Be Excellent To Each Other

(It occurs to me that none of the night actions matter. You'll see why now.)

Another false dawn. Once again, you all awake and gather in the square. The sense of dread is palpable. A weary headcount is unnecessary with so few people left -- it is immediately obvious that Grim... and Dimrill are both missing.

You head to Grim...'s house, but as you pass by Dimrill's shop, you see that the door is open. Sitting unbound on a chair is Dimrill , his throat ripped out by what looks like a wild animal. There has obviously been a struggle as several things in the shop were broken before Dimrill was placed in his chair, and by the looks of his face he has been punched repetedly. None of his teeth are missing, but most of the front teeth are caved in. The blood is everywhere. Scratched onto his chest is the number 100, and the words 'Now I am eternal'.

You see Grim... when you turn to leave. He has tied his feet to a beam on the wall above the door you came through, and forced his wrists onto two nails, hanging as if on an inverted cross. His blood-smeared mouth hangs open and Runcle's long insisor teeth can clearly be seen -- grafted into the gaps where Grim... removed his own. Grim... was the serial killer. Dimrill was a vanilla townie.

Altough clearly dead, his unmoving eyes seem sharp, and focused. They seem to follow you around the room.

You hurridly step outside and, with just a look, reach a wordless agreement. Myoptika and Rodafowa smash out the windows and set light to the curtains. Bluecup and vegetables bring extra kindling, throwing it in through the windows. Soon the shop is ablaze, but the howling wind causes the flames to burn out rapidly. The comforting glow dies down quickly, and all is dark again.

There are twenty-four more days of darkness to go in Barrow. Is the town truly safe? In the following days, with the constant deaths over for the time being, Curiosity is able to give detailed psych evals to all the remaining townsfolk. Eventually he discovers the unhinged one in your midst was vegetables, whose pecuilar form of catatonia was most incompatible with getting killed.

In the final tally, ten townsfolk are left, but they will never be the same again.

To answer the most burning question -- Grim... asked me back before the game started if he could die with the fifth victim, and the text of all his kill scenes has been building to that. This is why I said earlier the game would end today.

Said it was Grim...

Fair play to Grim... I said you and Mr Chris were my top picks for SK, but your post on the last page of the last thread made me think you were innocent (as it was intended to do, I'm sure). There was no reason for you to divert attention towards Kalmar and vegetables with Mr Chris only one vote away from a lynching, but that enough to swing it for me in the end.

Good game Mr Gaywood, I think the sheer volume of townsfolk led to a bit of a slow start, so the introduction of the noLynch option was a good idea. Might have made our job easier if we'd lynched a few more townies at the start though.

What I'd like to know, is out of KevR, Craster and Runcle, who was the recruited vampire and why didn't they say anything about being bitten?

Attached to this post are the after-action report I wrote as I went along the game, showing who did what to who, and calling attention to some particularly revealing comments and clever moves from players. The XLS has all the night action tracking, if you want to see what everyone did.

The initial Sire was Craster and Runcle the initial Childe. KevR was bitten on night 1 and didn't own up, largely because you were all talking about staking bitten people!

LaceSensor was your only Van Helsing and The Rev Owen one of your priests. They knew each other's roles. This made it a bit baffling in Day Three when Owen was defending Mr Russ as hard as he could (he had checked him out and knew he was Townie) but LaceSensor still kept pushing to lynch him. Zardoz was your second priest, but he didn't know who the other two were.

Curiosity was indeed your psychiatrist and vegetables your loon. I don't think vegetables liked this game unfortunately

Rodafowa, Bluecup and Malc74 were your masons.

Finally, Dudley was your constume 'nd village aunty, and Grim... your deranged serial killer.

Final result is a split townie/SK win.

But dain't vote that way! I knew it wasn't Mr Chris because Mr Gaywood let slip an interesting titbit during CoD4. He said he was tempted to modkill him after the revelation of the meta-data, I assumed he would do so because he wasn't anything other than a vanilla townie. I also knew Curiosity was definitely the Psychiatrist due to him and The Gaywood laughing about how Mr Dave registered "a little bit" on the mental scale when he investigated him. Lessons learned: don't you sillies talk too much outside of the game, and always listen to The Beard.

The game achieved most of the things I wanted of it but a lot of people seemed put off by the slow start. If I were to run it again, I would add some pre-bitten Townies at the beginning of the game; these would be easy (but also obvious) targets for the vampires to spread more quickly. I would also require all Townies to speak out if bitten (I think) but add some Selfish Townie roles who's only goal is to survive (and hence they would not speak out). I'd tinker with the protownie roles too; the Van Helsing is too weak I think (although actually, the vampires were shit scared of him, because of the insta-Sire-death, so perhaps he works very well as a boogeyman even if he never kills any vamps).

