Thanks for the idea. I'll tool around with it for a bit.
And I just realized I said the word "hosed" a lot in that post.
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- Xyre
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Member for 18 years, 7 months, and 26 days
Last active Mon, Dec, 11 2017 08:59:16
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Three more!
e: and arimnaes. I've ripped him off so many times I just assume we're the same person.
Obviously I miss a lot more people, but those two did some truly top-notch games.
I'm sad to say I think the time for this kind of game, at least at this size, is passed. There was a time when there was enough enthusiasm for big, unwieldy works of art; that players could persevere through all the twists and turns out of excitement for what might come up. When, frankly, we all still had time for the commitment this sort of game requires. I think the slow shamble to the finish line and all the modkills and apathy before then suggests these sorts of games can only now be appreciated from a distance. Which is really unfortunate.
So long as you don't do something daffy like trying to /in by posting /replace. Because then you'll be disappointed, and I'll be disappointed (in you).
You are the crew of the USS Inheritance, a black Vienna-class deep-space cargo ship somewhere near the Eagle Nebula.
Things... have been better. The ship is on emergency power. The engines are dead. The escape pods are gone. The monitors are playing nothing but Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park on endless loop.
How could this get any worse? Glad you asked!
The Inheritance is transporting a shipment of big red clicky buttons to a desperate planet on the outer rim. But some among your number are space mafia, who wish to seize the big red buttons for their nefarious purposes. It's your job to stop them, crew. I must inform you that should you fail, you will be fired. Out the airlock.
Eight players will receive the following PM:Four players will receive the following PM:The game lasts over the course of one very long day. There are no nightkills and there is no scum-chat. The deadline is set for 12/31/9999 at 11:59PM.
At any time during the day, a player may PROPOSE a three-player group. (E.g. "Propose [Proposalname]: A, B, C".) Players may then VOTE for proposals by name. (For example, if a proposal is named TANGO, you would support that proposal by posting "Vote Tango".) When a proposal gets a majority of players' approval, it passes. Those three players will be sent a link to a new quicktopic and prohibited from posting further in the game thread. Those players will have a three-day deadline in which to lynch one of their number in the quicktopic. If they fail to lynch, all three will be killed. Then the survivors will return to the main thread and the quicktopic will be closed.
- "Bah" posts are strictly prohibited. If you're dead, you can't post.
- Players in the main thread may not vote for proposals involving players currently in a QT, but may pass additional proposals while waiting for players to come back. The vote threshold for proposals is based on the number of players currently in the main thread, not all living players.
- Players may not post in closed QTs on penalty of modkill. But players are free to reread QTs to which they have access. (If you have something to say to another person in your QT, I recommend you say it before you lynch the third member.)
- Players may not quote QTs, but they may paraphrase them. What constitutes a "paraphrase" is to be construed narrowly and with serious punishments for those who screw it up.
- Proposal names may be one word only, and shouldn't be named anything that would be confusing. I recommend the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for starters.
- While the "real" deadline is set for the end of the 100th century, the mod does reserve the right to set interstitial deadlines for passing proposals on penalty of whatever scary things he can come up with.
To join, type /klaxon.
1. dkingsland967
2. DV
3. King_Deekus
4. kpaca
5. Megiddo
6. Mindreaver
7. not_a_gimmick
8. Nykllor
9. Rodemy
10. Seppel
11. Shockwave07
12. Tordeck
I think Micros should be capped at 7 players and their day length capped at 10 days. That would almost certainly guarantee a Micro takes no more than a month, which would solve the problem of always giving people a ready option to join in.
I'd also be in favor of discouraging the design of games with more than 20 roles for active players (a broad phrasing to account for things like hidden players) as a protection against the sort of quagmire that seems to have overtaken Mind Screw. The days where the community could maintain the high energy required for the twists and turns of a big game are probably behind it, simply because most of us have complicated lives now. Not prohibiting it, mind, but inserting the necessary caveat "larger games have a greater risk of imploding due to indifference, and so if you want to design a larger game, it'd better be damn well worth that risk."
Here's a question I don't think people have posed yet: how many people here still engage with the rest of MTGS (that is, for non-mafia-related activities) on a regular basis? Because I hate the Curse software, too (having to press something like three buttons just to get to the most recent posts in a single thread and having to draft my posts in notes and copy-paste them over on my phone is abysmal).
At this point, I'd be in favor of taking the entire community and setting up again on a new site, with maybe a few of us maintaining a presence here to get interested people to come visit. Undoubtedly it'd be complicated and irksome, and there'd be some attrition (both in players and history), but at the point where we're trying to come up with the best way to advertise ourselves offsite, one wonders whether it'd just be better to sell something new rather than the same old MTGS.
The biggest limitation at this point seems to be people who can and want to write that much flavor. I know from having seen the pieces that Az at one point was working on blowing the story in Inheritance out into a whole arc, which would be cool to see, but that was years ago, and I suspect he just doesn't have the time to work out all the requisite elements. The same thing happened with the follow-up to Ozone Underground, trying to put a capper on the David Klein story (and that's not even mentioning the fact that I never even finished some of the role PMs in OU).
The Asphodel Meadows (and to a lesser extent, word-count wise, the rest of my games) was largely fortuitous, because I was a lazy high school/college student with a lot of time on my hands for producing literary whirligigs. Even if I didn't have my own offline writing to work on, I just don't have the time for that sort of thing anymore, and I'm definitely not the only one. It's one thing to sell the site on its reputation, another to sell it on its potential.
One idea would be to try to break the work up into pieces - get four or five co-mods/co-writers to segment the work of one really big project, whether based on an existing IP or just on the writers' reputations. Give the people on MU lots of links to what's come before to try to draw them in. But I don't know who'd be crazy enough to sign up for that job, either.
My game is comparatively very simple and hopefully quick - 12 players, no special roles, no nights - so I don't think running it and a specialty concurrently would be a problem for player counts, but I'm also willing to step aside if we want to shove the specialties through.
Of course, if the experience of Mind Screw should teach us anything, it's that a game could be voted up in the PCQ with much enthusiasm and still take an eternity to fill up and be coming to its end slowly and painfully. (With no disrespect to Tar, whose game is really cool; I think the age of Mind Screw/super-high complexity games on this site may be coming to its end.)
I had fun with this setup - it's light, but confusing enough as to give players the chance to actually outplay each other.
dragon_reign was forcibly replaced after he never posted in the game thread.