Thank you for playing everybody! I had lotsa fun hosting as usual, the high level of activity was very much appreciated!
If you and your friends are camping in a forest and suddenly a bear starts chasing you, you don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than your slowest friend. That to me was this game in a nutshell. Town had a decent idea of where to look for scum for the most part but when it came to making a decision, a bad play from some townie or other or some role usage that seemed untrustworthy would draw everyone's attention and direct the lynch towards a town player. The scum team exploited this perfectly and kept finding new slow friends to put between themselves and the bear that was coming for them until the game was in the bag. Many townies had 2-3 scum players (CP and HoL most notably) correctly connected to each other, and if only one scum lynch had gone through, chances are more would have followed. As it is however, scum swept this game with little difficulty.
As far as the game's balance is concerned, there's a few minor tweaks I would've liked to make in hindsight as the setup ended up looking a bit too scumsided. My perception may be skewed here though by the fact that scum happened to petrify towns most powerful role N1 and never let it back into play. The resulting lack of power roles on the town side of things in turn fueled setup spec along the lines of "DV and Duelist as co-scum would be too powerful in this setup", so it's safe to say that scum simply hit the jackpot with their petrify shot.
As you may have noticed, the cornerstones of this setup were:
- A strong town Developer who is auto-protected by a Seraph Knight -- this concept was somewhat undermined by the Petrify shot not getting blocked as well as the two Strongman shots scum had at their disposal. That is one hindsight balance change I would have preferred, oh well. At least the game didn't get busted open by a N5 Sensor shot which is a scenario I gambled on that never came to pass.
- A Vanilla Cop with a high amount of shots, flanked by a high number of VTs, but also a Mafia Goon and a Survivor who can muddle the investigation results.
- A pair of confirmed town Masons whose confirms come at the price of a Beloved Princess effect once both Masons are dead.
- The custom Petrify role which I may or may not use again in future games in a rebalanced fashion
- An indy whose role and win condition can change. Had Jeff, Sky and Big Man died while Haza was still alive, Haza would have become a 1x Deathproof Serial Killer, possibly after previously getting confirmed as Vanilla by the Vanilla Cop.
Needless to say not every interaction that could have happened will happen in any given game, as was the case here. I feel like fairly little of the potential of this setup was seen in action but some of it not being realized is probably for the better.
There's also things I'm not very happy about, such as CPs alleged character claim that supposedly never happened but that other people thought happened and cleared him as town for. Doing that felt underhanded and along the lines of the kind of "play" that contributed to ruining this section before, but this time I'll take the blame as I should have done something about it at the time it happened. What I should have done is ask CP if he accidentally claimed character or not and told everybody in thread what the answer was to eliminate all WIFOM around that post. Apart from that, I would still prefer a handful of people to quit flaming over minor issues but oh well, I'm not about to change any of you and I know most of you guys who dish it out can take it as well.
Reading through this it comes off a lot more negative than things actually are, I think we had a fun game with deserving winners.
Once again thanks for playing and see you next time! :woozy_face