California Trilogy: City of Angels - On Camera (Game Over)

[Thok]

I also don't think I ever directly advocated inciting modkill through inactivity, I merely placed it on the table.

Not that scum could actually mention this, but the following rule is relevant.

9. If you are modkilled for breaking the rules of the game, you lose.

In particular, deliberately getting modkilled in this game is by definition going against your win condition.

I do think mith should have made a brief post in the game reminding people of this; when I sent him a PM about this issue, he reminded us of this rule and told us he wasn't going to interfere, but it's not like scum could reasonably make an argument defending a person who was "clearly" going to be die and turn up scum no matter what we did. ("Clearly" because our perception was reasonable; mith may suggest otherwise, but there wasn't that much difference between CKD's play in this game and Commodore Amazing's play in Verbose Mafia 2.)

Agreed. We screwed up on the choices for the last scene so I'm very sorry about that.

Of the mistakes that you made, the choice of who to put in scene 7 was minor; a real mistake would have been putting Starkiss/Shadowlurker/(Exactly one of me/Goofballs) offstage. Town was never going to get more than two of the following four things (a cop, Zufaul in endgame, SL in endgame, learning both Goofballs and me were scum)

[VP Baltar]

Getting two of those in endgame would have been more than sufficent to win for the town if you ask me.

[Thok]

Getting two of those in endgame would have been more than sufficent to win for the town if you ask me.

You got two of those in the endgame (Zufaul in endgame and learning both me and Goofballs were both scum.)

[VP Baltar]

Yeah, you're right. duh. I guess a different combination might have been useful. Zu was pretty much not helping anything because everyone knew he was the AP long before that anyhow. Having an active player like SL or a cop to determine hewitt's alignment would have made a world of difference, imo.

[curiouskarmadog]

I felt both the town, and ckd himself, handled his information rather poorly.

now I am really unhappy.

mith, please explain exactly how I handled the information poorly? Deciding to remain town, how should I have handled the information? I was completely up front and honest, are you suggesting I should have done that differently? I interested why I was singled out in particular here.

[zu_Faul]

zu_Faul: I didn't intend to post it there. Tbh I think deliberately breaking the rules is something neither town nor scum would do, but if anyone would deliberately break the rules in that context it would be scum trying to mislead the town and happy to cop a strike for it. I hope none of you think I deliberately posted on-stage, it was an accident, as I said.

I did not want to imply that. Sorry if it sounded like I accused you of cheating.


@VP Baltar: Well, I told you hewitt was town...

[curiouskarmadog]

I felt both the town, and ckd himself, handled his information rather poorly.

now I am really unhappy.

mith, please explain exactly how I handled the information poorly? Deciding to remain town, how should I have handled the information? I was completely up front and honest, are you suggesting I should have done that differently? I interested why I was singled out in particular here.

also curious, sorry if you alread answered this....you said this was random, what would have occured if mafia had been the advocate instead of me?

[mith]

pj/ckd: The ckd message would only have been sent in the event that both advocates were innocent, and only to the advocate not meant to drive.

I said that the assignment of actors to roles was random, and that the roles for the scene 1 advocates were predetermined (thus, the alignments for the advocates were random). I never ruled out advocates (or anyone else, for that matter) receiving additional information. I never understood the "mith said it was random, so ckd must be lying" argument, pj.

ckd: The main thing I had in mind was you offering yourself up as the lynch - that's only rarely a good idea. You might have been lynched eventually anyway, I don't know, but it felt like the town only really started to seriously revist the idea after your suggestion. I think it was compounded by everyone (including you) first assuming that the SMG was the PNIA - and given that you were in the previous game (with no Zodiac Killer), and that you were the one who received the SMG message, I would have expected you would have been the most inclined to consider other possibilities (/ask me a bunch of questions trying to get a non-"I can't answer that" response).

pj: ~shrug~ It's not even that I like players figuring things out in my setups (if I want that, I'll probably run some sort of Mish Mash game); it's that with the Mr. Grey trilogy, part of the point was that there were some things that weren't

meant

to be figured out, that the "obvious" answers were often incorrect... and that ultimately, those answers don't really matter when it comes to catching scum. Continuing with ckd as an example, there was ample opportunity for players to step up and say "Hey, ckd looks town, I don't understand what's going on with the SMG thing but we shouldn't lynch him" - and in fact at least a couple of players did so, and he survived to scene 6. I don't think his lynch was in any way inevitable - the town just made the wrong decision, helped by one of the scum.

