# Mafia REUNION observation and comments ie the FORBIDDEN THREAD **URL:** \ **Category:** Thread Games\ **Created:** [January 6, 2017, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439 "2017-01-06T02:30:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/181 "2017-02-12T21:20:45Z")
We all knew a week ago that the professor was getting the axe -why so slow? ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/182 "2017-02-12T21:32:53Z")
> [@SCAdian](#): > > Only two hours to Dusk – where are the shenanigans? There are supposed to be earth-shattering shenanigans! Not when the lynch is a long-forgone conclusion, I’m afraid. ---
**Author:** ![storyteller0910](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecae2f/32.png) [@storyteller0910](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/storyteller0910)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/183 "2017-02-12T21:33:57Z")
> [@Svejk\_1](#): > > We all knew a week ago that the professor was getting the axe -why so slow? \*\*I could invent an exciting reason, but the actual reason is that my daughter commandeered the computer for a project due tomorrow. \*\* ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/184 "2017-02-12T21:43:46Z")
I’d figured it was late Mafia actions. ---
**Author:** ![sachertorte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sachertorte/32/3727_2.png) [@sachertorte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sachertorte)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/185 "2017-02-12T22:29:10Z")
Hi. ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2017, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/186 "2017-02-12T22:38:50Z")
Hi. Well, with both of us gone, the gang should actually get to work on finding Scum. I hope. ---
**Author:** ![NAF1138](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naf1138/32/3245_2.png) [@NAF1138](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NAF1138)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/187 "2017-02-13T00:19:21Z")
> [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](#): > > Hi. Well, with both of us gone, the gang should actually get to work on finding Scum. I hope. I feel like your death was 100% driven by meta gaming Prof. Much the way Idle’s was. Town is going to meta game itself into a loss. Post in here if either of you want spoilers. ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/188 "2017-02-13T00:36:29Z")
None for me, thanks, I’ll wait. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/189 "2017-02-13T00:46:51Z")
> [@storyteller0910](#): > > \*\*I could invent an exciting reason, but the actual reason is that my daughter commandeered the computer for a project due tomorrow. \*\* That’s pretty funny 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Thing\_Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@Thing\_Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing_Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/190 "2017-02-13T00:56:11Z")
Welcome, Prof and Sach! Hope you hang around in this thread for a while. I have to say, I totally would have voted for Prof based on the Pleonast vote/unvote thing (I mean, even if I were Town) and frankly I think it was poor play on Pleonast’s part to not think about how that would look if he flipped Seer before claiming. ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/191 "2017-02-13T01:01:01Z")
Pleo is an iconoclast unto himself. I admire his style, but I don’t understand it. ---
**Author:** ![sachertorte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sachertorte/32/3727_2.png) [@sachertorte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sachertorte)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/192 "2017-02-13T01:18:48Z")
> [@NAF1138](#): > > I feel like your death was 100% driven by meta gaming Prof. Much the way Idle’s was. Town is going to meta game itself into a loss. > > Post in here if either of you want spoilers. But there were plenty who were metagaming reasons why Prof. P. wasn’t scum but Town too. Also, I have to say that Prof. P plays in a way that looks remarkably insincere. I was ready to lynch Prof P until I remembered that in a previous game Prof P was the same way, which is also meta-gaming. I was fine with the Prof P lynch because he was either scum or vanilla. Vanilla are kind of a liability. Pushing something else could reveal Town Powers, which at this juncture is the biggest threat to scum. But the Pleonast thing was just dumb. And no vote record of any consequence. That’s probably the worst thing about it. I think perhaps scum realized that cultists would tip the favor to Town in a mass claim and that is why they finally realized that they needed to kill cultists. Stupid JB for pushing that stupid idea that cultists were against Town. I tried to walk that tightrope the best I could. Come on scum, are you really going to waste your kills on cultists? get in there and kill each other. My unshared read was TexCat: Serial Killer TexCat was way too focused on Third Parties and kept reminding everyone that “they don’t know that the cultists aren’t the extra killers,” which I found weird. Technically true, but such an assumption isn’t extraordinary. It seemed to me TexCat was working extra hard to make it look like TexCat didn’t know whether or not cultists were the extra killer, because TexCat is an extra killer. I figured if the SK’s weren’t interested in killing cultists, I wasn’t interested in finding SKs. Though my reads were terrible this game. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/193 "2017-02-13T01:34:39Z")
Personally, I don’t think I would have trusted **Pleonast** ’s breadcrumbs, but I would have been comfortable voting for **Prof** based on the “Here’s who I think is Scum, so I’m going to vote a Cultist” thing. There are probably other people I would have been comfortable voting for, too, but it turns out my death came just in time: I’ve been way too busy to do any serious analysis (busy in a good way, but unexpectedly so). ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/194 "2017-02-13T01:40:34Z")
