Oh, that. Without saying too much publicly, that was the weirdest possible situation that could imaginably have come up, so much so that I had completely different Dawn reveal planned just in case it did, just to acknowledge the weirdness. As it happened, the way things shook out was only the second-weirdest possible situation.
No wonder the remaining players are speculating in all directions! 
Please don’t take it as a reproach, but this is where you overestimated my capabilities.
Well, the role assignments were random. And I certainly didn’t expect anyone to figure it out on Day 1.
No, more like Angel saying how Mahaloth always looks scummy, and Prof saying how he wants to believe Angel but he’s been duped by them before. I don’t want to throw water on their reunion or spoil their fun but it weighs on my assessment of those players and maybe keeps me from seeing something important. I’ll admit I’m not a strong player and my first forays ended with D1 and D2 lynches. And in my first game on mafiascum I got snookered into revealing myself as a backup cop, forcing the town doc to protect me despite the real cop still in the game.
I’m leaning both Angel and Thing.Fish are town. I don’t like how everyone is going along with the “If Thing.Fish is removed and turns up town than Angel must swing next.” plan.
Obviously there’s some mechanical weirdness going on, and assuming Angel is scum based on Thing.Fish’s reveal strikes me as lazy.
Also, it seems to me Mahaloth’s connection to this is a null tell. We have no evidence he redirected anything. I don’t have a read one way or the other on him, but I don’t think we can draw much of any conclusions on him from Angel’s use of power.
It’s good for town that there’s discussion happening around all this, but I think the players are taking an easy way out if Thing.Fish flipping town means automatic exile of Angel the next Day.
I will add to my above post that voting Thing.Fish is not a bad move. Even with my leans on him as town, his death will reveal info. Especially because anyone who immediately jumps on an Angel bandwagon the next Day with spurious reasoning has a higher than typical chance to be scum.
I also want to add that Storyteller seems townie to me.
Than again, Storyteller almost always seems town to me. He’s one of the best scum players we’ve had. And I wasn’t even playing mafia back when Storyteller did his infamous “scum Godfather who threw almost all his compatriots under the bus getting massive town cred and essentially winning it for scum” gambit.
Then again, he’s never been scum in a game I’ve played in. And I think I only pegged him as scum once as an unspoiled observer.
IIRC, that was the second game we played here. I do wonder, though, if that would still work today: I think we’ve learned enough since then that he at least wouldn’t be able to get away with it as easily now.
It wouldn’t work today. And it didn’t work much after that game. From what I understand, after that game people learned that voting scum while always a pro-town move is not necessarily an anti-scum move. (As I recall, it was also storyteller’s first game and the idea was all his.)
It’s similar to the “third vote on a bandwagon is a scum tell” thing. Once it’s become a trope, it loses its effectiveness.
I’ve seen that word “gastard” mentioned but did not know its origin.
I played in a game on another site which began as everyone was town Day 1 but did not know it. After the first lynch the “dead” player replaced a random townie and each Night after they’d recruit a townie. Other lynched players were removed and it became town vs a vampire and his toothless minions. I think the vampire won. I remember some players being upset with the setup.
Gastard originates from Arkham Asylum Mafia, the first game I ever played in.
Very complicated setup. 24 players. Everyone a power role. Only 10 unrecruitable and undeniable town. 6 full scum. 6 full third-party (2 of which were serial killers). 1 townie (Harley Quinn) who was an investigator and if she found Joker would join him in a serial killer team (by dumb luck my mass block on Night 2 as Mr. Freeze happened to prevent this from happening and Joker got discovered the next Day guaranteeing Miss Quinn was loyal town after that, though no one knew about this until the end of the game). 1 Mason leader (Penguin) who was pseudo-town, since he had a secret win condition where he could win by himself if certain conditions passed. So he worked with town and knew the three actual Masons (Penguin’s henchman) who were all full town and had no idea he had a different win condition.
Town only voted two townies out the whole game and it still came down to the wire because the game was heavily weighted against town. The mods (Boozahol Squid and r00sh) even mentioned that it was a quasi-bastard game, though no townies actually realized at the time how precarious town’s position was until Penguin dropped a statistic of ratios of factions remaining and I figured out that town was only one misvote away from a loss.
Anyway, Town were the villains in the Batman universe, and Scum were the good guys and had various cover roles, a few of which were from outside IP. One of these cover roles was The Ventriloquist (in this case the original Arnold Wesker version). When mass name claim happened on Day 1 or Day 2, a scum took this cover and even kept the post restriction that was added for flavor, where all letter-b sounds had to be replaced with the letter-g. (Which was canon for Wesker.) The post restriction wasn’t real and the player occasionally slipped up, which eventually led to the player being voted out.
She frequently called the mods “bastards” for giving her the post-restriction (she was really trying to sell this bit), but due to the post-restriction, she changed it to “gastards”.
And so a Straight Dope mafia meme was born.
Later, when I decided to nickname my own False-Flip bastard game “Inglourious Basterds” after the Tarntino movie, someone who was fully spoiled in the forum I set up for spoilers suggested I change it to “Gasterds” to follow the meme. And so I Spoonerized the pronunciation to “Inblourious Gasterds”.
And now you know the rest of the story.
Well, that was fun but disappointing. Very curious to see what the hell was going on Night One.
Tell me about it!
Thanks for sharing that. As a long time lurker on both the Dope and that other place I enjoy following mafia games.
I think the craziest thing about it is that it all made perfect sense.
All will be revealed in due time.
But do you want to know what made me very suspisious of you, Thing.Fish? When you answered so quickly to my request for advice telling me to use my power. It was just the same as in the Godfather, the scene where Tessio tells the boss to negociate with the other family. He had been told the frst to come up with that suggestion would be the traitor. I had the same feeling there.
Of course it was only business
Interesting. I was trying to be helpful; I would have given exactly the same advice as Town.
Of course, it was sensible advice, it was clear that this was the course to take. But would you have felt compelled to give that advice as Town, and give it so quickly?
Be this as it may: it is not the first time I do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and I am not talking only of this game.
One thing to keep in mind is that everyone on this board is on a different schedule: Sometimes someone being the first to answer something just means that they happened to be on at that moment and happened to check the thread.
What if there’s more than one redirector in play? Bus Driver plus standard Redirector make for all sorts of fun, especially if they overlap their targeting (or target a different Redirector).