Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Game Over!

[callforjudgement]

Why would that prompt you to ask the questions you did, though? Tracking a player lets you see their target, but it doesn't tell you about other players with the same target; what made you reject the possibility that Italiano and someone else both targeted me?

Also, if you did decide that a non-Italiano Friendly Neighbour had targeted me, why push me to confirm that in thread? If they die N3 the information doesn't matter, and if they don't die N3 they'll be able to confirm themself to someone else. (Besides, they presumably confirmed themself to someone N1.)

[callforjudgement]

FYI tracked RCE N1, my thought process has been checking people somewhat visible but without claimed active powers (RCE posted the fake day vig which put him on my radar, and Walter was the neighbor of a PR so I thought maybe he might either be PR or have an action).

I believe this statement. I also, however, think it's pretty much an admission that you're a scum Tracker, not a town Tracker.

What sort of town Tracker thinks "hmm, maybe such and such a player is a power role, let's track them to see what their role is like" rather than "hmm, maybe such and such a player is scum flying under the radar, let's track them to see if I can catch them performing the nightkill"? The thought process you've described is pretty much the thought process that scum would go through when deciding upon a Tracker target, and doesn't make much sense as town.

[callforjudgement]

Why would a townie even need to know Italiano's schedule? Either he's confirmed or he isn't (in this case, he's confirmed). So at this point, any further Friendly Neighbour actions he has are effectively Fruit Vendor actions (i.e. they're visible to the recipient but no additional information is gained); and seeing as he's confirmed, he can use them as he likes.

Knowing Italiano's schedule would only be useful to eliminate possibilities in which Italiano were scum, but those possibilities have been eliminated anyway.

[callforjudgement]

As for reading Walter based on night actions, I recommend Walter claims to Italiano (if he hasn't already) via the Neighbour PT, and Italiano can work things out from there. There's no reason for information about town power roles to be public, especially when there's a confirmed townie who can make use of the information.

[callforjudgement]

I don't see this set up working with a town tracker doesnt mesh well i dont even need to read the thought process

I agree with this. Just based on known roles, the setup is already in the region where scum power would be needed to balance it (even with the Neighbour pair to cause red herrings for the PT Cop, PT Cop + 2 Friendly Neighbours would be townsided against 3 Goons). Adding a town Tracker on that doesn't make much sense from a balance point of view; there are no bad interactions with the other town roles (other than potentially tracking a town power role who coincidentally targeted a kill, but this is unlikely with a PT Cop because there's not much target overlap, and a falsely accused Friendly Neighbour has no issue defending themself), so it would just end up making the setup even harder to balance. This factor alone makes me think that it's highly likely that it's Gamma (barring ridiculousness like a 9:4 setup, but that seems unlikely unless there are a lot more power role claims).

However, Gamma's actions today, even before the Tracker claim, were enough to reverse my earlier townread on him; the apparent motivations for his actions don't match those that a townie would have at all. If you suspect that Walter is a Friendly Neighbour, even with modifiers, why go to all that trouble to confirm it (including threatening me after I made it clear that your line of investigation was a bad idea, and leaking a lot of information to what would be your scum opponents if you were town)? The only way that the information could have a chance of being lost would be if I got nightkilled (which doesn't seem very likely when I wasn't receiving many townreads at the time), and even then that would mean Italiano would be alive, and would be able to clarify Walter's night actions (which Walter would have claimed to Italiano, because Italiano is confirmed town). I didn't think there could be a plausible explanation, and when Gamma finally produced one, it indeed wasn't plausible (and the stated night reasoning looks like scum reasoning rather than town reasoning).

(I also think "tracking Walter to me" wouldn't be sufficient evidence to prompt a typical player into suspecting that a setup contains a duplicate role. So I had a suspicion that Gamma has additional information from somewhere, either from fakeclaiming Rolecop as Tracker or via a second power role on the scumteam. This argument is much weaker than the other two, though.)

So in summary, my read is that Gamma is scum by nightplay/setup balance considerations, and also, independently of that, scum by dayplay considerations. Either would be strong enough to make me vote there today; both together is enough that I would be surprised (and vaguely horrified) if Gamma ends up flipping town.

