Mafia: Cecilvania [Game Over]

This is the kind of explanation I’m expecting when I ask these questions. I put forth what I saw as the list of possible explanations and why I thought it was scummy. You present another motivation. I disagree with your reasoning; however, I can understand how someone would reason that way. I’ll this point settled.

This is an important point to me because, the way you stated it, I wasn’t sure if you were genuinely suspicious of me, but reluctant to cast a vote or what. It may have been a smudge, it may have been a deliberate attempt to express suspicion, it may have been something else entirely as it seems it was. I wanted you to tell me more about it. I’ve gotten a response that provides me with the information I was looking for.

Do you disagree with the reasoning I gave. Your actual motivation aside, even with the best intentions, I maintain that it is an anti-town action. You may or may not agree with my logic as to why, but I don’t think it’s extraordinarily difficult to see why I may think that, hence why it piqued my suspicion.

I’m not willing to do that, and there’s a couple reasons why. The decisions made by either a power role or the scum overnight are not real-time decisions. They have the entire night to mull over the ramifications of their actions and are much more likely to see the pros and cons of such actions. As such, a detective impersonator’s explanation is likely to be sound and well thought out, as he had just as long to come up with a fake explanation as the real detective would to come up with the real one.

Second, as was demonstrated by storyteller’s claim, if he is in fact honest, decisions that are made in realtime are much less likely to be as well thought out. He was pressured and made the claim and later regretted it. Thus, the fact that he did answer it, particularly given this example from earlier in the game, doesn’t necessarily mean that he would have necessarily thought of all of the negatives and appropriately weighed it out.

Third, we can assume that anyone who is pro-town motivated will try to act in the best interest of the town, but we can’t assume that every action will be or even that we’ll agree on which actions are and are not in the best interest of the town. That is, even with all of that information, it’s entirely possible that he weighed it differently and came up with a different answer than I did. However, we want an answer to that, we’ll have have to ask him.

This is also why I find it suspicious when people ask these sorts of questions. Sure, they could be townies who just didn’t see the negatives or disagree with the seriousness of the negatives. However, it’s also possible that the questions are asked specifically because there are nefarious reasons and a lot of times those reasons just miss the person being asked. Particularly in the case of a revealed power role, he’s more in a “help town as much as I can before I die” mode rather than a “carefully think over everything everyone says” mode.

Hence, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to scrutinize these sorts of questions.

Fair enough.

This will simply boils down to a pointless semantic argument about the usage of “you know”. I’m making my assessment of the motivations, and if they don’t match up, then bloody-well say so and explain why.

Your last sentence here is the key point with regard to my OAOW case. I make a case why it wasn’t A or B. The only one I got was from sachetorte, but I also gave my reason why I disagreed with motiation C. OAOW didn’t counter my arguments for why it wasn’t A, B, or C, and he didn’t give me an alternative D. If one cannot provide his pro-town motivations for certain behaviors, what am I suppose to think?

This is exactly the response for which I was looking, as I said above. This is a reasonable motivation for your behavior that I didn’t already cover and for which I do not see a counter-argument. Hence, why I consider this point settled.

Well, obviously she was town, so I think she was a townsperson grasping at straws. This is not to say that I think FS is necessarily town – she may well be scum for all I know – but I’m still not convinced by HM’s reasons for thinking so.

By the way, I’m off to Louisville tomorrow at an ungodly hour of the morning to score AP exams. I should have Internet access in the evenings, so I’ll be keeping up with the game and I’ll get a vote in tomorrow, but I may be posting rather sporadically over the next week or so.

I think storyteller briefly mentioned this, but I think it bears repeating: Sooner, rather than later, the Wolves will start targeting the townspeople who have been “confirmed” by his investigations (if he’s actually the Detective).

Indeed, right now we have 13 Players alive, and if there are Masons(Stoneworkers) right now we could have as many as 6 “confirmed” players. I don’t think we have critical mass yet, but I believe the Masons should take a “mass claim” into consideration when and if they believe that reveal would narrow down the suspect lists sufficiently.

whoops, haven’t done a vote count yet.

Day 3 count.

WF Tomba - BlaM, Darth, Nanook

Not voting - EVERYONE ELSE!

Seriously people.

28.5 hours left in the Day.

Why do you think that if you don’t develop a compelling case against someone else, that we’ll lynch you “by default”?

Nothing solid, but I feel I should share some thoughts.

I’ve thought WF T was suspicious since my first readthrough of Day 1 when I subbed in on Day 2. I really wish I could put my finger on it, and as much as I hate to lay down (the appearance of) a baseless smudge, there ya go.

Also, call it gut, but I’ve thought F Slit is our Dr. Acula. Again, nothing I can really point to, but the whole attitude on what she’d do if she was bitten just screams of trying to assess various townie’s opinions on what they’d do if they were bitten, so she would have a better chance of bitting somebody who’d remain faithful.

