Mafia The Game III: Kinder and Gentler

The Game Room
1841

[QUOTE=Gadarene]

The Day will end at 10:30 a.m. my time on Monday. Eleven players left, so six votes will lynch.
[/QUOTE]

This is another thing that’s interesting. And I’m bringing it up now only because there are doubts to whether a recruitment happened yet or not.

Remember, I’ve hosted this game many times. I’ve actually hosted more games than I’ve played in (this is my third game as a player, whereas I’ve hosted about nine or ten games). And so based on how many people are left in the game AND how many of those remaining people are scum, I always lower the votes needed too. This is because, very obviously, the game must stay mathimatically fair and right.

So because of this, I’ll always keep the number of votes needed, in the day, at least two or three numbers higher than how many mafia are left in the game. Usually three if I can cut it.

This makes me believe that, since it’s six votes to lynch, there is three members of the mafia left. That would mean recruitment did happen. I could be wrong, though, as, again, I’m just speaking from experience of being a host.

But didn’t BlasterMaster do the actual odds and deduce it was about a 99% chance it happened?
Yeah. I’m willing to believe it probably happened.

1842

[QUOTE=tirial]
Also I can’t build links between SCL and diggit to** fluiddruid**, which I would have thought would have occurred early on when they couldn’t discuss. If anyone can, please let me know - I haven’t had a thorough look.

[/QUOTE]

Me! Pick me! :smiley:

Link #1:

  1. On day 1 I voiced a small suspicion of her (put her on my top 4 which in retrospect is quite awful), to which she answered by changing her vote to me. The day ended with her vote on me. A bit weak, I’ll admit, but there you are.

  2. fluiddruid: A bit more. On Day 1 she waffled between me and NAF. On Day 3 when your suspicion about Kyrie’s “breadcrumb” surfaced I ventured a guess he’d investigated NAF. After that, you convinced me the breadcrumb could plausibly be traced back to **fluiddruid **and, after a while, I voted against her (and kept my vote up). On the next day I saw 4 votes against her, voiced my argument in favor of lynching Lightnin’ and… she was lynched anyway (should have argued harder, mayhaps?) :stuck_out_tongue:

1843

[QUOTE=Rachm Qoch]
Another one is nesta. She was in the middle of the Lightnin vote, but she’s also on my radar for a couple other reasons. Maybe I’m making something out of nothing, but I’m not sure what to make of her attempt to stir up Hal earlier: was she trying to see if he might accidentally slip up and out himiself as mafia, or was she trying to stir him up like Lightnin to get him to attract townie suspicion? Compounding the matter is her late vote for Lemur, when she never really suspected him before.
[/QUOTE]

This came in late enough yesterday that I didn’t get a chance to address it, but I might as well do so now.

FTR, I’m a he.

I think I’ve explained my posting about Hal Briston. I saw a number of people saying he was looking suspicious, so I reviewed his posts looking for signs that he might be scum. I posted what I found. I wasn’t really fishing for his response so much when I quoted a bunch of his posts. I was posting it for everyone else’s benefit. My purpose in reviewing his posts was to get a read on him, though, and his response has helped do this, and hopefully I’ve helped the team a little by getting Hal to take a strong stance on something.

About my late Lemur866 vote. Yes, it was a “me too” vote at the end of the day which made no difference in whether he was lynched, but I put my vote on who I thought was most likely scum at that point, and I’m glad I was right for once.

You’re wrong about my not suspecting him before, though. He has been hovering high on my suspicion list for most of the game. I even put him in my top four in post 1364.

1844

[QUOTE=nesta]
(snip)
You’re wrong about my not suspecting him before, though. He has been hovering high on my suspicion list for most of the game. I even put him in my top four in post 1364.
[/QUOTE]

Dude… suspecting someone ain’t the best defense. **fluiddruid **spent most of her in-game-life suspecting Lemur866 (and viceversa).

