Overkill 1: Serenity/Firefly (GAME OVER)

[Bulbazak]

Here's how I did River as a PR in a past game. Probably wouldn't be as useful, but I liked the idea of her having a Half-Sane modifier:

Spoiler:

River Tam

I remember everything. I remember too much. And some of it's made up, and some of it can't be quantified, and there's secrets...

You are River Tam, Half-Sane Investigative Jack of All Trades. You were drawn to this location after the Serenity landed. Something important is about to happen. Something bad, and you can help. You can see into other people. You can see the truth about them and their actions. Unfortunately, you're not exactly in your right mind. As such, there's a 50% chance that your investigation may be inaccurate.

You have the following 1-shot abilities at your disposal:
Cop
Watcher
Tracker
Follower
Voyeur
Role Cop

Your investigations will be in the form of "You investigated X." followed by the result. Cop results will be given as town/mafia. An insane cop investigation would be the opposite result of what would normally be received. An insane Watcher/Voyeur investigation would say that nothing happened. An insane Follower investigation would be "kill" for anything other than a kill, and "nothing" for a kill. An insane Tracker investigation will tell you that X went to the person who was killed, unless they performed the kill, in which case they would go nowhere. An insane Role Cop investigation would result in a Vanilla result.

You win when you have gotten rid of all anti-town factions.

Best of luck.

[Thor665]

Just .. |A Blood-Thirsty Sylvester Stallone" themed game. Characters Mr Stallone played in his long career. You all get to be Sylvester.

Dibs on Oscar.

[Cerberus v666]

I would also consider adding a rule in regards to how much of our role we are allowed to share.

Discussion about how roles were formatted played pretty predominantly during the game, so if you wanted to nip that in the bud, you could just simply add a rule that no discussion of role pms be allowed at all, and have the sample town role pm placed at the beginning, and that be the end of it.

Or have all town roles be formatted the same way to cut down on gaming the system. A sample town PM is provided in the OP as usual.

Like, if I was asked if the Doctor version I use is the standard (1 kill heal) or the variant.. I wouldn't know how to answer that w.o. either calling EJ a liar or lying to you myself.

Asking the mod clarifying questions, and then relaying those answers, should not be banned and punishable by a mod kill. If EJ didn't do the required homework before fake claiming, then that's their fault. You can either choose not to answer or answer truthfully. Don't punish the players that ask. That's just bastard.

I figured. So they knew there were actions on Chickadee, and I claimed an action on Chickadee. Something should have made them stop, but really, I'm not surprised they didn't. It was obvious from the moment they voted that they were super tunneled. The problem with accounts that say they are super logical or are going to use reason to solve the game is that they rarely do. They're the ones most likely to fall into a tunnel or get super emotional, and the fact of that matter is that what they tout as reason or logic doesn't matter in mafia. I used to be all about picking apart arguments and finding inconsistencies. I'd state that I'd "logic you to death". And during that time, I was a horrific scum hunter. I still am when I let my emotions get the better of me and don't take a step back. That's exactly what I want to breed when I play scum. I want you to argue and get emotional until no one pays attention to you. The key actually does fall down to motivation and intent. Why did that player do X? What do they have to gain? Etc.etc.etc. It's actually a lot easier to do this when you're not involved in the game, tbh, but it can still be done. I mean, I probably should have noticed Thor putting a lot of weight on page 1 posts. That's normally a bad argument, and Thor knows that. The fact that we had a blue moon situation here doesn't change the fact that early game posts rarely mean anything, and cases that rely on those posts are half-baked. The thing was, I really wasn't paying much attention to Thor enough to try to sort him. He made a Nacho-scum type of move, and I really wasn't caring. I mean, I could have approached pretty much everything differently, but that's the thing about hindsight.

