Episode 11 Format

No good in introductions... Attenborough wouldn't have approved himself. Waste of money! Waste of time!

Ahem.

Good evening, BBC viewers. Unfortunately, the original cast of The Goes Wrong ORG have all been retired indefinitely for gross insubordination taken ill.

Just get off! It's my microphone, mine!

But don't worry, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society happened to be passing by and will be filling in with specially trained Christmas Temps! It's still The Season, so it's still their season, and their contracts happen to be far cheaper to renew and extend.

So please welcome our impeccable new cast. Our seven Actors Present, if you will:



All of you have been forcibly commissioned invited to produce just one more Play of the Week with us, before you leave forever.



Now, I'm aware there are rumours swirling about that the 'old guard' are planning to invade the BBC offices, and pull of some new takeover bid involving another fire alarm stunt. But our loyal Audience should please trust my judgment on this, and if they do happen to enter the frame... well then do your very best to ignore their underhanded attempts at avoiding properly biased and capitalistic contract negotiations in which they hold no power whatsoever ruining Christmas.

So please do watch out for these seven disgruntled ex-employees, our Ghosts of Actors Past:


All of you are still lurking about, I'm sure, attempting to infiltrate and undermining our production of A Christmas Carol



But most worrying of all is the incontrovertible evidence that one of our Christmas Temps is in fact an Impostor! In cahoots with the Ghosts of Actors Past... perhaps even hiding in plain sight, despite being *whispers* one of them

Now, if an Impostor were a good Actor, we'd probably have to forgive them. After all, we'd desperately need their talent and would be unable to hold a grudge. But if an Impostor were not doing a decent job of Acting differently, if they were shoddy enough at their task to get themselves caught - well then it's best they be excised.

And so our task for this Episode is to catch an Incompetent Impostor!

If you are an impostor, I suppose your goal is to avoid detection and keep anyone else from linking your Ghost of Actor Past to your Actor Present.

Because this Episode will end with somebody getting unmasked, and if they were unable to keep their dual identities fully separate, they will find they no longer have a Future in this Game.

Here's how it's going to work:

First, we have a Challenge again! I know, I know, it's your very first Challenge and it's sure to be exciting!

It's due in around 24 hours, at 6:30pm Tuesday GMT, which is 2:30pm Tuesday EDT, and 5:30am Wednesday AEDT.

Whoever wins the Challenge will prove themselves too wily to be an Incompetent Impostor. And so they will be safe from Identification, and from elimination this round.

The Challenge will also give us a 'Bottom Two' (who performed the worst), who will become suspects at risk. And they will enter into the Identity Crisis.



The second part of this Episode will involve a Vote between the two players going through the Identity Crisis.

Everyone will have a Vote, including the player who is safe, and the Bottom Two themselves. You'll all have 16 hours after the results announcement to cast these Votes.

And whoever receives the most Votes will need to put their own life on the line, in the finale of the Episode...



Third, the player who received the most Votes in the Identity Crisis will need to Identify an Incompetent Impostor.

They'll do this by naming one Ghost of Actor Past (original rep) and one Actor Present (new rep) who they think are one and the same person. They can name anybody they want, except for the winner of the Challenge. (The guess will be pre-submitted, non-live, and I'll have further instructions for how that works once the Bottom Two are announced.)


If they guess incorrectly, and name two reps who were not played by the same Actor, they will be eliminated from the Game and sent to the Critics' Corner.
This is the risk you'll be trying to avoid by staying out of the Bottom Two in the Challenge, and campaigning not to receive Votes in the Identity Crisis.


But if they guess correctly, and name two reps who were indeed played by the same underlying Actor, the guesser will be spared. And the player they Identified as an Incompetent Impostor will be eliminated instead.


So if you want to avoid getting eliminated this Episode, you will need to get to work on two different fronts: Find a way to avoid becoming the guesser. Or make sure nobody can correctly Identify both of your reps as one and the same.

Communication:

We know that for the Christmas Temps Actors Present, it must seem impossible to fully trust anyone right now, when they could also be anyone else

But I'm afraid that the Old Washouts Ghosts of Actors Past have found away into the BBC offices and into most of our Sets.


