Hey, I explained my vote. I think Tom is trying to pull out claims from people and I think that is bad. Therefore, the vote.
We’re a quiet bunch this morning!
The lynch is coming up soonish. I’d like to see people who don’t have their votes in yet to seriously consider who they’d like to see lynched.
Another thing I think we should all do prior to the lynch is give a snapshot of how we’re feeling about all the active players. If you find them suspicious, or leaning town on them, or having no read at all, I’d like to know. I’m on my phone, so I’ll do mine a little later today to get things started off.
Any serious issues with this? One benefit is that scum would have to obviously lie about how someone strikes them, or honestly admit that their teammates are striking them as scummy. It’s a little bit of extra information as we head into Night.
Thoughts?
The main drawback is that it shows the Scum who might be suspecting them, and allows them to kill off people who might pursue them, or use the entire situation as WiFoM.
This post is giving me the stinky eye towards astral. I feel like the case I made against glowacks is typical day 1 fodder (90% hunch, 10% evidence), but in the past my gut has been pretty good, so I’m ok with it. There’s been additional votes since I made my case, and this post feels like the beginning of a late day swing. I’m fairly confident at this point, if glowacks comes up scum that one of his voters will too (i’m thinking astral but it’s a relationship feeling and not a astral on his own feeling).
The problem with what astral is suggesting at this point is that it will give scum more information to balance their play against. I see no need to reason to lay all my suspicions down right now. Plus as I’ve seen time and time again, laying a whole pile of poorly thought out suspicions out there, tends to lead to accusations of smudging AND town infighting, due to the time it takes to defend against such suspicions and the fact that (at least for me) that being voted for draws attention. If you’ve got solid leads on scum, by all means lay them out so they can be examined and discussed, but this call for other lesser cases, is leaving me feeling leery.
Fair enough, your criticisms are well-founded. I was approaching it from a “any of us could die, so let’s throw all of our thoughts out each day” but I can see where you’re both coming from.
While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with throwing useful thoughts out at the end of the day, there’s equally something to be said for choosing tactical reveals of suspicions and voting plans.
Of course, unless it’s mathematically proven to be an “all roads lead to victory” move for town, I’m categorically opposed to policy-based strategies and categorically opposed to any plan that has no enforcement provisions: For example, if your plan WAS good, how would you have enforced compliance? Would you have considered people who did not follow your plan scummy?
It’s not much, but I don’t like this post. Everyone posts from the scum’s perspective from time to time, but it can be a good tell early in the game.
Here’s some more posts trying to think about scum.
vote special ed
It’s not my best proof, but it’s a good Day 1 vote.
Yeah, shame on me for thinking about how actions might help the Scum.
Bad Townie, Bad!
This bit of piety would be a lot more compelling if I’d ever seen your playstyle work. I have not, except in games that are mechanically unbalanced in such a way that the power roles can win it for town. As it stands, you’re essentially asserting “No guys, totally do it my way, it’ll totally work this time.” Prove it.
I will not only vote for, but PREFERENTIALLY vote for ideas that are subtly scummy.
First of all, it doesn’t swing the odds more than a few percent either way. Second of all, it hands the scum free information for no apparent return. Third of all, even evaluating its effectiveness with any accuracy would require that we know how many scum there are, which we do not. Fourth, it’s trying to protect power roles that we are not sure exist.
Admitting to avoiding the thread on the first day does not a lurker make, man.
I’m complaining that you’ve deliberately set yourself up to do a mechanistic series of actions at the start of every day (including your pointless automatic vanilla claim). From a metagame perspective, this is long-term scummy–invariant play is a place scum can hide.
Anyway, no one has to work to get you to play suboptimally, you do that all yourself.
Your playstyle is suboptimal and hurts the town’s chances of finding scum. It’s apparent from the way you (if I may metagame) design the games you moderate that you design games to reward mechanistic, policy-based, methodical play. That’s fine if you’re a chess robot, but that’s not how most games are balanced and that’s only rarely a winning strategy.
That may be the single worst voting rationale that I’ve ever seen posted in a live mafia game. The only reason it’s not a scum tell is that it’s too blatant.
Hey guys. Feeling like crap and can’t get my head around the game. I’ll try tomorrow morning and get something down anyway.
Current vote tallies (with voter[s], in chronological order):
glowacks: 4 (Red Skeezix, Giraffe, Astral Rejection, special ed)
Tom Scud: 2 (Mahaloth, Zeriel)
Astral Rejection: 1 (glowacks)
Mahaloth: 1 (fubbleskag)
special ed: 1 (Wolverine)
Zeriel: 1 (Pleonast)
Votes will be final when Night 1 begins on Monday at 10am CST.
Votes cast today, by player (in post number[s]):
- Astral Rejection - [del]Giraffe[/del] (39/68); glowacks (68)
- glowacks - Astral Rejection (55)
- Pleonast - Zeriel (64)
- Zeriel - Tom Scud (37)
- Mahaloth - Tom Scud (34)
- Normal Phase
- special ed - [del]Pleonast[/del] (33); glowacks (79)
- Red Skeezix - glowacks (41)
- Giraffe - glowacks (63)
- pedescribe
- fubbleskag - Mahaloth (77)
- Tom Scud
- Sir T-Cups
- Wolverine - special ed (87)
First note: this seems like a very dangerous set of assumptions; for myself, even with 4 scum, having a doc, cop, and 4 masons (even divided) in a 14-person game seems extremely unlikely. I don’t know if we should even speculate on the overall setup with the little info that we have; my guess would be at best we’d have doc, cop, one set of masons (probably 2 of them), and maybe the martyr.