**sachertorte** , my feelings on SKs are complicated. On the one hand, the death reveal I’m always happiest to see is that of a Serial Killer, because no other single death is as much of a benefit to Town. On the other hand, though, I never put any effort whatsoever into finding a Serial Killer, because there’s very little Town can do to find them. I mean, yeah, you can potentially catch them lying, just like Scum, but you can’t catch them with perfect information, or voting patterns, or the like, because they don’t really know any more than Town does. Pretty much all you can do with a Serial Killer is play as though they don’t exist, and hope that you’ll get lucky and kill them accidentally. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2017, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/195 "2017-02-13T18:04:46Z")
> [@Thing\_Fish](#): > > Welcome, Prof and Sach! Hope you hang around in this thread for a while. > > I have to say, I totally would have voted for Prof based on the Pleonast vote/unvote thing (I mean, even if I were Town) and frankly I think it was poor play on Pleonast’s part to not think about how that would look if he flipped Seer before claiming. Agreed -it’s a smudge that won’t wash off. Guess he had no better information to bread crumb. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2017, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/196 "2017-02-14T14:33:35Z")
Since that’s played out, I think I can safely say here that _I don’t breadcrumb_. One reason was demonstrated here–too easy to misjudge. The other reason is breadcrumbs are too likely to draw the attention of the wrong players. Best to simply reveal to everyone in plain language. ---
**Author:** ![paulwhoisaghost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e5b9ba/32.png) [@paulwhoisaghost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/paulwhoisaghost)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2017, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/197 "2017-02-14T23:14:36Z")
> [@sachertorte](#): > > But there were plenty who were metagaming reasons why Prof. P. wasn’t scum but Town too. > > Also, I have to say that Prof. P plays in a way that looks remarkably insincere. I was ready to lynch Prof P until I remembered that in a previous game Prof P was the same way, which is also meta-gaming. > > I was fine with the Prof P lynch because he was either scum or vanilla. Vanilla are kind of a liability. Pushing something else could reveal Town Powers, which at this juncture is the biggest threat to scum. But the Pleonast thing was just dumb. And no vote record of any consequence. That’s probably the worst thing about it. > > I think perhaps scum realized that cultists would tip the favor to Town in a mass claim and that is why they finally realized that they needed to kill cultists. Stupid JB for pushing that stupid idea that cultists were against Town. I tried to walk that tightrope the best I could. Come on scum, are you really going to waste your kills on cultists? get in there and kill each other. > > My unshared read was TexCat: Serial Killer > TexCat was way too focused on Third Parties and kept reminding everyone that “they don’t know that the cultists aren’t the extra killers,” which I found weird. Technically true, but such an assumption isn’t extraordinary. It seemed to me TexCat was working extra hard to make it look like TexCat didn’t know whether or not cultists were the extra killer, because TexCat is an extra killer. > I figured if the SK’s weren’t interested in killing cultists, I wasn’t interested in finding SKs. Though my reads were terrible this game. As VT I was trying to egg on scum to cross kill or kill cultists. It seemed to work, as the wolves killed mafia and the next day the mafia killed you. No offense, but to me it was better than them killing town. And it could be that nothing I said had any impact on their decisions, but my ego demands that I consider it possible. Sent from my SM-G930T using Tapatalk ---
**Author:** ![paulwhoisaghost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e5b9ba/32.png) [@paulwhoisaghost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/paulwhoisaghost)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2017, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/198 "2017-02-14T23:15:39Z")
I’ll take spoilers whenever a mod has a chance. Sent from my SM-G930T using Tapatalk ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2017, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/199 "2017-02-15T02:11:21Z")
Congratulations to **paul** , for getting night-killed as a vanilla. And I really hope **Meeko** doesn’t think that vanilla are worthless. That’s my second-favorite role to play (the first being some crazy weird role that doesn’t make sense and is impossible to get any actual use out of). It’s easy to say how to play as a Detective, or as a Doctor, or the like, but all the advice you’ll get on that is how to use the role. But the real skill, indeed the real heart of the game, is in how to play as a vanilla (and then, if you have a power role, how to use that _on top of_ being vanilla). ---
**Author:** ![paulwhoisaghost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e5b9ba/32.png) [@paulwhoisaghost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/paulwhoisaghost)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2017, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439/200 "2017-02-15T03:11:53Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Congratulations to **paul** , for getting night-killed as a vanilla. > > And I really hope **Meeko** doesn’t think that vanilla are worthless. That’s my second-favorite role to play (the first being some crazy weird role that doesn’t make sense and is impossible to get any actual use out of). It’s easy to say how to play as a Detective, or as a Doctor, or the like, but all the advice you’ll get on that is how to use the role. But the real skill, indeed the real heart of the game, is in how to play as a vanilla (and then, if you have a power role, how to use that _on top of_ being vanilla). IMO, vanilla town are the best role town has. If you can get a good playstyle or system going as VT, it won’t matter what role you’re handed. What better way to play scum than to pretend you are VT and do your best to forget your scummates. Of course that only works if you are really good at playing VT. Otherwise you’ll get lynched. Sent from my SM-G930T using Tapatalk [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mafia-reunion-observation-and-comments-ie-the-forbidden-thread/776439.md?page=11)