Eh? You suggesting I wouldn't have considered modkilling him if he were the SK? That wouldn't have stopped me.

I really think that Mr Chris posting about Craster and KevR PMing each other was a real shame. I'm sure it was in people's minds during Day III, and without it I think the vampires would have had a much better chance of holding out. The game pretty much ended on that post unfortunately.

Aye well, I knew that by that point is was pretty much all over so my mouth ran away with me a little.

Fair enough that we lynched him then eh?

*wonders into village*

What the FUCKS being going on here?

Ah, that was grand fun. Had I known exact numbers of roles, I think we'd have played a very different game.

Daywalker!

I sincerely hope you play the next game I run. You and Mr Chris.

*sharpens penis*

The funny thing is, that I was close to calling out Grim... on day 3 due to his constant wanting to know where info came from, as if he was trying to get people to roleclaim. I thought that would be a vampirish thing to do, though. I was going to wait until he did it one more time, but Mr Russ stepped in and did the same thing, so I switched focus to him.

Hey don't be down on The Beard, man! It was either go on and pretend we didn't hear Chris'ses cheating, but knowing really we have huge evidence against these two people, or act on it and WIN! I just was the tide-turner. Gandalf, if you will, to your Saruman.

*Tightens scrotum*

I won? (Kinda) with 3 posts in-game!

In my death message saying Mr Pointy liked Dimrill was very simply because Dimrill and I (Mr Pointy) had been the ones baying for blood, so Dimrill was a kindred spirit. I wasn't implying anything to do with his guilt or innocence.

I'm pleased I was right about Grim... I thought he had to be. I wish I had more faith in myself sometimes.

It just sort of hit me yesterday that Grim... hadn't really been suspected of anything, but he had a really good chance of being the SK. I voted for him to try and gauge his reaction and other peoples which was I voted for Mr Chris as well. Unfortunately by the end it seemed like most of the people left weren't around/couldn't really be bothered so I didn't get much out of it really.

Thank you, thank you! I'll read the report and come back, but you best make some space, because frankly my head is so big at the moment you wouldn't believe it

Well, duh Making the priests and Van Helsings 0-2 each was a good move I think.

Following-rules-FTFY.

Mr Gaywood hasn't mentioned quite how fucking livid I was with Dimrill on day 3 - I had pegged KevR as a bad man and went off on one via PM because I wanted his teeth. I dithered over killing Runcle for ages, and Gaywood ummed and ahhed over whether I could name Craster as his boss on the stiching, and decided 'no' in the end, so I put Dimrill's name instead. When Gaywood told me Runcle was a childe (he wanted me to write the text myself as he was busy, so he told me a little early) I actually cheered in my office.
Killing Runcle that night perhaps wasn't a good idea, as it put all the focus on the SK on Day 5 because all the vamps were gone, but I was scared of getting killed.

Hey, that sounds like I'd told you Craster was the sire, which you certainly didn't know. You were pretty sure Craster and Runcle were the vamps, although you wavered on that, but you were bricking it that Runcle was the Sire when you chose to kill him.

I ummed and ahhed about if you were allowed to write anything on the corpse like that, regardless of what it was. In the end I went with yes on the grounds the town probably wouldn't listen to you anway. Then you chose to call out Dimrill, which I was privately happier about because the vamps were in a tight spot and I didn't want the game to wrap up just as it was getting going. Although then it did anyway.

Lesson learned: Stick with your hunches. The Gaywood will be able to confirm that I was mightily suspicious of Grim... at some early point. (Most specifically, his reaction to me voting for Runcle stunk more that a little, but also just his general attitude toward me.)

Bah.

Er yes, this is certainly true. Apologies for any confusion caused.

Indeed. I asked who he was suspicious of:

Oh, and finally, Why did you not kill me?!? I was kind of relying on you to do that.

I said it was Grim...

Nevertheless, at least I survived, and the town won, and Myoptika is still a complete idiot.

And Mr Dave, no sensible SK would ever kill off someone else who is being suspected of stuff.

Also, vegetables is the least lunatic loon I've ever seen!

I've had a draw and a semi-win in the last two games now - phoenix from the ashes!

Shame on you who thought I was a baddie...

I was more refering to the town. I had a fairly short post ready to hit 9 votes, with a [vote: Mr Dave] at the end.

