Sporefrog

Originally Posted By: Thuryl Originally Posted By: Marlenny There was no betrayal from me last game! Andraste on the other hand... If Andraste had betrayed the Anama properly last game, she and I could both have won. I was keeping her in check

Originally Posted By: Thuryl Thoughts on this game: it seems like the main advantage the DLs have over any other alliance is that they can pretty much trust each other absolutely, since they all have identical win conditions. This definitely helps. Almost all of my other alliances have involved unexpected betrayal.

It's pretty funny, every single action I did either failed or I rescinded. Purchase mystic symbol from the anama shop. Symbol has already been purchased. Attack RCCCL. Rescind attack from RCCCL. Curse Xelgion. Too late. Haha all I did was give Excalibur 20 coins. Nothing else.

Who ended up killing w-dueck? I made a pact with Rowen last night that I would betray gladwell and keep Rowen alive, as long as he got rid of w-dueck or gladwell. I was worried deuck would've had a box of traps set up or something though. Great game by Sarachim. I can't believe you posted a trade in the main thread on day 1 and still got people to trade with you! About DLs: The domont really has to be on the ball. Since there's no secret word anymore, we figured each other out based on our mutual enemies list. Our random targets were only known by us, so once we both started listing off the same people, we knew we'd found each other. It was pretty scary when we both revealed our roles though. I could post the dialogue if anyone's interested. Edited for spelling

And thuryl, poor poor thuryl. Have you already figured it out? Excalibur and I were both DLs.

I mean you can call me a jerk, and maybe it's just pent up aggression after that last game, but I was fully intending to Rod of Alacrity the blademaster into your face. It's your first game, you aren't allowed to win yet! Great job moderating Marlenny. I want to know how Duck died, haha. And who was responsible for killing gladwell? I was about to do it to avenge Sleeping Dragon.

Andraste needs 3. I was prepared to kill people for them -- the darkside makes no negotiations

Excuse me, *I still has some artifacts for us to take?

I like the idea

Originally Posted By: Omlette On that note, one thing I noticed this game (I don't know if it's a general pattern) is that the players who are on AIM generally had a greater influence on me than those who I had to communicate with via PM. I'm sure that's not the only factor (it didn't save Sleeping Dragon, for example), but, well, it might be in the interests of some of you to get an AIM account (and if you don't like AIM, Trillian is free and lets you chat to AIM users...) -E- I definitely agree. I almost want to say that I'm not going to talk on AIM anymore about the game, but I can't decide if it's a bad thing.

Skribbane addict, I like it! He can fit into alliances and his ability fits his character really well. Looking forward to the next game.

I think her assessment that not including herself in the next game because she "influences it too much" is a very fair assessment.

I was going to suggest letting people have one of each type of action submitted at the same time, but I'm still finding problems with that. I don't know what the best option is for scenarios like: 1) joining a faction and then doing something that requires being in that faction 2) trading an item, and then, if you get the new item, using it and attacking somebody. I think so far the best rules we've come up with are donating coins, and donating non-skribbane items (or slightly changing the addict's enemy list). I also feel like there's a conflict between roles like Shanker that try to keep people alive (and thus relying on a lower time limit on games) and letting the game proceed until it's reasonably clear who the winners will be (like how the older games turned out). It's certainly part of the strategy to fulfill your win condition in 5 days, and I have no inherent problem with that, but it makes the volume of moderator traffic I think possibly have an inflated effect on the outcome of the game. People have to act quicker when they have a smaller time limit.

So it was! That's right, I died immediately last game trusting Marlenny too much (a problem I have :PPP), and didn't follow the rest of the game. I must've never checked the rules.

Originally Posted By: Doom Warrior Oh, and sporefrog, you stopped me from sending some money to Excalibur for him to buy the wand of death. He was planning on doing it before, but not if Marlenny came back, I think. Also, if I did give him the money and he did kill Thuryl, even though the rest of the anama would have one, you would have still lost, and so would have Tarson, since I wouldn't have been able to give him back the Holy symbol. There was enough money floating around to buy an artifact, keep the holy symbol, and buy the wand of death. I calculated it. Andraste just had to be the one to use the wand of death since it would give her 40 coins.

The other option, of course, is to have longer days. That would give people more flexibility, since we'd have 48 hours to work out their trades and alliances before submitting actions. Having an external site, or a message board or email account that only the mods can read seems like the easiest solution to "having to report everything to *I anyway" since either moderator could just bold, delete, or otherwise mark every command that they've processed. Then there's no risk of overlap or need to worry too much about communication.

Doom Warrior: Andraste and I submitted an illegal action to kill Thuryl because one of us had already participated in two trades, which was a newly-imposed limit this game. Since the game ended at the time *I processed that command, technically thuryl didn't die. We could have just wand of deathed him still, but the game ended when *I processed those commands.