OK, time to get down to business. While I am still leaning toward Blaster Master being scum, I am not completely sold yet. So while my spidey-sense continues to tingle, I am not going to vote for him toDay, particularly since there is a much better target: DiggitCamara. Here’s my case:

First, he’s just participating enough to stay in the game - classic lurking. He has 26 total posts to date in the entire thread, 5 of which were fluff/night/confirming before the game started. So that’s 21 total posts for the game, most of which are only a couple of sentences long. And only 2 so far toDay.

Second, and more importantly, is his vote for sacehrtorte yesterDay. I already tried to highlight this at the time, but rather than just ask everyone to go look at it, I’m going to restate (and expand) the case. I am going to repost a series of quotes from the sequence, as I think it’s important to look at the whole context. It all started here:

This is the first we hear about sachertorte’s “implicit” defense. Sach responds:

There was a lot more to this post, in which he laid out a case against Blaster and voted for him. I also chimed in on this point:

Diggit responds to me with these two posts:

Please read these two posts very carefully! In 688, he raises two pieces of evidence: First, sach’s “implicit” defense of OAOW (and someone he can’t remember!) Notice how he picks up Blaster’s use of “implicit.” After this post, he realizes that sach and I have corrected Blaster that his defense was not implicit at all, and in fact was anything but. So he quickly posts again, saying that he can’t remember if sach’s defense was implicit or explicit. But that’s his main point of evidence against sach! He basically just admitted that his vote is based on evidence that he doesn’t remember. (And, as we know, was not true). As I said in reply to him then:

After I confronted Diggit about this point, he tried to get out of it by claiming that sach’s defense was implicit before it was explicit (thank you, John Kerry), until he was called on it by Diggit. (He makes this case in post 728 ). But in that post, he conveniently left out a post that ruins his argument, which I point out to him in post 732 , forcing him to admit that he was mistaken. (<-Please click those links and read those posts - they’re too complicated to repost here).

The second reason for his vote for sachertorte was sach’s “legacy from yesterDay: subtly raising suspicion against others, but not actually starting a vote against them.” But sach had already laid out a case against Blaster Master and had voted for him in post 683, so this point is just a flat-out lie.

Please note that this is not a semantic argument about implicit vs. explicit. It’s about DiggitCamara arguing dishonestly to start a bandwagon against a Townie. Hopefully more people will listen to me toDay.

Vote DiggitCamara

I’ve been thinking about this a little too, trying to apply what she’s done to the what if she were our resident MD in Bloodletting. Lets see…she’s been posting but just enough to try to stay under the radar? Check. But others have too. She sent feelers out about what would people do? Check again…it fits well but you can’t assume that this is the case 100% here.

Either way I’m inclined to leave her alone for now. So, no vote yet…but I do have a list of those I don’t see myself voting for today, at this point.

Pollux
Rugger
Freudian
Shadowfacts
Myself
…story. I know yesterday I tried to get some discussion going on lynching him at the end of today, but what with a lack of support AND my own thoughts about this issue, I’m not entirely sure of this move. Yet.

That leaves me with :

Blaster
Diggit
Nanook
WF Tomba
Fretful
Darth
And Hal.

In my list of 7 there, we have 1 huge lurker (Hal), two moderate lurkers for today (Diggit and Darth), and several loud posters (Blaster, Nanook, Tomba). Fretful doesn’t quite fit into any of those…on the quiet side, but has been participating today. Those lurkers are still quiet, on day 3? No discussion of their motives, they’ve been flying under the radar again. Of those 3, I would be at least one is scum. I need to analyze these 7 a little more though before I commit.

Because nobody else has any votes!

Everyone, I think if you review the way I have played this game, while keeping in mind that I[ul][]am not very experienced[]do not have good “instinctive” scumdar[]am trying to play with intensity and energy[]get combative when I’m suspicious of someoneseem to have a personality conflict with Blaster Master (which is not his fault)[/ul]you will find that there is nothing truly suspect about me.

I have already tried to explain it to you. So have other people.

You said you were able to rule out the possibility that One And Only Wanderers unvoted storyteller due to the risk. You felt that the post in which OAOW cast a Finger of Suspicion on you ruled this motivation out. As far as I can tell, your only reason for interpreting his FoS post that way was that it came after a statement from you about risk. You did not seem to have any grounds to discount the reason Wanderers gave for FoSing you. When I challenged you on it, you just cited the need to read between the lines in this game, as if that gave you license to read any unstated meaning you chose into another player’s post.

