Ab:Loaf Dead PT

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

No, you just wouldn't have plundered each other faction without plundering arsonists.

what

we had to self plunder?

[MegAzumarill]

?

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

ok sorry I read wrong. if all arsonsis die its just us and town and if town was plundered then we should win.

in a town end game no arsonist lives

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

Faction Introduction:

Pirates

Pirates

have a factional Complex Combined Vanillaiser/ Role Cop action. (the target will lose all personal abilities and the

Pirate

performing their action will learn their role. This fails if used on a vanilla role.

Pirates

win when at least 1 player from each other alignment still alive in the game has been successfully plundered and at least one

Pirate

is alive.
A

Pirate

win causes all members of that faction to leave the game victorious and the rest of the game to continue.
Additional Info:
Cop: Maritime Cop
Godfather: Pirate Captain
Miller: Sailor
Mason: Coast Guard

Factional Concept by KittyTacky

(Note that since this post is a faction introduction it should be treated as "Vanilla" if rolled for a role.)

"win when at least 1 player from each other alignment still alive in the game has been successfully plundered and at least one

Pirate

is alive."

Thats how this alignment is explained on the game setup thread

[MegAzumarill]

Which is not how it is phrased in your role PM. Notably the "still alive" part is absent.

I did want to intervene at some point but that's really overstepping running the game impartially so there wasn't much I could do, but this may be better discussed postgame.

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

Which is not how it is phrased in your role PM. Notably the "still alive" part is absent.

I did want to intervene at some point but that's really overstepping running the game impartially so there wasn't much I could do, but this may be better discussed postgame.

but why was it was changed from setup thread? wasn't the game we got entirely random?

[TemporalLich]

backing down is waffling and will get me speedlimmed, so I have to be overconfident to survive D1 and then actually be able to solve the game

[TemporalLich]

especially when you're leading wagon - slightly risky plays under pressure is a scumtell so I'd either have to play it safe or go all out

and considering my role has a lot of variable power it's better safe than sorry, so I should assume I'm a pivotal PR and play it safe instead of going all out on risky plays

[MegAzumarill]

@Kyoko
It's covered under thread accuracy section, where it says roles and alignments aren't translated verbatim.

Pirates in particular are supposed to be hunting for scum and town, and hindering both as they do so. In running abloaf as a large, the still living means they don't auto lose if the 3p dies early. In a mini, it would mean pirates translates into basically just easier town with extra abilities on most player hits, which really isn't needed when there's a high probability of just winning night 2 outright. A more faithful translation of the win condition would at least need to hit both factions to win, so that's what it was.

Definitely people misunderstanding their own abilities is one of the most feel bad moments as a moderator, particularly if it is to their detriment in a major way. Thankfully it didn't end up being a huge deal (I still think everything outside of the kokichi hammer was greatly working in your favor for relations with both town and scum)
I also didn't think the change needed highliting because I figured the first source of a wincon someone would look to would be their role pm rather than the abloaf thread though if I ran it again I'd definitely highlight the changes more and make it explicit, or otherwise use some other metric for making sure people understand their role.

[MegAzumarill]

As an aside, I think it's funny the first faction introduced in the thread (Pirates) was rolled for the first run of the setup.

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

sorry but I think this was handled bad. the setup has to be clear if its an open. it must be written on the setup thread how the role is different in large/minis.

lets say we knew that it was changed we could still hard lie to people about something and have a written mod note that would have been considered a mod lie. I mean we could simply quote you from setup thread and say this is how you wrote it there and its an instance of mod lie even if setup thread is written before game started.

[TemporalLich]

eh... this is a collaborative deck and those are almost always bastard mod games

but still, heavily changing roles and alignments is contrary to the spirit of collaborative decks

[MegAzumarill]

To be fair, the setup is not an open. Various elements are explicitly up to moderator choice (mysterious energy, fae bauble, dreaming god), others implicitly (if someone cannot use a "role" is that meant to mean they also cannot use a factional ability? As written it wouldn't but some roles by the same name may be worded to block both, should the two roles of the same name and same intended effect work differently based purely on the author's wording. What happens when someone unstoppable protection is hit by an unstoppable kill? What if a role name of an existing role is posted with no ability, some posts are written as if they are themselves the role pm the player receives, so do they just receive a blank PM? These cases have to be decided case by case by a moderator, mostly using common sense and while if the moderator was the sole creator of the setup these could be consistently defined, this isn't true for collaborative decks.)

