I think we ought to be skeptical of any claim that falls outside the most common power roles. Detective, Doctor, Mason, sure, but Beat Cop or Miller? It seems unlikely.
I tend to agree with this. Having read Sach’s post in the past he comes across as conservative when it comes these games. That’s why I would be skeptical of someone claiming Chia Bingo Master for instance.
You guys need to be considerate and not post when I’m in class…sheesh.
Queen of Town , you tread dangerously close to showing some form of hidden knowledge, as Blaster so kindly pointed out. Today is day one, and there are always stretches to suspicion, but giving the benefit of the doubt is sometimes not worth it. If you’re really suspicious and doing so, FOS him (no need to formally, of course 
). But please, get a vote out early enough that we still have time to discuss.
/oog I will be away from my machine all day thursday, thanks to a conference at work. Wonderful. /oog.
:o
I think I’ve finally got my head on straight.
zuma is a man. It’s Shadow Facts. And Queen of Town, peekercpa, and fluiddruid are three different people, and Shadow Facts and Blaster Master are also different people. :smack: :smack: :smack:
People have been suprisingly consistant. I was expecting peekercpa to back down, or for IceCreamMan to be a little louder, or something. But no significant differences from page to page.
Unvote Shadow Facts
peekercpa is really bothering me, but in an brewha(YSI) sort of way, rather than a Blaster Master(Recruting, after he was recruted) sort of way, so I will not vote for him.
Nanook of the North Shore is acting very stereotypically, I think. This is not significant either way, not yet, but I’m throwing it out there.
bufftabby stuck to her word about random voting…not sure what that means either.
I’m incredibly suspicious of MindWanderer, MadTheSwine, and Ice Cream Man, but I don’t know why. Every time I go to compile evidence, it disappers. That’s called scumdar, I guess? Not a smudge.
But my vote goes to
Vote W F Tomba
because most of his posts, of which he has few, are one-liners. I don’t know if that’s an official scum tell, but it seems scummy to me. Think about it–a one-line post, if it votes or asks a question or something memorable like that is going to look like the user is contributing, while making it very difficult for that person to actually be evaluated. Meanwhile, the person can quietly jump on bandwagons and avoid suspicions. Also, the other times I’ve seen such behaivor (DS in the Recruiting game, OAOW in the YSI game, CatInASuit in the Conspiracy game (the three games I read)), the people in question were scum.
I’m not sure what this means. Since this is my first game, I by definition can’t have a style, so I’m acting stereotypical of what exactly? A new player? I actually think I’ve been different than most of the new players I’ve seen in the games I’ve read. Not intentionally mind you, but simply by having some experience in following the games at least. As a scum? I can’t even try and argue against that, since there’s no actual meat to the semi-smudge. How do you argue against vapors?
BTW, you can all just call me Nanook, or even just Nook rather than typing the whole thing out.
After a flurry of votes and unvotes, the vote count is now:
1 - bufftabby (WF Tomba)
2 - WF Tomba (Ice Cream Man, pedescribe)
1 - Queen of Town (Sitnam)
1 - MadTheSwine (peekercpa)
4 - Menocchio (fluiddruid, bufftabby, zuma, ShadowFacts)
2 - peekercpa (Koldanar, Mind Wanderer)
1 - Sitnam (Blaster Master)
2 - fluiddruid (Queen of Town, Menocchio)
A one-line post in which a vote is given, with a clearly stated reason, is contributing. But if you see me jumping on any bandwagons, please let me know.
Meanwhile, Blaster Master has been contributing a lot of sound and little light to this discussion, trying as hard as he can to dig suspiciousness out of unremarkable posts by Queen of Town and Sitnam. It doesn’t look honest to me.
Unvote bufftabby
Vote Blaster Master
I’m sorry, that was unclear. I meant stereotypical of a new player. Your posts just screamed newbie when I was looking back on earlier posts, so I mentioned it. No offense, or smudges meant.
And W F Tomba, I do think that a one-line post with a vote is scummy, since it’s “reasoning” is usually hand-waving that doesn’t actually say anything, and is thus hard to trace.
Because I am a CPA and CFO I tend to put my world into black and white (just not red). I want to be able to look at someone’s statements and go, hey 2 plus 2 might eaqual 5 but it sure doesn’t equal 7,000. I realize now that there is a heck of a lot more subtlety to this game than I ever got from just reading other games. If that means that I have come across as being suspicious of everyone and picking on “null” tells, well it’s my first game and hopefully I won’t get kicked out of this club.
And on the coding stuff over the weekend: I truly did not know that my blackberry could do some of the things that BT taught me.
I also didn’t know that the reply function copied in the original quote. I’ve been doing a whole lot of writing down user names and then doing the whole quote = followed by cutting and pasting (Doofus).
Because of the first paragraph I must in good conscience
[color=red]Unvote Mad the Swine[/color=red]
And of course to continue my incompetence that should have been
[color=red]Unvote Mad the Swine[/color=red]
Fuck it. I’ll get that vote done in the morning where I can be on my desktop.
I agree with you about hand-waving being suspicious, but I do not agree that short posts are more likely to contain it. Some people who play this game are very good at churning out paragraphs and paragraphs of hand-waving.
By the way, I will fully explain my vote for Blaster Master, with specific post citations, tomorrow. I’d do it now but I’m at someone else’s house using their dialup connection and I don’t think it would be considerate to hog it.