This seems like a tiny point, but your whole argument against OAOW depended on it. You concluded he was scum because you thought that there was no pro-town motivation for his behavior. You came to this conclusion by listing what you thought were the three possible pro-town motivations, and then finding a way to eliminate each of them. But your elimination of the second possible motivation was entirely based on an unsupported (and in my opinion unsupportable) interpretation of that FoS post. Therefore you have not really eliminated the second possible motivation, therefore your whole process of elimination fails, therefore your argument fails.

I should have laid it out just like that to begin with, but frankly I thought you were a Werewolf trying to sneak one by us, so I didn’t actually believe you needed it explained.

Reminder, no one will be prodded individually to up their post counts. Please make sure you actually play. No one wants to win because the other team scewed up and didn’t post enough. I am putting out the word that the subs should be ready and waiting.

26.5 hours left in the Day.

Four people have not met the posting threshold, one hasn’t posted at all.

Due to personal issues, WF Tomba is unable to continue in the game. He will be replaced by MHaye.

WF you get one goodbye post and then it’s off to the spoiler thread for you.

FYI, toDay is the last Day anyone gets a sub. It’s modkills from here on out.

Quick, lynch him before he ruins that wonderfully poignant goodbye post he already had!

Let’s talk about the death of sachertorte, as it fell out yesterDay. I’m going to use a system I used over on the other board; it seemed to work OK there. I’ll be coding votes for sach in orange and votes for anyone else in purple.

OK, to business.

The start of Day Two was interminably slow. The first voting action came:

Hal Briston Vote #1 - by Nanook - Post #668
Coupled with an accusation of flying under the radar, and explicitly described as a “preliminary” vote. Nothing suspicious here in and of itself, depending on how things play out. Let’s keep going.

(Sachertorte and ShadowFacts spend a fair bit of time arguing. Essentially, Shadow is accusing sach of disingenuously trying to push a lynch of me without explicitly saying “I want to lynch storyteller.” It seemed that way to me, too. sach, in turn, accuses Shadow of trying to stifle discussion, which seemed then and seems now to be an unfair criticism).

sachertorte Vote #1 - by BLAM - Post #680
This is a straightforward vote of sach for his implicit defense of Wanderers. Very short voting post.

WF Tomba Vote #1 - by Darth Sensitive - Post #682
OMGUS vote. Tomba smudged Darth, Darth responded with a vote and no explanation. Hm.

BLAM Vote #1 - by sachertorte - Post #683
He’s basically voting BLAM for not coming to the same conclusions he did re: Wanderers.

sachertorte Vote #2 - by DiggitCamara - Post #688
This is a piggyback of BLAM’s reasoning - “how did sach know that OAOW was Town to defend?” - and Shadow’s - “Sach tries to raise suspicion against folks without actually starting a vote against them.”

Diggit Vote #1 - by ShadowFacts - Post #691
Hm. The first ping I’ve felt so far. Shadow is upset at a fairly minor point: Diggit describes sach’s defense of OAOW as “implicit,” saying that it might have become explicit at some point, but if it did, he (Diggit) thinks it was after sach’s suspiciously aggressive defense of Wanderers began.

The thing is, that wasn’t really the point of Diggit’s vote. Diggit voted for sach because: (1) sach appeared to “know too much” with his aggressive Wanderers defense; and (2) sach appeared to be trying to shove suspicion in my direction while distancing himself from it by saying “I’m not trying to lynch story” over and over. So ShadowFacts is nitpicking.

And here’s the thing: in his early Day arguments with sach, he is clearly outlining reasons to be suspicious of sach. One of those reasons is this:

My question is this, Shadow: by saying the things you said about sach, then placing your own vote somewhere else - on paper-thin justification having to do with a nitpick of an otherwise reasonable argument with which you agreed, weren’t you kind of sort of doing the same thing you were accusing him of doing?


Separating posts. More to come shortly.

Now I chime in, saying that I think sach has been completely dishonest by characterizing my participation in the game as sparse. sach clarifies that he meant my recent participation. I clarify that he didn’t say that, he said something else. He is unmoved by my appeal. ShadowFacts rushes to sach’s defense, but hastens to add that “he is still suspicious of sach, too.”

Hal Briston Vote #2 - by Koldanar - Post #710
Pure lurker vote.

sachertorte Vote #3 - by Freudian Slit - Post #713
Entire voting text (minus the actual vote) follows:

Immediately following, ShadowFacts steps up to defend sachertorte. Again (#716). Remember, ShadowFacts spent the early part of the Day attacking sachertorte for insistently defending a player, OAOW, who turned out to be pro-Town.

By #720, ShadowFacts has completely reversed field on sachertorte, saying to Hal:

At this point, Shadow is defending sach pretty strongly. Why, when Shadow spent the first half of the Day telling us all that he found sach suspicious, does he now feel so strongly about not voting for sach that he’d rather fire off a lurker vote?

Freudian Slit Vote #1 - by Hockey Monkey - Post #723
“For the same reason as yesterDay.”