[callforjudgement]

They have to have more powerful roles than just goons, at this point.

It's possible for them to have enough power to balance a Tracker in addition to the known roles (e.g. they could have a Ninja), but I don't see why a moderator would put that in a setup. Normally setup design starts with thinking up the idea behind the setup (e.g. two Friendly Neighbours), then you work out what needs to go around that (you need extra power but not that much, adding in some Neighbours so that a PT Cop gets false positives gives the setup a bit of a theme), then you work out what's needed to counterbalance it (in this case, some way for scum to find and/or screw with the power roles). Adding in a town Tracker seems like something that a setup designer would be unlikely to think of, because now you have extra confirmations where you really don't need it, and would need to add something to the scum side specifically to counter it. Then, once you do that, the game becomes really swingy because the setup has way too much PoE ability for town in the lategame, so you end up with a setup where scum have to win quickly or risk getting steamrolled.

I personally wouldn't allow anything like that when reviewing a setup. However, I wasn't the setup reviewer here, and at least mastina is rather more permissive of setups than I am (I don't know Nexus's or Datisi's mod/reviewer meta). So it's possible, but the odds seem rather against it.

[callforjudgement]

Hammer outside of Gamma today, and figure out a way to confirm/deny his role.

I think the only ways to get more information on this will be to flip or massclaim, and when (as far as I can tell) scum is taking risks to figure out peoples' roles, massclaim is probably a bad idea.

It might be possible to confirm Gamma as a Tracker, but even if we do, it still wouldn't confirm his alignment. It's a common town role and a frequently seen as scum, too, so confirming the role won't tell us much about the alignment.

[callforjudgement]

I already believe Gamma is probably scum, but what I’m questioning and what doesn’t make sense is how scum!gamma would know to “track” Walter to callforjudgment? The only way that’s possible is if all three of them (Gamma, Walter, & callforjudgment) are scum together.

That's probably an actual night action result figured out via a scum power role; either they have a Tracker and tracked Walter, or else they have some other power role that gave them the same information (e.g. a Watcher targeted at me). (Scum don't like to claim Watcher, because it's much more common as a scum role than as a town role in practice; it's too hard to balance in town hands.)

[callforjudgement]

@Mod: What happened to Nosferatu? Should he be on the votecount?

Having trouble with the votecounter, sorry. -GB

I'll be going to bed soon, but I'm online right now, so time to put out some reads/give some information.

First:

Titus and Walter are both confirmed town.

This is based on information that is not currently public.
As long as you agree that the setup is 10:3, you don't have to trust me to trust this information: as town I wouldn't lie about something this important, and if I were hypothetically scum, it would mean that everyone else were town.

I also strongly believe that Nosferatu and geraintm are both town (geraintm more so than Nosferatu). This is

not

based on private information, so it's possible that my reads are off, but I'm very confident about the geraintm read and pretty confident about the Nosferatu read.

I had a strong townread on Frogsterking on day 2. However, his behaviour was

really

scummy on day 3, especially given the Gamma flip. I still think the towntells I picked up from Frogster are genuine towntells, but am not sure how strong they are, especially in light of his recent behaviour, and I no longer want to fight that wagon if other people want to force it through.

I don't have a townread on Looker. I don't have a strong scumread by play, but the PoE is getting really small now.

VOTE: Looker

[callforjudgement]

Ooh, an idea that could explain Gamma's actions…

@

Gamma

: Did you receive

Italiano's

Friendly Neighbour PM Night 2? That would explain your actions here; you would naturally assume that I'd fakeclaimed to receive Italiano's PM for some reason, and would be hoping to catch me in a contradiction (in this scenario, you'd be lying about the "confirms a player as town" reason for pressuring me in order to reduce the chance I caught on). The question in this scenario would be intended as a subtle way to check for a second Friendly Neighbour (with you forgetting that Nosferatu would be able to counterclaim a "no" answer and thus it would reveal the existence of a second Friendly Neighbour in the case that I was town).

I thought of two more possibilities.

Given that Gamma has flipped now, and as a consequence answering this question won't leak any information: what were the other possibilities?

