Mafia V: The Cult of Sekham

I dunno…I can certainly understand someone seeing zuma’s reaction as shady, but then again, I’ve seen a lot of people think that retaliary votes are just as scummy. I’m just more of the mindset that zuma’s reaction was, at least, a bit more typical than the vote was that preceeded it. That was just out there and is the thing that came up on my radar.

See, that’s half of what got me. It wasn’t even what you’re saying, but just the certainty that they’re lurking at all. Just because someone isn’t posting doesn’t mean they’re lurking. There’s a huge difference there. I was saying (and still do, and always will) if someone isn’t posting that much, I’d rather they sub out rather than use that as an excuse to vote for them. She seemed to automatically think that people who weren’t posting were “lurking” and trying to stay off the radar, and thus was all for killing them off (her own words, which I quote).

So I don’t know…just reeks in a lot of ways to me.

Mtgman, you seem, also, like you’re one who posts a lot (a lot more than is needed because you like to look at things from all possible angles) and who thus would be a pretty dangerous evil player if you were/are. So far you haven’t set off any of MY alarms but there are a few things I read in your post here that I take exception to.

See, this makes sense and is, at least, trying to figure out a way to possible make things work, but I seem to recall you were ready, at first, to use random.org to make your vote or point FOSs at people?

Snipped.

So, if I read you right, you’re saying that not voting at all for the first Day is something that should be considered? I never got why this made sense to people. The scum have ONE huge advantage…and that is they know who is who and can pick off players at their whim each Night. That means that those people who are for the good…and I mean REALLY for the good and not just acting like it…really needs to take the chances to get rid of one of their ranks when they can.
That is what this game is about and, really, you of all people should know this. I dunno if it’s just a difference of viewpoint or what but to me, this game is about risks and going with your gut. But to hold back and not vote at all the first day just seems to me to be giving up the right to possibly find someone who is scummy.

And I read over your next paragraph and it still puzzles me. You seem to be okay with the idea of getting all of the roles out in the open and while I DO somewhat understand your reasoning, I still think (personally) it’s just too risky. The game is based, putting it bluntly, on bullshit. Bullshitting the other team and, if need be, lying and saying and doing anything you can in order for your team to win. And frankly I wouldn’t put it passed scum to do just that, so all it would take was a counter role-claim to confuse all the rest for a Day while cultists starting picking everyone off at Night.

So no, I just don’t and can’t see your sense behind letting TWO FULL DAYS go by without dunking anyone. We have the chance NOW, we should take it. If someone is unsure or is scared of a bandwagon, fine, then everyone should vote for people in no danger of being on a bandwagon. That way, in the end, those who do help sway votes or add to vote counts that go to death could very possibly be scum trying to make a minor difference.

Geez, hockey, didja really need to quote the whole post? Haha.

After all that reading, I was too tired to snip it! :stuck_out_tongue:

Ah. That was a nice read. Only a page and a quarter, once I had set the filters for no posts shown with “Oracle or Apprentice or probability”. :slight_smile:

I knew at the start that I would be late in starting to post, but it seemed really likely that the First Day would run the full 120 hours. And it looks like it’s going to.

I vote sachertorte , for the nonce. It’s because of the Big Scheme (which shall go nameless here) proposed earlier. If there’s one thing I learned in M2 it’s that the Beat Cops’ (Apprentice) single night’s Investigations (Ritual) were not worth much. We can hope that the Oracle finds the Apprentice but it’s not worth getting panties bunched.

mtgman gets the FOS for the similar reason of a big plan implemented early on that could help the Cultists.

Wow! A busy day at work really sets you back in the thread. I’ll review today’s happenings and post my own first vote next, but I first wanted to respond to this:

I had quite the opposite intention! I never thought the lurkers-are-suspicious arguments would get flak (although it’s only Idle Thought who disagrees, as far as I can tell.) In my expectation that lurkers were indeed going to get put under the microscope do the NAF’s (and subsequently my) pressuring them, I mentioned that power roles might want to not be under that microscope. The quality of that advice notwithstanding, imagine that I left it there? Would you not have said, “Look at Pasta trying to figure out who lurking power roles are by getting them to suddenly start posting!” Wouldn’t a sudden poster raise suspicion? Fearing that a newbie power player might give themselves away like that, I threw in the “don’t show up all at once” bit to make it harder for scum to identify power roles who agreed with me and wanted to come out of lurkdom. In retrospect, I figure any words involving “power role” will look scummy, but the clause that tripped your meter was put there entirely because I didn’t want any lurker/poster transistions to be obvious to scum.

