And if the alpha stays out of the lynch tie pool, then that provides information, too.
Example: Suppose that Mason 1 is already out, and the two people Town deems to be most suspicious are Alice and Bob. Mason 1 declines to vote for either, and Alice and Bob each get, let’s say, five votes. Alice dies. We don’t know whether the Alpha was voting for Alice, or if the Alpha was abstaining, and the tie was broken by some other Mason or Wolf, or if all of the tiebreakers were abstaining, and the lynch was random… but we do know with absolute certainty that the Alpha did not vote for Bob, and that’s five people the Seer can choose from and be assured of getting an accurate investigation.
But we don’t know if the alpha stayed out of the lynch pool so we cannot conclude anything from the seers investigation. only the wolves can conclude , or at least narrow down on who may be masons from the ties lynch .
Re-read what I wrote. In such a case we can’t point to one specific person and say “That must be the alpha!”, but we can rule out some possibilities as the alpha. If the detective can guarantee that e’s never investigating the alpha, then the alpha becomes powerless, and it only takes a few known non-alphas to make that happen.
It is true that the Wolves can get more information from this trick than the Town can, but they couldn’t pin down anything from it, either, and if you’ve got a trick that will give information to both Town and Wolves, that’s usually good for Town.
It gets even better if more Masons are known to the Town. Suppose, for instance, that all of the Masons are known, and we have a tie. Then we know that either there is at least one Wolf on the side that got the lynch, or that none of the wolves were involved in the lynch. That would be huge information.
The other thing that goes with this is avoiding accidental breadcrumbing. If you’re the Seer, and you investigate player A night one, don’t say something like
“Player B is 100% town to me.” Because after you die, we 'll read your posts and
say, aha, the seer has an town result on Player b.
And then by extension, if you are a vanilla town, and by day 2 you have called 3 players 100% town, you’ve just told the scum that you are NOT the seer, as you could not have 3 results already, and the real seer would have been careful not to say such a thing, hopefully.
This is all pretty next-level stuff, but it’s something to be aware of.
I think it’s good to note that these are, by and large, corner cases. We definitely need to keep our eyes open for an opportunity like this, but mostly we just need to play mafia and trust in our analysis. Note that, for example, in your last scenario, it relies on the wolves not noticing such a configuration and hopping on the bandwagon. It’s worth it to them to ninja lynch a townie and sacrifice one of their own in exchange for not publicly 100% clearing a huge swath of townies.
Probably one of the best things that would come out of the discussion around the actual result of a tie lynch would be a wolf being caught with perfect information during the discussion
It relies on no such thing. To avoid revealing information in such a situation, the Scum would have to be on neither bandwagon and also not be in the set of players who didn’t vote on either bandwagon, and that leaves no place for them to be. They can try to minimize the amount of information revealed, but even that helps the Town: It’d mean voting based on something other than the public information in the thread, which would mean they’d have to justify votes based on weaker reasons, which is makes it easier for conventional Scum-hunting to find them.
Blah, blah, Chronos back to his massively outside the box thinking.
I agree with jsexton. The best idea is to just play mafia like normal. Even more so with this being a newcomer game. If an opportunity arises to use the tiebreaking system to our advantage, we can. But I am guessing most folks will just vote for whome they think is scum, not forcing a tie.
Chronos, do you want to pull out your scum finding program/script as well?
I usually leave editing open as well. If people can pull of “secret messages” via editing-within-the-time-limit, that’s pretty smooth. Hardly worth the risk, I imagine. Our editing isn’t open indefinitely.
Sorry guys, I had to go to a lamb dinner at my grandma’s…
I agree with Chronos. The tiebreaking mechanic could potentially be very helpful. As long as there is a possibility for information, there’s potential for a hanging wolf. As long as we manage to keep everything in order, there’s a good possibility to mine a few nuggets of gold. I’m really happy Bayard volunteered to do spreadsheets, since I’m terrible at it.
I suppose it’ll be clearer if/when it comes up.