As for Talilan - I think it was clear that the post wasn't deliberate, and I decided that modkilling them for it would just make things worse. That's mostly a flaw in the execution of the game. I didn't have any way to

prevent

players from posting in the On Camera thread (short of opening yet another forum just for that thread, which would have been excessive but maybe I should have done it anyway). Four different players posted On Camera by mistake, and had I decided at the beginning that it was a modkillable offense the game would probably have died just from that.

I don't

like

that they made the modkill suggestion, and in fact this is something I hope to address in my ruleset next time I run a game. It has no place in the game of Mafia. That said, merely suggesting something like that was not against the rules, and it was clearly a terrible plan - so again, I didn't feel it warranted a modkill.

[petroleumjelly]

never understood the "mith said it was random, so ckd must be lying" argument, pj.

Sigh. One last time, then.

Assume the Advocates were chosen randomly, and CKD claims "if I am followed, I will join the Screen Mafia Guild."

1.)

This leads to the natural assumption that the Screen Mafia Guild already exists, because you cannot "join" something that is nonexistant.

2.)

This means that it was possible for a member of the SMG to be given an offer to join the SMG.

This is the first snag that convinced me that CKD was lying; why give a member of the SMG the chance to join the group they are already in? That makes no sense. The only way to avoid that would have been a non-random assignment, which I would not believe.

3.)

If there was another scum group -- such as what happened in this game -- it seemed absurd to me that you would actually give them a chance to join a different scum group. That simply struck me as being multiple levels of ridiculous: why should a scum group

ever

expect for one of their own members to switch to a different alignment?

So basically, regardless of whether the SMG or some other scum group existed, I would have lynched whoever claimed CKD's information solely because you told the town that you chose that Advocate randomly.

Summary: It made no sense to me that you would ever make that offer to a member of any scum team.

~

You basically wiggle out of this by:

pj/ckd: The ckd message would only have been sent in the event that both advocates were innocent, and only to the advocate not meant to drive.

I'm sorry mith, but this is flapdoodle. The Advocates were random, but the consequences of following them were going to change depending on the Advocates? That is the ultimate "I gotcha!" from a Mod. Well done on completely fooling me.

That is the kind of weasely wording that I do not like to have to deal with as a player, and this is why I will probably avoid your games in the future. I can understand and appreciate the constant "I can't answer that" responses to some extent, but this game hit the point where that answer became

distinctly

unamusing.

[mith]

The Advocates were random, but the consequences of following them were going to change depending on the Advocates?

The Advocate information in that scene was "Who is supposed to drive?". Both Advocates received this information. Both Advocates would have received that information no matter their alignments. The purpose of the Advocates was to provide information (complete, or partial, depending on the scene) as to the

Outcome

(in the Good/Bad, +1/-1 sense).

Perhaps it was misleading to include additional (non-Advocate) information in a PM to an Advocate; perhaps I should have put it in a separate PM. If that's the case, then I apologize - it wasn't my intention to muddle what "Advocate" meant in that way. Other than that, though... there was an "event" (the sending of the SMG portion of that PM) which was triggered under certain conditions (which happened to coincide with the assignment of roles to actors) - not a common mechanic, but not unheard of either.

Anyway, if you want to avoid my games on the basis of a mechanic that even I admit I wasn't happy with, and that certainly wouldn't be seen in a non-Mr. Grey game anyway, that is of course your decision to make. I'm not trying to convince you that it was fair, or that you should play in my super-awesome next game (since I don't have any plans for modding anytime soon). I'm just trying to understand the complaint so I can take care to avoid potential problems in the future.

[curiouskarmadog]

for the record, I didnt want to go to endgame. I wanted to win the game and no one was believing my information. I felt that I SHOULD have been lynched for two reasons. 1.) no SMG had flipped and with every non SMG death I was looking guiltier and guilter. No doubt that if I made it to end game, I would have been an easy lynch (if someone disagrees please say something). 2.) I felt that town needed to know that the information I had was the truth BEFORE going to end game...

what could I have done differently?

I presented cases on Star and Orbits....no one was listening.

[curiouskarmadog]

Also, I enjoyed the game on the most part. Scum played a pretty good game. I just felt that if the information I was given day 1 was not there, this game would have ended much differently.

[Kise]

5 noms for VP! Pooky had my sides hurting also.

BTW... as a fervent Anonymous supporter during the war...

