magistrate (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
magistrate) wrote2022-07-21 04:24 pm
magistrate) wrote2022-07-21 04:24 pm
Entry tags:
- *....,
- *not enough exposition,
- *shoggoths are the reason for the season,
- *too much exposition,
- *well that was random,
- entry: essaything,
- entry: rec,
- entry: rec...?,
- game: blood on the clocktower,
- game: cataclysm dark days ahead,
- game: vampire survivors,
- metagame: game mechanics,
- rec: game,
- rec: let's play,
- stuff: links,
- topic: game design,
- topic: gaming,
- youtubers: no rolls barred
Blood on the Clocktower: A review of a game I have never played! (part 1)
If you'd asked me half a week ago, when I'd first learned of it, what Blood on the Clocktower was, I'd have said it was basically a game of Mafia (or Werewolf) but overcomplicated to the point of catastrophe. That was when I first encountered it, wandering unprepared into a Twitch stream by someone who'd accidentally left their stream game listed as "Vampire Survivors", a relatively mindless swarm survival game where you just walk around an infinite map and attack hordes of monsters automatically.
If you asked me today, I would say that Blood on the Clocktower is basically a game of Mafia (or Werewolf) but overcomplicated to the point of UTTER HILARITY.
All of these are bluffing games, with a good team and an evil team. Evil knows who good is, and have the power to kill secretly in the "night" phase of the game, but are outnumbered. Good has the power to kill openly by voting someone down in the "day", and there's more of them, but they don't know who evil is. So it's a game about coordinating witch-hunts and hoping you kill off the evils before you and the evils kill off all the goods.
The usual way to add spice into these games is to introduce characters with special abilities. For example, an Investigator in a Mafia game might wake at "night", point to a player, and learn that Yes, they're Mafia, or No, they're not. This is powerful information, because it lets you direct your attention to kill off the evil players... but it has some fairly specific downsides. To wit:
1. None of your fellow good players know you're the Investigator, so they have no reason to believe you. You could be Mafia, trying to frame a good player to get lynched during the day. (This would decrement the number of good players in play by one, which is good for evil and bad for good.)
2. If you show your hand to the Mafia, they probably will believe you because you're pointing at their people, and then you will probably die during the night. (Which might bolster your claim with the good players, but at that point, you're dead.)
BotC takes this and runs with it by giving absolutely everyone in the game a special power. A different special power. Many of which actively interfere with other players' powers. Some of which can potentially end the game on a single misplay.
Some of these powers gather information – but never information that's both specific and unambiguous. It might be, "You start the game knowing that one, and only one, of three given players is evil", as the Noble does. Or maybe, "every night, you learn how many of your living neighbors are evil", as the Empath does. Or, as the Washerwoman, "You start the game knowing that one of two characters is a specific role."
Some of these powers might have effects, which are frequently powerful but either uncontrollable or single-use. The Slayer can publicly attack another player, once in the course of the game, but their crossbow only has one bolt... and it won't do anything but kill the Demon, the Big Bad of the Evil team. (The Evil team is usually, but not always, one Demon and their two Minions. Each Demon and Minion also has their own unique ability.) Or there's the Mayor, who can do absolutely nothing for the team until the last day of the game, when there are only three players left... and if he can convince them not to kill anyone that day, Team Good insta-wins. (This is complicated by the fact that if he's lying about being the Mayor, that night, the Demon is certain to kill off a good player, and Good insta-loses.)
And then there are all the spanners thrown into the works by disruptive abilities.
The Poisoner minion causes players' powers to go haywire: a Slayer might shoot the demon and not get the kill, which would seem to confirm the Demon's non-Demon-ness. An Empath might be poisoned and learn that neither of their neighbors are evil, when in fact both of them are. A Drunk player will firmly believe that they have a role, but not actually be that role, and therefore have powers that do not work: a little like being perma-poisoned. Some characters, like the Recluse, may appear to other players with information-gathering abilities to be evil, when they're actually good.
And, crucially, in any given game, no one knows exactly which roles are in play.
(Unless they're the special character who can see behind the DM's screen.)
