Ultimate Chaos: Game in progress

[whitehelm]

Bah...I change to Griever

[Mustiado]

Griever, if just for gross overconfidence earlier in the thread.

[Jontom Xire]

I'm Da Rogue is apparently unable to get online for a while, so that only leaves Lord Fullbladder to point. I'm inclined to end the day early if he points in time.

[Jontom Xire]

Day ends!

The mob forms, the crowd roars, and Griever is led to the gallows.

After the long drop is over, the corpse is examined and two things of interest are found. A "The Fourth Degree" tattoo and a copy of "Spying for dummies".

Spoiler

Show

Griever was lynched. He was a spy for The Fourth Degree.

Night starts.

Please get all night actions in on time.

[Dallas-Dakota]

(( Away for a few weeks, please don´t auto lynch me.))

[whitehelm]

Hello? Anyone?

[Jontom Xire]

Ok, now I'm confused. I could have sworn I just posted a quick "I'm busy" update, but now it seems to have vanished.

I am also really confused because my spreadsheet tells me that Griever was lynched Day 4 (30th July according to this thread) yet a night action from the 31st July is marked in my spreadsheet as Night 3!!

So what I am going to do is declare:

Night ended!

If it appears that I haven't processed you night action properly, please PM me.

And with that:

Day starts.

[Freshmeat]

Let's see what stuff ThePhantom is made of.

[ThePhantom]

Then lets see what Freshmeat_ is made of as well.

[Saint Nil]

Lets see what Saint Nil is made of!

[Shadowcaller]

"Every day its the first day" would be this games motto since the votes always seems to be completely random.

[whitehelm]

I think I'll point at ThePhantom today.

[banjo1985]

Shadowcaller

[ThePhantom]

Lets' go with instead shadowcaller

[Mordokai]

ThePhantom

[Lord Fullbladder, Master of Goblins]

Banjo1985! Where were you on the night of last Tuesday afternoon!?

[Saint Nil]

The Phantom

[Yspoch]

The Phantom

[Jontom Xire]

Day ends!

It's lynching time, and this time it is your ever popular ThePhantom being led to the gallows. The crowd boos and cheers and cheers and boos and then the lever is pulled and that's the end for ThePhantom.

Examination of the body reveals a "The Fourth Degree" tatoo and a book entitled "Recruiting for Dummies".

With ThePhantom's death, Freshmeat and his buddies, also known as "The Freshmeat Foundation", demonstrate complete control over the sheep like populace of the game and thus fulfill their win condition.

Both Whitehelm and Hap_hazard survived and so fulfilled their "survivor" win condition.

===Summary/Analysis===

As may now have become apparent to some of you, this game had the potential for everyone to win, although the martyrs had, perhaps, the most difficult win conditions.

A quick summary of the groups in the game:

The Freshmeat Foundation:

Freshmeat and a few hand picked members had to demonstrate complete control over the game by controlling as many aspects as possible, lynches being the most obvious. Preventing any lynching was a valid option, so if the Peace Corps had suggested a common aim, namely that Freshmeat and his team help to prevent instead of cause lynches...

The Peace Corps had a bane per two members and their goal was to go two day night cycles with no deaths. Not that difficult once they had contacted Freshmeat AND had a member recruited into The Fourth Degree (recruitment does not mean loyalty as I made completely clear to everyone so recruited).

The Secret Club. The founding members win if everyone is a member by the end of the game. They got a forced recruit every second night and anyone could voluntarily become a member. They could have simply sent a PM to everyone asking them to join. No rule against it.

The Fourth Degree got a scry, a bane, a night kill, and a recruit every other night which replaced the scry and night kill actions. Their mission was to ensure that no members of "Blue Serpent" were alive. There was no "Blue Serpent". All they had to do was realise this and they had won. Also recruitment did not force loyalty, so it was advisable for them to scry their target before recruiting. They recruited two (or was it three) additional members without checking them first.


I was a little disappointed because there were two groups who wasted some amazing opportunities:

The Fourth Degree hardly used their night abilities at all, especially their scry ability which would have been key to their winning but was not even used once.

The Peace Corps had bad luck with losing a lot of members very early on. However they had a stroke of good luck when The Fourth Degree, the only group with a night kill, recruited one of the Peace Corps without first scrying him. This may be the reason why the Peace Corps baning action that night was successful - or they may simply have got lucky. In any case, with the Freshmeat Foundation having contacted them and being willing to work together, the Peace Corps had a real chance to fulfil their win condition. Instead Whitehelm joined first one bandwagon then the other, thus getting himself kicked out of the Peace Corps. This was not contrary to his real win condition which was simply to survive, but I do feel that it was a bit of a wasted opportunity. I'd love to know what was happening behind the scenes. Did Lord Fullbladder decide to side with the Fourth Degree? Did he simply not tell Whitehelm that he had been recruited?

What I hoped would happen was that Lord Fullbladder would make sure he knew every intended night kill and then make sure it got baned while communicating with Whitehelm to get the Freshmeat Foundation to exert its, by now considerable, influence to stop anyone pointing at all during the day phases. Lord Fullbladder could point out to other members of The Fourth Degree that if they pointed they would expose themselves and make targets of themselves. Thus for the requisite two days no-one would die and the Peace Corps would fulfill its win condition. The Freshmeat Foundation would fulfill their win condition by demonstrating control over the general populace by preventing a lynch.

Lastly, did anyone even vaguely realise that Dallas-Dakota was playing a schizophrenic? He had two conflicting roles and an extra rule that he could only play one role per day phase, alternating between them. The people most likely to notice, his fellow members of The Fourth Degree, were fairly inactive in this game - there doesn't seem to have been any co-ordination or plotting or planning. Even so, I thought it would be a difficult role to play which would result in lots of bizarre happenings and general chaos. In fact I don't think anything ever came of it.

