Pick Your Power: Double Deck (GAME OVER)

[Quipla]

What new powers/modifiers would you like to see in future versions of this setup?

- Card thief: name a card and a player. If the player has the card, steal it. (I think massclaim was really strong here. I'd like it to be more punished!)
- Joker (not fully thought through). There is only one of these in the deck. Play this as any other card, then discard it.

Totally agree that massclaim needs to be more disincentivised - a solitary Stealth Vig power is really the only power that currently dissuades it. I'd actually already scribbled down Thief as a good power inclusion for future games, along with Discarder (name a player/card, if they have it, discard it) or Deleter (name a card in the deck or player's hand/permanently delete it, ie; won't show up in the discard pile). Both should punish massclaim quite well and a Deleter has the bonus of creating uncertain information about the deck which can aid more creative fakeclaiming.

I've thought about Jokers too, but not really sure how one could be implemented in a balanced way. Your idea seems good, but I think the top draftee picks it every time and uses it for a Cop/Vig if town and a Vig if scum almost every time, which just makes the setup more swingy based on who wins top ranking.

[Quipla]

I really would also not remove the deck rigging. Sure its a complicated mechanism that can be abused, but it allows for a lot of creative uses that make this setup a lot of fun - might need some minor tweaks to avoid infinite loops though . I think the real fun here starts when both town and scum teams have one and then you have to figure out which person above/below you in the draft is stopping you from abusing your awesome plan.

I agree Deck Rigging is a fun power, if a bit complicated for those not really paying attention, but it needs to be tweaked if it returns. I'd probably only have it cover 1/4 of suits next time as opposed to 2/4 and maybe alter it so the rigger gets told the bottom 3 cards of the deck at the start of the phase and then picks which one to put on top, so it prevents looping with card reviving to the Rigger and has to make more interesting decisions based on what's available to rig.

The scum factional kill disabler: The downside of this card will get NEVER activated since town will ofcourse never lynch the person on this suit. Maybe make it apply to any death during spades so that scum has a shot at activating the downside, AND requiring the person to play better to avoid having to out themselves as having the card.

Yep, I like Beloved as a scare-power for town, but it needs to be matched to a different power for this reason.

I personally feel a new deck of 104 cards needs to be used to determine trumps, so that all cards have equal probability of showing up. Card spy and deck rig still put cards on this deck. Deck rigging a card should remove that card from the game after it has become trumps so it cannot be card revived and deck rigged again. After a card has been trump it gets removed from the real deck as well so that Inventory can still be applied to the old deck.

I feel like the using the same deck for drawing trumps from is better as it helps minimise the amount of power active at once by making low-demand suits/ranks more likely to appear. It also allows players when drafting to select cards from ranks that feature a few mediocre cards in the belief that those are less likely to be selected, increasing one's own card's chances to be activated. I think reducing power as much as possible needs to be attempted in some way (which is why a Disabler exists in each different suit) to minimise the very high levels of swing already present in such a setup.

Do you think the setup was within the realm of balanced and not favouring one side too heavily?

Very hard to judge after this one game. I think number-wise, 18vs 5 is ok....but....A LOT of very strong tools were not utilized this game. Personally I think there are (way?) too many cop cards in this game, and if town had picked more cops + card cops I think this game becomes virtually unwinnable for scum if a few of them come as trumps early. Defences against cops are only in clubs and diamonds, and requires a heavy investment for scum. On the other hand, scum could have made some killer combinations with card cops + vigs to seriously up our killing potential, but even then itll become a race against the clock to eliminate all the cops in time I think and you have a lot more card-cop liabilities.

The Cop powers and which cards they occupied were the most thought out because they have the most potential to destroy a scumteam. You have to remember that all the Cops were placed on Spades/Hearts cards, meaning that if all the Cops were taken, there's only one suit for each rank that a Cop can get an untainted result, as the two Queen of Spades Cop cards for example can't get activated by any Queen of Spades since they're in player hands.

