Well - I wanted to avoid the theoretical capo-ized mason. That opens up a guarantee of recruitment for the others, who are considered safe.
If they claimed as priests, trying to get them is pointless, as you don’t know which they are and the failure rate is too good. But I agree, on continued examination, that my idea on claiming is unworkable.
Any initial recruitment of a mason has a 50% chance of failure. I don’t think the gain of recruiting a mason is worth that risk. If a mason has already been recruited, the scum will know who the rest are anyway. I would also like to emphasize that it lowers the pool of places the godfather can hide. Once we can take out the godfather, there is no further need to worry about recruitment.
I don’t think so, certainly not at this point. Part of our advantage, from a numerical perspective, is that the scum has a large out of which they are trying to find specific power roles. In that sense, having masons claim early increases the scum’s chance of locating power roles. Even worse, scum may be willing to waste a recruitment or two trying to get a Mason on their team, especially later, after some vanilla and other recruitables are gone, and the recruitment failure at random is very near the 50% failure they’d get on Masons. Then, we’d be stuck with falsely believing a set of individuals is more trustworthy than they actually are, and when we did get down to knowing it was a Mason who was recruited, we’re essentially forced to look in our own “confirmed” pool
At this point, a think Masons are better off just trying to keep themselves hidden and only claiming if they need to do a role claim to avoid getting lynched.
If we were going to have a partial role claim, I think masons would be the best group to initially claim. Do you disagree with this statement?
I can’t agree with this. Let’s assume worst case for a moment, that the scum have successfully recruited twice, and some other assumptions like that there’s three priests and three masons. Thus, currently there’s 23 players of which 3 are scum. Assuming it’s not a capo attempt and that we lynch a townie today, there are 6 unrecruitables (3 priests, Doctor, Vig, and Bishop) and 3 Masons. That’s 7 1/2 unrecruitables out of 19 non-scum for 39% failure rate on recruitment. If the Masons and Priests claim, we end up with 3 unrecruitables out of 13 for a 23% recruitment rate. Or, they may decide to kill instead. Right now, we have a 10.5% chance of either the Doctor or Detective being killed at random, but after such a claim it would be 15.4%; IOW, it would increase their odds by almost 50%. Not to mention, one of the scum would almost certainly claim priest, leaving us wondering if they did, and if so, how do we figure out?
Anyway, just looking at the numbers, recruiting a Mason, given that he’s claimed, isn’t a whole lot less likely than just a random shoot in the dark, but it does carry extra information and, of course, the general sentiment that Masons are trustworthy town.
I just can’t see how this would help us find the Boss that much better such that we can potentially give that much benefit to the scum.
It depends on the situation, which is why I really don’t understand this discussion. The Masons have more information that the town does about their roles, so they’re the best ones fit for deciding when they should claim. As for discussing some sort of mass role claim, again, it depends on the situation.
What’s the point of discussing whether or not a mass role claim on Day 6 might be helpful? We’d be making way too many assumptions about the events between now and then. I think such discussions should take place in the context of the situation. That is, if you think it’s prudent to do so now, bring it up and we’ll discuss it; if you don’t think it’s prudent, we can discuss it if someone wants to. But really, we need to concern ourselves with the strategy now and finding scum now. I’ve explained already why I think a mass role claim isn’t good now, but it MAY be a good idea later. Do you dis agree with that statement?
The priests *definitely *should not claim. We simply can not know how many there are and cannot verify their claims without investigation, which would waste time and expose our investigative roles (who are recruitable and killable since there’s almost certainly a Hitman now). The scum could trade a soldier to tie up and eventually out a detective or beat cop.
I’m a bit more ambivalent about the Masons. They can confirm each other, and I think the scum wouldn’t bother while they’re still in such a target rich environment. But they’d bare testing later in the game.
Perhaps the vigilante? Just because he’s out doesn’t mean we have to put him on a leash.