ShadowFacts Vote #1 - by Hal Briston - Post #726
Notes that Shadow’s accusations of bandwagon jumping are unfounded.

Darth Sensitive Vote #1 - by Pollux Oil - Post #734
Jesus, we were all over the damn place yesterDay, weren’t we? Pollux points out that Darth’s actions don’t really match his statements - Darth has claimed to have placed a lazy vote, but voted for someone other than his own chief suspect, which does sound odd.

Darth Sensitive Vote #2 - by WFTomba - Post #743
Darth and Tomba seem to like to toss one-liners at each other. I can’t read either of them at this point.

sachertorte Vote #4 - by storyteller - Post #754
I’m basically the beginning of the end for sach with this vote, so I think it’s worth reposting my reasons:

Shadow Facts Vote #2 - by Fretful - Post #756
She basically makes some of the same points I’ve made so far - why is Shadow defending sach so earnestly all of a sudden?

OK, that’s basically it. Santo rolls along with the coup de grace later, and there’s a bit more mucking around and voting, but I’m ready to come back with a vote. Bear with me.

See ya, everyone. I’ve enjoyed myself most of the time, but I have not been able to play appropriately and I don’t think I should continue. I hold no grudges against any of you and I don’t intend to give up Mafia altogether. It’s just time for me to leave this game.

But it sure seems like a semantic argument to me. So the defense of Wanderers was explicit vs. implicit (although, for a portion of the Day, it certainly was implicit). What difference does that make? It was still a defense carried out with inexplicable ardor, which was the point of Diggit’s statement and the reason underlying his vote.

Which I think was almost surely obvious to everyone.

Since this appears to be the meat of your argument against me, I will answer this. If you feel there are other things you need addressed, feel free to let me know.

I found **sach’s **post about you suspicious. I laid out the reasons why I felt it was, questioned sach about it, and he defended himself against my accusations. It was a case that required a lot of reading between the lines, and I stated that at the outset. By the end of that conversation, I felt somewhat satisfied that **sach’s **motives were not as malicious as I originally thought.

In the meantime, several players began to vote for sach with reasons that I felt were…not good. **Diggit’s **post(s) in particular I found suspicious, and posted why. (Your attempt to reduce my case against Diggit to “nitpicking” despite the epic I just posted above has been noted, btw). Then began a repeat of Day One, with sach in the role of OAOW, and me in the role of sach.

Guess who my vote is going to be for? Actually, let’s get that out of the way right now:

vote ShadowFacts


My previous posts were long, and introduced a lot of side issues, so I’ll summarize my case here.

At Post #661, early Day Two, ShadowFacts posts a fairly long smudge/FoS/whatever of sachertorte. His basic argument is this: sach spent a lot of time subtly and implicitly indicting me, while refusing to out-and-out state that he wanted to lynch me, vote for me, or even express his suspicion in a more direct way. Shadow argues that by doing this, sach might be:

Shortly thereafter, he reinforces this:

Shadow and sach go back and forth for a while, and I’d encourage everyone to read the sequence of posts; it is pretty clear that, in that sequence of posts, Shadow is “suspicious” of sach. Right?

But then, BLAM chimes in with his description of sach’s defense of Wanderers as “implicit.” Shadow calls him on it, but doesn’t vote for BLAM. Diggit repeats BLAM’s characterization, but the “implicit” is a fairly minor element in a vote that is based on two pillars: sach’s inexplicable defense of OAOW looking like PKS, and sach’s legacy of “subtly raising suspicion against others, but not actually starting a vote against them.”

So Diggit’s reasons for voting for sach are, respectively, one shared with most of the Town and one that Shadow himself has advanced. He uses a bad adjective to describe the defense, but Shadow picks it up as a reason to vote for Diggit (no vote for BLAM, though, who used the same adjective in the same way).

Over the next page and a half, Shadow takes great pains to remind us twice that “I still find sachertorte suspicious.”

And then, suddenly, without warning or explanation, Shadow’s suspicion of sach is gone with the everloving wind. Suddenly Shadow is so unsuspicious of sach that he essentially says he won’t vote for sach, so much so that he’d rather place a lurker vote on Hal?


So in the course of a few pages, Shadow

  1. Said he found sach suspicious - but didn’t vote for him - thus contributing to an air of suspicion around sach while keeping himself technically clean of the lynch - the same behavior for which he was condemning sach himself!

  2. Continued to express suspicion of sach even while refusing to vote for him (and casting an ill-supported vote on Diggit over the latter’s use of the adjective “implicit”)

  3. Gradually transitioned into a full-court press defense of sachertorte, who remember Shadow has repeatedly claimed he finds suspicious.

  4. Conveniently manages to be elsewhere when the actual lynch occurs.

I’m feeling pretty good about this vote.