Lord of the Rings Mafia

[Mahaloth]

@Suburban_Plankton

Mahaloth: are you really going to make us go through another whole week of this conversation?

I will not make anyone do anything other than follow the rules.

[special_ed]

@Suburban_Plankton

@special_ed

If every Vanilla shook my hand we’d have a potentially huge pool of confirmed Town who couldn’t be lynched!

That would be fantastic. Yes, the Scum could kill off each and every one of our power roles, and that would be OK. Let me demonstrate with a smaller example.

Let’s say 16 people, 4 Scum, 5 power roles, and 7 Vanilla.

[…]

Confirming players is good. Very good. The Scum have to, at some point Night Kill them

OK, I see your point, and it’s a pretty good one. But lets say 23 people, an unknown number of scum, and an unknown number of power roles. Do the numbers still add up in our favor?

I’m not saying they don’t, but since we don’t know any of the actual numbers involved, it’s not quite as cut and dry as your example.
I don’t necessarily think special ed’s motives are anything other than what he claims, but I do question the validity of handshaking, for reasons already stated by others. I don’t think we’re getting any useful information from them, and at this point it’s very difficult to tell 'unhelpful information ’ from ‘intentional misinformation’. I’d lean towards ‘no information’ being the best alternative at this point.

Mahaloth: are you really going to make us go through another whole week of this conversation?

Confirming Vanilla Town is always good. Very good. They can never be mislynched. (OK, should never)

Scum can kill in the unknown pool hoping to hit a power role, but they run the risk of leaving confirmed Town alive at EndGame which is very bad for them.

That said, we don’t have any confirmed players.

[Pleonast]

@special_ed

This analysis also fails to take into consideration possible recruitment and/or 3rd party players.

Well, I did say I was not including power roles. I stand by my statement that 5 scum is the most reasonable assumption about our opposition until we get more information.

And I already addressed recruitment in a previous post. Summary: it’s very similar to a godfather in terms of lynching.

@Mahaloth

@Suburban_Plankton

Mahaloth: are you really going to make us go through another whole week of this conversation?

I will not make anyone do anything other than follow the rules.

Thank you! Mod intervention into gameplay should be as close to non-existent as possible.

[Gadarene]

@Pleonast

@Gadarene

I’d like to get a little more explanation from Pleonast about why he thought that claiming a power role right off the bat was a good idea.

I’ve already answered that question in this thread. I have nothing further to say about it. I don’t want to fill this thread with debate on that point.

The explanation Pleo refers to is in post #194, and reads as follows:

@Pleonast

I’m not going to the scum’s homework for them. The point of my claim is to make scum do work. The town should ignore it, because it cannot be confirmed. The scum could ignore it too, but may find it hard to do so.

I don’t think this is a convincing or satisfactory explanation, but if you choose not to expand on it, then I suppose that’s your prerogative.

Seems to me that a claim like this hurts town far more than it hurts scum, whether or not it’s true.

(Plus, how is it different from a magic bag, if – having just finished reading the Mazalan game – my understanding of that term is accurate?)

[special_ed]

@Pleonast

And I already addressed recruitment in a previous post. Summary: it’s very similar to a godfather in terms of lynching.

You’re assuming a one time Town to Scum recruitment. There is a potential for other recruitment. Town to 3rd party, 3rd party to Scum, 3rd party to Town, Town to Masonry. All very dissimilar to having a godfather in the situation where a detective has investigated some people as Town

[Nanook_of_the_North_Shore]

I think that was more of a request to move the end of Day up. Which I kinda agree with, too long a Day saps interest in the game.

One thing to add to the whole handshaking nonsense, which wasn’t really made clear by Ed’s little breakdown. If at any point the number of confirmed Town is greater than the number of scum+unconfirmed, the game is over Town wins barring extra kills/recruitment types. That’s the power of confirmed Town. I remember my first ever game. At end game, there was 3 confirmed Town, 2 scum and me, unconfirmed Town. I committed suicicde by mod, which guaranteed Town would win.

