Thread: Expert No-Playerlist Mafia - Game Over: Assassins and Unclesam win
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Old Mar 29th, 2012, 1:32:49 AM   #465
Bass
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Since the NPL postgame will not be done for a while and I don't want to pull a LonelyNess, here is the postgame for my non anonymous competition hosted inside an anonymous game.

Introduction

First, I would like to thank everyone again who had the courage to sign up for my "experimental" game that was hosted within this one. I am sure many of you are wondering, why would I go so far for a gimmick as ridiculous as this?

If you have known me in the past, I used to be famous for making gimmicks within other mafia games. For example, in PokeMafia I made Stump the PokeFan, where players had to post questions that I would answer, and they would win a spot on the "Wall of Fame" if they could stump me. But why did I do it in NPL mafia?

I suppose I will use this paragraph to talk about my role in NPL mafia since it is relevant in regards to the formation of my competition. My role was the Invisible, but I expected my research obligations in real life to make it impossible for me to play NPL mafia adequately, so I subbed out during Night 0. Ironically, LonelyNess, and later Layell would replace me, and I tried to lynch the latter during a brief attempt at trolling while not playing. I was furious that I was forcibly put back into the game by Paperblade's role. It might have been cool if he won, but regrettably I wasn't on to possibly save him from one of his lynches. Sorry man!

But back to my game. After subbing out, I was contacted by my greatest friend and enemy, Gmax. As neither of us were playing in reality (IIRC), after getting the usual BS out of the way, we nostalgia'd hard on our old mafia experiences, including my gimmicks. That is when Gmax encouraged me to do a similar thing for NPL mafia, and that is how it all began. Here is the full log if you are interested:

...


The Concept

Now that I had the motivation, I didn't want to do this halfheartedly. I personally despised the cowardly way everyone was acting due to the nature of NPL, so my goal was to tear that wall down. Weed out the cowards. To do this, I thought the best idea was a game with a playerlist inside one without a playerlist. I remember stuff like this working in eric's Color Mafia in Simpson's Mafia, so I figured why not try it here? But I also wanted to be a little more elaborate than that. The entire format, which was a series of tasks, was based on a similar competition I played on another forum in the past that I won. It had punishments to the losers and awarded a secret prize to the winner. In my case, I got a signature, made by irak, if any of you remember him:



A very fitting prize indeed. That competition was pretty much a test of courage, and I was proud to have won it. But that wasn't enough. The tasks of that particular competition were mostly silly and subjective in nature, in order for it to be up to the standards of Circus Maximus, they needed depth. My last source of inspiration then was all of the games that required you to communicate with others, come up with strategies, trick other players, as well as engage in diplomacy. Several mafia games that I have played here have fit that mold, but that was not what I was aiming for. Although not a direct influence, my tasks for this game mostly resembled the games found in the manga Liar Game. It is a great manga by the way, and I highly recommend you reading it.

Most importantly though, while keeping these influences in mind, my tasks were original. Some of them were created on the fly based on what was going on in the game at the time, while others were elaborately constructed in advance. But with all of that said, my competition started with the survey.

The Tasks

Now it is about time I provide a brief overview of the tasks. The tasks themselves were mostly experimental, and they are the reason the game was fun to host. A normal mafia game, even if experimental, only lets you test so many ideas, but with this competition I could test several at once and give everyone a taste without the disjointed feel of The Circus. Furthermore, I wanted to reward the players who did well by making the tasks more complicated as the competition went on. Coming up with some of the ideas for the later task was a great challenge, and as a result I think there were a few places that I messed up, but it was still very fun overall. Now with all of that out of the way, I will provide a brief overview of the tasks. I say brief though because you can already find more detailed descriptions of them in this thread as we speak, with the exception of the last three since I didn't want to spoil any important details then.

So anyway, the preliminary task was the survey. I thought it would be fun to make the very act of signing up a task. But being the preliminary task, it was also the most simple to pass in that all you had to do was read the rules carefully. Most of the people that signed up did, only two people fell for my simple trick in regards to the first question. More importantly though the survey was a fun way for me to learn about each of the players based on how they answered the questions.