Additionally, specifically for pirates, edge cases exist such as stuff like witches, a faction rolling all vanilla, ALL non-pirate players rolling vanilla means that any definition of a win con for pirates that is explicitly unchanging can cause a pirate win mechanically impossible in some scenarios without explicitly defining it recursively with the rolled roles. Extend this outward for the 40+ alignments in the thread and that isn't a realistic ask of information to give to players, especially if you start defining this philosophy outwards it quickly becomes unmanagable for anyone for larger collaborative decks. So it's incredibly ineffective and at times actively harmful to the game to take the approach of it being verbatim from the thread.

In the case of a moderator lie, I don't see how it is a lie. It is mentioned in the rules that alignments are translated this way, and that the Abloaf thread may not be exactly accurate. If a player inquired about it, I would give a truthful answer. In fact, the example is of a similar case, of a groupscum wincon being worded in a way that doesn't make sense for that faction in the context of abloaf.

The way the situation presented to me was as follows:
A: Allow a game with a faction skewed to win at the expense of another faction to go through.

B: Itemize a list of all 40+ possible alignments, win conditions, and abilities in style and how they could interact with each other alongside all the edge case clauses for role combinations that could break alignments.

C: The effected players to the change immediately know, all players having already been informed explicitly of the possibility of groupscum's win conditions being altered otherwise the change stay's silent until inquired, which is encouraged to do by the rules anyway.

I stand by my decision to do C. You can argue perhaps there is an option D or ecen E I didn't consider, but the above 3 are the best ones I can come up with.

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

I still think if you wanted to change the wincondition of a group from what was posted in the open thread of setup,

you had to clarify it there in that open thread that if this or that happens wincondition changes in this or that way otherwise it is a direct moderator lie and it hurts the spirit of game.

I would have been frustrated if I was town and all my theories of how to treat a scum faction would have been wrong cause mod decided to change what was written about them and run them differently.

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

I really think you got lucky that we won and left game mid match and this didn't end up mattering

I would not let this go otherwise.

simply include all variations of a win condition for all roles in the actual setup thread for next matches

[MegAzumarill]

I would be more frustrated if I was a player who's win chance was heavily skewed in either direction by a refusal of the moderator to address balance issues in translating roles over.

[MegAzumarill]

Especially considering in this instance

A: Effected players were informed
B: Every player was informed of the possibility of exactly this happening
C: It made no significant impact on anyone outside of those that directly received the updated information.

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

I would be more frustrated if I was a player who's win chance was heavily skewed in either direction by a refusal of the moderator to address balance issues in translating roles over.

You can consider balance when you design setup

lying about a group wincondition (and then saying since I could change stuff for balance it was fine) is not ok

simply consider all these issues that might happen for all factions say their wincondition will be one of the following there and say mod is allowed to choose whichever for balance purposes

or not include the wincons there and add what you want for balance purposes

you cant say the wincon is this but I decided to change it for this run of game

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

That change is heavy

It makes a always have to town side group to a always have to find all alignment and screw town by leaving game group.

It really changes the rythem of the game. You cant just change what was written about it even if its about setup balance, so all I'm saying is write it better in the original thread so its no longer a moderator lie when you change things at your discretion

[TemporalLich]

fair enough

collaborative decks are a random mish-mash of roles and alignments that may or may not be well thought out, and a lot of things in collaborative decks are left to moderator discretion (which I'd consider as the bastard mod element of direct moderator influence, since it would usually be determined after randing the setup) anyway.

Some amount of moderator editorialzing is acceptable and inevitable, especially if roles are worded ambiguously or unclearly (e.g. roles that mention Mafia in AB:LoAF being changed to mention True Groupscum is within the spirit of collaborative decks imo, as AB:LoAF explicitly doesn't use the Mafia alignment). However, a substantial change to a faction's wincon that would allow Pirates to be endgamed by Town even if Town has been plundered is against the spirit of collaborative decks imo

pedit: Collaborative decks aren't meant to be balanced in that matter - the fun comes from random role madness and potentially game-breaking interactions

ppedit: yeah idk... collaborative decks would probably not be fun if roles could just receive major changes at will from the game moderator.