Not so anonymous any more.

I'm actually pretty surprised that Starkiss lasted as long as they did.

If you check the QT, you'll see I strategize a bit for what should be done after I'm lynched rather than what can be done while I'm alive. If Zito didn't accidentally hammer Tal, then I was sure to finally get what I deserved. Thanks to what happened with the numbers in the previous scene, Talilan wanted to leave "liars" off-camera with SL, so I was not even a lynch option. I agree with CKD that with him, Thesp, zu and myself off-camera, I wasn't getting lynched there -- not with the mystery surrounding SMG. Before that, I was opposed to the Gaspar lynch but dram hammered him (Gaspar didn't believe us to be scum so I believed he was one of our scum-mates). I think the Gaspar situation was when I was really being put under heavy suspicion. Before, if I recall, I was suspicious for my belief in the 3rd party that KY Krew was talking about and also not voting him. Speaking of which, KY called me assistant director by mistake and I thought that was a hint that he was my partner. In reality, none of the Sci' knew about me.

After a while, I have to admit that I no longer wanted to be careful about not lynching one of my own. I said to dram that we should just scumhunt and lynch whoever -- except DAB since that was the only buddy we knew of. I think it was Talilan that mentioned my 1st off-camera vote was against them in Scene 4.

It got semi-frustrating trying to figure out whether I was being put under suspicion by buddies or not because I wasn't certain of how to retaliate/reply (wouldn't want to make my partners look too bad). When Gaspar flipped innocent, I couldn't believe it due to the support I got from him/them. It was suspenseful at times waiting on flips. Even hewitt had me thinking we were partners after a few scenes where he and DAB (who rode my nuts when I first came off-camera, lol) backed off of me. Back when I had that page-long battle against Tal and they admitted to second guessing whether I could be scum (and something about everyone agreeing I'm scum so that I'm not lynched), I even figured that hydra was with me. Any time someone backed off of me, I made the same assumption, so my stances changed occasionally.

The only person I was definite was

not

a buddy of mine was CKD due to his advocate PM. I thought Sci' were 3rd party and the SMG were the main scum, so this also influenced me to be careless about who I voted for. I played the sideline more often than not because, in my (and maybe dram's) head, I had to figure out who was likely our partners, who was likely SMG, and who was innocent.

It does feel good to have experience as the traitor-role (a surviving one, at that) and could have been more fun if I had more time to invest in reading instead of skimming. There were times where I thought Goof was tipping me off as to who the other Sci' members were (when she'd claim someone as town in the same sentence as me), but, obviously, that wasn't the case.

[Kise]

In fact, when hewitt, CKD & Tal mentioned (pre-scene) that they found me suspicious, I thought they were SMG ganging up on me -- if you remember, I said CKD is already scum that wanted town points by letting panzer drive scene 1. DAB backed off of Gaspar, and both were saying they found me town so this also screwed with my head. Then when hewitt and Tal didn't pursue my lynch, I really started pulling my hair out.

[Talitha]

Yeah. I would have been incredibly surprised to get modkilled for making a suggestion, any suggestion -- no matter how illegal or unethical the idea was. This wasn't a newbie game. (Also, as ortolan alluded to, in mafia it's near impossible to say whether someone is truly advocating something, or merely presenting it for players' consideration and discussion... and the latter, at least, should be perfectly allowable.).

A modkill for posting in the wrong thread would have been more understandable to me as, even though it was an accident, it breached a well-understood rule. I'm glad there was some understanding towards this though as mith pointed out, several people did it (though not with the same game-affecting consequences as our post).

CKD: I don't have a problem with how you played for the most part - I saw you were really trying to do your best for the town. But where I think you could have done better was where you were very forceful about wanting to be lynched. You guaranteed your lynch by claiming scum, etc. I think you could have offered to be the lynch, even argued for it, but what you did took away any choice/options the town had regarding you.

[Talitha]

Wish we could have seen what happened if we stuck to the original plan of lynching you and Hewitt 1 & 2, Kise Probably we would have been #3, but you never know. Yours and Hewitt's flips might have given us some cred.

[Thesp]

Wish we could have seen what happened if we stuck to the original plan of lynching you and Hewitt 1 & 2, Kise Probably we would have been #3, but you never know. Yours and Hewitt's flips might have given us some cred.

I feel like we could have gotten MO if we'd lynched hewitt and StarKiss first, as long as you didn't keep your campaign to lynch me. I think lynching you was our biggest mistake in the endgame, though I understand why it happened. Oh well.

