Cat, that’s a … really weird question. You’ve been around the block, you know the arguments…why bring it up at all? Was it just a question to incite discussion? Because I can’t see how discussion from that question would turn into anything other than white noise.
Au contraire, it’s already been useful 
I’m not only looking to incite discussion, I’m looking for the responses people give as well.
Besides, I have an interesting Magic Bag[sup]TM[/sup] idea for tomorrow. I’m sure everyone will shoot it down, but this is the one setup where it may work.
Hey, nothing like trying to change the mindset for fun and games. If it turns into, “Lets wait for the power roles to tell us what to do”, the town is going to be stuffed.
:smack:
Storyteller’s Blade Runner game (see the off-board site for details).
Three of the four active Replicants were in the top eight posters by volume (out of 22 players) on Day 1, and the fourth subbed out early in Day 2.
Lurking is not a guide.
Besides (as I said elsewhere) what do you mean by “lurking”, hmmm? Define the term before proposing who to lynch for it.
Ditto, and double ditto. Especially in a game like this where false claims are going to be (at least initially) much easier, we have to start working together to find scum the old fashioned way.
Power roles tend to try to stay under the radar, too - I was the doctor in Doperville, and I was trying to not draw too much attention to myself, and then I got night killed. Of course, in that game the scum knew everybody who was scum, so they knew I wasn’t scum and had to be under-the-radar town (along with one other poster, IIRC), so they nailed me, correctly. But if we start lynching low-lyers, we may force people into role-claims too early and shoot ourselves in the foot.
NETA - in this game obviously it will be harder for the scum to find the power roles that way, since they don’t have perfect knowledge.
Also, everyone is a power role. If we all try to fly under the radar we are similarly screwed.
Cowboy up people, don’t lurk because it is safe. That is a sure way for us to lose the game. (See YSI for further evidence.)
Thanks for that - I don’t read the off-board games. It seems that our two data sets are precisely opposite, so perhaps lurking is a null tell. As for a definition of lurking, there is one at mafiascum.net . I would say personally that the worst kind of lurker, and the one I am often on the lookout for, is the “Active Lurker” as described in that link.
But let me quote myself from a PM I sent to the mods of Cecilvania during the last game as a reason for trying to prod lurkers. I was growing increasingly frustrated with the level of participation in that game, so I sent off the following rant:
I really believe that lurking is harmful to the Town whether it’s Town or Scum. So even if you don’t think scum tend to lurk more, using the threat of the lynch to provoke people to post is only to the good of the Town.
And please note that every time I talk about this (and I do in pretty much every game), someone tries to reduce my position to “ShadowFacts wants to lynch lurkers,” as you have done here. That’s not why I’m saying and it bugs me when people do that. I don’t want to lynch lurkers - I don’t want there to be any lurkers! And if voting for people can prod them to post more, then I will do that. If more people would join me, it would be more effective. I think when people have a few votes on them, they will talk, either about themselves and why they shouldn’t be lynched or about someone else they find suspicious. This generates further discussion, and so on. I believe this can be an effective strategy, and I won’t apologize for it.
End of manifesto. 
Whew, I missed a lot already! Catching up on the last two pages for now.
My milage definitely does. I have never seen a vote analysis, taken on its own, generate more than complete speculation regarding the alignment of the players involved. Scum will vote for Scum; Scum will vote for Town. Town will vote for Town; Town will vote for Scum. This is true in every game, but is of course especially true in this game. Those vote counts might be cold, hard, and inalterable, but they are also useless as anything but a starting point. Tell me who voted for who, sure, but then tell me why. That’s what matters; that’s where the bad guys get caught.
Surely does, which is why it’s almost always a terrible strategy. I am strongly opposed to any lynch-lurker approach, and here’s why: from what I’ve seen, deliberate lurking is almost never a sign of Scum vs. Town. There is a minimum post count in this (and in most) games; a player who doesn’t meet that minimum won’t be our problem for long whatever he/she is. A player who does meet the minimum is providing content to be analyzed, and if it’s not as much as other players, what of it? Shit happens, people get busy at their jobs or in their lives, or just have nothing to say for a few pages; Scum are no more likely than Town to have a bad week at work. Any sort of mechanical lynch-the-guy-with-the-low-post-count plan I will oppose.
Provisionally disagree, but more on that later.
Hm. Interesting. I checked out the offsite board, and found the following:
In Batman, for the first half of Day One, the scum ranked #s 2, 11, 16, 18, 24, and 27 in terms of post count.
In Blade Runner, the ranks were 4, 6, 9, 17, and last for Day One.
In Firefly, the ranks were 3, 8, 9, 13, and 26 for Day One.
In Asylum Lane, the ranks were 2, 8, 10, and 13.
So on reflection, I continue to disagree with your contention that Scum tend to lay low on Day One. It would appear that the Day One posting distribution tends to be similar to the overall posting distribution, with some Scum posting high and some posting low, with still others settling comfortably in the middle.
Except you are assuming that when someone “lurks” - read, posts infrequently - they are doing so as a conscious choice, and can be prompted to change this behavior with voting.
