Mafia: Baker Street [Game in progress]

[Johnny_Bravo]

@TexCat

Would it be possible to get a recap of the case on Diggit?

I voted Diggit for jumping in on the Daphne vote when it looked certain that Daphne was being lynched. My reasoning was that Diggit was trying to build town cred by making the best of a co-scummer being lynched.

I’ve since unvoted Daphne (per her reveal) but haven’t been convinced that Diggit’s vote wasn’t just the regular kind of bandwagon voting.

[Chronos]

Quoth DaphneBlack:

I am concerned that with relatively little time left, the votes are spread pretty thin. We need to start moving toward a consensus.

I disagree. Consensus is important in the endgame, to prevent the Scum from unduly influencing the vote, but in the early game, it can actually be bad. If most of the players vote the same way, then when we learn the alignment of that player, it doesn’t tell us anything about the alignments of the voters. But if the votes are spread out, then if the lynchee flips Town, we can re-examine those who voted for em, and if Scum, we can re-examine those who didn’t. If the Scum want to try to swing the early votes, let them: It’ll make them easier to find on subsequent Days.

[Johnny_Bravo]

As an aside: Chronos, your summary is awesome.

[DiggitCamara]

@storyteller0910

(snip)
The Setup
(snip)
5. With one or two modest exceptions, every player - Town and Scum - has been given a single clue about the game setup, the roles, or the characters. More than half of these clues are 100% accurate; some proportion of them that is >0% and <50% are false. False clues have been given only to Town-aligned players. I will state for the record that I have by various means attempted to ensure that public reveal of certain clues or other information may not always benefit the side of the player given the clue.

(snip)

@Silver_Jan

I don’t think scum have the only correct clues because I know I am town and my clue is correct. I do agree though that Town most likely have matching clues, I think it would be game breaking if Town and Scum were paired off with the same clues.

The rules state that pretty clearly, by the way (unless you want to posit that Scum numbers more than half the players, at least one Town-Folk HAS to have a True Clue ™).

Double clues have interesting implications, though. Sadly, they’re easily faked…

[Askthepizzaguy]

@Pleonast

Hmm, “scum will vote for townies for no reason”? You have already voted for a player for no reason.

vote Askthepizzaguy for doing what they say scum do.

Who is they?

And I’m struggling to understand how you think you’re scum hunting right now.

I said:

Scums like to pretend to be all serious and will refuse to vote for their fellow scums unless they see a strong logical case they can agree with.

But of course they’ll vote for townies for any reason, or none.

They generally don’t vote for their fellow scums for no reason. They may joke vote their fellow scums and remove that vote later. But they don’t tend to lynch their fellow scums without first establishing how hard they’re using “real” detective work to bag their fellow scums, with a big ostentatious case or “solid” reasoning.

However, they don’t hold themselves to such a standard with townies because when a townie dies, they get no credit for being right. So why waste all that effort and why try to impress anyone with a case that they know will end up lynching a townie. Obviously they don’t want to take the main credit for a lousy case.

This is all discussing scum behavior.

Now a townie is not going to know IN ADVANCE that they’ve nailed a scumbag. That’s why they are more liable to cook up big cases on their fellow townies, and vote for scumbags for no particular reason.

Your conclusion is that since I voted people for no reason, I’m a hypocrite and must die?

Well, you join several others voting me for, apparently, hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is as good a scum tell as skimming. Have fun with it.

[septimus]

@DiggitCamara

sinjin’s attacks on Mahaloth read like typical over-enthusiastic reaction on a possible slip by a co-player.
…
Note that this doesn’t tell us anything about Mahaloth at all, but I’m pretty sure sinjin is town-aligned because of this reaction.

DiggitCamara’s implication that being “over-enthusiastic” is a town tell seems to agree with the point Pizza just made.

(Not that this may not tell us anything about DiggitCamara’s alignment. )

[Pleonast]

Now on page 4…

@Rysto

I kind of see your point, but there’s an incident in scum pond mafia that sticks out in my mind. In that game, there was a critical lynch vote between a scum (me) and a townie. Each player was allocated two votes, and in that vote one player voted for both leading contenders. The net effect was that it was as if he hadn’t voted at all. Nobody in the game caught it, but the spectators sure did.

Now as it happens, the player who did it was town and just made a poor move, but I could definitely see scum pulling something similar intentionally. So I’m kind of suspicious of multi-voting.

That is not a problem with multivoting, but with the players. Now that you’re alert to that kind of problem, you could catch scum doing it. That is a good thing!

@wevets

Idle Thoughts

I don’t know what to make of your vanilla claim right off the bat, but since almost no one else does that, I’m already suspicious. I don’t know enough to judge whether your claim is one I should trust or not. If you were in my shoes, looking at your claim, what would you look for?