Tails: We didn't stop pushing you was because of both the super damning flavor cop result and crumb, as well as the fact that no deaths at all meant that there was another protective around. With Jayne gone, BG didn't make sense for *anyone* except arguably Simon, and if there were another protective in the game(as there clearly was because there were no deaths) then they were more likely to be Simon than you, which meant your claim simply didn't work with the game state. Our check on Chickadee was far more interested in whether or not she performed an action(because if she had, she was clearly lying scum), and not whether or not an action came to her(because if one didn't, it wouldn't be a guilty on you or anyone else; you'd just claim to have protected someone else). Your play was actually town enough( from my perspective, Drixx didn't like your entrance), but your claim didn't work with the game state.

*cough*Jailkeeper*cough*. Yes, I know that was my actual role, but if you want to talk about how you couldn't believe a fake claim because there were missing kills, missing kills that can easily be explained by a role that blocks all kills on a target, then your math is still wrong, even if you are getting the right answer.

Tails, the jailkeeper thing explained the lack of deaths on N1, but not N2, given that any competent scum team would have realized they had no choice but to kill. Your bewildering decision to jailkeep chickadee rather than killing someone was not something we considered, because it wasn't a good move to make, and we assume competence on the part of our enemies.

Honestly though, even without all that...there was almost no way you were going to endgame. Perhaps if Cheeky never flipped and didn't stop any kills you might have had a chance, but against a competent doctor who, upon their flip, would guarantee your own lynch...it was a challenging path to victory, to say the least.

[Jingle]

Oh yeah, Ej, you can sig now if you want

[Almost50]

Happy Scumday btw A50

Happy scumday A50.

Thank you, guys

Or have all town roles be formatted the same way to cut down on gaming the system. A sample town PM is provided in the OP as usual.

I'm going quite the opposite. "No two Role PMs are worded the exact same way, regardless of Role/Alignment."

Asking the mod clarifying questions, and then relaying those answers, should not be banned and punishable by a mod kill. If EJ didn't do the required homework before fake claiming, then that's their fault. You can either choose not to answer or answer truthfully. Don't punish the players that ask. That's just bastard.

That's exactly what I meant. If you don't do your homework and decide to fakeclaim anyway you will be punished. People are free to ask questions in the main thread to get the answer revealed to everyone, but if they choose to do it in private they need not jump to conclusions and then come share it as "mod said so".

Dibs on Oscar.

"Of course I knew. I just had no idea!"

[Toogeloo]

[Jingle]

Dibs on Oscar.

I didn't know Stallone was in Sesame Street!

That's exactly what I meant. If you don't do your homework and decide to fakeclaim anyway you will be punished. People are free to ask questions in the main thread to get the answer revealed to everyone, but if they choose to do it in private they need not jump to conclusions and then come share it as "mod said so".

My rule of thumb is that I won't publicly answer any questions referring to a role that isn't flipped. If someone wants to provide me with a hypothetical role and ask how it affects their role, that's fine. But if anyone had asked about say... the lightning rod... preflip I would have answered I can't answer that question at this time, because to do so means I've considered how the role would interact, giving minor evidence that it exists.

Of course, If Toog had PM'd me (as the mod) and asked "Would my role affect a theoretical ascetic role?" I would have answered how you did, because Toog knows that a lightning rod exists and the interaction is based on how the lightning rod functions.

And yeah, you're probably a little too loose lipped with game related stuff as a mod, but that is tempered with modding games. I'd err on the side of caution and slowly increase your level of involvement, despite that your A50 charm is a lot of what made this game so fun.

Your rule isn't really bastard (it's fully announced and transparent) but it is more restrictive than my modding style. Of course, that's just my modding style. If we wanted a bunch of clones of me modding games left and right then let's just say the site would have bigger problems.

[Jingle]

Oh, also, I would add the rule that a post appearing to break the rules breaks the rules. Because rules lawyering is something that people do.

For example, if I just post a string of numbers, you have no way of telling that it isn't cryptography. But making that not against the rules means that I could post actual cryptography and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. (Note: this is an egregious example to prove the point, not something I expect to actually come up.)

