No!!!
Don’t tell anyone that. **Cowgirl **should keep it a secret until she dies.
Oh, right, right! Sorry, that was stupid of me.
And, on third thought…maybe the Mafia didn’t go after any of the ‘obvious’ targets for fear that Cowgirl would be protecting them, so that would make it less suspicious that they all survived.
This game is too twisty for me. Another Bloody Mary!
Right here, sorry Chief. 
I was buying lunch.
I investigated MonkeyMensch, per previous requests and current suspicions.
Came back town.
My lead? Despite the fact that the last 2 days the person lynched was not someone I wanted lynched?
Lynch me if you must, but don’t listen to lies about me. If I “led” then don’t you think Monkey would be dead?
True Monkey isn’t dead, but there’s more than just getting your way. You’ve also managed to get people to second guess who they think is mafia.
You haven’t been hit my the mafia and I find that very suspicious (among other things). It’s either because you yourself are mafia or you are completely wrong about your accusations and the mafia are sitting back and enjoying watching you lead the town away from them.
I have? Really? Who? Do you mean because I tried to not get aguecheek killed? Honestly I haven’t tried to sway very many people at all, I don’t think at least. All I have done is post posting histories of people and then given my opinion. But think as you please, I know that I have no hope in convincing you.
First of all, I’m very sorry that I missed the past Day. It won’t happen again, I can promise you.
Second, unless I missed it, nobody ended up doing a review of my posts. I’d offer to do it myself, but that would pretty much be missing the point.
Third, I think that the Mafia are going after the SK, and that they night-killed Arizona Teach. I just can’t understand why they would go after Menocchio instead of confirmed townies Pleonast and sturmhauke.
Fourth, if that’s true, I think that puts a lot of doubt on Aguecheek’s claim. His investigation of Queuing as the SK would seem to make him a prime target to the Mafia if Aguecheek truly was a cop.
Fifth, as I’ve mentioned before, his claim is exactly what a Mafia would claim. He gave us a bunch of information we already knew, and nothing that we can use to confirm his claims. His investigation of pimaspinner was bizarre given that pima’s claim was being tested the very night that Aguecheek did his investigation. And why did he investigate MonkeyMench instead of cowgirl last night?
Welcome back Rysto!
So many thoughts… I think we might be able to make some real progress today.
I’m going to begin, if I may, with some basic strategy thoughts:
This game has fallen into a definite pattern. I have pointed this out before, but not as strongly or as specifically as I’m going to do here. The pattern has gone like this:
(1) Player A (town) makes an assertion, which runs contrary to the ideas of -
(2) Player B (also town). Player B, perhaps logically, finds this suspicious, and says so.
(3) Player A thinks that Player B is the one using suspicious logic, because it differs from his or her own.
(4) Player C (also town) agrees very strongly with Player A.
(5) A fierce argument ensues, with accusations and counter-accusations thrown back and forth.
(6) Barring role claim, we lynch Player A or Player B, with support from Players D through G (alignment unknown). The lynched player turns out to be town.
(7) We get frustrated.
So far in this game, the direct confrontations between individual players have not involved Mafia. The confirmed Mafia, it seems to me, were largely dispassionate. Some laid low, some posted more often; some gave the FoS to townies and some to one another. But they have not done so forcefully. They have not doggedly returned to the same conflict over and over. They have been opportunistic, using their votes as tools. Now that I’ve said this, they may change their approach, but I’d humbly suggest reviewing people’s voting records not just for apparently faulty logic – which can be employed maliciously by scum or in genuine error by townspeople – or for a bad record of identifying Mafia (which is a characteristic shared by, frankly, everyone in the game) – but also for that sort of casual, opportunistic approach to voting.
Now, to specifics.
I suspect brewha of being the Serial Killer. There, I said it. I know I said yesterday that I couldn’t think of a good way to identify the SK, but then I noticed something odd. In response to my observation that his vote seems to change a lot, he says:
Did any of you see the Pearl Islands season of Survivor? The winner that season was Sandra Diaz-Twine, who twigged very early on to the realization that that show, while it appears to be a team game early on, is in fact a game with only one winner, and that getting voted off the show for any reason means losing. Her philosophy became, “Anyone but me.” Her vote was for sale, and she admitted it. She’d ally with anybody, vote against anybody, as long as the vote wasn’t against her.
That’s what brewha’s statement above made me think of. It’s essentially: “I’ll vote for anyone, as long as it keeps me alive.” I was going to post a response to this when he said it, because it struck me as a very odd thing to say. Ultimately, this game is a team game. A townie may not want to be lynched, but wouldn’t consider it the worst possible result; actually, if brewha is just a vanilla citizen, losing him would actually have been better than losing Lakai, who we have a bit of town-ish evidence about. Even the Mafia is playing a team game. Why would brewha be in such a panic about the possibility of being lynched that he would role claim the INSTANT he took the vote lead and change his vote twice to keep his own head off the block? Taking one for the team isn’t the optimal outcome, but it isn’t the worst possibly outcome, either.
But not everyone is playing a team game. One player has reason to avoid lynching at any and all costs.
So that’s my SK theory. Thoughts?