The end result is that almost no one can fully trust any of their information. There's almost no verifiable evidence, and most events have a plausible alternate explanation. Even if you do chance into something verifiable – for example, Player A, a Farmer, turns another good player into a Farmer if Player A dies at night, meaning that the new Farmer (woken at dawn and handed a pitchfork and a straw hat, no doubt) knows that last night's death was a Farmer, and thus good, and thus probably to be trusted – you probably won't be able to convince anyone else of that.
The game hinges on complex webs of trust and information flow. And sometimes catching someone in a lie isn't enough to prove them untrustworthy: the good Damsel can insta-lose the game for the Good team if their identity becomes known by the wrong people, and a good Balloonist has a target on their back if they become known to the Demon in the early game, so both those roles have a strong incentive to lie about who they are to anyone they don't trust. Which is usually everyone.
There are strategies to approach this morass of ambiguity, but I haven't seen a single game without a strong component of Wild Mass Guessing.
This is not the only source of added complexity over a game of Mafia/Werewolf, either. BotC also uses a Storyteller, a Dungeon-Master-like role who facilitates the story and can influence the course of the game, sometimes to the point of choosing who dies. And dead players stick around as helpful (or unhelpful) talkative ghosts, who may be more free to tell the truth they hid while they were alive... but who no longer have any powers, and who have a single Ghost Vote that they can use in only one execution before losing the power to influence the lynch mob entirely. There are mechanics which cause players to switch roles or allegiances. It's chaos.
This also means that the first time I watched the game being played, I could not follow it despite having the wiki up in another three tabs in my browser.
Still! It was oddly compelling. I started checking out the No Rolls Barred gang playing Blood on the Clocktower, which helped a lot because they're actor folk and are engaging to watch even when I have no idea what's happening. By the third game or so – and each of these games clock in at 2-3 hours, so at this point I'm well on my way to an academic minor – I was following the internal logic pretty well, and in the next few I started getting swept up in the drama.
The weird interactions between roles, mechanically, mean that there are lots of openings for odd little betrayals and self-sacrifices. I found it genuinely touching when one character offered his own neck to the chopping block to save someone else he thought was falsely accused... taking a trustfall that his extremely valuable power would be picked up by a charater who could take a dead player's power, but only once, and only if they were who they said they were. In another game, a character willingly nominated themselves for execution, because they believed they might be playing a Demon who insta-won the game if Good didn't execute someone, but they were also playing in a game with a Minion who insta-won the game if they nominated someone good and that someone was killed. A self-nomination was the only immediately verifiable way that that wouldn't happen.
And it opens up opportunity for high amusement, too! The Psychopath minion can kill people in broad daylight and has a 2/3 chance of escaping execution even if they're nominated, so it was pretty hilarious to watch the players in one game roleplay that.
(Later on, the Pyschopath character, sitting alone in the Town Square because no one wants to talk to them, serenades the Zoom camera with "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. It was glorious.)
And there are moments that are absolutely chilling, mostly to do with demonic powers. Like when an execution vote passes, and the Storyteller announces "[Player Name] is executed... and does not die. Everyone, goodnight." Or when a number of players raise their hands to execute someone, and the Storyteller announces "Zero is not enough votes to pass. The nomination fails."
By the time I got to the end of We Are Legion, I found one of the most triumphant final showdowns I've seen in media. And, okay, I kinda ship two of the characters in that round of the game.
(Those of you who know me will know how unlikely a statement that is.)
(We Are Legion was an episode where no matter who won, I would have been happy, because damn, both teams deserved it. It was a masterclass in deception and trustfalls.)
And this is a problem I seem to run into a lot, because like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, the only zombie game I love with all my soul, it is a game which seems impossible to enjoy unless you're the kind of person who likes their games to come with a novel's worth of documentation on the side. And trying to sell anyone on it as a form of theatre relies on someone having the rather specific dual interest of "board game LPs" and "group comedic/dramatic improv".
In conclusion, I hated this game on sight, I was unable to escape its gravitational pull, and now I love it. And I both hate and love that I love it.
I have more thoughts on Blood on the Clocktower and ludo-narrative dissonance, but that has to go into its own post, because I've almost hit 2,000 words on this one.
If you asked me today, I would say that Blood on the Clocktower is basically a game of Mafia (or Werewolf) but overcomplicated to the point of UTTER HILARITY.
