Mafia: Simpletown

The Game Room
281

[QUOTE=pedescribe]

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.

[/QUOTE]

Let me get this straight:

-You’re incredibly suspicious of me but for no reason at all.
-You can’t produce any reason for your suspicion.
-You attribute this suspicion to an intuitive ability to detect scum
-This is not supposed to be a smudge on me.

So in one sentence you insinuate that I’m scum and in the next you say you don’t mean it or something?

… What the hell?

282

Blaster Master, your assessment is sound, but I simply can’t shake the feeling that scum would say anything to save their life. Someone later claiming the role wouldn’t doom the scum who claimed it earlier, in fact, if most of Simpleton agrees that ‘falsely claiming a power role isn’t in scums interest’ we’ll end up lynching the real doctor once he claimed later in the game…which of course will result in the gallows for the power role claiming scum who at least lasted a few more rounds and was instrumental in killing town’s doctor.

283

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
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.
[/QUOTE]
True. But the current setup actually makes it worse for scum to emulate roles, if you think about it. If I was scum trying to emulate a role, I would be reading the description over and over, re-reading the thread from that mindset, and so on. Playing blind makes that very hard and more intimidating to do.

I don’t mean to imply we shouldn’t be critical of role claims - we should. But, a low-role game does make handling such claims a little easier for Town and harder for scum to attempt.

284

Hello.
Not everyone has met the 4 substantive posts per Day requirement. (Yes, I’m counting).
Over 48 hours remain in the Day, so no worries.

285

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Blaster, what I’m trying to get at (and perhaps not being clear about) is the difference between evaluating role claims in an open game vs. a closed game, and I don’t see how your maths are addressing that specific difference. For example:

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
For the non-mathematically inclined, basically, the chance that a major power role claim is a lie is low because there’s little motivation for scum to claim it because it gains them little, and is cover easily blown.
[/QUOTE]

(Bolding mine) It seems to me that such cover is less easily blown in a closed set-up than an open one, and that thus it potentially gains them more to claim than in an open set-up.

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
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.
[/QUOTE]

(Bolding mine) Are not all role claims unconfirmable in a closed set-up? This is the main point I’m trying to get across, I guess. I agree with you that claims are generally believed, and I also think that they are increasingly believed as more Days go by. I think if we’re not careful that could really bite us in the ass down the road.

[QUOTE=fluiddruid]
True. But the current setup actually makes it worse for scum to emulate roles, if you think about it. If I was scum trying to emulate a role, I would be reading the description over and over, re-reading the thread from that mindset, and so on. Playing blind makes that very hard and more intimidating to do.

I don’t mean to imply we shouldn’t be critical of role claims - we should. But, a low-role game does make handling such claims a little easier for Town and harder for scum to attempt.
[/QUOTE]

I disagree. Since neither scum nor town have any idea what roles there are, scum could make up whatever they want pretty much with impunity. Hell, even if scum claims Detective, for example, and there is a real Detective playing, should s/he counter-claim? What if there are two Detectives? And in terms of emulating behavior, is it harder to emulate a Doctor or Detective just because you don’t have a role description? I don’t think so.
Please note that I am not advocating that we don’t believe role claims. It’s definitely in our best interests to not lose power roles and we should believe them tentatively. I’m just saying that I think we should tread very cautiously and avoid the trap of treating claimed roles as definitely town (under the “nobody has counter-claimed, so I’m going to believe that claim” rubric).

286

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Agreed. However, I am also assuming that the scum are running under similar assumptions and, if anything, they can make better estimates because they have additional information we don’t, namely, how many scum there are. They can then use their number to make estimated guesses at what number of what roles help balance out their number. For instance, if there’s four of them, I’d be willing to bet that their assumption for the role distribution isn’t significantly different from mine. Further, since they know what our assumption is, they’ll also know that if they make a move that would bring any of those into question without good reason, it will be looked at with a lot of scrutiny.

So, if there’s four of them, they must know that we’d be hard pressed to believe there’d be more than one doctor or detective. Thus, while a doctor isn’t 100% confirmable, he is still mostly confirmable, because the scum would know that trying to sell a second doctor would bring a lot of heat that would be difficult to dispel.