And could I ask what you might have besides discussion of your PM and clue to offer the thread?

Can you elaborate why you think an early claim is suspicious? Why would an unconventional playstyle indicate alignment?

@Idle_Thoughts

You must have never played a game with me before. I claim every game on Day one. And so far–in my 9-10 times of doing it–I’ve been Town.

Please don’t meta game. Your alignment in past games as no bearing on your alignment in this game.

@septimus

CLUE: One Scum player, a woman, has a power that targets protective roles. If her target is protected, the player doing the protecting will die.

Assuming the clue is true, we do have a female Scum, … but so far only one revealed female. This makes my vote easy:
Vote: Idle Thoughts
Just (half-)kidding.
[del]Unvote: Idle Thoughts[/del]

Heh, that is my clue as well. I’m not sure what the implications of that is.

I’ve very doubtful of your vote. We don’t have enough information to know the number of male vs female scum and male vs female town.

@Johnny_Bravo

So I’m a little bit leery of players who maintain that they always play a certain way early on in Mafia games. **Idle Thoughts **claims every game on Day 1, **pizza **is “being pizza” when he votes early and indiscriminately.

The problem is that this employing this kind of metastrategy provides a great smokescreen in the event that you do end up being scum. If pizza is scum this game, then he never has to justify his early voting record beyond “well, I’m pizza and pizza votes early and indiscriminately.”

Likewise, Idle Thoughts doesn’t have to justify his early reveal beyond “I’m Idle Thoughts and I always reveal early and anyway I’m almost always town.”

Either way, “pizza being pizza” is enough justification to not vote for him: he’s acting consistently within his own metastrategy and I haven’t seen anything else from him that pings scummy. I 100% believe that he’s totally cool with attracting a Day 1 lynch when he’s town, but the way I feel about that isn’t germane to the game.

This is a good summary of why meta-gaming is a poor strategy, both as reason to vote for someone and to not vote for someone. We really need to focus on the evidence in the game we’re playing. Alignment is uncorrelated from game to game; introducing information from other games simply clutters this one.

@Askthepizzaguy

You can take this with a grain of salt, as it is a player’s depiction of his own scum/town play differences, but I have a long history to back me up.

Here is my key scum tell.

I didn’t bother to read further than this. You’re going to simply try to distract us from the evidence in this game. Any tell that is self-acknowledged is a tell that can be manipulated.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Done with page 4.

[Inner_Stickler]

If you’re going to give us a play by play as you catch up, would you mind giving it post numbers rather than page numbers. From where I sit, we’re just at the beginning of page 3. Saying you’ve finished page 4 tells me nothing about where you are in the game thread.

[Idle_Thoughts]

@Astral_Rejection

Have you ever explained the point of this whole exercise?

Here and there. The basic premise of it is: I will never do it if/when I’m scum. So if I’m doing it, you can be sure that I’ll eventually flip Town or neutral Third Party (which I’ve also been before when doing this)

Of course, since there are times that I’m Town and I don’t do it…so not doing it doesn’t automatically mean I’m scum.
I have been VOTED ON on Day One for not claiming on Day One, before…for that reason alone (by three different people).

[septimus]

@Idle_Thoughts

I will never do it if/when I’m scum. So if I’m doing it, you can be sure that I’ll eventually flip Town or neutral Third Party …

I am Town. I have never quoted Yeats’ poetry when I’ve been scum. Never. Not once.

*I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core. *

Q.E.D.

[Pleonast]

Doing page 5…

@Idle_Thoughts

If you’re being funny, why didn’t you unvote me?
If you’re being serious, you know I’m male, right?
And if you’re being serious and already know I’m a male: Why the vote?

Well, you did claim to be “Estelle Anderson”. And your claimed invitation is to a “Mrs. Anderson”. Are you saying that you’re a male named “Estelle” who uses the prefix “Mrs”?

Or was your claim fabricated and you forgot what gender you are?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Okay, not much worth commenting on, going to page 6.

@TexCat

We know that giving our clues away will help scum. This is word of mod.

No, it’s not. The rules say revealing a clue might not helping the revealer’s team. It very well could help. For example my clue if true, reveals a scum power, which scum would very probably already know about. If it’s false, scum already very likely know it’s not true.

Simply assuming revealing all clues will hurt us hurts us just as much as assuming revealing all clues will help us.

vote TexCat for discouraging players from revealing any clues at all. I don’t see a pro-town motivation for cutting off a source of information.

@TexCat

Gnarly: CLUE: All ties are resolved via random.org. 186

Gnarly’s clue is entirely unhelpful. We didn’t know how ties resolved before, and all this tells us is that they are resolved randomly. Not any better than not knowing.

