WW Isocerne City [Recruiting]

[BobTheFerret]

Bladescape was killed. He was The Observer. He did not hold the box.

Night 4 ends. Day 5 begins.
Expect Day 5 to end on Saturday, July 23, 5:00PM Eastern Standard Time (USA).

AUTOLYNCHES!
It's starting to get late in the game, and there are several inactive players. Therefore, at the end of the day today, any player with no day vote within the past 3 in-game days will be autolynched. Thank you for your cooperation.

[Lex-Kat]

I have a feeling that Gray Mage has the box.

[banjo1985]

Really? Fair enough, Gray Mage for me.

[Lord Loss]

Gray Mage sounds like our best bet.

[Zjoot]

Gray Mage it is.

[bladescape]

Needless to say... I should've seen that one coming.

[Tilt]

No use fighting a foregone conclusion. Gray Mage.

[BobTheFerret]

Gray Mage was killed. He was a Councilman. He did not hold the box.

Day 5 ends. Night 5 begins.
Expect Day 5 to end on Wednesday, July 27, 9:30PM Eastern Standard Time (USA).

REMAINING PLAYERS AFTER DAY KILL AND AUTOLYNCHES!

Lex-Kat
Banjo1985
Lord Loss
The Grimmace
Tilt
Orzel

Anyone not listed is now deceased! Unless I messed up, that is. In which case, kindly let me know via PM.

[BobTheFerret]

The Grimmace was killed. He was a Councilman. He did not hold the box.

Night 5 ends. Day 6 begins.
Expect Day 6 to end on Sunday, July 30, 5:00PM Eastern Standard Time (USA).

[Zjoot]

Rats! I was so close, too.

[Lex-Kat]

So there's five of us left. Question is, who do we want to keep for the end?

My vote, let's get rid of Orzel.

[banjo1985]

Councilman Banjo finally puts his little green stress ball away in one of the volumous pockets of his robe. He steeples his fingers and grins a predatory grin.

"I think it's time we stopped playing around, Lex-kat, I'm sorry but its time for you to go."

[Lord Loss]

As she walked into Councilman Loss's chambers, she couldn't help but gasp. The walls were covered with bloody origami figures. Councilman Loss sat at his desk, looking at some sort of box.

His chair swiveled around, and he faced her, a mischevious smile on his face. Upon the box, the words Make Your Own Origami were written, accompanied by a cariety of origami figures in a variety of colors.

"Do you like them, Councilman Alexa? Queried the madman, pointing at the origami figures affixed upon the walls. Each had a name written upon it. She could see only a few of them, but each one was one of the dead Councilors. "Do they remind you of anything?"

She frowned. She had no idea what he meant...

And then she remembered. The little boy making Origami in the Citadel. On his own. Sobbing away. Why had he been crying? She remembered having made him a hot cocoa.

It's starting to come back now, isn't it? It's all starting to make sense.

The boy... he was Lewis. The child of Arianna and Reever. The Councilmen she had sentenced to death. She gazed up at Councilman Loss. Councilman Lewis...

Grinning at her, Loss stood up, his face glowing triumphantly.Do you remember now? How my parents died for a crime they didn't commit?

She shook her head. The child's parents had been traitors. She was sure of it.

"I think it was Councilor Xan that did it. I think you refused to see it because you were friends. I think you knew, to some degree at least, that my parents were innocent. I think everyone knew. You're a murderer, Alexa. And the Council doesn't tolerate murderers"

Lewis handed Alexa an origami figure. A crane. Like the other ones, though, it wasn't new. The paper was old and tear-speckeled and the folds were innacurate, as though it was made long ago by trembling hands.

Councilman Loss drew his pistol and smiled at Alexa. His look was torn between sympathy and hatred, joy and self loathing.

[Tilt]

Closing the door of his office behind him, Councilman Litt's look of concern gives way very briefly to a sly grin, then to an expression of sincere sadness. He gestures to an optical sensor, and a viewscreen brightens up the room, showing the smiling face of Councilwoman Alexia as it records his message.

"I'm afraid this is the end of the road for us, Lex."

He puts his hands sheepishly behind his back and looks to the side, away from the view screen. The stylish thing to do at this point would be to proudly twirl his moustache, or to take a deep drag on a cigarette and disappear mysteriously into the night, but Litt is clean-shaven, a non-smoker, and not very comfortable playing the villain.

"I couldn't possibly ask for forgiveness, but I will try to make you understand me. You see, when Councilman Ramsus first approached us, he was not the first person to have approached me. What was I to do? If I'd refused his offer, I'm sure the three of you would have had me killed within a day or two."