[callforjudgement]

I have been worried that this setup is implausibly townsided for a while. That's part of the reason I was so suspicious of Gamma; a Tracker on top of the roles I already knew about was just too much.

That said, there are some limitations. For example, one of the confirmations I have could not have been obtained on Night 1, no matter what else was happening in the game. I don't think it would have been possible for more than three people (plus the D1 and N1 flips, which don't count) to be cleared at that point.

I know that it's fairly hard to believe the setup, but it doesn't really matter at this point: we have three eliminations; from my point of view eliminating Looker and Frogster is enough; from your point of view you might need to eliminate me too, but there will still be enough time for that and it should be a forced town win regardless.

[callforjudgement]

Actually, after thinking about this, it's probably best if I claim today, so that everyone has a better handle on what's going on.

Do people think it should be just me who claims? Or should we be massclaiming?

[callforjudgement]

There weren't many vote counts at the end of day 1, but there were a lot of relevant vote

changes

in that time which weren't caught by the mods' ISOs.

This might explain why you have geraintm as scum by VCA, but I have geraintm as town by VCA. At least, we shouldn't be drawing opposite conclusions from the same information!

[callforjudgement]

Italiano and Walter voted for shelly in #820/#821. geraintm voted for Walter in #824. RCEnigma (=you) offered to hammer any wagon that reached L-1 in #826 (effectively a vote without voting). geraintm asked for a shelly prod in #828, then moved to shelly in #830 when I pointed out that she was posting elsewhere. There were only 2½ hours to deadline at this point. Deadline then got paused (due to shelly being replaced), and geraintm unvoted.

As a consequence, given shelly scum and Walter town, all a hypothetically scum geraintm would need to do would be simply to not post after the Walter vote, and shelly would have survived. I didn't think "shelly isn't posting" was a reason to scumread her (I townread her for it, on the basis that I couldn't explain her behaviour unless she'd forgotten about the game, and she seems to like playing scum so I doubt she would forget about the game if she were scum). geraintm seems to have taken it as sufficient reason to move his vote under severe time pressure, though. I don't see that coming from scum; there is no reason to bus someone who generally seems to be considered town but is receiving votes anyway, as the wagon is unlikely to reignite on future days.

(PEDIT: The confirmation of Titus as town assumes 10:3, it isn't reliable in a 9:4 setup. I find it very unlikely that scum would be given a power role in a 9:4, though, unless there's considerable unclaimed town power. That may be a reason to massclaim, so that we can determine how many scum there are.)

[callforjudgement]

Err, Looker, Titus is confirmed town. Your vote is not useful there.

[callforjudgement]

Can you respond to 1844 cfd?

I'm not sure I understand your VCA logic, here.

It seems quite plausible that the shelly wagon would be all town. In particular, I don't think any votes after Nosferatu's are useful for VCA purposes; at that point it was almost guaranteed that shelly would be the elimination that day, and with the potential for a 2½-hour deadline to be instituted at any point and only three votes on the largest counterwagon, it would have been obvious for anyone (town or scum) to pile onto that wagon in order to avoid deadline expiring.

Also bear in mind that geraintm's unvote of shelly came pretty soon after geraintm's vote of shelly; the original vote was to avoid deadline, the unvote was after deadline was suspended (in a sort of weird awkward position where it could have started back up at any moment with only 2½ hours left). I don't see why a hypothetically scum geraintm wouldn't just stay on Walter (scum geraintm implies Walter is town, because otherwise the setup would be 8:5), rather than moving to shelly.

As for the other topic of discussion, Parity Cop is not Normal.

[callforjudgement]

if your concern was that the setup was townsided, i don't see why 9:4 wouldn't offset that

We'd need considerably more town power that has been claimed so far to balance a 9:4, especially when scum have a power role of their own.

If you're a moderator trying to design a 9:4, why would you make it even harder on yourself and give scum a Tracker in addition to the fourth member?

[callforjudgement]

The reasoning on Walter and the reasoning on you are entirely unrelated. So I know that you and Walter have the same alignment because I know, separately, that each of you is town (and thus must have the same alignment because you're both town).

