[QUOTE=brewha]
Can anyone explain to me a situation where Lakai is not mafia and yesterday’s vote goes through anyway? If there were 3 mafia left, they all three knew that Pygmy Rugger was mafia. They knew that they’d be down to 2 if he gets lynched. They could have easily switched votes to Lakai and lynch him instead. Why didn’t they? Lakai is mafia.
I was going crazy yesterday because I was sure that if the town was split, the mafia would get an easy lynch. Because if half the town voted mafia and half voted for town, the mafia would pick the town and all vote for that person. The thing I didn’t expect was the the town would be split a different way. Half the town votes for mafia the other half votes for another mafia. This is the only thing that could have happened that would not result in a townie death.
If someone can poke holes in my theory other than the fact that a beat cop exonerated Lakai, please tell me.
[/QUOTE]
Okay, how about this case: the three Mafia were Pygmy Rugger, Fretful, and Brewha. (Meaning the other six were town.)
Pygmy had four ‘town’ votes - SBS, Kat, Queing, and Storyteller.
Lakai had one ‘town’ vote - Pleonast plus two Mafia - Brewha and Pygmy.
What can this particular Mafia trio do to save Pygmy? Well, Brewha could beg and plead for some of the townies to switch their vote from PR to Lakai. He did, but no soap, and the deadline was approaching.
What then? Well, Fretful could change his vote to Lakai, possibly citing the uselessness of leaving it as a singleton, resulting in a 4-4 Pygmy/Lakai tie, and they could hope that chance would save Pygmy.
Except as soon as Fretful voted for him, Lakai would HAVE to switch his vote from me to Pygmy just to save himself. And given how precious each townie’s life is right now, that wouldn’t be a selfish act, merely what he needed to do to preserve his own, known to be town, life.
Result: Pygmy hangs anyway, and a huge focus of suspicion fall on each and every one who DIDN’T vote for PR. Probably especially on Fretful for his last minute jump.
So what should Fretful do instead? Why, vote for anyone other than Pygmy or Lakai. (He shouldn’t vote for Pygmy to leave open the chance that Kat would be swayed at the last minute to jump to Lakai.) And he’d get bonus points for voting for fellow mafia Brewha – a distancing vote that costs nothing.
Which explains the final vote count we had, doesn’t it?
Mind, I’m not saying I have a deep belief that Brewha and Fretful are the last two Mafia. Brewha just asked if someone could poke a hole in his theory that it **had ** to be Lakai and Fretful, and I believe I’ve just done that.
There may be other trios that work out similarly, I quit when I hit this one, it only taking one counter example to kill a theory.
I’m sorry, Brewha! It would be really nice to have it cut and dried.
However, there are two even bigger problems in relying on reasoning like this.
First, it requires that the Mafia all play impeccable games, always making the perfect logical moves – but is that reasonable? Yes, they get to conspire at night, but whatever plans they have can be upset when the Townies do something unexpected. In the post above, Brewha mentions how he was totally surprised when the town vote was split between ‘two Mafia.’ Well, couldn’t the Mafia have been equally caught by surprise when 4/5ths of the townies stubbornly insisted on voting for a particular mafia? It was a surprising show of solidarity, unprecedented by the town before this. Once it happened, each of the Mafia individually had to decide what to do, and try to guess what the others are up to and coordinate their efforts in an ‘invisible’ way. Not exactly a easy thing to do. The mafia are just as human as the townies – they can easily miss the ‘correct’ move under time pressure and deprived of the chance to discuss.
Second, you’re totally focusing on a single play. A sensible player has to look ahead and see what the consequences are. For any of the Mafia - whoever they are - staying unsuspected is FAR more important than saving any single other mafia. So losing PR reduces them to two? So what? They still get to kill a townie each night. Better two mafia still hidden among some townies than three mafia and four townies who KNOW EXACTLY who the mafia are and will string them up one by one for the win.
All in all, this theory of yours is either a honest failure or a really nifty way to encourage the town to lynch Lakai. You did, after all, want us to go after him instead of his ‘co-mafioso’ Fretful, right? So, if you actually are a Mafia, you would manage to get townie Lakai lynched, and then what? At worst we manage to lynch you the following day. But Fretful? Why, he might even really be a mafia, but since you yoked him to Lakai, and then Lakai proved town…
So, so many twists and turns. How paranoid can we be? How paranoid do we need to be?
Just had another thought, and I refuse to rewrite the above to fit it in properly:
Actually, the situation against PR was even worse than 4 out of 5 townie votes. Pleonast said he would switch his vote if it looked like PR was not going to be lynched, and why wouldn’t the mafia believe him?
So, why didn’t Pleonast simply shift his vote at the time he made his post? Well, my guess is that he was waiting to see if anything ‘interesting’ happened. Like votes suddenly shifting onto Lakai at the last minute… And knowing that Pleonast was watching would make it even less likely for a Mafia to take a risky vote shift that was even more likely in vain.
Oh, and come to think of it, I think the results would be very similar if the Mafia were Brewha, Pygmy and Kat: if Kat jumped from PR to Lakai, then Lakai would shift to PR, and so would Pleonast, and again the Mafia would have thrown a spotlight onto one of themselves in a vain attempt to save another.
Wow. Very long post. Is there a size limit?