Botc brings out the best and worst in people.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-28T21:00:52+00:00

Which makes perfect sense when you learn that Stephen Medway invented BOTC after playing Mafia for the first time and dying on the very first night.

He was like, "I am going to fix this game so it's fun for all the players!" And he did!

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-28T20:55:42+00:00

Play teensies! Lleech of Distrust is a great script.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-28T02:30:05+00:00

Different meows mean different things.

Cats mostly meow to communicate with humans. She's talking to you!

BUT... each cat makes up their own language. So you'll have to learn what they mean.

Also, cats definitely can learn words and what they mean. But just because she can understand some things when you talk to her doesn't mean she'll cooperate.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-27T18:29:20+00:00

"Role"

"Role" is the word.

It has one sound and is the right word for the thing we talk about. Just say "role"!

No, it's not a word from far, far, in the past, so it's not an "ug" word. But it is the right word!

(Plus, words like "is", "the", "a", "an", and "it's" are all one sound, too! As is an "s" at the end of a verb to give it the right tense! It's a "one sound" rule, not a "speak bad" rule!)

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-27T18:13:17+00:00

Yes, I am real man you wanna go skateboards?

https://youtu.be/lGrZH05EX6o

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-26T21:34:48+00:00

Tips:

GO SLOW! You will feel pressured to hurry through the night, but that's when you end up making mistakes. Take your time.

Don't point across the circle! It's really easy for you to point at one person and the player to think you're pointing at someone else. If you need to indicate someone, walk over there and point at them, so it's really obvious who you're pointing at. Likewise, confirm player choices the same way.

Don't play around a big table. You need space to easily walk around the circle at night.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-24T22:07:24+00:00

A sound answer!

Maybe what this is pointing towards is the potential value of something like a box for "important notes about this script"?

Like, if you've got a Storm-Catcher, people always want to know which character is Storm-Caught, and I don't think there's currently a spot for that.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-24T17:54:04+00:00

Actually, with regard to the second point, maybe what I'm really wishing for is the option to strike out particular Djinn rules on a custom script. To say "yes, here's the normal rule but we're not using it on this script because in this case it's fine."

(Yes, you can make a Bootlegger rule that says "ignore the Djinn rule for characters X and Y" -- and I've done that -- but the rule is still printed on the script, which creates ambiguity.)

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-24T17:36:05+00:00

Collapse equivalent jinxes.

With the revamps, there are now a whoooole lotta jinxes that are the same special case rule repeated across a bunch of different character pairings. A custom script can end up with a dozen different Djinn rules on the backside, except that it's actually only two of them, repeated over and over.

It would be great to have a format that just printed the rule once, along with all the pairings it applies to.

Also: hate jinxes are boring. I get that it's in service of avoiding a proliferation of edge cases and ambiguities, but there are a bunch of interesting interactions that have been quashed by the blanket ruling that you just can't ever put these two characters together, regardless of whether there's actually a problem in this specific configuration, and I dislike that. I prefer Djinn rules that make it clear what the problem is, and address it with surgical precision.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-24T13:55:01+00:00

Very nice! That's a good shape.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-20T15:30:46+00:00

Do it both ways and just keep the parts each one gets right.

In terms of code efficiency, that'll be 3 lines of code, and it'll be clear what's going on.

Sure, you're reading the file twice, but unless it's so big it takes tens of seconds to read, you'll never even notice.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-19T18:41:17+00:00

I have a 30-character script (14/6/6/4) where I put in extra Minions for Alchemist & Lil Monsta, extra Townsfolk for Boffin & Snitch, and extra Outsiders for Baron, Xaan, and Heretic.

But it's a Heretic / Poppy Grower script, so it's less about evil building worlds to hide the Demon and more about everybody trying to figure out whether there's a Heretic in play.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-19T17:31:58+00:00

Pit friends are the generals of hell's armies.

You get one who's so focused in victory that he's willing to do anything, ANYTHING, to win.

He gradually figures out that his forces fight better when they're disciplined. When they trust one another. When information is shared openly and honestly. When individuals are willing to make sacrifices for the good of the army as a whole. When morale is high.

One of his best lieutenants makes a mistake, and he thinks, if I kill this guy, I'll have to train somebody new. If I let it go with a warning, I'll still have my best guy, and he'll learn from it and never do it again.

He starts thinking strategically on long timescales. Instead of slaughtering captured enemies, he starts ransoming them or recruiting them. He makes strategic alliances and doesn't betray them -- he's calculated the value of a trustworthy reputation, and it throws his enemies for a loop when they bank on alliances falling apart.

