting that isn't just "get a blanket approval every single time i run one of these," so lemme know if you have thoughts on that. personally, i am fully in favor of players trying to suss out which groups of roles match each other, and i think it's fun to let designers lean into that. like when i ran the original incarnation of this premise, non-reviewed game, one of the roles was "John, a town Shootsmith!" and the role PM started "oh man! you're John, a town Shootsmith!" i can't recall if there was any attempt to piece together the game using who submitted what, but that was also self evidently probably not designed by the person who just submitted "mafia 1-shot neighborizer encryptor: can only use 1 shot of neighborizing" as one of their roles. personally, i think that's a unique aspect of this that is worth leaning into, and i would love to receive a set of roles from somebody where one of them is super obviously intended to look like another one of the designers wrote it and for the players to have to deal with that fact

oh also: Bingle was not an Amway consultant yet when those alleged recruitments happened! for that sort of role change, i would always, always rule that you do not have whatever new abilities are being granted by someone else's actions until i personally confirm that you have them. i told Bingle this via PM, so i think this is all an elaborate ploy. once 24 hours have officially passed and i'm definitely in the clear to let Bingle in, we can finally get the full answer regarding any possible ploys. all that to say: Bingle was only ever in the one hood but did a pretty good job convincing everyone that that was due to mechanical reasons, and now that that's "disproven," it's probably gonna get weird

[xyzzy]

oh btw something i noticed early on but after the game had started that was very much a judgment call: the Amway PM says that you gain all your recruiter's abilities, not all of their Amway abilities. 100% of the time i will always rule in favor of not having the game be trivially broken by bullshit, and "stack all the abilities onto each other so we can definitively check everyone's claims and also somehow everyone has access to the factional mafia kill????" is bullshit

[xyzzy]

also god it would be so funny if somehow Meuh could die tonight. tragically it's not meant to be, but it would be hilarious

[xyzzy]

nope!! actually it's incredible how completely wrong every attempt to work out who designed what has been. Ranger's list has, like, a single correct piece of information on it

[xyzzy]

absolutely interested in getting designs from people in the future, though tbh I like the fact that I discussed on page 1 that finding weird corner cases only goes so far in this, so I'm less interested in trying to suss out all the corner cases in advance. I've loved the situations in this game where the mechanics have created surprising results that I didn't anticipate and I had to make judgments about what I believe is the most sensible interpretation of the mechanics. wouldn't wanna get rid of that, y'know?

before I run another one of those, I wanna make sure I have the all clear from the list mods for a role format that's cohesive and unified but that provides an ample playground for designers -- this is an extremely mild spoiler, but

there are a couple players who, if they look very closely, will realize that the flavor text on the most recent flip matches their own flavor text, and might plausibly be sample flavor text that I included in the templates I sent to the designers, and that there might be one designer who intentionally left the sample flavor text in their PMs. that being said, as it stands, that's not really a thing they can discuss, even though I'm pretty sure the designer in question left that as an intentional breadcrumb.

I'd like to have a unified template with a fairly basic style guide but otherwise give designers a great deal of freedom to design within that template and then, ideally, get permission to run future games where players have explicit permission to discuss wording in a way that might normally not be allowed.

btw, re:mod influence, as a rule I always answer "yes" to the "this game might have any of these elements" question, which includes mod influence. my last game had a role that more or less said "you can submit whatever night action you want. I'll decide if I think it's fair and potentially tweak it if I think it's too powerful." I conferred with the designer of the treestump role on adding the 24 hour clause to make running a dead thread more straightforward, but in terms of how I submitted it to the queue, strictly speaking I could've just made the choice to let dead players into the dead thread immediately and be extremely lolconsequences about it. that being said I didn't want to do that because, as mentioned awhile back, I like to err on the side of making sure the game isn't bullshit.

[xyzzy]

also here's my terrible idea for a veiled committee upick:

-players send role names
-I randomize a setup and figure out the alignment and role name of each player
-I randomize assignments of role names to the designers and let them know the alignment of each role they're designing
-I randomly insert additional role names with alignments into each assignment (so, like, each designer gets the same number of town and mafia roles in their assignment, but some of them are decoys)
-they design the roles and I find out what the setup is

the big thing to keep in mind here is that I'm then having to wait on a bunch of designers to submit roles between when the game fills and when it can actually start. with a regular upick, you have usually a designer and a reviewer working together in the same document, and you can have a super fast turnaround. having a bunch of designers each working independently introduces so much possible friction to the process. so you gotta make sure the designer group is prepared to act fast from the beginning

[xyzzy]

also I noticed earlier today I'm real close to a post count of 5000. that's fun

[xyzzy]

sadly quadruple posting in a PT does not raise your post count