Thundercats Mafia Gameplay Thread [Game Over]

[glowacks]

Weren’t you just scum in a game where cover roles were issued, but not mentioned in the game rules?

There was no need for cover roles in the previous game, for the same reason as this one: there was no expectation that every player would have a unique name and scum could very easily claim vanilla town.

[glowacks]

@Astral_Rejection

Your words, not mine. I built my own case on how it might help us. I supported Zeriel’s vote on him, because it was reasonable. Disliking Mahaloth’s vote =/= supporting Tom Scud’s idea. You’re misrepresenting me.

I am well aware, and you might see I immediately responded with an “edit” when I noticed that I hadn’t meant what I actually said.

Yes, I’m making a lot of single posts, because I’m not sure how much more time I’ll have, so I’m addressing small things as I find them.

[glowacks]

@Zeriel

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).

Although I don’t doubt the merit of your point, Pleonast did not claim vanilla this game; he claimed Thundercat. There’s quite a distinction. It’s not entirely pointless because it says that if he’s vanilla, he has a unique name.

[glowacks]

@Giraffe

Did you read my post? I’m not voting for him because he didn’t vote like scum, I’m voting for him because his posts and votes so far have pinged me more than anyone else’s as being scum-like. Scumminess is about more than how one votes, it’s about how one argues for or against a vote and what induces one to vote.

Well sure, I’m concerned about Astral Rejection jumping on Giraffe given his brush off of Tom, but that’s not my main concern. It’s the suggestion of a mass claim that has me worried more, and that is explicitly making him look like scum to me.
It is my opinion that the most likely game set-up is 3 scum and a minimum of Town power roles. In such a case, a mass claim would do nothing except tell the scum who the power roles were. It is true that there could be 4 scum and we have lots of power roles to balance that, and thus have a mass-claim be beneficial, but we don’t know that. Thus, I see a huge potential negative for the Town that should be apparent at a moment’s notice, and only the possibility that it might work out for us.

It really doesn’t even matter that I find 3 scum and minimal town power most likely, what matters is that we should be considering the possibility, and in such possibility a mass-claim offers tons of help to scum. The scum know exactly how many of them there are, and if there are 3 would be very interested in a mass-claim.

[fluiddruid]

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)
pedescribe: 1 (Tom Scud)
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):

1. Astral Rejection - [del]Giraffe[/del] (39/68); glowacks (68)
2. glowacks - Astral Rejection (55)
3. Pleonast - Zeriel (64)
4. Zeriel - Tom Scud (37)
5. Mahaloth - Tom Scud (34)
6. Normal Phase
7. special ed - [del]Pleonast[/del] (33); glowacks (79)
8. Red Skeezix - glowacks (41)
9. Giraffe - glowacks (63)
10. pedescribe
11. fubbleskag - Mahaloth (77)
12. Tom Scud - pedescribe (95)
13. Sir T-Cups
14. Wolverine - special ed (87)

Day One ends in ~18 hours.

[fluiddruid]

Just a reminder folks, this game requires participation, and consecutive no-votes will lead to removal. If you need a sub, we have several, but otherwise, please remember to place votes. The Day ends in 2 hours 15 minutes or so.

[Normal_Phase]

I don’t have much time. I’ve skimmed enough over the weekend to have a vague idea of what’s been talked about, but only a vague one. I’m going to look at glowacks to see if I’m comfortable with the lynch on her; if not, I have no idea what I’ll do.

[Normal_Phase]

[quote=“glowacks, post:38, topic:579228”]

The downside is narrowing the pool of people the scum have to choose among when going after power roles. We don’t have an exact idea regarding how many Mason-like folks we have to bolster the ranks of confirmed Town, but I did a bit of sweating last game as scum when the confirmed Town pile started stacking up - and it was much easier to deal with in that game, as we didn’t really have to worry about finding power roles. The only thing there is of course the Town didn’t have to worry about the power roles being killed. How much advantage is there to a stack of confirmed town unless you can have it total more than half the number of remaining players?

[quote]

Huge, since the presence of confirmed town narrows town focus onto the pool of players in which the scum are trying to hide. Fewer distractions = greater likelihood of success. As scum, the absolute most frustrating event for me is when lovely lynch-bait turns up a mason or some such.

You clearly know this (you mention sweating last game despite that you ultimately won it easily).

Glasnost’s scum surrender due to a growing confirmed Town pool was predicated largely (in my view) on there being a Vig whose identity the scum had no idea about, but we don’t have one this game that can shoot indiscriminately (if we even have one).

