Rant time.
This will be my only post on the subject. I’m not quitting, and I’m not going to beat on this forever, but I feel like it’s got to be said. I’m aware I’ve got a bit of an attitude issue at the moment. It’s just the way it is for now. So here we are:
I can see from the asinine, nonsensical nature of all the revealed roles that we are once again in one of those massively over-complicated, probably totally unplayable messes of a game that veteran moderators for some reason feel compelled to create. I don’t know if it’s out of boredom or some kind of bragging rights to see who can build the most horribly complex, bogged-down mess of a game, but we’re back in one, and for me it just sucks all the fun right out of it.
Sage once suggested I should quit Forum Mafia and go play something a little easier, like Candyland. Okay, let’s look at Candyland.
Candyland is a game with the simplest rules possible. It’s so simple, your three-year-old can play it effectively. And you know what? The rules never change. But the game is just as much fun the 100th time you play it with your kids as the 1st time. That’s because the fun isn’t in the ruleset, it’s in the interaction of the players. Even though the rules are simple and unchanging, the fun comes from the way you talk and interact with your kids and your spouse as you play the game.
And so it is with Forum Mafia. The fun in this game is twofold:
1) Sleuthing. It’s a whodunit, and the joy is in trying to figure out who the liars and killers are, relying on your own smarts and, yes, guts. Using clues to unravel a mystery in which you get to play a direct part
2) Interaction of the players, as with any game. Having active, funny people to play with makes a good game.
So when you have a game with 1000 moving pieces, full of “liar roles”, where your decisions don’t mean anything and clues are false, the game devolves. Now you’re playing Master of Orion 3, where there are hundreds of sliders and switches, and none of them are adequately labeled, and nothing you do seems to matter in any way you can determine. At that point, the game devolves into one of two things- either you just shrug your shoulders and start killing people at random until the game inexplicably ends, or like with the similarly over-complicated unplayable mess of the Milk game, people give up completely and just stop voting… because why bother?
I mean, “trainee doctor”, “incompetent vigilante”, and “compulsive firefighter”? What the hell do any of those even mean? My first thought was that Krypsyn shot himself. What else does an "incompetent" vig do? But who knows? When there are multiple bodies hitting the floor with nonsensical descriptions of what happened, it feels like there’s nothing to put your teeth into to try and figure out what’s going on. It’s very… very… very frustrating for me.
But now it’s said, and as I mentioned up top, I’m not going to keep beating up the game for it. I’m going to get back in and do my best, but all of you will just have to forgive me if for multiple reasons, I just don’t feel quite up to wowing you all with my great logical deductions today.
JMich: And just so we don't have deadline problems,
vote yogsloth.
Yeah, great, cute.