1845

Idle:

Actually, I’ve just been making so that it takes a majority vote to lynch. :slight_smile: I don’t remember whether I put that in the rules, but it’s my understanding that that’s the pretty standard way to play. Am I wrong? (I mean, I’m not wrong for this game, because I’m running it, but am I wrong in general?)

1846

[QUOTE=DiggitCamara]
I have been letting the whole CaerieD kill simmer a bit and… well, I’ve come up with a theory.
[/QUOTE]

A theory you say? Honestly I don’t think speculating about why she was killed will really help us at this point. Yes, if we knew why she was killed it would be good information, but there are a lot of possibilities, including that they just used random.org. I have a few theories myself: that she was killed because she was a danger to the Mafia, possibly for fingering scum somewhere along the way; that she was killed because she’d fingered townies along the way and the Mafia was hoping we’d use her now town-verified opinions to lynch more townies; that the Mafia saw that she wasn’t target #1 like she had been for days past, and decided she might as well die now; that she might have been a mason, and the Mafia is now thinking about end-game and wanting to get rid of verifiable townies; that they haven’t recruited the doctor and wanted to go after someone who wasn’t likely to be protected. Or a combination of any of these. See what I mean, lot’s of reasons why, and I don’t think we can be sure enough to use her death for much information. Maybe that’s why they killed her.

[QUOTE=DiggitCamara]
But to complete my theory, I’d like to ask everyone else: could you please list your suspicions about CaerieD? Particularly: when and why did you suspect CaerieD? What post? Who else did you implicate?
[/QUOTE]

I’ll play along a little, though, because you may have a theory I haven’t thought of, or a really good reason that narrows the list of possibilities down.

Apologies if I’m not very specific about this. My notes are still sitting on a hard drive that has no power, so I’m going by memory.

I first suspected CaerieD back during Day 1, because I too had noticed that her demeanor had changed a little from Mafia2. But, I was also suspicious of those who were pointing it out. I remember one or more of them said she was being more aggressive or something, but that wasn’t exactly what I had noticed about her. They were called out for misrepresenting her current posts, and it was true that they were wrong in their characterization. So, she was on my radar then, but not all that strongly.

I think I recall some weirdness on Day 2, but nothing that really stands out, so I guess she was mostly off my radar at that point.

What really got me was her interaction with fluiddruid on Day 3. I was rather convinced fluiddruid was Mafia on Day 3, and CaerieD seemed to be trying to get fluiddruid off the hook. This is what made me first put CaerieD near the top of my suspicion list. On Day 4 she still felt really scummy to me. Since then she’d been slowly slipping back to the “hell if I know” part of my list.

I don’t know if this helps your theory, but that’s what I remember about why I suspected her.

1847

[QUOTE=DiggitCamara]
Dude… suspecting someone ain’t the best defense. **fluiddruid **spent most of her in-game-life suspecting Lemur866 (and viceversa).
[/QUOTE]

Oh, I agree. But you misrepresented my suspicion history, so I corrected it. I’ll stand by my suspicions, whether they seem to implicate me or not, because they were genuine at the time I had them.

1848

[QUOTE=nesta]
Oh, I agree. But you misrepresented my suspicion history, so I corrected it. I’ll stand by my suspicions, whether they seem to implicate me or not, because they were genuine at the time I had them.
[/QUOTE]

(pssst… you’re confusing me with tirial… but I could misrepresent your suspicion history if it’ll help)

1849

[QUOTE=nesta]

(snip)
I’ll play along a little, though, because you may have a theory I haven’t thought of, or a really good reason that narrows the list of possibilities down.
(snip)

[/QUOTE]

Bingo! Thanks for your post.

1850

[QUOTE=DiggitCamara]
(pssst… you’re confusing me with tirial… but I could misrepresent your suspicion history if it’ll help)
[/QUOTE]

Bah, actually I confused you with Rachm Qoch. Sorry about that. That’s what I get when I try to post from work with all the interruptions.