As I said earlier, I'm planning to claim today, and will explain why you are town, and why Walter is town, when I claim.

If we decide to have a massclaim today, I will claim as part of the massclaim. If we decide not to have a massclaim, I will nonetheless claim unilaterally.

As such, I think it might worthwhile to discuss whether a massclaim is a good idea or not. I think a massclaim may be preferable simply to avoid paranoia about whether the setup is actually 9:4, because that will need additional town power; if it's 10:3 then I imagine every unknown town role is vanilla, and the scum will claim VT to match. This also means that if it's 10:3, scum should know all the roles except mine already, so there's no real disadvantage to a massclaim. But given that scum were rolefishing yesterday, and many people are sceptical about me, I can understand it if people decide that a massclaim today is a bad idea.

[callforjudgement]

I will be V/LA for much of this weekend. (I should still be able to get a few posts in, but might be missing for much longer than normal.)

OK, here's my claim.

I am a Town Alien, without modifiers. (Wiki page, for players unfamiliar with the role: Alien (role).) This is a combined Rolestopper and Roleblocker; it prevents any other actions affecting the target, but it also prevents the target using any actions.

On Night 1, I targeted Tayl0r Swift. With two scum still alive, and lots of townies around, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to stop a kill by blocking the player performing it. Additionally, players who look scummy often turn out to be power roles. So I decided to protect Tayl0r from the nightkill instead; I thought she would be the most likely choice of target (being very townish and somewhat active), and was also unlikely to be a power role. (Unfortunately, she did turn out to be a power role, and her night action was lost as a result.)

On Night 2, I targeted ItalianoVD, who was the only confirmed townie at that point; same reasoning, trying to stop the kill. (Because Tayl0r had claimed to be a power role at this point, I couldn't protect her because it would cause her action to fail again; I just had to hope that scum would go for ItalianoVD rather than her.) This is the reason I was so anxious on Day 2 to make sure that ItalianoVD was definitely confirmed town, without any potential for a missed action; I obviously wanted to protect the confirmed tonwie, but my role would prevent him confirming himself a second time, so it was important that the first protection went through. It also had the bonus of increasing the chance that scum shot Italiano, thus increasing the chance that I would stop the kill.

Also on Night 2, I was targeted by Walter with a Friendly Neighbour action, confirming him to me as town (this is a 100% modconfirmation with no way to fake it). I don't know his exact role for certain (e.g. for all I know he could be a JOAT with a Friendly Neighbour shot), although anything other than Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour would be a surprise given the claims that have been made so far. I claimed this (in an intentionally misleadingly worded way, to avoid disclosing the existence of a second Friendly Neighbour to scum) in #1570. Walter immediately posted #1571, which I took to mean that he was letting me know that he had understood the real meaning behind my claim. I subsequently clarified in #[poat]1660[/post] that the Friendly Neighbour I was talking about in #1570 was not Italiano, but a second Friendly Neighbour.

On Night 3, there was only one scum left alive (assuming 10:3). My roleblock prevents, among other things, players killing. So assuming there's a death overnight (and there was), anyone I target with my ability can't possibly have performed the nightkill, and thus it must have been performed by someone else. I targeted Titus, so because the kill went through, it must have been performed by someone other than Titus, = Titus is not the last remaining scum. (I chose Titus because out of my PoE pool – Titus, Looker, Frogsterking – she was in the scummiest slot (thus a town confirmation would give the most information), and also she seemed like she'd be more valuable as a confirmed townie than Frogsterking or Looker would be.)

---

I should also talk somewhat about my strategy for the game. I've intentionally been playing to a different meta than my normal town or scum meta. The thing is that Alien is a very weak power role for town early on, but gets much more powerful when there's only 1 scum left. So, when I got the role, I had to contrive a way to outlive two scum without my role being discovered, without scum nightkilling me for other reasons, and without town eliminating me.