I think it’s not a particularly great idea that could easily have come from scum, particularly if there are 3 and very few town powers, but don’t see it necessarily as such. I see Tom as either one of 3 scum, or a member of a Masonry that wants to potentially leverage their numbers by increasing the number of confirmed Town. I really don’t have a clue which. I view the early voters with a slight amount of suspicion, but recognize that folks are looking at whatever they can for Day 1 votes and that the scum could just be sitting back and relaxing for now.

I am pinged by this last paragraph. The masonry comment makes no sense to me as a counter to the “one of 3 scum” hypothesis. Surely Tom could be any town player and think having a couple of confirmed townies off the bat might be a useful thing (in addition to any masonry) – why would he have to be a mason himself to do this, if town? He wouldn’t, so the whole thing looks like a manufactured justification for NOT voting for Tom. There was something earlier that struck me the same way, too, but it’s gone out of my head.

Tom’s voters are Mahaloth and Zeriel? I’ll be interested to see how you approach them.

[Normal_Phase]

@Red_Skeezix

A couple of points:

1. Proposing/discussing plans is not really a scum tell, even if under scrutiny they turn out to be anti-town. (Although, some times scum does this, but I’ve never seen it to be a reliable scum tell.)

Agreed.

2. Day 1 is not the time for plans. We have no reason to trust the source of any plans. And no other supporting information to validate/repudiate any possibility of plans. Except in a possibly game breaking scenario, Day 1 plans are usually aren’t worth the electrons they are printed on. Despite the fact that this is a smaller game, we aren’t in the mid-game yet. We have no lynches or mislynches or votes to discuss.

Disagreed! If not now, when? I was about to respond to your first point that discussing plans is if anything a not-scum tell (then a couple of counter-examples came to mind), but still, my feeling is anything that might be brought up early that might make scum uncomfortable is a good thing.

Further, you omit to discuss what about Tom’s plan is actually susceptible to further analysis based on new information. You just sort of dismiss the whole thing as not worth talking about now. I don’t like that.

Furthermore, glowacks post is troubling to me: it’s half smudge and half fishing expedition. The entire post reads like a scum trying to come up with justification for a vote, but not wanting to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Plus the whole “Tom is either a mason or a scum”. It’s a false dichotomy, based on the assumptions that he’s putting forward. Why are you so concerned if he’s a mason or not? Furthermore Glowacks’s is ignoring the most likely option, that Tom simply didn’t think about all the ramifications of his plan, and it doesn’t imply anything about the role or alignment of Tom Scud.

vote Glowacks

Don’t you mean justification for not voting? Glowacks didn’t vote for Tom (or anyone else) in that post.

I don’t see fishing as a potential motive, nor do I see any real concern about whether Tom is a mason (if scum, the overriding motivation in that false dichotomy appears to be to find a justification for not voting for Tom, either because the case is thought to be too weak or because Tom is also scum).

[Normal_Phase]

@glowacks

I don’t get this. In what way does making a an argument about the trade-offs involved in the plan indicate a scum leaning? Just because it might be something that a scum might do? Are we only “allowed” to make extremely firm arguments as town, even if we don’t believe them? Can we not say exactly what’s on our minds, along with the thought process that led to them?

I’m not saying that the analysis was 100% complete, but it wasn’t like he did pages worth but forgot one point that made it all moot. The calculation needed to figure out a naive estimate of the change in win percentage given a claim is quite involved, particularly because we don’t have a clue what the role distribution is or even have any idea about their probability distribution. The calculation was pretty quick and simple, and showed exactly what the problem with the vanilla claim was.

I’m with pedescribe that I think 4 scum in 14 players would be heavily in the scum’s favor and necessitate a large number of power roles that would be hard to balance around a mass claim, especially given the lack of scum power roles besides godfather. I’m inclined to believe a minimum of power roles for Town and 3 scum, and would think that scum who knew only 3 of them existed would want a mass claim because there’d be so little for Town to claim it would be of little benefit to them and tell the scum exactly who to go after. That’s not to say there aren’t 4 scum, but I see significant scum motivation for the pushing of a mass claim in the case I find more likely.

Gah. Up until that last sentence I was getting a pretty strong town impression from this post of glowacks. Whether the conclusions on Giraffe vs Astral, or on the number of scum, turn out to be accurate or not, I see nothing wrong with the logic behind them. (Unlike with Tom-scum vs Tom-mason.)