Anyway, replace you with he in the post you quoted and I think it should make sense. I was just correcting my suspicion record, for better or worse. It wasn’t even the main point I was making in that post.

1851

[QUOTE=Gadarene]
Idle:
Actually, I’ve just been making so that it takes a majority vote to lynch. :slight_smile: I don’t remember whether I put that in the rules, but it’s my understanding that that’s the pretty standard way to play. Am I wrong? (I mean, I’m not wrong for this game, because I’m running it, but am I wrong in general?)
[/QUOTE]

Okay, I get you. You mean the majority of all the players left.

Yeah, it can be done that way too, although that might make you run into problems if you’re ever running low on town and high on mafia.

For example, say you have nine players left and five are town and four are scum and it’s currently Day. This would mean it would take five votes to lynch someone. So it’d be pretty easy for the mafia to pick people off one at a time, especailly if they all just waited until one protown person had a vote against them and then all ganged on on them. Result would be that person is lynched and scum wins (as the sides would be tied and they’d have a free Night kill anyway coming up).

Usually when I host it, I set the bar at either two or three more votes needed as there are scum left, so in the above scenerio (which I’ve seen happen a lot), it would be six or seven needed to lynch and thus at least two or three pro-town would be at fault if they made a mistake.

shrugs But your way works too pretty well.

1852

[QUOTE=DiggitCamara]
… any reason why I wouldn’t?
[/QUOTE]

Whatever floats your boat or sinks your sub. Conveniently for you, it isn’t a vote justification I can really defend against. My past votes are what they are, for the reasons I stated at the time that I made them, and I can’t change them.

Other (current) players who:

[ul]
[li]did not vote to lynch Lemur: Idle, Millit, Hal[/li][li]voted to lynch Lightnin’ (which you didn’t bring up, but I will): DiggitCamara, Millit the Frail, nesta[/li][li]voted “late” for fluiddruid: Millit the Frail, Hal Briston, Rachm Qoch [/li][li]voted to lynch Projammer: nesta, Millit the Frail, Rachm Qoch[/li][/ul]

I’m not sure what your definition of “late” is for the fluiddruid vote, but my list came from the trailing 6 votes of the 11, and as precedent that true town did indeed vote late in that vote, CarieD’s vote followed mine. And depending on your definition of “late” in that statement, I’d just like to point out that Millit sure does pop up a lot.

1853

[QUOTE=tirial]
Fluiddruid had the detective point at her, Lemur866 both slipped, and fished for powerroles. If there were any tells like that I’d happily vote, but I just don’t see them.

<snip>

BTW, on post counts, **Rachm Qoch ** has 50 posts in the entire game (the lowest of any poster in the game and below several dead players). Please could you post some more analysis Rachm?
[/QUOTE]

One of the issues I’m pondering is Lemur’s power-role fishing and subsequent repeated insistance that the mafia had probably recruited, and possibly recruited the doctor. One of the things that outed him to me at least was his attempt two or three days back to argue that the watchman/doctor, from the mafia’s perspective, are no better recruited than dead. When his argument fell apart, he still refused to conceed the point. Then, later on after the third no-kill night, he did a 180 said that the doctor was possibly recruited, and we could no longer trust a potential doctor role-claim. Hmm. What was he trying to spin?

You have two conflicting principles. First, the odds of three consecutive blocks on successive nights are exceedingly small. It’s at least in the single digits, and maybe even less than 1%. This would lead me to conclude that there probably was a recruitment somewhere. On the other hand, as Omi no Kami stated in Post #1407, the recruitment is strategically best used later in the game. A random recruitment at this point in the game is a mistake, from the mafia’s perspective. All else being equal, what good is a recruited townie who could possibly just end up getting lynched in the next few days? The question is then how do you reconcile all this?

My best guess is this: There was a recruitment, but it was not a random recruitment. It was a targeted recruitment. That’s the only way it would make sense.