Curio, the only reason I suspected you is because Vegetables didn't do anything as the Loon. Because of this, I firmly believed that we didn't have a loon, and that you were lying.

My brilliant plan that didn't work at all was to play the long game and try to lurk and not contribute much, before I was brutally killed by someone or other as threats escalated. This didn't happen, and I was screwed. I think I'm a bit rubbish at being a loon- I try to play each game as I would if I was town regardless of my role, and the loon is possibly the one role that just doesn't work out for.

And when I did try something after Mr G PMed me telling me to BE MORE LOONY, I was pretty much insta-fingered, so there we go.

Your in-character PMs were a treat though vegetables!

It's always the sanest man who's the lunatic, after all. I have posted a lengthly diatrabe on the Dead Zone about this, which was SLAGGING ME.

Why would the SK not bleed?

Gihh. That;s what I get for cut/pasting something I wrote for a vampire. Bugger.

um.

1. told you so

2. sorry abut the meta thing. can i suggest we add that to the rulees? it seemed fair game as people have constantly been using other meta data like frequency of posting. need to make it clear what is acceptable and what isnt, as there are gameplay arguments for allowing or disallowing anything.

It's been added into GothamScum rules already.

Yeah, it should have been in the rules, right from my very first game, but I just completely forgot about it. Not your fault, as there's nothing there saying you can't do it, but it basically fucked us vamps. Incidentally, we were doing most of our chatting via email, but because KevR had only just been embraced, I didn't have his email address! You were lucky to catch us!

My personal view is that saying "X is being very quiet, he's normally much more vocal" is fine, but linking it to board features such as PMing, or seeing who is looking at what thread or making posts elsewhere on the forum (as I myself did later on day 3) is not.

It may be handy to also say "If playing Mafiascum + derivatives, it's highly advised to set it to log you on invisibly", because it's probably fairly easy to see such things without meaning to.

I had to try my damndest not to let things I wasn't supposed to know affect my voting, else the Grim... would certainly have got my vote the last day. As it stands, I'm now not sure who I actually would've voted for if I hadn't had that at the back of my mind.

The thing is, I didn't even know that function existed. Neither did most people in the Dead Zone. Neither did anyone playing CoD the other night.

There was no reason to protect yourself. I still don't know how to get to it through the board system.

I posted the location in the dead thread, it's quite obscure.

viewonline.php

Sorry, you get to it on the board index, the words "Who is online" is also a link.

Well meta discussion aside, thanks to The Gaywood for an innovative ruleset and a decent game. Cheers!

Stupid games... I'm now thinking up rules for a Murder She Wrote game...

Role: J. B. Fletcher: You are Jessica Fletcher, as the star of the show, you are completely unkillable. Everyone knows who you are. You have no night actions. Your Win Condition is Twofold : A) Town B) No murderous townies get away with it.

Role: Murderous Townie: You are a townie, but another character is blackmailing you/has run you out of business/etc. They won't get away with it. You have meticulously planned your murder, it will happen on day__ night phase. Your target is____ If you are investigated before this point, you will simply show as townie, as there is no evidence against you. If investigated after the deed is done, your murderous alignment will be revealed. If you are roleblocked, your attempt fails, you become a simple townie. If your target dies before you do the deed, then you become a simple townie. Win Condition: Getting Away With Murder, You must commit your murder and survive to the end of the game.

Role: Dr Mark Sloan. You are taking a break in Cabot Cove, which means that (uh-oh) a Murder She Wrote/Diagnosis Murder cross-over is happening. Unluckily for you, the mafia turns up in town while you're having your holiday. You may protect someone or investigate someone as your night action. As the game takes place on another show, no-one knows you and your investigative meddling in the past has earned you powerful enemies, so you aren't likely to shout about who you are. Unless things get really desperate.

Role: Special Guest Star: You are the Special Guest Star of this episode. Everyone knows who you are, they vaguely recognise you from some...where...else. Because the production company is paying you a crap load of money, you begin the game unkillable and un-arrestable.. However everyone knows that the Special Guest Star is a murderer, so in any night phase you may select a victim, (unlike muirderous townies, you have a Creative Control Clause in your contract) and you will kill them. Your role in the plot is finished after you kill, so you become vulnerable. If investigated after you kill, your nefarious deeds will be discovered. You know you're going down at some point, so you don't care about getting away with it. Your win condition: Town.

*giggles madly*

I do think the basic mafiascum concept does have room to do some really off the wall shit.

Yes, like that

I wonder if we could tempt Chinny in with AmstradScum.