All that said, the handshaking here didn’t accomplish that. Based on previous Maha games, you have to assume the scum have false cover roles. That alone means handshaking won’t work, though when you add in story’s penchant for subtle variations to different Town members, then it’s really worthless.

Pleo loves claiming weird things on Day 1. There was a recent game where he did that, got voted for it, refused to full claim, and got lynched. He was the Doc maybe? I forget the specifics, but he was what he soft claimed to be. The point is, the claim itself tells us nothing about him. And no amount of asking will make him do more than he already has.

[Gadarene]

@Nanook_of_the_North_Shore

Pleo loves claiming weird things on Day 1. There was a recent game where he did that, got voted for it, refused to full claim, and got lynched. He was the Doc maybe? I forget the specifics, but he was what he soft claimed to be. The point is, the claim itself tells us nothing about him. And no amount of asking will make him do more than he already has.

Which makes it a great strategy if he’s scum this time around, then. Isn’t the point of discouraging vague and nonfalsifiable power claims that scum can easily hide behind them to gain quasi-confirmed town status, secure that townspeople would rather be safe than sorry this early on to avoid lynching a power role?

[Gadarene]

NETA: And obviously I’m not saying Pleo is scum,* since we have so little information about anyone at this stage, and obviously you all have far more experience playing with him and his tactics than I do. But his reasons for claiming, as stated, seem kinda illogical and ridiculous to me…so if anyone would like to take a crack at explaining to me, using small words, why such a claim would ever benefit town at this stage of the game, be my guest.

Look: if he is a town power role, he’s just given scum valuable information and planted a big ol’ target on his back without doing anything to appreciably help town. If he’s not a town power role, he’s lying, and I’m given to understand that lying is normally, y’know, a bad thing. Hence my confusion about why people seem to be treating it fairly blithely.

*Perfectly happy to FOS, though.

[Pleonast]

@special_ed

You’re assuming a one time Town to Scum recruitment.

No, not assuming only one.

As for the rest, yeah, I didn’t address every possible recruitment scenario, not did I claim to. In fact, I explicitly said I wasn’t considering power roles, which every other type you mentioned involves.

Also, townie to Mason is not recruitment, as there’s no change in victory condition.

[Hoopy_Frood]

@special_ed

@Pleonast

We need an estimate of the number of scum. With 23 players, the mislynch number* as a function the number of scum is:

Town Scum Mislynches
 20    3    8.5
 19    4    7.5
 18    5    6.5
 17    6    5.5
 16    7    4.5

Without knowledge about power roles on either side, I’d say there’d be 5 scum. More than that means too many scum would have to be lynched for the number of available mislynches. Fewer than that would make it too easy.

Power roles, of course, change the balance. But until we get more information on those, I will assume we’re working against 5 scum.

*For those new to the game, the mislynch number is the number of times we can lynch townies without losing the game. It assumes that the only means of death are the town lynch during the Day and the scum kill at Night. Deaths by other means will change the mislynch number.

This analysis also fails to take into consideration possible recruitment and/or 3rd party players.

5 is still a reasonable expectation of the scum numbers regardless of power roles and 3rd parties.

With 6, you will likely have significant power roles on the town side, and unlikely to have an SK roaming around. The advantage to scum is too high otherwise. SK are a pro-scum mechanic–contrary to people who claim that they are neutral because a scum death by them hurts the scum team worse than a town death hurts town. These people forget that SK’s typically reduce the mislynch count, because even a ratio of 1/3 scum to 2/3 town (a very overpowered scum team), the odds are pretty much that town will lose a mislynch every 6 days. As the beginning ratio of scum decreases from that 1/3, the effective mislynch amount provided by the SK increases. This doesn’t even take into consideration the loss of information early deaths can cause. And the SK isn’t going to do town any informational favors like vig would.

With only 4 scum, expect an SK to be present, and/or scum to have bonus kills.

With 5 scum, anything’s pretty much possible in the setup. Though, assuming we’re not in an all-power game, the chances of a lot of crazy roles (like what the Super Smash Borthers or Batman games had) coming out are unlikely. But in a game with this many people, there are no doubt some 3rd parties.

