[M] Wizardry Mafia 2.5 - Game Over! Town Wins!

[BoomFrog]

Assuming no more modkills as well of course, but I think we've weeded out all the low interest players at this point.

[Adacore]

That scenario also requires me to be a sorcerer with three feats (disguise, quicken, warp), and sorcs only get two feats.

I guess we're just waiting on mpolo to AM-field Lataro, then we can get the lynch done and win the game.

[mpolo]

I just sent in the cast command, so,

Vote: BoomFrog

[Lataro]

lets see if it goes though before hammering this.

[mpolo]

Oh Happy Day. My spell was disrupted. Either somebody else cast that Delusions, or there is something else affecting me.

[BoomFrog]

That scenario also requires me to be a sorcerer with three feats (disguise, quicken, warp), and sorcs only get two feats.

I guess we're just waiting on mpolo to AM-field Lataro, then we can get the lynch done and win the game.

Good point. Game's over. I'll vote myself as soon as those MM are cleared.

Unvote

[Lataro]

right, so I'm dead I guess. >.>

Whatever, Misnomer, you better make a shield pot and give it to someone tomorrow, if D5 happens...

vote: boomfrog

thought I'd finally survive til the last day of a game that wasn't a small for once...

[mpolo]

If I'm not disrupted tomorrow, I have one Bolster that I can transmute into Shield or Panacaea. But if we haven't won this when BoomFrog goes down, I may well be disrupted…

[PhoenixEnigma]

I submitted my spell casts a while ago, but I haven't heard anything back on them - obviously not in thread, and no notification that they were disrupted either. I think we're pretty much waiting on that to be processed before we hammer?

[BoomFrog]

I'm taking as many of you evil bastards with me as I can!

Vote BoomFrog

[Lataro]

meh, since you're the final scum, your lynch occurs before the missiles hit.

I win, in both senses.

[ElectricHaze]

There will be a delay, as I have been dealing with my car suddenly not having brakes and some other RL stuff. Please hold, Thank you.

[Lataro]

There will be a delay, as I have been dealing with my car suddenly not having brakes and some other RL stuff. Please hold, Thank you.

It's cool man, stop your car first before wrapping the game up, we'll wait.

[Aardvarki]

I don't want to keep you waiting any longer, so I'm just ending this with some crappy flavor, sorry guys. Good Game!

As the evil wizards schemed and plotted, they managed to pick out the Good Guys one by one. The Good Guys hadn't properly prepared. Their plans were discovered too early and fell apart as a result.

ElectricHaze and his army of Darkness marched towards the Chancellor. The Chancellor wasn't dumb - he knew he stood no chance. With all his allies defeated, he fired off a few spells to try to lay down the path for his escape. ElectricHaze countered them easily.

"You've lost, old man. This room is sealed, there is no way out, my wizards are still strong, and you've got nothing left. Accept your defeat like a good little slave, and maybe we'll spare you."

"You're right, Haze. The room is sealed, and I'm almost out of spells. But there IS a way out!", said the Chancellor with a cunning grin on his face.

With that, the Chancellor flung himself across the room. Once directly over the center, one last spellcast by the Chancellor created a column of ice around the center of the room, encasing himself and the portal in a shell of ice.

The evil Wizards destroyed the shell, but it was too late. The Chancellor was gone.

Did the Chancellor survive? Will ElectricHaze ever find his father? Did Aardvarki really just pull these questions (and this flavor) out of his ass? Find out next time on...

Wizardry 3.0!


BoomFrog was the Good Evoker, the last of the Followers of Aardvarki.

Town Wins!

[DaBigCheez]

And remember: Evil will always win, because good...gets modkilled en-masse

BoomFrog - you were kinda flailing towards the end, but I definitely respect that you were willing to keep trying and playing, big props to you ^_^

Oh, and by the way, you made the right choice of nightkill target; I was going to be using my Revelation on you during the night.

Other amusing notes - I don't think I cast a single actually-useful spell that whole game. My cast history was as follows:

Spoiler:

Extended Foresight N1, to let me react to stuffs. Pings me about incoming Revelation.
Chat with PE D2, I know that *someone* cast a Rev on me so I believe the claim easily; we coordinate with amusing cryptography for no other real reason than that we could. Then:
Useless Arcane Sense on Lataro to confirm something we already know-ish
Here's the fun one - that Detect Magic PE claimed? That was actually me. PE didn't have any left, but I thought it was important to check FAOT; I'd already claimed a spellcast, so I couldn't do it without outing myself as a power role...but wait, the AV link was still active! So, I proposed the possibility and then left...and in a hilarious comedy of errors, I was gone for several hours, during which PE claimed a Detect Magic cast. So, I got back, hurriedly sent in something Transmuted to a detect magic while being thankful no other casts had been processed in the meantime, sent the results to PE using AV, and then the day ended before PE could actually post the results, so nothing useful came out of it anyway. Frankly, I was surprised nobody tried to call PE on "where were the results of that Detect" - FAOT flipping scum probably helped with that.
If not for the Detect shenanigans, I would have been throwing on an anti-Smite Spell Armor (extended), which would have kept me up last night, but it all worked out.

