Upon mod-clarification, some my previously held views (as in prior to roles going out) on Spawn have now been tossed out the window, specifically the portion of the below quote in purple:
I have no idea why my brain was parsing it that way in hindsight, but when it came to the Spawn mechanic I was assuming that somehow the voting records would not be public. Or something.
Do we need to confirm? I always felt that posting content implicitly confirms anyway.
Either way. Confirmed.
I suppose there could be roles that interact with Spawn in some way, but I have trouble surmising a pro-Town power that sufficiently benefits from keeping spawn around over killing the spawn. It simply doesn’t compute for me. The downside to letting spawn live is so large that I can’t think of a power that would make it useful.
To those pondering the utility of letting spawn live sometime in the future (I seriously doubt we’ll find a case where it is a good idea, but I’ll entertain the theoretical), I ask you to remember that for every summer that we don’t lyse spawn, we must spend one future summer lysing two spawn. Maybe a situation will come up, but I feel that the evidence will have to be very compelling:
At the very least we would have to know with 100% certainty that two players are scum. Even then, I feel one scum one spawn killing is probably better.
Remember, we know that spawn are anti-Town with 100% certainty, and all spawn must be dead for us to win. Why would we kill someone who may or may not be anti-town when we can kill an element that is KNOWN to be anti-town? If someone waltz in a told you that Player X is scum, wouldn’t you lynch player X… even if player X was inactive?
I also guess that killing 2 players dilutes the voting record, but I’m not completely sure if that is true or not. I feel that it is true, but don’t have any hard data to prove it.
vote Spawn
And in my newly enlightened state, I have to say that the random aspect could just as easily bite town in the ass in the case of an hidden town power role who just happened to pick up a bunch of Spawn votes.
I’m thinking that later in the game when the spawn are many enough and scum are thinned out a bit that we might revisit the idea of leaving a single spawn alive on a relatively continual basis to try to screw with scum voting. That said, that day isn’t Day One.
vote spawn
That having been said, do we have any bright ideas for how to approach this that DON’T involve the spawn? I have one.
vote peekercpa Nice totally unsupported vote on a strong player there, cupcake.
That reminds me of a game show I saw once, called Dirty Rotten Cheater. I wonder if that game can be made into a Mafia Hybrid. 
<snipped>
yeh, kind of. spawn are anti town but their votes are random. so they could as easily fuck a scum as a town in a toss up lycnh vote (at least on my understanding of the color).
absolutes are BAD. keeping my options open.
<bleached>
well since i know i am town, then, yeh voting for a total unknown strong player would be the cards.
uh, you know something?
and neta: “…when the spawn are many enough…” fuck dude, we kill one each fracking day how the hell is there going to be “many”. shit, one is not many.
Vote Spawn
Yeah, this makes sense on Day One for sure.
And, for now:
vote peeker
For his totally baseless vote. Flinging votes around for no reason isn’t OK, even if it is peeker.
**Did we address if the Spawn get to cast two votes each? **
and somewhat related:
**Will there ever be a time when a player will not be able to cast two votes? **
Something like this, is my opinion. I think there’s a lot of knee-jerking going on with regard to the Spawn. A whole army of Townies have chipped in, so eager to show how Townie they are by getting their vote down for a Spawn, as if having a pile of votes on the Spawn seven minutes into the Day matters at all.
Spawn cannot coordinate, they cannot vote in a directed fashion, and their deaths will reveal nothing about the game. Every lyse of a player will increase our ability to analyze what has happened so far; every lyse of Spawn will give us nothing, no information, nada. The idea that having two living Spawn is so egregiously problematic that it mandates daily split voting seems to me, at first glance, to be one that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.
With 21 players, I figure 3-5 PC Scum, with 4 the most likely number given the existence of the Spawn mechanic. Discounting for a moment the influence of third parties, that would mean 17 Town. So right now, the balance may be 17 Town vs. 5 Scum total. In the worst case, if we were to lynch two players this Summer and hit both Town, we’d end up at 15 T vs. 5 Scum going into Winter (assuming one Scum directed Night kill and ignoring other factors), and then 14 T / 6 S next Summer. But a quick double Spawn lyse gets us back to 14-4.
On the other hand, if one of the two players lynched turned out to be Scum, then it’d be 16-4 starting Winter, then 15-5 at the outset of next Summer. If we then lynched one player and one Spawn, we’d trim things to (worst case) 14-4 or (best case) 15-3.
I think the short version of this is that the knee-jerk response is wrong. In some cases, lynching multiple players may prove to be a beneficial strategy, because having an extra Spawn hanging around won’t really affect us at all until the endgame.
