GTW 39

no clever subtitle

The game is The Resistance. You may remember this from Game 36, though we are playing with fewer numbers, and I'm making one change which may help people out a bit as they learn the game. I'll get to that.

You six are members of the UN Security Council, attempting to thwart the plans of terrorists who have stolen nuclear weapons, and threaten to detonate them in world capitals no later than 10 days from now. Two of you secretly wish for the terrorist plot to succeed. You were put into place years prior, sleeper agents tasked with gaining information on operations to stop the terrorists, and sabotaging those operations by leaking that information to the cells carrying out aspects of the plot.

The UN Security Council will take turns submitting names of Security Council members to receive classified information pooled from the world's intelligence services, in order to plan and carry out operations to kill or capture terrorist cells. Three such operations will be enough to stop the terrorist plot, but there is only time for at most five operations total before the terrorists detonate their bombs. Should the terrorists escape justice in three operations, due to sabotage by the traitors on the Security Council, the terrorists will surely succeed.

Phase One ("Team Building Phase") of each turn will consist of subcommittee membership selection. In a rotating fashion, the order of which has been determined randomly, each of you will take turns putting forth names. If the names are approved by a majority vote of four, the mission will go on to Phase Two. If the names are rejected by three members, the next person on the list will then propose a new set of names. Five rejections in a row, and the Security Council is deadlocked and the terrorists and their agents on the Security Council automatically win the game. Phase One can therefore have as many as five votes before the game progresses.

Phase Two ("Mission Phase") of each turn will consist of solely the members selected for the operation. Each will decide if they wish the mission to succeed or fail. A single vote for failure on any of the five operations will cause the operation to fail. A operation will only succeed if the members of the chosen subcommittee unanimously decide it should succeed. Obviously innocent members of the team ought to always vote to succeed a mission, but sleeper agents have the option to either cause it to fail and earn a point for the terrorists, or have it succeed to keep their cover.

All voting will be done privately, via PM to me. I suggest using the same PM thread that you got your role PM from, just to keep things nice and simple, as you can keep replying to that instead of sending me dozens of new PM threads. Phase One votes will be revealed all at once, when all votes are in, indicating how people chose to vote. Phase Two votes will always be revealed in quantity, but not who voted how. If you want to publicly declare their approval or rejection for a given set of names in Phase One, you are encouraged to do so, but these statements will not count as your vote.

Here are the six players, in the order they will put forth names for consideration on operation teams.

JacaByte
Crow T. Robot
retep998
adam_0
Mackilroy
SoItBegins

JacaByte will be the first to suggest names for the first operation team, then after his suggestions are approved (and the mission carried out) or rejected, it will be Crow T. Robot's turn. Things will continue as such, and loop back around to JacaByte again after SoItBegins has had a turn.

Okay, so I promised one change to make the game a little easier for the good guys, since you're all still learning this and haven't figured out good strategy yet. I am not going to tell the two sleeper agents who the other one is, but I will let them know, via PM, if the currently (and publicly) proposed names contains their cohort. Eventually, through process of elimination, it may be possible for the two sleeper agents to discover each other's identities, but it's my hope that they will use the information I give them to coordinate name selection, and not their mission outcome votes (to ensure only vote fail vote is ever made at a time). Even if sleeper agents discover the identity of their cohort beyond a shadow of a doubt, I highly recommend that they do not contact them in any way. Similarly, I encourage the sleeper agents to ignore any such contact, as it stands to reason an innocent member might attempt to trick them with a false claim of being their cohort, in order to influence their mission outcome votes.

If I may offer some general strategy advice, I strongly suggest people be more inclined to reject operation teams than approve them, as that gives innocents more information to narrow down the list of suspects. I also suggest people ought to be distrusting of those who propose a list of names that does not include the person proposing it.

Ultimately it is up to the innocents to gather as much data as possible, and take control over the operation selection process to exclude sleeper agents. It is up to the sleeper agents to give the innocents bad data to confuse them, and get a sleeper agent on as many operations as possible.

