A Clash of Kings - A Divided Kingdom

[danakillsu]

I am now going to nom MacavityLock if this hasn't already been done.

[MagnaofIllusion]

Ok, just finished the Dead QT - you people are nuts.

First I'd like to say Thanks and Congratulations to Faraday and Seacore for the wonderful game. It had the full McGilla (Simpsons reference FTW) IMO.

1. Great writing. When I'm not exhausted I'll be making a Scummy nod for this.
2. Great handling of votes and other sundries, Wincongate notwithstanding.
3. Day events - These were awesome and I looked forward to what each new day would bring. Color me disappointed that the Royal Wedding event got cancelled.

I'm half asleep so I'll try to keep my thoughts focused.

To everyone (mainly Locke) who kept saying that I was playing for the draw Day 5 and 6 - that's incorrect. I was playing to get to endgame. I need Mac to survive those days to narrow down the Town enough to get to 4 or 3 players left. I feel a little slighted that I didn't get more credit for getting Mac off the hook when he was tracked. I think I helped divert Thor and make Mina question herself with my arguments that it was 'logical' and drawing some of the heat to myself. I was fairly confident that come 1-1-1 or 1-1-2 given a chance I could make a better argument for the Greyjoys winning than the Lannisters. I had planned from the outset to out Mac based on my claim knowledge at the very beginning of Day.

I was shocked when only 1 body turned up on the morning of Day 7.

Everyone can read my thoughts in the Greyjoy QT but I did originally intend to kill diddin on Night 6 to 'poison the well' as it were to prevent Macavitar from winning if he NKed me. Heck, I even tried telepathic communication with him to let him know But CSL's little fit about losing when he played frankly a horrible game made me decide to shift to Richard since I didn't think Town deserved a win.

I have to say I've lost a little bit of respect for some players in reading the QT. Quite frankly the amount of Technicality Lawyering that went on at the end was sad.

And I came THIS close to killing Mac Night 8. I really did mull it over for awhile. But in the end I couldn't live with handing Town a victory if we cross-killed with no players left alive. I even went so far as to check with the Mods. Had it been an Everybody loses scenario I might have gone for it.

Happy with the way it turned out.

I'm pretty happy with my play here. In reading the Dead QT I'm especially satisfied that my status as scum was pretty much only solidified when I supported Macavitar's obv-fake claim. The fact that the only real mention I got in the QT was pretty much from scorned mislynch targets of mine makes me smile.

Good game to many of you. I'm not going to sling mud. I look forward to seeing many of you around in future games here.

Sleepy Vic Greyjoy out!

[Seacore]

Magna, first of al, well played, I enjoyed watching your actions and reading your thoughts in the QT after everybody died.

But I think you missed a chance to win outright.

After you helped save Mac's life and got Unsight lynched. And after you and Mac killed the rest of the kingsguard, you still came out heavily supportive of Mac.

I think if you'd done things a little bit differently, you would have won.

For example.

You came out demanding CSL's head, that wasn't a bad move, but I think you could have reigned it in a little. In doing so, you could have allowed yourself to be convinced that Macavitar was the best lynch of the day. Once Mac was dead, you would then have killed diddin that Night.
Next day you would have had Thor in your corner, you would either have convinced Richard, or it would have gone to a no lynch.

It's a bit more hypothetical if it got to the no lynch, I would have killed thor and tried to convince richard that CSL did that, but whatever.

An argument against that action might have been "But just as CSL had to know that MoI was scum, town-MoI would have had to know CSL was scum" that's true, but CSL was so murky that if you'd looked as scummy as CSL, everybody would likely have settled on the Mac lynch.


Please don't read this as a criticism of your play, I thought you did really well. It was just that when you and Mac wiped out the kingsguard, that's the plan that popped into my head and I said to myself, I said self "MoI has won this"

[hasdgfas]

I have to say I've lost a little bit of respect for some players in reading the QT. Quite frankly the amount of Technicality Lawyering that went on at the end was sad.

As I think I said in the dead thread, for me it was probably bitterness over screwing up so badly Day 5. The win condition thing was important to point out, but other things weren't so much, at least from what I remember me posting. And CSL's self-hammer didn't help the situation. That just caused tempers and bitterness to increase exponentially. Quite frankly, if that didn't happen, I probably would have been ok with the outcome if it stayed the same.


@Mac: If I came out upon Day 5 starting and went "Hey guys, we should massclaim", do you think you would have claimed the same way you did?