In fact, for these reasons, I’m not even 100% sure that it makes sense to lyse Spawn at all this Summer. I realize that this opinion may get no traction, and that I’ll most likely take heat for it, but I learned a very important lesson from Ed’s game about playing to not get lynched, so there’s my opinion - let’s see what folks think.
<bleached>
crap, i already said i was going to put my first non spawn vote on either story or sach depending on who posted first.
shitty fucking decision, maybe. but no reason, absolutely not.
either accept that you are voting for a wrong reason or redact.
I don’t see how this is a problem. That “future Summer” could well be the last Summer of the game, if we eliminate all of the PC Scum, in which case, so what? It’d be a purely administrative Summer in such a case.
As to peeker, I am basically unmoved, mostly because I’m pretty sure he has voted for me on Day One of every game I’ve ever played with him. It’s getting to be a bit of a tradition.
neta:
hey, zeriel see my previous post.
sheesh.
apparently these games have become lynch peek on Day/Summer 1. lazy town or oppotunistic scum i can not say. yaknow, ltl kind of has fallen out of flavor these days. one of these days lynch the peek just because he talks will go the same way of that mastedon.
Fine, fine, there is a reason.
It’s just that your “reason” equals “no reason” in terms of worth.
I’m in agreement with **storyteller ** in thinking it odd to promote a spawn lynch every Day without question.
If we don’t lynch spawn, we have extra known Scum who play really badly (random voting) around. If we end up lynching 4 or 5 Scum, then we can take care of the Spawn quite easily: we kill 2 per Day, they kill one of us.
The upside to leaving Spawn alive is that we get more information by killing more players. Additionally, if the Scum take a lead in the lynch vote, it’ll be doubly difficult for any voting manipulation to save them.
With all that said, I think early in the game, when we have little information to go on, it might be best to lynch the spawn as well as a player.
Well, after Colorless, I think you were the one who advocated a peek lynch early, on the basis of, if peeker is Town, he’s pro-Scum, and if peeker is Scum, he’s pro-Scum.
touche.
good point. if you guys want to lynch a townie then pile the fucking votes on.
I don’t care that spawn vote randomly. The danger isn’t the VOTE, it is their EXISTENCE.
Do you really fear scum because of their vote? Seriously?
Every summer a new spawn forms, that means on average we need to lyse one spawn each summer. The most efficient method to achieve this is to lyse one per summer. That leaves us with one lyse for a player with which to hunt scum.
No. My knee-jerk reaction was that double lyse of players was an interesting twist and viable option. It wasn’t until I thought about the situation more that I realized that spawn is a zero sum game.
If we fail to lyse spawn, then at some point in the future we must lyse TWO in one summer. Which do you think is better, lynches in the early game or lynches in the late game? If you can convince me that early lynches are more beneficial than late game lynches, then I will agree with deferring spawn lynches. In my experience, I’ve found that town is terrible at finding scum in the early game, and much better at finding scum in the late game. Thus, to me, taking shots in the early game seems like a recipe for disaster. I would much rather have the option of lynching players in the late game.
Plus I’m not even convinced that killing two at once will yield more information than killing one at a time. In my view the double kill obfuscates the vote record. Two kills super-imposed? There is no distinguishing votes! It seems like a mess to me.
Basically I think that 2 today and 0 tomorrow is much worse than 1 today and 1 tomorrow. It provides a cleaner vote record AND the second kill is made WITH MORE INFORMATION (the result of the first kill).
I’m baffled that we even need to discuss this.
Yeah I think there was some crossing of the beams going on.
Talk about knee-jerking…
I certainly don’t perceive everyone who has voted early for Spawn as having one and only one intent, and that is merely trying to come across as seeming “Townie”. Now if what you are trying to say is that it would be quite easy for a few scum to try and behave in such a fashion, I’d agree. But you can say such things without using such a broad brush.
And as has already been said, every mis-lyse of a Townie (which is likely to happen when we try and lyse non-Spawn, and even more likely to happen when we try to lynch two non-Spawn) takes the Town farther away from win condition fulfillment regardless of what other data may or may not be divulged upon the flip, while lysing Spawn takes the Town closer to win condition fulfillment.
Also, not everyone who is considering the split strategy is using Chicken Little rationalization deserving of descriptors like egregious. The win condition argument is more of a conservative and safe bet strategy. Nor is everyone who is considering the split strategy right now advocating that everyone need employ it like clockwork from here on out with no exceptions. And characterizing things that way with that broad brush of yours 7 minutes into the game strikes me as yet another double standard.