After I get spoiled I won’t be posting to this thread again, so I’m going to put it out there now: I’m still suspicious of Daphne.
The day has barely begun and I’m already sick of Pizzaguy.
He clearly wants to pick a fight with AstralRejection, but he should very well know that if both TexCat and AstralRejection were scum, that Astral’s defense of TexCat makes little to no sense. Both PizzaGuy and Astral were unwilling to vote for TexCat and I don’t think that is an indicator that they are scum. Why would Pizza? He should know better.
A scummy AstralRejection would know that TexCat was scum and that outright refusal to vote for her would look bad. The scum move there is to turn on each other and make it look as much like Town v. Scum as possible. One dies and the other looks good.
I haven’t been spoiled yet.
I stand by what I said at the beginning of the game. Even if Pizza isn’t scum, his “pizza being pizza” attitude is poor town play and is probably just cover for the instances when he is scum.
I think that in future games I will automatically vote for anybody who claims to always play in a particular manner.
Sorry, M. 
That did not work out as well as I had hoped.
That night is not Night, it’s just color. 
That’s an intentional funny right? 
I think I already posted this in the main thread, but I’d like to be spoiled, too. Hardly seems any point in not being spoiled, as a dead Scum: We already know the biggest secret, so the small secrets aren’t any fun.
Besides, there are some things that I’m dying to say to someone, but can’t, because they’re spoilers.
Me too, please.
This gets said a lot, and there’s a grain of truth to it, but it isn’t really true. It’s almost always better for a detective to find Scum than to find Town. This is so even if the Godfather(s) is dead: There are more Town than Scum, so every Scum found brings you closer solving the game than a Townie found. The grain of truth is just that, even in the absence of finding Scum, confirming Town is still pretty useful, and nothing to be ashamed of.
Except for scum will make slips that reveal them as scum.
Townies make screw ups.
There are often times ways to tell which is which.
However, you can never prove a townie is a townie barring a detective, mason claim, etc.
Scum can be confirmed through their actions. You don’t need a detective to confirm scum.
Town cannot be confirmed without a game mechanic that explicitly does so.
Not to mention, that if you confirm a townie, you don’t need to do anything else to them.
If you confirm a scum, you still have to lynch the scum. So how is the detective finding scum any different from a scum outing themselves through their own slips? The detective has not changed the fundamental state of the game by confirming a scum as scum, other than reducing the unknowns by one, but the lynch of the scum is redundant for that.
But with a town confirmation, the unknown pool has shrank by one. And if you lynch someone else from that pool, you can narrow the unknowns by two every cycle. No redundancy.
So I would say the exact opposite to what you are. Usually confirming town is better than confirming scum. The scum confirmation ending up better is the exception, not the norm.
Except that confirming Town is only useful because it shrinks where you need to look for Scum. But identifying an actual Scum shrinks it to the maximal degree possible.
Look at the extreme case: Suppose that there is only one scum left (and more than one townie, else the game would be over already). If you investigate a townie, you still have to figure out which of the n-1 players is the scum. If you investigate a scum, though, the game is over, you win.
It’s also true for cases with more scum, though that takes more examination on a case-by-case basis than I feel like going into right now.
No it doesn’t. Whether you find a scum or a town, assuming your investigation is true, you’ve narrowed the pool by one regardless. However, you can narrow the pool additionally by lynching into the remainder. So the pool can narrow by two by finding town, only one by finding scum.
Sure. But if there are two scum, finding one scum puts you no closer to finding the last scum then finding a townie does.
I would say the cases where finding scum beats out finding town are fewer. Although, if all the scum have additional powers, finding scum as a detective gains more importance because the scum powers can screw with the game state. But if all that’s left are scum goons, and all the scum can do is kill once per night, you come out much more ahead by finding town because you narrow the pool scum can hide in twice as quickly. And every townie you confirm is someone you can trust. Something that can’t really be quantified.
Granted, once the detective is outed, his usefulness declines somewhat since scum can start targeting the confirms so as not to shrink the unknowns. But a detective outing himself with a large list of confirmed town is a great thing.
Town rolled over scum in SMB since I had managed to confirm 5 town and found both PFK’s (though I didn’t know the PFK roles). We even convinced the serial killer to target scum, and scum in turn had to target him.
