In the spirit of old school mafia, I'd love to do some... wait for it.... wait for it....
RQS! (Random Questioning Stage)
I know, SE's you probably hate me and are probably going to call me out on doing useless bullshit, but I think it's a good way to start the game and to get a baseline for how we expect to play this game.
Questions:
1) When/how often do you expect to post?
2) Is low activity a scumtell? Is high activity a towntell?
3) Lynch "all" liars or no?
4) Is too scummy to be scum a fallacy, or not?
5) (for those who have played before) What's your towngame like, and what's your scumgame like?
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1) I'll likely be posting relatively actively (maybe 1-3 times a day on average), but as for walls, I don't think I'll post a lot of those on here especially since I am in quite a few other games and modding some.
2) To some degree, I think that scum has an intrinsic motivation to not post/create apathy and deny the town information. The more you post, the more you might expose yourself. That said, scum also might have an intrinsic motivation to assert themselves and drive town towards mislynching another townie. So I think activity can be AI (alignment indicative), depending on the intent of the posts, but this is a tricky and often controversial question. I think activity is more AI when it comes to newbies, but the more experience one gets, the less AI activity is imo.
3) This was a common question often posed on MS, at least in the older days. I think town should do everything in their power to not lie, since a townie can play this game without lying, while scum can't. It's the one leverage town has over scum. The moment a townie lies, it adds a lot of confusion and can also give scum a crutch to lie. There are some very rare cases where it's okay to lie (like in weird setups where you claim a different role than your own to throw off the night kill), but for the purposes of this newbie game, I highly encourage everyone townie NOT to lie, even when claiming power roles. So lynch all liars? Maybe a little extreme, but if we see someone lying in this game, we should fight tooth and nail to figure out why they lied, and at the very least reward them a massive load of scumpoints for doing so.
4) To some degree, but I think it's important to distinguish something. Remember that the goal of scum is to a) survive (or get partner to survive) and b) get other townies lynched. A lot of scum will try towntell a lot, since they are extremely concerned with their image. So I think there are cases where "too scummy to be scum" cannot be dismissed as a fallacy, for example when there is no scum motivation to do a lot of scummy things. If someone is lurking out, weirdly casting votes, etc., it doesn't necessarily mean that they're scum. They're doing some "scummy things", but sometimes stuff like this is indicative that the player is not concerned with their images. That being said, there are some times where this is a fallacy, for example if scum lays a hammer down on a townie very aggressively (generally, when scum does something that clearly benefits their alignment). In this case, using the "too scummy to be scum" logic is fallacious since getting that townie lynched clearly benefitted scum.
5) You can look in my old games for some meta and stuff. I'm pretty different across games tbh, and even within games. It kind of depends on how I feel. My last completed game was Newbie 1717, where I won (pretty luckily) as scum. Any completed game before that was more than 2 years ago, since I took a 2 year hiatus from this site, so take anything you see there with a grain of salt. What you might find is that sometimes I am generally fairly aggressive as town, am generally pretty good at townhunting (and therefore getting scum by PoE), and I am rarely concerned with my image (but don't take it from me, take it for yourself! And make sure to skim through at least two games each of my town and scum games before you make a hasty conclusion). I honestly am not a fan of playing scum (if I could, I would avoid playing it), and sometimes that reflects in my game. I try to emulate my aggressive town playstyle as scum, but posting for me feels very unnatural and forced when I am scum. Sometimes it works out okay, like in my most recent game, but sometimes it doesn't quite work out so well.
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I recommend that everyone answers these questions (you don't have to write as much as me), or if you don't want to, explain why you don't like these questions. I won't be offended if you choose the latter, since I know how much people have gravitated away from RQS (but I wanted to bring it back
).Anyway,
VOTE: hiplop
Hi hiplop!! Nostalgia at its finest.
This is my second game with hiplop, ever. The first game I was with hiplop in was actually my very first game on this site, more than 4 years ago: Newbie 1222. He was also the IC in that game, and I was mostly a Village Idiot burden to the town (but, to be fair, my reads were nearly spot on besides the D1 mislynch lol). So if any of you newbies are concerned about this game, at least take solace in knowing that definitely you won't be as bad as I was in my first game
. Hiplop I hope I've improved since then lol 
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