Mafia V: The Cult of Sekham

The Game Room
3361

I’m awake. I didn’t have any revelations in my sleep, unfortunately.

Some of you speculate that I’m the Prophet. That’s certainly a possibility that would fit in with our facts. I am not the Prophet, but there’s no way for me to prove it. I don’t see myself as being led about…I believed Idle Thoughts initially but changed my mind after thinking about it. If there’s something scummy about my posts I’d be interested to know exactly what it is.

I still don’t know who to believe, but I am finding it pretty difficult to accept MHaye’s recruitment as a likely occurrence. Zuma’s unexplained drunken posts don’t make it any easier to accept IT/zuma’s claim. I don’t see why a Monk would make posts like that. Even drunken rambling usually has some basis in reality…

–FCOD

3362

May I ask why?

3363

Sure. Unless the Cult has it’s own investigative role, I don’t see how they could picking up on the power roles. Maybe one, MAYBE two, but not three. I was in the Mafia in M2, and I don’t recall that it was that easy for us to find the power roles. I think they’d have to be very lucky to pick out three power roles like that.

And besides that, I just can’t let go of the drunk posts. They don’t make any sense if **zuma **is a Monk.

–FCOD

3364

I’ve been through the Day’s posts, finally.

I think everyone would agree that the only common ground is that one or other group of players is lying. The question that needs to be asked is “why did the Cultists do it?” That is, what did the Cult hope to gain with this gambit that reveals at least two of their number?

The answer to that question hinges on two others, questions that the Cult know the answer to and the Town doesn’t.[ol][li]How many Cultists are there?[/li][li]Has the Cult recruited?[/ol]It should surprise no-one (with my role) that I have been concerned about the question of how many of each role in the game since I opened the role PM. Primarily because knowing how the roles were distributed was key to determining how confident I could be over investigations Before the Oracle’s Death (BOD).[/li]
The workings probably don’t interest you very much, but by Day 5 it had evolved into the belief that there had been six Cultists at the start. I can lay it out again if you wish though.

I don’t believe that the Cult’s current actions make any sense unless the Town is in a “lynch or lose” situation, or maybe one step from it. The action completely polarises the players into two camps. In order to ensure that they don’t lose a Cultist now, a substantial number have to “gang up” on one of the other claimants. If they do then come the announcement of the execution result, they’ll look like a Cultist lynch mob. That won’t matter if success means they win now, or puts them into a position where they cannot lose.

However, since the Cult are not in the majority right now they still have to succeed in persuading two or more townies to vote along with them, or obfuscate enough that our votes are split. This means that the we need to vote together now to avoid losing now.

Since if there were seven or more active Cultists the game would have been declared over at Dawn there can be no more than Cultists now. As shown earlier, if there are six Cultists with a recruitment still availalbe the Cult has won except in one very unlikely circumstance (ie that the Avatar is the last cultist standing), I’m going to assume that there were six original Cultists. They may or may not have used the recruitment.

On that assumption, entering Night 6 there were 5 cultists functioning out of a total of 18 players. There were three players who had claimed roles. The Priest, the Disciple and a probable two Monks were in the remaining 10 players. Would the Cult use their recruitment power on one of those 10 players, hoping to hit the Apprentice? Could they be sure they’d correctly identified that player, and that neither the Priest nor the Disciple had identified the Apprentice and extended their protection? Or that the Priest might choose, for reasons of her own, to perform the All Protection ritual?

Frankly I doubt it. If they used the recruitment that Night, they had only one rational choice – the one player they knew was vulnerable to recruitment. Zeriel, as a Monk, would be immune, and the Martyr role might also be immune in his own proper person. They wouldn’t know, would they?

Of course Pleonast might be faking a claim, but they’re not going to convert one of their own. The other issue is that there might be only four functioning Cultists at that point, or even three. Either being true would increase the chance that converting an unknown would work. However, it would reduce their information pool and reduce the chance they could spot the Apprentice through discussion.