My solution to this issue was to play more honestly and openly than normal. That sounds like it should be a great thing as town, but there are lots of thoughts and ideas you have during a typical game that you can't really post (because they "look scummy", even though they aren't really). In a typical game, there are lots of things you think of, but then end up not posting, because you know you're going to get scumread for them. (To be clear, I normally won't post these regardless of whether I'm town or scum, although I'm much more likely to have these thoughts as town because I have less information then and thus am more likely to be off-the-mark.)

In this game, through day 1 and day 2, I adopted the strategy of simply posting these thoughts anyway, even if I couldn't see how it would help. The idea was that being open about my thoughts, even at the cost of looking scummy, would give people a logic-scum read on me but a gut-town read on me, meaning that small wagons on me would be frequently likely to form, but that they'd have trouble gathering momentum. That way, scum would assume that I would be a potential miselimination to bring into the late game, but town would never actually force me to a claim. It also had some advantage in reaction testing (in particular, I had a townread on Raya based on her actions towards me being almost identical to how I'd expect a townie to react, but I didn't think this read was strong enough to override the scumread on Raya from Nosferatu and Tayl0r who I had a stronger townread on; often my reads are bad, so I'm typically willing to sheep people who I townread and have strong reads of their own).

[callforjudgement]

Wait for everyone else to claim first, I think (including claiming any Friendly Neighbour messages received). Confirmed players should normally go last in a massclaim, because it makes it harder for scum to make sure their claims match up with everyone else's.

[callforjudgement]

I think everyone (except confirmed town Walter) has claimed now? Here are the claims/flips, and known actions, of every player:

• ItalianoVD: Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour. Died N3. Targeted Nosferatu N1 (#1531), blocked by CFJ N2 (#1746, #1861), targeted geraintm N3 (#1833).
  
• callforjudgement: Town Alien (#1861). Alive. Targeted Tayl0r N1 (#946), Italiano N2 (#1746), Titus N3 (no evidence, Titus is VT).
  
• Gamma Emerald: Mafia Multitasking Tracker. Died D3. Target unknown N1 (claimed Titus in #1710, but was scum so may have been lying, Walter N2 (#1710, #1734, #1861).
  
• shellyc: Mafia Goon. Died D1.
  
• Looker: Vanilla Townie (#1876). Alive.
  
• Not_Mafia: Vanilla Townie. Died N1.
  
• geraintm: Vanilla Townie (#1867). Alive.
  
• Raya36: Vanilla Townie. Died D2.
  
• Frogsterking: Vanilla Townie (#1870). Alive.
  
• Nosferatu: Vanilla Townie (#1874). Alive.
  
• Titus: Vanilla Townie (#1862). Alive.
  
• Tayl0r Swift: Town PT Cop. Died N2. Blocked by CFJ N1 (#946, #1861). N2 action is unknown but doesn't really matter.
  
• WaltertheDunce10: Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour (#1863). Alive. Targeted Frogsterking N1 (#1870), CFJ N2 (#1660, #1861), N3 action unclaimed.

I think it's time for Walter to claim his N3 action. Based on current claims, the only player who would have failed to receive Walter's N3 Friendly Neighbour action was Titus (also Italiano, but there is no chance Walter would target Italiano last night). If Walter did target Titus last night (which seems likely based on stated reads), that confirms me as an Alien specifically (and scum are most likely vanilla apart from the known Tracker). If Walter targeted someone else, then there's an unclaimed power role around (effectively confirming me as town because a 9:4 wouldn't give scum three power roles).

Assuming that Walter did target Titus, then the setup is:
Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour ×2
Town PT Cop
Town Alien
VT ×6
Mafia Multitasking Tracker
Mafia Goon
Mafia (unknown, but probably Goon, possibly an investigative)

From the point of view of people who aren't me and don't know I'm town, it could alternatively be:
Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour ×2
Town PT Cop
VT ×7
Mafia Multitasking Tracker
Mafia Multitasking Alien
Mafia Goon

The second setup looks pretty scumsided to me (scum are likely to figure out power roles quickly, the PT Cop is screwed as soon as she claims anything because she can be easily blocked

or

killed, and the PT Cop is quite likely to accidentally claim a guilty on the Friendly Neighbours), although I might be biased because I already know it's wrong. The first setup looks a little townsided, but is more believable (I think the Alien was probably added as a protective who shuts down the town power roles when protecting them, Jailkeeper-style, and the reason it's an Alien rather than a Jailkeeper is to reduce the townsidedness of the setup a bit (it increases the chance I'll block one of the town power roles by accident).

