Of course you knew, Meeko. For you, it was (or should have been) a simple process of elimination: The other three players were a confirmed Mason, an uncounterclaimed Doctor, and yourself. Likewise fubbles “knew” you were guilty (or at least, had to so pretend). It was Lightfoot that had to actually make a decision, and your play almost caused her to decide wrongly.
Well versed Chronos
that was mostly what I meant
Meeko’s attitude ( as I read it) was that since he was claiming Vanilla he wasn’t actively going to help= that didn’t give me much confidence in my decision
it really was a coin toss for me ( except fubbles not jumping in with a claim)
btw how did burby get the message?
and did anyone try to kill me?
We didn’t try to kill you because we were confident that we could block you as necessary. Also, since you refused to actually claim Doc (for whatever reason) there was still a chance that you’d get lynched at some point.
Our plans fell apart when Dizzy tried to nightkill me and I didn’t receive a PM telling me that my bulletproof had gone off. I don’t know if that was an unintentional flub as a result of the mod change or if my bulletproof acted differently than Suburban’s. Either way, my thinking was no PM = no nightkill attempt. We left wombat unblocked, thinking that either a nightkill would bounce off of me, or that **Meeko **would get ganked.
Then wombat nightkilled me. Everything kind of fizzled after that, since with **fubbles **still gone at that point it left **Texcat **alone to deal with trying to wrap things up.
good game town!
thanks for the game, storyteller. enjoy your growing family.
now to the spoilers.
So, if I know I am right, how exactly am I shooting my self in the foot? Isn’t doing the WRONG thing equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot? How is doing the right thing shooting yourself in the foot?
How much can a vanilla townie do?
There was one point I the game where I wanted to vote Pizza. I made the comment once we found / did Cookies in.
I couldn’t vote pizza. They were removed from the game.
I commented that I was left behind and couldn’t catch up.
Insert comment on participation here. … Because we all know that if I had participated, I could have gained powers I didn’t have.
I’m not sure what else Lightfoot wants from me.
Your job as vanilla isn’t to gain powers, because in most games vanillas can’t gain powers. Your job as vanilla is to examine the votes and rationales of the opposing players, and determine which of them are dishonest and/or scummy. In fact, that’s EVERY player’s job, and any powers or abilities are a side stage to that fundamental aspect of the game.
You “shot yourself in the foot” by refusing to actually play the game, and that’s frustrating. If all 20-some-odd players who didnt have powers threw up their hands and quit the game, why would any of us play?
Of course not. I never consider game balance when designing a game.
I refused to play the game?
Gee I hope I don’t win then.
Not sure how to comment here.
The vanilla players are the heart and soul of the town side.
They can trade their lives for mafia scum, any 1:1 trade or even 2 for one trade is usually good for town. That is why they can fearlessly accuse and lock on to whoever they consider to be the scummiest players. They can accuse several players at once and not worry about blowback, because if they die, they will flip town and it won’t be a town detective or doctor that dies instead. They are the pawns, but rather than being the least valuable, they are the most.
The mafia can typically take out a town doc or detective role in one lucky shot. They take all game to wipe out the vanillas.
Vanillas must provide cover for the power roles, and generate traction against suspects. They should generally take the lead in accusing, or pretend to be a town power role and hope they get picked off. They can even falsely claim things, to try to draw mafia fire.
If a town detective gets lucky and does his job well, he can trade himself for one or two scumbags, and usually die thereafter. He can also miss godfathers or whatever anti-investigative powers that the mafia have on their side. He can also hit nothing but townies and die before revealing. But he cannot win the game alone 99 times out of 100. Someone needs to vote with him, and if he goes, an unengaged vanilla town will have to win on their own.
Town cannot expect that the detective will save the day. They must assume the detective will die without revealing a single scumbag, or that the claimed detective may be mafia. As such, if the vanilla townies do not engage, they more than likely cannot win.
You can absolutely win without any town power roles. Vanilla mafia is based upon that idea. But if you rely solely on town powers, often times you will be duped by false claims and half of your teammates will stop accusing, discussing, or looking for scummy behavior, particularly when all we ever do is whatever the spokesperson for the detective or town powers says to do. That kills discussion and kills independent accusation, and causes the town to become predictable.
When fighting against an entrenched town mass, with loads of power roles, many of them publicly known, I can say with experience and several victories on my side, the town leadership can become too predictable. Not that long ago, a draw was forced based on that very principle. All of the town’s most valuable and vulnerable players were known, all their moves were easily predicted and thwarted, and it was relatively straightforward to determine who needed to die next for us to win.