However, even if there’s a different number of scum and they may have reason to believe there’s more than one of a particular role, they still run into the same issue because of where our assumptions stand and, even worse, they run into have both doctors being fairly sure that he’s lying

287

NETA: …oops, accidently hit submit too early. Fortunately, I was almost done with my thought.
Basically, my point is, while we don’t have solid information, we can still establish a base of information by establishing a general concensus on the likely role distribution. Thus, we can, in effect create a situation that is almost as good informationally, while still leaving sufficient ambiguity to protect any roles that vary from that.

288

So here is what I found hard to believe about Blaster Master’s post #241:

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
As others have already pointed out, the first is an example of an OMGUS vote. That, in and of itself, is a null tell, as it’d not be beyond expectation that a new mafia player would throw such a vote and, in fact, this is fairly common behavior.

With that in mind, this vote was quickly called out for what it was, and it wasn’t long before the second quote came along. In this quote, you specifically state that you’re “getting into the spirit of the game”. Then you confess that the following vote will be “truly random”.

First of all, you admit that you lied. Further, you are confessing that you agree with my logic that random votes are good, but this also comes AFTER the fact that I specifically stated that unreasoned votes would be looked at with greater scrutiny. IOW, this looks more like a knee-jerk reaction to being called out on a vote and backing out of it and that the “getting into the spirit of the game” was simply an excuse.
[/QUOTE]

Sitnam’s first post was basically fluff. A few lines of scene-setting, and a jokey OMGUS vote for Blaster Master. Nothing can be inferred from it. I don’t think Blaster Master will disagree with me on this, since he said so himself.

And yet when Sitnam follows up with an equally null post, offering a polite excuse for his earlier statements, Blaster Master goes all Grand Inquisitor on him, putting absurd pressure on the phrase “getting into the spirit of the game” (I still can’t figure out what was supposed to be significant about that remark) and trying to “catch” Sitnam in a lie or contradiction – and this is all over a couple of basically empty posts! I just can’t believe that anyone would really think these statements were worth examining. It seems more likely to me that Blaster Master’s suspicions are feigned.

In my next post I’ll address Blaster Master’s post #244.

289

[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Blaster Master, your assessment is sound, but I simply can’t shake the feeling that scum would say anything to save their life. Someone later claiming the role wouldn’t doom the scum who claimed it earlier, in fact, if most of Simpleton agrees that ‘falsely claiming a power role isn’t in scums interest’ we’ll end up lynching the real doctor once he claimed later in the game…which of course will result in the gallows for the power role claiming scum who at least lasted a few more rounds and was instrumental in killing town’s doctor.
[/QUOTE]

Here’s what you have to keep in mind: scum’s motivation isn’t necessarily to stay alive. All scum have to do is have one living at the end when we don’t, so if one scum is caught, it may not be in the scums’ best interest for him to save his own life.

A good example of this would actually be my scum behavior in fluiddruid’s game. I was recruited into a bad situation with the Boss under suspicion, went for a big recruit which failed. In that case, me getting investigated was actually a pleasant surprise, and I spent the Day refocusing discussion away from productive ones and trying to get myself lynched in place of the Boss while simultaneously trying to dispel suspicion on him by snuggling up to him. Unfortunately, my miscalculation was that the town didn’t realize the desperate situation that we were in, so my ploy just didn’t quite cut it.

The whole point is, sometimes scum will try to save themselves, sometimes they’ll use it as an opportunity to distract the town, sometimes they’ll use it to redirect suspicion. This is why establishing one pattern of “scum will always try to save themselves” is a bad way to look at it simply because that’s something they can manipulate, and if they do do something else, you won’t catch it.

This is why I constantly reitterate myself that motivation is a much better tell than behavior. In this case, self-preservation is the same for the Doctor as it is for scum, both are valuable members of their respective teams, thus self-preservation is generally a null tell.

290

[QUOTE=WF Tomba]
So here is what I found hard to believe about Blaster Master’s post #241:

Sitnam’s first post was basically fluff. A few lines of scene-setting, and a jokey OMGUS vote for Blaster Master. Nothing can be inferred from it. I don’t think Blaster Master will disagree with me on this, since he said so himself.