[Hoopy_Frood]

NETA: Of course, none of this takes into consideration recruitment. But since recruitment can be accomplished in all sorts of ways, there’s really no way to analyze it’s effect on setup until one can confirm both its existence and some semblance of the mechanics behind it.

[Chronos]

Quoth Suburban Plankton:

OK, I see your point [about confirming Town], and it’s a pretty good one. But lets say 23 people, an unknown number of scum, and an unknown number of power roles. Do the numbers still add up in our favor?

We don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s probably reasonable to assume that there’s a large chunk of vanilla Town, plausibly as much as half the total number of players. Plus some of the power roles might be able to confirm themselves or others by the nature of their powers: Add them to the pool, too. Plus even if the actually confirmed don’t strictly outnumber everyone else combined, if the numbers are close, that’s still a huge advantage for Town.

But now, on to new business:

First off, I think that, in my initial discussion with special ed, I inadvertently gave out enough information for Scum to deduce that I’m nonvanilla. Since that cat’s out of the bag anyway, I might as well tell more. So far as I can tell, my power consists entirely of the fact that I started the game with a particular piece of information. I do not believe that it would be in Town’s best interest to make this piece of information public at this time, but I will want to be able to prove later that I had this piece of information on Day 1 (i.e., before any Night powers could have been used). So what I’m going to do is take an md5 hash of my information. The message hash, as returned by that website, is
093220ee6df5628413c40e71e086d5f0
When it becomes appropriate for me to reveal the information publicly, I’ll post the exact string I used to get that hash, and everyone can confirm that it agrees. The fact that I had this information at the start of the game will, I think, be evidence (though not proof) of my Towniness.

Next order of business: The handshaking. I myself did not handshake or confirm anyone else’s because I was working under the assumption (which I think has since been confirmed) that special ed’s handshake applied only to vanillas. I did, however, take note of the handshakes everyone else posted. I did this independently of Telcontar and then cross-checked with his, to decrease the chance of overlooking one (plus there’s been several since his summary). Here’s the sum total of what I found (spoilered for space):116 special ed: Last section: 7 a’s and 8 t’s. no x’s
130 Red Skeezix: 6l 3caps with a CRC-16 of 1EC3
131 Chronos: You win when all threats to the Alliance of Light have been destroyed.
174 Wanderers: Role PM meets ed’s handshake, also 6Ys
176 Gadarene: has same win condition
180 Gadarene: only counts 5 Ys, asks Wanderers for Us and Cs
181 Wanderers: confirms 6 Ys, 2 Us, 2 Cs
184 Meeko: has 11 Os in last two lines, 12 Os in last three
199 Hoopy Frood: has 6 Ys in entire PM, no numbers, color of role and wincon inconsistent
206 Telcontar: has sentence with words “Sauron and his minions”, that sentence 4 As 3 Us 2 Hs, margin of error
208 Gadarene: Different counts for all of Telcontar’s letters
213 Telcontar: Corrects to 5 As and 3 Hs
225 special ed: Confirms Wanderers’ 6 Ys
231 special ed: Finds all of Telcontar’s original numbers wrong
232 special ed: Also disagrees with Telcontar’s corrected numbers
256 Hoopy Frood: PM mentions Sauron thrice, twice as "Sauron and his minions
266 Gadarene’s PM contains only one mention of Sauron
280 LPN’s PM also mentions Sauron thrice
310 USCDiver: Role PM agrees with all handshakes summarized by Telcontar
311 USCDiver: Clarifies that agrees with ones he could figure out
318 peeker: 6 periods in PM
Some observations from this:
First, we had more people posting handshakes than people confirming the handshakes of others. These things are useless if they’re not checked.
Second, we have enough disagreements that it looks like there are multiple variants of the vanilla PM, but at the same time, Wanderers and special ed seem to agree, so either there’s not a separate PM for every vanilla (reasonable; this is a pretty big game and it’d get tiring to type up enough distinct ones) or at least one of those two is lying.
Third, though… USCDiver said that his PM agrees with all of the handshakes posted, or at least with all of the ones he understood (without listing which ones those were, which makes that not very useful. If there are multiple different versions, he can’t have agreed with all of them. For this reason, I’m strongly suspicious of USCDiver, though I can’t shake the feeling that I’m overlooking some obvious explanation, so I’m not voting for that yet.

