First of all, hello, and Second.
My opening post to the entire game, in an attempt to help people develop mindsets early on the differences between the strengths and weaknesses of the Blue Dragon and the Hand of Byzantium factions, is as follows.
Thanking people for playing this game, and thanking those individuals who have helped create this setup as a whole over a vast period of time:
Hey, I felt it was important to open with this. Town has wasted valuable time being confused about mechanics in past games, so this is a statement on how virtuous was conceptualized, and how the Blue Dragon and Hand of Byzantium are different from one another.
Virtuous is the culmination of months and months and months of work of the various elements of the game – í42 for the Blue Dragon and Unseen Factions, the Forum of Lies Team for the FoL-exclusive BD and Unseen classes, Alice for the Hand of Byzantium faction, Pug for the Call to Arms ability and many of the aspects of the scum Blue Dragon classes, me for much of the flavour and the flavour idea for virtuous and the classes within, as well as balancing on some of the classes, Vulgard for the brunt of balancing for the abilities for all of the classes, and Amelia for putting in the finishing touches in making the game into a multiball, neutless format. I just felt like thanking all of these individuals who have helped to make this experience possible, which I am fairly confident is the most mechanically complex social deduction game in the history of the internet.
The idea for Virtuous basically was born when I made a thread in April 2019 asking if and when Return of the Blue Dragon IV would ever happen. I was informed that that setup was apparently extremely unbalanced and basically unwinnable for the Blue Dragon. I played in Alice’s Hand of Byzantium III game that July, and learned that I loved that faction (and its corresponding unseen classes) as well. So I figured, why not put it all together; a more balanced, much more complex and nuanced, and more wondrous version of Return of the Blue Dragon, and that was that. I’m grateful to be playing in this one and that my depression has receded enough at this point to make this possible.
Anyway, on to the point of this message: What are the major differences between the Blue Dragon and Hand of Byzantium factions, and what kind of mindsets to we need to employ that are different between the two?
Strengths, weaknesses, and tips for battling the Blue Dragon:
Let’s begin with the Blue Dragon. The Blue Dragon have incredible mechanical power and resiliency. The Heroine, the Blue Dragon’s killer, is always occupy immune. The Blue Dragon as a whole in this game can be thought of as a pretty nasty hydra dragon. Each time you cut off one head, two more pop up to take its place. You have to eliminate all the heads in a quick speed to really finish them off. The reason this is the case is due to one simple truth: As long as the Blue Dragon as a faction exist in the game, there will be a Visionary alive. Whatever the Visionary’s Vision is, within the ranks of the Blue Dragon, it seems to be unforgettable. Additionally, Blue Dragon convert classes can have incredible power in their Call to Arms night abilities, varying anywhere from additional killing power, to learning players’ exact roles, all the way to forcing anyone, even roles that are immune to redirection, to target themselves. Also, the Heroine gets an extra use of immunity piercing for every dead Blue Dragon member in the graveyard. The Blue Dragon’s weakness, though, is that they have quite weak social protection. The Visionary never has death immunity, and ONLY the starting Visionary has investigation and tracker protection. Also, the blue dragon don’t really have any source of godfathers, besides the starting visionary only and the righteous king. Basically, the Blue Dragon are like a swarm of killer bees. They don’t care if members drop here and there because of how easily their faction can rebuild itself, and bussing themselves can even be useful to give the Heroine more uses of her immunity piercer. However they do have the tendency to drop like flies, and once the starting visionary dies, they will never have another godfather. Also, most of the convert abilities that are not from Call to Arms are fairly weak.
Strengths, weaknesses, and tips for battling the Hand of Byzantium:
On the other hand, we have the Hand of Byzantium. A perfect analogy for the Hand of Byzantium is my dear friend blow, Pre-Errata Chaos Emperor Dragon: Envoy of the End, Original, Pre-Errata Version.
