(t)BTM: a Chance for revival - signups [3/14]

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#1

Welcome to the next episode of
(test)* Behind The Mask
A chance for revival.

*being a test game means, there are some experimental features, which are usually not part of a vanilla BTM game experience (yet). This time, both action and voting phases are removed (the rolelist/roles are reworked accordingly). Gifts are reworked. Sorcerer reworked into Warlock. And there is a potential for bots (NPC-characters) to appaer in the game

Everyone please follow the general rules, while posting in this thread. (Basically, be nice, mature and respective to others)

Game Rules:

Each player is assigned a unique role, with its own ability and duel/dance rankings.
Your role is secret. Your goal is to find out other players’ roles while keeping yours hidden.
The game will rotate through two different phases until a winner is decided.
Players can talk to each other in secret, (no public announcement needed) while they include the host in the communication.
Once a player dies, they can’t talk anymore.
The last player standing wins. (in case of a deadlock, the player with the most gifts win.)

Challenge Phase:
The game start with this phase
In this phase, each player can issue challenge to another player.
Everyone can issue only one /challenge during each Challenge phase.
The challenged player can choose to /accept or /deny the challenge. (choosing deny will use up a gift of theirs. If the challenged player doesn’t react until the phase ends, they automatically accept the challenge.)
Players can choose to not challenge anyone with /nochallenge to speed up the phase.
The winner of each challenge is decided by their duel/dance ranking. (this can be influenced with role abilities.)
Each player gets a gift for any challenge they are participating in.
This phase lasts 24 hours. (plus 24 hours after the last challenge is issued, players are not allowed to issue challenges after the initial 24 hours has ended)
Challenge phase can end prematurily, if all issued challenged are accepted or denied.

Dinner Phase:
In this phase, you may guess other players’ roles. If you guess correctly, they die at the end of the phase. If you are wrong, you will die instead.
Each player also receives a plate of food. Certain roles interact with food, such as poisoning it.
During dinner phase, player can switch their plates with an other player, (this uses one of their gifts), or can use /no-switch to speed up the phase.
This phase last 24 hours at most.

Roles:
BLACKMAILER

You are the Blackmailer
Killing

Ability:
During the Dinner Phase, you may blackmail one player. Blackmailed players must participate in a challenge during the next Challenge Phase, or will die. Only the blackmailed player will know that they are blackmailed.

BLACKSMITH

You are the Blacksmith
Manupilation

Ability:
When you challenge a player to a Dance, you will secretly use your Duel ranking instead of your Dance ranking.

Two times per game during the Challenge Phase, you may treat all your received challenges as Duels.

GARDENER

You are the Gardener
Survival

Ability:
Any player who has received a flower cannot guess whether anyone is the Gardener for the rest of the game.

During the Challenge Phase, you can choose one player to secretly give a flower to.

INVESTIGATOR

You are the Investigator
Discovery

Ability:
Five times per game during the Dinner Phase, you may choose two players to act out a theoretical Duel or Dance. You will learn the winner of each challenge without any interfering factors.

MAN-AT-ARMS

You are The Man-at-Arms
Killing

Ability:
You gain a bullet whenever you win a Duel or Dance. You can only carry a single bullet at any time. You start the game with one bullet.

During the Dinner Phase, you can consume a bullet to secretly kill the loser of a Duel or Dance at the end of the phase. You kill your target, before the guesses re revealed. But you die instead, if you tried to shoot the Soldier.

MONK

You are the Monk.
Manupilation

Ability
Three times per game during the Challenge Phase, you can temporarily move yourself to the top of the Duel and Dance rankings.

MUSICIAN

You are the Musician
Manupilation

Ability:
When you challenge a player to a Duel, you will secretly use your Dance ranking instead of your Duel ranking.

Two times per game during the Challenge Phase, you may treat all your received challenges as Dances.

PEASANT

You are the Peasant
Discovery

Ability:
In the Dinner Phase, you will learn if the Blacksmith, Musician, or Monk activated their abilities in the previous phase. You will be notified of any secret plate swaps. You will be notified of the original target of the Poisoner.

POISONER

You are the Poisoner
Killing

Ability:
During the Challenge Phase, you may secretly poison a player’s food. A player who consumes poisoned food will die at the end of the Dinner Phase. Your poison kill their target, after the guesses are revealed.