[MegAzumarill]

I would be more frustrated if I was a player who's win chance was heavily skewed in either direction by a refusal of the moderator to address balance issues in translating roles over.

You can consider balance when you design setup

lying about a group wincondition (and then saying since I could change stuff for balance it was fine) is not ok

simply consider all these issues that might happen for all factions say their wincondition will be one of the following there and say mod is allowed to choose whichever for balance purposes

or not include the wincons there and add what you want for balance purposes

you cant say the wincon is this but I decided to change it for this run of game

I fail to see a point within this game where any misinformation has been stated on my part.
I frankly fail to see your point at all.

The rules say, the roles and alignments are taken from the abloaf thread.
It says that the roles and alignments will not be taken verbatim, (i.e. that the orginal thread might be inaccurate) but translating the spirit of how the roles and alignments are intended to function, e.g. like a benign groupscum's exact win con wording.
A benign groupscum's exact win con wording was altered in the exact way the rules said might happen.
(Surprised Pikachu Face)


I made an effort to see if there was a way to make consistency within the deck itself, and it isn't there.
To define a crosscompatible system to handle it qould take looking at almost a thousand cases, mostly east to resolve, but many nonetheless. This number would not remain in any degree of sustainability if abloaf would keep growing, of which it is always intended to be open to do.

It also is a setup I do not have full control over. It is a setup that is, as previously stated, implictly and explicitly up to moderator interperetation and influence. and I do not have the liberty to conclusively define how a moderator should handle a pirate/witch/town split or similar unplayable as written setup if someone else were to roll it. There are numerous ways to handle such an event but that's up to the person running. This is doubly true since the setup is using TAR, so a definition would be explicitly worthless since basically any other mod using this setup would have half the roles and abilities work slightly different. You basically are asking me to physically change how something works for other players based on how I personally interperet what it says which is far worse than anything I've done imo.

[MegAzumarill]

Additionally the while alive clause isn't an intrinsic part of pirates, far from it. It's pulled from DoAR where it doesn't have that ability, in fact the only reason it exists is for the edge case of a 3p existing.

[Kyoko Kirigiri]

All I'm saying is fix how its written in original setup thread. add more ambiguity to it or list all possibilities. The way it is right now is not right.

"The rules say, the roles and alignments are taken from the abloaf thread.
It says that the roles and alignments will not be taken verbatim, (i.e. that the orginal thread might be inaccurate) but translating the spirit of how the roles and alignments are intended to function, e.g. like a benign groupscum's exact win con wording.
A benign groupscum's exact win con wording was altered in the exact way the rules said might happen.
(Surprised Pikachu Face)
"

I argue that it didn't translate the actual spirit of the role. You messed with its win condition, its not like you added a restriction of 1 shot or 2 shot to a skill.

By changing the win condition you effectively changed how the role would work in presence of everyone else and how it should have been played. The change ended up irrelivent in this run of game cause pirates left the game winning but if they wouldn't you practically had two versions of the roles announced, one in your setup deck and one that you sent on players role pm. Even if you argue pirates should have just went along the role pm, you could not justify this change to everyone else who were playing this game and were having a different and wrong impression of wincon based on a clear moderator lie. People might have treated pirates differently just because you told everyone their wincon is something else and not the one you changed it to cause of your "balance check" and it could have ended in a really wrong fashion for everyone playing.

So

you need to have a list of all possible versions of a role in your deck and max you do for balance is choosing between them. - When its about changing who a skill works (on its core level) or when you're talking about roles win condition

This was a mod mistake and a critical design error and I'm not gonna say it was not one just cause I ended up winning with current version. So I hope you consider what I said here and change the way you do this for next runs

[Kokichi Oma]

sorry but I think this was handled bad. the setup has to be clear if its an open. it must be written on the setup thread how the role is different in large/minis.

lets say we knew that it was changed we could still hard lie to people about something and have a written mod note that would have been considered a mod lie. I mean we could simply quote you from setup thread and say this is how you wrote it there and its an instance of mod lie even if setup thread is written before game started.

Hammering me was anti-pirate and too pro town. I think you should have been willing to work with other scum more.

[Kokichi Oma]

That being said, let's play another game together Kirigiri