The doctor and bishop should definitely not come out. The Bishop is recruitable, and while the doctor can block himself, while he’s still unknown he’s more free to block *other *players. The investigators ought not to come out unless they find the boss (perhaps any scum for the beats). Or if they need to disprove a false claim or avoid being lynched themselves, obviously.
I don’t like this at all. You really have nothing to say?
My apologies for not following Today closely as yet.
The off-board game just ran through a tense four-player Day in under five hours. I’ve been reading this game, but need to go over the arguments of Today again. Fortunately weekends tend to have low posting volumes so I will be caught up by this time tomorrow and have something to say.
I have a few impressions but nothing firm yet.
I think that everyone declaring roles is a bad idea.
First, there are too many roles that have an unknown number greater than one available: priest, beat cop, and townie. Scum could easily divvy these up amoung themselves so they don’t lump too many into one place, and hide. Especially if there’s only 2 or 3. No one in these groups can speak up for each other, because they don’t know each other.
Second, while it would look like we had more information, we really wouldn’t, cuz all of it would be suspect. Sure, if someone screwed up, we’d be able to nail them, but we might as well wait for that now.
Third, we’d be giving way too much info to the scum without getting much in return. They would be able to pick and choose instead of stumbling through the dark like we are.
Hey look, a bandwagon!
I do agree that infrequent posters should be suspect. It makes it too easy for scum to hide.
I don’t know that they should be suspect; I’d much rather they come and participate, and add to our pool of information. As a few have said before, quiet townies can hurt us in this game. Participate!
I’m of the opinion that the vigilante should not claim unless he/she is in danger of being lynched, or enough days have passed that a mass roleclaim would be beneficial for town (and no, I haven’t started crunching numbers as to when that would be so). I’m also against putting the Vigilante on a leash. He/She can take our advice as they see fit, but a Vigilante that only has to answer to him/herself means that the kill decision is being made by a guaranteed Pro-Town member. By forcing the Vigilante to follow some kind of consensus, we open up a whole can of worms that makes my head hurt just thinking about it: How can we be certain that the decisions we come up with would be any better than the vigilante’s? And as the game progresses, the number (or at least the ratio) of scum would increase, making that decision more suspect to scum interference.
Pleo, as someone else already mentioned, can be considered truthful. There’s only a very minute chance that he’s a gambiting scum, and his rush to claim feels more pro-Town (because it isn’t in town’s benefit to lynch a priest, and he wanted to generate discussions beyond “Pleo is scummy”).
Off the top of my head, I don’t remember if we’re guaranteed a Police Chief, but someone mentioned that the Police Chief should wait to use his one-time power until after the Boss dies - I wholeheartedly agree with this, but on the other hand Police Chief is a role vulnerable to fake claiming, so I’ll be taking any claims with a grain of salt.
OneCentStamp, don’t feel intimidated. Just play the best you can and trust your instincts, as they can be surprisingly accurate. Also, remember that if you’re a Townsperson then you’re fairly dispensable - yes, it would suck to die, but if you do before you’re recruited then your alignment remains pro-Town; drawing a Night Kill means that someone spent their Night killing you instead of a power-role; and if you end up being lynched than the voting record may give us valuable information down the road.
(Mafia lesson for the newbies: saying “I’m new at this” is a weak scum tell around these parts. The reasoning is that one is more inclined to go easier on the new blood, so a scum might say that as an excuse for flaky behavior. However, it’s only a weak tell because obviously pro-Town players can be new, too, and it is easy for a new player to feel overwhelmed by all the action going on. I got lynched in my first game for making some really dumb mistakes, but fortunately my death wasn’t too detrimental to my team and we won the game.)
Sorry guys–when I signed up, I thought I wouldn’t have to participate on Thursdays and Fridays, which are just about the worst days of the week for me to post.
Also, I don’t know if solid post counts are that accurate right now, because I, for one, have not posted at night–all the drinking games and such aren’t really what I’m interested in Mafia for. Some players have posted a lot during “dead” times, so they’ve got higher posts counts despite not saying much; it happens.
