It does make sense. If my program is accurate, at least, then Diver being Scum implies that you’re Scum, so you’d want us to think he wasn’t.
Quoth Meeko:
Only if the game started with five Scum, or they have some other trick up their sleeve, but if that’s the case, then there’s nothing we can do about it, and Mahaloth would presumably have declared the game over right now.
Yes, that’s true. And I voted for him to force a tie and risk both of us, so that we could go to a smoke monster scenario, which I expected to happen, so that I could come back and report that he was town when he was really scum.
I was thinking more along the lines of, you voted him because if a Scum was going to die anyway, then the other one might as well gain some Townie cred in the process. And then you didn’t break the tie because for you, at least (or for Diver, of course), breaking the tie would be suicide. And then when the smoke monster scenario came up, you decided then that you’d better lie.
Fair enough; it seems obvious to me, though, that if that was our thinking, Diver would have voted for me, not the other way around. But I guess that’s your call.
In other news:
it occurs to me that if we lynched Zeriel for a perfect information slip about Diver, it should have occurred to somebody that we might take that as an indication that what Zeriel said about Diver (which was that he was town) should have carried some weight. Obviously I didn’t think of it, but then, I’m an idiot.
Speaking of perfect information,
At least, I said he was a townie. Thanks for that immediate measure of trust, I guess. Does my word carry that much persuasive force in these parts suddenly?
That obviously depends on what we think of Jimmy. If Jimmy is Scum, then absolutely the folks who voted for Diver look suspicious, but if he’s not, then it doesn’t mean anything.
OK, allow me to speculate and attempt to inject something useful. This is a metagamey question for Mafia mods or those with mod insight.
Why the elaborate tie-breaking mechanics? Chronos states the obvious here. It could well be that Mahaloth was just spinning additional Lost colour for the fun of it, and the result was (essentially) a coin flip. My question is, though: does this say anything about Jimmy’s and Diver’s alignment? I am thinking that if was Scum/Scum or Town/Town, Mahaloth might not care if a random roll decided the lynch, but he might not be happy about letting it decide a Town/Scum scenario with the game on the line (or close to it). At the very least, the principals having to provide some sort of input washes his hands of the random element.
Note: I am not implying anything about Jimmy’s (or Diver’s) alignment. As Chronos mentioned, we essentially don’t know any more now than we did at the start of the day.
We went through the whole tiebreaking conversation in the first couple of days. Mahaloth was playing coy from the very beginning with regard to what happened with a tie. First he said “if there’s a tie… you’ll see.” Then he demonstrated how to ask the mod a question in bold and green by using the example question “what happens in case of a tie?” And at some point we asked and got an unsatisfactory response.
Given all of this, I thought that the fact that town didn’t want to risk getting screwed with in a tie was well-worn ground. My take on it is that Mahaloth had a particular fun idea about what to do with a tie from the very beginning (since according to internet the smoke monster is kind of a big deal) and tried to give us fair warning.
storyteller’s post right in the middle of our fear-of-tie discussion sums it up pretty well. I think at that point we were pretty much expecting a wacky tiebreaker, and I guess it just got lost (oh shit look at me) in the (are you ready) fog of the gameplay since then.
Except you are: Jimmy Town but Diver Scum isn’t possible, but Jimmy Scum but Diver Town is. So by implying that they were different alignment, you’re effectively implying that Jimmy is Scum. I’m not sure I buy the underlying argument, but if you do, that’s where it logically leads.
I might also add that if we had known about this mechanic beforehand, it would have been a lot better deterrent than an ominous “We’ll see”. Here I was thinking that the worst that could happen was that the Scum got to break the tie, but this is in at least some ways worse: Information is critical in this game, and everyone takes for granted finding out what players were when they die.
It was a good enough deterrent for the first few nights, at least. I just thought everyone generally assumed a tie was bad for town. Seems reasonable enough to me.
Generally speaking, what are the possibilities?
Scum can break tie: bad
Who dies determined randomly: bad
Neither dies: bad
Both die: neutral? I guess; could be good, could be bad.
Last person to vote to make the tie dies: bad
Someone dies at random: bad
Just because the way that it was bad was unexpected doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have known it was bonecrushingly dense to take the one thing we had control of and cede control.
fang - I think what he meant was that it would be really fucked up behavior for me to tell you all Diver was town if he was scum, which is pretty reasonable.
I mean, assuming that I’m at any level a rational actor, you can safely conclude that I don’t think it’s a good idea, if I’m town, to lie about what Diver was. I mean, a good town player wouldn’t take information that only he was privy to and manipulate and mislead the rest of town just to serve some kind of inscrutable selfish design, right?
I get that part, but I have no idea what happened with the smoke, how you came to know what you did, and if the information you were given is accurate in the first place.
Note: If it needs saying, I am not fishing for more info – please don’t elaborate and risk a modkill, etc.