"So instead I played my part. I became a mole. I watched as one alliance was dismantled, while I stayed true to another. These were not circumstances that called for heroics or high morality. I'll try my best to see to it that such circumstances arise again, but these last few days I've had my hands full just saving my own skin." Again he faces the viewscreen. "You must understand -- I am not a man with a great lust for power. I'm just a man with a great fear of death."

"Goodbye."

He gestures again, and the room goes dark.

[Xanmyral]

-Snip-

((

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<= Awed

^
ll
Ignore the ghost if you wish. Had too after reading this.

))

[bladescape]

*Snip*

Knew it was either you or Lex after I died. I was confident Gray Mage didn't have the box, and he was the only other one who would've wanted to kill me at that time.

Your other team couldn't have an Observer floating around, could they?

Just calling it now, Lord Loss/Banjo/Tilt has the box. Banjo, Lord Loss and Tilt are teammates. Lex dies today, Orzel in the night. Banjo, Tilt and Loss are the winners.

EDIT:Lord Loss unlikely, Banjo and Tilt most likely, I'd guess Banjo but I may be wrong.

[Lex-Kat]

Betrayers!! To be honest, I always thought you had the box, Tilt.

[Lord Loss]

I have had the box for most of the game, although Banjo started with it. I am also an Eavesdropper.

Tilt is the common sense of the team. He came up with lots of plans and told me when my ideas were not the best. Which was most of the time.

[BobTheFerret]

Sorry if you guys were hoping to wrap this one up yourselves... I figured I could at least not skip this RP.

Alexia stood and watched as Councilman Loss stood up from his box, drew his gun. Normally, she would have insisted on her title. But she knew that it didn't much matter now. And she knew, in the end, that he would win. But there was still some time left for her, she thought, feeling the faint breeze of a vent playing across her hair. She built this place, and it wasn't ready to abandon her yet.

So the fans roared louder; vents closed all over the facility as a maelstrom of air filled the room. The cranes on the wall took flight, flocking to Councilman Loss as if they were pigeons looking for a meal. And so as Councilman Loss struggled, Alexia ran for the door. Down the hall, and out of the building, as Loss sat back down and with the press of a button cleared the cranes from the air. He opened the laptop screen on the box, cracked his fingers and settled down to work. As he activated his control panel, he called the other councillors. It was time to bring things to an end.

When Alexia made it outside of the building, she gasped. The air outside the building was filled with police robots, hanging lazily in flight and buzzing softly as they formed two walls across the plaza. They seemed almost to be playing a dirge on their rotors as they flew. But the exit at the far end of the plaza was still open, so Alexia kept running; she wasn't surprised, however, when an autovan rammed itself into the archway ahead of her. She turned; Councilmen Litt and Banjo stood in the doorway of the City Hub.

"It's time, Alexia," called Banjo. "Time to die," he said, drawing his weapon.
"You can strike at the machine once or twice, Alexia," added Councilman Litt, "But sooner or later the game will end." He slid his own gun, an ornate pistol, out of his checkered jacket. "Game over, Alexia. Thanks for playing. I'll miss you," he said, as one lone robot separated from the pack.

The robots slowly huddled around Alexia, buzzing mournfully. She looked at them through cracked eyes and smiled as they hooked themselves around her body. She could see Loss's robot, the one with the smoking gun, hanging regretfully in the air in front of her; it watched silently as the other robots picked her up and carried her away. Out, through the evening, out through the city; she saw the place she helped create slip into darkness from high above. When she died, the robots flew her body out over the harbor and laid her to rest in the sea.

They gathered around a table in Councilman Loss' destroyed office. Loss, Banjo, and Litt. The last councilmen. The only councilmen, at the center of the city now indisputably theirs.

"What do we do now?"
"Will we go back to the way it was? Follow the plan?"
"No," said Loss, as he sat at the head of the table as the lights dimmed. "It's time, now, that we made some changes."

Lex-Kat was lynched. Orzel was autolynched.
Day 6 ends. Game over.
Victory Lord Loss, Tilt, Banjo1985.
Thank you all for playing!

I think I've mentioned this before, but this game is sort of a side project to a web-based roleplaying game that I'm building. I'd still really appreciate it if any of you all want to help play test it and provide feedback; it can be found in my status or at its website at http://isocerne.appspot.com/. PM me if you want to talk about it.

Now, for feedback. It'd be nice if you could let me know...