And yet when Sitnam follows up with an equally null post, offering a polite excuse for his earlier statements, Blaster Master goes all Grand Inquisitor on him, putting absurd pressure on the phrase “getting into the spirit of the game” (I still can’t figure out what was supposed to be significant about that remark) and trying to “catch” Sitnam in a lie or contradiction – and this is all over a couple of basically empty posts! I just can’t believe that anyone would really think these statements were worth examining. It seems more likely to me that Blaster Master’s suspicions are feigned.

In my next post I’ll address Blaster Master’s post #244.
[/QUOTE]

You’re missing the point. He made a move that was clearly and OMGUS vote under false pretenses, he was called out on it, and then backed out. Could it have been an over-zealous new player having a little fun? Maybe. Could it be a new scum player getting a bit scared from drawing some immediate attention? Maybe. These situations are indistinguishable and mutually exclusive. Thus, they require further investigation.

291

Your example is flawed in that this is a vanilla game, I know we can’t know for sure, but Bosses are unlikely. And I believe EVERYONE wants to stay alive and keep playing, it’s just that scum would have nothing to lose by using a power role claim to avoid it, we shouldn’t allow a townie who’s lying to avoid the noose and it’s incredibly unlikely in the first rounds that we’ll pick the actual town power role.

Math or no, your assessment that a power role claim prelynch has a 100% probability of being honest seems absurd.

292

[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Your example is flawed in that this is a vanilla game, I know we can’t know for sure, but Bosses are unlikely. And I believe EVERYONE wants to stay alive and keep playing, it’s just that scum would have nothing to lose by using a power role claim to avoid it, we shouldn’t allow a townie who’s lying to avoid the noose and it’s incredibly unlikely in the first rounds that we’ll pick the actual town power role.
[/QUOTE]

How is my example flawed? It was a demonstratable example where it was in the scum’s best interest not to try to self-preserve. It’s not 100% analagous, as we’ve never had a game with EXACTLY the same set-up, but the point wasn’t “the scum have a Boss, therefore this is what will happen”, it was “here is a situation where this occurred, therefore it’s possible that it will occur again.”

Further, it was an example of how behavior is NOT a tell, but the motivation IS a tell. The pro-town behavior was wanting to find the Boss, but most of the town wanted it to, so evaluating that generates no information. However, the motivation was to draw attention to myself and away from the Boss, this is clearly a scummy motivation, and thus, if it is divinable, it would be a better indication of scumminess.

Still, do you want examples that don’t include a Boss? How about fluiddruid’s death in M3, where she went out providing enough disinformation to result in the lynch of multiple townies.

Seriously, do you REALLY think scum will ALWAYS claim a power role? I don’t get what you’re trying to prove here. By the logic that everyone wants to stay alive and play, then every pro-town player should claim a power role too, to the detriment of the town. It’s just as much fun to observe the game as it is to play, so the motivation should be to win. If you’re just playing for the sake of continuing to play, well… that sort of breaks the game, doesn’t it?

:confused: You’re arguing a strawman here. I never claimed that a power role claim is 100% believable, what I said was that as the ratio of the power role motivation to tell the truth to the scum motivation to lie grows, the truthiness of such a claim approaches 1. As you point out, scum don’t have zero motivation, so it’s clearly not 1. My only point was that it is significantly more believable than the 12.5% you stated earlier.

293

I’m not sure why people are so sure that scum can claim any bizarre power role and have it be believed for even a second just because its a closed set up. Sach was quite clear when creating this game that it was going to be a back to basics game. There is no reason to believe for a second that Sach will go all bastard mod on us and toss the something along the lines of a Chia Bingo Manager at us, especially when you consider posts he’s made in past forbidden threads. As such, I think we can safely treat role claims in this closed game not much differently than they are treated in a normal open game.

Sitnam, I would agree that 100% belief is a little over the top, and that townies should never false claim. That said, your attacks on Blam’s math on this are coming across to me like scum setting the stage to get us to lynch outted power roles, which is very anti-town. If you look over past games here, power roles seem to get outted early in the game with disturbing frequency. Heck, look at the game that just ended. Drain the detective got outed by day 2.