But significant scum motivation in pushing a mass claim in the (more likely, in glowacks’ estimation) 3-scum scenario, yet Tom himself doesn’t get any grief for wanting some claims? Only Astral? Did Astral actually push for a mass claim, literally?

Finally, Astral was all about supporting Tom’s supposedly bad plan because of how much talk helped Town, and goes to make a really long post to show just how much he’s thinking about he’s helping Town. But it includes a vote on Giraffe precisely for speaking his mind and giving his input, even if it wasn’t complete, and deciding that it was more scum-like than Mahaloth’s vote which provided very little in the way of justification.

vote Astral Rejection

I’ll have to go look at the referenced post of Astral’s.

[Normal_Phase]

@Astral_Rejection

I haven’t done one of these in a while! It’s time for a classic Astral Rejection infodump. Let’s tackle a couple of things!

If you just want my vote and analysis of players, jump to the clearly marked break.

First off, Tom Scud. I’ve been giving your idea (and the specific way you worded it) some thought, and I don’t find it as suspicious as I originally did. Yeah, your idea won’t necessarily give us any good information, but I see where you’re coming from. Plus (and I could be wrong on this) I think you’re relatively new to mafia on the straight dope, right?

No, he’s not.

[quote]
We’ve hashed this out a bunch of times before, but I need to get out of the habit of assuming poor ideas are inherently scummy. This goes for everyone - I want you to toss out your ideas, even if they’re half-baked. Talk is always good.[/quoe]

Oy. That was very close to “lecturing the townies”, the mistake of Red Skeezix’ that I was right about in the last SDMB game and regrettably failed to pursue.

That said, here’s my crazy half-baked idea, built upon a couple of (possibly tenuous?) suppositions:

1: Per the rules, Lion-O (detective), Panthro (doctor), and Wilykat & Wilykit (masons) are all in the game.

No, they are all listed as “may include”. The only single player about whom there is no ambiguity is the godfather, Mumm-ra. That probably means that Lion-O is also present. (That the godfather has a secondary “ability” of revealing the number of living scum upon death allows for some ambiguity there, but I don’t really expect that Lion-o would be left out.)

One more thing about Thundarians: there’s nothing to say that named vanilla roles other than Cheetara or Tygra are not in the game.

2: At least 2 Thundarians are in the game. For the purpose of this hypothetical, we’ll assume 2. This could be wrong, but they’re mentioned in the rules, and given our reduced numbers 2 is more likely than 3. I guess 1 (or 0!) is possible, but then why mention they’re also masons?

One Thundarian would just be silly. Zero is not explicitly ruled out, but as there’s no “may include” on the Thundarian section as a whole, I don’t expect it.

3: Of the 4 ancillary town characters (Snarf, Hachiman, Snowman, and Snarfer), at least 1 exists. Two or three is also possible, but I’m starting from a pessimistic angle.
4: Since I’m starting pessimistically, let’s assume all other town players are Ro-Berbils, Wollos, or Bolkens.
5: For a game this size, with two teams of masons and 2 power roles, let’s assume 4 scum.
6: Given this, 6 players are instantly confirmable by mass claim - Lion-O, Panthro, Wilykit, Wilykat, Thundarian 1, Thundarian 2.
7: 8 players would then be unconfirmed, 4 of which are scum.

If Panthro and the kit/kat pair were definitely in the game, which they’re not; and if there are four scum.

Given the ratio of confirmable to unconfirmable, if we can make it through today without lynching one of the confirmable, and if scum kill one of the unconfirmables, we as a town are in a fantastic position. We might even want to discuss a mass claim at this point.

I think I’ve done a clear job of laying out what I see as the most likely game state at this point. I’d appreciate if you guys could look it over and point any mistakes I’ve made. Overall, I’m still opposed to the claim toDay, but I think a claim discussion could be meaningful as early as toMorrow. Hope this all makes sense!

Meh. Given the mistake about the Thundarian power roles, this isn’t really worth the pixels that were used to write it, so it’s hard to assess motivation. Clearly if glowacks is right and Astral is wrong, then this is a scum-friendly proposition. But does that mean it came from a scum? My first impression says no, that scum wouldn’t base an anti-town proposition on such an obvious mistake. So I don’t agree with this part of glowacks’ vote.

---

THIS IS THE PART WHERE I TALK ABOUT OTHER PLAYERS!

{quotes snipped throughout here since I have no time to add them back in}

Plan for the worst, always. 4 is a safer guess than 3, and you can be happily surprised if the game ends a scum death sooner than you thought it should.

