When the Larvae Moult | The infection spreads | Post-mortem p.74

Hyperion wrote:Just reread Karl's breakdown the roles and imo the parasite role is far too overpowered

Parasite: As a night action, each Parasite may ask me to change hosts. To perform this action, name a player during the night phase. If successful, your current alt account dies and leaves the game, and you take over the named alt account. (This mechanism replaces 'wolf kills' in traditional AYA?.) When you take a different host, you gain any night abilities of that host.

I don't see how it's possible to deal with that as you can never get a hand on someone to work out if they're a wolf before they've moved on. It doesn't allow you to see who they might have spoken with/voted for and it gives them potential extra powers as well all in addition to the 'kill'.
It's an interesting dynamic but I feel it definitely needs tweaking and reducing in power were it to be used again

You'd look to see if the persons changed in any way. I was an awful Ted

Loved the game Karl! thanks for running it

Man I was so pummed to be the Spy and saw so much potential to cause havoc for both sides! ( although technically I was a baddie)

Typical of Falsey to target me, but hopeful my intelligence training cause some confusion. I was also really surprised that no one noticed how my posting style had changed when my account was taken over compared to other games when

Its funny, reading back on karl's posts there are some subtle hints to what is going on, guess the nature of the "kills" just caused so much confusion nobody noticed the hints.

Anyway, big props to Karl for trying something different. Really loved the idea of account manipulation and would love to see it again in other games!

Kezzer wrote:Loved the game Karl! thanks for running it

Man I was so pummed to be the Spy and saw so much potential to cause havoc for both sides! ( although technically I was a baddie)

Typical of Falsey to target me, but hopeful my intelligence training cause some confusion. I was also really surprised that no one noticed how my posting style had changed when my account was taken over compared to other games when

Its funny, reading back on karl's posts there are some subtle hints to what is going on, guess the nature of the "kills" just caused so much confusion nobody noticed the hints.

Anyway, big props to Karl for trying something different. Really loved the idea of account manipulation and would love to see it again in other games!

I tried my best! I actually went through the posts of all the people I took over, for about 10-20 minutes to determine punctuation usage, smilies etc

Lucky noone took over me, you wouldn't have a hope in hell of being this bad at typing and spelling!

Karl wrote:

Errkal wrote:Lucky noone took over me, you wouldn't have a hope in hell of being this bad at typing and spelling!

How did you become a Spy?

I was interested by this part of my role PM:

"Your power relies on covert support from an outside agency. If you are killed or otherwise rendered unreliable, your handlers will choose a new Spy to support."

But never got a chance to work it out

Kezzer wrote:

Karl wrote:

Errkal wrote:Lucky noone took over me, you wouldn't have a hope in hell of being this bad at typing and spelling!

How did you become a Spy?

I was interested by this part of my role PM:

"Your power relies on covert support from an outside agency. If you are killed or otherwise rendered unreliable, your handlers will choose a new Spy to support."

But never got a chance to work it out

I got a PM to say my role had changed. Randomly happened one day, I figured someone had control on who was the spy and they had done it.

Never really looked into it as didn't really have time with work getting in the way.

FudgeDiver wrote:

Hyperion wrote:Just reread Karl's breakdown the roles and imo the parasite role is far too overpowered

Parasite: As a night action, each Parasite may ask me to change hosts. To perform this action, name a player during the night phase. If successful, your current alt account dies and leaves the game, and you take over the named alt account. (This mechanism replaces 'wolf kills' in traditional AYA?.) When you take a different host, you gain any night abilities of that host.

I don't see how it's possible to deal with that as you can never get a hand on someone to work out if they're a wolf before they've moved on. It doesn't allow you to see who they might have spoken with/voted for and it gives them potential extra powers as well all in addition to the 'kill'.
It's an interesting dynamic but I feel it definitely needs tweaking and reducing in power were it to be used again

You'd look to see if the persons changed in any way. I was an awful Ted

Sure, and had we been told that this was the premise, it would have been fun trying to catch people out.

Plus, I've not been on GRcade in ages, so nobody knew what my posts were normally like, anyway.

But I knew.

This was probably my least involved AYA. Partly due to being busy but also because I had no role, no one PM’d me and no one really accused me. I was just sort of there in the background contributing nothing.

But as an experience it was great. Thematic and more story driven than normal which I enjoyed a lot.

Very interesting write-up of the events, it's fun to see how many decisions could have effected the outcome for both sides. Thanks for writing that and for running the game Karl.

Thank you all so much for playing. I'm happy people enjoyed it and that it's generating a lot of discussion! Here are my thoughts on some of the points made.


Re: narrative: I'm really glad everyone seemed to enjoy this element. It was the main focus of the experience for me and I'm so glad people thought it was fun and interesting as a horror short story / role-playing experience. Thank you all so much!


