Um, I think that should be in bold.
Vote Pleonast
Have you played Mafia before?
The actual answer is: who knows? This is a “closed” setup. We haven’t got very much information, we don’t know how many roles (or what kind of roles) there are… well, unless you discount pede’s comment on his PM. There might be players with separate win conditions, but, story being story, I don’t think those conditions will change over the course of the game.
Recruiters are right out (as per the game’s rules).
Strangely, up to this point, that would have been my interpretation as well. But **story **being **story **(i.e. the introduction), his non-vanilla PM’s are bound to be interesting as a rule.
You seem to be fishing(kinda scummy IMHO).
Vote pede
This is a good idea to get public. It can help both town and scum, but since scum can figure it out among themselves as well, better to say it in the open.
This is my first actual game, but I’ve lurked the last one and read several others.
I found this flash file linked somewhere, which gives a nice overview of possible roles (with the note that the SDMB isn’t shy to add twists to them ;)).
Looking back, he could have just been talking about the color (though he already had one post after the opening color). His actual slip quoted:
If it was a real slip about having powers:
- He is a power role: his suggestion it is a power role is a half claim, to avoid a full claim;
- He is vanilla and trying to get scum killed instead of a real power role;
- He is anti-town: setting up for a false claim. But this is IMO unlikely and other scums would have advised against it (they can talk both day and night)!
Just wanted to point out the last again: Scum talking privately day and night really hurts town, because each scum post could be previewed by the other ones to catch mistakes! Also makes manipulating strategies and votes much easier.
Your reasoning is the same why I voted for Pleonast myself, but everyone seemed to ignore it. Also in hindsight his votes for Total Lost (random) and Rapier42 are invalid (which on reading the rules is clear). Pleonast has unvoted pedescribe now, but has not restored his Rapier42 vote (or explicitly unvoted him).
I’m considering to put my vote back, but like you said we still haven’t heard from all players and I’ll wait for that. Maybe they don’t play in the weekend?
My comments:
238–suggesting ideas, even bad ideas, is not anti-Town.
241–I did not come out favor of the same idea. I kept my vote on Rapier for the reason I stated then “to see what the official vote looks like”.
The First and Last Time I Beg For a Little Sympathy, I Swear:
I’m working the last two 12-hour nightshifts of my internship this weekend (just finished one, the other’s tonight), so I’m going to be silent for a bit following this post. And I admit, I’m not reading closely, but I will get myself very much caught up on Monday night.
So I’ve got nothing as far as votes yet. I find the developing wagon against pedescribe to be very weird. I don’t see anything particularly scummy about his behavior. He got called on a slip (that doesn’t seem remotely slippy to me–it wasn’t a very bright or important thing to say, but IMHO, it’s harmless) and, well, it sucks to get called out like that so early in the game. Doesn’t this happen a lot on Day 1? Everyone puts up a fight not to be the first one lynched, with barely anything to go on. On the other hand, I also see very little that’s overly scummy about Pleonast’s behavior. This all feels like typical Day 1 stuff–the exchange of strategy ideas means a lot of fertile ground for people to sound like they’re flip-flopping. However, I reserve the right to do a 180 on either or both of you later toDay with enough damning evidence. Someone’s gotta swing; I’m just saying that ideally, there would be a more compelling reason to vote for someone.
Sorry I’ve got nothing more substantial, but I have only skimmed Page 2 and have been awake for a very, very long time…now I’ve got to go to bed! (And I don’t want to get modkilled in my sleep!)
VOTE COUNT
pedescribe (4) - Almost Human, bufftabby, hawkeyeop, diggitcamara
Pleonast (2) - JSexton, Thing Fish
What are you talking about? I said the color was pretty cool. It is. Admit it, the color is pretty cool. Everyone seems to think I’ve claimed some sort of power role because of it. I have no clue why. Then AH comes in and says I “slipped” scum? WTF? I tell her “I did not slip. And everyone else who thinks I’ve slipped think it’s a power role slip anyway”.
What? Fishing? How could you even see that as fishing? I denied her accusation. That’s all I did. What does that even have to do with fishing.
Oh, I see. Sorry, I thought you were looking for something more specific. My rule of thumb is 20-25% scum, depending on power level. That works out to 5-6 scum, as others have said. At a guess, I’d go with 5 mafia and 1 SK or other loner role, but that’s just looking at what’s typical. Storyteller is creative enough that I’m wary of pinning too much on that sort of speculation.
That seems needlessly antagonistic, Pleo. Do you have something against me?