All of these are bluffing games, with a good team and an evil team. Evil knows who good is, and have the power to kill secretly in the "night" phase of the game, but are outnumbered. Good has the power to kill openly by voting someone down in the "day", and there's more of them, but they don't know who evil is. So it's a game about coordinating witch-hunts and hoping you kill off the evils before you and the evils kill off all the goods.
The usual way to add spice into these games is to introduce characters with special abilities. For example, an Investigator in a Mafia game might wake at "night", point to a player, and learn that Yes, they're Mafia, or No, they're not. This is powerful information, because it lets you direct your attention to kill off the evil players... but it has some fairly specific downsides. To wit:
1. None of your fellow good players know you're the Investigator, so they have no reason to believe you. You could be Mafia, trying to frame a good player to get lynched during the day. (This would decrement the number of good players in play by one, which is good for evil and bad for good.)
2. If you show your hand to the Mafia, they probably will believe you because you're pointing at their people, and then you will probably die during the night. (Which might bolster your claim with the good players, but at that point, you're dead.)
BotC takes this and runs with it by giving absolutely everyone in the game a special power. A different special power. Many of which actively interfere with other players' powers. Some of which can potentially end the game on a single misplay.
Some of these powers gather information – but never information that's both specific and unambiguous. It might be, "You start the game knowing that one, and only one, of three given players is evil", as the Noble does. Or maybe, "every night, you learn how many of your living neighbors are evil", as the Empath does. Or, as the Washerwoman, "You start the game knowing that one of two characters is a specific role."
Some of these powers might have effects, which are frequently powerful but either uncontrollable or single-use. The Slayer can publicly attack another player, once in the course of the game, but their crossbow only has one bolt... and it won't do anything but kill the Demon, the Big Bad of the Evil team. (The Evil team is usually, but not always, one Demon and their two Minions. Each Demon and Minion also has their own unique ability.) Or there's the Mayor, who can do absolutely nothing for the team until the last day of the game, when there are only three players left... and if he can convince them not to kill anyone that day, Team Good insta-wins. (This is complicated by the fact that if he's lying about being the Mayor, that night, the Demon is certain to kill off a good player, and Good insta-loses.)
And then there are all the spanners thrown into the works by disruptive abilities.
The Poisoner minion causes players' powers to go haywire: a Slayer might shoot the demon and not get the kill, which would seem to confirm the Demon's non-Demon-ness. An Empath might be poisoned and learn that neither of their neighbors are evil, when in fact both of them are. A Drunk player will firmly believe that they have a role, but not actually be that role, and therefore have powers that do not work: a little like being perma-poisoned. Some characters, like the Recluse, may appear to other players with information-gathering abilities to be evil, when they're actually good.
And, crucially, in any given game, no one knows exactly which roles are in play.
(Unless they're the special character who can see behind the DM's screen.)
The end result is that almost no one can fully trust any of their information. There's almost no verifiable evidence, and most events have a plausible alternate explanation. Even if you do chance into something verifiable – for example, Player A, a Farmer, turns another good player into a Farmer if Player A dies at night, meaning that the new Farmer (woken at dawn and handed a pitchfork and a straw hat, no doubt) knows that last night's death was a Farmer, and thus good, and thus probably to be trusted – you probably won't be able to convince anyone else of that.
The game hinges on complex webs of trust and information flow. And sometimes catching someone in a lie isn't enough to prove them untrustworthy: the good Damsel can insta-lose the game for the Good team if their identity becomes known by the wrong people, and a good Balloonist has a target on their back if they become known to the Demon in the early game, so both those roles have a strong incentive to lie about who they are to anyone they don't trust. Which is usually everyone.
There are strategies to approach this morass of ambiguity, but I haven't seen a single game without a strong component of Wild Mass Guessing.
This is not the only source of added complexity over a game of Mafia/Werewolf, either. BotC also uses a Storyteller, a Dungeon-Master-like role who facilitates the story and can influence the course of the game, sometimes to the point of choosing who dies. And dead players stick around as helpful (or unhelpful) talkative ghosts, who may be more free to tell the truth they hid while they were alive... but who no longer have any powers, and who have a single Ghost Vote that they can use in only one execution before losing the power to influence the lynch mob entirely. There are mechanics which cause players to switch roles or allegiances. It's chaos.
This also means that the first time I watched the game being played, I could not follow it despite having the wiki up in another three tabs in my browser.