Re: game balance: the feedback on this has been fair and really interesting to read. The game in retrospect probably was tilted towards the Parasites and if I were doing it again there'd be a lot I would tweak. Saying that, the run could have gone a lot differently:

The Parasites had an active hand in seizing these opportunities. I think the feedback is very fair and very valuable for any future mystery games, but in that I don't want it to get lost that the Parasites played a very strong, aggressive, active game.

Besides hints being too obtuse, perhaps part of the problem was that I just didn't account for how much a highly-motivated Parasite team could tear things up.


Finally, on Hype: I should have punished him by giving a willing dead player his account instead of him to play on. That's a really clever idea I only had last night when it was all over. (Hype: nothing personal & no hard feelings. You probably felt I was being a bit of a dick at the time, but hopefully it makes sense in retrospect.)

Karl wrote:Finally, on Hype: I should have punished him by giving a willing dead player his account instead of him to play on. That's a really clever idea I only had last night when it was all over.

Yeah, no, I thought of this this morning and thought it would have been better, but appreciate you didn't really have time

Karl wrote:4. If Sykes hadn't jumped in the ominous pool - he wasn't fully aware of what it was, but he had a visual description of it and it was his free choice - he wouldn't have become a Parasite.

I couldn't believe the other two jumped into what was described in our pm as something like a whirlpool of tentacles and larvae

It was quite funny actually, I was confused the following morning. I sent you a PM telling you to jump in and then the next day you hadnt and I was all ???

Karl, did you simulate what would happen if I had jumped in?

As an observer this was a good game to try and follow. I also didnt tie together Karl's account hint (as I assumed it was him accessing) and the torn out throats. I did think the spys could access accounts but also didnt make that last jump. However, I feel the clues were there for those thinking hard enough on it to pick it up.

I think you could have pinned the paras following that revelation. You'd have to install a verification check for groups via PM, delete those PMs and then reverify the next day.

Roonmastor wrote:You'd have to install a verification check for groups via PM, delete those PMs and then reverify the next day.

FWIW, I was concerned from day one that this might be a threat to us as well. We had codechecks to ensure we were dealing with the right people.

Errkal could have screwed us with that one. If he passed the code on to a couple of people we would have broken our trust chain and been in a solo position, for a little while at least. And Errkal must have had access to our data sheet. Another missed opportunity.

Sorry I was so inactive for the whole game, ended up being out every day and working most nights this week. Almost won by doing nothing anyway until I was rudely shot at the last second.

False wrote:Karl, did you simulate what would happen if I had jumped in?

Sure, a couple of rules interact there. You would have become a Pupa and immediately someone else on your team would become the Alpha.

First off, thanks Karl for running such an interesting and highly thought out game! The premise and writing made this interesting from start to finish, even once I was out.

As a game I do think this was far too imbalanced towards the parasites. As others have said I read the OP as a warning that Karl as GM may interfere with accounts as part of the psychological horror theme. Never did it occur to me that other players could take control of other's accounts. Once I was out from it happening to me it of course became obvious, but I don't think I'd ever have worked it out. It's just too much of a game change from any mafia I've ever played.

On day 3 I was actually quietly confident for the village. We'd luckily hit Ted (actually fudge as it turns out) and I was in contact with primarily denster with quite a web of roles worked out. Not all were perfect in the end (especially my late reaching out to Errkal - how did you know the no role human role PM so perfectly?) but I was deliberately shielding Denster's identity while feeding back information to him. I felt like we were being really careful so that even if I was killed the circle could succeed.

Unfortunately we had no inkling that my PMs would become compromised, and that must have played right into the parasite's hands. Our careful web of trust was completely broken.

If we'd been aware of the actual rules, I would have played completely differently, and I think that is the main point of imbalance. The parasites didn't modify the wolf role and how the game is played, they flipped a lot of it right on its head. Vote history examination or other regular mafia tactics just become useless, but we as a village had no idea.

I'm amazed that I correctly targeted Cribs on day 1 and hit Ted the day after. Complete stroke of luck

Also I wish soneone had noticed the sudden drop in activity for Delta_Orange once I got took over! But I don't blame anyone, I'd hace never realised either :p

OrangeRakoon wrote:Also I wish soneone had noticed the sudden drop in activity for Delta_Orange once I got took over! But I don't blame anyone, I'd hace never realised either :p

I noticed this. I was a couple pages behind reading and at first I thought you'd died. Then I realised you hadn't and it drove me crazy not being able to point it out.

False wrote:It was quite funny actually, I was confused the following morning. I sent you a PM telling you to jump in and then the next day you hadnt and I was all ??

Yeah, I was very suspicious of you at this point, not really answering questions and being very vague about what needed to happen.
Re. that pm, I'm pretty sure I received it/read it after I'd already PMd Karl my intentions. I do remember it being a response to whether I should go on the expedition and you just responding "jump in". I didn't know whether that was just a turn of phrase or you'd actually wanted me to jump in the tentacle death