(Addendum to the above: note how many times in the setup thread it says “the _____ MAY include”).
Clearly, my asking Fluid about cover roles IN MY VERY FIRST POST == “not considering the idea of scum cover identities”.
Why yes, I re-thought my plan after hearing arguments against it, and after Fluid did not react as I’d hoped to my questions. I still think that (1) the unique and publicly disclosed vanilla names are a unique feature to this game, which makes them worth talking about (2) there probably is some way to make use of them to help Town out.
On “moving on”; we’d just had a five-post sequence clarifying Pleo’s note about a mandatory vig, which as it turned out was based on a mistaken premise. Thus, “Moving on”.
Um. My thinking on the unique-vanilla-claim thing was essentially as follows:
Confirmed Town are good. Most Town wins that I’ve seen have been based on growing the pool of confirmed Town and squeezing out the Scum.
That’s about it. I think glowacks is likely to be right that there aren’t cover roles due to the multiple options for vanilla claims (complete vanillas, or claim a R-B-B role, or roll the dice and hope that one of the named roles isn’t present (which is an especially useful option late in a mass claim)). But there’s enough uncertainty to largely neutralize the advantage of potentially having a confirmed Townie or two out there.
Side note:
We in fact know EXACTLY what power roles MIGHT be out there, and we have a much better idea of what power roles ARE out there than in a normal closed setup.
Not happy with Zeriel’s vote and reasoning on me, but I also don’t want to OMGUS vote. I’m not certain about the case on glowacks; I’ll see if I can take another look at it, but we’re having people over for Easter dinner and I’m going to be spending most of the day cleaning & cooking.
For the moment,
vote pedescribe
whose sole contributions to the thread are
(1) a suggestion that there are probably 3 rather than 4 scum
(2) a question to Pleo about a piece of game terminology.
(1) is arguably a mild pro-scum argument, and lurking is a plausible scum strategy.
Another side note: We don’t actually know that; though the set-up post indicates Mumm-ra’s powers, it does not specifically indicate that there are no (other) scum power roles, and fluid refused to clarify when I asked straight-up. I think it would be mildly gastardly to throw in (say) a roleblocker given the setup thread, but I’m not confident in that either.
Glowacks: I don’t hate the case. Giraffe’s and Red’s votes look like pretty solid Day 1 votes. I’m a bit dubious about Astral’s vote, since it’s equally bad Scum and Town play to blurt out if you think you’ve spotted a Mason; good Scum play would be to sit on that info and use it in deciding your Night Kill. Ed’s choose-your-own-rationale vote makes me :dubious: a bit.
Correction: it was in my second post, but the first one where I raised the unique-vanilla claim idea.
Wow, I seriously hadn’t expected people to jump all over me for using a turn of phrase in a certain way. My use of “I see X as Y” doesn’t mean the same thing as “I see an elephant in my bedroom” or “I see the TV is off”. My use is more along the line of “I consider it likely that X is Y”, and the reason the word “see” is used is hard to justify, but means something along the lines of offering my perspective or my viewpoint, both words having roots in vision.
I don’t have anything to say to defend myself, because I don’t get any of the arguments against me at all. Not a single one of them makes any sense to me, and are likely using theories based on what normally happens in these games. I don’t mind admitting that I’m not normal at all and that most of your theories about how people act are probably completely wrong when it comes to me. People find me generally suspicious all the time even though I’m generally the exact opposite.
Last game I managed to avoid and deflect suspicion mainly because I was paying very strict attention to what I was saying and being very careful. It probably helped that folks really had no clue what to expect from me, but I was very careful to avoid things that I considered stereotypical for scum. This game, I felt I should just be laying my thoughts bare and not really paying attention to exactly what I said. I suppose that’s a huge mistake since anyone who says anything slightly suspicious Day 1 gets lynched. That is, when I was scum I tried to make sure that I played like Town in order to avoid suspicion, but I failed to realize that when I’m playing as Town that I need to make sure I play like Town as well.
I don’t have anything to claim, and anything further I say in my defense is just going to be reasoned with “that’s something scum would say”. Day 1 is such a crapshoot, we should be happy we’re lynching vanilla town and not forcing a power role to out themselves. I didn’t closely read comments not regarding myself once I saw how many votes I had, so I will go back over things to see if I can find some more insights. I might not be able to get another post out before Easter dinner, but I’ll try to get something out tonight.
Ah, so my main mistake was trying too hard to do things to help the Town, like voting when I saw someone make arguments I thought would be typical of scum and not voting when I didn’t think someone was scum even though their suggestion was not optimal. I see how it works now. The reason I survived as scum before despite trying as hard as I could to look like Town (which is an obvious scum tell, right?) but I had no idea how to look like Town and so it generally wasn’t picked up on. Now that I’m not trying to look like Town, I do things that actually are obviously Town and thus get singled out as scum.
What a weird game.