Random votes should be used to jump-start discussion on Day One. But by the end of the Day (and every Day), you should be voting for whoever you find most suspicious. Presumably that will be a different person than who you picked at random. Yes, that can be difficult to decide the first few Days, but it is the burden of a Townie to do so. Do your best.
Uh, is this some sort of admission that you didn’t get a a vanilla Townie role?
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And speaking of vanilla Townie roles, we seem to have two. This leads to an interesting effect. In the usual Mafia game, players are assumed to be a vanilla Townie by default. But we can’t quite do that here, since there are two roles. We could just assume everyone is one of the two.
But there’s another option–we can force everyone to claim Alpha or Beta vanilla. True vanillas will claim truthfully. Power roles and Deadites will have to lie.
Why would we do this?1. PRO: It will trap Deadites into a claim earlier. This will limit their options for later false claims. Although power roles will have to lie, they will have a true claim to make, and so won’t have to worry about furthering the lie. And Deadites falsely claiming power roles are typically easier to catch.
2. PRO: Some pro-Town powers may be able to target or detect specific vanilla roles. This will make it easier for the lying Deadites to be caught earlier. CON: This net may also catch power roles.
3. CON: Some Deadite powers may be able to target specific vanilla roles. We’d be feeding them what the need to know. Furthermore, this may make it easier for them to distinguish truthful vanilla roles from power roles who’ve lied about their redshirt status.
On the whole, I think it’s probably not a good idea to reveal vanilla type at this time. But I think we need to keep it in mind for later in the game, once we have more information available to evaluate the pros and cons.
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Oh, a general Mafia caveat–please don’t try to meta game players by looking at absences. Especially this time of year. I know I’ll be posting sporadically. Both sides of the game have families and other obligations.