Late in the game, control of the Brig could be crucial - Scum are aiming for a majority among non-Brigged players, so locking Town up, or releasing Scum, could win the game for them. There’s certainly an argument for protecting confirmed Town early in the game - I’m not sure if I’d advance it to protecting “likely” Town. We could easily be wrong, especially early on before we confirm Doc results.
The fact that so many actions are public is interesting:
Doc - as mentioned, we’ll all know who the Doc is investigating, and the Scum will know what the result will be. So the Doc should announce results when they get them. I’m wondering if it would be possible to Brig the Doc overnight and still have them receive results. If so, it might permit some sort of mutual confirmation. I’m asking Pleo about this now.
Executive Officer - I don’t see how, without very good information, there can be any value in promoting/demoting. We’re just as likely to put Scum into a power position as we are to take them out of it. If we do get confirmed Town, we can try to promote them into a power position in the Day and Brig them at Night, but frankly I think that’ll be tricky.
Captain/Chief of Security - Generally, I’d expect the Chief to carry out the Captain’s orders. If we encourage the Chief to second guess the Captain, we’re giving Scum a loophole to manipulate their WinCon. If the Chief wants to ignore an arrest warrant, they’d better give very good reasons. Similarly, if they have a choice of who to arrest/release, they’d better lay out their reasoning as well. I acknowledge that just following orders could allow a Scummy captain to manipulate the loophole - but at least this way we only have to worry about one power position at a time, rather than guess which of the two we have to trust.
I agree - we can’t force people to follow us, and the discussion on strategy will a) possibly develop a good strategy and b) get people to commit to a position on who they trust and what actions should be taken. Also, as actions are largely public, we should definitely be holding people to account for their decisions and that process is going to be easier if there’s been a good discussion of all the ramifications beforehand. (
Given the potential influence of Brigging on the balance between the two sides, I would definitely want to avoid players being locked up or released at the last minute of the Day. I’m happy to let the Doc put in a last minute order, especially where the vote’s gone down to the wire and we’d want want to investigate the runner-up. Promotions/demotions I think should generally be agreed upon, and based on pretty convincing evidence so I’d be very suspicious of a last-minute shuffling of power-roles.
Care to share with the rest of the class, then? 'Cause I’d love to know why mine are the only votes that counted.
Unless it’s because, you know, I’m the Captain, and they know better then to let my sexy, sexy votes not count…
Hey, can you guess how I decided to play this?
I was initially leaning towards “do advise the rank positions”, too, I just can’t quite figure out why I was, given how strongly opposed I usually am to telling power roles what to do. Most especially the ones who are known or very likely to be town, but really even the ones whose alignment is questionable (as would be the case here). I’ve picked up on scum many times due to illogical use of their claimed role, something that might not have happened if said scum had the benefit ahead of time of knowing what the bulk of townies expected of him.
There is the alternate course of forcing actions (that is we take straw polls on everything, and the power roles hold to the majority decision or expect to pay the price) – in certain circumstances that can also be effective to use one scum against another one. But I don’t really see it as practical here, even if it were advisable.
To a certain extent there’s a risk of the townies ourselves providing cover for scum decisions if we give too much advice, isn’t there?
Ultimately I think it comes down to whether it’s more important for the town as a whole to be able to correctly judge the occupants of the power positions than it is for the power positions to use their abilities optimally. The latter is more likely if there is more discussion. There former is more likely if there is less.
So what if we are wrong? We’ve locked up a scum for the night, removed their vote the previous day and for as long as they remain locked up, and possibly (if not likely) restricted their actions in a meaningful way. How is this bad?
I’ll give you this: if the “likely town” turns out to be a town power role (cracker, etc), there is a possibility of negative consequences.
Mutual confirmation?
I’ve touched on my belief that it’s important to get a good feel for the players in the power positions – I would therefore not necessarily be opposed to a move that pushed a lurker down the ladder and a more talkative player up it.
Both of them should weigh in heavily on the day’s arrests and/or releases. The Captain can only be removed by lynch or night kill, correct? (He could be brigged, but would go back to the previous position if ever let out. Again, correct?) If so, then if anything I think I’d be more comfortable with the Security Officer driving that boat, awkward as it might be. At least a security officer making bad decisions is also vulnerable to removal by the XO – there’s one more incentive for him to do things right.