Anyway, I’ve tried to post substance but have mostly been overlooked. I’m just sayin’. I’ll post more over the weekend, when free time is vast and flows like wine. 
That was basically the point I was making when I mentioned to NAF that those sorts of posts have a pretty high noise-to-signal ratio and were a good way to make a scum look helpful while simultaneously doing next to nothing to enlighten anyone. After all, he said I had 4 posts to the game thread, when three of those were posts during the Night. That’s why it jumped out at me that his post wasn’t particularly useful, because including the Night posts makes it entirely misleading and could obscure the point he was trying to make to begin with.
The funny thing is, I don’t disagree with the initial point he was making. Perhaps if Night posts hadn’t been included, it might have been a good tool to call out the lurkers and make people realize that they needed to make a record in order to help us after a potential recruitment, and make it harder for the scum to decide who to recruit in the first place. But I’m not sure how “Bartender, I want to do a body shot off of dotchan now!” type posts will help us with that process. Had NAF gone through and weeded out the Night posts, I don’t think I would have called him out at all.
Now, to deal with the subject of power roles purposely role-claiming…
Obviously, any recruitable power role should not roleclaim unless their lives depend upon it. I’d like to see BlaM crunch the numbers about when it might be worth it for Masons to claim, provided he gives us Cliff Notes for the English majors. Priests are an easy place for scum to hide, and I think that provided our Detective is alive, it might be a good idea for the Detective to investigate any claimed Priest that Night, and the Beat Cops to look elsewhere.
And as for the Vigilante? Under NO circumstances should a Vig claim unless facing certain death. This is because one of the Vig’s best traits is the fact that a recruitment attempt will give them the name of a random scum! Obviously a claimed Vig will never be recruited because of this, so it’s in our best interest for the Vig to remain silent.
Because of this, I’m going to Vote Menocchio. His suggestion that the Vig should claim is sheer madness. It’s two levels of scummy–one because it would be a huge mistake for the Town if that suggestion came to be, and two because it shows a player who isn’t fully paying attention to the rules, which is a very unTownie thing to do.
Okay, this could be a really subtle town move, or maybe he just forgot/didn’t realize. I’m not sure it’s enough for me to vote for a Menocchio lynch, though. I don’t think that your second point, not paying attention to the rules, is necessarily a lynchable offense, and I think that you might be jumping the gun with this point.
I think role claiming is very premature.
No one other than the Masons and the Vig can reliably claim (the masons have each other to verify, and a false-claimed Vig will just be killed by the real Vig that night. The Priests can’t be verified, so claims on their part won’t lift any suspicion from them. The Beat Cops and the Detective are inarguably the best targets for recruitment, so a claim by them sets them up to be recruited or Capo’d.
While having the Masons outed would reduce the numbers of people we have to search through to find the Boss, they can just reveal themselves if they’re being threatened. While they’re unknown, the Boss may try and fail to recruit them, and every time that happens is a bonus for the Town.
I don’t think Menocchio’s suggestion is a scum-tell, merely the results of someone overlooking one line in a very long ruleset. I didn’t remember the whole ‘recruited Vig gets a name’ bit until reminded about it. The more that I think about Menny, the less I get Boss vibes from him: I just can’t see why the Boss would be as open and as active as he’s been this game.
I like the idea of hunting lurkers… or even better, the semi-lurkers, the ones who post just enough to keep themselves in the game. I am going to toss out a FOS on hotflungwok… who’s posting behavior has changed rapidly from yesterDay to toDay… but for right now, I think Boss hunting is more important than recruited scum-hunting.
Oops. Yeah, I really did forget the Vig got a name with a recruit attempt. Obviously, he should remain hidden in that case.
I’d prefer not to edit since the continuity of posts makes a heck of a lot more sense otherwise. Plus, the correctional posts almost immediately follow (on the same page, no less).
Vote Tallies:
Menocchio (2) - dotchan, Drain Bead
NAF1138 (1) - Blaster Master
Pleonast (0) - (Darth Sensitive)
hotflungwok (0) - (Blaster Master)