[MacavityLock]

@Mac: If I came out upon Day 5 starting and went "Hey guys, we should massclaim", do you think you would have claimed the same way you did?

Hells no. You almost guaranteed would have caught me had you gotten a massclaim to happen before calling me out. Catelyn-Brienne Finder was a claim born of desperation. Sorry.

[hasdgfas]

@Mac: If I came out upon Day 5 starting and went "Hey guys, we should massclaim", do you think you would have claimed the same way you did?

Hells no. You almost guaranteed would have caught me had you gotten a massclaim to happen before calling me out. Catelyn-Brienne Finder was a claim born of desperation. Sorry.

yeah, I realized that I was far too obvious about it when I brought that up. I needed to slow-play more.

[xvart]

Give me a better claim that I could have made under those circumstances.

I think the hider claim

might

have worked, although that could have been more suspicious since it would have been too convenient for a Lannister to be a Lannister hider.

xvart.

[MacavityLock]

Hider wouldn't have worked. I targeted Miku, who died that night (because, you know, I killed him). If I'm a Hider, I die if my chosen target dies, so I should have been dead.

[xvart]

Oh yeah. Duh...

xvart.

[Locke Lamora]

Magna: to be fair, yes, you did do a good job of backing up Mac and making sure he didn't get lynched. You and Mac both played on town's uncertainties very well. I just thought you could have still done that and then got Mac lynched when CSL did to win the game outright. In hindsight, I guess what I should have said was that I thought you were aiming to bring Mac to endgame with you rather than trying to dispose of him beforehand. In any case, you played a great game and it may well be the case that if you hadn't backed Mac up so strongly, you both would have lost. I was just indulging in some speculation because, like many others, I really couldn't stop watching this game!

All credit to Mac too; the claim seemed obviously fake from the dead thread but it was played out perfectly to maximise town's uncertainty and leave them second-guessing.

[LimMePls]

Things that upset me about this game:

- I totally misread LMP's connections.

Despite your attacks on me D2 (or perhaps because of them) I knew you were town. That's why I kept trying to hint that I may have connections with people and not be scum. I was hoping you might pick up that I was hinting we were masons, and that was why we were connected. I knew you were town because you spotted the connections and you pushed them. If you were scum you'd spot the connection and say nothing and NK instead. I think you played a really good game, only like you mentioned you didn't push hard enough to show that Mac must be scum until right at the very end, when people saw it as more of a defense than an attack.

[LimMePls]

Actually, LMP should be warned for his asshole-like behavior postgame. That's just not sportsmanlike.

As I said, you are shameless. You get to screw around and play horribly (act scum the whole game, quicklynch town doc, and self-hammer) and lose us the game, and then have the gall to come in here and A) point the finger at others and B) act offended when I call you on it. You're clearly very immature, so that's all I'll have to say on the subject.

[Faraday]

MOD I was wondering all game: Was I supposed to be a miller character of sorts?

Yeah, given the watcher is probably more 'townie' we felt the hound would add a bit of LOL LANNISTER to the game, especialy with the namecop. Littlefinger was also supposed to look dodgy as a namecop and as a townie, but that never panned out as it happens.


COMMENTS? I DON'T HAVE ANY.

[Faraday]

Okay so for reals :

Stuff I'd do different, write the win conditions slightly better. I still think 1/1's a draw no matter what the win conditions are though, maybe that's just me, a lot of people in the dead qt disagreed but I really couldn't award the game any other way. I mean I guess I could have a draw condition in role pm's too, but that seems unneeded, I guess I just assumed everyone thought like me. Your fault for not (this is a joke, calm the fuck down)

Set-up was p okay. I'd probably take out the doctor if ran again, or maybe give the scumteams a 1-shot ninja/1-shot strongman each (Lannisters/Greyjoys) to counteract the opposing teams and the towns powers.

Hope you enjoyed the flavour, a fair bit of effort was put in to that to make sure it was fine.

Maclock deserves a title - his fakeclaims are brillaint, even the ones discussed in the qt were amazing, the gendry hider in particular was great I thought.

This whole not playing to win thing is being overblown, I can completely see where the scum were coming from here. Also all that stuff with the win cons...I guess I think that point cow brought up was irrelevant to the draw, it was overblow unneccessarily, Seacore was right the first time as far as I'm concerned. Lesson learned to make it fully clear in the future.

