I find the biggest problem to be finding the posts when you do a search on someone who is now dead and posting in the forbidden thread.
I do wish even the forbidden threads were taken off-site. BUt I understand that you’d get lower participation especially from interested people who have yet to play.
Okay, topic for discussion: If there is a voluntary vigilante (and not a one-shot vig), should he/she use his/her power on Night 1? Telcontar came out strongly against it in the Lost Mafia, but then he was scum. Bear in mind that there might not even be a vig in this game.
Advantage: it’s another town-controlled kill. It at least has a random chance of hitting scum, even if it’s more likely to kill town, especially on night 1. Mafia night-kills, of course, always kill town.
Disadvantage: Especially on night 1, it’s nearly random, and much more likely to kill town than scum. Also, there’s a decent chance of hitting a power role by accident, without the power role having a chance to claim.
Note: in the various spoiled and forbidden discussions of the Lost game, several players commented that a good use of a vig kill would have been to kill the runner-up in the lynch vote, letting Town evaluate whether players switching votes late were scum trying to save a scum or just noise.
Thoughts?
Hi everyone, welcome to the game.
Please can we agree not to allow any tied votes, the game rules state “Whomever receives the most votes dies and is out of the game. If it is a tie……you’ll see.” Whatever happens in the event of a tie, it’s unlikely to be beneficial to town. I notice that a tied vote really screwed town over in the Lost game.
No sense in exposing our power roles at this stage.
Is the edit window 1 minute?
Good idea.
You could just go to the thread and use the 'Search this thread" tool.
As for the Vigilante, killing with no info doesn’t seem like it could ever be a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, if it’s Night 1 and the Vig has a feeling about someone, go nuts, but killing with the amount of info one typically has going into Night 1 (and since they are working alone have no one to discuss this with) seems rather anti-town.
No.
Please don’t.
Not even if your hunch is really good.
An overactive vig at the start of the game is almost always scum’s best friend. These games tend to have as many, if not more, townie power roles than scum, and early game feelings rarely have a lot of foundation: if we’re lucky, the vig will just his a vanilla town player and narrow the hiding places for the scum, but in an open game like this, we don’t even have the luxury of knowing how many vanillas there might be.
A vig should save his killing power until later in the game, where his odds are much higher and his guessing become a necessary evil, or he actually knows for certain who must be scum.
::grumbles:: time bomb necromancer, nothin’ happenin’…
Heh, nice mouseover text on the forbidden thread.
Ya, the edit window is small but and it is unlikely that a slip will be caught in time but I still think editing is a bad idea. Really, poor grammar won’t be held against you. Heck if nothing else, which posts are edited could be used to convey messages if the scum aren’t allowed to Day talk. It much simpler to disallow it and at least know that what you see is pretty much what you get.
Since I need a place for my vote to go you’re editing is a good enough reason at this point in Day 1
Vote Alka Seltzer
The solution to that problem is to use the facility that allows searching a specific thread for posts.On the forum page, find the game thread.[ol][li]Click on the number in the “NNo. of Posts” column for the thread to open a window listing the posters in that thread (in descending order of postcount.)[/li][*]Click on the number of posts a specific player has made (not the player’s name) to search for all posts made by that player in that thread.[/ol]
IMO, it’s those "Oh shit, I posted that to wrong thread’ edits I’d be most concerned about. FTR, I’m a big fan of No Edit, Not Ever.
Sigh I borked the list tags in my last post. Never mind.
Remember folks, Grudges Are Bad.
If you go and lead a lynch drive against someone who psyched you out in a past game, even (or should that be especially) a two-year-old game (cough cough) then you could be harming your own side for the sake of getting your own back. (Of course, if you know your revenge target is not on your side, feel free to knock yourself out going for the jugular.)
Remember, this is a team game. You should be willing to subordinate your own impulses if it helps your side win.
Here endeth my usual rant.
Ya, those hurt too, but I was thinking of a simpler Us/Them slip either way I think voting for editing is fair game.
Yeah, we shouldn’t let editing happen. It screws with the record of the game.
As to the vig, I disagree that vig kills are bad in the early game. They are risky in the early game, but they aren’t actually bad. Most people disagree with me, but then again, I think most people are wrong so take this for what it’s worth.
My reasoning for voluntary vigs to kill in early game if they think they have cause:
In the early game (early game generally meaning the first three Days but potentially extending to the fourth Day depending on how the game is balanced) town benefits from dead bodies in the Night. This is counter intuitive, but if you think about it, it makes sense. What town lacks most in the start of the game is information, what it has to spare is players. Killing off town players early in the game does two things that are still helpful to town. 1, it gives town information about the game setup that they can only get from death, shedding light on voting patterns in a meaningful way as well as (in closed setup games) exposing the thought process of the game designers. The other thing it does is change the ratio of scum to town allowing town to have a better chance of “stumbling into” a lynch of scum. Scum lynches generate more good scum catching data for town than just about anything else. Also once one scum has been caught, it reveals a lot about how the rest of the scum team plays. So, in the early game, when town has bodies to spare, it is my feeling that it is good to have the vig kill IF they think they have cause. Anything that makes them think they have a better chance than random is a good thing, and even if you hit a power role, if the game is well designed, it shouldn’t matter. Town should not be relying on power roles to win the game.
