I don’t know if using the barn to announce investigations is a good idea… Without knowing who did the investigation, its a shot in the dark as to whether we trust them or not. And there’s always the risk of some sort of stalker power telling the wrong people who wrote what.
Which reminds me:
What happens if multiple people try to write on the barn during the same night?
Then all the messages will appear on the Barn. It’s a big barn.
OOG
I am getting Internet hooked up tommorrow at my new place.
Consider this a 24 hour or so repreive from my posting volume.
/OOG
I say: let anyone who wants to use the Barn figure out how and when.
It’s a one-shot thing, after all and I frankly don’t see a sure-fire way to make it a transparent message for one and all.
Since no powers can be used at day, and we haven’t had a night cycle yet, is there any advantage to lynching on the first day? Is the scum population large enough that we have a decent shot at actually getting one of them? Do we have any ways, right now, to narrow down our choices?
Or is the idea that we’d better take a shot at offing one of the scum now since we’re guaranteed to lose a townie every night?
I would laugh and laugh. 
Re: the barn. In Evil Dead 2 (the game), I had a series of abilities including “Message,” which was identical to the barn ability everyone gets. My scum buddies and I used it to send a message to a member of our team who was NOT allowed access to our board until he killed someone. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t one of us.
There are bound to be a few genuinely useful uses for the message ability, although I don’t have a solid guess yet what that might be. Earth-shattering revelation, I know, but hopefully that at least gets the wheels turning for somebody, and with new players about I figure it doesn’t hurt to lay everything out, no matter how mundane.
Now I know I’ve been out of touch with Mafia! What is “Pizza’s three phase plan?”
We should lynch you just for making this joke…
Occasionally someone will make a boneheaded mistake and accidentally reveal the fact that they know things that Town could not possibly know, but for the most part it’s a shot in the gathering gloom at best. Still, the lynch is the only guaranteed method that Town has to rid or ranks of Scum, so holding off on doing so only guarantees that we’ll start out with a loss.
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
I’m pretty one of the phases is “kill everyone who’s not Pizza” 
Oh Johnny Bravo you’ve gone and done it now!
Just kidding, but that is a great question and one for which there is no right answer. We certainly have ways of narrowing down our choice on Day 1. We will have more than a week’s worth of posts to analyze! But there are some games in which there is no good choice despite hundreds of posts. We just won’t know until we get closer to the end of the Day.
It’s easy to maximize information–everyone makes a full claim. Some players will lie, but with most townies telling the truth, and a few strategic lynches, we’ll be able to quickly find the liars.
Of course, scum will gain the same information, which means many players will be loath to do a mass full claim. This may or may not be balanced by forcing scum to claim as well.
If we don’t do the mass claim and want to minimize forced claims, the best approach is to be skeptical of forced claims. Just because someone claims (under coercion) to have some awesome power doesn’t mean we shouldn’t lynch them. The only claims that should be automatically give a reprieve is one that can have their alignment confirmed. Having a confirmable power is not that useful.
Neither. I’m holding off revealing anything else about my role until Day Two.
I think you mean “believable” instead of “transparent”. A Barn message is by definition transparent, because everyone will see it. It cannot be believable because a message will be anonymous unless someone takes a lot of effort (there’s cryptographic ways to sign messages). And if a player want to send a message that is definitely from them, they can simply post it in this thread.
You answered your own question. But besides not giving up our shot at scum, there’s another reason to lynch.
We gain information from every lynch. We get the alignment of the lynchee, plus the motivation of everything they said. We get the votes of all the players. We get the discussions of all the players, even if we don’t know their motivations. By themselves, these things are not much, but they accumulate as the game progresses and they’re the surest way to catch scum in the long run.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
By the way, do players prefer if I do these multi-quote posts, or would you prefer I do one post per response?
All other things being equal (i.e. no scummers making any slip ups) probability favors a stretched Town neck at the end of Day 1, but sometimes you get lucky and manage to lynch a scum.
Bad ideas, different ideas, crazy ideas, poorly worded posts, poorly read posts…these are all molehills that usually get turned into mountains that the Town clambers up in the early game to hang someone on top of. The problem is that Townies are behaviorally and statistically more likely to exhibit such behavior because there are simply more Townies on the field of play, and some would also argue that scum are going to be more careful and conservative.
And then you have posts like this one, where wise words and anecdotes are freely offered, but someone(s) somewhere(s) will either innocently-though-paranoidly perceive it as ‘safe’ or ‘lacking of substance’ or ‘trying too hard to be the helpful townie’ and/or someone(s) somewhere(s) will maliciously spin it as such. Or both.
Welcome to the minefield, newbies. 
Hee! No, I just replied to the PM directly instead. (Also if people are anything like me, they get excited whenever there’s a new post and it’s no fun when it turns out to be unimportant housekeeping stuff like that.)
I’m not sure I get the whole Barn thing to be honest; that’s a new one on me. Would it help to read past Evil Dead mafia games, if they’re available on the SDMB?
Well here I am in bed with all the time in the world to post and pontificate.
I’m also here in bed with a currently 3 day fever from a flu that’s just ripping KC to shreds.
So I’m not sure how good I’d be at anything at the moment. Even puns. I’m just grateful it’s not my stomach that’s bothering me because I’m certain I wouldn’t lycanthrope.
My preference is to use multiquotes if you are responding to different posts.
But I really don’t like the sprawling line-by-line quote/response posts. It is very difficult for me to parse out and comprehend an argument made this way, but that is probably just me. Others love that shit.
Cool. I really appreciate the clarification, guys. I have more newbie questions. I hope it isn’t bad form to keep asking stuff, but I figure it’s best to get it all out of my system now.
When we’re talking about “full claims,” and then qualifying them with forced/unforced, are we just talking about copying/pasting our role information? And I assume there’s no way to really force someone to make that kind of claim short of the majority of players declaring “show us your role or else we lynch you”?
edit: Pleonast, I don’t really mind either way. Do whatever makes you happy.*
*Unless that involves turning into a wolf and eating me. Just sayin’.
I don’t think anything like the Barn has ever been used in an SDMB Mafia game before (i.e. a public anonymous statement). Just another new and interesting twist from storyteller.
A very recent proposition he made on another board here in which we divide Days into 4 (not 3, sorry) phases: nominations, discussion, defense/prosecution and judgement. It aims to ensure discussion from early on in the day, forces scum to take stances, avoids last minute forced claims because a player wasn’t around or under suspicion earlier, ensures cop results don’t result in lack of discussion, and basically provides some structure to the Day so lurking is discouraged.
I don’t believe it’s been tried and I suspect that it has less value on D1 than in later Days but I’m willing to consider approaches that enable scum hunting earlier rather than later.
A forced claim is when someone claims under lynch pressure. An unforced claim is made when there is no lynch pressure. Pleo has a history of making unforced claims on Day 1 because that is how he likes to roll. It seems that this time his role is affecting his roll, or perhaps that is what he wants people to think.
It’s a shame we only get to write on the wall once, or tomprrow you’d wake up to a great big “F1R$7 P0$7!!”