fraud with peril
fraught with peril
I think this is actually a valid concern. In the games I’ve played and seen, there’s always a day 1 “lynch the lurker?” discussion where the consensus seems to be that lurking on Day 1 isn’t a scum tell.
But our strategy in this game is to divide the Day into sections where we go from nominations to accusations to lynchizations. I think this gives scum, especially on Day 1, a really easy incentive to “lurk” through half the Day. By doing this, they get to bypass things that hurt them in two ways 1) no one nominates them, which makes them less likely to swing and 2) they don’t have to worry about committing to someone early by voting for anyone.
I’m not saying it’s being done. I’m not even saying I don’t want to try this format, because I do. I’m just saying this model of doing things gives scum extra incentive to stay hidden until things blow over on Day 1. Maybe that’ll be useful information on Days 2-whatever. Only time will tell.
Oh haha! Didn’t even catch that!
Bookmark this link exactly as it appears:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=678349&goto=newpost
RyJae, I appreciate the explanation, I think I can understand your thought process a little better (Look, shiny! Oops!) and look forward to seeing you get stuck into this game, rather than posting more non-posts.
Ender, could you explain your point of view on multivotes? Are you voting **Red **based on a disagreement on strategy or does his opinion indicate scummy motivation?
Chucara, what does knowing someone for any lenght of time have to do with placing a vote? Why the hesitance?
Texcat, thanks for those useful links. That’s a useful post.
Lightfoot, I can sense you are quite opposed to Pizza’s plan, fair enough. I’m just willing to try something a little different and I’m reminded a little of early Day governor elections and 24 hour lynch countdowns which aim to encourage participation and discussion throughout the Day.
Good luck USC.
@ Johnny, are there any people in particular we’re waiting to hear from? ValSalva, **Meeko **and **fubbles **maybe? Lack of participation D1 is usually more an indication of life than alignment. **Meeko **mentioned having some issues. Is **ValSalva **even playing, I don’t think she’s confirmed yet. **Fubbleskag **is just lurking, probably scummily.
Choie, I’m sorry for being obsessed with you, this is now my third post in which I mention your name, it must suck being stalked and scum. If your style as scum is to sit back and twiddle your thumbs while others do all the legwork, keep it up.
Choie has many obsessive admirers. I seem to remember hounding her relentlessly all throughout De’endee Mafia and being ever so wrong about her alignment, yet fully convinced she was Satan’s sexy feminine form incarnate.
She’s the devil-woman, I *knew *she was. The only thing that convinced me otherwise was my death and subsequent spoiling and swallowing a gag-inducing amount of pride.
Occasionally, knowing a players playing style helps me pick who is not playing like they normally do.
I don’t mind voting, but I see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary to lead to towards anyone in particular.
In the interest of at least having a vote for now:
vote orthohedron
Because pancakes - that’s why 
Pancakes is a great reason, but since all we’re doing is playing Jedis and Siths and using the force to feel disturbances…
I sense a disturbance in the Force. I sensed it earlier and the feeling has not subsided even after leaving my desk and driving around town. The dark side surrounds this quoted post.
I wish to second the nomination of orthohedron.
Vote: orthohedron
(Color removed)
You are actually thirding the nomination.
This was my second post on the matter. The first described why I am wishy washy. The last game I played with Pizza where he came out with this “pizzaplan2013” he was scum, and I’m cautious about letting Pizza plan lead us…
That’s the beginning and end of it. It’s a meta reason…I’ve spent too much time on my own insecurities here, and don’t plan on mentioning it again.
I like parts of the plan in theory, because yes it does get people talking, but as I said in the last post, we’re spending too much time talking about the plan and not talking about the people nominated.
Really? You couldn’t even come up with anything to base your vote on? Not even reiterating someone else’s reasoning?
So you’re cautions about a Scum **Pizza **leading us, but you’re willing to have a Town **Pizza **lead for a bit? Ok, how would you know the difference at this point? I can think of one fool proof way you could know!
In your first post on the subject (which you mention above) you state:
I’m interested to hear what you found on your re-reading and who you would like to Nominate. Or alternatively you could talk about the people already nominated since that seems to be something you think would be helpful at this point.
