Ah, of course. I always catch the subtle details, but never the blatantly obvious ones.
A "well played" and a gentleman? Why yes, good sir, that would make me happy. Jolly good show.
Here's the simple turret system:
- Four turrets cover four equal-sized sectors of the city.
- Everyone secretly votes hot/warm/cold for their sector.
- Highest votes for each determine actual setting, coinflip/random to break ties.
- At night, if your body-temp matches the setting in your sector or the sector you are going to, a turret opens fire on you, with a 20% chance of killing you.
- No more than one member of a team (eg. werewolves, vampires) can be killed in one night- change the results if one does.
- In the morning, you get a report of what the settings were, if any fired, but not which guns went off.
- Optional: Host moves people each day as needed to keep the sectors fairly even.
- Optional: You can vote for another sector apart from your own.
- Optional: You can move house once by PMing the host.
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The more complex one that I abandoned follows. One reason I adandoned it is that whilst it is simpler, it takes so much longer to describe. It's not finished, so expect mistakes, and I hadn't formalised the rules. Here goes:
You have taken possession of an extremely powerful and effective town defence system. The system includes three powerful independently-aimed programmable turrets. Each turret has three extremely long and heavy rotating barrels, mounted together on a rotating central platform. Each barrel is capable of firing thousands of rounds a minute at a target. The turrets are attached to a powerful central sensor system.
You want to make sure you are on the right end of the barrel with these babies.
The triple-barrels are unique in their design. One is equipped with bullets, capable of shredding through layers of brick and humans in under a second. The second is loaded with silver bullets and shards, designed to bring a werewolf to a spectacularly glittery end. The third fires several volleys of blessed and sharpened hardwood stakes, fired with enough force to go through a vampire and pin him to the ground. The sunrise then takes care of the remaining problem. The three barrels are nicknamed warm, hot, and cold respectively, to match the body temperature of their primary targets. Only a single barrel can be active on each turret at a time, but the correct barrel can be automatically rotated into place as needed.
Designed for security, the system can be programmed, and then sealed inside a titanium armour shell. It takes well over an hour to remove this shell, and requires cutting and drilling parts of the structure. The tools needed to do this make an incredible noise. If anyone were to try to change the settings on this thing, everyone in the town would know about it.
The system is set up on the tower to give full coverage to the town.
Looking at the manual, you discover the means to program the turrets.
Each turret is given a set of heat and location settings. For the heat setting, you can specify hot, warm, or cold, any pair, or all of them. For location, you can specify a set of several programmable locations. It seems the pre-programmed locations are set to each of the four corners of the town, plus the two central intersections. plus the front door of each surviving person in the town. The instructions do not seem to provide a way to change these pre-programmed locations, but you can choose among them at least.
The turrets are initially set with a simple program: All heats, and all locations. This is your most effective general-purpose defence available where you do not know what you are up against. Each turret has is own settings. You may want to fine-tune these.
The system runs on a timer. This timer has been preset by the fine folks at Artilleryville to turn on at night and off in the morning. The instructions don't say how to change it so a quick discussion resolves that it should be left this way.
The turrets are heavy and slow to turn. The barrels take a couple of seconds to roll into place, and only one barrel can be locked into an active position at a time. Whenever a viable target is detected, the system will attempt to spin around to the right location, load the right barrel, and fire, no matter what the settings are. The barrels are liquid cooled and fire in controlled bursts, so there is negligible chance of overheating.
The powerful main sensors are always trained on the current location of the turret. If a target crosses its path and the right barrel is loaded, it will immediately open fire at full power with a 100% chance of complete destruction of the target and much of the surrounding architecture. If the wrong barrel is loaded, however, it will try to roll the right barrel into place whilst it opens fire. This reduces the accuracy somewhat, and field studies show a 30% chance of incapacitating the target.
Additionally, secondary sensors will scan the entire area for targets. If a target is found, every turret with the right barrel loaded will quickly spin and fire in an arc, with a 10% chance each of hitting their target. If the wrong barrel is loaded, it will pass on the target, as field tests show that it simply cannot spin and load fast enough to fire upon a moving target. Regardless of whether the target is fired upon or not, with each detection a log entry is made as to the heat detected and location, and settings at that time. These logs are tamper-proof and can be checked by everyone in the morning.
In game terms, anyone traveling at night must leave their house, travel along the main streets in any way of their choosing, enter the house of their target, and then do the reverse to get back home. Each time a location is crossed, the present location and setting of the turret will be randomly chosen from its programmed set. If the location matches, the turret will open fire as described. If not, the turret and main sensors were pointing elsewhere at the time, and the turret did not see you. The secondary sensors have a likelihood of detecting your movement that grows the longer the distance traveled. Once a sensor has detected you, the chance of reacquiring your position again is vastly increased. As such, it may fire on you more than once. Consequently, you should try to minimise the distance you need to travel, unless you are trying to avoid passing by certain locations.
You may propose a turret program if you like, after which you should vote for it. If you like the design of someone else, you may vote for theirs. Votes should be in bold, with a name followed by the words "turret design", ie: I vote for
fish's turret design. You may also vote for the default setting, which is fully-random heat and location settings. If no votes are made, the turrets remain with their last program.
An example program:
1. Hot/Cold, all dwellings
2. Warm, all western intersections
3. All, all
This will set one turret to swap between hot and cold on all dwellings only, one turret locked onto warm on the western intersections, and one fully random.
The default program is:
1. All, all.
2. All, all.
3. All, all.
According to the manual, properly maintained, all three turrets should remain in perfect working order throughout their lifetime. Unfortunately, the manual does not specify how to properly maintain them.
Player
