Denster wrote:I also don't think the thread should have known that the cannibals were aware of the outcomes for the tasks. Again this hampered us as we couldn't mislead and get away with it.
Ah, but the decisions (tasks as you call them - basically the once-a-phase choice that the Leader makes; I'm right in thinking this is what you're referring to?) was literally a 50/50 every time, so it'd be an easy one to chalk off as a guess / simply not knowing. Omnivores got plenty of these wrong and weren't suspected for it. There was no logical consistency to the outcomes, and there wasn't meant to be - it wasn't supposed to be something uninformed players were able to deduct through reason, it was meant to be a crapshoot for everyone not in the know (and the only players in the know were the Cannibals and one FOTD per phase).
The leader had a
lot of power this time around. Pick two players to die, pick a direction for the group, pick a clue. Even just getting this power once could lead the omnivores on a several-phase wild-goose chase. You might have lost a cannibal out of doing so, but you'd have potentially incriminated plenty of other, innocent players.
Of course - this is all conjecture as I can't say for sure that the game was perfectly balanced - it obviously wasn't! We've never done this game before. But we did think it was as balanced as we could reasonably make it for a first attempt. The lynch votes being out in the open were to create multiple lines of enquiry for the group at large - meaning lots of potentially innocent people incriminated for voting for innocents, or unknowingly voting against cannibals, for example. So you say it counted against you but it could also have been used by you to turn the screw.
We tried to hammer home the 'seven days, short game, loads happening' approach because we wanted you to pick up on the fact that, if you got all the decisions right, the game could be won in (IIRC) five days. And if you'd have lost some members on the way, that wouldn't matter, because they'd still be winners, and losing members wouldn't affect your ability to kill - only the decisions would do that.
The omnivores
did get some lucky clues - perhaps we allowed too much of the games outcomes to hinge on RNG - but they also managed to get the right candidate each time, so they deserve some credit.
The events were all planned in advance - those that weren't fleshed out i.e. didn't have a narrative that fit the game's theme, still had the basic mechanics planned e.g. how many volunteers, what the risk is, what the reward is. The omnivores got an extra seer early on because that event went their way. Likewise, the adding-cannibals event went the best possible way for the cannibals. But almost straight after they picked up yet another good clue and the cannibal numbers continued to drop.
Like I said - it's hard (and tbh not fair) for me to say who played well or who didn't because it's not the same from our perspective, when we know all the possible outcomes and player roles. If anyone felt hard done by at any point, I can only assure you that everything was planned out in advance, nothing was changed to try and level things up, and everything that wasn't a 50/50 predetermined crapshoot was decided by Karl/myself through using a random number generator.
I hope everyone who played at least enjoyed it, and I hope any future game-runners feel free to mine any of the new concepts we introduced as they see fit.
(Watch my posting rate fall off a cliff now.)
I knew Ironhide was my alpha but then had no idea that title passed on to me when he died. I genuinely thought Errkal was saying I was "seered" even though I wasn't because he believed my crap about an amulet 
I vote to lynch Euan again.