I wasn’t even in the game and I got killed!
AVENGE ME!
Um, dead bodies speak?
Blaster, how about the possibilities of a Vig? This being closed we obviously don’t know where power roles stand; would it be S.O.P to include one hidden scum role as well?
Well, my understanding is that this is a “back to basics”, and I’d consider those to be the most basic roles. Hell, we may not even have all of those. AFAIK, most games will include these roles with a rule of thumb that vanilla town should make up around half the population (7-9 would fit this bill fine), and the scum should make up either 25% or sqrt(n), or 4.
I would guess that a Vig is outside the idea of a simple game but, obviously, we can’t be sure. For the sake of simplicity, I will run under the assumption that there likely isn’t one until we have evidence to the contrary.
:o
Wow things move fast.
First of all, e-mail enabled.
Secondly, … I’m going to guess that there are no power roles. That’s why it’s closed, if there were, Sach would have at least given some hints about it.
So if we have no power roles, then we probably have a slightly greater numerical advantage than normal. Not sure what to do with it…
Thirdly, I can subscribe–for sure–in 7-10 business days. Sorry, the bank has issues.
I’ve never played a “closed” game before, so I have no idea what to expect in that regard. BM’s role allocation seems reasonable, although I wonder if it is too complicated for a game called Simpletown.
I’ll start off like I often do, by saying: GET YOUR VOTES AND ANALYSIS IN EARLY! There’s no reason to wait until Wednesday or Thursday, because you can always change your vote.
Closed simply means we are not given any information about the roles prior to the start of the game. While open has been pretty much been the norm around here, in most other parts, they’re run closed. Assuming it means no power roles is not safe. We could have none, we could have only some of the ones I mentioned, we could have a Chia Bingo Master (though, obviously, the last would be against the theme of the game).
That said, it changes the town’s strategy somewhat when evaluating power roles. For instance, if we know there are Masons, then if we get a Mason claim and no counterclaim we can be pretty sure that it’s a legitimate claim. In this game, we have no idea if there are or are not Masons, thus any such claim should be treated with much more scrutiny.
Sounds about right for scum numbers. If two kills happen tonight, well that would be our answer.
As far as random voting goes, in my experience in the past…oh, 3 games I think? I’ve seen an uneven mix of scum in that (50% of the random day one votes were scum, when the number present has been a much lower percentage). Admittedly thats nowhere near enough data, but it certainly does make me think. Can you refresh for me just what we, as a town, get out of a random vote? The person this has been levied on generally doesn’t even have an argument to present, so unless they’re panicky scum, what does it truly get us.
Yikes. From thread start to kick off in less than 24 hours.
Also, since this is the first time playing I am sure some of the more experienced players won’t hhave any problem letting my know when I make an ass of myself.
It has been my experience that the more experienced (esp. if they’re scum) tend to jump all over newbie mistakes as “OMG He’s scum!!!”. Keep in mind, I’m only on game 4 now, myself 
It very well could be. It is based entirely on how I might set up the game based on the theme, so if someone says “I’d actually expect only 2 Masons”, that’s legitimate. At this point, we’re simply trying to figure out what our illustrious mod would have chosen when setting up the game, and without support evidence, it’s just a guess.
However, that said, I think having a general idea of what our expectations are will be helpful when evaluating role claims and Night results in the furture.
/Agree
Last minute vote swings are often information poor and IME more likely to hurt the town. It is always a good to give anyone on the hot seat plenty of time to defend themselves, potentially make a role claim, and still allow us enough time to extend that courtesy to the next person. If done early enough, it is entirely possible that a valuable power role could make a compelling counter-argument without having to use a role-claim. The last thing we want is a last minute vote switch onto a power role who hasn’t even had the opportunity to role claim.
So everyone needs to keep that in mind that if Blaster Master votes for me we need to lynch him immediately.
Well, regardless, without any information, we should definetly(sic) not no-lynch. We need information, and, as has been pointed out in previous games, lynchings (and the attacks and defenses that come with it) are our best way.
Should we role-claim at some point? Since we have no clue about accuracy, it would be a mess, but it might help figure out something.
I’ve read a few parts of previous Mafia games, they sounded interesting, so it should be fun to play. But I am also a Newb. When I first saw the thread I thought it was the newb mafia game people were talking about planning, but it will be fun regardless of whether expert mafiosa are around or not.
The You-Solve-It sounded especially fun because of the clues aspect, so it would be neat to see something like that ran again sometime in the future.
As to the game itself, there’s not enough to observe yet for me to make any observations imho. Soon though.
just throwing out thoughts, btw
With the town PM out in public, and no true idea of what roles are present, right now no…a role claim will do no good just yet. If you’re on the hotseat, and it will save you (…and you are a pro town role) by all means come out; it could stave off the lynch and possibly allow you to save the town.
Don’t forget though, a roleclaim of anything other than vanilla can make you a night-kill target too.
I was about to post this:
To follow up on the closed game idea, can we have a discussion about role claims? Ordinarily, role claims are generally believed absent a counter-claim so as to avoid lynching a power role. I assume that is different in a closed game given that we have no idea if there even are any roles besides Simpleton and Scum?
Then on preview **Blaster Master **beat me to it with this:
It’s an interesting discussion to have, IMO, particularly on Day One when we’ve got nothing to go on.
I’ll try to be brief about it, but it essentially goes back to my pseudo-random hypothesis from some time ago. Basically, this hypothesis is based on the fact that pseudo-random is discernably different from true randomness. In this case, for a townie, a random vote is truly random (since he has no additional information), OTOH, a scum random vote will not be random because they have additional information. Of course, they can counter this by simply using a randomizer. So, at worst, it provides us no information and only a kick-off point for discussion; and at best, it potentially provides some information when analyzing the actions of a discovered scum.
The other relevant part of the PRH is that scum will attempt to randomly distribute themselves through certain categories. For instance, based on post count, content, votes, etc. However, because this is driven by information, it is not truly random in the way that pro-town distributions wills be. Hence, it will be pseudo-random which, as mentioned above, is distinctly NOT truly random. It will often have a more even distribution. Thus, while we can expect a truly random distribution amongst townies and their random votes, the actual distribution will more closely resemble |n-s| random members and |s| pseudo random members.
Of course, that may all be a little abstract to seem useful, but the point is that we can use these sorts of divisions later on to find patterns.
Sach, if someone reaches a majority vote, do you end the day early? If so, do we have an extended night?
Actually, thats all fairly interesting and something I hadn’t considered. (I have studied Chaos a bit as applied to Computer programming, so I understand where you’re coming from in regards to PRH). In essence, a scum random vote on day one that is not selected with a generator can signal scumminess, combined with the analysis of their overall activities?
No. Day ends on Thursday at 4PM EDT regardless of the vote count status.