The one thing I don’t like about recruitment is that it can happen at the very end. Which means that there is just about no way for the townies to figure out who the recruit might be and are pretty much shooting in the dark.
One way around this would be to give the recruitment power to just one scum–the Godfather, or Alpha Wolf, or whatver. If the head scum gets lynched, the recruitment is lost too. This puts a lot more pressure on the scum to recruit earlier. And an early recruitment is a lot less powerful than a late recruitment, since the early recruit will now start leaving a scum paper trail, and also has to survive more day lynches.
Okay: assume a mason recruit and a non-mason kill last night. That leaves
2 masons
1 mason-mafia
2 townies
The day lynch is controlled by masons: 2 masons + 1 mason-mafia = 3 to 2 majority. It doesn’t matter if the town suspects anything because they are **powerless **to stop it.
Then at night the mason-mafia kills the other townie, leaving
2 masons
1 mason-mafia
The mason-mafia roleclaims, and gets lynched. Mason win.
There is nothing town can do to stop this course of action.
There is nothing mafia-mafia can do either since they are all dead.
Oh, an perhaps tie the recruitment to a particular player so that there is some expediency in using it and not waiting until the endgame for the recruitment. We had some good discussion in this thread about the recruitment and possible pitfalls that might be avoided. Letting the recruitment ‘float’ pretty much establishes a de facto unkillable mafia.
Funny you should say that… that’s exactly how I intend to do it, plus having more un-recruitable roles AND having a recruit blocker. So then if the scum do it too early, they have a high risk of failing. If they wait to long, they have a risk of losing it, so they have to find a good time around the middle to do it when they have an idea of what the roles are and who might be getting blocked.
Here the thing, though. If that were the case, you’d have two paranoid townies ready to lynch a mason, and two masons pretty sure there’s one among them, but if that’s the case then, why should they lynch a townie when they KNOW they’re not going to get scum?
Plus, like I said, if the recruit is mafia, and get’s it to a point where he’s going to win either way, I would be very displeased to see the game come down to a scum claim and a lynch. He’ll win either way, whether he claims or not, and he’s already earned it by pulling off a successful night kill and anti-town lynch, so why not make the masons earn it, or the mafia earn it by seeing if they did a good job recruiting?
I dunno, a “hey, I’m mason, and I was recruited… lynch me!” just seems so anti-climatic. If I were to allow masons to be recruited, I’d set it so they’d be mod-killed immediately if they did that just because I think it’s such poor form.
As you can see, I agree in general; but I would put the recruitment power on someone who is not immune from cop detection. This puts a bit more pressure to use the recruitment early, especially if recruitment power itself is cop detectable.
Mostly, I agree with you. I think a mason recruitment should have completely changed the player’s alignment and win condition to mafia. Then we would not have the conflict of interest we are discussing now. No need to mod-kill (which itself probably should only be used very sparingly), just change the win condition and there is no motivation for masons and mason-mafia to collude.
However, as the rules are stated, the course of action I outlined is the optimal strategy for both mason and mason-mafia. I understand your distaste with collusion and the bizarre situation where masons lynching townies becomes the optimal strategy, but that’s just the way the game worked out. I don’t think Gadarene envisioned such a possibility. The incredible play/luck of the masons in not getting outed nor night killed was so unlikely! And it apparently didn’t work out that way anyway as it looks like the mafia recruited a non-mason.
Oh, I should also add: Blaster Master, Please don’t include recruitment in your game. Imagine if tirial was the one recruited. He(she?) spent so much time and effort hunting down scum. How pissed would he be to put all that effort into winning the game for town only to lose as mafia because of recruitment? That would suck. At least, I wouldn’t like it very much. Although, if recruitment happens early, this effect is less distasteful.
Yeah, that’s another meta-game reason that late recruitment sucks. Especially if town is winning, and you’ve put in tons of effort for the town win, only now to find yourself on the losing side
That’s a good idea. I have a role that would be perfect for. One of the scum roles I’m toying with is one where he knows he’s scum, but doesn’t know he’s this special role in which the one responsible for his death (chosen among all who voted to lynch him at random, possibly including other scum). The idea was to make scum think twice about jumping on bandwagons for their own kind, possibly resulting in a few more scum tells.