There will be no PMs this round.

Instead, we've assigned each of you to three Sets. At each one, you will find either four or five Actors, a mixture of Actors Present and Ghosts of Actors Past.

The Set assignments were produced by a random draw, entering all fourteen names three times each. So it is possible - likely, even - that some Sets will contain both versions of an Imposer. That could be an advantage for them, to better direct the conversation on Set... or it could be a disadvantage, if it leads to them getting associated too closely, and potentially Identified.


There are also two Backstage Areas yet to be filled: the BBC Control Room, and the BBC Reception. Each of these can hold exactly 7 Actors, so every one of you will need to choose one or the other. Once your choice is made, you will be unable to switch. And once one Backstage Area fills to the 7-Actor capacity, everybody else will be forced to choose the second Backstage Area.

To choose and access one of these Backstage Areas, simply pick a Member Group to join: either 'BBC Control Room' or 'BBC Reception'. Of course, you'll need to do this with both of your reps - we recommend that you don't have both of them join a Member Group at the same time though, in case that gets noticed You'll also need to decide whether it's in your best interest to try gaining a pair of eyes in both of the Backstage Area, or whether that might risk making it easier for others to Identify you and match your reps.

Once the Backstage Area are full, we will lock everyone in for good. Those and the other three Sets available to each Actor will be the only places they can communicate, for the entirety of the Episode.

Discussing Identities:

In Episode 10 we demanded that you all do your best to avoid any discussion of who you were, or who you had been. (Hopefully you all followed that very closely, so that you'll be safer now.)

But during Episode 11, you can and should discuss your own Past and Present identities, and everyone else's. You can freely rep claim. You can discuss all rounds of this Game, including the last Episode and all Episodes before that. You can speculate together about which reps might be matched, and strategise around and up to the Identification guess which will end the Episode.

The thing is... you should also, certainly, lie about your own Past and Present identities. You should also use your discussions and speculations to further mislead, because the more certain others can be about matching your identities, the less safe you are. And you should expect everyone else to also be lying and misleading for the same reason! Every mention of other reps or previous rounds, or other Sets - they could all be vital clues, or potential misdirects, or even both.

So everything you say or hear could be a clue, and everyone has good reason to be lying, and there's nowhere to talk with only Past reps around, or where you can be certain you truly know who else is listening... should be a fun couple of days for you all to navigate

(Also, it should go without saying that you're not to discussion any aspect of ID beyond this board. You're looking to match reps from within different parts of this Game; discussion about who from the ORGing community might be playing behind those reps remains a severe breach of the Rules so please make sure you don't go there.)

Playing as Two:

Finally, some advice about how to pull this off Most of it you'll need to figure out for yourself, but I will outline a few pitfalls and make some technical suggestions:

- Before you post anything, double check that you are posting it from the correct account This will be especially important if you find both of your reps sharing the same Set and able to post in the same conversation.

- Proboards does not like it when you switch accounts, especially when you have multiple tabs open from different login sessions. There are two possible ways around this. The first is to use different browsers, or to keep one account logged in with incognito mode. The second, if you're stuck on one browser, is to keep track of your logins/logouts and keep peeking back at the name in the top right corner of the board - and if there's any risk that you've left tabs open, then you should always select all and copy all text before you post it, so that if your account switching has produced an error, you'll be able to go back, refresh and post again without all your effort being lost.

- Remember that you were all encouraged to imitate one another last Episode, and do not assume that even your best rep matching guess is correct. Never forget that the player making the Identification guess at the end of the Episode has every reason to make the guess they feel most confident about, even if it involves an ally.

- The easiest ways to doom yourself this round are to blatantly give yourself away. Make use of the fact that you're on invisible mode, and perhaps try to avoid posting with both accounts at around the same time (even in different places, as other people might also share the Sets you do, without you realising it). Don't infodump from one Set to another without expecting people to speculate about where your information is coming from.











And that's all from me. Back to warding off Set invasions and cutting all the fire alarm wires, between contract negotiations.

The Present actors are prepared, the Past actors are preparing, the stage is beset by both and the Sets are nearly fully staged.

Please enjoy A Christmas Carol? And uoy sselb.