This night was just funny though - I thought to myself "I'm going to gamble that scum's not going to target me tonight so I can get a Rev off on BoomFrog - I've got others who ping me more, but I just want *certainty* there". And that was a gamble I lost. Still got pinged by Foresight and managed to throw a shield on PE before I died, though; maybe it stopped a Disrupt? *shrug*

But yeah. Well played town (perfect lynch record woo), but I think this would have been a very different game if we'd had to deal with the sorcs ourselves

And PE, I am disappoint. You should totally have Warped that fireball into BoomFrog during the day for style points

[PhoenixEnigma]

And PE, I am disappoint. You should totally have Warped that fireball into BoomFrog during the day for style points

Man, don't think I didn't want to! That was a lot of the reason I took warp spell, because daycast fireballs would be awesome, but I didn't read the rules close enough* - it's day spells at night only, not the other way around.

Warp Spell (3/game): Cast a Self-only or Non-Self spell on any target, or cast a Day-only spell during the night. You can use both abilities on the same spell, but only by using the feat twice.

Otherwise, good game, I'm rather impressed that BoomFrog played it out to the bitter end, even after all the modkills

*I did a lot of that.

[Misnomer]

And remember: Evil will always win, because good...gets modkilled en-masse

'All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing'

But yeah, I actually found it kind of hard to play this as town - even in normal games I find town roles harder to play than anti-town roles, so I was really kind of stumped as to how to play a weak town role that nonetheless had a lot of potential different actions... playing a sorc last time came so much more naturally to me, which might explain why people thought I was one this time round too.

[DaBigCheez]

Oh, right - yeah, my mind appended a "or vice-versa" there. And yeah - as my D1 posts show, I too did a lot of rules-reading-fail >_>

@Misnomer: lololol

[ElectricHaze]

Yeah, sry about the ending guys. I was really busy, with things like my car not working, and on top of that, all the lurking and modkills that went on didn't really have me in the "Lets write some awesome flavor for this badass game" mood. Hopefully, with the changes for Wiz 3, and probably moving it into a small game slot will make things better on that front.

In other news, we are looking to run Wizardry v3.0 soonish, preferably around mid September.

[Lataro]

Holy shit, I survived til endgame for, as far as I can recall, the first time EVER in a medium/large game, regardless of alignment!

Moreover, holy shit, I actually got to play town for longer than a game day!

[mpolo]

Congratulations, Lataro!

And the rest of town. I'm kind of amazed that I survived, but then again, they had me pretty locked up with disruptions…

[Gopher of Pern]

yeah mpolo, you were the only known town power role.

I screwed up my IM cast, I thought it automatically disappeared. Definitely need to read the rules closer! Not that it really made a difference.

Great town play, mixed with modkills on the sorcs and scum, really hurt us. I was also really paranoid about pming on N1, due to all the leaked msgs. Overall it was not an easy game to sub into, though Boomfrog did a good job of it.

[BoomFrog]

BoomFrog - you were kinda flailing towards the end, but I definitely respect that you were willing to keep trying and playing, big props to you ^_^

Oh yeah, I was unprepared at the end there and made up my falseclaim late at night and in a hurry. I had to claim specialist because it was the only way I could technically theoretically maybe still win, If I got adacore and mpolo mislynched. Obviously an absurd longshot but I had to try on principle.

My origonal plan was to claim EHW and claim I'd cast revelation on the real EHW. Then the next day I'd get lynched and cast revenge at hammer. Of course for that plan to work GoP had to live. If Van hadn't disappeared I think I could have gotten her lynched.

Mpolo you mostly lived because I wanted to sponge more shields from you against the sorcerers. Then later we weren't sure what you had trap carded against. Obviously in retrospect I wish I'd killed you instead of VZ.

Town had a preponderance of divinations and very few protective spells. It made false claims very difficult, FOAT was basically caught out because of Misnomer's scry. And there were a large number of Semi-confirmed town by the end which narrowed scum to a small group at endgame. However without any modkills I think town may have lost even with a perfect lynching record due to evocations.