If there is no leadership, and everyone’s accusation is listened to, and town powers and the data that come with it are considered but not considered the word of God, and everyone remains engaged, then town presents too many targets for the mafia, and their lynch pattern and night activity becomes too unpredictable for the mafia to reliably thwart. If everyone in the game makes it their personal business to accuse, hound, and then lynch their top suspects, then it doesn’t matter if they are town powers or not. The sheer number of accusations mean that town is going to end up accusing every mafioso, which increases the chances that every mafioso will be lynched. If certain suspects are ignored, that increases the chance that a mafioso will sneak through and prevail.
Town’s main threat to the mafia are their numbers. Every townie must do their task and make the accusations. If they fail to do so, then they pose no threat to the scums. Townies who don’t accuse, don’t vote, or merely bandwagon and don’t discuss, don’t move their votes around, are very easy to predict, avoid, and conquer. Their behavior drags down their team. Inactive teammates are just as bad as dead teammates, if not worse- rather than proving a threat to the scums, they provide cover. They become lynch bait.
Every townie must take their responsibility to the team seriously. The mafia will eventually destroy all the players that pose an actual threat to them, and leave alive the folks who appear distracted, disengaged, or will just bandwagon whoever is the top suspect. Then it becomes a simple task to create momentum on the wrong person and watch that townie contribute to his own failure.
Dissent must happen, but cooperation is crucial.
That is primarily why I advocated, as early as possible, accusations on suspects for no particular reason, and keeping the tally low. You must generate independent accusations and begin targeting the mafia blindly, as soon as possible. You might not point fingers at a scumbag, but some townie will, and if they keep doing it, it’s going to become rather uncomfortable for the scums as that accusation never goes away. They are forced to murder that townie, or eventually be lynched by that townie, who was just shooting blind. That’s not a great choice.
It’s not that I expect a townie to guess all the mafia. It’s that, of any random ten townies, I bet you one of them is going to randomly accuse scum on round one. And I want them to keep doing it, over and over, round after round, even while considering other suspects. That is their job. Someone’s going to get lucky. And if we all did it, then every scumbag would be accused on round one.
And if the tally is low, that means there’s a real chance that a couple votes could shift, and lynch a scumbag round one. That is how you should play the opening. And that generates data for later.
But I digress. Folks aren’t interested in that kind of strategy I suppose. The bottom line is that treating a vanilla role like it is worthless is like treating an offensive lineman like he’s worthless. You do that, and your quarterback is going to be in for a very bad game. And you will lose.
Great game, story! Thanks for seeing it through, and hope you’re having fun getting to know Aaron.
I think Scum played pretty well (with perhaps one notable exception in the area of PM-faking!). We started well, and pulled back from initial setbacks, but Town were too good.
Meeko, for what it’s worth, IMO vanilla town is the best town role to have. You ask what a vanilla town can do - the answer is, they can win the game by finding scum. Precisely because they don’t have powers to preserve, or PIS to keep to themselves, vanilla have freedom to challenge anybody, stick their neck out and lead Town to lynches. If you make that your focus next time your vanilla, you’ll find their’s plenty for you to do.
thought experiment for vanilla roles-
[spoiler]Example game, 20 players, 3 mafioso, all vanilla roles. How would you approach it?
Round one, everyone accuses someone for no particular reason. This person is now their “chosen suspect”. The idea being to keep the accusations spread as evenly as possible. Every mafioso in the game, or most of them, receive a vote round one, and are put on the spot as a potential lynchee. Odds are they escape from this unscathed, but, the person who voted for them is still alive, most likely. And so it goes…
Do they murder the person who chose them? So soon? That’s a bit flinchy. Do you leave them alive? Especially if they’re tenacious about voting for you? That’s also risky. No matter what, pressure is exerted on the scums. Further, do the scums choose and vote for each other all game? That’s good for bluffing, but means you’re that much more likely to lynch a scumbag. Everything is now a double-edged sword.
Several rounds go by, people are dead, and now what? Folks that have been murdered are proven innocent. If they were the ones accusing the mafiosi, then the continued survival of said mafiosi grows more and more suspect. If they were not the ones accusing the mafiosi, then those that were are probably still alive, and still accusing them.
And no intelligence or decision making has gone into this at all. You’re simply continuing to accuse your randomly chosen suspect, and waiting for the mafia to poison themselves with their wine in front of me choices. Murder my accuser, or let him live and keep accusing me? Won’t it be suspicious when neither one of us ever dies? I’ll be closer and closer to being lynched as the total number of votes drops, and that same guy keeps accusing me. I’d better kill him… but when?