There were two separate Miller cards to fakeclaim on Diamonds investigations for scum, and a GF/Ascetic/Roleblocker also in Diamonds for scum to take. The clubs Cop disabler was an important card for scum defense, but even if scum didn't want to take that, they had other defensive options too, such as; 2/3 of Cop cards were on Jacks/Queens making them vulnerable to Royalty Vigs and the 10 Cop had a PGO/Roleblocker available in the same rank and a Jailkeeper in the Queen which can provide chances to evade being investigated.

There was also thought put into which cards were to be put on the same rank for Cops; the QH, JS, 10H were the three Cop activating cards untainted by Disablers/Millers/GF's etc. but were also some of the most attractive cards in the deck; Jailkeeper/Card Flip, Suit Veto/Alpha Deck Rig, Alpha Vig/Fruit Allergy. 4/6 of those cards got drafted, which meant there were only two pure Cop Investigation cards in the deck.

A selection criteria I didn't see scum considering this game (which I think would be a good one for future scumteams) would be to select the premium cards from ranks they're scared about (particularly if they have good suit powers), which has the twofold effect of collecting some good powers and also reducing the chances of the powers they're scared of activating.

Like I said earlier, I think predicting which cards will be in high demand and which will be ignored (and thus, which cards will have good odds of being activated) makes for a fun draft metagame and is one of the reasons why I like the deck comprising of the left over undrafted cards.

Scum having strongman on half of all trumps also probably makes way too many other cards a bit on the weak side for town since it makes all bulletproof/docs even less likely to save someone.

The card draw / card revive balance is a bit off. Card revive is a lot better in what it achieves since you can pick the card and person. But card revive has decent other skills (especially the 7-h) while all the card draw cards have have downsides, especially for town.

Agree re: Strongman and would probably only have it on 1/4 suits next time. I think the suit powers Card Draw comes with could be upgraded, because when you think about, you're likely only going to get one, maaaaaybe two uses of Card Draw at best, and if the card has a detrimental power on it, you might as well just draft a different card and pretend you drew it. I also like the idea of a Super Draw power (name a specific card in the deck, if it exists draw it to your hand).

[davesaz]

Liked the setup, thought the balance in this case was due more to players than cards, would play again.
An interesting alternative mechanic would be to pick 2 cards and be dealt a third. That way you have control over the cards you want but could get saddled with an unwanted one (or get an unexpected bonus).
Card revive a random card to a stated player or stated card to a random player might be interesting.
Not a fan of the fruit vendor / allergy. Even though it didn't play a part in the game other than as negative strategy, the possibility of a mass vigging if used in conjunction with a deck rig is pretty swingy.
The specialty vig cards could be a good disincentive to massclaim, if used to their full potential.

What if the draft and card picking happened before alignment? Scum would lose the ability to coordinate picks but card picks would no longer be alignment indicative. That would pull the teeth out of massclaim.

[Quipla]

What if the draft and card picking happened before alignment? Scum would lose the ability to coordinate picks but card picks would no longer be alignment indicative. That would pull the teeth out of massclaim.

In the first Pick Your Power game hosted by SpyreX, number selection happened before alignment and draft choices occurred before knowing your scumpartners, but in all subsequent PYP games, number choice and draft choice have happened after alignment/partner knowledge.

Personally, I think the coordination of picks allows for more interesting flavours of manipulation for creative scumteams and also enables another form of scumhunting for savvy townies -- there are a lot of inferences you can make about what scum may or may not have picked, especially when the town has a few flips under their belt. Even number analysis can be handy at times, for example; town should have concluded that it's quite unlikely TWIE is scum picking 12 after Uzi who also picked 12 flipped scum. Does town really think scum are willing to double up on such a high number and sabotage their draft position? Maybe some scumteams with very deceptive/forward planning players might, but most won't consider this longterm gambit.