Still! It was oddly compelling. I started checking out the No Rolls Barred gang playing Blood on the Clocktower, which helped a lot because they're actor folk and are engaging to watch even when I have no idea what's happening. By the third game or so – and each of these games clock in at 2-3 hours, so at this point I'm well on my way to an academic minor – I was following the internal logic pretty well, and in the next few I started getting swept up in the drama.
The weird interactions between roles, mechanically, mean that there are lots of openings for odd little betrayals and self-sacrifices. I found it genuinely touching when one character offered his own neck to the chopping block to save someone else he thought was falsely accused... taking a trustfall that his extremely valuable power would be picked up by a charater who could take a dead player's power, but only once, and only if they were who they said they were. In another game, a character willingly nominated themselves for execution, because they believed they might be playing a Demon who insta-won the game if Good didn't execute someone, but they were also playing in a game with a Minion who insta-won the game if they nominated someone good and that someone was killed. A self-nomination was the only immediately verifiable way that that wouldn't happen.
And it opens up opportunity for high amusement, too! The Psychopath minion can kill people in broad daylight and has a 2/3 chance of escaping execution even if they're nominated, so it was pretty hilarious to watch the players in one game roleplay that.
Psychopath: *charges across the Town Square and axe-murders someone in full view of the town*
King: I nominate [Player Name] for execution!
Storyteller: All right. Tell us why.
King: They just murdered someone! In cold blood! Right in front of us!
Storyteller: [Player Name]. Your defense?
Psychopath: I didn't kill anyone! It was a hug! That had disastrous consequences!
(Later on, the Pyschopath character, sitting alone in the Town Square because no one wants to talk to them, serenades the Zoom camera with "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. It was glorious.)
And there are moments that are absolutely chilling, mostly to do with demonic powers. Like when an execution vote passes, and the Storyteller announces "[Player Name] is executed... and does not die. Everyone, goodnight." Or when a number of players raise their hands to execute someone, and the Storyteller announces "Zero is not enough votes to pass. The nomination fails."
By the time I got to the end of We Are Legion, I found one of the most triumphant final showdowns I've seen in media. And, okay, I kinda ship two of the characters in that round of the game.
(Those of you who know me will know how unlikely a statement that is.)
(We Are Legion was an episode where no matter who won, I would have been happy, because damn, both teams deserved it. It was a masterclass in deception and trustfalls.)
And this is a problem I seem to run into a lot, because like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, the only zombie game I love with all my soul, it is a game which seems impossible to enjoy unless you're the kind of person who likes their games to come with a novel's worth of documentation on the side. And trying to sell anyone on it as a form of theatre relies on someone having the rather specific dual interest of "board game LPs" and "group comedic/dramatic improv".
In conclusion, I hated this game on sight, I was unable to escape its gravitational pull, and now I love it. And I both hate and love that I love it.
I have more thoughts on Blood on the Clocktower and ludo-narrative dissonance, but that has to go into its own post, because I've almost hit 2,000 words on this one.
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(If there was a Blood on the Clocktower bingo, [players yelling "I HATE THIS GAME!"] would be a very valuable square.)
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Part of me thinks I would dearly love to try a game, and another part of me thinks that I would go completely off the deep end and it would only end in frothing fits. I hope you enjoy it, if you get around to watching!
(It is so complicated. It is a rabbithole of complexity, and this rabbit is digging aaaaall the way down.)
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(Apparently No Rolls Barred is either based in or operates sometimes in London, and films some of their stuff in a BOARD GAMES CAFE, and I don't know if I'd ever previously heard of such a thing. Apparently they're a thing. Apparently they also exist in San Francisco. I wish I'd known this before I got pandemic anxiety piled on top of my baseline social awkwardness.)
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(I do enjoy several board games; I think there's just too much social and physical infrastructure that needs to happen to set them up. Card games are a little easier – Fluxx and One Thousand Blank White Cards are both amazing – but even then, there's a level of Get People In The Same Space which often defeats me.)
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Highlights include the quotes "This is a lot hornier than I thought it would be for a Jenga episode," both competitors chanting "Maths! Maths! Maths! Maths! Maths! Maths! Maths! Maths!" at the tower, and so very many looks of sheer sodden desperation.
Anyway, I saw it and thought of you.