PROFESSOR

You are the Professor
Discovery

Ability:
During the Dinner phase on one of your guess, you can make a hidden guess on a player you are already guessing, if your hidden guess is correct, only your secret guess will be revealed instead of your original guess.

If you won a challenge, you can have an extra hidden guess.

SOLDIER

You are the Soldier
Survival

Ability:
You are immune to being poisoned. You will counterattack and kill the Man-at-Arms if they try to shoot you. It will be announced, that the Soldier defended themselves against the Man-at-Arms.
If you kill the Man-at-Arms, you gain their ability to shoot losers of challenges. You gain the gun, with zero bullets, and you can gain a bullet, when you win a challenge. (you can only carry only a single bullet at any time.) You also would kill, before the guesses are revealed.

THIEF

You are the Thief
Manupilation

Ability:
If the Poisoner dies, you become the new Poisoner.
Up to five times per Dinner Phase, you can secretly swap the plates of two players. (you can’t change announced premium food.)

TRICKSTER

You are the Trickster
Manupilation

Ability:
Each Dinner phase you may tag at most 4 participants with a card, be it an Ace, King, Joker.
You always need to have at least one more King or Ace seperately as Joker in play.

The effects of these cards only happen when paired after the challenge phase, the effect varies depending of the pairing.
Ace+Ace/King+King/Joker+Joker yields no effects.
Ace+King the winner of the challenge gains an additional gift.
Ace+Joker the challenge becomes a death challenge. (the loser will die.)
King+Joker neither player gets a gift for this challenge.

WARLOCK

You are the Warlock
Killing

Ability
You gain a soul whenever you succesfully guess a player’s role. You start the game with one soul.

Once per game, at any time, you can unleash all your souls. For each soul, you can immediately kill any player. This reveals your role to all players and cannot be done if you are the loser of a challenge.

Challenge list:

The ranking of each roles will be constant during the game. Also a role’s placement inside a tier doesn’t have any correlation on the tier on the other challenge list. (for example if, Man-at-arm is rank 2 on Duel list, it still can be either 11, 12 or 13 on the dance list, but it Will have those ranks during the whole game.)

duel list

Best dueller: Blacksmith
Good duellers: Man-At-Arms, Soldier, Trickster
Above average duellers: Investigator, Professor, Warlock
Below average duellers: Monk, Peasant, Poisoner
Bad duellers: Blackmailer, Gardener, Thief
Worst dueller: Musician

dance list

Best dancer: Musician
Good dancers: Blackmailer, Gardener, Thief
Above average dancers: Monk, Peasant, Poisoner
Below average dancers: Investigator, Professor, Warlock
Bad dancers: Man-At-Arms, Soldier, Trickster
Worst dancer: Blacksmith

Gifts:

Any gift can be redeemed anytime, while the player has gifts. Each player starts with 1 gift.
Using Deny or Switch takes effect immeadietly.
Premium food can be claimed publicly, or in private.
The use of guess immunity, and free guess (and Premium food, if taken in private) are announced at the end of Dinner phase.

Deny:

During the challenge phase, use on a player, who challenged you. The challenge won’t happen and the targetted player loses their challenge opportunity this challenge phase.

Premium food:

This round you can’t die to poison, and if you claimed the Premium food publicly, your plate can’t be changed with other players.

Switch:

During Dinner phase, publicly change your plate with an other player. (Switchbacks are allowed.) You can use multiple switches in the same dinner phase.

Guess immunity:

Guesses on you this round won’t be registered. If a player used a free guess on you, they Will gain back the gift(s) they used for the Free guess on you. Death stake guesses on you, while you have guess immunity doesn’t results in the guesser’s execution.

Free guess:

You won’t die on this failed guess. You can use multiple free guess during the Dinner phase. (If any of your target used Guess Immunity, you gain back the gift amount, which was blocked.) You aren’t allowed to make death stake guesses in the same phase, you are using free guess(es).