Again, there are four innocents, two sleeper agents. There are five operations, and each side is attempting to win three of them. A single failure vote on any operation, and the sleeper agents win that operation. No failures, and the innocents win that operation. The operation sizes, are as follows. 2, 3, 4, 3, 4.

The 10 day thing, that's mostly story-based. I'm not going to make each round last exactly 2 days. If it ends up that way, or less, great. If not, the game will just go as long as the game goes. We'll only really know how long each round will last, based on how many votes it takes to get into Phase Two of each round.

JacaByte, you are up first, please propose two names to go on the first operation. JacaByte, and everyone else, expect a role PM shortly.

Knowing fully well that I am innocent, I move to place myself and retep998 on the first operation. retep998 was selected randomly.

Proposed Operation Detail:
JacaByte
retep998

Please PM me, everyone, whether you APPROVE or REJECT the first proposed first operation:
JacaByte
retep998

Done. Let's see how this goes.

I've received three votes of six. People should feel free to say how they're voting and why, not that there's much to go on right now.

Knowing fully well that I am innocent, and that JacaByte moved to place himself and I on the first operation where I was selected randomly, I do hereby approve his operation proposal.

Anyone remember last game? If we blindly approve proposals, we'll end up biting it again. I've voted to REJECT the first proposal, so that we can see who proposes what in the second and maybe the third. THEN we can decide.

We have absolutely no way of knowing who's innocent and who is not during the first round; I have a two out of five chance of picking somebody who is a traitor. My choices for the first op will be just as good as the second and third choices.

Operation 1 Name Proposal 1
JacaByte
retep998

JacaByte - Approve 11:43 PM
Mackilroy - Reject 12:03 AM
adam_0 - Approve 12:10 AM
SoItBegins - Reject 2:37 AM
retep998 - Approve 2:53 AM
Crow T. Robot - Approve 9:06 AM

Well, nothing was learned, it seems ;).

Operation #1 is approved. Innocents receive only one set of voting data for the round.

JacaByte and retep998 should inform me via PM as soon as possible whether they wish the mission the SUCCEED or FAIL.

You guys chose poorly on the team. I'm still waiting on one of the two to tell me if the mission is going to fail or succeed :p.

glares at retep

Operation #1 has been completed successfully.

Crow T. Robot, you may now submit names for the second operation team. The team will consist of 3 names.

For UN approval, I submit Crow T. Robot, SoItBegins, and adam_0 for the next operation team.

Because I am only sure of my own innocence, the odds of Crow T. Robot's team being free of traitors is approximately 16.6%, which is far too risky of a proposition.
Therefore, my only choice is to reject Crow T. Robot's proposal.

Retep, the reason for my selection was because the last time we played mrxak's game, we were too trusting of those who were picked in the first selection because they all voted for the first mission to succeed but later when we used them over and over again, we learned that the majority of them were in fact the terrorists. So I feel that we can not rely on just one good vote so far, we need to cover our bases. Please support this slate of people.

Please PM me, everyone, whether you APPROVE or REJECT the first proposed second operation:
adam_0
Crow T. Robot
SoItBegins

Already three votes in. Apparently people are watching the topic closely, so thank you.

Sent in my PM. I reject Crow's motion. There are two reasons I have for that: first, I know that I am innocent, and I'm not on the committee, which means I can't help ensure a successful mission. The second is that as mrxak pointed out in Game 36, we had very little data to draw upon because we pushed motions through so quickly.

I'm afraid even I must reject this alliance, as I cannot be sure of my other committee members.

I'm rejecting Crow's motion because it does not help us deduce who potential traitors are in any fashion.

Edit: I want SIB to tell us how to find the probability that 1 or more of the members of the first team were traitors like he did in GTW 36, because I can't do that even though I took college discrete math and we did probabilities in there. (I can tell you how many different ways there are of arranging people in a photograph, and many ways there were of selecting the first team (15), I just can't tell you how many ways there are of selecting a group such that 1 or more were traitors.)

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 15 July 2012 - 11:04 AM