So here's my big question: Do you think FOAT would have still been lynched if I hadn't pointed out the lameness of the Silent Ray of Frost claim? This is the only thing I think I might have done wrong this game.

[DaBigCheez]

I like to *think* that I would have found the claim suspicious either way, but your post did kind of arrest my attention where I might have skimmed over things a little more otherwise; it was some p. good distancing, and made me think you were townie for a long time, but it might have been better to sit back, or to make it less attention-grabbing? That would have lost a lot of the whole point of the thing, though (looking townie due to getting in first), so IDK.

[Adacore]

Yeah, massive props to Boomfrog for continuing to play right to the bitter end. I really respect him for that (and the fact he was doing it had planted some slight paranoia that maybe he actually was town and the Good team had both High Wizards or three Alchemists or something crazy). There were potential ways in which almost any of the remaining players could be scum, but they were very convoluted (involving Ray of Frost casts by other scum to achieve the two-missiles-in-one-night, then a quicken feat to get the two disrupts off), and I didn't want to bring them up to give the scum more ammo.

I'm not happy that the sorcerers got modkilled this game. They were both in pretty good shape - Van had a bit of suspicion, but not too much, and RR was almost completely neutral. I think town would've been in serious trouble with the sorcs both surviving an extra day or two - we were starting to run really low on MM defences. I don't think town picked up enough shields in general, actually. As BoomFrog said, we were short of Protection. I was strongly inclined to go for a Protector myself, actually, the only reason I didn't was because I did it last game and wanted a change.

[Not A Raptor]

Oh, we won?

I'm going to come out and claim one of the day one Arcane Voices: I was the one who asked for somebody who got the codeword key to speak up.

[DaBigCheez]

After reading through the spoilers, I'm kinda half-sorry I didn't just take Astral Echoes at game start and spam the heck out of that - honestly, the main reason I didn't Transmute something right then is because I thought the mods would just refuse to give out a game-breaking codeword PM <_<

Incidentally - what *was* the method of determining what PM an Echoes received? And were you guys amused by my comms with PE?

[Aardvarki]

Because by popular demand, Echoes is OUT for W3.0, I'll tell you.

Echoes pulled the most recent PM, longer than the first paragraph of lorem ipsum text (I never actually word-counted the PMs, just eyeballed them), that hadn't been pulled by Echoes already. It was my intent (though never actually practiced) to piece together PMs that had been split apart, so multiple consecutive PMs by the same player in order would count as one, but splitting PMs into multiples only actually happened twice in the game (and didn't get pulled by AE).

I really didn't expect the scum to slip so heavily during N0. My actual intent with AE was to prevent the scum from getting to plan too too heavily during N0 (I expected AE to cause them to stay quiet, for the most part), because I felt it was a little bit too much of an advantage being allowed to plan their spells together, while the town is forced to risk possibly ending up with four diviners and no protection (pretty close to what happened this game - 3 diviners + mpolo). In the end, it gave a LOT of information, but nothing solid. I think it was two or three more casts on D1 that would've caught the actual code. To be honest, I wasn't very concerned about it even if that happened - but I never expected the sorcerers to both end up needing to be modkilled!

DBC, I found yours and PE's communication hilarious. By the end of D2, I was reading your PMs without even needing to cross-check the code except for rarely-used words. Decoder ring? I 'ardly know 'er!

Amusingly, the split-into-four-PMs code you and PE used WOULD have qualified as a single AE-able PM under my rules. Whether or not it would've been decodable without the (separate) PM describing how the code works is another matter entirely, however.

All in all, I felt the town played well, the scum played not-so-well, and the sorcs didn't play at all. I think W3 may be a Small, rather than a Medium, because I don't want so much lurking next time around.

[DaBigCheez]

For the amusement of others, here's sample PMs between me and PE:

Spoiler:

Investing an alligator in turtles would probably be good for PR (or at least morale XD ), but likely isn't leveraging our assets very well. The rest of this year is looking pretty flexible, liquidity is very high. I'm thinking a shrimp party sounds good - longterm ROI with Shrimp in the Otter or Swordfish fields seems risky, Carp or Chicken are probably better investments going forward. KFC makes me lean towards chicken, but that could be the greasy feeling it leaves on my fingers. Might Hedge with an Ostrich against Swordfish as well, although that will kick my Puppies pretty hard for the foreseeable future. The only reserve would be a silly goose, and I'm not sure what the market value there is.