[Almost50]

^This is a good point, but it also could lead to much confusion and debate. What if someone posted some gibberish like "My someone of would and with your style"? (I took the first word of each paragraph in 4731 followed with the last word of the first line of the same paragraph). Now what?

How about posting song lyrics? Or something like "remember what we talked about earlier via PM?"?

I mean, sometimes scum (and Masons) would agree to use some kind of code that is readable to everyone but not as easily comprehended. I think the daychat being available all time takes care of most of this, but still I don't really know if posting a song lyrics or video is in fact meant to include a code or not.

[Jingle]

That's a decent argument for allowing cryptography. I wouldn't say it works as a defense of things that appear to be cryptography though.

A different example would be something from my own ruleset: It is against my rules to post your entire scumteam. This is because I've seen games where someone decided they didn't want to play anymore and conceded by just outing their team, and that's awful. The rule against appearing to break rules prevents me from saying: "I'm scum with Thor and Tails." and then being confirmed not to be scum with Thor and Tails because I didn't get modkilled for it.

Another use would be creating a fake IC role PM that says you're allowed to quote it (Not the way I'd handle the role, but valid as a mod choice, I suppose) and 'quoting' it into the thread. Technically, I didn't quote privileged information, but I appear to have, and thus the rule against looking like you've broken the rules is the one that prevents you from appearing to have broken the rules.

My four rules that I suggest for every mod (again, you don't have to adopt them, I just suggest them) are

1. Follow Site Rules.
2. DBAD. (Don't be a dick.)
3. Pretending to break the rules is just as bad as breaking the rules.
4. I reserve the right to add to or modify these rules.

Everything else generally falls under one of those four somehow, or is related to the game itself.

[Almost50]

1. Follow Site Rules.
2. DBAD. (Don't be a dick.)
3. Pretending to break the rules is just as bad as breaking the rules.
4. I reserve the right to add to or modify these rules.

1. I believe that's my #1 too
2. And that is supposedly covered by my #10
3. Noted. This should be adopted into my set of rules (the missing #9, perhaps??)
4. Also should be adopted in my rules set. I'll have them both copied and saved into the Word file for now, and will include them along with the other 4 or 5 we talked about in the preview thread when we are putting the final touches for the opening page.

Oh, btw .. in the previous game .. everything that went wrong was my fault. Varsoon did everything right.
In the next one everything that goes wrong is Jingle's fault. (Just kidding. He's given some good advice and has been encouraging)

[Jingle]

I blame FakeGod. He helped me balance a game like 5 years ago, so anything I do wrong now is clearly his fault.

[Tails]

@Cerb: I went over my thought process in the PT. But yeah, I never thought I had a shot of winning. I even thought about leashing myself and giving town a second doctor, but I knew A50 would never allow it if I voiced the thought out loud.

[Tails]

If I knew there was no second team, though, I might have tried going for a shot.

[Gamma Emerald]

Sorry Tails
I’d love to try another game with you sometime

[Almost50]

Sorry Tails
I’d love to try another game with you sometime

How about Overkill 2? I'll be sure to make Tails a Mason and give YOU a scum role.

[Varsoon]

Sorry about not doing more to try to balance this from a flavor perspective--I wasnt/am not super familiar with the flavor, so I didn't realize the roles would be such giveaways. I did propose a few options in the setup thread to curb flavor gaming and while we did go with flavor-on-flip, it clearly wasn't enough.

I think the best approach, really, is to either give scum a means of punishing flavor gaming (not fun, but can work) or to make flavor not intrinsically tied to alignment (somewhat against the spirit of staying true to the theme in most cases imo but most people seem to prefer this).

[Varsoon]

Also-also if you want more kills to absolutely go through, ensure that scum gets a Strongman kill or just run a public mechanic where 1 kill will ALWAYS succeed and that way town protectives are just around to try to keep it down to one kill. Really depends on how you want to approach the notion of OVERKILL and implement that. Obviously, here, we overlooked how much town would be able to keep its protective roles alive while also clearing enough others as town. I think, as rule of thumb, if you don't do something like a guaranteed strongman, there should be less protective roles than kills in the game and could even tie this to having protective roles that stop being capable of protecting once potential killers are eliminated.