That’s a very good point. I guess my feeling has been that usually the highly experienced players add more than enough signal… or is it noise, hmmm?.. to the early Days without my utterly poor thought-out ruminations added to the mix. Honestly it just takes me a while to get a “feel” for how the game is going, and since the first Day yields almost nothing but meta stuff, I figure my own contributions aren’t of much use since I’m embarrassingly unknowledgable about that stuff.
In my defense, I’m a really weird player in that I have almost no real strategizing skill (though I make damn good Excel charts!) and work almost entirely on instinct, which is probably why people either dismiss me or don’t trust me, because there doesn’t seem to be much there there. Particularly early in the game. Later on, my rhetorical skills are of much greater use.
But in the meantime, all I can do is make stabs in the dark about people whose play style I sorta-kinda-maybe know. And that’s why I’d rather lurk for a bit.
I will say that in my vaaaast three-game history I’ve been either the last townie to die (in two games) or stood victorious as sole scum (once). So I’m doing something right, knock wood. (Watch, I’ll be the first lynched now for sure. In a cop movie I’m the world-weary partner of the lead who announces he’s two weeks from retirement.)
I just don’t understand this question. If you’ve played with people before, you know something about how they play the game. F’rex, I know Silver Jan OMGUSes a lot but is a very good player despite that; I know Pleonast rushes to claim and then disappears (at least that’s what he’s done in the game I played with him); I know Guiri kinda acts as the Arbiter of Rightness and is often highly trusted by others, for good reason (in my past experience he was always Town, FWIW, which is nothing); I know gnarlycharlie is an emotional yet tricksy player; I know pizza is a huge strategizer and posts a lot and when he gets his claws dug into someone he is nigh impossible to change his mind; I know Normal Phase is a dangerous and smart player to have on your side. I’ve never played with Meeko but I’ve, um, read a lot about him in past games. Wild card.
These are purely my impressions, not necessarily accurate, but I don’t understand how you can question the notion that knowing someone’s game style is immaterial to how one votes in the game.
OoooOOOooh, just noticed this:
Interesting. Yesterday he used the fact that I was allegedly the only person who hadn’t confirmed to issue an early J’accuse in my direction. Disingenuous again? Seems odd for someone with his vast experience and skill to forget his reasons for accusing others, but maybe he gets nervous as Scum and thus tends to obfuscate? I admit I only have experience with him as Town, so who knows.
So combined with his earlier wide-eyed question, “What does knowing someone have to do with how you vote?” this is a lot of disingenuousness for someone with his experience. Coupled with his weird mistrust of me (which, ironically, can only be due to your past dealings with me because I’ve done almost nothing in this game so far), I’m looking very very askance at him.
To answer his mud-flecked question:
It’s even worse being stalked and Town, frankly. The sole time I’ve played as Scum, I wasn’t hugely nervous when people’s eyes aimed at me. Not sure why. It wasn’t just ‘cause I was overpowered (I was but never felt like it–I genuinely thought being the only Scum with no one to strategize with was a hopeless, frustrating situation), but I guess I had a grudging respect for people who could see through my facade. But the two times (three, now) I’ve been Town and accused falsely? That gets my dander up! Like a cornered cat, I am, all a-hissin’ and a-makin’ my fur stand on end to pretend I’m bigger than I am.
Hee. Flattery will get you (almost) everywhere, pizza. If it helps I felt the same way about you, without the feminine part. I was quite genuinely shocked when you flipped Town–because you’d been so tirelessly on my case, it only made sense if you were Scum, because I truly couldn’t fathom why anyone would think me guilty.
Ugh, now, see this is what I mean about having nothing useful to add. I just don’t know enough about most players this early in the game to say anything that would be genuinely helpful. As for the suspects that have been named so far? I mean, Johnny Bravo and orthehedron’s newbie questions seem perfectly legit to me since they’re similar to the questions I asked in my first games. Babale’s confusion about the Barn isn’t hugely different from my own. Pleonast is almost impossible to call. Far as I can tell, he’s basically claiming a role, so he’s either trying to attract attention from Scum (as a redshirt Townie) thus deflecting it from our genuine role players, or he’s trying to stay safe as a redshirt Townie, or he’s trying to stay safe as a Scum. Which is it? Hell if I know.
And though I’ve accused pizza because he’s already taken a leading role in the game, the truth is, that’s what he does, and I’ve seen him do it as Town exclusively, so why on earth am I holding it against him? Just because it was the only real instinct I had as yet.
Emphasis on was.
