I think the idea of posting anything from the PMs right now is only going to cause a lot of confusion and generate a lot of (most likely, unwarranted) suspicion. I foresee us spending too much time trying to read into what each player posted and seeing what it may or may not mean. It seems like a big distraction. I also think it would be pretty easy for the scum to fake something that can be easily incorporated into a fake claim. I don’t see any advantage for town to do this.
Careful you don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back there, Total Lost! Allow me. To give you a pat, not break your arm. And while “brilliant” may be a bit much, I will certainly say that the idea has merit.
I’m on board with it. Kind of like bread crumbs that you announce. You show your crumb and leave it for everyone to see. If and when it becomes neccessary, you can explain what it means. I don’t really see a down side.
Everyone is going to have to decide how much to post, though. Too much and you might give yourself away as a power role. Too little and you might be labeled scum for trying to hide something.
If the scum have fake PMs, don’t you think that whatever color they chose to post here would be from that fake PM and therefore if they ever posted their fake PM to support their fake claim, it would “match” as it were?
And it does, of course, come with the added potential risk of causing us to mis-lynch a power role who participates, fabricates something to keep from being outed, gets called on it, and doesn’t put up a sufficient defense.
I don’t know if Total’s idea works or not in reality, I shall remain a fence sitter for the time being while I ponder the ramifications…but I like the idea in theory. I like the idea of forcing scum to make their play early and without a lot of time to coordinate.
I am not thrilled about the potential downside. That said, I have spent many a game imploring players to remember that scum are as smart, if not smarter, than they are. Maybe it is time to give town some credit when it comes to being able to hide their own power/vanilla status. I know I could post a snip of my role PM that does not reveal my alignment but would play into a reasonable claim later in the game and not be totally useless.
Here’s a sample of a fake claim the Scum had access to in ED1. It only takes me a minute to see quite a few sentences I could use that seem quite Townie and relatively ambiguous.
I can’t believe we are catching ourselves* in the same conversation as in Lord of the Rings. Look, the claim(share role PM) thing is not a good idea right now and we should save any kind of claim for later.
Story has the game well planned and covered. Stuff the claim stuff away for later in the game, where we may want to actually mass claim.
Well, yourselves in Lord of the Rings. I was in the spoiled discussion slapping my head that players would pursue it so much…with a lot of other spectators saying the same thing!
I agree with Mahaloth. Anyone who thinks a mass claim would work strikes me as being a mafia newb, especially with someone like Storyteller modding.
He’ll have found a way to make it not work as well as people are thinking.
Total Lost, you seem very hard pressed to get any info you can out of people’s PMs. It seems most people are not for it at this time so why continue to press it?
I’m actually not that interested in what this says about Cookies as much as I am interested in what it says about Oy!. I find that usually when somebody states an assumption that I know to be wrong it really sticks out to me. And I’ve found that as scum there can be a strong urge to try and cast that bad assumption as PIS, especially early in the where the scum can be pretty hard-up to find a reason to state some suspicions of players that they know to be innocent.
So I have to admit that I’m kind of wondering if the scum didn’t get their role PMs at the start, and Oy! knows that and that’s why Cookies assumption to the contrary jumped out at him. It’s extremely thin. But I wanted to get that idea out there.
Yeah, I’m not even that much of a fan of it, and it was my own idea. Basically, I was trying to come up with something that might not give the Scum a list of power roles but could pin the Scum down later–trying to mitigate the potential losses of a traditional mass claim. If I were a Vanilla (not saying what I am one way or the other, just dabbling in the potential hypothetical), I’d pick something that sure sounded like I might be a power role, for example. If I were a power role, I’d pick something that sounded bland and vanilla. I have faith that a two-sentence blurb wouldn’t necessarily be painting a Kick Me sign on our power roles’ backs, because nobody who plays this game is stupid, Town or Scum. But I’d rather do what we normally do, which is nothing at all, because the game is more fun if you don’t try to trick it.
So the big thing I noticed in reading the new page of posts since I left work was the exchange between Idle and Mahaloth, the latter referring to the former’s vote for me as a “placeholder,” and the former expressing confusion about what he said that gave that impression. Well, I don’t want to put words in Mahaloth’s mouth, especially since he didn’t follow up, but here’s what led me to believe the vote was a placeholder:
And as for your repeated insistence that you remembered more than one person saying what I said, well, I said the exact same thing to defend myself when I did it, so forgive me if your protests ring hollow to me. I still can’t remember what game it was, so I can’t remember if I was Scum, but either way I’d been skimming and totally smudged someone. And that game had been going on a LOT longer than this one, and had more pages for me to go digging through to figure out that I was creating a Group Of One.
From storyteller’s original post concerning the Role PMs:
<bolding mine>
He says there that the actual roles will be distributed after the Scum picks their final player. I think that’s right in line with what Oy! is saying. I’m not sure I share his suspicion of Cookies, but I don’t think Oy! is giving away anything here; just reminding the rest of us that everything we say “can and will be used against us”
FWIW, any pings I may have gotten from Oy! have settled down into null tells. The only thing from that whole exchange that still might niggle at me is Wanderer’s follow up to Oy! in post 233. It struck me as both mildly encouraging and mildly wrong in a different way than others were apparently interpreting what I had said.
Wanderer seemed to hone in on my use of ‘some’ as being possible PIS in post 210, whereas others seemed to take issue regarding my use of ‘role’ in 137.
The different “role” interpretations at least makes sense to me.
Hmm. Cookie’s post made me go back and read Wanderer’s at 233. Having watch** Oy** watch LOTR mafia, I know he’s a new player and a bit uneven experienced in the lingo of mafia. So, while I disagreed with Oy’s worry about Cookie, I didn’t read anything negative about Oy from it. Taking a second look, I’m actually a little worried by Wanderer’s apparent encouraging of Oy. Here’s his post in full
If you were going to come in and say it wasn’t relevant, then it seems odd to end with “could be suspicious.” The post seems to say “well, i don’t find him suspicious, or maybe i do, but you should run with it.” Feeds the fire a little without fingerprints.
Pursuing a mild smudging on Day 1 worked well for me in LOTR and Day 1 cases, especially early ones, are thin, so I’m going to:
