Lord of the Rings Mafia

[peekercpa]

@Hoopy_Frood

@Chipacabra

Oh, I do have one more thought. Self-preservation is not a townie virtue!

Yes it is.

You know you’re town. Therefore, you know if you are lynched town will get a mislynch. Granted, you run the risk of exposing a power role, but you could also nail a scum. Now there are situational exceptions, as there are for almost any scenario in mafia one could come up with, but as a general rule, saving yourself from dying if you’re town is a great thing to do, unless you are intentionally screwing over a power role to do so.

Self preservation is a null tell.

i disagree hoopy. i think as vanilla your job is to suss out as much information as you can. and if you die trying then that is otay. especially if scum waste a NK on you. that gives the big boys/girls (dicks and what not) time to make some hay. and i have said it before and will say it again, i play this for a win. and self preservation is not a win in most cases. if i can advance my team’s cause at the expense of my own preservation then i take that path every time.

[Chronos]

Quoth Suburban Plankton:

So are you saying that I said it on purpose? What motivation could I have for that?

You said it; you tell me. Are you trying to argue now that it was a serial killer slip?

And I knew I remembered seeing the whole MHaye thing come up before (him inventing a name for the Scum, and someone calling him on it), and I just found it: 'Twas in Random Mafia, and I asked him about it two posts later. So this is consistent for him, though I don’t remember what his alignment was (and it’s hard to check, since he was mod-killed without reveal).

[Pleonast]

@peekercpa

i disagree hoopy. i think as vanilla your job is to suss out as much information as you can. and if you die trying then that is otay. especially if scum waste a NK on you. that gives the big boys/girls (dicks and what not) time to make some hay. and i have said it before and will say it again, i play this for a win. and self preservation is not a win in most cases. if i can advance my team’s cause at the expense of my own preservation then i take that path every time.

I agree with peeker.

[peekercpa]

and that is where i have a little bit of difficulty with ed. i understand what he was trying to accomplish if he is vt. but that is not a given. and to some extent it is also self defeating in that even if he is vt then all he does is narrow down the pool where scum will most likely fire. i mean certainly if scum take out too many unconfirmed then they have nowhere to go but early on i think it a dangerous ploy. i think this is why he as always seemed to espouse non necessary vt claims early on as poor play. first they are basically useless to uninformed townies, second if you are lying you are typically going to get lynched as a matter of policy (i know i said i was niller but i was kidding - trust me this time) and third scum will typically look elsewhere to go hunting. and if scum were provided a vt pm then the whole handshake business doesn’t do anything except blind folks that scum could be hiding in the “confirmed” vt pool.

which by the way would suck badly.

[special_ed]

@peekercpa

now who is it in past games that has basically hammered anyone for unprovoked vanilla claims? care to remind me ed?

I was outed as a Vanilla by my error, very different from an unprovoked claim.

[special_ed]

@Telcontar

@special_ed

OK, let me put to rest this all Vanilla Role PMs may not be the same.

As I’m an outed Vanilla Town, here is my role PM. It’s useless for handshaking at this point.

If any other Vanilla is up for lynch, please before dying tell us if your PM is identical to mine aside from the role Name, which I’ve deleted.

Why is this helpful?

It’s information that is potentially useful if other Vanillas point out the unity of our Role PM before their death. Some people were commenting on the variety of Vanilla Role PMs, and I’m distrustful them.

[special_ed]

@Suburban_Plankton

@Telcontar

Why is this helpful?

I’d like to add, where exactly were you ‘outed’ as Vanilla Town? Apparently I missed that.

In the game thread. You should try reading it. It contains useful information

[special_ed]

@Suburban_Plankton

@GuiriEnEspana

Special Ed has to be either VT or scum (or 3rd party…) with access to a VT PM in order to make an attempt at handshaking with other VTs. And anyone who said their last section matched Special Ed’s last section had to have the same “You have no other powers beyond daily voting for lynching.” phrase in their PM thus “outing” themselves as VT.

OK. So he wasn’t so much outed in the past; rather he claimed to be vanilla earlier, and he is outing himself now by supplying the PM for other Vanillas to compare.

OK< that’s closer. My error was including the entire Powers section in my roleclaim, which, of course, limited me to shaking hands with only Vanilla.

I failed to think that a non-Vanilla would attempt a handshake with me since they should know that their role PM was different. That was my mistake. I should have either attempted my handshake with only the win condition or made it explicit that I was Vanilla.

[Chipacabra]

@Hoopy_Frood

@Chipacabra

Oh, I do have one more thought. Self-preservation is not a townie virtue!

Yes it is.

You know you’re town. Therefore, you know if you are lynched town will get a mislynch. Granted, you run the risk of exposing a power role, but you could also nail a scum. Now there are situational exceptions, as there are for almost any scenario in mafia one could come up with, but as a general rule, saving yourself from dying if you’re town is a great thing to do, unless you are intentionally screwing over a power role to do so.

Self preservation is a null tell.

No. No, no, no. You’ve almost got the right logic, but you’ve got the wrong conclusion.

The important thing for a townie is to die usefully. Yes, being lynched on day 1 because you said something stupid is a useless death. Townies should avoid this not out self-preservation, but out of town preservation.

Even a townie lynch can be a useful death, if the voting record for that lynch exposes scum or collaborates a townie claim or other condition I can’t think of offhand.

Self-preservation is anti-town. It’s semi-scum (with fewer players, each scum’s life is more precious to their team, but when the writing is on the wall even scum should happily take it for the team). Self-preservation is primarily a third-party virtue.

[special_ed]

@Meeko

Special, Peeker and Chronos, at least from the onset, seem to be at equal odds with each other. That is to say, if the game has a third party, I would bet one of them [at least] is a third party. Just seems way too convenient. I’m more inclined to trust Special here, over the other two [and indeed wonder if the other two aren’t both scum] but, for the grand total, it seems like they all want something.

Not sure I get your reasoing here. Why does that exclude all 3 of us from being Town?

@Meeko

**Special **wants to be verified as vanilla town, but I think he is doing a good, and legitimate town job on it.

You might be alone in that assessment. I messed it up pretty bad. A learning experience for me. I never had a handshake attempt go badly before.

@Meeko

Peeker is … well peeker, just with 10000% more SPAM this time around. My God Peeker, tell me I was never THAT bad.

no comment

**
**

@Meeko

I’m not so sure the handshake worked. Is anyone?

Everyone should be very convinced that the handshake failed.

[special_ed]

@Hoopy_Frood

@Chipacabra

Oh, I do have one more thought. Self-preservation is not a townie virtue!

Yes it is.

You know you’re town. Therefore, you know if you are lynched town will get a mislynch. Granted, you run the risk of exposing a power role, but you could also nail a scum. Now there are situational exceptions, as there are for almost any scenario in mafia one could come up with, but as a general rule, saving yourself from dying if you’re town is a great thing to do, unless you are intentionally screwing over a power role to do so.

Self preservation is a null tell.

What about those lovable no-reveal Scotsmen?

[Hoopy_Frood]

@peekercpa

i disagree hoopy. i think as vanilla your job is to suss out as much information as you can. and if you die trying then that is otay. especially if scum waste a NK on you. that gives the big boys/girls (dicks and what not) time to make some hay. and i have said it before and will say it again, i play this for a win. and self preservation is not a win in most cases. if i can advance my team’s cause at the expense of my own preservation then i take that path every time.

There’s nothing wrong with dying as vanilla. That’s not my point.

If you are up for lynch as vanilla, going quietly into that great night isn’t doing anyone any favors typically. You know town are mislynching. Now this doesn’t mean you should lie, but you should present other cases against other people. You also should not vote yourself. Now whether you leave your vote on someone you honestly suspect or cast a self-preservation vote is a manner of debate and frequently situationally dependent, but self-preservation is not in any way a scum tell. Town do it all the time, because they know that they’re lynch is a town lynch.

Yes vanilla should die instead of power roles, but scum and 3rd party should die instead of vanilla.

My point is protecting yourself when you’re town is not a bad thing. It only becomes a bad thing if you willingly put yourself above your side.

[special_ed]

@peekercpa

and that is where i have a little bit of difficulty with ed. i understand what he was trying to accomplish if he is vt. but that is not a given. and to some extent it is also self defeating in that even if he is vt then all he does is narrow down the pool where scum will most likely fire. i mean certainly if scum take out too many unconfirmed then they have nowhere to go but early on i think it a dangerous ploy. i think this is why he as always seemed to espouse non necessary vt claims early on as poor play. first they are basically useless to uninformed townies, second if you are lying you are typically going to get lynched as a matter of policy (i know i said i was niller but i was kidding - trust me this time) and third scum will typically look elsewhere to go hunting. and if scum were provided a vt pm then the whole handshake business doesn’t do anything except blind folks that scum could be hiding in the “confirmed” vt pool.

which by the way would suck badly.

No one should believe that anyone who shook hands is in any way confirmed.

I did attempt to handshake.

I failed.

I wasn’t used to failure with this particular gambit.

[Hoopy_Frood]

@special_ed

@Hoopy_Frood

Yes it is.

You know you’re town. Therefore, you know if you are lynched town will get a mislynch. Granted, you run the risk of exposing a power role, but you could also nail a scum. Now there are situational exceptions, as there are for almost any scenario in mafia one could come up with, but as a general rule, saving yourself from dying if you’re town is a great thing to do, unless you are intentionally screwing over a power role to do so.

Self preservation is a null tell.

What about those lovable no-reveal Scotsmen?

You’ve seen my multiple rants on those already. They’re anti-town roles by default.

[special_ed]

@Hoopy_Frood

@special_ed

What about those lovable no-reveal Scotsmen?

You’ve seen my multiple rants on those already. They’re anti-town roles by default.

I know, that’s why I had to ask

[Suburban_Plankton]

There was a subject that caused a bit of a stir a while back, that’s mostly been forgotten now…but I’m not so sure it should be.

It started way back on Post 175.

@Pleonast

Confirm receipt of my role PM. I have a Townie power role.

Trying to catch up everything. Don’t you guys ever sleep?

When asked why he was coming our so early with a bold claim like that, he tells us it’s just a game (Post 185)…

@Pleonast

@Gadarene

NETA: Why in the world would you say this? (Partially a sincere question, since the last couple of days are the first time I’ve given any thought to Mafia strategy in three years, so there may be commonly accepted wheels within wheels for this kind of thing that I’m not seeing.)

It’s a game I like to play with the scum.

…and that we should just ignore it (Post 194).

@Pleonast

@Red_Skeezix

I hate this strategy, mostly because I don’t think understand it or the motivations that drive you to pursue it: for the fourth time that I’ve seen (willow,wrestler,mafia games game, now)? Perhaps if you could explain the finer points to me it would be enlightening and make me feel less stabby.

Please indicate the pro’s and con’s with respect to the each following hypotheticals.

1. There is no town protective role
2. Scum have a cop
3. Scum have a watcher
4. Scum have a roleblocker
5. Scum have a strongman
6. Scum have a tracker

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.

Nevertheless, a couple hours later (Post 228), he subtly reminds us of what we’re supposed to be ignoring

@Pleonast

@special_ed

I have a WinCon, just no WinCon section. It just sorta hangs there after the ‘Powers’ section.

So you have Powers to?

and a little while later (Post 244), her reminds us again… (italics mine)

@Pleonast

@Telcontar

Okay, at this point I’m inclined to think that the role PMs are distinct, or at least that there are several variations. We can either:
1.) Continue with a fairly fruitless discussion.
2.) Move on
3.) Make some attempt to make sense of the apparent differences.

I’m a bit torn about the merits of 3. In many ways it resembles 1, but it has the illusion of progress and poses some danger to power roles. On the other hand, I’m growing rather suspicious of players as a result of what’s happened already and this might clear it up.

The only information we each have is our own role PM. We don’t even have a sample or vanilla role PM to compare to. So it makes sense that we discuss this. While it might not lead us to finding scum, we have no reason to believe that it won’t.

For example, I have no idea what a vanilla role PM looks like. From ed’s comments, I now know he is either not vanilla town or vanilla town have a “Powers” section. Is that useful? I don’t know, but it’s more than I knew beforehand.

@peekercpa

a fucking double return is in the same section? jeebus dude. isn’t that the fucking definition of a new section?

I’d call that a new paragraph.

After this, Pleonast and peekercpa go off on a discussion about what consitutes a "section vs. a “paragraph”, and other questions of semantics, and everyone forgets about Pleonast’s claim.
Until the next morning, when Gadarene repeats her original request for ean explanation, but is dismissed (Post 359)

@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.

Gadarene decides not to press the issue, and everyone (including me) seems to accept his claim at that point.
morning 8/13

Late that night, Astral Rejection makes mention of Pleonast’s reasserting his status (Post 474), and Ireference AR’s post the next morning (Post 492)

Two days later, Pleonast finally responds to both of us (Post 644)

@Pleonast

@Astral_Rejection

I thought his comment earlier was a one-off, but he’s been repeatedly asserting his power status.

Um, my “second” claim logically and unavoidably follows from the “first”, given that no vanilla role PM is publicly available*. It is in fact not a new claim.

I find it odd that two players think it’s worth mentioning. Why bother?

*And it’s in some ways a warning to other town power roles–you’re vulnerable because of this, which is why I hope the designers took this into account when balancing the game. Giving cover roles to scum helps them out against townie handshaking, but townie power roles are still left vulnerable. Why don’t more designers run open games? It avoids quirky problems like this entirely.

This kind of wishy-washy “not scum” but “not okay” post is a traditional way for scum to try to seem engaged without risky much. If the a consensus forms against the player, they can say they saw something early. If it turns out the player is town, they can say that’s what they thought. No risk.

That’s real ironic coming from someone who’s hardly participated ToDay.

A magic bag means the player promises to deliver something. You know, like pulling something out of a bag.

I never promised anything and you implying that I did is either lack of reading comprehension, or sloppy thinking, or you trying to make my claim seem like more than it is. Suspicious, in a single word.

This is a slip showing non-town thinking. 22 players want you dead only if you are on your own team. Townies have no reason to be this paranoid. Maybe other townies will try (or succeed) to kill you, but they certainly don’t want you dead.

This combined with the wishy-washy comment I remarked on above leads me to
unvote
(Why do we need to explicitly unvote when we can only have one at a time? A new vote should replace an old one, since you’re only giving us one anyway.)
vote Suburban Plankton

“SAHM”? Stay at home mom? I don’t think that’s what you’re referring to. Please explain.

@Suburban_Plankton

It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality. Too many of your posts don’t contribute anything to the discussion. I’m at work at the moment so I don’t have time to go back over each of your almost 100 posts (since the beginning of Night 0) in detail at the moment, but the large number of ‘throwaway’ posts is distracting to me. And I figure that anyone who is deliberately causing distractions is likely up to no good.

I may be voting for you, but this is a very good point. peeker is not being helpful to the town with a bunch of small, almost-joking posts that are not or barely relevant to the game.

It’s not quite enough for me to vote for him yet. But it’s safe to say that if I were a Vig (and I’m not commenting either way on that), peeker would be dead at the next Dawn. I’ve vig’d him before for an anti-town posting style, so he knows I’m not bluffing. (And nothing personal, I just don’t think it’s helping town in any way, and it sure makes it harder to find the few posts he does have useful comments in.)

and again in Post 656…

@Pleonast

@MHaye

It’s an acronym.

SAHM= Sauron And His Minions.

One of my quirks - I don’t like calling people “scum” so I try to work out what the bad-guy group is called in canon and use that.

I think “Forces of the Dark Lord” might work better though, so I’ll use that in future.

Maybe I missed it, but did you define this acronym before using it?

@Astral_Rejection

Pleo, I think it’s worth mentioning because it seemed to be such an unnecessary claim. Of course your second claim logically follows the first, but I’m asking why you claimed in the first place. And it’s disingenuous to say that two players think it’s worth mentioning. Gadarene and Peeko both question you a few posts after your initial claim; that brings us up to 4 players. I bet others have questioned it as well.

Because apparently everyone (including you) understood it was nothing new, almost everyone didn’t remark on it. Except for you and Planckton.

Don’t try to distract the point by bringing up the “first” claim. That’s not the topic I’m discussing. It’s the fact that two players felt it necessary to bring up the obvious “second” claim.

Except he never responds to the question of why he first made the claim, and then reasserted it twice. Instead, he engages again in a discussion on semantics. He attacks my use of the phrase “second claim” instead of “reassertion of his claim” (forgetting apparently that AR did in fact use the phrase “reasserting his status”). He never did answer the original question (posed twice by Gadarene and once by AR) of why he made such a claim in the first place. He refused to respond at all to the question of why he twice reaffirmed his position after having told us that “it’s a game” and “the town should ignore it”. He quite successfully deflected all attempts to get more information out of him.
It seems like Pleonast was hoping that by claiming in such a manner right off the bat, that everyone would just sort of blow off his claim (as I think most of us did). And then by off-handedly reaffirming it, it would slip into everyone’s consciousness. And after several hundred more posts, it would seem like something that had always been there.

I made my Post 492 on 8/14 at 08:36. Two days later, (8/16 at 09:38) Pleonast responds. I had forgotten all about the issue by that point,and given the lack of discussion on it, so had everyone else. So why did he bring it up then? Well, the previous afternoon I had garnered two votes, and then in the half hour before Pleonast’s post I picked up two more. He saw some momentum going, he responded to the question about his “reassertion” (without actually addressing it directly), and cast a vote for me in the same post. Since I was now by far in the lead on the way to the gallows, any claims I made from that point on were going to be held very suspect. And Astral rejection had also picked up a couple of votes for his flip-flop on USCDiver, so that pretty much put an end to any discussion about Pleonast and his Power Role.
unvote peekercpa
(though I still wonder if there’s an ulterior motive behind all of his chatter)

vote Pleonast

[Nanook_of_the_North_Shore]

Really? You’ve decided your best play is to go back to that? People who have quite a bit of experience playing with Pleo have told you he’s done it before. Nothing you say or do is going to stop him from doing it if he feels it’s correct. Hell, he let Town lynch him without claiming as a Power role because he felt it was the correct play. And I already discussed your subconcious idea. It’s a load of crap. I too thought it was a wonderful idea when I came up with it. I was wrong, still crap.

It seems to me there’s 3 possible reasons for this. Either you’re a Townie who’s gotten a burr in your saddle and aren’t willing to let it go(which can be a dangerous attitude to have*). Or you’re scum. It becomes 3 because if you’re Town, it says nothing about Pleo, but if you’re scum I can see two reasons for it. If Pleo is Town, this is a clumsy attempt to try and force him to full claim or, if you hit the lottery, get Town to lynch him. Or if he’s scum, it’s a ham handed bus attempt, so that when/if he flips scum you can point back to this and say see I knew it! The latter two seem slightly more likely to me, so I’m going to move my vote.

** unvote

Vote Suburban Plankton **

*It’s not always bad, and I know that. Being stubborn can prevent scum from slipping away from things that were bad for them, or from convincing people to forget something they’d rather people didn’t remember. But it can also be bad, when you’re cling to something beyond all logical bounds.

[peekercpa]

sheebus,

unvote

[Mahaloth]

**Vote Count:

Chronos(1): Specialed

Suburban(8): Telcontar, RedSkeezix, Hoopy, Oredigger, Pleonast, Cucuy, Chipacabra, Nanook

USCDiver(2): Drainbead, Gadarene

Peeker(2): Suburban, Natlaw

Astral(3): OneandOnly, USCDiver, Nanook

Pleonast(2): Meeko, Suburban

By all means, check for accuracy. **

[peekercpa]

@special_ed

@peekercpa

now who is it in past games that has basically hammered anyone for unprovoked vanilla claims? care to remind me ed?

I was outed as a Vanilla by my error, very different from an unprovoked claim.

i call bullshit. if scum were provided a vt pm then your ploy was perfect. and unless you were scum you wouldn’t know what a vt pm looks like. with maha, sach and story providing guidance you would also run the risk of it being a story everyone is different situation. but it feels like you knew what a vt pm would look like and attempted this lame ass handshake shit (which i personally abhore so factor that in as well). that’s enough for me.

vote ed