Chaos Emperor Dragon: Envoy of the End led to the creation of the YuGiOh Forbidden List, when such a list never had existed before. It was bound within this list until several years later, when the card was errata’d and nerfed to oblivion. The reason this card was so powerful was pretty simple: It was incredibly easy to summon to the field from your hand, only requiring you to banish any one Light and Dark monster from your graveyard, and once it got to the field, it won you the game instantly with its effect, which could burn your opponent of almost half of their life points with almost a single move, and there were other cards at this time which could let you bring out the Chaos Emperor Dragon over and over again from your graveyard, since the effect was not once per turn, to just attack your opponent for game, since they have no resources left now. The Pre-Errata’d version of Chaos Emperor Dragon: Envoy of the End, as well as Virtuous’s Arbiter, are the ultimate bosses. The Hand of Byzantium as a faction is centered around two things; number one, keeping its members alive, and number two, achieving social deception through mechanical thievery. Although it’s easier to get more copies of an Arbiter than it is Throne of Lies’ Mastermind, it’s much, much harder to get them than additional copies of Blue Dragons’ Visionary. This is compensated, though. Firstly, every Arbiter is always occupation, redirection, investigation, and tracking immune. Also, every Arbiter has a unique ability to socially fake being another class, with mechanics, by snagging any day ability from a non-unique unseen class. The versatility and high range of options here is what makes the Arbiter so good: it’s impossible to predict what sort of social shenanigans they will attempt using the mechanically deceptive tools at their disposal. Additionally, the Hand of Byzantiums’ greatest power is that every Arbiter is a godfather, and a good number of the HoB conversion classes are also godfathers. It is much harder to mechanically nail members of the Hand of Byzantium, even though they are mechanically weaker themselves. Furthermore, while the Champion is not occupation and redirection immune like the Heroine is, he does have two big advantages over her; the first is that he has a one use two-for-one killing ability, and the other is that one of his kills will flip and show logs of the Champion’s choosing instead of what actually was the case. Like I said, less mechanically dominant, but still a host of mechanical strengths that the Blue Dragon don’t have, based around socially fooling everyone via stolen abilities and ample godfathers. And finally, every ability that the Hand of Byzantium Convert Classes have is really powerful. Most of them aren’t as good as a lot of the BD Call to Arms abilities, but they’re significantly more powerful than any Blue Dragon Convert non-Call to Arms ability.
Summary of the above two dropdowns:
Basically, the Blue Dragon are like an annoying swarm of hornets – easy to track them down, but each one can be very painful. On the plus side, because they have such weak investigative and night protection, even if you swing and miss early, you can always still be in the game later versus the Blue Dragon.
And, the Hand of Byzantium are like an incredibly powerful emperor boss dragon who has a group of minions – if you kill two members of the HoB really early, they’re basically finished as a faction, but if you don’t nab any of them before it’s too late, they’ll be too socially and mechanically fortified to stop, even if the Unseen hasn’t lost yet.
Statement on why the Blue Dragon and Hand of Byzantium factions in this game are so much more powerful than the Unseen and Cult factions from Throne of Lies:
Virtuous is at the extreme on the front of High Powered Rolemadness games. Every player in the game is a mechanical juggernaut in their own way. This means that if you waste a hurtful ability on a good player or waste a helpful one on an evil player, things can backfire instantly and dramatically for the Unseen. Our gracious host has learned that lesson the hard way. However, if used right, the Unseen can easily smother the Blue Dragon and the Hand of Byzantium with their mechanical abilities alone. This means that every target with abilities should be thoughtfully considered with at least some social reads at the core of every decisional targeted ability choice. Targets for abilities should never be randomly selected, if at all possible.
For most of the first half of the game, at least, the best strategy is the strategy that is at the core of all of Forum Mafia: Social Reads and Interpretation. Mechanical discussion has little value until later in the game when there is definitive evidence to prove a couple out of all the theories to be the most likely to be true. This entire post (and the likely replies to it) is my attempt to divert attention away from mechanics for most of the day, if possible.
Thank you all once again, and let’s have some fun.