With all that said, combined with the fact that peeker has seemed to have calmed down some, I’m going to go ahead and

Vote Sitnam

294

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
:confused: You’re arguing a strawman here. I never claimed that a power role claim is 100% believable, what I said was that as the ratio of the power role motivation to tell the truth to the scum motivation to lie grows, the truthiness of such a claim approaches 1. As you point out, scum don’t have zero motivation, so it’s clearly not 1. My only point was that it is significantly more believable than the 12.5% you stated earlier.
[/QUOTE]

The 12.5% came from your best guess that there were 2 power roles (doctor, detective) and the odds of selecting one of them for a random lynch day 1 is 2 in 16. Are those not the only two people that can honestly claim the role?

Nanook I have no idea what happened in other games, but I’m pretty sure its irrelevant anyway. Are you saying since it’s happened before we’re more likely to lynch a detective in round two again?

295

Ok, now this provides an ahah moment for me. The difference that you make between behavior and motivation is subtle but significant. Reread with that in mind.

296

[QUOTE=Sitnam]

Nanook I have no idea what happened in other games, but I’m pretty sure its irrelevant anyway. Are you saying since it’s happened before we’re more likely to lynch a detective in round two again?
[/QUOTE]

No, what I’m saying is that the argument that the odds of us hitting a power role early in the game is low is false. It’s false because its happened over and over, and it’s also false because there’s some decent reasons why a power role might get outted early. Playing a power role is obviously quite different from playing a vanilla, and those differences can cause people to misinterpret the power role’s posts. Misinterpretations of this type often drive early lynches, which leads to power roles being outted.

297

[QUOTE=ShadowFacts]

<Snip>
Are not all role claims unconfirmable in a closed set-up? This is the main point I’m trying to get across, I guess. I agree with you that claims are generally believed, and I also think that they are increasingly believed as more Days go by. I think if we’re not careful that could really bite us in the ass down the road.

I disagree. Since neither scum nor town have any idea what roles there are, scum could make up whatever they want pretty much with impunity. Hell, even if scum claims Detective, for example, and there is a real Detective playing, should s/he counter-claim? What if there are two Detectives? And in terms of emulating behavior, is it harder to emulate a Doctor or Detective just because you don’t have a role description? I don’t think so.
Please note that I am not advocating that we don’t believe role claims. It’s definitely in our best interests to not lose power roles and we should believe them tentatively. I’m just saying that I think we should tread very cautiously and avoid the trap of treating claimed roles as definitely town (under the “nobody has counter-claimed, so I’m going to believe that claim” rubric).
[/QUOTE]

I agree with you 100% on this, Shadowfacts. I’m going to be reasonably skeptical of any role claim, and I would hope other Town will do the same. In the last game, I thought we were a bit too quick to believe some of the role claims. Now, these role claims did all turn out to be truthful town (or truthful scum–you really were initially a beat cop in that game, right, BlaM?), but there was also not exactly a large enough pool of scum to risk false claiming. Had there been more originally-vanilla scum, I’m willing to bet we would’ve had at least one false Priest.

So, I guess what I am trying to say is, I’m not really going to believe a role claim if I feel like all other evidence against someone would damn them had they not role-claimed.

298

[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Your example is flawed in that this is a vanilla game, I know we can’t know for sure, but Bosses are unlikely.
[/QUOTE]

By “bosses” do you mean a godfather-type role? If you do, I think it’s not unlikely… I’ll follow up in a sec. If that is what you meant, why do you think that is the case?

299

[QUOTE=Nanook of the North Shore]
No, what I’m saying is that the argument that the odds of us hitting a power role early in the game is low is false. It’s false because its happened over and over, and it’s also false because there’s some decent reasons why a power role might get outted early. Playing a power role is obviously quite different from playing a vanilla, and those differences can cause people to misinterpret the power role’s posts. Misinterpretations of this type often drive early lynches, which leads to power roles being outted.
[/QUOTE]

Does scum know who else is scum already? If there are masons do they know each other already as well? In retrospect, if both of these are true it certainly raises the odds of a random protown power role lynch.

300

On second reading, I’m willing to believe that Blaster Master just misread Queen of Town’s post.

This takes away a big chunk of my reason for voting for him, but he’s still my number one suspect.

By the way, Blaster Master, I think your distinction between behavior and motivation is theoretically correct, but practically inapplicable. If you don’t know someone’s role, any idea of their motivation is just an inference from their behavior.