It’s been a while, but years ago I thought this though and determined that with a dead Godfather, investigations of Town are slightly better than investigations of scum. It boils down to unknowns versus knowns. If at anytime the number of known town is 50% or more, town wins. Town has limited ways of dealing with unknowns, primarily lynch and investigation. If a cop investigates a scum, then Town still has to use a lynch to eliminate the scum. It’s a doubling up on resources.
Except that the object of the game isn’t to find town, or even to find scum: It’s to kill scum.
True, and if you’re already really close to that threshold, the situation changes. But that’s extremely rare. Far more often, Town wins by just plain killing all of the Scum.
If we’re going to play that game then one could simply say that lynching scum is the most expedient way to win. Simply lynch all the scum and we’re done!
More seriously, I think the difference lies in what I consider the end of the game. I say that winning by force (50% confirmed Town) wins the game. It seems that you insist on playing the game out (i.e. taking the Days necessary to lynch every last scum). I assert that Town can often win by force faster by confirming Town than by lynching scum. I know this to be true because we had a situation where a Cop investigated a scum and that actually HELPED scum.
No, I agree that “winning by force”, as you call it, can happen, and that you might as well call the game at that point. My point is just that that situation is very rare, compared to a game where it does actually play out to the bitter end.
OK, I decided to actually run some numbers through the Monte Carlo simulator I have lying around. Suppose that we have, say, 20 total players, of whom 4 are Scum. The Detective has just gotten three results, dumped them all, and then gotten killed. There are no other power roles on either side.
If the results were all Scum, then Town is clearly going to kill them one at a time until the investigations run out, putting us in the scenario where we have 14 players, of which 1 is Scum. In this situation, Town’s probability of winning is approximately 79%.
If the results were two Scum and one Town, then Town is going to kill the two Scum and Scum are going to kill the confirmed and someone else, putting us in the scenario with 16 total, of which 2 are Scum. In this situation, Town’s probability of winning is 60%.
If the results were one Scum and two Town, then Town kills the outed Scum, Scum kill one of the two confirmed, and we’re left with 18 players, of which 3 are Scum and 1 is confirmed. In this case, the probability of Town winning is 50%.
Finally, if all three results were Town, then we have 20 players, of whom 4 are Scum and 3 are confirmed, which gives Town a chance of 48%.
And just for the sake of comparison, if we didn’t have any of those detective results at all, the chance would only be 33%.
So, yes, finding confirmed Town does definitely help the Town team, but the more Scum you find, the better. I can run other cases as well (different numbers of players, Scum, and investigations), but I assert that this will always be true unless you have a significant number of Townies confirmed through means other than the Detective’s investigations.
That’s all very interesting and everything but I think at the point where the Cop reveals there should already be 6 dead players.
I do admit, that the existence of Masons (living masons) affects the viability of confirmed town. Also, since the masons are all dead and the Cop is known and the Doc is dead, investigating Town may not be as wonderful in the current game as in other games.
Also, a random simulation can’t account for the game-effects of a scum investigation. Remember Day Two (of course you do! :D)? There was little to no discussion. The Chronos lynch didn’t yield any insight into the game or the composition of the scum team.
However, the TexCat lynch has given Town something solid to talk about. Imagine if DaphneBlack had simply stated that TexCat was scum. Would Scum be in a better or worse position than they are now? (Don’t answer that!)
Another interesting side-effect of the Day-Only setup is that DaphneBlack’s power has be relatively useless since she caught Chronos.
It seems likely that not only did Chronos perform the Day One kill, but since he was obviously going to die on Day Two, he performed the Day Two kill as well.
When Scum is going to get lynched, Sherlock’s power becomes much less useful that Day. This is a huge difference from the typical Day-Night mechanics where a lynched Scum is no longer able to perform the murdering.
Also, it seems highly likely that TexCat performed the Day Three murder.
So DaphneBlack stating that septimus hasn’t murdered anyone yet really means nothing.
The cop is known??
My clue indicated that there might be more than 1 set of masons or mason-like groups. I thought it referred to something like how Watson and Holmes seem to recognize each other or why Astral now wants to identify Brian Donner.
I’m not sure what DaphneBlack’s power is. I was guessing that it was more of a 1 from column A and 1 from column B type power. One night she could track, one night she could watch, one night she could investigate. I thought she indicated that she was watching JohnnyBravo, but last Night it seems she tracked Septimus?