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Friday Fun Thread for September 09, 2022

We don't have the bot, so let me step in: this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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We have a Blood on the Clocktower themotte/rdrama Discord group. It's a social deduction game similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game), but with a much bigger emphasis on mechanics and logical deduction: there are no "simple peacefuls", everyone has some interesting ability, which also makes it more suitable for online play since you have a lot to discuss right from the start.

Though if you saw previous announcements there's a change: after 9 asynchronous text-based games we decided to try playing it live over voice chat and got seriously hooked on this format, so that's what we are doing now, and in particular are intending to do tomorrow, Saturday 10th September, at 19:00 UTC (http://time.unitarium.com/utc/1900), expecting to play 2 games lasting for about an hour and a half total.

https://rebrand.ly/StorytellerIntro - one page rules explanation.

http://bit.ly/TroubleBrewingScript - one page character reference for the Trouble Brewing script (the game has different sets of possible characters called scripts).

http://bit.ly/TBalmanac - detailed list of Trouble Brewing character abilities with corner cases and interactions, not necessary to read but helps to understand how it all works.

PM me for a discord invite and with any questions you have.

I'm going to post this in Discord probably, but also can post it here to maybe entice people more.

Some Advice to a Newfriend on Playing BotC

Unlike in Mafia/Werewolf, dead players don't have their roles revealed and can keep talking and even vote once (usually on the last day). This has profound implications for both enjoyment and strategy: instead of being a game over, getting killed, especially in the night, usually makes you more trustworthy and therefore more involved in discussions, and you can still share all the information you got before death etc.

Good roles range from actively benefitting from getting killed by the Demon (such as being told about two players one of which killed you) to being OK with getting killed or executed instead of more important players because you used up your once-per-game ability or got your on-the-first-night information, to trying to stay alive because your ability gets more useful the longer the game goes on. This means that good players are expected to lie their heads off, including in private, if they have a strong incentive to fool the evil into thinking that they are on the opposite end of that spectrum from their real role.

However since evil players can also do that, it makes sense to decide to trust a random person and tell them your role first thing, so that they can confirm that you hard-claimed it to them when you explain why you lied to everyone. Of course, evil players can do that too. Other things you can do are telling someone that you're one of two or three roles, telling a few people that you're an important role and seeing if that gets you killed in the night, or even privately agreeing to swap claimed roles with someone if you want to get killed and they don't or vice versa. Obviously, evil players can do all that too.

Bluffing is kinda stressful for evils, especially Minions (since the Demon knows 3 not-in-play good roles), but in light of the above don't worry too much, decide on a role, maybe on a backup role, and comfort yourself with the fact that if your claimed role clashes with someone's actual good role you probably can get you both executed, haha. Or just keep telling people that you're new and are unsure if you can share your role until you have heard enough to get some idea who is and is not in play (of course good players can do this too, to trap evil players into claiming their role) (also, you probably should bluff a non-meh role eventually to make that believable).

At least skim the http://bit.ly/TBalmanac, mostly to get a sense of how roles interact, don't worry about memorizing them, you can keep the one-page script open for that and once you actually start playing with your virtual life on the line, it will all click into place incredibly fast.