I am still confident that Pygmy Rugger is scum, and have become extremely suspicious of hocow in the last day or two, as well. I have reasons, which I will outline a bit later tonight, but if I don’t get to the dishes right now I will be lynched quite for real.
One other thing before dishes, though…
(bolding mine)
Does this sentence make any sense to anyone unless my theory is right and brewha is the SK? At this stage of the game, lynching a townie just because he’s made incorrect guesses would not be good for the town at all. We’re getting down to the nitty gritty here - we can’t afford to keep killing townspeople "regardless of [their] affiliation. It sounds, again, like all brewha cares about is keeping himself alive and getting rid of anyone who points suspicion, no matter how lightly, toward brewha.
Oh, yeah, we need to leave ourselves lots of time in between our “final” votes and the end of the Day. The last two Days it’s been late-running bandwagons that have led to lynchings, and a lot of players seem to have been caught by surprise by them. I think we should get our votes in 24 hours early.
I guess I’m playing backwards then, because I’ve been more suspicious of the folks who were doggedly returning to the same conflict over and over. Does this mean I have to read the thread again? shudders in terror
Actually that makes some sense. His post with the vote switch to Lakai put him on my radar, too, although before I didn’t really have that high a suspicion of him. Does brewha have a response?
I was inclined to give Pygmy Rugger the benefit of the doubt, based on my suspicions of cowgirl who never responded to my requests to clarify by linking or quoting what she called his “smoke and mirror” posts. If she is the Guardian Angel, then he loses some of that. On the other hand, hocow’s not on my radar at all. Some days, I forget she’s still playing.
Oh Thank God. I was about to role-claim SK because this game was making me tear my hair out and I just wanted it to be over. I wish I could say that I was killed because I was getting too close to the Truth, but frankly I’m surprised I was targetted at all since I’ve successfully led the charge against more than one townie and was pretty good at doing the mafia’s work for them. Ah well.
Well played, bad guys. Well played indeed.
OK, I can see how this makes me look bad. But I, like everyone else, am getting frustrated. I know this is a team game, and I know I will still win if the town pulls this one off. But, like I said before, I know that I’m a townie. I didn’t know that malacandra wasn’t. I had been suspicious of him because of the dispute he and Queuing had earlier in the day.
I don’t know why you guys can’t see what I’m seeing. We’re getting manipulated by a very skilled set of mafia. I tell you what. Lynch Queuing or Lakai. If either one of them turns up town, I walk to the gallows, put the noose round my neck and happily leap off the platform. Because if they’re town, I got no clue what to do next.
Or, if you’d rather, lynch me first. When I turn up town, take both of them out. But, we’re down to 15. If you kill me, we likely lose two more town tonight. If we don’t take out the SK the following day, we all lose.
Ah, another offer to die. That has been tried already you know.
Anyway, since at the moment I am still choosing to believe all role claims, including aguecheek, and he says Monkey Mensch came up town, I will
unvote monkey mensch
I will be reading the posting histories again, and will put a vote in tomorrow.
Rysto aguecheek was suppose to do you, but he did me instead. So it seems you may not get done. Or I may do it, but I was in a car accident recently (I am fine) and need to take care of a lot of BS such as buying a new car and arguing with an insurance adjuster about how much money he will be giving me.
cowgirl did you do kat?
Well, on the bright side, at this point we’ve got almost a fifty-fifty chance of hitting scum if we pick a lynch victim completely at random. Of course, so far we’ve been doing much worse than we would by random chance, so it’s probably best not to count too much on that…
I think it’s time to take a long, hard second look at cowgirl and, especially, Aguecheek. If they are telling the truth, they’ve both been remarkably ineffective at using their powers, and it doesn’t make much sense to me that the Mafia would go after Menoccio or ArizonaTeach when there are tempting townies in power roles ripe for the killing. (And yeah, I know one can argue that maybe they’re holding off in hopes that the town will do their work for them, but since the town’s strategy so far is to hold off from lynching anyone who has made a role claim, that doesn’t seem a very likely bet. On the other hand, it makes fake role-claiming a great strategy for scum, particularly if the claim can’t be tested.)
Menoccio was one of the more vocal skeptics of Aguecheek’s role-claim, and if that claim was a lie, it’s not hard to see why someone might have wanted him silenced.
I thought it over and I like Rysto’s idea that mafia is going after the SK better than my idea that they are scared of the GA. Though that would mean that the SK killed Menocchio. Why would the SK do that?
I’m digging Storyteller’s analysis. Vote brewha.
Right now, I’m on brewha’s side. His reasons might be different then mine, but like I said earlier, I’m gonna vote Queuing.
I’m on record regarding getting rid of the SK early in the game, and I’m still for getting rid of the SK.
No, you misunderstood. I’m voting Queuing becuase I think he is scum. Very smart and manipulative, but scum. There are obviously people who don’t agree with me on that point. I was trying to convince them to vote Queuing as well. I figured that even if people were on the fence about Queuings scumminess, they could rationalize the vote by realizing that we have been making bad decisions while listening to him.
Are you saying that offering yourself to the noose is some kind of smoke screen to throw town off your scummy scent? Yes, that has been done before.
My first plan involves killing who I think is scum(you and Lakai). If you are not, I will be glad to die, I won’t have a clue where to go from there anyway.
Drat. And I was certain I’d identified one, maybe two mobs.