Post by Judge Sam on Jun 28, 2008 18:44:22 GMT -5
The Messenger was a really fun role. Leticia did an absolutely fantastic job with it ~ it isn't easy to come up with creative ways to use it but she knocked it out of the park. She got the name of a Citizen, spread fear with the Spies with the "Courier," used it to prove Katie's role, and got some information from the event.
Here's the role PM in case you forgot what it did:
You have an ability that is special. You are the Messenger. As a postal worker for the city, you are in the unique position to send and receive secret, anonymous messages to a variety of people without being noticed.
During the game, you will be allowed to send anonymous messages to any player you wish. Messages are limited to 100 words or less. It will be posted in their confessional without a name attached.
Right now you have 1 ability:
1) Send an anonymous message to one person. Takes 1 piece of paper.
As the game goes on you may receive additional abilities.
So what's this piece of paper business? It so happens that you need something to write your messages on and I am the only one who possess paper in this city.
So you'll have to win them from me!
To earn pieces of paper, you must successfully predict the outcome of game events. For every event you correctly predict, you will receive paper. Your questions will be posted in a separate thread tomorrow. Each Episode's predictions are due before Imprisonment.
This may seem like a harmless ability, but with creative use it could prove to be incredibly powerful. With finesse and a carefully worded message sent to the right person at the right time you could drastically alter the game for good. If you have any questions, please post them in this thread.
Upgrades:
Episode 3: Congratulations. You have received the power for your message-ees to send back messages to you. Except they have to call you collect, meaning every message they send you costs YOU one piece of paper. You may wish to inform them of this before they wipe you clean.
Episode 5: *NEW* Your word limit is now 200!
*NEW* You can now give messages to other people. Simply post who you want to give the ability to send one private message to and I will inform them that they can send anyone they like an anonymous message.
Episode 8: You have a new ability! You can send an anonymous message to the Spies. It will be posted in Spy Headquarters.
Episode 9: - Send an anonymous message to the Burg. You can say whatever you want and I'll put it on the top of the Burg. (costs 2 papers.)
Episode 11: As you know, every 2 episodes you get a boost to your power. This time is no different. You also know that your role requires creativity which you have exhibited in spades with the Courier junk and your messages. Recall that you can also combine this with all your other powers.
You are a purveyor of anonymous messages. As a reward for lasting so long, you can now create any anonymous event you wish that will take place. It could be something live at chat. It could be a poll. It could be like the rumor mill, or it could be everyone sends anonymous messages, or almost anything you can think of. It must involve anonymity of some sort. All requests may be modified by me at my discretion and require my approval.
You can do this event once, it costs five papers.
During the game, you will be allowed to send anonymous messages to any player you wish. Messages are limited to 100 words or less. It will be posted in their confessional without a name attached.
Right now you have 1 ability:
1) Send an anonymous message to one person. Takes 1 piece of paper.
As the game goes on you may receive additional abilities.
So what's this piece of paper business? It so happens that you need something to write your messages on and I am the only one who possess paper in this city.
So you'll have to win them from me!To earn pieces of paper, you must successfully predict the outcome of game events. For every event you correctly predict, you will receive paper. Your questions will be posted in a separate thread tomorrow. Each Episode's predictions are due before Imprisonment.
This may seem like a harmless ability, but with creative use it could prove to be incredibly powerful. With finesse and a carefully worded message sent to the right person at the right time you could drastically alter the game for good. If you have any questions, please post them in this thread.
Upgrades:
Episode 3: Congratulations. You have received the power for your message-ees to send back messages to you. Except they have to call you collect, meaning every message they send you costs YOU one piece of paper. You may wish to inform them of this before they wipe you clean.
Episode 5: *NEW* Your word limit is now 200!
*NEW* You can now give messages to other people. Simply post who you want to give the ability to send one private message to and I will inform them that they can send anyone they like an anonymous message.
Episode 8: You have a new ability! You can send an anonymous message to the Spies. It will be posted in Spy Headquarters.
Episode 9: - Send an anonymous message to the Burg. You can say whatever you want and I'll put it on the top of the Burg. (costs 2 papers.)
Episode 11: As you know, every 2 episodes you get a boost to your power.
This time is no different. You also know that your role requires creativity which you have exhibited in spades with the Courier junk and your messages. Recall that you can also combine this with all your other powers.You are a purveyor of anonymous messages. As a reward for lasting so long, you can now create any anonymous event you wish that will take place. It could be something live at chat. It could be a poll. It could be like the rumor mill, or it could be everyone sends anonymous messages, or almost anything you can think of. It must involve anonymity of some sort. All requests may be modified by me at my discretion and require my approval.
You can do this event once, it costs five papers.
So this role came from two places. Somewhere I typed up that the thing about these mafia roles is that they can be used so many ways and are unique to the person playing them. You can give the same role to two different people and one could be a dud and the other amazing. You could give the same role to the same person but in two different games and one could be incredibly unique and the other time just stupidly overpowered. There's so much flux.
Another thing is that I'd like to see roles I create played again to see what would happen. For that reason, before Spies 5 started, I looked over every role I've done up to this point. Something like 12-14 of them. I went through them all to try and find one I could either do again, or adjust/upgrade.
Surprisingly there weren't too many I wanted to do again! I don't know why, each role had it's own peculiarity, but I ended up crossing most of them off the list.
One I didn't cross of the list was the Gambler from Spies 2. If you don't know what that was, basically Tiffany would predict events just like Leticia did. But she only had one question (Imprisonment or Exile). If she was right, she got rewards like votes and an investigation. If she was wrong, she got penalties.
Now actually I might do Gambler 2.0, so act surprised if I do haha, but I thought a lot about Gambler 2.0 for this game. It was the main one I wanted to revisit. Old Gambler had a few problems and I worked a lot on trying to fix them. I did get pretty far on that route, but still things weren't working out, and there were still some glaring issues.
A second "role" that I was looking at was that weird thing called Spymail I experimented with in Spies 1. Basically players could send anonymous messages to another with restrictions. I felt that was a little overpowered for the Citizens but I was looking at that too.
So Gambler was in there as a role as a placeholder at this point. I was trying to think of new rewards to give people as a reward for their gambling. There's only so many different prizes you can give out. Eugenicist already had investigations, so that was out. Extra votes were okay, but not incredibly exciting. Medic already had Imprisonment stuff. What could I give as a reward? I had some ideas but it was so haphazard, so many different little things.
The solution was to make the reward be secret messages. That was a lot simpler, and added a whole new dimension to the role. It then took on life as it's own.
So I think Angus posted somewhere else "Why the heck have the 'gambling' question aspect to this role? It doesn't need it." And I agree, it could have been done equally well with just giving them 1-2 pieces of paper each Episode. That would have been simpler for me haha rather than try and come up with all these points. (a headache in itself) Maybe I should have done it that way and saved the guessing game fun for a later role. But that was pretty funny and I liked how it made Leticia 'earn' paper to use with there being a finite amount based on her skill. So when people used her paper sending them back to her, it might frustrate her a bit haha. Or if they sent back unhelpful messages!
There were tons of small rules that had to go with this role to make it balanced, as well as all the upgrades to keep it interesting (another thing that made this role like 4 roles-in-one). Some other parts of it that existed at one point but were axed were sending messages to the dead, reading one of the other players PM's, and doing things during live events.
Yeah so that's how gambler 2.0 became messenger and the other cool things that Leticia did such a great job with. I was looking for a creative person have the role and I think I was lucky enough to end up on a great person for it!