Regarding lurking:
(1) Some scum will do it.
(2) Townies who do it are easy scum targets because they leave no paper trail (I believe HazelNutCoffee pointed this out), so they’re not useful to town (given that we have a chance of off’ing a townie anyway.)
(3) Lurking townies who aren’t targetted by scum are going to remain blank pages, and I won’t be the first to say that identifying townies is way more useful to town than identifying scum, so having them be quiet is no good for town.
(4) Subbing them out is probably a neutral action (no gain/no loss), but killing them is too unless there are many scum doing it. (If there aren’t extra scum, it’s a wash. That’s my whole point. Again, the quality of the point can be debated.)
(5) A couple of lurkers are undoubtedly just busy with real life and haven’t had time to post. I appreciate that, and I’m sorry that they aren’t getting to enjoy the game. But, I don’t owe them anything. I’m here to win this thing for the town.

Idle Thoughts, I’m obviously not planning to go guns-a-blazin’ into the crowd of wallflowers, but I’m certainly going to keep my eye out. And as I’ve mentioned several times, I don’t suspect the absent lurkers, the ones who just haven’t been able to join. It’s the pseudo-lurkers (I was calling them “soft” posters) who are clearly present but aren’t contributing (read: aren’t sticking their necks out for the good of the town).

There’s plenty of meat in the thread to discuss now, so I plan to move away from the lurking topic. Certaintly the points of view are out there, and folks can churn over them if they wish. I don’t think anyone else has voiced Idle Thoughts position on the matter, but there have been many who have expressed suspicion of the below-the-radar players. (The fact that others have shared my opinion makes your vote for me, Idle Thoughts, look a bit revenge-y.) If my fellow Nairu followers think I’m off base, do let me know.

Now, time to read some posts. My suspect list will follow.

And on non-preview I agree, though no trust should be implied ;), with Hockey Monkey and **Idle Thoughts ** (and other players earlier) with no-dunks being a bad idea. Dunks equal information, however dearly obtained. The mis-dunks just have to be sucked up and then soldier on from there.

Just stating my position…

I’m enjoying the game, but my reading and posting will come in bursts.That’s the way like is. But I know I can get always get meaningful posts and discussions in during five, or so, IRL days.

Call me superstitious but I can no longer stare at the reply number of 666. :stuck_out_tongue:

Miscellany:

ArizonaTeach’s unvote in 580 also struck me as a little odd (just a little, though.)

I’ve never gotten any vibe other than “likes strategy games” from sachertorte. Also, I just noticed in 566 that he pointed out something (re: lurking) that I missed before:

This is a point I had not appreciated, and I do grant it. (I won’t be voting for a lurker at the end of this post anyway.)

Malacandra’s weird vote in 546 also strikes me as, well, weird, as it did others.

Captain Klutz post in 536 said:

This is the sort of below-the-radar thing that makes me suspicious.

Queuing is on my watch list, but my notes don’t include posts numbers for him, so I’ll have to go back.

And, finally, I vote Idle Thoughts for the reasons listed below.

Having watched prior games and moderated one of my own (on another board), I knew that some scum (not all, but some) might write posts which seemed to eat their own tails, so to speak… posts which looked like they were trying hard to draw pro-town conclusions, but which never seemed to… get there. Anyway, Idle Thoughts’s first(?) big post gave me this (admittedly vague) feeling: 292. I’ll admit I get the feeling a bit less upon rereading it.

There’s also some deflection of attribution of claims. The above post had that. Here’s a good example, from 483:

The vibe I get from these sorts of statements is: “Hey, vote for this guy, but remember that I didn’t say it!” (Perhaps it’s just being nice and giving credit where credit’s due. Perhaps it’s scum trying not to have his own history that can be tracked.)

Finally, there’s the adamant lurker defending. Maybe he’s just defending his honest position aggressively – not a bad thing for town to do – but if he were scum and there were many scum targets laying low, his defense would make much more sense to me. Of course, others are free to ignore this observation if they buy into his arguments fully.

I still haven’t caught up on today’s actions, so my apologies for not having yet engaged in the newer topics of discussion. I hope to remedy that… now.