1. How you felt about the game as a whole
2. How you felt about your own role and amount of power in the game
3. How you felt about the game balance, and
4. How you would want to change it in the future

I'll fill that one out myself, later.

Once again, thank you all for playing! I don't think I was really a very good moderator, but it's been excellent playing with you all.

[Tilt]

Thanks for the game, everyone! Nice closing narration.

Answers to questionnaire:

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1) I had a lot of fun with it. I really like the "shades of gray" concept where there are no good guys and no bad guys, and you choose your own team.

2) I was the baner. My role might as well have been "immune to night kills", because this to me was a game about looking out for number one, so I self-baned every night. On the other hand, just because it didn't involve any real decisions for me doesn't mean it was a bad role -- it did affect my play, I didn't need to be nervous about the box holder knowing my identity. If it's desirable to see people baning other people, there should probably be a non-self-baner instead of or in addition to the Jammer as currently written.

3) Before the rule change it was probably a bit too easy on the people having the box. After it, though, I think properly organized non-box-holder networks should really have been able to root out Lord Loss, what with Observers preventing box transfer, Inspectors being buffed, and every player pair becoming a sort of mini-Inspector. However, the nerf really locks the box down tightly and I don't think starting the game with it in effect would be very fun. I think the unboxed players should instead be boosted in other ways without removing much box mobility.

4) These are assuming pre-change observers, so they're other ways to boost non-box-holders.

Off the top of my head I'd propose some sort of way to speak to address all players pseudonymously, through the narrator. I'd imagine the information-gathering roles (Inspector, Eavesdropper, Observer) occasionally discovered information they really wanted to share with the whole game (i.e., "Lord Loss has the box" if you're not cooperating with him and you're not well networked enough to bring him down on your own), but claiming such a role publicly would've been a death sentence, because there's no innocent majority to protect people who give information. The way I imagine it, you'd be assigned a pseudonym and you could speak freely under that name in narrator posts (by PMing the message to the narrator). Of course, lying, fake-claiming, counter-claiming, and so on would all be allowed, expected, and encouraged, but hopefully this would get a rumour mill going that wasn't really present in the game thread. I think this would be a boost to everyone not holding the box, after all, they're in the majority.

As a balance tweak, perhaps the tiebreaker should go in the direction of the people taking away the box instead of the people holding onto it.

I also think it wouldn't be a bad idea to be strict about autolynches. If important roles are tied up among the inactives, that hurts the game (especially innocents, as box-holders are likely to be active) -- they should instead pass on to an active sleeper ASAP.

I think I'll write up an after-action report at some point, this was a fun game in terms of behind-the-scenes decisions made. For now, here's the QT of the Ramsus/Xanmyral/Lex-Kat/Tilt/Bladescape group. (Lord Loss, Banjo, and I communicated by PM.)

Any chance we could get a bit of an infodump from an omniscient narrator perspective, i.e., what the roles of the autolynched players were, who the sleepers were, when they ran out, and so on?

[bladescape]

Brilliant game. I would've been able to work out the box holder if it hadn't've been for Tilt's betrayal.

On that note, why was it that my teams kept dying? Seriously, I had the worst luck with getting teammates, not that I didn't know Ramsus would probably have half-a-dozen. I'm assuming Reinholdt had quite a few as well.

Questionaire:

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1.Oh! The intruige! You never could trust your team, and trusting Tilt and Lex enough to tell them I was the observer... was my downfall. I knew the reason as soon as I died.

However, the on the plus side, the double faced lies that everyone told was rather brilliant. I could go at length, but really. Twas fun all.

2. Annoying only in the regard that despite narrowing it down to TWO people before I died... Meh. It was a cool role to have after starting as just a villager.

3.Could use some more balance, but Tilt has better ideas on this.

4.Uhhh... Could I be the Jammer next time? =P

Brilliant Job, Tilt. I'd already worked out Banjo and LordLoss were teammates, but I'd managed to convince myself that Grimmace was the third one.

Hence why I actually revealed my role. Epic fail from my part.

[Tilt]

You know, I actually argued against killing you off that quickly, though in retrospect I think it was the right thing to do. You were mostly targeted not for your role but because you admitted to being in contact with another active player, Gray Mage, that we had no control over or information about -- we wanted to hurt as many networks as possible, and you were in two (paired with Lex, paired with Gray Mage). At every level I sort of had to assume that you were lying about no longer being friendly with Gray Mage.

We were paranoid about other observers and still wouldn't move the box even after we killed you off, so even though it felt great to have eliminated an observer, we didn't actually get much use out of it.

