[Pregame Setup] [S2] Vampires II: Brotherhood of Blood

[Rainboy]

Looks like Hater's game was a success! Since I didn't really get to play in it (thanks mage), I may as well host one. The design is interesting to me, and I think there's a lot to learn from how the first one played out. Over the next couple of days, I'll be trying to overhaul his game pretty heavily to try to expand play and balance some things. I'm aiming for the following overall changes:

• Revise the action economy so each player has meaningful choices to make in what abilities to use, not just who to use them on. (Drain will no longer be a default 'vamps should use this' ability)
• Lower and standardize the cost of most abilities in the game to encourage most abilities to be used more frequently. (In line with above)
• Make lynch and NK more meaningful to the game as a whole.
• Encourage wolves to slowly strangle the village rather than relying on wombo combos to power through particular targets. (Yes, I'm still salty about that; no, this emphasis is not due to salt [see previous games].)
• Limit the use of roleblocks and percentage health damage (mostly by wrapping those mechanics up into the lynch and nightkill).
• Focus abilities so they have a more defined scope, and more defined ways to counter, predict or play around them.
• Overhaul peeking mechanics so there is less risk in using them without coordination, but more defined bounds for what information you can get.

This game will feature three types of shields:

• All shields will last for one round, and absorb damage (but not Life costs) up to their value.
• Normal shields have no special characteristics.
• Holy shields will heal for 50% of the unused amount when they expire.
• Cursed shields will grant health equal to the amount the shield absorbs (not counted as healing), and deal damage equal to the remaining. Until a Cursed Shield is completely broken, it refreshes each round.

More will be posted in the next few days. I plan to start on Friday, but things may slip to Monday depending on schedule and how much time I've had to iron things out.

[signups open]

[Lawliet]

[In]

[Flath]

[In]

[Pr0Gr4mm4]

[In]

[HATER]

Can confirm. Last night, got drunk and put bunches of new ideas into the roleset. Enjoyed self immensely.

Gonna be a hell of a game.

[in]

[ARSENIC]

[In]

Seems you're getting drunk pretty regularly these days, HATER.
I'm proud of you.

[Shadi]

Almost all of it sounds good but I kind of liked that wolves had to work together as a team to completely annihilate one target, it makes sense since in other games they only have 1 "secure" kill a day.

If they can spread their chaos it'll be super hard to investigate + it kind of encourages wolves not to one shot which is probably a bit meh not being able to do as a whole. However, I am talking prior to the final product so just see it as thoughts while you develop. It's not necessarily bad that they can 1 shot once a round.

[Konijn]

[in]

[Rainboy]

Almost all of it sounds good but I kind of liked that wolves had to work together as a team to completely annihilate one target, it makes sense since in other games they only have 1 "secure" kill a day.

If they can spread their chaos it'll be super hard to investigate + it kind of encourages wolves not to one shot which is probably a bit meh not being able to do as a whole. However, I am talking prior to the final product so just see it as thoughts while you develop. It's not necessarily bad that they can 1 shot once a round.

A lot of the games I run attempt to slant the death towards later rounds, and they usually seem to be generally well accepted. Look at games I've hosted like Transistor, Escape for Redemption, Chaos Rising, and Quantum Werewolf where there are special mechanics in place that explicitly kept people alive early in the game. Even games like Origins and the two Boswell games tend to have a bunch of toughness/protection floating around to increase the chances that things stall early in the game. I dare say that every last one of my non-mafia games has had something in place to push the average life expectancy out.

That said, my aim is to encourage the wolves to spread out damage by making it more effective to do so. I am still aiming to allow the wolves to invest massive resources into piling on high damage on one target, at the cost of doing less overall damage than when they spread out.

[ARSENIC]

Honestly, spreading the damage does seem like a decent idea - the vamps just got pretty unlucky in the last game with how quickly we were able to zero in on them. As long as that doesn't happen again, though, it's possible delaying deaths will only create more confusion and more desperation as everyone notices their HP pool dropping and gets increasingly aggressive as a result, pushing and shoving for as much information as they can before they die, then they drop like flies 3-4 at a time in the last couple of rounds.

[GERTY]

Players:
01: Lawliet
02: Flath
03: Pr0Gr4mm4
04: HATER
05: ARSENIC
06: Konijn






Phase: Pregame Setup
Rules Thread

Game ID: Pisces (Psc)
Use the game id or it's abbreviation as the subject of any PMs to the bot regarding this game.

[Rainboy]

Hmm. 6 players is pretty rough. I don't think I can host any meaningful game with so few. If we can get it up to 10 or so, I can make something work. Rather than leave things forever in limbo, I will be closing signups no later than this coming Monday; if we don't have enough, I'll decide between running a very vanilla game and just giving up my hosting spot for a couple weeks to see if we can scrounge up some interest.

[Rainboy]

Welp, nothin' to see here.

[Toon]

Ill join a normal game, The vampire mechanic seems a bit boring to me ;/