I would vote Septimus out of this bunch, but I already have.
vote: Gnarly
for risking helping scum while not helping town at all

This is bizarre. Whether it’s true or not, evidence is useful. We may not figure out the full picture until later, but hiding the puzzle pieces helps us not at all.

@DaphneBlack

Can I ask the people who are voting for me if they are voting for me for “sounding uncomfortable” or “asking questions” (or the third vote rule*) or if they have anything else? Because I can’t really defend against the former, and I suggest to you that it is not a case which is likely to net you many scum. Zero scum, in the case of me.

Why are trying to defend yourself? Point out errors in others’ arguments, but there’s no reason to expect to be able change others’ assessments of you.

@DaphneBlack

[*More meta-TVR: in a multivote game no less. In the same post I “TVed” Silver Jan, I also voted Septimus, remember.]

Please don’t use undefined abbreviations. I have no idea what you’re saying here with “meta-TVR” or “TVed”.

@Astral_Rejection

I went back through the thread (thanks to everyone for not making Day 1 a rocket to 50 pages!) and reread gnarly and Scathach. Nothing jumps out at me as super scummy between the two… but nothing jumps out as super townie, either. I’d give Scathach the nod for “more likely to be townie” for her efforts to catch up, which seem more townieish than gnarly’s participation so far. There just isn’t much to work with.

So… as weird as I think this is, I can’t work out what I should do about it.

1. I don’t believe two town players would get the same clue.
2. I don’t believe Storyteller would give a town player and a scum player the same clue, so that town could “catch” a scum, or make a 1-1 trade.
3. I don’t believe gnarly or Scatchach is lying about their clues, because Scathach says it’s the same, and I assume it’s identical or she would have mentioned otherwise.
4. I don’t believe gnarly and Scathach are BOTH scum trying out some crazy meta strategy where we “clear” one or the other, because that’s crazy.
5. I don’t believe this is the potential “bad result” Story promised for revealing clues.
6. I don’t believe this is a Storyteller mistake, because his games have been very well organized.

What am I missing? I’ve pretty much ruled out every possibility, so I’m making a mistake somewhere.

Your mistake is expecting that there is any pattern to how clues are distributed, other than scum clues definitely being true.

I think clue duplication both reduces the risk of not revealing a clue (since someone else has it) and reduces the risk of revealing a clue (since someone else already knows it). Which is a fancy way of saying don’t make any additional assumptions about the distribution of clues.

@Astral_Rejection

As for #2… again, I feel that it’s bad design. That seriously hurts scum through no action of their own, but by the very setup of the game. I believe #1 is far more likely than #2.

It’s very easy to include design elements that hurt or help one side more than the other. It’s balanced by giving an advantage or disadvantage elsewhere.

For example, multivoting helps town. If the game designer opts for multivoting, they need to compensate by reducing the effectiveness of town elsewhere or improving scum somehow.

This is why it’s very hard to make balancing arguments without knowing the full game setup.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Okay, that’s up to the end of page 6. I’ll try to get up to date before the end of the Day.

[Darth_Sensitive]

And ugh… now we have another set of duplicate clues. I’m really not sure what that means, especially as pleonast comes in with his duplicate clue after I’ve laid out my case that says one of the two is likely to be scum, though more likely the first one. Not sure if he read that far or not, but I have to assume that he did.

I really don’t know now which is more likely to be true: we have two pairs of town (possibly more) with the same clue, our first pair was t/s in some order and our second pair is t/t, the other way around, the chances of one of the pairs being ballsy scum trying to get one of them by (and if it’s the second pair, intimidate doctors out of protecting an obvious nightkill target (I think the odds that all 4 are scum is absolutely miniscule)), the chances that this is actually a form of masonry, and more importantly, the possibility that I’m overthinking all of this far too much, and I may be falling into the “clues can hurt your side” trap.

I realize that it’s inconsistent with my vote on gnarly/scat, but if one of the second pair is scum, it feels more likely to be pleonast, since he got set up to feel that the second claim was safer with my earlier arguments.
Vote pleonast

[Idle_Thoughts]

@septimus

I am Town. I have never quoted Yeats’ poetry when I’ve been scum. Never. Not once.

Q.E.D.

Okay…

Well, when you have a history of actually doing that a few times, I might actually give it some thought.

[Inner_Stickler]

I’m tempted to think that the duplicate clues is a check on scum leaving false clues somehow.

[gnarlycharlie]

@Askthepizzaguy

I recall seeing several players pointing out that there is a limit imposed by the game host through the game rules as to an absolute maximum amount of fake clues. Somewhere between 0 and 50 percent of the clues are fake, but no more than that.

Unless the game is half scumbags, in which case they’ve already won the game, it’s not possible for this to be true.

can’t they have more than one clue?