I've bought Kangaroo insurance in case of any late trading with Tigers, so we should be OK on that front (if it comes up). I'm also planning to relaunch Fish in the first half of next year, targeting the same market segment, unless you have a better roadmap?

Agreed, excellent liquidity, let's just not get into too much margin-trading - we'd hate to overextend our leverage.

Carp and chicken are agreed pretty good, but it might be two or three years before that investment comes to fruition, and the bottom might drop out of the market in the meantime barring serious intervention from the Leopard and Hamster Commission. I'm not sure they'd want to spend that much political capital to protect that kind of investment before it's even really bearing fruit, though.

Chicken could be nice, but doesn't really go well with shrimp as far as my tastes are concerned; I think I'd prefer a nice chicken-and-ostrich casserole. Carp and possibly moths might go better with the shrimp, with maybe an ostrich-and-porcupine side dish.

Same market segment could be good, but there won't be substantial growth during the next couple quarters so an investment elsewhere may be wise; anticipating a year and a half for decent ROI. Might be better to save the fish for at least the first bit of the year, and see if any good opportunities for investment come up - especially if the shrimp harvest during the night is good.

Also, when I was talking about getting fish for lunch towards the beginning of D3, that was intended as a cue to PE - "Fish" was the code for Arcane Voice, and I wanted to chat

Yeah; even with combination, there'd be a minimum of three PMs that would need to be intercepted for scum to get any useful info out of it (one for content, one for code instructions, one for the code itself), and I didn't think they'd likely take that much AE - and I could (and did) short-circuit town attempts to brute-force the code.

[Adacore]

Those PMs are awesome. You can almost believe you're reading (hilarious) emails sent by an exotic meats dealer

I'm not sure I ever posted this anywhere, but I would've used it if I were scum: A 100% foolproof method for locking down PMs in the presence of a listener would be to use a decent encryption algorithm, then base the key on a combination of a keyword and, crucially, the time the post was sent. Post times aren't included in Echoes results, so if you used three or four of them to generate a key, you'd get a code that was almost impossible to crack even with access to every single scum PM.

I even made sure I was online for game-start so that if I got a scum role I could send the first scum-message to start the cryptography before anything useful got sent in open PMs.

[John Citizen]

Yes! First win!

Sorry for lurking and getting myself modkilled, I had no access for 2 weeks by which time I was dead. Town seemed to do well without me though...

Also, I sent the potion to mpolo D1. It was a spell armour against alter alignment; I set it to make the results of the detect good that I later cast more accurate.

Those PMs are awesome. You can almost believe you're reading (hilarious) emails sent by an exotic meats dealer

I second this.

[BoomFrog]

Also, I sent the potion to mpolo D1. It was a spell armour against alter alignment; I set it to make the results of the detect good that I later cast more accurate.

Clever, although scum should just not drink any mystery potions the get generally.

Ideas for Wiz 3:

Spoiler:

Slight of hand needs a strong buff, it's only useful in a close lynch. Make it a cantrip and automatically silent perhaps?

Knowledge: Instead of gaining 3 prepared 1st level spells, you cast any one 1st level spell in the game. If it is a cantrip you also add the spell to your spellbook.

Knowledge2: Alternative idea. Make Knowledge a first level spell that adds any one 1st level spell to your prepared spells list.

Foresight: Although this didn't really come up the thought of it terrified me. I was paranoid that I would try to smite or fireball the EHW and he would have foresight and then trapcard me as a response and I'd fail to kill and get caught red handed. I suppose spectral horror protects against this somewhat because the EHW wouldn't want to claim, but still. I think this spell shouldn't protect against the NK perhaps?

Alter Alignment: An even number of Alter Alignment should yield normal results on detect good.

Deception: You should be able to pick what role you appear as when revelationed.

False spell: A new illusion cantrip, it does nothing but it is automatically disguised without feat usage.

Preparedness would have made more sense as a free feat for Diviners.

[DaBigCheez]

I will say that Silent Spell didn't feel like a very useful feat as a Diviner - just about every spell I cast was either night-only, or I *wanted* people to see I'd cast it.

[Lataro]

Because by popular demand, Echoes is OUT for W3.0, I'll tell you.

Good, because I pry would have dropped if I was scum, having to use codes like that just sucks the fun out of the game for me with all the time that goes into just figuring out what someone is saying.

[Adacore]

Deception: You should be able to pick what role you appear as when revelationed.

I think this would nerf Revelation too hard given the balance of this game, but maybe not.

False spell: A new illusion cantrip, it does nothing but it is automatically disguised without feat usage.

Preparedness would have made more sense as a free feat for Diviners.

