Heh. 
Good job Hal. You played very well. Also to the Brotherhood who came very close. You outplayed us too. Good job.
Thanks for the game Story.
Oh, and Good job to Mahaloth as well.
Visorslash, nice job making everyone believe you could unlynch anyone at any time… It was a good play, even if we did make it work in our favor (Don’t worry, even if he IS Town, Visor will save him!).
I never did think you had the power, for the record 
congrats Hal! great game. i’d rather have a PFK get the win.
thanks for the game, Story. very creative for a very open game.
Town made a number of mistakes, my lynch included, but this was pretty bad. i saw that right away since i had excluded Astral from my list of experienced Dopers becuase he didn’t start the game.
First off, fantastic job with the role claim Hal. That would have been well beyond my writing skills.
Also, hats off to storyteller’s inventive setup and excellent game colour.
I dropped out for both in and out of game reasons. I was spending too much time playing a game I wasn’t enjoying any more due to the participation problems. Town have almost no chance of winning with so many holes in the game. I kept going until a sub could be found, but it would have been better all round if I’d simply stopped. The vibe I was getting from town was that I was just pissing people off, which was not my intention. I wasn’t actually rude to anyone. I definitely won’t be signing up to play again. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out the game mechanics and scum-hunting, but I’d be better off following future games as a non-participant.
I see I self-protected on Night one. That leaves me with an odd record in Mafia. Scum and PFK have tried to night kill me five times in total, but have only succeeded twice. Despite that, I did more harm than good for my team, by pushing for fubbleskag to be lynched (it gets worse, as I suspect sinjin may have restored him). After he flipped and I left, I picked Suburban Plankton, Inner Stickler, MHaye and Babale for scum in a PM to storyteller. But really, my confidence in that read was very low, and if I’d remained in the game I could easily have ended up voting anywhere else. Snickers was my only solid town read in the whole game. I wasn’t even confident that Stanislaus was town, until MHaye flipped.
well done, Hal.
Yeah, I screwed up quite a plethora of times this game. The latest being the whole Astral thingy. That was pretty ridiculously stupid right there.
Can I ask a question? Do you guys think that Town was at a disadvantage this game as compared to other Mafia games? I really have nothing to compare it to, but I believe that we were. Here’s a few things that weren’t working in our favor:
- Inactive players. I’m not just talking about those for whom extraordinary circumstances got in the way, but those that weren’t regular active contributors.
- A 95% open setup where Scum knew everything and Town knew almost nothing, and could hide very little.
- Some pretty weak town powers (The Miller? Who wants to use that?)
- Two of our most powerful positions (1 investigator and the carpenter) both were lost to Town.
I’m not complaining. Half of the above was just luck of the draw. The others are what they are. It’s all just a game.
But I’m wondering if others felt the same way, that town was really odds on to lose this game from the very start.
I don’t think so. We had way more mislynches available than scum had regular lynches. In four correct lynches, scum could lose, but it ended up taking, what, seven mislynches for us to lose?
Well yeah, but I’d argue that’s the scenario for every mafia game. Scum are vastly outnumbered, and it always takes just a few correct guesses for town to win. I even read somewhere that math indicates that with equally skilled players, you have 50:50 odds when scum = the square root of town.
So in theory, 15:4 is pretty close.
I’m just saying the setup and random happenstances of this game put town at a disadvantage to winning.
That’s just math though, assuming “random” lynches and non-random night kills. The lynches aren’t random, because scum influences them. It seems like Mafia can’t be won by town through logic or analysis, and must be won with psychology or luck.
Mafia’s definitely a social game, not a logical one - although I think you can get a long way by applying logic. But essentially it’s about our ability to deceive and to detect deception. Playing online makes it harder for Town, because you don’t see people hesitate, flush, smirk, make eye contact with fellow scum or otherwise reveal their emotions.
(On which note, special kudos to MentalGuy who I don’t believe anybody even considered might be scum, due to his excellent impersonation of conscientious Townie.)
But you can spot inconsistencies in people’s behaviour, or emotional responses to the situation. (I do think Suburban gave himself away by being too defensive at one point, and I’m kicking myself for giving up on that.)
I don’t know what the overall record is, but I’m pretty sure Town have won a fair proportion of the games we’ve played here.
Personally, I’d like to thank story for designing this game. It was an innovative variation on the usual set-up, and fun to play - I got frustrated towards the end, but that’s my fault for not being better ( or Scum’s/Hal’s for being too good!). I think Scum did have one big advantage that they don’t normally, which was their unimpeachable role-claims. However, we identified this and in fact, it did cut both ways - Babale did leave himself exposed when visor died (and we should have hammered that) and Suburban couldn’t have survived a claim by the time we made them - we would not have believed he’d failed to investigate, or sat on a result for so long.
It’s very difficult to judge, but I think this setup favoured town if anything. The watcher roles were potentially very powerful, with the ability to self-confirm and semi-confirm several town in one night. A double watch of Visor on night 1 could have potentially given town a large semi-confirmed pool, including The Knight, both watchers, one or more protective roles, The Carpenter and The Canon.
I was slow to see the possibilities in the setup, and I didn’t want to point them all out, as I was hoping to assess role claims. Doing something visible was as or more important than the action of the power themselves. For example, a role-block of an investigation would have been a great result. A plain investigation was almost useless by itself, given the issues over trusting the investigator and the possibility of the Cloak being in play. A role-block of an investigator would give two semi-confirmed. (The presence or otherwise of The Memento being key in all this).