The central plank of the contention of Idle Thoughts and zuma[sub]2[/sub] is that I was converted. When you view the question through the lens of what the Cult knew then, you have to ask if they would risk using their recruitment when the chance of wasting it was so high?

The only possible Recruitment night is Night 6. If they did recruit that night (say because, as was suggested, they feared to lose the Prophet the next day) the only rational choice for recruitment would be HockeyMonkey.

I have a question for HockeyMonkey. In 3158 you claim to have tried to roleblock Kyrie Eleison on night 7. We know that the cult succeeded in their Night 7 action so that obviously failed. More to the point is, who did you try and roleblock in Night 6?

The situation now is that with 14 players surviving, there are either 5 or 6 active cultists.

Case 1 : There are six cultists, the recruitment having been used. We are right on the knife-edge.[ul][li] Lynching a Townie means that we have seven players to the Cult’s six, with the Cult killing the next action. A successful kill will fulfill their win condition.[/li][li]Lynching a Cultist means that there will be eight Town to five Cult. Then the Cult kill a townie, so the split is 7 – 5 and we’re back where we started.[/ul][/li]The only hope for us in this scenario is that the Cult have to play chicken with the remaining protective role(s). If our protectors do make the right choice a small gap opens up.

Case 2 : There are five Cultists and the recruitment still unused.[ul][li]Lynching a Townie means that we have eight players to the Cult’s five. The next action is the Cults. If they kill, the split is 7-5 in our favour; if they recruit the split is 7-6. We’re now worse off than in Case 1. If we were then to kill the Avatar then Sekham’s Revenge cancels the loss out and the split is 6-5 with the next action being a Cultist kill. They’d then win.[/li][li]Lynching a Cultist means we’d be at a 9-4 split, down to 8-5 after recruitment.[/ul]The fewer Cultists there are now the harder it is for them to steer a vote favourable to them. I cannot see them risking the fake Monk play if there were five or less cultists at the start. As soon as one dies and the role is revealed, the voting blocs harden. To be honest, Case 2 above is risky right now. I therefore conclude that, despite the risks I outlined above, that the recruitment must have happened on Night 6. In which case the odds on favourite for recruitment is HockeyMonkey, although there is another possibility I’ll discuss in the next post.[/li]
To the remaining Townies (I don’t care about influencing the heretics who believe in Sekham) :- Realise that we are on the verge of losing, and cannot afford to execute a nonSekhamite. The Cult’s biggest weapon at the moment is our uncertainty and disunity. We need to unite and dunk one person.

(This post has really grown, so I’m going to split it into two).

3365

Now in the argument over which set of claimants is telling the truth, I’m hardly an impartial observer. My role, and the investigations I have made, means that I know Idle Thoughts and zuma[sub]2[/sub] are not telling the truth, because I know Sachertorte is in fact a Monk and they both claim Sachertorte is not.

I reread the whole Day yesterday. It took too long to post last Night.

Firstly, consider zuma[sub]2[/sub]'s PUI in the context of his statements in [post=8899033]3300[/post]. According to the latter post he’d been out with friends, drinking and talking a lot about this game. Generally socialising, or gloating over the coup he and his Cultist buddies are going to pull on the hapless Townies when the game restarts?

Then, fresh home and still fairly plastered he logs onto the Dope and sees my failure to get a reading on Queueing. He posts claiming that I am “not the apprentice.”

I wondered then if the Cult were not up to something, but decided that on its own it was not nearly conclusive enough. It could just as easily be an inebriated Townie. However, it could also be zuma[sub]2[/sub] in his inebriated state not only unable to restrain himself, but also unable to remember exactly what the plan was.

Then came Idle Thoughts and his post. At this stage and for quite a while afterwards, he seems to be content to make the claim for he and zuma[sub]2[/sub], but there was no mention of me lying, or being converted. Indeed, exactly the opposite. In his first long breakdown post ([post=8892965]3148[/post]) his attitude is

That doesn’t sound like a townie who thinks I’ve been converted. It sounds like a townie who has provisionally accepted my claim, or a Cultist who doesn’t want to make me think he might be lying.