[bladescape]

You know, I actually argued against killing you off that quickly, though in retrospect I think it was the right thing to do. You were mostly targeted not for your role but because you admitted to being in contact with another active player, Gray Mage, that we had no control over or information about -- we wanted to hurt as many networks as possible, and you were in two (paired with Lex, paired with Gray Mage). At every level I sort of had to assume that you were lying about no longer being friendly with Gray Mage.

We were paranoid about other observers and still wouldn't move the box even after we killed you off, so even though it felt great to have eliminated an observer, we didn't actually get much use out of it.

Make that TWO mistakes. I could've kept the Jir and GM network and my new network going by not admitting I was in it to you, and continuing to work with them.

I was just so annoyed at Jir and Gray Mage for planning to use me as the extra body to be killed off.

[Gray Mage]

1)It was fun, although I wasn't able to dedicate as much time for this game as I probably should've.

2)Villager in a game that everyone looks out for himself. Needless to say, there wasn't much that I could do besides trying to plot, which is hard when you have no information whatsoever (no night abilities and day lynches not really helping find out the box means I was kind of blind the whole game). In the end, I kind ended in jir's group in name only, because at most I only replied to his PM's with generic comments.

3) The game wasn't very balanced. I agree with Tilt's evaluation of needed changes, though I think it'd be hard to trully organize a network to root out the box holder, but I could be wrong.

4) On the top of my head, have more information gathering roles.

@Blade: I actually didn't really plan anything in this game. So, to make up for that, I'll be sure to propely plan to use you as extra body to be killed off some other time.

[Xanmyral]

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How you felt about the game as a whole: It was good, loved the intrigue. Also teaches me to not be so trusting.
How you felt about your own role and amount of power in the game: I liked that I had a role, but I never was able to use it. It's the role that only really helps if I have the box, or know who has the box. Which is what is suppose to happen, so no real discrepancies here.
How you felt about the game balance, and: Good.
How you would want to change it in the future: It was fine, I think. Personally though I was still a little iffy on the rules though.

Tilt, you are one magnificent backstabber. You make me proud that I died, since I figured it was a random bandwagon. You get major props, and an internet from me.

[banjo1985]

Hehe, we won, good show Lord Loss and Tilt!

After starting with the box I really didn't do much. I sent PM's to a few random people, essentially threatening them with early night kills if they didn't support me as the box holder in the night vote. That got me Lord Loss and Tilt, and when it looked like I'd be lynched Day 1 I moved the box on to them. Since then we just popped off networkers and kept our eye on things, Tilt really masterminded everything.

I didn't think threatening people Day 1 would work, but I at least tried to target players I didn't think would try to betray me. Turned out it worked, so all good in the end.

As for the questionnaire:

1) Yeah it was good fun as the original boxholder in a network, but the amount of non-participation in the game limited what can be learnt from it. A few late narrations early game took the interest from a lot of players, leaving us with a reasonably easy path to victory. Who knows how it would have turned out if everyone participated?

2) The box holder is awesome, it's a bit like having your hand hovering over the big red button! I didn't even get to use it before you all tried to lynch me though, so after I passed it on I was essentially just a networked villager.

3) As I said above, hard to know with so many inactive players, its very hard to see how the roles would interact. Run again with an active player base and a tighter narration schedule, I think we'd get a better idea.

4) I like the setting, and I like the transferrable night kill dynamic. I'm not that great on rule changes, so I'll leave that to others to play around with!

[super dark33]

When will next game begin?

[Zjoot]

You mean I wasted every single night voting for Banjo to keep the box! I really should have been more active in this game...

[BobTheFerret]

You mean I wasted every single night voting for Banjo to keep the box! I really should have been more active in this game...

Actually, it'd be nice if you could tell me why you did that, 'cause I honestly have no idea. It's been confusing me the whole game...

[Tilt]

That was confusing us, too. Lord Loss eavesdropped Grimmace and found him blue-voting Banjo, which caused us to worry about Banjo somehow being disloyal to the group and in cahoots with Grimmace.

The very last night (as early as tempo permitted) Lord Loss and I eavesdropped Banjo and we were all ready to lynch him instead of Lex if that he wasn't toeing the party line at that point. I assume he checked out since Lord Loss voted as he did. Don't worry, though, Banjo, we were always 99% sure you were straight with us .

I sent PM's to a few random people, essentially threatening them with early night kills if they didn't support me as the box holder in the night vote.

Waitwaitwait. "A few" random people, as in.. more than Lord Loss and me? Surely not including Grimmace, given that he lived almost until the end of the game?