However, putting the recruitment power of him as well, or in place of that other power, instead of on the GF-equivalent would make the scum even more paranoid about using the power early by fear of losing it because they wouldn’t know when. It would work just as well with the theme as well. Hmm…
Well, one way to address that might be to put a hard limit on when the recruit could happen (hey, it IS possible that the role with the recruit power could live to very near the end). Or to possibly allow the recruit, if the recruit isn’t blocked, to choose between being recruited, or dying and reamining town-aligned.
This thread has been interesting. I can’t wait to find out what was going on behind the scenes though the whole game.
Also, I was pretty sure I gave away my Masonry at a few points, but it wasn’t until after the fact. I was a first-timer, so I had no idea what I could get away with. Also, I tried very hard to play as if I were vanilla town, to avoid tells. Therefore, when I was posting, I never tried to avoid talking about Masons. I figured that going ahead and being a little bit bold was a good strategy. We’ve all had different strategies, we Masons. I’m really interested to see how they handle this. I was hoping we’d all survive the night (don’t know if tirial would have helped or not…she’s sketching me out lately) and could mass role-claim. Or that we’d have an “inside man” who would turn on the Mafia and help us.
In this thread, I’ve seen Gadarene mention the general “tone” of town vs. Mafia several times. I don’t know that I noticed it in anyone else, but I tried very hard to be genuine and transparent throughout, always saying what was on my mind. Is this what you were talking about, Gad? Looking back, I almost feel like you were talking about me. But then again, I feel like I’ve been a cipher in this game. My name has barely come up in this thread, and sometimes it was almost like I didn’t exist in the game. Ah, well, good for the Masons, right?
Well, since it doesn’t matter now, I had a strong feeling you were a mason and that most of the rest of the town knew you were a mason. Either way, I think you did a good job because I never saw any significant doubt from anyone that you were not pro-town after the first day or two. OTOH, that could also mean that you didn’t put your neck out on the line enough. I’ve never played a mason, but it would seem to me that because you have the safety net of being able to claim mason to avoid a lynch, one could use that to his advantage to try to trap scum. Then again, if not for the recruit, the lay-low method of play you all used here, it would have all but guaranteed a victory.
Still, that there’s only five people remaining. I’m interested to see how the last two masons play. Will they wait for the town to discuss the likelihood of the recruit being a mason before claiming, or will they claim, each hoping the other wasn’t the recruit, and try to take control, being fairly confident that the recruit is not a mason. IMO, I think the mason play today will pretty much make or break the game for the town. If the recruit isn’t lynched today, the game swings back in the mafia’s favor.
I’m baffled by how different DiggitCamara’s logic operates from my own. I just don’t see how he can think that mafia would recruit earlier than they needed to. To me, it seems pretty obvious that mafia would recruit when down to one, and the no kill night evidence supports that. Mafia choosing no kill is a really bad move for them, especially on the night that Diggit proposes because that no kill night gave the town an extra lynch before losing.
Also, I don’t understand his fixation on Blaster Master’s last post (“Looks like we’re gonna lose”.) He seems to think its a truthful declaration about the state of the game and the state of the mafia. I think it is simply an effort to imply that lynching him will lose the game for the town, and nothing more.
On Masons: As a non-player I didn’t really pay attention to masons except for some comments that were then pointed out to me to be too obviously mason-oriented to be really a statement by a mason. So dead players, how do you identify a mason?
Yeah, I wonder, though–if it was obvious I was a Mason, why didn’t you recruit me? I think recruiting a Mason at an earlier stage (ie when it didn’t look like a Mason win had a chance of happening) would have been the way to go. I mean, it effectively destroys the only knowledge anyone in the town has, and if that Mason can lay low until the end, and ruin everything. If one of the Masons is the recruit (terribly unlikely, I think, but possible), then he or she could almost secure a Mafia win if he or she thinks it’s more likely than a Mason win.
I bet you were cracking up when I posted my first long post about you being scum-tastic and then another about how NO ONE was paying attention to it. That was pretty frustrating. All in all, I posted about as much as I possibly could, but I felt like I had a very hard time getting noticed. I can’t keep up with some of the very prolific posters. Starting the spreadsheet took some time, but updating it took about five minutes a day, if that. I think my difficulty in keeping up influenced my posting style a lot. I tried to say more outrageous stuff later in the game, to “stick my neck out” a little more. I didn’t think it would be noticed as much as it was, apparently, so I showed my hand a little too much.