[banjo1985]

Hehe, I enjoyed this one, it was pleasingly silly! I was part of three groups during the game, and spent most of it not really sure what was going on! To me that's the sign of a good werewolf game.

[whitehelm]

Here's what happened from my perspective....At the start of the game I immediately revealed my Survivor role to the rest of the Peace Corps. I figured the best way to survive was to constantly be one of the ones baned, so I promised the Peace Corps I would help them as much as possible in exchange for being protected. That eventually paid off.

Up until then I was keeping a low profile in order to increase my chances of surviving while trying to get an idea as to what was going on. By the time I was attacked Fullbladder and I were the only active Corps left, and I was the one sending in the bane to protect myself. I don't think Fullbladder ever talked to me the whole game, and I figured he was just randomly pointing and not paying much attention (I was probably right). I finally "revealed" myself as a baner publicly because I wanted to make sure I didn't get lynched by whoever tried to kill me. I got contacted by hap_hazard and Freshmeat.

After a brief back-and-forth with Freshmeat I revealed everything to him, hoping that the Peace Corps could joint win with his team. The problem was we didn't know the goal of the 4th Degree, except for knowing they were the ones night killing. We guessed that they wouldn't be too eager to stop killing voluntarily, and we had no way of figuring out who they were targeting so I could protect them. hap_hazard was 4th Degree, but he would only say that he wasn't in control of who they killed, and he didn't really know anything. Fullbladder didn't say a word despite me sending him details of my pms, so I had no idea he became 4th Degree, and in fact we didn't know they could do anything other than kill. Since as far as I knew, there was no way to control night kills, I settled for ending the game before I died.

Also, I would like to say it was banjo's fault I joined the Griever bandwagon...when I got on the forums after my first point, I had a pm from Freshmeat saying Griever needed to die or any deal was off, and at that point, Shadowcaller had one more point then Griever.

[Jontom Xire]

The Fourth Degree was so inactive that I twice sent them PMs saying I would take all night actions from any member who cared to post one. Despite this I got naff all actions from anyone and no-one posted a specific night action that belonged to another member.

So to summarise, hap_hazard could have controlled the night kill - all he had to do was send me a PM and make sure he communicated with others to make sure there wouldn't be a recruitment attempt (which would replace night kills and scries) that night.

[Freshmeat]

Well, that was chaotic.

I think the Foundation had a pretty cool win condition, though it required a lot of work early on, and later on it merely required a lot of PM's being sent around. We were operating under the idea that if we got three 'predictions' right and then made these happen, we'd win. As such, we were a little reluctant to try anything too fancy, especially near the end. We definitely didn't want to reset our own counter when a simple lynch going right would suffice. We were also a little unsure when the nights would end exactly, so we didn't want to interfere with night kills or night kills-that-miraculously-got-baned unless we were absolutely certain our meddling would have an effect before the night ended, or would get lost-in-private-messaging somewhere.

We knew that we could enforce a no-lynch and that it would count as a form of influence. However... the Peace Corps was in shambles.
We really needed the Club's votes to get any sort of control over the day phase and didn't want to annoy them by suggesting something as 'boring' as lynching no one for two days on end, as their win condition was allegedly 'to have fun'. We also didn't want to tell them the Corps' win condition to prevent them from betraying us.
We were mistrustful of the Club's fishy-sounding win condition until the end, and deliberately tried to interrupt and prevent communications between them and any other faction. Our suspicions that they needed to recruit a certain number of all players only got stronger when Mustiado suggested to me to try and recruit whitehelm and Co. into the Club. Naturally, I 'forgot' doing exactly that. We also had a mole in his ranks with Mordokai.


I think we were fairly lucky that the Secret Club recruited one of us (Mordokai) while we scried Mustiado (someone of the Club) on the very first night of the game. We quickly merged and worked together, which gave us solid control over the votes, though the Club members of our group often needed a little prodding before they'd point at the Foundation's intended target.
Only the Griever bandwagon was met with considerable resistance, but that turned out quite alright too.

Personally, I think inactivity or lack of interest was a pretty huge problem. Lots of our planning and caution turned out to be quite unnecessary because everyone who wanted to make deals, we had already absorbed into our end-game network. All we really had to do was keep the Secret Club in check, prevent them from communicating with either 4th Degree or the Peace Corps, and then create a situation where they could either point at one of their own, or point at the Foundation's intended target.

From the looks of things, 4th Degree definitely had the most potential. The Secret Club was pretty strong too. The Foundation was about average in strength, while I think the Peace Corps might have been a little too weak.
In hindsight, I think it's interesting how most of these win conditions were set up in such a way that cooperation was perfectly possible. There appears to be no single grouping of factions with grossly conflicting win conditions.

[Saint Nil]

Fun game. I loved my win condition, get lynched. O well, mabye I'll get to die next game

[Lord Fullbladder, Master of Goblins]

Ach. Sorry guys. And that means both 4th Degree and Peace Corps. It's a bad habit I have in these games. I don't know what to say to these PM's that seem to just be an update of plans, and I don't have anything constructive to say, so I just stay quiet. (Plus there's the fact that I seem to have mistakn the Peace Corps win conditions...) I didn't know if 4th Degree had any plans already in the works, and I barely heard a word from them. I had no plan myself. I mean, hell, when I play the Seer in these games I end up wasting most of my time scrying random villagers. I'm not good with plans. I'm a horrible werewolf player.