Let me say that one again.
TOWN SHOULD NOT BE RELYING ON POWER ROLES TO WIN THE GAME.
That isn’t mafia. That’s bullshit. Power roles help balance things out, but in a well designed game no one power role should be so important that their death will cripple the town and prevent a win. Town should be able to catch scum on their own.
Then there is the possibility that the vig might actually catch scum, which is always good for town as it buys them more bodies to be able to lose and allowes town to not fear the mislynch as much.
Now, after about Day Three the above generally no longer holds. Town generally does not have the bodies to spare at that point, so the vig will likely want to re-asses the position that town is in and generally keep it in his pants. But my feeling is that the game is won or lost in the middle game, something like 80% of the time. Days 4-6 or 7 are the point when the game really hangs in the balance and town needs to have generated as much information as possible before that point so that they can lynch scum at *least *one time in that window. (again, depending on how the game has been balanced.)
In endgame the vig (if still alive) should go back to killing, and at that point should be looking to kill off all unconfirmed players so that scum have no place to hide and town can start picking them off like flies.
So, that’s my feeling on vig killing. For what it’s worth.
Thanks MHaye, it will give people something to read in the quiet moments.
As for a possible Vig; no, don’t do it, you will, if you exist, hurt the town more than the scum unless you are sure.
As for my comment on the game:
Expect everything, assume nothing.
Power roles are nice to have but should not be necessary.
Come on, NAF. We’ve been playing this game long enough (Conspiracy was two years ago!?) to see what happens when vigs start killing early. Their hunches turn out wrong, and they knock off towny players, usually hitting scum at a completely random rate despite their best-laid plans.
Now there is the benefit of kills being decided by a pro-town element, but town is in a game where we trade numbers for information. Starting the first three Days off with extra dead Townies does have the benefit of shortening the game, but what we gain in added additional information about dead players we give up in additional days where the scum have to come out and provide information for us (well, usually not me, I tend to be dead by then) to leaf through later. Throwing away our numerical advantage means that the benefit of power roles is lessened, and while I agree that the game isn’t won or lost on the basis of those roles, they sure do make things easier.
NAF, while I agree that some of your reasoning is sound, I still disagree somewhat. Yeah, don’t rely on power roles to win the game, BUT it’s still a team game, so we have to rely on each other. Second, killing off townies will indeed give the rest of town some info, that info would be better suited a few days into the game. What good is it to know that Player A was the town detective if we don’t have a day to two of discussion to look at who he was defending/prosecuting? What good is it to find out that Player B was VT if we can’t do a WOW on him because he’s only been around for one day and not all that talkative.
I think if we have to find the good in the Vig Kills your point make sense for a little later in the game. But early on I don’t think town benefits at all from Vig Killing.
You’re voting me for fixing a quote tag? Noted. Policy lynches are generally a bad idea, scum love them as it gives them a free bandwagon to park their vote on, effectively a free pass to the next day.
I don’t see any scope for scum to exploit the edit window as it is so short, but if town agrees on no editing I’m fine with that, I’ll just have remember to preview.
A word of caution, be very careful when discussing use of power roles and role-claims. Townies have a tendancy to implicitly claim vanilla when doing so, giving the scum a better chance of hitting power roles with NKs and blocks.
Hey there, I didn’t even notice that. I thought you guys were just talking about it. If might give scum a free pass for the next day. Yeah, voting for an editor gives scum a free pass to the next day, but not voting for an editor sets a precedent for scum to edit later in the game if they/you slip.
As for scum using the one minute edit window, there’s great time for them to use it. In fact, I go out on a limb and call you a skimmer since I already mentioned it once. If they post something to what they thought was the scum board and turned out to be the main board. They can quickly delete it and put a normal post in and say they were just fixing bad code/spelling/grammer etc…
Vote Alka Seltzer
I’ll change my vote later if need be, but at the moment, editing is the most scummy thing done so far.
I used to think that editing was just policy, but as Joey P brought up the scum can accidentally post to the wrong board thing, I am inclined to think it’s a bad idea. I’m not going to vote for you yet, Alka Seltzer, but I don’t think it’s just policy.
As for vig kills, I don’t think the vig should kill right away. But do you think it’s wise to announce in the thread whom the vig should kill? If there’s a scum power role, it could block the vig’s kill, no?
I agree with NAF in regards to the Vigilante.
Go ahead and kill if you want to, and don’t if you don’t want to.
Yeah, we might kill Townies, and that’s bad. But killing a Scum is extra doubleplusgood. And, if the game is balanced with 1/4 Scum, with 4 kills we should get 1 Scum. That’s a wash.
Add to that the fact that our Vig could likely take out someone with a moderate amount of suspicion on them, I think it increases their chances for hitting a Scum.
It might be interesting to check back in old games and see how well a Vig did percentage wise compared to the percentage of Scum.
Another good use for a Vig is taking out claimed or suspected 3rd party players. That way, we don’t waste a lynch on them and still get them out of the way.