Thought I’d try one last time since I want MTS to get a good night’s sleep.
unvote Mad the Swine
I’m not going to argue the math, Blaster Master, since it’s a bit beyond me. But, I’ll say from my experience as scum, I agree with the conclusion.
The easiest role for scum to clone is vanilla town.
Yes, last minute role claims suck, but not because they generally indicate scum (they don’t, in my experience) but because they make targets of valuable roles. Scum would just as soon hang back. On rare occasions, you’ll get a scum gambit that doesn’t follow this, but it’s very risky. Scum has far too much to lose to throw themselves away and at best you end up one for one with drawing out another power role.
My math was only an evaluation of the truthiness of a claim, and did not include any speculation about whether a particular role did or did not exist. Obviously, if the role doesn’t exist, then the numerator is zero, and it’s must be a blatant lie. My model was trying to determine the truthfiness of a claim given that that claim has been made.
Skip over the math, fine, but don’t skip over the point, which is why I tried to summarize in the end. The bottom line was sitnam made a egregious error that resulted in intuitive, but provably false values. If he says the value is 12.5% and I say it’s pretty darn close to 100%, I’m going to need to back up why in a way that’s not just an appeal to authority.
Do you disagree with the summary point of my math? Did you not find the numbers that he provided HORRIBLY outside of your experience?
Fair enough, I can see how it could be just a poorly phrased statement; however, I reserve the right to use this to establish precedent later. As for giving benefit of the doubt… this is one of those activities that will make you doubt the general goodness of people, the scum WILL manipulate you, particularly if you’re willing to give them anything.
Let me try to explain the motivations. Let’s say we have someone whose lynch is imminent barring a claim and thus he claims doctor. We have three scenarios to evaluate:
-
He’s telling the truth: If we lynch him, we lose our doctor; if we don’t, he’s outted, but can at least play chicken with the scum. Advantage is not to lynch.
-
He’s lying scum: If we lynch him, we lynch scum. If we don’t lynch him, we don’t know whether he’s scum or not. Advantage is to lynch.
Now let’s examine the motivations, in both cases, assume he’s about to be lynched:
A) He’s the doctor: If he claims, he puts us in scenario 1 above. If not, we definitely lose the doctor. It’s clearly in the town’s interest for him to claim.
B) He’s scum: If he claims doctor, he may avoid a lynch Today, but he’s put an expiration date on his life; if the real doctor claims or dies, he’ll be lynched immediately. OTOH, if he can make a compelling argument that doesn’t involve a claim and avoid a lynch, he no longer has the fate of the doctor hanging over his head. IOW, he has to weigh the immediate gain versus the long term gain. Considering that the doctor pretty much has to die for the scum to have a reasonable chance, it’s generally a net loss, even if it’s an immediate gain to claim doctor. IOW, it’s generally in the scum’s interest not to claim that sort of power role.
C) The lynchee is the doctor and a scum counter-claims: The risk here is enormous. Best case scenario, they believe him, lynch the doctor, then lynch him. Worst case, they believe the doctor and lynch him. The doctor is a powerful role, but that’s a hefty price to pay, and is generally only worth the gambit in rare situations. Besides, knowing who the doctor is does give the scum additional information they can use to predict his actions in the ensuing chicken game. Obviously, to the scum’s advantage not to claim in normal circumstances.
Thus, while the costs of scenarios 1 and 2 counter eachother, scenario 1 is much more likely than scenario two so, in fact, they really don’t.
IME, a claim is generally unvoted unless it is either completely unconfirmable (eg, Priest from the last game), it’s inconsistent with his behavior, or otherwise unbelievable precisely because we have more to lose by lynching a power role than leaving a scum alive another day, unless we’re in a Lynch or Lose situation.
You’re kidding, right? 
It may or may not look honest to you, but I frankly don’t care because appearances are meaningless. I found them suspicious, and I explained my reasoning. Is my reasoning flawed? Even if my reasoning is flawed, flawed reasoning isn’t evidence of scumminess, it’s simply evidence of flawed reasoning. For instance, if I were scum, what would be my motivation for pointing out my observations about QoT’s post, when I obviously wasn’t the only one who noticed it either? Do YOU really find those posts unremarkable? Do you think I’m completely off my rocker?
And to preempt what half of your case may be, I do spend a lot of time early in the game discussing general strategy, I’ve done it before as town and as scum. Part of that reason is because it generates discussion, but the othe reason is because it IS relevant to discussion because there are a lot of new players here, and it’s stuff I’d have found useful when I was playing my first couple of games. I’d have to be pretty brazen scum to outright give BAD advice, and I’d have to have all the veterans with me too because surely one of them would have gone “BlaM, that advice is bad!”
Meanwhile, you’ve not really provided anything of use to the town in terms of discussion until this vote with a promise to expound later. And yet, you’re calling me out for bringing little light to the discussion? Seriously, I don’t know what to make of this beyond that it doesn’t make sense, so I’ll just hope you can actually make a case.
Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? All of our roles are unconfirmable. We may have two doctors. We may have zero doctors. We may have some exotic roles. We assume that things are “simple”, but that is only a working assumption.
I agree that we should work under the general assumption that we’ve got a bog-standard setup, but we ought not to be assume that it must be so either.