Be Excellent To Each Other

We can't rely on Kovacs style belm-ups in every game

I think we can

I certainly hope so!

I do think that the voting in this game made it easier for the bad guys to just hide out and be quiet as they simply didn't need to vote.

As for people signing up to play then not playing, I don't know really. Yes life does get in the way sometimes, but Trooper is right, it's self fulfilling and everyone needs to talk, that's why the 'days' are always a minimum of 24hrs, it was amazing that the town beat the mafia with so many mod kills.

I was thinking of opting out of any future games that end at 2pm as I find it so hard to participate. The day is ending just as I get home for lunch. Then I lose the afternoon and evening posting while night actions are coming in. There was one 'day' in this game when I posted in an evening and nobody replied until the next day, it's nice to be able to have a conversation or you end up only making one post all day. And Gilly was getting on my nerves saying it was a posting pattern - grrr! I DON'T HAVE INTERNET AT WORK!

When I ran an evening finish game, there was even less talk going on. Life really does seem to get in the way of an evening finish, work is less important than beex though, so we always seem to get a lot more chatter with a lunchtime finish.

Oh I agree completely, I'm not saying you should change it. I was just annoyed that I was being pulled up about it in the game when as far as I was concerned it was common knowledge and there wasn't a lot I could do about it. Also, it makes it seem like I'm not participating, when I really am trying to.

I think part of that is not to be rigid over exactly when the games finish, some days finish at 14:00, some at 17:00, some at 22:00 or whatever.

And if all of them last at least 36 hours then it gives as much chance as possible for people to be involved without being too long.

Malc

Good idea Malc, I would like to see this trialled.

Aye, that seems to be the best solution, and what we pretty much do at the moment. Although I go with at least 24 hours for a day and start rigid, but swap times between 10am, 2pm and 10pm, depending on when the day actually finished.

I really don't think the day end time is a factor in people not being talkative.

No, me either. But it does help those of us who are a little more restricted.

There are times, when I am on the road all day or in constant meetings, so I go quiet...

Yeh, iirc i had the Romeo character and thought you were my wonderful Juliet (who i knew was a safe as houses Townie), unfortunately for me the description you were given was that i was a creepy stalker and you had to get me lynched...gah!

With regards to my lacklustre joining in of games, it is mainly RL getting in the way in some form or other, mainly my job being totally away from a computer and i just hate typing on my phone so i generally keep up to date with the games but post little during the day, although some games do draw you in more than others

With this last game work suddenly became stupidly intense and i have to admit i was tempted to contact trooper and pull out, but decided against that as it would have just ended up weakening the town more as i saw it, better to have a semi participating player on the towns side than not at all..

I really found the lack of need to vote as a hindrance to actually voting, with us not needing to get a set number of votes for people to be carted off it ended up giving alot less data for the town to analyse as people could sit back and chill more.

Massive thanks to troop for running another game, i know a huge amount of work must go into these games, especially of you want to make them really confusing

The best game that come into mind for me is the Blind Scumm game we played not so long back. Some of the ideas above look very good, i would like to try the vote to keep in game (although i am not sure how it would work).

Would it help if there were 2 people running each game?

I know the way the days are written influence the game, and it is part of the role of the GM to be descriptive and make it as fun as possible for people, however you probably noticed that some days actions and intros/endings are much better written than others, purely down to how much time I had that day and what was happening at work. Plus, to be honest, how much effort the players were putting in...

2 people running each game would make that easier to deal with.

Also, should the GM play more of a part during the days? Throwing in situations and things that happen throughout the day, much like a dungeon master would in a role playing game?

I think a vote to keep, where everyone on the forum can vote to evict, rather than just players, would be interesting. The X Factor style game mentioned in another thread.
Technically that would be a challenge though, and would obviously mean no dead thread, which is just as fun as the main thread sometimes

A lot of the original games were 2 handed and i think that worked well - it would help to make sure things are better prepared , also it would give the GM another person to bounce ideas off (other than the dead thread)



That would work - or giving the players another task they need to do before the game will end (didnt Grim... do that at some point - building the spaceship for an escape i think?)

I'd be careful. I'd love to see a game run like that, but not as a Mafia game. The point of a Mafia game is very simple - ignorant masses versus a few co-ordinated bad guys. There's a whole lot of psychology backing up how it works as a game. Sure, throw in a few additional roles to make it more entertaining, but if you want to change the dynamic of how it plays, I'd suggest starting more from scratch.

You may not have noticed, but I pretty much do that already

How about sort-of reversing the metadata rule, and getting the counter to say "X has read the thread at 10:02, 13:10 and 16:45, and last posted at 08:33".
If you want to make it more like the real-life version of MS (which hardly has this problem at all) then that's the way to do it.

I talk too much and end up getting lynched on day 1

I have a great idea for an insane game of Scum. No idea if it will encourage or limit talking, but I want to run it anyway.

It's not Xmas themed, so if someone wants to do one of those in December they can. Or if nobody does, we'll do my mental one in December. Or in January. Whichever.

Does it use Bobbys rules?

lol @ this navel-gazing thread that I missed up until now. You should have four games a year MAX. I rarely play now because there's just so many.

I'll run the next one! *downs bottle of gin*

Dick.
There should be more games, but people should sit out of the ones they don't have time. When there's less games people feel compelled to play so they don't miss out, and then if work/real life does get in the way they stop posting so much.

In fact, take many of these ideas (GM involvement, two GMs, strong role-playing, blind power roles) and you end up the game of KillerScum that me and Grim... ran. Which was acebest, if I do say so myself, and had no problems with participation despite the post limits!

I did enjoy that one..

I did enjoy that one..

As that's the opposite of what has happened, I can only assume you've made it up.

My posit is that because games happen only once a month or less people are all "IN!" without thinking about if their real life workload would prevent them posting this time around.
If there was another game along right after they'd be all like "OK, I'll wait."

Basically it boils down to, don't go "in" if you aren't going to talk...

Oh right - I figured once a month was quite often - they tend to last a couple of weeks, after all (although not, I suppose, for everybody).

Indeed. It becomes quite a long time between games if you're killed on the first night. I think once a month is still fine, and Trooper's comment is spot on.

Yeah, agreed. It doesn't really feel like a special occasion like it did when we first had them. You end up with two weeks out of four being MafiaScum, which sometimes has a knock-on effect to the rest of the forum (or used to, I haven't really been around to notice recently).

I thought things had been noticeably worse recently!

Surely fewer games less often means more people want to play, ergo smaller proportion of players who don't say much/anything? If you had 30 players and 5 not talking, it's not as much of a problem as 20 and 5, for example.