Ugh mtgman, that was a long post. I still disagree with you. I don’t see how any comprehensive strategy can be put together when their is a random number of people who are not even trying to play nice. The other thing is:

Is it even possible to not dunk?

I hope not. Regardless I think we kill everyday. Information is gained by the blood of others.

That is about all I have to say about that.

A couple things about this post.

  1. Try harder to let it go
  2. Complaining about other’s not taking the same ‘heat’ as you is not helpful, particularly when the reason is they actually shut-up about their idea when it was shown to be flawed.
  3. Try harder to let it go

Finally I believe I am ready to cast my vote. I am doing this because:

I WILL NOT BE HERE FROM FRIDAY EVENING UNTIL TUESDAY MORNING. Just so you all know :).

Dunk DiggitCamara.

I do this for 2 reasons;

  • his vote for cookie and then unvote very quickly all done due to “tradition” that isn’t even a tradition (2 out of 4 does not a tradition make)

-it was he who posted the 2nd Oracle/Apprentice plan. While he has not kept on about this plan, like a couple other people, I seem to recall that this idea was thrown out there once the discussion of the other plan had seemed to die off. This cause further plan discussion, including the divide and conquer plan rearing its head again. I admit I was caught up in this discussion again, as were other people. IMO I believe it is time to STFU about great plans to solve this game once and for all. It ain’t going to happen. We have had 2 plans proposed both shown to be severely flawd, and a mammoth post or 2 from someone who also loves the idea of a cohesive plan.

ON PREVIEW: I await your questions Pasta, or your reasons at least.

(colour removed)
Yes, I thought Zeriel’s take on my post was a bit odd, but since you had called him on it I didn’t feel the need to respond.

As for “take one for the team”, I repeat that it would be preferable to keep non believers alive. It’s just that they cannot be confirmed and scum can safely claim to be non believers.

And another thing in favour of lynching - one of the non believers is a budding Psychopath.

Well, it looks like I didn’t miss too much after all, mostly proposals for and declinations of Big Schemes.

If we could do a no-dunk, I’d be against it unless there was a good reason for it. Dunking provides information. We need information.

Queuing, I couldn’t find anything too suspicious on a quick re-read. (The top of 551, maybe, but I’m kind of filtering the oracle/apprentice stuff at this point.) I’ll de-watchlist you, but… I’m watching: :stuck_out_tongue:

I just don’t feel and see you’re getting my point still or understanding, so I will try one more time and put it as plain as I feel I can.

You keep and continually using the term “LURKERS” and “LURKING”. You even say you’re FOSsing them and that you WOULD not mind killing off the “lurkers”. In all of your posts you keep using the specific word “lurker” or variations thereof…and THIS is what I’m taking issue with and why you’re the top one on my list.

HOW do you know they’re lurking?

Lurking means READING THE topic and not posting. Lurking means DELIBERATELY staying out of the conversation but still following it along. Lurking requires INTENT.

What I’ve been saying, all this time, is, how do you know the people who are not posting–who were on that list–are lurking? How you KNOW they are specifically in the wings and reading this topic along but not posting to it? How do you KNOW that it’s not, instead, that they HAVEN’T READ or been reading ANY OF THE TOPIC since their last post? Because if it’s that case, then the terms “lurking”, “lurker” “lurk”, etc would not apply…and THAT is all I’m saying and have been trying to say.

IF people ARE lurking and you KNOW they are, then YES, feel free to vote for them and “FOS” against them and try for their heads. Because THAT IS shady to a certain degree, at least. But if someone is just NOT posting that does not = they are lurking. Not posting does not mean someone is lurking…and that is what I’m saying. That just because someone is not posting or not posting MUCH is not a good reason to vote for them. That I’d much rather have them subbed out rather than have people use that as an excuse to vote for them. Because if someone is not able to post at all or much it just means that. That they aren’t able to post much or at all. But using that as a reason to vote for them when you say they could be scum works the other way too…they could be essential to us and have a huge helping role and voting for someone who possibly couldn’t defend themselves due to not being able to post much could be a heap of trouble. It’s just better, to me, to get someone who CAN make a few posts a day and give us something to work with (rather than vote for them). That’s what I’m saying, that’s all I’m saying, that’s what I’ve been saying all this time, that’s what I’ve said in past games, that’s what I’ll always say.