But in my experience, most of the time, when someone posts infrequently, (as I said before) it’s because they’re busy, work gets crazy for a few days, computer access is spotty, or whatever. If multiple votes pile up on such a person, it won’t be effective in prompting increased participation - the person isn’t posting because they can’t - but it’s counterproductive in terms of Scum finding, because once you say “I’m voting for Joe Schmo because he has a low post count and I want him to post more” the conversation is basically over until Joe Schmo shows up. And if the Dope happens to be down during Joe’s only computer time for a given two-day period, and if you get your way and two or three people are using their votes to try to prompt him to vote, then this strategy results in a lot of wheel spinning.
I don’t get it. I agree that hiding and waiting for the power roles to take over the game would be both boring and stupid. But, if you have some sort of Magic Bag, isn’t that a power role telling us what to do? Or am I misunderstanding the term “Magic Bag”? I thought it meant a power role with multiple powers, but if you’re using it in a different way, it might make the quoted passage make more sense than it does now.
Magic bag typically refers to a player saying something along the lines of “I KNOW something. But I am not going to tell you what. Maybe tomorrow.”
Typically right before the end of the Day so the scum can kill them that Night.
On Magic Bag[sup]TM[/sup]s :
CiaS may actually be on safer ground with his Magic Bag[sup]TM[/sup] than such people normally are; it depends whether he defines “Tomorrow” as being Day 1 or Day 2. If it’s the former, then the various factions won’t be able to get a hit in on him before he can open the bag and show us his box o’ tricks.
Sometime Tomorrow then, CiaS.
Now to head off a possible query at the pass.
One small discrepancy between what I sad about the postcounts of Replicants in Storyteller’s game and what Storyteller said; he listed five scum where I listed only four. One of the Replicants didn’t know, at the start of the game, that they were a Replicant. I didn’t count that player; Storyteller did.
Is that just a raw post count, or did you weed out the fluff? If the latter, that data does pretty much blow a big hole in my “scum tend to lurk” theory - apparently Simpletown was an aberration. If the former, well, I’m not sure I can buy it yet. Posting a lot of fluff is another way of active lurking. But thanks for providing the data - I may have to change my mind on this yet.
Nevertheless, as I posted above, I still think low participation hurts the town. Of course, if someone is not posting because they can’t, as you propose, prodding them will not help. But if someone is “actively lurking” as I mentioned in my earlier post, then it might.
Perhaps that’s true for the conversation regarding Joe Schmo, but why couldn’t you vote for Schmo for lurking, then continue to scrutinize other players who have posted interesting stuff for discussion? As far as I know, there is no rule that you can only talk about the player you’ve voted for.
Gah, every single game I get into this argument. Maybe I should just give it up… :smack:
But I’m right!!
What kind of metric are you using to differentiate between a fluff post and substancive one? Length isn’t going to work, as someone can be terse and still impart information or verbose without providing a material contribution. Beyond that, what you seem to be saying is that we should look for people who aren’t actually justifying their actions or explaining their positions; isn’t that simply analyzing content? And isn’t analyzing content for motivation the point?
Bingo! But to add to that, people who talk a lot but say little, in my experiance, tend to be scum. There are always exceptions because scum have the abiltiy to adapt, but as a general rule scum don’t actually say a whole lot even when they talk a lot.
Would you say the same thing holds true for scum who are also in danger from other scum? I mean, it seems that in this game there’s a lot of incentive for scum to be actively looking for scum… just not their breed of it. Wouldn’t you expect more investigation from them?
NETA - Assuming all groups exist (I know, I know), for example, nobody wants to night kill a vampire. Everybody with a night kill is going to be afraid of that and wants to lynch the vamp instead. Why wouldn’t scum be active in discussions trying to find other scum roles, for example, that could be harmful to them?
It depends. I didn’t play in the last one of these (and couldn’t keep up enough to even follow it) but it would seem to me that each group wants something different. The key would seem to be, figure out what each group wants and then work backwards to see who is aiming for those goals.
Survivor types will simply want to stay alive and this would be your traditional scum in this game. If they can just stay alive they can really let the rest of the players do the heavy lifting and not draw any suspicion on themselves. At least for the first few Days. This is nearly instinctive to the point where almost every first time scum does it a little bit. The only people who don’t typically do this are the experienced scum. (Again, as with everythig there are always exceptions, I would actually be one of those exceptions)
At the end of the day (Day too) what we need to be looking for are actions that further an agenda that are pro scum. Not anti town actions because proscum actions can, sometimes, also be protown and anti town actions can sometimes be anti scum.
I frankly expect the first few Days of this game to be mostly panic and chaos (much like in the Batman game) but the Batman game was won by the fact that scum gave themselves away by their clearly pro-scum actions. It took a while for the patterns to emerge, but by the end of the game it was clear which players were acting in the best interest of the town more often than not, and which players weren’t. I expect the same to be true here. Our biggest obsticle will be getting people to talk enough that there is a clear record at the end of the game without having an overload of information that makes it impossible for us to get to the end of the game.