Storyteller isn’t in this game. I think it’s pretty clear that you can only vote for people in the game (since your Story vote wasn’t counted the last/first time the vote count was posted). So even though IANTM, I’m guessing your Fred vote will probably not count. : p
I read through the previous game (admittedly hastily) and I’ve been considering the roles. Primarily my own (for now) since I have a power to promote as EO.
It seems to me that the promotion power is very valuable. Right now the only things that we can do to affect rank are to promote or kill. Scum can night kill, and if they have the ability to promote as well it leaves us susceptible to key positions (doctor, primarily) being jostled at bad times, especially in endgame. It’s a pretty effective counter to every officer – including the Captain, given the Chief’s veto power. As such, I’d put the rank of key positions as follows:
Doctor (granted this would be relatively easy to out a scum player sooner rather than later, but in the meantime we’ve lost critical time doing proper investigations)
Executive officer
Engineer (he more or less has to get very lucky with this number of players in the pool)
Captain and chief of security (they ultimately share a power, with captain nominating and chief vetoing)
… in order of important to Town. That said I don’t plan to be promoting anyone in the short term. To me it makes the most sense to leave power roles where they are, since the bulk of them must be Town (presumably!). Perhaps it makes more sense to fiddle with the people just below officer rank if there is someone near officerhood (the #6-9 slots, maybe) who I have a reason to want, or not want, to move up as people are killed - but by the time we know enough to make a good judgement, I bet there will be changes in the officer ranks and/or Mate claims and the like.
You’re right that there’s no harm in brigging a Scum. I’m just generally reluctant to start treating people as if they’re Town until we’re very sure they are - the more we take actions that treat people as if they were Town, the more we’ll treat that as fact rather than best guess. Purely rationally we wouldn’t, but I think it would have a subconscious effect.
I’m not sure if this will work but e.g. **Mahaloth **(current Doc) investigates Inner Stickler (next in line). We brig Maha after he submits that order. If he still gets a result (big if) then a reported-Town IS investigates Maha. (Obviously a Scum IS would get lynched). Assume IS reports Maha is Town. If Scum kill either of them then we get a near-definite confirmed Town who can be Brigged for his own protection on future Nights. If they both stay alive, then either we have two confirmed Town or we’ve isolated two very ballsy Scum. If the Scum are very lucky then one of these two is the Ring-Leader in a fluke of the ranking order: if the Ring-Leader hasn’t turned up dead by then we’ll have to wipe the slate clean - but that’s true of any investigation.
I quite like this as an idea, as it encourages everyone to talk.
The Captain is hard to remove. But that’s a good reason to make him accountable - if he’s making bad decisions I want him to justify it, not pass the buck to the Chief.
Right now, I’d rather the Chief and the Captain both be pretty open with their decisions and I don’t particularly like making the chief just follow the captain’s orders as long as they can justify the refusal.
It’s probably time zones (it was bed time for me in CET when I posted the post you replied to).
All this talk about promoting made me think “what about demoting?” - in essence it is the same but the the thing is that it isn’t just a promote - it also a demote of the player of the next rank (and vice versa).
Also since the Head of Engineering is a Night Action, if we don’t trust the Chief of Security we could swap him with the HofE, lynch him (or even swap, arrest and lynch if the CoS didn’t take an action yet) and still have someone else do the Night action.
In general I don’t think that arrest+lynch the same person is a good idea. Because if the lynchee is town it also robs him of his votes.
The death confirms that the investigation made was honest (it might be incorrect [del]until the ringleader flips[/del] since techically all scum can be ringleaders). So not really confirmed but likely so especially if one or more ringleaders show up dead.
I think the only other way to get confirmed town is claimed school mates and one of them is confirmed by death.
If I read the rules right a Hacker can replace the Captain or Exo (or anyone) with whomever he wants once.
How about this to keep our Captain honest: if he doesn’t have a good candidate by the end of the Day to arrest or release, he should put out an arrest warrant for himself. The Chief then can brig the Captain if needed.
I don’t think I like it though since outstanding warrants give the mutineers more options to reach their win condition (get someone as Chief, brig a town with outstanding warrant).
