Scum mafia: On Cecil pond [Game Over]

The Game Room
2001

Looks like we lost. Oh, well. It’s for the best (at least for me) that we lost now. I doubt we would have been able to get all three in a row.

Of the three the only two I would have pushed for at this point were Rysto and amrussel. Rysto for reasons that you all probably know. amrussel, just because. I’d been suspicious of him today for being so agreeable with me. But that’s not a “good” reason. I didn’t have time to articulate that nor would I have today.

By the way, I was never going to claim. Ever.
I figured the only way to confirm my claim was to lynch me, so you might as well learn when that happened. My role is also why I thought TexCat was a scum power role immune to storyteller.
3 ways to die – 1 with immunities to each one.
At least that was my theory.

I also feel that the game should have ended back on Day 5. There was absolutely no reason for scum to muff the cop claim. Had they done a clean claim there would have been nothing to stop it.
Again, I believe this is unbalanced. That scum muffed the play doesn’t make it balanced. We just got lucky.

2002

Yeah, I was expecting the gamer to finish a hour later as well. Some thoughts on the game:

We were a very inexperienced scum team, only rysto had played as scum before. I think it was especially difficult for Kelly, paying his first ever game as scum. It was actually quite a close in the end, rysto was on the rack when amrussell made a brave move against Diggit. Was good to see that pay off.

Meeko, Freudian and Drain all exposed themselves by picking up on “plankton was ambiguous”. From the public information, town power roles could have been types of plankton or other creatures living in the pond. I wasn’t role-fishing, just making sure I posted from a public perspective.

Story and Drain were right that it was unlikely all the scum would avoid bussing Kelly. Was a bit of a dangerous assumption though, scum might avoid a bus for just that reason.

Best town play - Red’s analysis of the mason voting. Without that, I might have been able to avoid being lynched that Day, although I was the most likely lynch candidate. It was quite frustrating for us that Meeko’s anti-town voting spree on Day 2 turned into a scum trap. If he’d voted scum instead of town we’d have been less exposed. We didn’t use the voting records to pick out Freudian, if we had we’d have realised a Freudian kill would have left me and OreDigger exposed.

Worst play - Red’s claim with a hungry vig in need of confirmation. His claim also left rysto naked as the only unrevealed player on the Kelly wagon.

I was expecting to die after I saved Kelly, but I had to weigh that up against the difficulty we’d have had getting Mahaloth lynched after a Kelly flip, Kelly’s attack on me which I think would have left me exposed if he’d flipped, and the fact that Kelly missed a chance to claim. As town, I’d be prepared to jump in with a late lynch-deciding vote, as I;d only do any harm if one player was scum, the other town and I picked the wrong one. We should have set Kelly up with a simple claim on Night 1. Unfortunately, I was away when the rotifer claim was prepared, I saw the problem when I got back.

@Meeko - I think you played quite well in the early game, you were making relevant points and explaining yourself pretty well. Once you seemed to get frustrated your play went badly downhill.

@Natlaw - I think you played a good game, despite having a poor voting record. You were involved throughout, and I found myself agreeing with most of the points you made.

2003

This implies then, that everyone can play a sub-optimal game. Social loafing / Free Riding.

And that is the inherent problem. Silly me, I thought everyone was at least invested in their Mafia games as I Was.

I would like to think that no one would opt in, into a game and then do nothing. Each person should do the most they can for their side.

That’s Individual.

Chronos, I have to ask now. Was this game balanced, … as far as scum was concerned? I mean, if you max out Town it is still an unbalanced game.

2004

I disagree, I think the game was pretty well balanced. If Rysto had been lynched instead of Diggit, town would probably have won. When it was revealed there were 4 masons, it should have been clear there wasn’t a full investigator. There is no reason any particular role has to appear in a game.

2005

I am going to dare ask this :

Town, why did you stick on Diggit? Were the Power roles that “powerful” to you, that Diggit was ““obviously”” lying?

2006

True, but town also make slips like this.

2007

I disagree. Town needs to analyse the claim and act accordingly. With 4 masons in this game, there really wasn’t room for a full detective.

I’m upset that the rotifier claim was mishandled. I don’t blame Kelly for it; it was his first game. I feel that it was a good role that fit well with the game, and made sense of the spawn mechanic. What happened, for those who weren’t spoiled, was that I came up with the Role early in the game and amrussell wrote a sample PM. I was planning on using the claim myself and only realized just before the Summer started that the role was perfect for Kelly to claim. I suggested it to him but didn’t fill in enough of the gaps before the Winter ended, so he had to try and figure it out himself and got a couple of small things wrong.

2008

Just as a starting point, you could have not voted for him! :dubious:

Great game, Scum. Rysto, I’d have gotten you lynched or killed you if you’d left me alive, but it wouldn’t have mattered much, because I won’t even pretend I had a bead on either Digger or amrussell. I might have suggested leaving Diggit alive to test his claim, but that’s counterbalanced by the risk that I would have killed sachertorte.

Ah, well. Good times, good game, sorry I briefly went batshit crazy.

And to repeat what I said on the spoiler board: thanks, Chronos, for what I’d consider a very well-balanced game that was won on merit and not on luck.

Anyone up for moderating the next one?

2009

Right, because Voting for someone, and then Unvoting them is THE EXACT SAME THING as simply voting for them.
I do not get this game anymore.