Bots. (experimental feature)

(Non-player characters)
If the game starts with less than 14 players, the empty spots will be filled with bots.
They don’t make guesses, or take guess immunity/premium food.
Discovery role bots don’t use their abilities.
Killing, survival, manupilaton role bots targets their ability randomly. (in case of a Warlock bot, it has 10% to activate at the start of each Dinner phase, unless they are in the final 2, The moment they are one of the lat 2 players, they automatically kill the second-to-last payer.)
Deception role bots activates their ability randomly, when it makes sense.

Each bot semi-randomly challenge at the start of Challenge phase (prioritizing non-bot players), and deny challenges, when it is likely they lose the challenge.

To join type /in and choose a (preferably animal) mask.

Playerlist:

  1. Reserved (?)
  2. Reserved (?)
  3. Reserved (?)
  4. Ishmael as the Raccoon
  5. Jane as the Gremlin
  6. Marshal as Lynx

(The earliest the game will start is 2025-11-17T11:00:00Z, even if the game fills beforehand.)

1 Like
#2

(reserved)

#3

/in

#4

please select a mask (preferably an animal themed one.)

#5

okay chat

#6

okay im 95% sure this uses outdated mechanics that we changed previously but

#7

Raccoon

1 Like
#8

Does it?

The only out of date mechanic I could see here is the presence of the Monk, but this version doesn’t alternate positions. And how the current challenge lists work, I thought it is better to run this version of the Monk, rather than the Nymph. Or the Thief not being able to switch Premium food (but that was always up to the host, how they run that specific interaction, and I put it in the OP, for any veteran BTM-er to know, I will run it this way, in this game.)

There are some roles, which usually aren’t in basic BTM, but after cutting out Voting phase, I needed some other roles, to fit the gap for the missing voting-related roles. (I might have the not updated versions of them in my library, if you have an issue with any of their out-of-date mechanics, tell me and I will try rectify those changes, before the game starts.)

I always have run CP this way. (where the last 24 hours is only for accepting/denying challenges. It works better, than extending the original 48 hours for the late challengers.)

And the gifts are completely reworked, so that can’t really be an out-of-date mechanic.

1 Like
#9

Does a Gremlin count as an animal?

#10

I will accept that as a Mask. (I won’t debate, if it counts as an animal or not.)

2 Likes
#11

first thing i noticed is that we changed blackmailer to attach a blackmail note to a plate instead, letting it be swapped
this is overall a minor change but it’s a nice bit of stuff
second thing is that we let the Soldier steal the man-at-arms’ gun after they counterattack because let’s face it soldier is useless as fuck

there’s a couple others but they’re way bigger than just specific role design and i cant remember specifics so

#12

/In as Gremlin

1 Like
#13

This was a change for the Massive game, (with 50+ roles), it was never vanilla mechanics, as far as I know. Without a buffer phase between challenge phase, and dinner phase, I would rather not use this mechanic, this time.

This one, I don’t have an issue to put into the game. (I still don’t remember this being a core mechanic, though.)

1 Like
#14

nah iirc it was created for a vanilla game and just ended up in the massive game
but it is fair if you don’t want to use it; i just think that thief is generally kind of useless as it stands

#15

none of these are core mechanics
they were only implemented after fol hosted it a few times a couple years back

#16

Thief knows poisoner is still in play. That’s a huge advantage for them. (Especially how the gifts work this time around.)
And he more or less knows, who was the poisoner, if they die any other way, than a guess. (knowing one more player’s position, than other players can give you a bit of an edge in the lategame.)

Also blackmail being able to switched, doesn’t really help thief in any way, it just makes the blackmailer less useful. (Which isn’t that strong, without the presence of the barbarian (or the voting phase) anyway.)

1 Like
#17

Soldier’s RC is updated.

(it gains the ability to kill, once they defended themselves against the Man-at-Arms.)

@Jane @Aleph

2 Likes
#18

can a mod lurker tell me if I have to appeal my high intensity misc ban to play this one. I again would say no but it’s been 19 84 in the past

3 Likes
#19

In my opinion, it’s a toss-up.

To be honest, it’s really based on the other players, how high the intensity of the game is.

If it is played in the right enviroment, a high-intensity BTM might need more social skill, than forum mafia. (Even though, you know for 100% sure, that everyone is on a different team, than you.)

#20

i’m gonna /in and if mods say no just open up an appeal process for me cuz frick that

3 Likes