And lastly, from your voting post, just this:

This in reply to me saying I was suspicious of Pleonast due to points someone else raised.
Going back, I had thought that person was storyteller, but I find it was actually Queuing via this post.

AFAIK, for one, I wasn’t the only one that did this, as storyteller did here too. (and also explains why I mixed the two up and thought it was him that raised the point originally)
And for two, if it was what you put in brackets, why, then, did I remention my suspicions of him (Pleonast) in this recent post of mine? If it was just a drive by post, as you say, wouldn’t it make more sense to never mention it again?

Anyway, that’s all. Maybe all of this is just a misunderstanding of each other. Maybe not. But in any case, I don’t know what else I can do to clarify to you what I was trying to say and I feel you’re of the same opinion, only regarding me.

I go away for a few hours to eat dinner and watch a limping TV show, and I come back to another 50 posts to wade through, including some lengthy analysis.

So I’ll add my own analysis about the game, which I thought about during the past few hours.

Let’s take stock of our assets. We have two information roles, one of which is not yet useful, and the “yet” has been discussed ad nauseum, infinitum, e pluribus. We have two protective roles, one of which is at half strength. And we have one attack role, which will average one kill every other Night. We also have one power-blocking role, and one secret attack role.

That’s a LOT of active roles. But it’s limited by the Oracle and Apprentice unable to definitively ID scum. Which leads me to think about two other roles:

First, the secret role may – and this is pure speculation – act as a GM balancer; their role might be used to tune the game to preserve balance, depending on how we use the limited information we have.

Second, we have the monks, who (unlike the masons in M3) are purely pro-town. At the moment, I think these are our best assets. Combine that with the Oracle’s ability to (mostly) conclusively ID believers, and I think we can try forming a core group of (more or less) trusted players. The conditionals are, of course, due to the Prophed IDing as a Believer and to the possibility of a recruitment. But at the moment I think it’s a useful approach.

Mind you, I haven’t yet thought out how to properly establish this core group. For that, I look to guidance from experienced players.

Now if I just had a wheelbarrow…

[QUOTE=Scuba_Ben]
<snip>
Let’s take stock of our assets. We have two information roles, one of which is not yet useful, and the “yet” has been discussed ad nauseum, infinitum, e pluribus. We have two protective roles, one of which is at half strength. And we have one attack role, which will average one kill every other Night. We also have one power-blocking role, and one secret attack role.

That’s a LOT of active roles. But it’s limited by the Oracle and Apprentice unable to definitively ID scum. Which leads me to think about two other roles:

First, the secret role may – and this is pure speculation – act as a GM balancer; their role might be used to tune the game to preserve balance, depending on how we use the limited information we have.

<snip>QUOTE]

Scuba_Ben, what is it that gives you the impression that the secret role is an “attack” role, or that it is a GM balancer?

Ack, freeeking coding! Preview Monkey, preview! :smack:

Sheesh. Go away for a few hours and come back to this.

Scattered thoughts: In terms of broader strategy, I think storyteller is right and Mgtman is wrong. That said, I’m inclined to classify Mgtman, like sachertorte, as a townie who’s overthinking things, because it takes a bold Cultist to go out on that kind of limb – and I’m far from sure that storyteller is town, because, well, last time he came off as that reasonable and trustworthy, he was the Godfather :slight_smile:

For the moment, I’m going to vote Autolycus because his silence is still rubbing me the wrong way, although I can easily be persuaded to do something else if he starts to talk, or if someone else strikes me as a likely suspect.

What does “wine in front of me” mean?

Prnicess Bride reference. There’s really no way of telling if it’s poison or wine. There’s a lot of annoyance being directed at Auto right now. If it’s taking him this long to perfect a “voice” to make it fun for him, this is not helpful in the least.

I am going to go through these posts one last time while it’s still manageable, and look for what I believe is the number one tell: inconsistencies. There are two types. 1) inconsistency within a game; and 2) inconsistency between games. Having played two and observed two more, I think I am ready to make some decisions on point 2, which I’ve never been very comfortable doing before. Point one is more important, though, and I do feel some players have been playing inconsistently within the confines of the first Day.

Thanks for explaining the reference, AZTeach, but I’m still not sure I understand what “wine in front of me logic” is. Could someone please give an example?

The Mafiascum.net Wiki article