[QUOTE=NAF1138]
ok, so there was a kill last night. So we have 2 options here right? Either our vig took their shot at a kill and knocked one of us out or there was no recruitment. Mafia can only kill OR recruit but not both (I just checked).
Either way, this gives us something to work with. So…thoughts? Personally, I want to hear what BlaM was going to say, re: no lynch, if he had been able to say it before the Day was ended early.
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I’ll try to keep this brief without the amount of effort I would have put into itotherwise simply because it’s not really relevant anymore. I do not want to side-track this Day more than necessary about hind-sight. Bottom line, I see lynching as the default because it provides information and provides a chance to hit scum (even if it is small). We HAVE to remember how the mechanics of this game work: Scum have an informational advantage, town has a numerical advantage. The idea is to leveral your advantage to diminish the other side’s advantage. In this way, the lynch is the town’s most powerful tool, and giving it up without a DAMN good reason, is generally to the town’s detriment.
Here’s what happened yesterday, in a nut shell: “Hey everyone, let’s not lynch” “/Agree” “…”. There was very little discussion, no information gained, no risk of the Boss outting himself or giving clues, very little read on other players to be able to allow us to see one pattern before they may have been recruited to detect changes.
By stifling the discussion of lynching, and not at least considering, having people put forth arguments and such, we don’t get any read on people’s motivations. And we’re essentially down one Day, except the mob is most likely one person stronger, we’re down two (one death, and the recruit) and we have almost no information to show for it. Yes, we DO have the information gained at Night by investigative roles, but we’d have gotten that anyway, without a lynch.
However, by NOT having that discussion, we lost potentially valuable leads for the town power roles. Perhaps someone made a suspicious or unsubstantiated vote, it may have allowed a power role to either find the Boss or be able to help back that person up if they fall under suspicion the next Day.
Sure, we COULD have put a power role up and made them come out, but that could happen ANY day. It’s no different if it had happened Yesterday or Today, but it’s not the dire situation that it was made out to be either. We DO have people out there that can protect our power roles. If, for instance, a detective was revealed, he probably would have been revealed Today (particularly since he’d have additional information to hide), with a random investigation that would either be (so-and-so is town, or couldn’t reveal because it was a power role), but he could also have potentially be protected from recruitment, forcing the Boss into a WIFOM situation of whether to attempt a valuable recruit that is likely to fail, or recruit someone else with a lower chance of them being a valuable role.
We have to remember, that leveraging our advantage means that, particularly early in the game, losing a pro-town player is of relatively little consequence provided we gain information greater than or equal to that loss. So previously, our numerical advantage was (n-1):1. It is now (n-3):2. Had we lynched, it would only be slightly less (n-4):2, but we’d have had a potential to gain some useful information. We’re going to lose people everyday whether we gain information or not (barring a successful protection), so we need to maximize our information gain compared to our numerical loss.
Now, that’s not to say that a no-lynch is always a bad idea. There are situations where the information gain is not worth the numerical loss, particularly in a LyLo situation, when a no-lynch will likely still leave us in a LyLo situation the next day. But the first Day is the day a bad lynch hurts us least (because our advantage is at it’s peak) while providing a basis of information for the remainder of the game.
All of that said, though I’m disappointed in the no-lynch decision yesterday, I am not explicitly suspicious of anyone for supporting it. Given the discussion, and lack of a counter-argument, it is impossible to distinguish between a townie motivated by believing he’s doing what’s best for the town, and the Boss motivated by self-preservation. Thus, I’m going to try to catch up and see if I have any other observations to add… that may or may not be tonight.
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