[Almost50]

My problem with Strongman is it will always resolve, meaning the strongest Town player will always leave the game on N1. It also defies the protective best guess, so even if they do outguess the killer's choice they still can't do anything about it.

That said, I can guarantee you Overkill 2 will not have something as strong as a Lightning Rod + Jailkeeper combination.

[Varsoon]

Good! It's OVERKILL, the strongest town player can get KILLED.
You could also design protective interactions in such a way that they don't clear players as town. Guaranteed kill does that, to some extent.

[Varsoon]

Roles like Bodyguard or Redirector or Bus Driver make more sense for having a protective sort of role in a setup where you still want kills occurring but want town capable of protecting its strong players.

[Varsoon]

But yeah I think the setup, either by role-design or public/semi-public mechanic should have at least 1 kill every night if you really want to stick with the OVERKILL thing and not have a huge amount of swing. When NO KILLS happen, it puts protective roles in really privileged positions.

It doesn't have to be like giving scum infinite strongman, either. I envision a public mechanic where it's confirmed one kill will always succeed--if every kill is blocked, then the kill that becomes 'strongman' is determined privately by preset parameters.

[Varsoon]

I'd thought I'd done something similar in FFT, but it's actually kinda the opposite.
It was known only to scum that, while they could submit multiple kills, only one would every resolve, if possible--and their factional kill had higher priority than the 'Job Class' abilities, which were usually the means that players had towards stopping kills. Scum also couldn't be killed. Basically, since the setup only had 2 scum players in it, I tried to mitigate swing REALLY HARD with private mechanics. I wish I would've been a little more transparent about some of the mechanics, though, since town put all their eggs in a mass-protection play that could have never played out well for them.

Subject: FFTACTICS MAFIA : THE CHURCH OF GLABADOS

Spoiler: THE LUCAVI'S FACTIONAL ABILITIES

"THE LUCAVI OF LEGEND WAS AN UNBEATABLE, FEROCIOUS MONSTER":

You may not be killed. Only the collective strength of the Zodiac Braves can defeat you with a lynch. All kills, regardless of priority, will fail against a Lucavi.

"I OFFER MY OWN LIFE FOR YOUR RESURRECTION":

Even in death, The Lucavi know that more blood must be shed to herald Ultima's return. When the first Lucavi is lynched, during the following Night Phase, they may pick a player who was voting for them--the chosen player is killed. Nothing can prevent this kill.

"HE'S POSSESSED BY LUCAVI!":

The Lucavi hold sway over the hearts of humans. Once per night, you may target a player to cause them to be unable to take any actions. This does not count against your action limit.

"WITHOUT POWER, NOTHING CAN BE ACHIEVED...":

Each Night, a single Lucavi may decide to kill a single player. This factional kill does not count against your action limit. Job Classes exist that will provide players with a killing ability. Members of the Lucavi faction can only kill a single player at night--multiple kills may be submitted, but only one will ever succeed, if possible. The Lucavi Factional Kill will always take priority to succeed over Job Class kills. If submitting multiple Job Class kills, please specify 'high' or 'low' priority in the case that all resolve successfully.

[Varsoon]

But yeah it's hard to mitigate swing in a setup built around multiple kills.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Also-also if you want more kills to absolutely go through, ensure that scum gets a Strongman kill or just run a public mechanic where 1 kill will ALWAYS succeed and that way town protectives are just around to try to keep it down to one kill. Really depends on how you want to approach the notion of OVERKILL and implement that. Obviously, here, we overlooked how much town would be able to keep its protective roles alive while also clearing enough others as town. I think, as rule of thumb, if you don't do something like a guaranteed strongman, there should be less protective roles than kills in the game and could even tie this to having protective roles that stop being capable of protecting once potential killers are eliminated.

Yeah, lol. This game would have been more accurately called, “Underkill”.