[Talitha]

Yeah, it is possible. In a Thesp, MO, Talilan endgame we probably would have gone and at least looked at MO again. I was less sure of you being scum than of StarKiss (the night we got lynched I was writing a post, still trying to get StarKiss lynched... then I had an issue, lost the post and gave up).


Just saw this:

Quote:
9. If you are modkilled for breaking the rules of the game, you lose.

I do think mith should have made a brief post in the game reminding people of this; when I sent him a PM about this issue, he reminded us of this rule and told us he wasn't going to interfere

Thanks, I'm sure someone would have found this rule if there had been any serious consideration of the mod-kill idea.
I think mith was right - I prefer mods to be hands-off wrt in-game discussions and not to interfere unless necessary.

Also wanted to say for the record that even though mith may think that such strategies of trying to get mod-killed have no place in mafia, I disagree with the generalisation. If after careful consideration I come to the conclusion that my death would really help my team, (and especially if mod-kills are a game function that are stated in the rules or my role PM) then I would contact the mod and ask if they would mind a lot if I deliberately draw a mod-kill. I've done this before in a DP game.

[petroleumjelly]

Anyway, if you want to avoid my games on the basis of a mechanic that even I admit I wasn't happy with, and that certainly wouldn't be seen in a non-Mr. Grey game anyway, that is of course your decision to make. I'm not trying to convince you that it was fair, or that you should play in my super-awesome next game (since I don't have any plans for modding anytime soon). I'm just trying to understand the complaint so I can take care to avoid potential problems in the future.

Well, a big part of the reason is that this is the second game (that I know of) where you allowed for alignment swaps. And that other game (MeMeMeet) you ran under the mith account, not Mr. Grey.

But overall, I think I'm just getting old and grumpy. The solution to my problems is probably to stop playing large games, period. That seems to be the breeding ground for the strangest roles and mechanics... *shrug*

I prefer mods to be hands-off wrt in-game discussions and not to interfere unless necessary.

Here I disagree. When an in-game discussion touches something (i) in the rules, or (ii) something that should be in the rules but is not in the rules [or is not clear in the rules], then I tend to remind the players of the rules. If the players are not showing a clear understanding or appreciation of the rules, then it is the mod's responsibility to clear up that confusion. Rules are not in place to be ignored or misunderstood.

~

Also, I think I will point out that I am not

trying

to be contrarian or a negative Nelly, but I know as a mod I always appreciate negative commentary / constructive criticism after games I run so that (i) I have a sense of things

I

can do better in the future, and (ii) so if anybody would like to use something from a set-up I run they can read the post-game commentary and decide whether or not they want to make any adjustments.

[Talitha]

We'll have to disagree then PJ I strongly believe you should be very careful when modding that your reactions and interjections don't introduce extra information or change the course of the game. By jumping into in-game discussion of rules you are likely to display an assumption that those who are discussing the rules are genuine and/or you may interfere with someone's secret plan or trap because you didn't see what they were trying to do. Best, if possible, to make sure your written rules are clear and exhaustive and then stay out of it until asked.

[petroleumjelly]

Well, in this case both Thok and I were asking about the intentional modkilling strategy, and apparently mith pointed both of us to Rule 9, but chose not to clarify that in-thread. I think that qualifies as "until asked." If two players (regardless of whether or not I was dead) are asking about the exact same thing, I think it is pretty clear the mod should be stepping in to clarify.

[Talitha]

But he did clarify, to the players who wanted and asked for clarification. If I'd wanted clarification I would've asked too.

At the time i was asking about it, the only people's opinions I cared about were the other living players. If I'm not breaking rules, I should be free to discuss whatever game-related thing I want with those people without outside interference.

[petroleumjelly]

I suppose I am of the mentality that all players should understand and appreciate all rules at all times. Otherwise there is not a point in having rules.

[Talitha]

Must be a different brain-style thing. Does this ideal hold true for you in real life as well? Is that why you're studying law?

[petroleumjelly]

Eh, I constantly question why I am studying the law. But there are far too many laws for everybody to seriously be aware of them all.

This discussion is really on the subject of games -- it would be like playing a board game and having two players going "well, can we do this?" and having the person who

explained

the game sitting right by the table and not saying anything so as "not to interfere." Explaining the

rules

is not interfering with the game -- it is simply putting the game back on track.