Originally Posted By: Et in Arcadia Alorael —Alorael, who isn't sure the large Anama alliance was productive. As he's said elsewhere, it would have worked if the Anama buckled down, met its own requirements, and ignored everyone else's. It ended up trying to balance too many things and didn't get a win for anyone. This game maybe could and should have been an Anama win at some point, but by the end of day 3, or maybe even day 2, it clearly wasn't going to happen. More people is not more victory. I think I disagree with you, Alorael. Our only problem was not inviting /more/ people to the alliance, by means of a group PM. Had Excalibur been invited to work with all of us and not just Marlenny, it's not apparent to me that he would have killed Andraste. Then, despite us being tangled up with her commands, Thuryl would have been wand of deathed and I can only imagine the game would've ended in short order. He killed her right after all of our coin trades had gone through, so not only did she die, but we lost all of our coins. We were at such a huge advantage before that point in the game, that we almost nearly pulled it back together anyway through the combined efforts of doom warrior resurrecting marlenny, marl resurrecting andraste, and just about everyone other than thuryl working to get the items necessary to kill him. It was a simple misunderstanding of the two-trade rule that caused me to idiotically stop someone (doom warrior I think?) from wand of deathing him and instead let andraste attack on the final day. I think it was his anxiety about andraste's allegiance that cost us the game, and I never even talked to him once. I think our alliance was utterly overpowered, and I'm going to stray further away from them in the future. Originally Posted By: *I Okay. I get the point. There really is no need to rub it in any further. I was just irritated with people saying there was anything wrong with the anama, or how silly it was for people to join when they didn't absolutely need to. I felt like you did an amazing job changing how their roles/faction worked this game. I apologize for coming off as mean -- from my disappointment with how the game turned out it should be clear how much effort I put into it. I feel really bad for the 4 or 5 people I had been working with who did not win, even when we had a 6 on 1 at the end. So I'd really like to take the opportunity to thank you for all your hard work on the game, *I. I can say without a doubt that Northern Isles has been more fun than most games with a 40-50 dollar price tag. I still don't know how you have managed them as well as you do. Thank you for running them *I

I second Alorael's opinion questioning how item-dependent the game has become. It was less enjoyable having to rely so heavily upon them this game, but that may have just been due to my role. It certainly adds more complexity to the game, but I'm not sure complexity is what we want when we're talking about a human processing every command by hand. Originally Posted By: *I Really, if someone just processed the item management Unless I missed the answer to this, wouldn't that be really hard to manage because many non-item actions are dependent on having used or traded items? Or would it be when you are logged in, you'll process any items and regular commands as usual, but when your backup moderator is logged in, he'll just process item-related requests? As for the case of skribbane, I don't have a feeling for how powerful the role currently is. If it's fine the way it is, then just make skribbane only tradeable by consent.

Ahh! Well that solved that problem, I think. Is there any reason to still say trades require both people to agree?

In that specific case I really don't know why Marlenny invited the pure spirit They had been allies the whole game though, but you'd have to ask one of them. The anama had gotten so huge, it just seems really against any the spirit of the game to say that they lost when they were succeeding so fabulously as a faction. That sort of thing makes me dislike the 5 day rule (which is funny, because I always thought 7 days was wayyy too long, but then I suppose *I had more free time).

Raising the time limit wouldn't have helped the former problem, though it would have significantly changed the outcome by the end. The real problem was just performing two trades, often times with somebody who just traded for something from someone else, and then using an item, and then performing an action. If you want to join a faction in there too, that's just way too much to do in 24 hours if you wait for each action to resolve individually (technically, you can't submit an action to use an item you don't yet have!) If trades take a day to go through by default, then that would certainly solve the problem too. Then you don't have to worry about saying "once I receive X item, use it on Y player"

I suppose an easy partial fix would be to make coin trading unilateral. In our last game, I could have just traded 20 coins to marlenny, then had marlenny trade andraste 40, rather than having andraste accept both to get around the trade rule (had I known donating coins counted as a trade). This would eliminate the need to mess with silly workarounds like that.

@Thuryl: From my experience, getting somebody to join you is a good way to ensure both people can mutually trust each other. There's really no reason to backstab once you are in a faction, simply for the reason that you gain joined victory conditions.

Originally Posted By: Thuryl They were strong enough if they played their cards right, but even if your plan had worked correctly at the end, the Adventurer would have attempted to attack me with the Killer Poison and died because I had an antidote. You made other mistakes before that, of course, but everyone makes mistakes in every game, so that's not very meaningful unless you want to try to divide every death into forced and unforced errors. I was wrong in thinking that the antidote only cured a Poison Potion, rather than a poison attack. But anyway, she was immune to magic. Not like it matters, because, again, there's no reason, as far as I know, that you didn't die a few days earlier to andraste other than *I having too much to process. The only reason everyone alive other than you at the end of the game did not win (maybe alorael too) was processing commands -- that's not a problem with the roles. You were a great gladwell, and a very apt player, and I'm not suggesting otherwise, I just felt that game was pretty unfair.