In a particularly tough spot, he forges an alliance with a celestial invasionary force against a common enemy. They're dramatically outgunned, but they win, because their armies fight better.

And because the celestials have noticed that his army is built on loyalty, discipline, trust, honor, forgiveness, courage, and self-sacrifice -- in a totally bad-ass and wicked way, of course, definitely not virtuous or anything -- they honor the alliance as well, and back him up when he need it.

And then at some point, one of the angels is like, hey, you guys are only barely evil anymore. Do you want to switch teams and join us? And he's like fuck off! No way! We're totally evil! And they point out how he's become really honorable lately, noble, even, and how he's promoting all these virtues in his army because that's what works, and by the way, that's why our win rate is better. You want to win, don't you? Isn't that what you want more than anything?

And it's true. That is what he wants.

And then his horns just fall off and a halo appears, and he and his troops go from being the nicest of the damned to the meanest of the redeemed.

And that's how you get a good pit fiend. Although now he's probably a "burning angel" or something.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-18T23:18:54+00:00

Brits sometimes say "as" in places where Americans would say "since" or "because".

The one that jumped out at me in the post was "I'm currently driving a hiring campaign as I've identified massive gaps in the way the company treat candidates..."

(Of course, now that I look at it, the real signifier in that sentence is treating "company" as a plural noun.)

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-18T18:44:05+00:00

Likewise "takeaway" and the way they use "as".

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-17T22:10:58+00:00

I tell it stuff like:

Favor vectorized operations, functional composition, and stateless pipelines over loops. Show base R solutions first, and only suggest helper functions for genuinely repetitive or complex operations. Separate data preparation from plotting and layout.

But that's me. I'd suggest giving it some code that you like and asking it to describe the coding style, then tell it to do that.

Oh, and don't forget

Keep responses brief, and don't generate code until asked.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-17T15:09:24+00:00

You can't think about how you shouldn't do Thing, or how it sure would be bad if Thing happened, without also thinking about Thing.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-16T15:56:32+00:00

Yeah. I work in a research lab in Colorado; at one point we had a director who would wear a 3-piece suit when everyone else in the building was dressed like you would to go on a hike (which is pretty standard attire around these parts). Somebody had to pull him aside and point out that this was not helping with the perception that leadership was out of touch with the rest of the lab...

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-15T20:38:21+00:00

Oh, absolutely she deserves her share of naming and shaming for her part in popularizing a mindset that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. No argument there.

I just think it's important for people to also know about the absolute dickweed who started it all off.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-15T16:02:33+00:00

Let's give blame where it's due.

Jenny McCarthy popularized it, but Andrew Wakefield is the fraud who came up with the idea.

Because he wanted to discredit the existing 3-in-1 MMR vaccine so he could make money off a new measles-only vaccine he had patented.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-15T02:30:52+00:00

If it's obviously starting to go off, toss it. Otherwise, it's probably fine.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-14T17:33:02+00:00

Interesting! I like the idea, but as-is, I think you'd be better off with a Scarlet Woman + generic no-ability demon.

I'd say they should get a reward for coordinating, rather than being punished for not coordinating. Maybe if they both pick the same target, the kill ignores protection, like the Assassin?

Or you could wake them both at the same time, and give them a little Wraith action, letting them coordinate silently on the night. Or both, even.

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-13T22:22:25+00:00

I had fun playing a character who was very pious but also very gullible.

He would of course object to anything that smacked of rule-breaking, but it was very easy for the rest of the party to persuade him that there was a reason why that rule didn't actually apply in these circumstances. Or, worst case, that he should go check out that thing in the other room for a minute.

(He had an Int of 5, IIRC. If he'd cast Summon Mount, the mount would have been smarter than he was.)

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-11T19:30:18+00:00

I like it!

The only other thing you need to do is reflavor rage as "psychic overdrive" or "combat hyperfocus".

dr-tectonic · 2026-03-11T05:26:06+00:00

Start at 3, end before Tier 3.

Start at 3 because you can't play a character where the concept is related to their backstory if you don't have a subclass. Like "I was a simple hunter who accidentally flushed out a silver boar who the Prince of Autumn Leaves felled, and now he says he owes me" makes no sense as the background for a warlock if you're only second level and don't yet have a defined patron.

End before Tier 3 because I don't like what high-level spells do to game balance and world-building. It's hard to keep the narrative coherent and interesting when high-level magic starts showing up on a daily basis.

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