And for scum, the looming presence of massclaim late in the game and to a lesser extent card cops means they can't just go out and pick every pro-scum power there is (without coming under heavy scrutiny/fakeclaiming a lot of cards), but instead have to draft

some

town-looking cards and strike a balance between making

some

pro-town looking moves while sneaking by as many pro-scum moves as possible without coming under fire for it.

I think too much interesting gameplay is lost if coordination of picks is to go.

[Vecna]

Hmmm how does card draw as a suit power sound? Then it can come with a negative utility attached while simultaneously playing into the desired effect of growing power over time at the cost of lesser initial power. It did indeed feel to me this game that as just a rank power it didnt activate nearly enough over the course of a game to justify the investment (allthough the miller power is also desirable for scum). Having it on a suit is probably slightly too strong again though.

Also I really liked the interaction we had going on this game during the card spy + 7 of diamonds and the card draw. Maybe card draw can be placed on a corresponding rank/suit to be a potential counter to deck-rigging.

I actually really like your suggestion of looking at the bottom 3 cards for deck-rigging and picking one to put on top. Makes it much less likely that it is a 2, while also allowing you to keep your card. This coupled with potentially it activating at the same time as card draw would make for some interesting dynamics I think.

Anyways your answers here show that you guys put a lot more thought into it than me and you seem to have a solid grasp of what youre doing.

I do really like fish's card ideas.

Also I guess this is not a popular opinion but I actually really liked being able to use our factional kill at any time during the day. This made for some very entertaining strategizing about the optimal time to use it and the impact it would have on the game, and it allows for a lot more mind-games mid-phase (as what happened with TWIE, and us killing RB making people think LUV was town). I agree a solution should be found though for the 48h lylo problem since that should not be a side effect of it. Killing someone 48hours into the game on day1 might not be desirable either.

Another small side-note: I think when you PM people at the start of the game about the draft you should add some very clear message in there that what theyre drafting cannot become trump again. During the drafting stages I was under the impression a fresh deck would be used for the actual game. Not sure if it was just me being clueless and not reading the rules properly enough, but I feel it is a very important message that should be made extremely clear to everyone since it has such a big impact on your choices.

[Fishythefish]

What if the draft and card picking happened before alignment? Scum would lose the ability to coordinate picks but card picks would no longer be alignment indicative. That would pull the teeth out of massclaim.

In the first Pick Your Power game hosted by SpyreX, number selection happened before alignment and draft choices occurred before knowing your scumpartners, but in all subsequent PYP games, number choice and draft choice have happened after alignment/partner knowledge.

Personally, I think the coordination of picks allows for more interesting flavours of manipulation for creative scumteams and also enables another form of scumhunting for savvy townies -- there are a lot of inferences you can make about what scum may or may not have picked, especially when the town has a few flips under their belt. Even number analysis can be handy at times, for example; town should have concluded that it's quite unlikely TWIE is scum picking 12 after Uzi who also picked 12 flipped scum. Does town really think scum are willing to double up on such a high number and sabotage their draft position? Maybe some scumteams with very deceptive/forward planning players might, but most won't consider this longterm gambit.

And for scum, the looming presence of massclaim late in the game and to a lesser extent card cops means they can't just go out and pick every pro-scum power there is (without coming under heavy scrutiny/fakeclaiming a lot of cards), but instead have to draft

some

town-looking cards and strike a balance between making

some

pro-town looking moves while sneaking by as many pro-scum moves as possible without coming under fire for it.

I think too much interesting gameplay is lost if coordination of picks is to go.

I definitely agree. It's cool that scum can try a strategy, and town can try to guess at it.

I played in that first PYP game

[davesaz]

Personally, I think the coordination of picks allows for more interesting flavours of manipulation for creative scumteams and also enables another form of scumhunting for savvy townies -- there are a lot of inferences you can make about what scum may or may not have picked, especially when the town has a few flips under their belt. Even number analysis can be handy at times, for example;

town should have concluded that it's quite unlikely TWIE is scum picking 12 after Uzi who also picked 12 flipped scum.