@Astral_Rejection

Nice straw man. I’m not currently voting for anyone on the basis of their clue, so your argument really kind of breaks down there. We also haven’t seen all the clues, so it’s possible that we have yet more matched clues.

We’ve got a real bad case here for voting for me because you dislike my line of reasoning, not because you can demonstrate it’s scummy.

straw man? nothing of the sort. i didn’t vote you for laying a vote on either if ** Scáthach** or me. i did it for assuming one or the other is scum and potentially lynch two townies. if i have misunderstood your post can you restate it then?

[Chronos]

Darth, even if all of the duplicate clues happen to be Townies, that wouldn’t make for a masonry, because we don’t actually know that all of the duplicate clues are Townies. Well, maybe someone has a clue that says that, but if so, they haven’t spoken up yet, and even if they did, we wouldn’t know if that clue was true, either.

Meanwhile, going the other way and saying “One of the duplicated clues must be a Scum” doesn’t say very much, either. We’ve got four people so far with duplicated clues, so picking one of them gives you about a 1 in 4 chance of catching Scum. Which isn’t much better than you’d get just from ignoring the duplicated clues entirely.

[Chronos]

Aside to gnarly: Why do you spell “Scathach” with an accent mark?

[Astral_Rejection]

Here’s one of those vote counts you’re always hearing about:

Astral Rejection (5) - wevets, Daphne Black, Chronos, Rysto, gnarlycharlie

Texcat (5) - Scathach, septimus, dizzymrslizzy, gnarlycharly, Pleonast

Askthepizzaguy (4) - sinjin, Chronos, Inner Stickler, Pleonast

Pleonast (4) - Chronos, LightFoot, Mahaloth, Darth Sensitive

septimus (3) - DaphneBlack, Texcat, Idle Thoughts

Silver Jan (3) - Astral Rejection, Askthepizzaguy, Captain Klutz

dizzymrslizzy (2) - Silver Jan, Septimus

Idle Thoughts (2) - wevets, septimus

Mahaloth (2) - Chronos, sinjin

sinjin (2) – Askthepizzaguy, Dizzymrslizzy

Chronos (1) - wevets

DaphneBlack (1) - Askthpizzaguy

Darth Sensitive (1) – gnarlycharly

DiggitCamara (1) - Askthepizzaguy

gnarlycharly (1) - Darth Sensitive

Inner Stickler (1) - wevets

Johnny B (1) - Lightfoot

[Darth_Sensitive]

@Chronos

Darth, even if all of the duplicate clues happen to be Townies, that wouldn’t make for a masonry, because we don’t actually know that all of the duplicate clues are Townies. Well, maybe someone has a clue that says that, but if so, they haven’t spoken up yet, and even if they did, we wouldn’t know if that clue was true, either.

Meanwhile, going the other way and saying “One of the duplicated clues must be a Scum” doesn’t say very much, either. We’ve got four people so far with duplicated clues, so picking one of them gives you about a 1 in 4 chance of catching Scum. Which isn’t much better than you’d get just from ignoring the duplicated clues entirely.

I threw in masonry just because it came to mind while posting , and I included it to be I’ll say that my level of certainty about the whole thing is much lower. If It was just the first pair I like my case a bunch, now that it’s two pairs, I don’t know what to think.

I need to go back and see if I like any of the existing cases.

[Astral_Rejection]

I’m not particularly interested in being lynched this early in the game (where would be the fun in that?), so can I propose we take a look at some other targets? LightFoot, for instance, would make an excellent lynch target.

At only 6 votes, LightFoot is one of our least-prolific players, and I wouldn’t say she’s used her posts to their greatest scum-hunting potential. After checking in, she makes another “I’m still here post” encouraging us to “back off” DaphneBlack after her claim. She also asks a question of Pizza.

LightFoot’s first substantial post targets pleo and Johnny B. She votes for Pleo based on his lack of a claim, and not due to anything he’s actually said in-game. She then asks a few questions of people, and throws a one-off vote for Johnny B for posts & tone.

Her next post also deals with responding to Johnny B, and while I could be misreading this post, it seems like she’s somewhat downgraded her suspicion of him.

Her final post so far addresses some odds and ends, and does no further scum hunting.

I find it interesting that in catching up, LightFoot didn’t see fit to weigh in on me, Askthepizzaguy, Pleonast, Septimus, Silver Jan, or nearly any of the other vote leaders. Her vote for Pleonast includes literally no other rational beyond his lack of a claim, and doesn’t tie into any of the other extant cases on him. She mentions Texcat only in passing to say “I am suspect of Texcat – can’t quite put my finger on it- but D1 wagons generally net Town players so I will stay out of that mix,” which seems a bit of a smudge on those voting for TexCat. LightFoot really had to go out of her way to say “Yeah, I think she’s scummy, but I’m sure not going to vote for her.”

Vote LightFoot.