Obligatory Devil’s advocate – unless there are in fact three, and the assumption of four is being used to push for an ill-advised mass claim.

So very, very, very much agreed. I still can’t believe we lucked out and you were scum in Glasnost mafia.

Can you clarify what makes his idea “obviously stupid” and “pro-scum”? Giraffe’s math would indicate it might give us an excellent day 1 shot at targeting scum. Plus, you misrepresent him; he hasn’t done anything that could be categorized as a “quick back-off.” He reiterates his interest in the plan, suggesting we could use it or a variant of it, a mere 12 posts before your vote:

The funny thing is, you have the beginnings of a solid vote. Tom Scud’s idea was indeed bad, and for a day 1 vote it’s currently as good as anything. You’re approaching it all wrong, however, and that makes me raise my eyebrow at you, sir.

This is all fine in so far as the attack on Mahaloth. I’m not getting any consistent idea of how Astral feels about Tom, though.

“First off, Tom Scud. I’ve been giving your idea (and the specific way you worded it) some thought, and I don’t find it as suspicious as I originally did. Yeah, your idea won’t necessarily give us any good information, but I see where you’re coming from.”

"Can you clarify what makes his idea “obviously stupid” and “pro-scum”? Giraffe’s math would indicate it might give us an excellent day 1 shot at targeting scum. "

“The funny thing is, you have the beginnings of a solid vote. Tom Scud’s idea was indeed bad, …”

What the hell? This is all in the same post. The last two were addressing posts by the same player. “Not as suspicious as originally thought/might not give us any good information – might give us an excellent day 1 shot at targeting scum – was indeed bad”? I see no sign of any consistent feeling about Tom leading through this post, only comments that address the needs of the moment. Which is rapidly reversing my impression from the mass claim thing.

I’m more okay with this vote on Tom Scud. The effects of Tom’s plan can be seen as anti-town. Not considering using town cover was an egregious mistake on his part. See Mahaloth? That’s how easy it woulda been to justify your vote.

This is in response to Zeriel’s vote, and actually I’m ok with this bit. “Can be seen as anti-town” is broad enough to fit with any of the above quotes.

However, my vote’s going on Giraffe for now.

His first post, quoted in its entirety above, is pure fluff. He’s not even close to building a case, and he’s already hemming and hawing over how difficult day 1 is. We know. We’re playing the same game. I was reading the thread on my phone earlier today at work, and this post instantly jumped out at me. It feels all kinds of scummy to me.

Fair enough.

His second post is quite a bit meatier. He tackles the maths of Tom Scud’s plan and decides that there’s about a 40% chance of lynching scum on day 1. Shit, that’s fantastic! That’s better odds than you see for the vast majority of mafia games. And then he ignores the ramifications of his projections. He says that by Day 3, scum have a substantially increased chance of hitting the doctor and cop. That’s true, but then we always know that the risk goes up as the game goes on. We have a cop so that they can hopefully confirm town or reveal scum. By day 3, they can give us two results. The cop’s investigation targets also get better as the game goes on, because of the shrunken pool. Plus, our lynch gets substantially better-targeted as well. Overall, I’d say his math suggests we’re in a HUGELY better place after a vanilla claim, because we will never lynch power roles (they’d claim), further decreasing the hiding places for scum.

And yet, he says it’s “not without benefit for town,” which is a fancy way to totally downplay any possibly benefits, and suggests we don’t do it. For day 1, this feels like a solid place to leave my vote.

tl;dr version: Mahaloth seems scummy, but Giraffe seems scummier.

Meh. I don’t see the major inconsistency here that Astral does. If I understand it correctly, Giraffe did some math that indicated an increased chance of lynching scum today at the cost of greater risk to our power roles later. How you weight each of those things is going to depend a lot on personal idiosyncracies, and I don’t find Giraffe’s “not without benefit to town” to be so egregiously wrong-headed as to be worth a vote in itself. It’s not a horrible vote (I do see where Astral says he’s coming from), but I don’t think it’s a very good one either.

To sum up: very slight town cred on the mistaken assumption, a great deal of “what the heck” on the Tom stuff (including a faint whiff of lecturing the townies), and a “meh, not thrilled” on the Giraffe vote. Glowacks pretty much ignores the Tom inconsistencies and focuses on how anti-town the mass claim idea would be; and criticizes Astral for voting someone who was “speaking his mind and giving input”, even though it’s the very nature of that input that actually prompted the vote.