DarkCookies makes her claim. Idle Thoughts reacts with a “very interesting” and a claim. In post [post=8893369]3154[/post] he comes out with the suggestion that since I found Sachertorte to read Town, that Sachertorte had been converted, a position which makes sense assuming that Hal breadcrumbed Sachertorte in his last Day alive.

I thinbk it’s reasonable to suggest here that the Cult misunderstood what I’d said in 2967- namely they believed I actually had reads on all for of Kat’s FoSs (post 1020, remember?) as Believer. Sure Pleonast had claimed, but maybe he simply detects as Believer or maybe how Pleonast reads changes if and when he roleclaims.

[post=8894139]3170[/post] must have come as a bit of a shock. They’d obviously been hoping to keep me neutral in the affair, and I’ve just declared war. If I am the real, unrecruited Apprentice and I keep silent about something I know to be untrue this late in the game not only am I not helping my team I’m actively working against them. So I opened my trap and revealed that Sachertorte is really a Monk. Since Monks cannot have been converted, this directly contradicts not only Idle Thoughts’s statement that Sachertorte is not monk, but his position that Sachertorte was converted.

In which case, I’d like to hear Idle Thoughts explain who Hal did breadcrumb on Day 3?

When I voted in 3172, I cosnciously decided to vote for IT over zuma[sub]2[/sub], because zuma[sub]2[/sub] had made no formal claim to something I knew was wrong (except that I was not the apprentice, something that could be put down to his inebriated state).

Now read [post=8894619]3177[/post]. First Idle Thoughts says that he believes me and then comes across 3170 and pulls up short. He has to because a major assumption the Cult built this false claim on has just been pulled out from under him.

Then he goes off into his ranting mode. Idle Thoughts, I’m sorry but it didn’t impress me in M4 and it’s not going to work now. You decided to go this route if your plan hit a snag, and here it is so off you go. It’s a deliberate mimicing of your M4 behaviour just so you can say “In M4 I did this and was town, so I must be town now.” or words to that effect. It’s like any other town tell. Scum are quite capable of mimicing them.

3267 sees Idle Thoughts challenging the players to dunk Sachertorte then if he turns out Monk challenges me to investigate him “to see if I am the Avatar” he says.

This sort of post sends me off into blue-sky mode. There is a way Idle Thoughts can be very very sure he is not the Avatar. My previous conclusions on the subject notwithstanding, suppose that Idle Thoughts is the convert? He has brought up Today that his vote led to Kat being executed. So what, if he’s been converted since? And as the convert, he cannot be the Avatar. That would make him the perfect execution right now. It would hit a Cultist and not risk Sekham’s Revenge.

That’s another reason to execute IT. If he turns out the Recruit, we’ve almost cetainly exonerated HockeyMonkey, while if he’s regular Cult that seriously implicates her.

Other questions that deserve answers directed at me.

One of the major planks in the case against me is that the Cult suddenly realised who the Priest was. The only suggested mechanism is that I knew through investigations and told my new buddies. Sorry, no. Fretful Porpentine let it slip herself, although I only caught it in retrospect. Post [post=8819343]2269[/post] looks like someone who has thought a good deal about issues around protection role players giving some free advice. That was in Day 5, so a Cultist might have spotted for themselves in a reread in Day 7, or possibly the recruit could have pointed it out. (You can be sure that IT will try and claim I caught it before recruitment. Sorry, I didn’t.)

CatinaSuit asked why I investigated Queueing. All my investigations can do is reveal the state of a person’s devotion to Nairu. Thus they help to test possibilities but don’t all (except for the IP roles) actually give definitive answers. Queueing engenders strong reactions. If we had an idea of his role we might get a handle on others by their reactions to him. And, at this stage, a result of Non-Believer makes regular Cultist a real possibility (although vanilla nonbeliever cannot be dismissed).