The next task then was a quiz. This time questions that had correct answers. The questions themselves were mostly based off my own knowledge, ranging from what I learn in my field of study to my various hobbies as well as how I liked my steak! The fun part though was that the middle scorers, not the lowest, were the ones that were eliminated, so this opened a cool little trick in which the first five players who got a 0 were guaranteed to pass. But to make things more interesting, I added the condition that the top scorer would get a special advantage in the following task, so this motivated many people to try and answer all the questions. However, all but Agape proved halfhearted in their attempts, as only he took the effort to watch Sengoku Basara and get that question right, thereby earning his perfect score. Lastly, I encouraged collaboration on this task, and this where the users who planned to get farther in the competition would start allying, particularly shade, billymills, and jumpluff in one and askaninjask and Walrein in the other. Finally, I want to express my disappointment in the performances in Gmax and Crux once more, who lost only because they were too fucking lazy. I think the rest of the tasks in the game would have been much more interesting with them around.

This all lead to the second task. The scavenger hunt was something I really thought of on the limb and was mostly designed to be fun. This was a scavenger hunt for my favorite 10 threads in Trou after all. The trick was though that everyone was given a unique answer, so therefore everyone had to communicate with each other to some degree to win. I was hoping some interesting diplomacy about trading information would happen, but instead jumpluff shocked me with her ingenuity by finding most of the answers on her own. With her help, her alliance, which now added Midou, made it very far. Tragically for askaninjask and Walrein, they were a little slower on the uptake (I did make one error in telling Walrein how many he got wrong, but it didn't matter in the end). By slow, I mean aska made his submission on time but Walrein was beaten to it by Agape by just a few seconds, and thus failed to move on to the next task. I honestly did not expect to get ninja'd, so I actually laughed out loud pretty hard when it happened. Poor Walrein.

I should really be saying poor askaninjask though, as when the third task came around, the shade-jumpluff-billy-midou alliance was going strong, leaving askaninjask and Agape to fend for themselves. On paper, it seemed that this task was designed to break this powerful alliance, but billymills devised an ingenious scheme that nearly guaranteed the survival of his entire alliance. It might have failed if Midou defected and Agape and askaninjask came to agreement, but neither of these happened and so the former alliance won it rather easily. This task took me the longest time to design and I was hoping that it would have been much closer, but even with an easy victory, billymills made sure to check over his strategy each day, and jumpluff maintained contact with the other players to ensure that they were acting within her alliance's wishes. shade contributed less, and Midou did almost nothing. Midou in particular was only useful in the sense that billy's plan needed four people for it to work.

This was all reflected in the fourth task. I will admit that while this was the most fun task to design and had a lot of potential, it dragged on far too long because I was originally not strict enough about the deadlines, and some of the rules were written too vaguely, since I wrote the task while under a lot of stress. But the outcome was obvious. Billymills, who was the strategist of the alliance, wrote the most useful decrees and constantly asked me questions in order to optimize them, but jumpluff really impressed me with her courage in following what was thrown at her. She did throw a fit at first when shade made that decree to make her post a public video, but she shocked shade and followed through with it, though without revealing her true identity. I accepted it because she could never prove that information either way though. But since two out of the four players really tried to win, there was a stalemate between billy and jumpluff, with jumpluff winning only because of Midou's laziness (in voting for her without thinking).

I was not disappointed by the final task, though. The goal of this was to solve a riddle to find the secret prize. jumpluff, who was experienced with this type of thing, solved it in a minute flat. For your reference, when billy and shade tried to solve it, billy didn't identify the prize correctly and shade just gave up. Anyone who still wishes to solve it is free to, but I will include a solution, and a revelation of the secret prize to the public, in the hide tag below:

Solution and Secret Prize


And that's about it for the tasks.

Final Thoughts

As I have already said, I had a lot of fun hosting this, and as a result of the positive feedback, I am hosting another one of these, but it will be a full game this time. In fact, the sign ups for it are underway as we speak, so if you regret not playing this but want to play in the next one, then hurry! I would also like to congratulate jumpluff once more for her victory, as well as several others who encouraged me to design the interesting tasks. Hopefully the next competition will not disappoint. I would also like to say fuck you to those who saw this but deliberately refused to sign up. You are just spineless cowards. That is all.
Last edited by Bass; Mar 31st, 2012 at 9:23:21 PM.
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