So here’s my big question: is it a good thing to come out of the box being so pro-town? I kept feeling like I would be nightkilled simply because I was so unlynchable, but it never happened. (Maybe because I kept voting for townies?) And then I tried acting a little more sketchy, toward the end, but it didn’t do me any good.
Think there is a somewhat legitimate fear that being vociferous will get a player lynched or night killed, so i understand Millit’s decision to lay low. What really should happen is no one should lay low and everyone should be prolific. That way the power roles still have cover.
Well, there’s a couple of people that have seemingly never been targeted, have never been serious contenders for lynching. I suspect those people are the masons. And this is because the masons never accuse each other. And since most of the lynch votes in this game (up until about the time I got lynched) were done by very low majorities, a simple block of masons voting against a non-mason is enough to protect any mason without being obvious. And they can do this without much fear, because if someone calls them on it they can just role-claim and therefore be protected.
Actually, he is right, I posted my thought process to the mafia board about how to handle that night, and it was actually a lot more complicated than it may have seemed. I’m going to keep it veiled in case anyone is reading, but he is correct.
At that point, as far as the town is concerned, there were two possibilies: tirial was recruited at some point during the no-kill nights, and the recruit was unused.
If it’s the first, that leaves 2 scum, 2 town, 3 mason, which means it requires 3 non-scum deaths to win. Further, given that the doctor was recruited, we’d be 100% sure the night kills would go through. Thus, we could afford 1 scum lynch, but it would be balanced out by a night kill, so I’ll ignore that to make it simpler. That means if we kill that night, get a townie lynch, and another night kill, we go INTO the last day with a tie. Gadarene specifically said (when I asked him) that the game only ends if the town does not have a majority at the end of the day. IOW, killing that night would still mean a second townie lynch. Thus, a non-kill would obfuscate when the recruit took place, hopefully put it off of tirial, and we’d still win at the same time.
If it’s the other way… well, obviously, the recruit took place then. But that’s why I spent so much time talking about the recruit, because obviously there’s only two cases that could be true about WHEN the recruit happened. Funny thing is, BOTH of them are using fabricated evidence to support their points.
I’ll explain why you weren’t recruited, at least from my perspective. Considering that I was fairly sure you were a mason, I recommended AGAINST your recruitment based on that. I don’t think I got all my thoughts out in the mafia forum, but I thought that, depending on how the game played out, if the town decided that it was a mason that was recruited, you’d be the first to get lynched because you seemed to have less suspicion than anyone else. I figured that if a mason should be recruited, it should be the one the town would least likely suspect would be recruited.
If it makes you feel better, when you started catching on to what I was doing much earlier than anyone else, it had me a bit worried. Fortuneately, there was enough noise around other people at the time to keep it down. That’s one of the things though about this game. It can be hard to get noticed if you’re not completely over involved in the game. Even in this one, where I felt like I was a fairly prominent player earlier on, as my time got more involved in other happenings in life, I lost a lot of my influence which made it more and more difficult to dispell my suspicion. OTOH, some loud people just draw more and more suspicion as time goes on. Then again, this was only my second game, so… who knows?
Yes and no. I think it’s important to play how you want to play, and for everyone to have their own style. I see a lot of similarities between this game and various poker strategies. Some players are tight, some players are loose, some players are loud, some players are friendly, some players are mathematical, some are analytical, some play on gut and reads, etc. If everyone was a lurker, the game would be boring. If everyone was loud and aggressive, it would be frustrating, if not impossible, to follow the game. If everyone were mathematical, we’d miss all the obvious analytical tells… etc.
I think the most important point is to pick your style and be consistent. For instance, if you start out loud and aggressive, if you change, you draw suspicion, which is what happened to me. While your votes and points may have been all over the place, at least from my perspective, your style was fairly consistent, which I imagine is why no one really suspected you enough to even TRY to build a case.
This is basically where everything goes to pot. If the win conditions are not well understood by everyone, then different conclusions are bound to occur. I was under the impression that if mafia ever reached 50%, they win, which greatly changes the impact of a no kill on the night in question.
Interesting. Under the ‘can only win at the end of a day’ rule, the added benefit of no kill from the mafia perspective is that it maximizes the number of town alive to better hide the scum without changing the number of chances for the town.
Is this rule typical? It seems out of sync with the other games and needlessly confusing.
