Day 1 claims: how useful?

[Yosarian2]

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I'm pretty sure TSQ is kidding.

Either that, or he's scum in all of his games right now and is hoping townies will take his advice.

[Yosarian2]

I am not at all kidding. A vanilla townie should always claim doc when pressured to claim. A vanilla claim gets them lynched, and a doc claim does not. The doc claim protects the real doc by drawing a scum kill, perhaps all scum kills, and the vanilla claim will not do that.

The only problem is if the doc plays dumbly. The doc/cop should NEVER claim day one, in my opinion, unless they HAVE to in order to prevent their own lynch. They should claim vanilla. (Which is one of the reasons I think "Lynch all vanilla claims is such dumb strategy...I have VERY rarely seen scum claim vanilla, since they're so likely to get lynched.)

All in all, I think LAL is really dumb.

Interesting.

The thing is, first of all, the real doctor is very likely to either counterclaim or to at least suddenly start voting and attacking the claimed doctor, giving himself away.

And "the real doctor should claim townie" is silly, because then he'd be lynched. The doc should claim so as to avoid being lynched.

So, if everyone played that way, then the town basically wouldn't get any information from the claim at all. If townies claim doc, docs claim doc, and scum claim doc, then anyone bandwagoned will claim doc, the town will lynch them anyway as the claim will have become totally useless.

The way we do it now, where the common stratagy is "good guys don't lie" or at least "good guys don't generally lie",at least if you bandwagon someone and they claim doc, you know that they're either the doc or the scum; and if they are the scum, and the real doc counterclaims, you can lynch without having to seriously consider a "Ok, I'm not really a doc, I'm a lying townie" response. And if there's not a counterclaim, then knowing the person is either the doc or the scum, the town can choose to avoid that risk and lynch someone else, which also helps the town a great deal. So there are a lot of advantages for the town to the good guys not lying in this kind of situation; switching to a "good guys always lie" stratagy like you're suggesting would badly hurt the town.

[Yosarian2]

More complicated is only worse if the people playing lack the ability to figure the situation.

Well, "figuring out the situation" is kind of how the town wins, and disinformation makes that harder almost inevitably. There are times a lie can be useful, but I don't agree that a "day 1 fake doc claim" is ever that kind of situation. If you want to get yourself nightkilled, there are better ways to do it without all the risks involved in claiming doc.

A good doc will not counterclaim or give herself away day 1, so that's how I play.

Not necessaraly true. For example, in a newbie game, if I didn't know if there was a cop, I would certanly counterclaim a fake day 1 doc claim, because it's worth it to get the doc nightkilled in that situation if it means that one of the two scum get lynched. And besides, it's very hard to not give yourself away in that kind of situation; if you're pro-town, you WILL tend to act differently towards someone you know is lying. That's almost unavoidable.

[Yosarian2]

It really doesn't matter what the real doc thinks. As long as the real doc doesn't do something stupid like counterclaim. There are VERY few situations where a doc should counterclaim on d1, and this is certainly not one of them. If the real doc is an idiot, then they will, if they are intelligent, however, you will draw the scum kill that night, which is a pretty awesome thing to do as a vanilla townie.

No, the real doc will assume you're scum, if you claim doc. At the very least, he probably won't unvote you when everyone else does. Which leads to "Yos, why didn't you unvote TSQ when he claimed doc? Do you want to lynch the doc?" Followed by me saying "Well, I don't know if I believe his claim, I think he might really be another doc somwhere who just dosn't want to counterclaim..."

Basically, even if the doc dosn't intend to counter-claim, this kind of tactic often gives the real doc away anyway, which will lead to the fake-claimer being lynched and the real doc getting nightkilled.

Besides, like I said before, if you want to draw mafia fire, there's much, much safer ways to do it, at least in a large game. For example, in Committe mafia, I wanted the scum to nightkill me rather then someone else becaue I was a "had to shoot every night vig", a role I considered somewhat less useful then even a vanillia townie. So without lying to the town, I took information that I had (like the fact that there were "had to shoot every night vigs", and the fact that I knew the person I had killed hadn't been killed by scum) and used that information to help the town avoid mislynches, while implying that I got the information from some kind of undefined role. Basically, I didn't lie, and I didn't say anything that might have caused a counterclaim, but I gave the scum the impression that I might have had some kind of info role, so they killed me, just as I intended.

If you want to get yourself nightkilled to draw mafia fire, claiming doc is about the dumbest way to do it.