Does town really think scum are willing to double up on such a high number and sabotage their draft position? Maybe some scumteams with very deceptive/forward planning players might, but most won't consider this longterm gambit.

I stopped paying attention to this, but it definitely would have come into play if I had survived longer.

I raised the idea of flipping the order of pregame events specifically for the effects on massclaim. I agree the advantages of the current system are strong and many.

[davesaz]

t 6 - rb
t 9 - Creature
t 14 - Jackel98
s 26 - MariaR
t 42 - Vedith
t 77 - kraska77
t 3141592653 - Titus
t 4 - MagnaofIllusion
t 4 - Transcend
t 5 - gerryoat
t 5 - Fishythefish
t 11 - davesaz
s 11 - Kison
t 13 - gigabyteTroubadour
t 13 - Maxous
s 17 - drealmerz7
t 17 - Drone
s 2 - Vecna
t 2 - Dunnstral
t 2 - SpyreX
t 12 - McMenno
s 12 - Lil Uzi Vert
t 12 - Vifam

scum picked 2, 11, 12, 17, 26.

and my numbers theory had guessed at 1 in the singletons (correct, 26), 1 in the very low numbers (correct, 2), and 1 in the very high numbers (wrong because scum's highest pick was 26).

[Fishythefish]

Give card - pass one of your cards to another player.

Fun for passing bad cards as well as good.

[Vecna]

Give card - pass one of your cards to another player.

Fun for passing bad cards as well as good.

Haha this would be so dirty for scum in combination with vigs/fruit vendors. I LOVE this idea.

Imagine card-spying...."hmmm a 2 is coming up. Here fishy, have my innocent child/suicide card."

[Fishythefish]

Yeah, I was thinking of it in concert with Card Spy particularly

[Vecna]

Or passing a beloved card to a player just before hammering him.

Or framing someone with a pro-scum card when you know he's about to be card-copped.

Yep, I think this game needs a Give card - card

[Vecna]

Works nicely for town as well. Confirm yourself with the 2-h, then hand it to a scum player while the 2 is active

[Fishythefish]

Ooooh! Nice.

[Quipla]

Another big issue I found with the game was Day 1 generating over 90 pages, which I feel like directly led to replacements (Magna) and indirectly led to a couple other replacements by trapping some players in permanent catch-up mode. I'm not sure how to mechanically solve something like this, or if there's even anything that can be done about it, but it really does make the game almost unreadable for players replacing in (and makes it harder to find replacements in general). After the first couple of Days and once more information was in the game, it became a lot more readable and people were spamming less, but I'd really like to hear about what other mods have done to combat this issue.

Has anyone tried bankable deadlines? It feels like making deadlines short, ie; one week but you can bank any unused time to carry over to the next Day might encourage town to make accelerated decisions early in the game to build up more deadline time for future days, but it might be one of those things that works better in theory than in practice. D1 in this game still achieved a lynch in 4 and a half RL days, so this might not actually solve anything. Night start is the only other mechanic I can think of to accelerate the start of the game and get to phases where confirmed info exists sooner, but I'm not really a fan of Night starts tbh.

Any other ideas or is this just a playerbase thing that needs to be accepted these days?

[gigabyteTroubadour]

just a playerbase thing that needs to be accepted these days?

i think it's this tbh

this table just happened to have a lot of shitposters and some of those shitposters were friends

i'd like to think my hyperposting afterwards (where i went from a middling poster to literally the top poster within like 1 gameday) wasn't destructive though in the same way :///

also gonna answer the survey now

[gigabyteTroubadour]

Which powers did you like/dislike?

I really liked my inventory actually! It was an unfairly underrated power but having the data of what cards are in the deck is an extremely powerful tool that town underestimated imo. I do kind of think it needed a slight buff in that i felt like i never got to use it until it was too late in the game for it to be super helpful.