Thanks to SpyreX for modding, he made the set-up less...killy death die, yes SPYREX made it less bloddthirsty. I know rit?

Town had too many players who played bad. That's what lost it for them really. I mean, without naming any names I think there's a few townies who could have done way way way way more.

LMP for best new player.

MINA BE MORE CONFIDENT OKAY?

Uh this is all stream of conciousness. I think prods and all that sort of shit went well, night deadlines were always on time, apart from one night or so when it was a few hours late (sue me).

[Faraday]

SpyreX for reviewing/giving us a votecount! not modding! lol.

[Faraday]

Also Lannisters/Greyjoy's get first preference for Pre-in's to A Storm of Swords (the best book fwiw). It'll probably be around same number of players, maybe 1 less. Not 100% sure so that's 13 pre-in slots I guess.

Seacore: it's only based on book 3, it's just book 3 was split in certain areas.


Um, yeah. I'll think of more stuff later.

[Faraday]

oh yeah the modding quicktopic has a fair few posts too, prob won't be linking that due to our mod bitching about certain things

As for the 'Lol grew new win con' argument in the graveyard, well, that's not really through, grew a draw con maybe? And in fairness most of the dead in the graveyard are town too, so yeh. There really was no other way to end the game as far as I'm concerned, I know seacore considered a 3-way draw, but that just seems weird to me. So yeah.

I'm really happy with the game, I felt it was complicated without being completely overblown ala a tar/kinetic game.

A Storm of Swords with a little fine tuning will be better, don't miss out yo!

[VP Baltar]

Ok, my final thoughts on the game now after having read everything except for the Kingsguard QT.

1) Setup was ok, imo. I think it was definitely balanced in the town's favor slightly from the start and the cross kills didn't help us any. The hand thing is town sided either way I feel. Scum who gets hand draws unnecessary attention (as Percy did) and town who gets Hand is just dangerous. I guess the best outcome for scum in that situation would be to get a VI to get the hand, but that's pretty much impossible. Stabby stabby was fairly balanced if not unwieldy. Copping obviously helps town regardless. Double lynch helps town regardless. Idk why the other day event wasn't used...seemed like kind of an impromptu decision.

2) This game is a lesson that many large games have repeated before, eliminate your VIs as early as possible because they will lose you the game. Scum are not going to do it for you. SSBF may have been worth keeping around for another day just for this purpose, who knows.

3) Mina and Thor, you guys played fairly well overall, but just lost your way at the end there. It happens and I wouldn't feel too bad about it. Both of you were considerable threats throughout the game and probably would have been NK'ed sooner had various other role related priorities popped up for either team. I dont' need to talk about lynching tracked results and all of that business.

4) I do feel that the game was a bit too heavy on flavor. Had a scum team not had someone who was a flavor expert on their side, it would have been near impossible to survive. I appreciate the atmosphere created by flavor, but imo it should not be a handicap for the uninitiated. Seacore mentioned Percy's SA games. I think those are a good example of something that's flavor heavy, but you don't have to be familiar with it at all to do well. Just a thought for future games.

5) I think I played OK this game. I came in as a favor to MacavityLock because he's a cool guy and I liked his Wire game. I had a lot of pages to read at a time when I was super busy, so I basically did not read the whole game before I started posting. Mac was obviously the flavor expert of our hydra, so I let him do a healthy majority of the posting. What I think I did well was boost Mac's spirits at a time when the Greyjoys were starting to overwhelm us. Even though I wasn't fully up to date with the game, my strategy was basically to come in be very vocal and appear to be busting some heads, which I think worked somewhat well. It got suspicion off of us during those earlier days. I also came back later (I was actually posting much sooner in our hydra QT than I ever posted in thread) and used my earlier stance on Unsight to our benefit. Mina was correct in her assessment that I got away with this because we were a hydra. Honestly, the town should not have allowed it. We really had to flip on Unsight at that point, so I created a fake statement about the arguments Mac and I were having. For future reference, a hydra that contradicts itself needs to be lynched asap. They are probably lying scum or VIs (and I hope I'm not considered the latter too much). In terms of what I would change about my play, not too much. I could have been more involved at times than I was, but I was comfortable playing more of a co-pilot role for Mac. Oh, and I wish I would have gotten the Mikujin lynch I wanted .

I think everything else has been pretty much covered. Hopefully I see some of you around again sometime soon.