Here’s what I think most likely happened: The third night, mafia tried to hit someone, and got blocked. The next night, they tried to hit the same person, and got blocked again. At that point, they deduced that the person they targeted was most likely the doctor, and recruited him/her the following night. This seems like it would be a logical move, but as I explained here, this is poor logic if you analyze it mathematically. If you try to target the doctor this way, statistically speaking, you’re more likely to pick the the wrong person than the right person. So what probably happened is that the mafia thought they had a read on the doctor, recruited him/her, only to discover that they made a mistake. This would explain Lemur’s attempts to discredit any potential doctor claim.

Way back after the second no-kill night, DiggitCamara posted this:

[Quote=DiggitCamara]
Well, I probably shouldn’t say this but, anyway, here goes nothing:

I think I know what happened:

  1. Scum tried to kill (yesterday) and were blocked
  2. Scum failed to kill.
  3. During the last day we discussed all possibilities

There it should have ended. However, there was one post (no, I’m not going to point it out yet). And thus the list continues:

  1. Scum noticed said post and concluded (probably correctly) that the doctor had unwittingly exposed him/herself
  2. Scum took their chance and recruited said poster

Having said that, I can only hope I guessed incorrectly as to the identity of our ex-doctor (and/or that the mafia made the same guess I made and failed)
[/quote]

When he posted this, it absolutely made me cringe. I thought to myself “if you’re town, why in the world would you point anything out that could compromise a power role?” I stayed out of it completely, since if he was wrong and the doc was still town, anything that could have been said on the matter could only have helped the mafia. At that point, I didn’t think he was mafia – after all, why would mafia telegraph the fact that they figured out who the doctor was and recruited him the second night? It seemed clear that DiggitCamara had screwed up and was a townie that accidentally might have outed the doctor as a potential mafia target. Regrettably other people participated in the speculation that someone might have outted himself as the doctor. You, tirial, and Idle Thoughts in particular.

But after the third no kill night, I went back and realized that DiggitCamara, and possibly you or Idle Thought were only pretending to think that the doctor had been recruited the second night, when in fact the whole idea was to stimulate conversation to suss out the doctor for a recruitment on the third night. Clever!

I don’t know if you (tirial) or Idle Thoughts are townies who unwittingly got drawn into DiggitCamara’s attempts to out the doctor, or if you are mafia taking part in the ploy. But you definitely have drawn my attention.

In conjuction with all this is DiggitCamara’s hard riding against Lightnin, a big fat FOS on DiggitCamara

1854

[QUOTE=SnakesCatLady]
Come to the Dark Side, please stop reading my mind. It tickles. I was going over my notes and thinking the exact same thing about the reason CaerieD was taken. It leads me to think a block of some kind has to have taken place on at least one of the no kill nights.
[/QUOTE]

How else could you interpret it? Mafia are allowed only one recruitment. So unless they voted two “no-kills” (yeah, right) there must have been at least one block.

1855

[QUOTE=Idle Thoughts]
Well, that’s fine. You may really be town and you may have your own suspicions. But I’ve said it before. If she really is town, why wouldn’t the mafia (who knows who really is what) vote for her if she really WAS town and I really AM town? That way it’d bump her off and, like you said earlier, put a LOT of suspicion on me the next day.

Yet the votes against her haven’t done this the last three days (when I started mentioning this fact two days ago).

So the case has to be one of the following:

I’m town and she’s town (but why haven’t the scum done the above yet?)

I’m scum and she’s town (then why aren’t they helping me get her lynched in the day when they could have started two or three days ago when she already had about three votes against her)

I’m town and she’s scum (which actually fits the best, makes the most sense and helps explain/would help explain a lot of things.)
[/QUOTE]

I’m just not following your logic here AT ALL, and since you keep saying it, I’ve got to call you on it. Let’s go through each case:

Town/Town: Why would the scum want to kill her? She’s drawn a fair amount of suspicion and it’s not beyond belief that she’ll get lynched on her own, in which case you draw an amount of suspicion and likely get lynched soon thereafter. If they kill her, they use a night that they could have used to either further implicate one of you, implicate someone else, or just get someone out of the way. Shouldn’t they want the town to do the dirty work for them when possible?