Third, though: I really don’t like Suburban Plankton’s post 187. Just some meaningless fluff, and then complaining about there never being anything to talk about on Day 1. This, when the handshaking discussion was already going full steam ahead, there was the whole conversation about anti-Town vs. pro-Scum, and we’d also had an anemic bit of discussion on whether or not to mass-claim. In fact, he (he is a he, right?) had already noted how verbose we were being. But he doesn’t weigh in on any of that, instead just complaining about having nothing to talk about. Compare all his other posts: In the seven posts he’s made since PMs were handed out, only the two this morning have had any game substance at all to them (the rest being just fluff of various sorts). He’s been the very model of non-participation.

Vote Suburban Plankton

[Gadarene]

Quick lurker review (and I recognize that the interminable Night Zero makes it hard for me to put into perspective the fact that we’ve only barely begun Day One):

By my count and skim of the thread, so far there are two players we haven’t heard anything from, Drain Bead and Cucuy.

MHaye has only posted once, but he did say in that post (#155) that he wouldn’t be able to post for a couple of days due to RL stuff. We’ve also had only one post from Astral Rejection (#312).

A few other posters (Natlaw, Little Plastic Ninja, USCDiver, Chipacabra, Oredigger, and Nanook) have posted a handful of times with varying levels of substantivity.

I don’t know if substantivity is a word.

The rest of us have been yakking incessantly.

[Suburban_Plankton]

@Nanook_of_the_North_Shore

I think that was more of a request to move the end of Day up. Which I kinda agree with, too long a Day saps interest in the game.

Yes, it was a plea to shorten the length of this day. Which may simply be selfish on my part, but I fear I will go batshit crazy if I have to read another week’s worth of conversation about handshakes etc.

Now if we manage to come up with something useful to talk about, that’s another story. I just feel like at this stage in the game we don’t have anything to go on. There’s no voting record, no roles have been exposed, we have no way of knowing anything with a reasonable amount of certainty. I’d just like to get things moving along.

Of course, I may be alone in these feelings, and if so that sucks for me…

And to add something of some value to the conversation:

At this point, I’m leaning toward special ed being town. I still have a ‘feeling’ about the way he presented the whole handshake thing, but he seems to have generated way too much controversy for him to be scum. Unless that’s exactly what he *wants *me to think…

**peekercpa **talks a lot. A LOT. And seems to go back and forth between useful comments and complete fluff. I don’t know hoe I feel about that yet, except that I’d have a much easier tome parsing through this thread if he were killed

I’m not terribly concerned one way or another about Pleonast’s role claim. It was so early on that it may be legitimate, he may be scum, or he may be vanilla and trying to throw people off, and there’s no way of telling which. I’ll reserve any judgement on that for later.

I have no opinion at all on most of the players, because not enough has been said to form one.

[Pleonast]

@Red_Skeezix

@Pleonast

From a theory point of view, in the future, there are much better ways to handshake with a shared secret then the letter counting method used so far. That method reveals too much information. Instead, use a hash of the “signed” secret. For example, let’s say my victory condition isYou win all scum are dead.I append my username to that and compute a hash.You win all scum are dead.PleonastThe CRC32 of that is df2216d2. This method allows anyone with the same victory condition to confirm mine is the same, while making it difficult for a player with a different condition to forge a fake hash.

[oog] I hadn’t thought of salting the hash/checksum. That is a good idea. [/oog]

Missed this earlier.

Yep, the salting prevents “me too” claims because everyone (even those with the same shared secret) will have a different hash to report. It doesn’t prevent reverse engineering of the secret is guessable, but it does prevent trivially easy forgeries. And it doesn’t reveal partial information (like the letter counts do) that can be used to eventually assemble (or ease guessing) the secret.

