Tuesday, October 30, 2007

A Somewhat Belated Arrival Post

I wanted to delay this until I got my info from Kevan.  Read into that what you will.

Arriving at the village of Zahndorf one sunny afternoon, the locksmith Oracular Rufio makes her way to the town hall.  Despite the warm weather, the remaining government officials seem tense and worried.  Rufio greets them with a smile.  “Condolences on the recent death of your Mayor,” she begins.  “I have heard news that this small peaceful town has been plagued by a rather… odd… criminal element in the recent weeks.  There has been some panicking, some lynching, some disorganization.  Now, I’m not a specialist in silver, and I am not a believer in the more superstitious solutions to the more eclectic varieties of crime, but in my long experience with my trade, I have found that violent discontents of all kinds can often be stopped by nothing more fancy than a good solid lock.  Far be it from me to tell the town how to police its own streets, but I would have it be known that I can provide protection, in the form of locks and deadbolts of all kinds, to the local populace.  For a fee, of course.”

I have some ideas for how to work this into the game mechanics, but I’d like some feedback from y’all.  Obviously we can start with giving the locksmith the power to make locks, similar to the rules for the swordsmith and the gunsmith that are already in the ruleset.  As far as the actual protection goes, I was thinking of doing something along the lines of, one lock in your inventory has X% chance of stopping 1 werewolf, e.g. if X = 50 than one lock has a 25% chance of stopping two werewolves, and two locks has a 50% chance of the same.  The chance decreases with increased numbers of werewolves and increases with increased numbers of locks.  Obviously, if someone is protected from a werewolf attack by his locks, he will be aware that he was attacked, but not by whom.

So the question is, what do you guys think is a fair value for X, and how can this probability equation be represented in the ruleset?

posted by Oracular rufio at 30 Oct 2007 05:04:01 UTC Comments (9)

Comments

aaronwinborn:

30-10-2007 13:27:47 UTC

something like that might work. should probably be a limit on it—all the locks in the world won’t help when they have to visit the outhouse in the middle of the night…

Chivalrybean:

30-10-2007 14:35:20 UTC

Also, anyone who is ‘doing anything’ at night is more at risk, like the night watchman, or anything that might take them outdoors.

Oracular rufio:

30-10-2007 14:46:03 UTC

Ok, so a cap at maybe 90% (85%?) total effectiveness for most people, and something like 50-60% for the night watchman?  Or many the night watchman shouldn’t get any protection from the locks since he’s effectively wandering around.  But if everyone gets locks except the night watchman, that might make it more obvious who it was…

The main point, is how many locks should it take to get to that cap?

Kevan: he/him

30-10-2007 16:16:59 UTC

If a lot of villagers end up having locks on their doors, won’t it just make it easy for the werewolves to concentrate their attention on those with fewest?

Oracular rufio:

30-10-2007 17:22:30 UTC

Yeah, I guess it’s kind of the same problem with the clerical/military professions all over again.  Although, the locks aren’t going to be 100% protection, so as long as they’re spread fairly evenly it shouldn’t have quite that effect - especially if the people who have the locks are more high-profile as far as the werewolves are concerned.

Brendan: he/him

30-10-2007 17:53:59 UTC

Frankly, I think all the percentage-defense mechanisms—guns, walls or locks—are unthematic and don’t add fun to the game.

Consider that the dynasty’s been going for over two weeks and the Werewolves have only managed to kill off two out of twenty-one players; we ourselves have only lynched one more.  The living population of the village is showing a net increase!  That’s not how Mafia works.

This should be a fast-paced game of intrigue and accusation with players dropping like flies, not an interminable dread-filled slog while we all barricade ourselves in and just hope not to die.  How much fun is this going to be for Bucky and Amnistar if they have to spend the rest of the round sitting on their hands?

Even assuming the Werewolves have their act together and can try to kill someone every night—which has hardly been the case so far—are we even thinking about how long a 90% protection ratio would make the game last?  They’d only be able to actually get someone about once every twenty days.  And that’s from locks alone!  I like this dynasty, but I don’t want to be playing it next June.

The Villagers’ chief objective in this game should be figuring out who the Werewolves are.  From here on out, I’m always going to support probabilistic-evidence proposals over defensive ones.

Oracular rufio:

30-10-2007 18:32:38 UTC

Yeah, I get you.  Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if there were the well-protected people versus the not-well-protected people who the werewolves would gang up on?  It would make the game go faster at any rate. :P

With the numbers I had there, you would also need 4 locks to get that 90%.  I really doubt that that would ever happen anyway, unless the game really does last until June.

Maybe what we need is something that makes it easier for werewolves to work together rather than a lot of things that make it easier for people not to be attacked by werewolves.  Then when we take preventative measures there will actually be reason for it…

Hockeyruler:

30-10-2007 19:21:25 UTC

you talked about a price. But seeing as we don’t know what it is we could assume that you can get all 4 in one day. and a 90% chance of being okay is just silly. I really have to agree with brendan, more types of detecting the werewolves instead of defenses.

Oracular rufio:

30-10-2007 20:07:32 UTC

The price was just flavor.  Everything else takes a week to make, so I’d assumed it’d be the same for the locks.  It’d take 4 weeks to get 4 locks total, and there’d have to be a pretty good reason for them all going to one person.  Anyway, the reason I posted it like this was to see what numbers would work.