[Eddard Stark]

I dunno, I tend to think knowing the flavour should prove at least some advantage to players? I mean it helped Maclock in that he could provide a fakeclaim really quick, but apart from that most fakeclaims would have been provided anyway with the relevant flavour via us . It does help in claiming and in general I guess i.e picking a role for a character but I thought we threw in enough things to subvert that (Greatjon as BP, Littlefinger as namecop), I don't know if it's something I'd really cut down too much on though. The ice and fire wiki is always there, I'll have more of a think of ways to get around that maybe without it detrimentally affecting the atmosphere of the game.

Agreed with most of the other things you say VP, set-up was town balanced, but if there's one thing I've seen recently it's that even in those scenarios town find loads and loads of ways to fuck it up.

I think this game does re-inforce the argument that a town is only as strong as it's weaker players, especially if they play so erattically they're impossible to read.

Oh also for those paying attention from the mini, (Mina spotted this) some of the roles were identical to claims in the mini (zorazter fakeclaimed 2-shot bp, raivann claimed 1-shot dayvig)

[Eddard Stark]

^ faraday

[Eddard Stark]

I don't think a town hand is that dangerous though, I think people overthought it. A double vote doesn't make that much difference, especially with 27 players.

[Thor665]

I actually appreciated the in-jokes from the mini - once Mina pointed them out. Funny stuff. Will be eager to play in/follow the second just to see if Mac's claim shows up as an actual role (plus that assassin guy might show up again and last more then a single phase, yes?)

@VP - thanks for the kind words. The better I get at Mafia the more I realize how little I know. I have realized I tend to be strong initially and sort of self-destruct in WIFOM later which is something I'm trying to figure out how to fight (that's why some players were picking up on my 'shutting down' towards the end). Clearly that's not a good solution, but I won't know how my new solution works till I get to another endgame situation. I am kicking myself for giving up on my gut ML is scum feel from early/mid game. If I'd played the game straight with all my initial reads I would have done slightly better then I did (though MoI would have won probably) Work in progress, thanks for the thoughts.

[VP Baltar]

I dunno, I tend to think knowing the flavour should prove at least some advantage to players? I mean it helped Maclock in that he could provide a fakeclaim really quick, but apart from that most fakeclaims would have been provided anyway with the relevant flavour via us . It does help in claiming and in general I guess i.e picking a role for a character but I thought we threw in enough things to subvert that (Greatjon as BP, Littlefinger as namecop), I don't know if it's something I'd really cut down too much on though. The ice and fire wiki is always there, I'll have more of a think of ways to get around that maybe without it detrimentally affecting the atmosphere of the game.

It could have been the players faults too. There were people really geeking out on the scumhunting for flavor related reasons and I was just lost. It was like,

"OOOOOO, don't you think so-and-so could be a such-and-such!"
"Idk, why don't we lynch who is acting scummy?"
"No effing way, I'm voting because the name they claim doesn't match what I think their role would be based on the book"
"..."

I agree that you don't want to compromise the atmosphere of your game though. Just giving my two pence. When I mod, I intentionally put major differences from the source material so players quickly realize that kind of logic is fail and they should be playing the game of mafia.


And, lol, yes town's definitely do find a way to bone themselves. It's probably because in a large game you are thinking about weeding out the herd for the first few days and the scum are meanwhile plotting their strategy. Larges are so unpredictable in that sense because the game can completely turn on its head around the Day 3 or 4 mark. This is probably why I don't mod larges and I have an epic losing rate in them.


@Thor - It just takes time. I went through the same phase. You have to find that right level of gut/case play that fits you personally. Going too far in the extreme of gut is usually disaster too. I wouldn't feel too bad, as it's just a game and as long as you take something away to improve your play, then it's been useful. I would definitely play with you again in the future.

[Faraday]

"OOOOOO, don't you think so-and-so could be a such-and-such!"
"Idk, why don't we lynch who is acting scummy?"
"No effing way, I'm voting because the name they claim doesn't match what I think their role would be based on the book"
"..."

Now THAT I understand. I mean Raivann claimed vig day 1, I get that it matched his character but he was pretty scummy and probably should have been lynched (it was a bad claim anyway, vig generally is for scum). I think most mods intentionally put in stuff to make things tricky, Sandor Clegane being town was one of those too as was Littlefinger. So yeah, that's fair enough I guess.

[Faraday]

Oh and thanks to all the players who stuck with the game and also the replacements who helped out. We were pretty good for the most part on flakes, especially for a large game.