This isn’t a huge thing, but I’m noting it for later. I’m a bit put off by Natlaw’s willingness to see which way the wind is blowing, and act accordingly. It’s a somewhat reliable tell for new scum who want to fit in, though it’s certainly not uncommon for new town either. Not worth a vote, but worth watching.
This isn’t true, in my experience. A killing role (SK) is something the mafia wants alive in the early game, as they are overwhelmingly likely to kill town. I’ll grant you that it’s far more damaging to the mafia when one of theirs gets cross-killed, but it’s worth the risk.
A survivor role wins with the mafia more than town. Last time I ran the numbers, it was about a 2 to 1 ratio.
Cultists play havoc with both sides, but that’s not a factor in this game.
The town has to treat all non-town players as scum that need to die. Sure, you might prioritize a SK over a survivor, just to avoid a nightkill. Thing is, a claimed survivor might just be masking a more lethal role. One recent game on another site featured a “neutral” role that merely had to be the lead voter on four lynches to outright win. Yeah, that sucked for us. Lynch all non-town. Period.
I’ve lost track of how many games I’ve played in. I think it is somewhere between 8 and 12, maybe more though. I’ve asked to be subbed more than I’d like to admit too, which makes the count even more fuzzy.
“Slips” (even just perceived ones) around the use of a single word seem to happen pretty much every day (multiple times each Day) and tend to get a huge amount of attention. While certainly not my favorite way to play the game, they are a fact of life and can be exploited for gains by any alignment. I only ask the newbs that you try not to be a one-trick pony. Don’t just cherry pick “slips” and base all of your analysis on them.
To the game at hand…
I’d really like to hear more from some of the other players, and I know that people want to see what I have to say too. Day 1 is often a bit of a catch 22 in that fashion.
I’ve tried to stay as objective as possible about the early votes that came out of a few players, but I think that is where my first vote is going to come from. Pleonast has gotten a good bit a scrutiny and suspicion, but I’m not really bothered to much by his explanations and justifications. The vote against Pleo that stands out, in my mind, is JSexton’s. It came in early out of the gate against one of the few people who is actually posting. This vote is circumstantial and based largely on a hunch that may be easily over-turned by a decent defense, but I’m going to make my wincing Day 1 vote for
JSexton
I fear that you were so quick to vote because you a) may have some insight as to other players’ alignments because you’re scum, b) may have seen a Townie (or at least someone not on your scum team) make a play early in the game that left him vulnerable, and c) may have acted to exploit both the insight and the vulnerability into a vote.
I want to be clear that I am not proposing that Pleo is town in any way but a weak assumption to arrive at a weak Day 1 vote.
Now Pleonast had an early vote too, but he’s also posted a good bit in his own defense and what he has posted seems reasonable.
Sure. PFKs have a natural incentive to help townies. They need to pretend to be townie in order to not be lynched. So they will act like a vig or a detective or whatever role makes sense for the power they have. Usually it doesn’t matter to them who dies, so they can play the game like a pure townie would. There is no such incentive for PFKs to work with scum, because there is no ability to communicate. They can’t pretend to be scum nor make arrangements with them. Thus, it is usually in PFK’s interest to appear as townie as possible. Since PFKs are playing alone they are generally going to have the most powerful roles, which can be absolutely devastating to scum. Naf in Marvel and Hal in Batman are good examples of PFKs that were deadly to scum. Even if they to help scum instead of town, they could not have hindered town all that much.
There are other reasons too. Players generally seem to have to natural affinity to helping town over scum, even if it doesn’t matter which does better to them. Just look at this game before roles were given out. Everyone wanted to help the town.
This isn’t to say PFK’s are always more helpful to town then scum, but as a general rule they are. I have argued with Story on this point, so he might very well have taken some of this into consideration. There are ways to have pro-town PFKS, but just because a player hinders town doesn’t mean he doesn’t hinder scum more. We need to not just to look at things from a town perspective whether we are designing games or playing them. If you want specific help designing/balancing your PFKs I’d be happy to help.
I’m not sure what I think of separate threads per day. Makes quoting more difficult.
Anyways, Pede this was your original post
The look pretty cool was right after the got my pm. Sure looks to me like they are connected.
There were some posts about ‘early votes thrown about’ (I see Cookies voted now for you for that reason) and people saying they didn’t see the reason to vote for Pleonast, so my unvote was more to indicate that it was more a suspicion of him, than that I was completely sure.
Since only he and pedescribe had votes, I wanted to look at other players more first (I unvoted before pedescribe got more votes).
I see how it looks suspicious, but if I restore my vote now it’ll look even more so :smack:.