[Mahaloth]

I know Day One is long, but a Sat-Thursday Day and a Thurs-Sat. Night is a schedule that I think works best(people play from work). I started the Day so we didn’t all just sit around with everyone confirmed waiting for the Day to start(would have been dull).

Nice, long Day for everyone to decide what to do.
Ahem, vote count:

Cucuy(1): Peeker

SuburbanPlankton(1): Chronos

[Hoopy_Frood]

@Gadarene

@Nanook_of_the_North_Shore

Pleo loves claiming weird things on Day 1. There was a recent game where he did that, got voted for it, refused to full claim, and got lynched. He was the Doc maybe? I forget the specifics, but he was what he soft claimed to be. The point is, the claim itself tells us nothing about him. And no amount of asking will make him do more than he already has.

Which makes it a great strategy if he’s scum this time around, then. Isn’t the point of discouraging vague and nonfalsifiable power claims that scum can easily hide behind them to gain quasi-confirmed town status, secure that townspeople would rather be safe than sorry this early on to avoid lynching a power role?

How does it make it a grand strategy if he’s scum? He already told town to ignore the claim–that he’s just throwing WIFOM out there for scum. There’s no reason for us to believe one way or the other. So I’m doing just that, ignoring the statement itself. You’re reading too much into it. For Pleo, this is pretty much a null tell of both power-role and alignment.

@Gadarene

NETA: And obviously I’m not saying Pleo is scum,* since we have so little information about anyone at this stage, and obviously you all have far more experience playing with him and his tactics than I do. But his reasons for claiming, as stated, seem kinda illogical and ridiculous to me…so if anyone would like to take a crack at explaining to me, using small words, why such a claim would ever benefit town at this stage of the game, be my guest.

I don’t think anyone but Pleo truly understands what he hopes his side will gain from it. And he’s stated he’s not saying anymore about it. I don’t understand the rationale, and I’ve seen him do it in multiple games I’ve observed him play in. And, IIRC, he was town in all of those. (On a side note, I think this is the first game I’ve ever played with him.)

Look: if he is a town power role, he’s just given scum valuable information and planted a big ol’ target on his back without doing anything to appreciably help town.

Since he does this all the time, I don’t think he’s told scum anything.

If he’s not a town power role, he’s lying, and I’m given to understand that lying is normally, y’know, a bad thing. Hence my confusion about why people seem to be treating it fairly blithely.

We’re used to it. It’s Pleo. It’s what he does. It’s not like he’s really lying to town in any way regardless. A protective role would be rather dumb to protect him at this point, particularly if they can self-protect, so it’s not as if he’s trying to distract our power roles in any effective manner. Town on the whole would be dumb to view this soft-claim as a reason not to lynch him should we decide at some point in the game to lynch him.

Besides, he told us to ingore it, so town should do just that and let scum figure out what they want to do with it.

[Gadarene]

Thanks for that analysis, Chronos. In the interests of precision, I’ll note that your summary of my post #266 isn’t quite accurate: my role PM only says “Sauron and his minions” once; I didn’t say anything one way or the other about how many times it mentioned “Sauron.” I don’t see any harm at this point in saying that Sauron is mentioned twice, once in the phrase “Sauron and his minions” and once independently. So, still different from Hoopy’s, but not by as much as your summary suggests.

(Also, that’s a unique and potentially worthwhile use of a magic bag with some fun implications for the game as a whole, so I’m looking forward to seeing what it brings.)

[Suburban_Plankton]

@Chronos

USCDiver said that his PM agrees with all of the handshakes posted, or at least with all of the ones he understood (without listing which ones those were, which makes that not very useful. If there are multiple different versions, he can’t have agreed with all of them. For this reason, I’m strongly suspicious of USCDiver, though I can’t shake the feeling that I’m overlooking some obvious explanation, so I’m not voting for that yet.

That pinged my radar at first, too. But when I went back and looked at the post her was referring to, I couldn’t find any inconsistencies, so that assuaged my suspicions a bit.

[Gadarene]

NETA: The logic still doesn’t click for me, but I’ve got some RL work to attend to, so I’ll accept your characterization of it as a null tell at this point and keep it rolling around in the back of my head.