Do you think the setup was within the realm of balanced and not favouring one side too heavily?

Yup!

Would you play in a future version of this setup?

hell yeah

What new powers/modifiers would you like to see in future versions of this setup?

During the game I felt like some powers were ridiculously weak, like trackers and jailkeepers, in that there was little guarantee they'd ever be used and that the one time they would be it probably wasn't worth it until endgame anyway. I think a way to make sure that a card is more likely to have a use would be important, and I wouldn't mind if that came at the cost of say, limiting people to less cards.

Agree with the consensus though that daykills sucked. i botched up big time when i didn't realize that the day after the first double lynch WASN'T mylo because i screwed up my math when figuring out how many lynches we had left, telling uzi to hold his shot or be lynched could have really changed the outcome of this game. i think it might be better to make trump cards last for the whole phase so that doctors would be useful in a daykill-free iteration of this game btw

I also liked Fishy's and Vecna's suggestions.

[davesaz]

just a playerbase thing that needs to be accepted these days?

i think it's this tbh

this table just happened to have a lot of shitposters and some of those shitposters were friends

i'd like to think my hyperposting afterwards (where i went from a middling poster to literally the top poster within like 1 gameday) wasn't destructive though in the same way :///

also gonna answer the survey now

I'm torn between wanting to crack down on pure spam to keep it readable for those of us who don't, vs. not wanting to kill the fun and it being hard to draw a balanced line.
Maybe WOTM / WOTC shunning the worst of the shitposters as a form of behavior modification?

[gigabyteTroubadour]

I'm torn between wanting to crack down on pure spam to keep it readable for those of us who don't, vs. not wanting to kill the fun and it being hard to draw a balanced line.
Maybe WOTM / WOTC shunning the worst of the shitposters as a form of behavior modification?

nah i think policy lynching works

with wotm/c'ing you run into the issue of like... said shitposters being able to tone it down in other games and then just antagonizing people you don't really need to

like i think some of the d1 shitposters (maria, transcend, i guess kraska but she was at least advancing the game in all of her posts?? rb had a high post count but idek if i'd call his d1 shitposting) have good games and can be fun players to play with but if they're not willing to put in the effort (or are deliberately not putting in effort) to play the game in a pro-town way then rope is a good incentive to at least get something useful out of their slots

and if they keep shitposting and making the game unfun across multiple games then they get bored of being pl'd and either change or get bored

... at least in theory

[TheWayItEnds]

Are we waiting for someone for the scum pt?

[gigabyteTroubadour]

Are we waiting for someone for the scum pt?

also this

[Quipla]

During the game I felt like some powers were ridiculously weak, like trackers and jailkeepers, in that there was little guarantee they'd ever be used and that the one time they would be it probably wasn't worth it until endgame anyway.

I agree that Doctors/Trackers are kind of meh rank powers that will need their suit powers upgraded in order to draw attention from draftees. I think Jailkeepers are better than those two as they're more versatile (can block or save someone and can't be disabled), but both JK's and Doc's will also benefit from less Strongman powers existing in future games. I also think there's no shame in there being a handful of overwhelmingly average or even mediocre cards in the deck in order to add variety to Card Draw's range of outcomes. Mediocre cards also become attractive to players late in the draft on the basis that they know they're much likelier to exist than other cards -- for example, we saw the 8 of spades (Jailkeeper/Hated) get selected three times and that was probably one of the worst cards in the deck.

i think it might be better to make trump cards last for the whole phase so that doctors would be useful in a daykill-free iteration of this game btw

I thought about this in the original design, but then the game only experiences ~6-10 different trump cards (as opposed to ~12-20), meaning many powers will never be realised.

[Quipla]

Pretty sure all of the scum signed off releasing the PT:

Scum PT

[Quipla]

If neighbourhoods want to release their PT's I'll leave it up to them.

[gigabyteTroubadour]

i think d7 and i both said we were ok releasing ours