Well, at least town didn’t lose. Well played, Hal - nice job, and nice win. And at least someone was certain I was town, so that’s a win for me! (Thanks, Alka.)
I protected **Stanislaus **the night I died. But not because I was certain he was town (although I should probably have been.) Instead, I’d dreamed up this convoluted scenario where he was scum, protected by the cloak (hence fubbleskag’s town result) and backed up by a scum gnarlycharlie’s investigation claim. Rounding out the scum team in this weird scenario was Mental Guy and someone else - I didn’t have a good read on the third; I think I was suspecting **MHaye **after his reveal (if that came before I died, I forget). Because scum would totally coordinate to that much of a degree, right? And that whole house of cards wouldn’t fall apart with any town actions, right? Oh well, one outta four ain’t bad, I guess. At least I was able to save a much better player than I, even if my reasoning was all wrong. Such is mafia.
Fun game, story. Thanks!
I’ve been following along (lightly) for the past few weeks. I thought the set-up was fantastic. I was worried about the randomness of the role assignments/who is scum being a potential problem, but that didn’t seem to be an issue at all.
I do think Hal being a PFK was a strong possibility that was considered and discarded way too quickly. The game started with 19 players and only 4 were scum. The setup strongly leaned towards another lynch burden for the Town. Town probably should have lynched Hal right away, but once they let him go and got closer to endgame, they were right not to lynch him anymore. I also also think that scum should have been able to kill Hal, and if I missed some way that they could have, they should have. MHaye’s rules and win condition analysis was also convincing in my opinion and reveals a potential flaw in the ruleset since it seems like it might be possible for Hal to steal the win and Town to satisfy their win condition as written. I haven’t looked at it closely though, but what MHaye posted before looked convincing.
I was also surprised (though I may have simply missed it in my skimming), that there wasn’t that much discussion about which scum picked whom. Once Suburban and Inner Stickler were revealed as scum, that led me to wonder who picked Suburban and Inner and who would Suburban and Inner pick as scum. That led me to suspect MentalGuy. Especially towards endgame, MentalGuy looked like the most likely scum pick. It made little sense for scum to pick Ender since Ender was known to be new and therefore a potential liability. Scum would be scared to pick him since Ender’s ability to lie and blend in and not make unintentional slips is untested.
I was shocked that the two town investigators both investigated Stanislaus. I vaguely recall there being discussion of splitting the group up to avoid overlap. What happened to that idea? It was a good one!
I really enjoyed this game, so I’d like to chime in and thank Storyteller as well.
I think we as a board have seriously improved our scum game. I pegged Babale early, ignored it later, and wasn’t ever actually in danger of catching scum at any other point. Kudos to the scum team, as well!
It only occurred to me much later, so I didn’t bring it up - would it have been good strategy to get the investigators to claim and investigate each other D1/N1?
In the actual game, it would forced Scum into either killing whichever investigator was targeting Suburban - itself a bit of a give-away - or trying to to claim the Cloak was in play/that the investigator was scum. If SP had refused to claim, he would have been trapped in a later mass-claim situation.
In general, it would have given us either 3 semi-confirmed Town (damn that Cloak!); isolated the 1 scum investigator; given at least one out of 2 scum investigators, with the risk that the second would win Town-cred; it would only have failed if all three investigators were scum - but in that case Town would always have been struggling.
Possibly.
Pros: Investigators are likely to be protected after a claim like that, it would be risky for scum to try and kill them.
Cons: Scum know who to put the cloak on. <– that’s a biggie
In my opinion, it would have been best to divide the player list into thirds and assign each investigator (by rolename) to one list. No overlap and very little chance of the cloak having an effect.
Also, I felt from the beginning that the cloak was most powerful in its potential existence rather than its actual use. Look at all the self-damage town did to confirm Stanislaus. Two LYNCHED investigators and one LYNCHED whatever-MHaye was. That was… not worth it.
Yes, one of the ways life was difficult for Town was that we just couldn’t trust investigations. We could have countered that by using watching powers more effectively, I think, but it was a non-traditional set-up and we didn’t spend enough time thinking about that aspect of it.
I didn’t use my power very well. I held on, and held on, until the night visor was killed. Then I protected myself. Because I trusted Babale at that point. Then when it should have been obvious that he couldn’t be Town, I didn’t push that point hard enough.
So, in thinking about the game, our scum hunting efforts failed pretty hard, and not for lack of effort or not playing the game.
What could we have done better to find scum? Mental Guy was all but invisible to me, and Inner Stickler was as well. I remember the discussion from my “let’s play mafia better” thread, where some were arguing that the game really does come down to chance, if both teams play roughly average games. Is that true? Are scum too hard to find in a well-played game?
I’m hoping to do better next time. I was just about awful at finding scum besides Babale.
Actually, in my opinion, the fact that Mental Guy was invisible to you should have been the biggest indicator that lynching him might be a good idea. Why do you think MentalGuy was invisible to you? Because he WANTED to be invisible to you. The players that “act scummy” are invariably town because townies don’t care how they are perceived. I call play like MentalGuy’s “clean nosers” and I like them better dead.
Think this game is a very good case study in Town lynching the players “acting scummy” when “acting scummy” is a very vague and not entirely concrete notion. Again, I skimmed, but I never really got why the two investigators were lynched. It seems to me that someone floated a plausible set of events where the investigator could possibly be scum and that was for some reason enough. And yet, those with no evidence either way are allow to skate without much pressure at all.