Post by Judge Sam on Aug 5, 2009 16:56:50 GMT -5
So this will be really short because there's not all that much to talk about +/- voting haha. And I'll write something about all the voting systems as a whole soon.
So the hardest part about these things was finding out when to put each system to make the game the best. It looks all really simple now but for the longest time there was so much moving around, alternate Episode schedules (3,5,6,8,9,10?) it was a mess.
So +/- started out near the end. Because with 29-18 people, does anyone really want to count 58-36 votes? Plus there'd be so many it would have less of an effect.
So it was there for awhile until the Team thing came in and I realized I needed something to do at the start. For the longest time IRV was the first voting shift. The first voting shift is important... it sets the tone for the twist, tells you what to expect, is the first thing you have a reaction towards seeing if the twist sucks or not. And IRV is cool but it's somewhat complicated, and you have to make an easily-messable list of like 28 people. (I tried a long time to not make you have to list everyone, but it didn't work, more on that during ep. 4). Plus the rules on IRV were long and I was already making you read a long general post about the voting shifts.
So I needed a voting shift that was simple and could be shown off first so +/- got moved up to the top! When the Teams thing came in it took me awhile to realize that I would get to use it in the smaller team groups which was cool. And I got to see two different versions of it in action!
For sometime during design it was also the last voting shift as well. When I was trying to fit in 7 or 8 shifts I was thinking of one to do at the end and that might have been the last one to make it a 'start and end' with the same thing type deal.
I got the idea for +/- voting from a Big Brother game I played in which it was used. It was a very cool system. At least in a BB game, it made for tons of strategic possibilities. Tons of abilities to lie, twist things around, affect the voting results, etc. And using it again and again made it really interesting.
I think if it was used for an entire game system it'd be a way to put a sort of check on a last-minute voting swing. (Don't know if that is a good or bad thing.) For example, if a few people decide to all swing their votes to one person during the last 15 minutes, there isn't much you can do. You would have to prove that is happening to a few people, then get all of them to agree on a target that already has a bunch of votes to put that person higher, and you may not even think that person is a Spy. So it'd be super tough to counteract that.
With this system though you can just get a few people to change their - votes and then the last-minute push is nullified. But since that can happen, maybe the people pushing last-minute might be a little more secretive with their plans...
Anyway, +/- was pretty simple and in this case simple was the best way to go!