USCDiver asked why I investigated Sachertorte. At that point I was completing the investigation of Kat’s FoSs. Sachertorte was the last one. I did consider leaving him for a week and investigating USCDiver.

One last point. Consider what Kyrie Eleison said in [post=8896345]3227[/post]. He quotes Sachertorte as saying Zeriel is not scum, and suggests this is evidence of knowledge from investigation.

How?

The quoted post is 2128. That was made in Day 5. If you assume I was converted, the earliest that any Cultist could know about my investigations would be Night 7. That just does not wash, I’m afraid.

Currently I think that along with Idle Thoughts and zuma[sub]2[/sub], USCDiver makes the best candidate for Cultist, and, if Idle Thoughts was not converted, HockeyMonkey as the turncoat.

Unmasking the others can wait until we have executed at least Idle Thoughts and zuma[sub]2[/sub].

3366

I will agree that it is unlikely that the cult is that good at picking out power roles. They might be that lucky though. Who knows? To me there are only a couple of possibilities for the no-kill realistically - recruitment or a block. Yes it would be a risky move to do the recruitment then as they don’t know who is what. Hockey Monkey had already claimed, and drawn some fire. Sure they might have gone for her. Isn’t it also possible that they just guessed? They had already been kicking some ass. Say Sachertorte is the prophet and was going away. He had also garnered a little bit of heat, and it is quite possible that the cult feared he was going to be killed by the believers for not being there. Since so many people had already quit it is quite possible that the cult were scared of a kill just because he wasn’t there and then they would lose their recruitment. They might have felt that they had no choice but to recruit that night. And if so, who knows who they recruited?

So doesn’t it make the most sense for the believers to do their best to find out what happened that night and to not spring this monktrap created by the cult? Isn’t the best way of doing this twofold: Killing Kyrie to find out if a block was even possible and Catina Suit telling us if Fretful used his power?

3367

[ul][li]HM claimed she roleblocked Kyrie on Night 7.[/li][li]The cult killed Fretful Porpentine on Night 7.[/li][*]Therefore it didn’t affect the Cult’s night action.[/ul]

3368

Queuing, CatinaSuit–revealing specifics about my role will help the Cult more than the Town. It’s that simple.

MHaye–excellent analysis. Remaining Townies, please read through those two posts carefully.

3369

Mhaye said:

I was about to lambast you for this statement, when I looked back at my spreadsheet and went :smack: . The NO KILL night block I administered was Kyrie Eleison. It was on night 6. Incidently I blocked **Kyrie ** on night 7 as well on the chance that I had hit cult the previous night. Somehow my brain linked the NO KILL with night 7. Sorry for any confusion.

3370

[QUOTE=MHaye]
[ul][li]HM claimed she roleblocked Kyrie on Night 7.[/li][li]The cult killed Fretful Porpentine on Night 7.[/li][li]Therefore it didn’t affect the Cult’s night action.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]

Except she says the following:

Its right here

I realize that the possibility exists that she is just trying to confuse the issue by purposely getting the night wrong. However I believe that it is more likely she just made an innocent mistake, so sorry I am not buying what you are selling right now.

I will NOT vote for one of the 2 blocks until I get more information. I have said multiple times how we can gain more information before making this decision. I urge all of you to give me a good reason to spring this obvious trap. If you cannot then give me a reason why we shouldn’t just go about gathering more information and saying "screw you 5, at least 2 of you are lieing, so screw you :slight_smile: "

Ok, Pleonast I suppose I will believe you for now.

My vote stands.

3371

My point was, it really doesn’t matter who HM blocked on Night 7 and making any decisions based on that, without waiting to see if she blocked someone else on Night 6, is wrong.

Since we now have testimony that HM blocked Kyrie on Night 6 too, you have better grounds.