Now I can add Guiri to that, and with even more rationale than pizza, because I’ve actually caught Guiri in a flat-out inconsistency (or lie, to put it less charitably) that he’s used against me. So J’accuse right back atcha, mister.
vote GuiriEnEspaña.
Short answer: a combination of both.
Long answer: In the last Storyteller game, we had the ability to multivote too. Some people employed it to cast two or three simultaneous votes during a Day. With the exception of what ended up being the last Day, I never voted for more than a single person at a time. Call it a philosophical difference in play style. But multivoting, in and of itself, isn’t scummy. Just muddying the waters, IMO.
But Red’s suggestion went beyond a multivote. He was advocating making up to 8 simultaneous votes which can’t possibly serve any useful purpose for Town. At no point does any person in this game, with the exception of Story, know who all the Scum and all the Third parties are. To even claim that you could guess at that is ludicrous. What you’re going to get 99,999 times out of 100,000 is a goodly mixture of Town and scum in those 8 votes.
But on an individual level it just makes a huge mess of things. Anyone that gets lynched you get to say “Aha! they’re scum! I voted for them (and seven other people)” Well kudos to you the law of averages.
or “Whelp. He was town. But I voted for others. You should have lynched them because I know I’m right there!”
And if everyone does that? We’ll have 206 votes going into Day’s end! With no vote robot I might add. What a fiasco on just about every level.
So to summarize, the multivote’s ok but something I rarely if ever employ. But when you start advocating voting for 1/3 of our player base you’ve gone from a philosophical difference to pure anti-Town behavior.
And there’s another word for anti-Town. That’s Scum.
I am not very fond of the pile of votes on Ortho. First Diggit votes because he thought Ortho overplayed the newbie card. It’s Day One. If Ortho is still claiming newbie on Day Three, I might consider this vote. Then Chucara votes because of pancakes? And Pizza because of a disturbance in the force? At least Diggit and Pizza quoted the posts they found suspicious, but it looks like opportunistic suspicion of a noob to me.
**
Vote: Diggit
Vote: Chucara
Vote: Pizza **
I think you’re throwing some of the baby out with the bathwater, Ender. There can be benefits to multi-voting.
If used it (in no particular order):
- allows for much easier crowd-sourcing and the best part is that Storyteller is the one that has to keep track of it, and in in an official Mod capacity to boot.
- is more relevant than a single vote approach for Town. Townies can and should carry a handful of suspicious people around in their heads, not just one. If each player votes in accordance with their personal handful, the aforementioned crowd-sourcing and pooling of those suspicions by way of voting is much cleaner than having to remember and re-read posts where suspicions are discussed yet a vote is not made.
- Again, back to the crowd sourcing, it enables the Town to have a much better idea who is the next consensus candidate for a lynch in case of a claim that takes the lynch leader out of consideration. When we vote for only one person at a time, the runner up is not necessarily the 2nd most suspected player in the game. But if everyone has a bunch of votes down for their list of suspects, the runner up is determined from a much more granular and relevant consensus.
Hey, that’s my line. :mad: </kidding>
Unvote
Vote Chucara
I have no idea what to make of pizzaplan2013. It seems unlikely to get this many folks to go along with a plan with that many components. Are we all committed to it?
I can sort of see this in the early Days when associations between players are not very strong and you may have 3 separate suspicions. But later on in the game, many times I will have a list in my head that looks more like “If X is scum, then Y and Z probably are, too.” But then if X flips town, I have to go back and re-evaluate everything. If I spent the previous couple of days with votes on X, Y, and Z then now I have votes for Y and Z on my record when I may not actually think them as being Scum on their own. In fact their scumitude was strictly predicated on the scumitude of some one else. Now the voting record is less than clear. We all know it is difficult to go back and re-read hundreds of posts from the early Days, but it is easy to go back, check the vote counts and try to find patterns. With a large number of multi-votes the patterns can become lost in the noise and can easily be obscured by Scum.
Most assuredly not.
I’m not saying that there aren’t downsides to mutli-voting. Ender’s post didn’t reference any possible benefits.
Another comment on this, ymmv, but this is exactly why it is a good idea to keep contingencies up to date along with suspicions. I often get some heat when I qualify my votes or suspicions with the other side of the coin. People seem to think it is wishy-washy and that I’m trying to not be accountable for my vote. But it is how I try to prepare for being wrong.