My suspicion of Pleonast isn’t entirely cleared, but he gave a good answer why he hasn’t revoted Rapier42. I still like to hear more why he thinks listing last nights target is a good idea for town.
He gave the reason that it makes false claims harder, but coupled with him saying ‘townies shouldn’t lie’ it only gives scum more information to analyze who the power roles are.
Suggesting anti-Town ideas is anti-Town. Not all anti-Town actions are done by scum, but anyone taking an action for which obvious scum motivation exists deserves to be looked at closely.
It is true that you came out in favor of a slightly amended version of the idea, which still has serious flaws (Natlaw pointed out one example of such in post 244) in that it could give scum information about other power roles as well as the investigator.
I’m keeping my vote where it is for now, but I’m certainly hoping to have something firmer to hang a vote on by the end of the Day.
Pleonast, could you please go into some more detail on your thought process that led you to quickly vote Pedescribe for that slip, and what about his response led you to unvote him? I think I can figure out what you were thinking, but I’d like to hear it from you.
In past games, I’ve come out swinging, speculating on color and other players with equal abandon. I decided not to do that, this game, in favor of observing and seeing what other folks have to say without the interference of the bias of my own stated opinions.
Thats kinda boring, though.
On Pedescribe: I agree that it feels like there could be something to his “slip”. The use of the “…” appears to connect two related ideas. I’m NOT buying a scum PM behind it, though. He’d have a scum board to express that particular sentiment on. His defense has been peculiar, which is mostly what makes me feel there’s something to his slip, but it’s not been the type of defense I’d associate with scum. So if there’s something there, it’s Town or 3rd-party. I’ll agree with whoever said it first, I hope a better reason to vote for somebody comes along by the end of the Day.
Which brings me to Pleo: I’m getting a funy vibe from Pleo. His defense to the apparent contradictions he’s been called on is entirely reasonable. But something is nagging me, I think its the aggressiveness. This is not intended as a smudge, and I want to say that up front, because I AM being wishy-washy with regard to him.
Right now, I’m strongly tempted to vote for Natlaw. Here’s a pretty drastic butchering of a post by Chucara:
Here’s the full quote:
As Jsexton said, the vote/unvote thing is interesting, but I’m even more disturbed by the above. Thats a horrible misrepresentation. The ONLY reason I’m not voting Natlaw right now is because of the newbie factor, but that doesn’t stop her (her? him?) from earning a shot of my Arched Eyebrow of Doom.
Sorry for not posting much before this. My wife just got sick, only days before we leave for Christmas, which made the last few days a madhouse. A few comments.
Pedescribes slip is certainly a slip I think. I’m not so sure it’s a scum slip though. Definately not worth voting for him over it, regardless of what power role hinting he may have done. All voting for him now is going to do is force him to claim(assuming he’s either a power role or scum/PFK). At which point, there will most likely be a rush of unvotes on him. Or are you all so sure of his scumminess that you’d be willing to possibly lynch a major role, like say a detective or doctor? The best course of action right now is to keep it in mind and watch him.
Pleo is acting like, well, Pleo. He can be very aggressive, especially early on. He also likes to punish what he feels is anti-town play, just look at the way he played Vig in the last board game. His actions so far are, to me, something of a null tell.
Unfortunately, after this post I will be leaving shortly for the airport. We’re flying to Arizona to visit the in-laws for a week for Christmas. I’m not looking forward to being on a plane for 6 hours with a sick wife, let me tell you. Internet access is extrememly limited at best at the in-laws, so I don’t feel comfortable making a vote when I won’t be around for a week.
Well, in the original context it might have seemed like an innocent slip by someone who had a power role. But your defense against AH seems to show that you had tried to get someone else to reply by saying something akin to “Yeah… my PM is pretty cool too”, thus outing a power role.
Or, like I said before, your second post makes your first post seem like a fishing expedition.
Well, they aren’t. Originally, I was gonna say:
But I decided that the last two points were pretty boring, so I changed it to
but I didn’t notice that there could be unfortunate implications to that.
Besides, I wouldn’t even say that if I had the opportunity. My role’s pretty boring.
I…what? You are reading way too much into this. I did not intend that. At all.
Hey, sorry I am still not participating. I am working on catching up, I promise. I have been (almost) keeping up with the reading, but I haven’t had much time to put together any thoughts yet.
I do have a quick question though, because I am working on a theory.
This goes out to anyone who might be involved in running the game, not necessarily Story if story isn’t around to answer:
**
We don’t have a post restriction and so can talk at Night. What about scum or any other party (third party or town group that is allowed to talk offboard) can they talk during the Day?**
My guess is that they can, but I would like confirmation before I spend time chasing ghosts.