**I’m breathing right now. **
Someone insult me based off of that.

2010

Oh, a couple more points:

There wasn’t anything more to the Spawn than what met the eye. The primary purpose of the mechanic was just to add a little color, and to provide something for the Town to talk about on Day 1.
The reason there was no Cop or Doctor was just that I couldn’t think of good color for them. The large Masonry was deliberate, to make up for the lack of a Cop.

Meeko, I still don’t follow you. Could you give an example of a game that isn’t individual, by your standards?

2011

Right, but killing sachertorte would not really have been a mislynch, would it though?

I certainly should have ridden Rysto more, but I was kinda distracted by sachertorte, whose style of playing really throws me off.

2012

I think you are asking me to clarify something I still need clarification on myself.

Ed said that I don’t think Mafia to be a Team game.

My point is, our team sucked for this game. There is no way for a team to win, unless everyone plays individually the best game they can. If this means including opportunities for synergy, so be it.

I don’t buy that I should some how play less off a personal Mafia game, and that, that will somehow help town overall.

You can’t go forward by moving backward.

2013

Thanks for running the game Chronos, I liked the flavour and I think the setup was good. If I was being picky (and I am by nature :wink: ), I’d say Red’s role was not a good one as it didn’t reward good play. Diggit’s role could have been a pig for scum, as with no blocker we had no way of killing him. However, that was balanced against the size of the scum team.

@Meeko - That’s awfully dismissive of the time and effort a lot of players put into this game. The game is tough, you don’t just have to work out who the scum are, you need to make a solid case against them if you are going to persuade other players to follow your lead.

2014

I think I fell for the half- then untestable claim and the not optimal town play (in my view) - I think I conclude too quick from not optimal play == scum.

By the way, my early game not voting Spawn was an attempt to lure scum into thinking I was a power role who could benefit for it so they would try to kill me.

I probably overrated the total mason power - they were a large confirmed group, but with no doctor or cop wouldn’t hold together an trap the scum in the unconfirmed pool (as happened in Dr. Horrible to me).

I might have been played good, but it’s the votes that count in the end :P. I relied too much on the vote record when the scum had enough bussing going to make it useless (in the strict sense - I didn’t buy the Rysto must have bussed thing that came out of it).
Probably should have voted earlier so there would have been more time to switch. So difficult to choose, my vote for TexCat took two hours with the vote change between the ones I mentioned. And I didn’t consider two of the actual scum at all :o.

Thanks for the game Chronos!

2015

Lysing sachertorte wouldn’t have been all that bad, but he didn’t have any protection against being eaten. Storyteller is saying he would have used his power on him, not just that he’d have led a case against him.

2016

The point is that you seems to take to full responsibility for the DiggitCamara lynch and only you could have prevented it. That’s forest fires, not lynches.

From the spoiled threat, dunno who said it: as the Green Goblin while I was Serial Killer, I only had one kill so that was the reason I didn’t kill at all - I wanted to save it for the end game so I could win.

2017

Yeah, thanks for the game Chronos - very enjoyable.

I agree that if we’d handled the rotifer claim correctly, we could have breezed it. If town had believed that Kelly could start confirming town if we left a spawn alive then a) we’d have effectively gained a mislynch from the extra scum and b) we could have fed you some nice disinformation (as Kelly attempted to do when he put Oredigger on his list). It would have been easily worth sacrificing one of us to gain trust, and then the only way you could have stopped us was by making good lynches with bad information. All credit to Rysto for coming up with the idea.

I don’t know if that means the game was unbalanced though - we could quite easily have pushed for a lynch on sachertorte’s role, or tried to NK Diggit’s.

2018

Congrats, scum. I think I feel better about my play in this game than I have for a while, so I’m happy with the result.

Meeko, my man, you were doing fine in early game. You just need to stay frosty because when you get angry/frustrated you start being easier to ignore/marginalize.

When’s the next one?

2019

Last I am going to say on this game :
**
I will NEVER again listen to anyone else on how anti-town I play. **

IT would seem that all of town dropped the ball on this game, my effort not being an outlier at all. But apparently, I’m more of a scapegoat, than a raccoon.

2020

I think there are various definitions of “personal” and “personally” being applied around this discussion.

Any individual player’s survival is not as important as the team win condition. Everyone playing such that they are trying to keep yourself him/herself alive as a top priority is often an inferior approach compared to a meta-strategy like pro-town one-shot vigs trying to stay alive with their power intact till the mid or end game, but a pro-town vanilla doing whatever they can to get night killed as opposed to lynched.

Similarly, taking things too personally in a paranoid manner can cause a townie to see motivations that aren’t there, like believing that the scum consider you a threat and attributing a conspiracy to the fact that Player A and Player B both voiced suspicions of you, even though Player A is town and is not otherwise complicit with Player B’s agenda.

A lot of the fun I have with this game is trying to juggle and balance these things within the confines of my role, and it is difficult and that is what makes it fun. I often do become too selfish in my play, or over-correct and become too dismissive of my instincts. I am prone to being defensive as a townie, but I have also caught the scent of scum while doing so often enough to know that it can be a valid play sometimes, as long as your defensive posture doesn’t cause too many other townies to think about you too much.

I think people are trying to tell you, Meeko, that now that they’ve played with you enough times, they think they see some patterns in your own struggles with the juggling that we are all trying to perform.

You have a strong personality, Meeko, and sometimes it seems like this game isn’t as fun for you as it could be. It happens to players all the time. I would try considering the constructive criticism as opinions on not only how to play the game better, or at least differently, but also to make it more fun for you.