**Scum/Town: ** Why would they help you get her lynched? Wouldn’t getting her lynched immediately cast suspicion on you in that case and, you being scum, that’s bad, right? I could see them helping you get her lynched in you’re both town, but in this scenario, that would only serve to get a scum lynched the next day.

**Town/Scum: ** This I see, or at least saw yesterday. It’s looking harder to believe now. I can understand the idea of attacking fellow scum to hide eachother, but they were pretty much relentless on her. It’s either because they really want her dead, or they’re playing a brilliant game and completely outsmarting all of us.

**Scum/Scum: ** Mainly, I find it most interesting that you ignored this case completely. I think it’s possible that you want the town to believe that exactly one of the two of you is scum so that, much like with **storyteller ** in M2, when one of you is lynched, the other is largely exonerated. Interestingly, this tactic seems to have backfired on SCL in this scenario, so I can’t imagine that that the scum would keep trying it, which seems to make this a low probability case; OTOH, you may have been recruited at a point in time following your initial suspicion, and so you’re simply keeping it up for consistency.

That all said, logically, it seems that the town/town scenario is the most likely for the reasons laid out above. IOW, my suspicion of SCL is greatly lessened at this point; unfortunately, I’m not really sure where else to look except that there DOES seem to be some kind of mafia conspiracy to get her lynched, and if you are town, as my logic seems to put it, who else has gone after her? I’m going to have to look close at DiggitCamara or whoever it was that voted for her if it wasn’t him.

1856

[QUOTE=Rachm Qoch]
One of the issues I’m pondering is Lemur’s power-role fishing and subsequent repeated insistance that the mafia had probably recruited, and possibly recruited the doctor. One of the things that outed him to me at least was his attempt two or three days back to argue that the watchman/doctor, from the mafia’s perspective, are no better recruited than dead. When his argument fell apart, he still refused to conceed the point.
[/quote]

Which is what made me start to look at him funny too.

Hahaha, I said this exact thing when it happened. : p But it’s nice to see someone else thinking it now.

Snipped.

One thing I don’t understand is why I’m not dead yet. By all rights, I should be… But at the very LEAST, I feel that either I or tirial should be as we have been and became some of the more/most analytical posters and thinkers, plus we’re the only two left who have experience in the game.

So it stands to reason (at least in my own head) that wayyyyy back three nights ago, they (they being scum) would have tried to take one of us out. I think, since they could only choose one and I’m still alive right now, that they chose to hit tirial and then, following your part up above that I had also mentioned earlier, recruited him.

Whether or not this is saying she was/is the Doctor, I don’t know. Maybe I am saying I think that unconciously. But I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s possible that the Night Watchman was lucky both times on her and so they thought she was the Doc and recruited.

Maybe again that I’m wayyyy off and the Night Watchman was lucky with someone else, twice, that they tried to hit (or they tried to hit the Doc, who is someone else other than tirial). But again, in my mind, it doesn’t make sense not to try to get either her or I out way back then…at least one of us.

Although this may raise your hackles even more, I’m telling you that nothing he said drew me into it then. I had already thought all of this before you brought it up and, combined with my wondering why either I or tirial bit it long ago, connected them.

Again, maybe I’m way off. I just don’t feel I am, though.

1857

For some reason, I’m starting more and more to think Idle Thoughts has been recruited. Why would the mafia recruit tirial and not him?

1858

[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Town/Town: Why would the scum want to kill her? She’s drawn a fair amount of suspicion and it’s not beyond belief that she’ll get lynched on her own, in which case you draw an amount of suspicion and likely get lynched soon thereafter. If they kill her, they use a night that they could have used to either further implicate one of you, implicate someone else, or just get someone out of the way. Shouldn’t they want the town to do the dirty work for them when possible?
[/quote]

Nothing is for sure in this game. She hasn’t been lynched yet, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t just kill her, then, at night and show she’s town (if she really is) and then have everyone else, the next day, go for my head.