You put that kind of pressure on the scums, and it makes things a lot easier for a town doctor or detective to come in and push things in town’s favor permanently, if such a role exists in the game.
This is what vanilla roles can and should do. They put the challenge to the mafia- you will be accused all game long unless you kill me. If the opportunity arises, I will indeed lynch you. If not, I’ll lynch someone else, but rest assured, I’m coming for you.
You’re vanilla townie. Your top suspect dies, choose another one. Join in on someone else’s top suspect, try to push them into the pit of fire, and see if you can’t help someone else’s lucky guess roast a scumbag. I’d bet you that even if your initial guess is wrong, your second or third will nail a scum. And the sooner you’re correct, the better the odds town has for winning.
It’s just a numbers game. People over-complicate it. Even when the detective fails to find scums, or the doctor fails to stop a murder, eventually they will claim and now the mafia is stuck with an even more depressing choice: murder the claimed detective, or the doctor, or the guy that will not. ever. stop. voting. for. me.
Rather than an organized dictatorship, or a lawless mob, town should behave somewhere in the middle- no singular leadership, but an organized, progressive strategy that inevitably leads to the mafia being accused throughout the game, and probably picked off by sheer luck. Under threat of death, and several rounds worth of that to analyze. Even the most experienced poker players tend to crack under that kind of tightening noose.
This is better than 15 players voting for one suspect every round, no pressure or voting record on anyone else, suspect dies, flips townie, repeat next round. You don’t pressure any scums or learn much of anything with that kind of voting strategy. The only thing you get is lucky, sometimes. But you won’t be able to tell who was on the team of that scum you lynched. Everyone voted for him, and it was safe to do so. If the mafia bussed him, when did they do it? Early? Late? In the middle? You can’t really tell. The wagoning removed the discussion and the thinking and all the pressure and subtlety and all the risk and any tells there might have been.
Nothing makes me happier as a scumbag to face a single-minded town voting all the same way. That way, every wrong lynch means every townie guessed wrong, you can’t tell them apart, and they’re all demoralized for both being wrong and having made no significant progress. And if they guessed right, I voted for my own teammate, and I look just like everyone else. You can’t tell it was me on his team at all. All of my choices are easy. I might even start murdering completely at random just to make sure there’s nothing to be learned from reading my murder pattern.[/spoiler]
My biggest problem with that is that, as a game, it sounds pretty dull.
Day One: pick someone at random. Vote for them.
Day Two: Vote for them.
Day Three: Vote for them.
Day Four: Vote for them…
Where’s the gameplay? Where’s the fun? The “intelligence and decision making” are why I play the game. Not having to apply those for several rounds is a bug, not a feature.
Do you honestly think your play contributed much if anything to the Town win? Serious question. You seem to be taking individual credit here, and I really hope I’m mistaken.
The problem for me with Pizza’s plan is that villagers will be tunnelling each other even more than they are tunnelling scum (because there are more town than scum).
Fifteen people on the same wagon is no good, but having 2 or 3 strong wagons is really useful. You have a much higher chance of wagoning scum, and the voting record becomes very significant when scum have to choose between bussing or saving each other.
So who do y’all think some of the MVPs of the game were, town-wise?
I think that Diggit’s barn post ended up being an extremely strong play for town in the long run, even though it was only strong after the wolves ended up killing Guiri. If Babale hadn’t been cleared, the game might have turned in scum’s favor. It’s ironic that even though Babale wasn’t playing, his presence as a confirmed town was still really powerful.
pizzaguy, the problem with that plan is that it puts no pressure whatsoever on the Scum. A Townie voting randomly is no threat at all, because a single voice will never get anyone lynched, and nobody’s going to convince anyone else to vote based on “Well, I guessed randomly”. And if the game starts off with random votes, how will it ever transition to non-random ones? Much better if people vote for actual reasons. Yeah, the early-game votes will be rather weak, but weak is better than nothing, and they at least provide the seeds for later, stronger votes to grow from.
Uh, yes?
You guys seem to be worshipping Lightfoot here.
Cookies, did the last lynch end in a tie?
How does that happen, if I didn’t contribute to the win?
I’m sick of no one noticing what I did here on the last day.
Babale drawing a Mason was definitely a lucky break for Town.
An all vanilla game wouldn’t be very fun to play, I don’t think. Maybe some sort of equipotent information delivery system, but that would be quite a challenge to balance fairly for the scum team. Maybe a multi-faction game?
I’m years overdue to actually finish any of my half-baked set ups. I’ll get around to it. Next week…
Then there’s really no basis on which to communicate with you, not about this game at least. Perhaps next time.