Play Diplomacy Online

Keirador wrote:The tribunal aspect was played with in Axe & Mob. I don't think that game was particularly successful (I personally had to get replaced because I was bored, to my shame), but I think the tribunal aspect did work quite well, if you wanted to check that out.

Reviewing, and hmm. I could definitely steal big chunks of this by having there be a President and a Committee, and playing with how each are selected.

Probably the President is elected and can't be the same on consecutive days. I also still like the idea of a rotating Committee with mechanics to allow the town to make modifications to it so they have some agency in the selection, and hopefully avoid a problem I can see off the bat where random selections mean some players never really got to participate in the decisions.

Don't like the requirement of an End Day vote, I think deadlines work better. Also think I'd prefer to have Committee discussion be public in the thread. Votes cast via PM, then made public in the thread. So players would have to answer for inconsistencies in their Committee discussion vs their vote.

Hmmm... part of me dislikes the idea of an Abstain option, but what if Abstention means scum get a night kill?

Thoughts. Hmm.

What did you find boring about the game?

Keirador wrote:

kimbyrle wrote:I guess I need it to survive, hey.

Once there was a time that Harb claimed to miss a Hamilton reference and doing so was a legitimate scumslip, glad you're also in that bucket.

You're kidding. (Yes, intentional.)

I need to hear how that was a scumslip.

If you weren't already aware, this is a thing that exists now as of midnight last night.

Whaaaaaat. (Yes, intentional again.)

*sends to ZZ post haste*

kimbyrle wrote:Don't like the requirement of an End Day vote, I think deadlines work better. Also think I'd prefer to have Committee discussion be public in the thread. Votes cast via PM, then made public in the thread. So players would have to answer for inconsistencies in their Committee discussion vs their vote.

Oooooor... having just read some of mhsmith's complaints about how a game with too much accountability makes it harder for scum to get rid of problematic townies... don't make the Committee discussion OR the votes public. Scum who end up on the Committee then have semi-anonymous ability to A) kill the President, or B) get an abstention that gives scum their pick of night kill. Then it becomes the Committee members' word against each other if the vote didn't come out the way some of them expected.

I'd have to consider how to deal with it if the Committee votes YES, NO, and ABSTAIN. Flip a coin?

kimbyrle wrote:Don't like the requirement of an End Day vote, I think deadlines work better.
. . .

What did you find boring about the game?

That. Days dragged on, endlessly. There was a general fear/paranoia about ending days at all. People were rejecting the idea of voting to end the day out of hand, because hey maybe somebody not in thread right this second might have some game-solving insight since the last time he was in thread and didn't have one.

I became convinced the game would not actually conclude, ever. That eventually it would just have to be called, and stop. The total lack of any time pressure eventually got me like a hundred pages behind on an interminable thread, because I always figured there'd be time to catch up if a Day ever ended.

Notably, I was also scum (the last time I ever drew it), so I didn't care about solving the puzzle, making endless days even more difficult to tolerate. This specifically is the origin of my theory that loose rules about deadlines and End Day votes benefit towns, stricter execution benefits scum. After I was replaced for inactivity, town won that game, I believe handily. Much as the town found GQ's length to be kind of a hindrance, I'd argue that re-setting Days there probably helped the town more than it was given credit for at the time. In a faster game, shorter game, you might not get mechanically caught, and nobody has the time to even begin second-guessing shadow.

Keirador wrote:

kimbyrle wrote:Don't like the requirement of an End Day vote, I think deadlines work better.
. . .

What did you find boring about the game?

That. Days dragged on, endlessly. There was a general fear/paranoia about ending days at all. People were rejecting the idea of voting to end the day out of hand, because hey maybe somebody not in thread right this second might have some game-solving insight since the last time he was in thread and didn't have one.

I became convinced the game would not actually conclude, ever. That eventually it would just have to be called, and stop. The total lack of any time pressure eventually got me like a hundred pages behind on an interminable thread, because I always figured there'd be time to catch up if a Day ever ended.

Notably, I was also scum (the last time I ever drew it), so I didn't care about solving the puzzle, making endless days even more difficult to tolerate. This specifically is the origin of my theory that loose rules about deadlines and End Day votes benefit towns, stricter execution benefits scum. After I was replaced for inactivity, town won that game, I believe handily. Much as the town found GQ's length to be kind of a hindrance, I'd argue that re-setting Days there probably helped the town more than it was given credit for at the time. In a faster game, shorter game, you might not get mechanically caught, and nobody has the time to even begin second-guessing shadow.

It's been my experience so far on this site that 72 hours seems to hit a reasonably sweet spot. It seems like what I've kinda observed is that the first 24 hours are observation, the next 24 are discussion / argument, and then the final 24 are looking for town's best vote. Obviously it doesn't always shake out that way, but 48 hours seems like it would be absolutely crippling, and 96 would make me want to hang myself.

Really, the more I think about it, I think I like my original conception of the Committee. It still gives scum the benefit of an accountability-free NK, something I think mhsmith has a point about them needing, while forcing them to justify votes in-thread and giving town some Immunity Idols to pass around partly at-will and partly by assignment. And the 48/24 day phase structure allows town to have their observation & discussion period, vote a townread into the Committee, vote out a scumread, and then the Committee to still have that 24 hours at the end to try to arrive at the town's best lynch.

Starting to think my wacky-ass idea could be pretty fun.

The Hamilton scumslip was during Lambert Simnel, two years and change ago, so within a few months of the original cast recording being released, just at the beginning of the Hamilton epidemic. I knew Harb was an early victim of Hamilfever, because he caught the contagion from me. I was 3rd party (last time I was non-town) actively trying to assist town and win with them. I'd correctly IDed the scumteam on D1, but couldn't convince anybody I was right. I was having a lengthy and protracted engagement with mhsmith trying to understand his POV on something (and ultimately trying to manipulate him into voting Harb), when he wrote a post that pretty much ended my concerns with him. So I wrote "unlike Angelica Schuyler, I'm satisfied." For his own purposes, Harb later tried to misrepresent the situation as me still attacking mhsmith, and to make this work, he had to pretend to have missed the Angelica Schuyler post. Not only would that never happen, and I actually for-real listed it as an example of Harb lying about his own play, but as he pointed out in the AAR, he hadn't been able to resist making a counter-reference at the time, BEFORE claiming he missed it, so there was actual in-thread evidence of him lying to the thread for anybody who caught the Hamilton references.

I eventually gave up trying to help the town on LYLO and won with scum.

That game had another potentially game-relevant Hamilton reference, when Harb (explaining why he hadn't weighed in on a given issue) said "I can not be everywhere at once, people!" and I responded "I'm in dire need of assistance!" and mhsmith, not being familiar with Hamilton, thought my post was a scumslip and mistrusted me over it for the rest of the game.

Keirador wrote:That game had another potentially game-relevant Hamilton reference, when Harb (explaining why he hadn't weighed in on a given issue) said "I can not be everywhere at once, people!" and I responded "I'm in dire need of assistance!" and mhsmith, not being familiar with Hamilton, thought my post was a scumslip and mistrusted me over it for the rest of the game.

OMG I'm dying.

Ok, I've given this game a complete overhaul that steals shamelessly from Axe and Mob but with some new spin. Once again welcoming input.