So since they’re not doing that, why then, would they take the chance (again, if she’s REALLY town) that she’d get properly lynched? So far that’s not happened. I’d think that they’d all vote for her (or at least help it along) and make her death a done deal and then everyone would be on me too.

Neither of those things have been the case though…and to me, that just doesn’t make sense. shrugs So I don’t think it’s Town/Town.

And since I KNOW I’m town, I think SHE’S scum.

You’re right..I did. I guess it was natural for me to forget it since I happen to know I’m town. Although I DID remember the “I’m scum, she’s town” option.

Well, for the record, I’m about equally suspicious of him too. But I maintain my feelings (and vote) for SCL.

1859

[QUOTE=SnakesCatLady]
For some reason, I’m starting more and more to think Idle Thoughts has been recruited. Why would the mafia recruit tirial and not him?
[/QUOTE]

Why would they recruit me and not tirial?

I already told you what I think about that.

But it doesn’t matter anyway since I think you’re scum yourself.

1860

[QUOTE=Idle Thoughts]
But didn’t BlasterMaster do the actual odds and deduce it was about a 99% chance it happened?
Yeah. I’m willing to believe it probably happened.
[/QUOTE]

Yes I did do the odds, and IIRC, that’s about the number I came up with making certain assumptions, some of which are decidedly untrue (but probably reasonably close to ground truth in practice). Namely, in order to calculate, I was assuming that the doctor protects, NWM locations, and murder targets were completely random. In practice, this probably isn’t far from the truth; certainly it’s true (or might as well be) for the NWM, but the doctor isn’t (or at least hopefully isn’t) using random.org to pick his protection target and the scum are probably choosing their targets with some consideration for who they think might be protected.

Of course, the question is, how does this affect the odds? Well, if it’s coming from a smaller pool, that makes the odds of a protection succeeding go up, which means my numbers are conservative (and those accurate in saying it’s highly probable that the recruitment happened), but if the scum are doing a good job of out guessing the doctor, it could be decidedly lower. That said, I’m inclined to believe the pool is smaller, because why would scum kill a pro-town player who draws a lot of suspicion; similarly, why would the doctor not self-protect in favor of protecting a suspicious person? I also assumed that the mafia wouldn’t no-kill. Just like when NAF said when asked a similar question (about mafia night-killing themselves); I can’t think of a good stragy for this point of the game where a no-kill is a good idea… I can think of one for VERY late game (mentioned below), but that obviously doesn’t apply to now.

That said, how do we factor in fluiddruid and **Lemur ** seeming to insist that the recruitment happened? Because if it’s decidedly in their favor for us to believe that, whether it is true or not. Namely, if it did happen, by insisting that it did not happen, it raises suspcion about it such that, late in the game, they an no kill and get everyone suspicious of all of the then confirmed townies and possibly get one of them lynched. If it didn’t happen, then if we all believe that it did, then late in the game they can recruit, let it look like a NWM or DOC block, and then suddenly have an impossible to detect scum among our pro-town roles. Thus, I’d be far more :dubious: if one or both of them were insisting that it didn’t happen.

That all said, I think my assumptions in my math are reasonable, which means my numbers are reasonable, which means I’m strongly inclined to believe it happened. However, if near the end of the game there’s a no-kill, especially if the doc and NWM are gone, but even if one or both of them are still around, it will warrant some discussion as to whether or not the recruit happened during the last three nights, or that night immediately preceeding.

And, to bring it full circle, I’m not even really sure why this is such a major question now. We still definitely have some scum who have always been scum and were not recruited. That is, we need to focus on catching them first, and if we happen to find the recruit along the way, cool beans; otherwise, I’m not sure it’s something to fret about, because we don’t have any confirmed townies to be concerned about whether or not they switched alliances.