so to paraphrase, you were scum in a previous game and you don’t want people to get revenge on you now you’re scum in this game?
vote MHaye
I’m a bit late to the mass role claim discussion. I’ll just add a few notes on why I think a mass role claim would be bad. Pleonast said that he got help on this game from mtgman. In a previous game mtgman specifically mentioned something about game design having to take into account the effect of a mass roleclaim. I can’t believe that mtgman would have overlooked any mass claim weakness. Basically, There doesn’t seem to be anything prohibitive of a mass roleclaim (though the slow reveal of information is probably enough to break it in and of itself), but I’m pretty sure that there is something preventing it from working, even if we don’t know what it is. In other words, even if we work out a feasible strategy to do a roleclaim, there is probably something hidden that prevents such a strategy from working.
And even if a mass role claim was a dead solid lock to win, what fun is that? I mean, I want to win and all, but I want to win by playing, not by breaking the game.
I’m not very comfortable with meta-gaming, but I confess I’m rather skeptical of the mass role-claim idea. It just sounds like it would be chaos. Scum are going to lie either way. Townies telling the truth would just benefit the scum; townies lying would confuse the scum, true, but they’d also confuse each other. Others have already mentioned that the time it would take to verify claims might be enough time for the scum to get the upper hand. I don’t see much merit in this plan.
Oh, damn. You’re right. Sorry…I only reread the OP when trying to prepare.
I’ll agree with the rest–mass role claim doesn’t seem too sporting. Sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. Or making teenagers depressed.
Wow, it’s quiet in here. Compared to the first days of the other Dope Mafia games, it’s positively dead. Seems like there may be a lot of hanging back, trying to blend in with the woodwork.
I wonder if, since everyone has a role and there are no plain ol’ townies, if people are more nervous about speaking up and drawing attention to themselves? If so, that’s going to make an already challenging Day One “what the hell do we do” scenario even worse…
I think it’s because Roosh isn’t playing. 
Yeah, if Roosh were here, we’d be at 600 posts by now. 
I’m thinking the slow start is probably due to the weekend. Our deadline is Wednesday, so nothing to panic about yet, but in an effort to get a conversation going I’ll write up a few thoughts on the multi-faction aspect of this game. While we have seen multiple win conditions before (SK, subset-win conditions), I think this is the first game with true multiple factions.
The Werewolves are pretty much self explanatory as they are the ‘typical’ scum we’ve played with before.
The Cabalists pretty much falls into a similar category as the non-believers of M5, except the win conditions are exclusive. I think it is better this way as we won’t have to worry about conflicting ideas of what constitutes a worthwhile win and the loyalty conflicts that arise (Hockey Monkey and Hal, I’m looking at you).
The Undead is the group I’m most worried about since they look quite powerful and we’ve never interacted with this type of scum before. They both kill and increase in number each night. This is much worse than an SK as the win condition is both attainable and occurs earlier than the SK win condition. At least the werewolves want the undead removed ASAP as well.
Undead don’t know which other players are Undead, so Hockey Monkey couldn’t know anything special.
I think this game might be having trouble getting started because all the Townspeople have no information at all, so they’re hesitant to do anything. Early in this game, we’re going to have a real problem getting information, because we don’t even know the alignment of the player who’ve been killed. It won’t be until the start of the Third Day that we, the Town, will have any information from our first lynch. Now, at least we have some investigative roles who will have some information on Day Two but they obviously have to be quite circumspect with how they use that information.
This means that the only information that we’re going to have for quite some time now will come out of our Daytime discussions. Therefore, it’s imperative that we all generate a lot of discussion now, so we have something to work with in Day Two. Lurking is absolutely not acceptable. Post strategies. If you’re newer to the game and have questions, ask them(just don’t ask questions that might reveal your role).
Some random strategy thoughts(most of these are basic Mafia stuff, but it’s good to make this clear to any new players):
Townies with investigative roles need to be breadcrumbing their results. I realize that’s elementary for experienced players, but just in case we have some new players with those roles I want to make that very explicit. The investigative roles are the Seer, the Detective and the Witches. Breadcrumbing refers to leave subtle hints in some of your posts to give us the results of your investigations. Subtle is the key word here. What you want is to post something innocuous about the target of your investigation that indicates their alignment(ie whether they’re scum or Town). The idea is that if you get killed before your role-claim the Town can look back through your posts and find the breadcrumbs, so we know the results of your investigations. It should really only be obvious that a post is a breadcrumb after your role is revealed. Remember that breadcrumbing can reveal you to the scum who will promptly kill you, so be subtle about things. I don’t say this to discourage from breadcrumbing, though, because it’s critical that you do so. If you ever have to role-claim you had better be able to point to posts containing breadcrumbs or the Town is likely to conclude that you’re scum making a false claim. I say all this now so that scum can’t make a false Cop claim and then say they didn’t breadcrumb because they didn’t know that they were supposed to. The Coroner does not need to breadcrumb. The Town will know everything that the Coroner does in a short amount of time; the risk of breadcrumbing isn’t worth it.
Freemasons are unlynchable. Freemason is basically the only verifiable role-claim(Witch is technically verifiable but trading a Witch for scum is absolutely not worth it). If there’s a false Freemason role claim exactly one Freemason should counter-claim(this, of course, will take one night to verify). Investigative roles probably shouldn’t bother investigator the claimant unless we’re worried that there are no more Freemasons(but thanks to the Omega Wolf, that’s not 100% guaranteed). Any other role-claim has to be decided based on the facts. People should be wary of jumping in a counter-claiming – for one, there’s no guarantee that there isn’t more than one of any role!(in particular, I believe that Pleonast has made repeated references to Detectives so if you’re a Detective please keep that in mind).