These are good ideas. As DBC said, the silent spell feat felt entirely useless as a Diviner - the one time I used it, I shouldn't have done. In general, this game has made a strong argument that town should always make their spellcasts visible whenever possible in order to help with confirming in mid-late game.

I think I'd actually prefer free choice on the feats, rather than restricting each specialist so heavily (although I do like the transmute (school) feats the specialists get). The 'packaged' feat made Evoker and Protector far more appealing than Diviner, imo.

[Aardvarki]

Well, there's two major changes that are occurring for Wiz3.0 that really throw a wrench into everything. After all, it's a new version number, which means big changes!

First off, I'm completely revamping the "spell preparation" to make it a little more simple. Instead of spells in your book being one-use only, they're unlimited-use (with rare exceptions, such as Transmute, which stays), but you just get less of them. This puts an end to builds such as the "DetGood/Missile/Shield" novice, who has the weakest role in the game but can still cop, protect, and kill; and puts weak roles closer in-line with standard mafia roles (doctors only protect, cops only cop, etc). This makes the game a little more straightforward and a little less chaotic. I feel this change will make the game easier to play as scum.

I'm also revamping the "spells per day" mechanism, and boiling almost all actions a wizard can perform down into "Mana". Mana basically is an "actions per day" counter - with roles getting between zero (gasp!) and three (possibly four) mana. Most first-level spells cost one, most second-level cost two. Additionally, a few feats are being modified from "x/game" to "x mana cost". Not a huge change, but I see it as a welcome simplification to a complex game, even moreso with the addition of other spells and abilities with continual mana costs.

All that said, from your suggestions: Sleight can be very powerful if used collectively by scum (four scum with Sleight can swing a seven vote difference), and I'm not sure if it's in or out for W3. Knowledge is in for W3, and it's actually very similar to a combination of your two recommendations. Foresight is still in flux but I'd like to keep it - right now it's just too powerful for Sorcs and too weak for everyone else, so I'm working on tweaking that. AA will see significant changes, as I am giving a rather large collective nerf to the Divination spells to bring their power down into line with the other schools and hopefully make Divination useful for the scum, to boot. Deception is in flux because of the changes to Divination magic as a whole, and I absolutely agree with your suggestion about Diviners, but they'll actually be getting a feat new to 3.0 that falls more in line with their school.

Amusingly, False Spell was almost included in 2.5. I called it Ventriloquism, but it ended up getting the boot to Illusory Missile, after I decided I wanted a more offensive swing to Illusion, rather than going for utility. It may yet make an appearance in 3.0. If I take it, I'll give it your name.

One last change that I think will make things slightly easier, given the smaller spell selection, is that there will be a much larger number of spells which can perform multiple different functions, the way Arcane Voice in 2.5 could (Anon PM, Anon Public Message, Private Link). I plan to keep the overall spell count approximately the same (give or take five) as in 2.5, I feel about thirty spells is the most any player should be expected to learn.

It's all still in the very early stages, and I plan to keep working on it for a couple more months before it's ready for release, so all of this is very subject to change! If anyone else has any ideas, I'd love to hear them and will gladly respond.



And in response to Lataro... What's so hard about just NOT using people's names? If you REALLY need to address someone, use something simple to identify them - something they said or heck, even their rolename is easy and secure enough for all intents and purposes. I never forced anyone to develop a code. I figured AE would throw a little mix into the coordination early on and then would fade away as it was used less. I really thought the codes were over the top, but amusing nonetheless. I felt like everyone over-thought the whole thing and a simpler approach would have really been best. Oh well, people don't like it, it's out. I personally would never have an issue with listeners in a game, so long as I knew they were there; but that's just me.

[Elvish Pillager]

Those PMs are awesome. You can almost believe you're reading (hilarious) emails sent by an exotic meats dealer

I'm not sure I ever posted this anywhere, but I would've used it if I were scum: A 100% foolproof method for locking down PMs in the presence of a listener would be to use a decent encryption algorithm, then base the key on a combination of a keyword and, crucially, the time the post was sent. Post times aren't included in Echoes results, so if you used three or four of them to generate a key, you'd get a code that was almost impossible to crack even with access to every single scum PM.

I even made sure I was online for game-start so that if I got a scum role I could send the first scum-message to start the cryptography before anything useful got sent in open PMs.

Yeah, but then as soon as a townie intercepted a *single* scum PM, they'd know that one of the scum was a player who knows about cryptography, which would blow your cover.

[VectorZero]

The first rule of cryptography is to not let people know you know about cryptography.