The town may not have enough time for gathering more information. If we’re lucky and the recruitment didn’t happen, we have one spare night. Can we afford to wander off on a side-quest now?

No, because it’ll still come down to deciding between the groups and if you’ve used up the time with a side issue and exonerated Kyrie by executing him, then you put the Town on the knife-edge.

3372

Maybe, maybe not. I am well aware of the possibility that you give. I also don’t believe you. I don’t believe Idle either.

In short what you are saying is by gathering more information you may lose the game. Springing a trap that the scum so obviously want us to spring may lose the game as well. Since I don’t want to do what the scum want us to do, and neither should any other believer I will not. Either way we could lose the game. My way gives us more information before we spring the trap. How this is a bad thing I don’t understand. What I do understand is doing something different then what the scum want is probably a good thing for the believers.

Even if I end up alone in my vote I will not change it for the reasons you are giving. Losing the game can happen either way. I would rather go out on my terms then listen to someone who could be a liar.

3373

How convenient.

3374

There was no pre-plan, of any kind, involving myself or sachertorte.

Here were my choices for how and when to claim:

  1. While Zeriel was still alive. Tempting, yes, but risky and hard (if not impossible) to coordinate. If we didn’t out sachertorte, how long could we protect his identity? What would Zeriel and I do in the case of a counter claim with one of our monks gone? Give him up? How would the town interpret sachertorte not being around if we did out him? Would the Day end with all of the monks exposed, and what (if any) security would we gain in exchange? I didn’t have enough answers to these questions to be confident, coupled with the possibility that Zeriel might be around for another day. I chose not to take this route.

  2. After Zeriel had been killed, I could claim just for myself, and leave sachertorte undisclosed.

  3. After Zeriel had been killed, I could claim for both myself and sachertorte.

When dawn broke and Zeriel had been killed, and Idle had already voted for me, I was 85% sure he was scum, but had no read on whether or not they were targeting me because they thought I was a monk, or just to catalyze a monk-hunt.

So I did the most unpredictable thing I could do, claim loud and early in a leap of faith that sachertorte not being around would be too tempting for the scum to pass-up, or at least disruptive to whatever other plans the scum had.

My claim was based on two gambles, one carefully considered by me and me alone, and one spontaneous leap. Any related conversations that took place outside of my own head, are documented right here for all of you to read.

3375

sachertorte(3) - Idle Thoughts, USCDiver, NAF1138
Idle Thoughts(3) - MHaye, Hockey Monkey, Pleonast
Kyrie Eleison(1) - Queuing

Anyone have a different vote count? Any reason why some of you haven’t voted yet?

3376

I just noticed something interesting: the three out of the four claimed power roles (ignoring Monk claims) are all voting for Idle. That ought to be a clear signal to undecided Townies. Can all three of us be wrong?

Vote people! When is Dusk?

3377

1115 PM eastern tonight.

Yes all 3 of you could be wrong. Since the only one with a role that has an sort of investigative powers is also a role that may be compromised there is no difference between the other power roles and vanilla me. So it means zilch.

3378

I am watching this unfold with curiousity and I will vote later

  1. I can see the slip that **Idle ** has pointed out, and yes **Cookies **, it could be construed as requiring perfect knowledge.

  2. Pleonast: **Queuing ** may buy it, but I don’t. Sorry, but at this point the more cards on the table the better. Look how much fun we are having with the monks at the moment.

Dusk is in approx 12 hours time.

3379

Thanks for the analysis, MHaye.

I am going to vote Idle Thoughts. I think we are all thinking way too hard about this…most of the time the least complicated scenario is the correct one. The chance of **MHaye **being converted is pretty slim, IMO, and zuma’s drunk post does not make sense if he’s a Monk.

–FCOD

3380

Actually, it is interesting. I think Pleonast’s role is a scum role, and I think either Hockey Monkey or MHaye was recruited. So, 2/3 scum are voting for Idle. Hmm…