The Vigilante, I think it goes without saying, needs to be very careful about using his power. If he kills Town he’s just killed off 2 Townies(I remember in Mafia II, our Vig killed the Detective on the second night, which was a huge blow). Even if he successfully kills scum he’s gone and made life harder on the Vicar. I’m not sure what the best way to use the Vig is, but he needs to be very sure.
I don’t think the werewolves will actually care much about the undead. The necromancer won’t really play any differently from a vanilla townie in the daytime, as he won’t care where his bodies come from. While he poses the greatest danger to the wolves (and everyone, I think), he’ll be very difficult to sniff out.
The vampire, on the other hand, in the absence of the necro, is actually likely to be a boon to the wolves. The more townie deaths, the better it is for them.
I’ll just post this in case anyone has missed it. Pleonast has some very good strategy hints in here for the various roles. He reiterates that there are several unused roles.
This info is in Pleonast’s sig line for future reference. I don’t think we need to discuss in detail which roles we think are in the game and which we think are not, but I do think it’s a good idea for us to make personal notes to that effect. Scum are going to false claim roles that they think aren’t in the game to minimize counter-claims by the real role. At that time, if it’s a role I don’t think is in the game, I can call them on it.
Getting the role information two Days after a death is going to bring an entirely new dynamic to the game.
The Witchdoctor should probably self protect until we have information from our investigative roles. The Vigilante and the Warlock will have to be extremely careful in their choices. Extremely. Keeping our Witches alive is paramount. As long as all three are alive they can protect AND investigate. It’s not clear from the rules (unless I missed it) if they can elect to protect one of their own. One thing we have to keep in mind about this new style of game is the No-Lynch. When everyone is a power-role, no one is really expendable. Mis-lynches will be a heavy blow.
I don’t have any other thoughts on other roles right now. (Well, I do, but this post is running long, and I have to work tomorrow 
.) I’ve been over the roles and rules several times and I’m having a blast trying to figure out the if A does X, then C is screwed, but…scenarios. It’s fun, but I think my head is about to asplode.
I don’t think that the role information is all that important. It’s far more important to know the dead player’s alignment than their exact role.
We all have power roles, but not all power roles are created equal. The no lynch option is not a good one for the Town. The town has two sources of information: the lynch and the investigative roles. We can’t forgo one of our most important sources of information except in a dire emergency(ie the Undead on the verge of victory).
Plus, it’s the weekend. I’ve found weekends to be very slow for games/posts.
Ah, I see sach has also pointed this out. That’ll teach me to read the whole thing THEN reply rather than compose replies as I go along, post by post.
It’s GREAT not having a “majority needed” rule, though.
Given the amount of scum in this game – and I would not be surprised if the scum make up 50% or more of the players – I think a majority needed rule could probably break the game.
The fact that there is probably so much scum is another reason, IMO, why the no lynch option is a bad one for the town. I think that we’re more likely to hit scum than Town. On the other hand, the fact that there is so much scum means that the scum will have an easier time targeting Town in lynches. But then, only the Wolves and Cabal can organize and none of the scum factions know who’s in the other factions, so they can still end up ganging up on scum anyway. And of course, any faction can’t be too obvious about ganging up on a single player.
In any case, we need information and only the lynch can provide us with it at the moment. The investigators won’t be publicly sharing their information until their hand is forced, so we certainly can’t depend on them for anything any time soon. They can of course try and be subtle about it and get the town to lynch confirmed scum, but they’ll find it quite hard to build a case against known scum if there’s no voting record to look at – not to mention it would look quite suspicious to the scum if a Townie all of a sudden change from voting No Lynch to trying to scum lynched. No Lynch is a bad idea.
What exactly is a majority needed rule? I’ve looked through the thread, but I can’t find anything about it, and this is my first game.
I believe that a majority needed rule – which we are NOT using this game – says that a majority of the Town is needed to sustain a lynch. In other words, 50% or more of the town must vote for a player for that player to be lynched. If the votes are something like:
Player A 45%
Player B 35%
Player C 30%
then no lynch will occur.
Now, we aren’t using any rule like this, so just forget we brought it up.
What I meant by “role information” was the full disclosure. We find out who was killed or lynched first, then the next day what their role/alignment is. In this game the knowing the role will give the alignment, no? There is no recruiting role…not in the traditional sense. The Necromancer can create Zombies, but they don’t contribute to the game anymore and they can’t be lynched or killed again. If I have that wrong, please correct me.
This is one of the situations I was alluding to. I do think some situations may arise in this game in which a No-Lynch could be the best option, but it’s one of those play-it-by-ear kind of things. I am generally not in favor of the No-Lynch, but this is a different kind of game, and I want to be open to new kinds of strategy. So I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand as always bad in this game. It may be something that we have to use. And that’s all I’m pointing out right now. Don’t think for a minute that I am suggesting it NOW.
Yes, but we know the alignment one day before we know the exact role.
I misread your post. We find out the alignment one Day after death, and the role the next Day.
Pleonast, I suppose we have the usually prohibition against editing posts?