I think I’m leaning toward voting for glowacks over Astral, mostly on the strength of the false-dichotomy portion of that one post, backed up by reasoning for the Astral vote that strikes me as missing the point of why Astral is suspicious, and failure to follow up in any meaningful way on an early suggestion that Mahaloth and/or Zeriel might be suspicious for voting for Tom. (And the waffling on that point, too: “scum might be sitting back relaxing”.)

vote: glowacks

[Normal_Phase]

Now I need a break.

[special_ed]

@Normal_Phase

Now I need a break.

huh?

Did you say something?

[glowacks]

@Normal_Phase

But significant scum motivation in pushing a mass claim in the (more likely, in glowacks’ estimation) 3-scum scenario, yet Tom himself doesn’t get any grief for wanting some claims? Only Astral? Did Astral actually push for a mass claim, literally?

I wouldn’t say Astral “pushed” for a mass-claim, but he suggested that we should consider one. Tom’s named vanilla claim idea does not put the power roles out in the open, just slightly narrows the pool in which they would be found while at the same time creating confirmed town players that the scum aren’t particularly interested in killing. In the previous game I was initially worried more about not being seen by the engineer and wanting to kill him every night until there were too many confirmed players; the sweating was because we as scum had little choice but to kill confirmed town and we had to make it less likely for the engineer to see us.

I fully admit to playing absolutely terribly due to not having a real clue how to play town, and will take into consideration all the accusations leveled against me in future games. A lot of what’s being discussed has gone way over my head though. If I failed to pursue various arguments, it’s because I didn’t seem any scum motivation in them. Most all the arguments from people I see some merit in and don’t consider them at all above the background level of suspicion. I made my vote due to feeling that the suggestion that was made would blow the game wide open for scum in circumstances that the scum would know existed.

As I typed this Normal Phase typed up even more, and I’m not particularly happy with it. She seems to just want to be sure of getting a vote on the popular guy to vote for and completely dismisses my argument by saying “the scum wouldn’t make such an obvious mistake”. I guess the scum get free reign to suggest bad plans because they obviously wouldn’t?

So long folks.

[fluiddruid]

Current vote tallies (with voter(s), in chronological order):

glowacks: 5 (Red Skeezix, Giraffe, Astral Rejection, special ed, Normal Phase)
Tom Scud: 2 (Mahaloth, Zeriel)
Astral Rejection: 1 (glowacks)
Mahaloth: 1 (fubbleskag)
pedescribe: 1 (Tom Scud)
special ed: 1 (Wolverine)
Zeriel: 1 (Pleonast)

Votes cast today, by player (in post number):

1. Astral Rejection - [del]Giraffe[/del] (39/68); glowacks (68)
2. glowacks - Astral Rejection (55)
3. Pleonast - Zeriel (64)
4. Zeriel - Tom Scud (37)
5. Mahaloth - Tom Scud (34)
6. Normal Phase - glowacks (111)
7. special ed - [del]Pleonast[/del] (33); glowacks (79)
8. Red Skeezix - glowacks (41)
9. Giraffe - glowacks (63)
10. pedescribe
11. fubbleskag - Mahaloth (77)
12. Tom Scud - pedescribe (95)
13. Sir T-Cups
14. Wolverine - special ed (87)

Dusk falls.

A hush falls among the shadows as you gather in the circle of light around the Altar of Truth. glowacks is led to the Altar by his accusers, and placed upon the Altar.

Slowly, the shadows melt away, revealing a diminutive humanoid form that you recognize as one of the goodly and peaceful creatures of Third Earth. After a brief moment, a loud cracking noise is heard and glowacks disappears in a brilliant blue flash. A moment later, the light illuminating the altar is gone, and you are plunged into darkness.

glowacks, a Wollo, is banished from Third Earth. Night One has begun. Night powers and communications are now available for use.

Dawn will break on Tuesday, 4/26 at 11am CST.

[Tom_Scud]

So it said somewhere in the setup thread that each poster needs to make seven or eight posts in a row, right?

[Tom_Scud]

Glowacks.

[Tom_Scud]

Fluid, have you pm’d Sir T Cups?

[fluiddruid]

Yes. Everyone who doesn’t place a final vote will get a PM warning about the participation rule (once). We do have subs available now so my hope is that people will let me know if they can’t play.

[Pleonast]

Well, didn’t make it back in time, but I see nothing happened except more piling on glowacks.