I'm still V/LA, and probably won't be able to check this thread for several hours (I might see a post if it's made immediately, and might be able to take a quick peek in in a few hours time but won't be able to make any substantial posts).

[callforjudgement]

I don't yet know who Walter targeted last night. I've already claimed my action.

If I were a Roleblocker, fakeclaiming as Alien, I'd either have to block Walter (thus blocking him regardless of his target), or else not block Walter (thus not blocking him regardless of his target). So there might well be a discrepancy in the claims that could be detected. As it is, being an actual Alien, I strongly suspect that Walter's target last night was Titus, because it's the only target that's consistent with the claims so far. This is information I can deduce as an Alien, and wouldn't be able to as a Roleblocker, and thus should be strong (but not conclusive) evidence of my role.

Even if you think I'm just guessing at who Walter's target is, there's a second reason why I wouldn't claim a blocking role as scum: as it is, with my claim, I currently have to target a player every night, and every time I do, I confirm them as town if anyone dies overnight. So if I were scum, I would at this point inevitably end up eventually losing the game through PoE (unless I could somehow get all of you, Looker, geraintm, Nosfeartu eliminated in preference to me, which seems very implausible). I will try, as scum, to avoid making a claim that will automatically lose me the game (I have made that mistake before because I had to claim under time pressure, shortly after replacing in, which means that I'm very unlikely to make it when I've had an entire Night to think about things). Even if you think I might make such a claim, it isn't worth worrying about the possibility yet because town will end up winning anyway if it's the case. If I were hypothetically scum, the simple thing to do would just have been to claim VT; then people would know there was an unclaimed scum manipulative role, but wouldn't know who it was, and thus it wouldn't make me into any sort of target.

[callforjudgement]

OK. In that case, I think that (assuming scum don't have an unclaimed manipulative role that somehow hasn't produced any visible effect yet, and don't have a Strongman), we have something very close to a forced town win here (even if you don't assume I'm town).

Without help from town power roles, we get to eliminate three people (on Day 4, Day 5, and Day 6; Night 6 is the earliest possible scum win because scum can't kill more than one player per day and, given the lack of additional town power, there must only one left).

With help from my power role, we get to either confirm or eliminate a fourth person (every Night there's a kill will confirm someone, and if there are two Nights with no kill then we will be able to make use of the Day 7 elimination). We can't control whether scum choose to nightkill or not, so a night with no kill won't prove anything, but "it's a 6:1 and scum are choosing not to kill" is a pretty good outcome in any case.

There are only five unconfirmed players (Looker, Frogster, geraintm, Nosferatu, and me). Thus, if we can identify even a single player in that group of five who we all think is town, we have a forced town victory. (Note: I'd prefer to aim my Alien action at players who are probably, but not certainly, town anyway. That reduces the chance that we lose if scum have a power role that can fool my "investigation".) It doesn't matter whether anyone thinks I'm scum or not for this; every night you leave me alive then either there's no kill or someone gets confirmed (because if I were hypothetically scum, my confirmation would be on a player who was town anyway because they were not me, and thus you can take it as fact that anyone I confirm is town even if you don't know my alignment).

We don't have to agree yet on which of those five players should be the one we agree as the "townie who goes through to the end", either; we can decide later, simply eliminating scummy players and confirming players overnight until we get there. (In order to maximise town win chance, this plan does require leaving me alive until at least Day 6; if people are still suspicious of me then, they can eliminate me at that point.) However, scum will probably aim their nightkills in order to sow WIFOM and/or get rid of people who suspect them or might come to suspect them, so we may be more accurate in identifying a townie now than on a future day (scumhunting post-massclaim is often very difficult).

[callforjudgement]

A summary of what's non-public that we know, and why we know it:

• Walter is a Friendly Neighbour, therefore Town. Multiple living players have received his messages, so this is effectively a modconfirmation and impossible to fake.
  
• Titus was blocked from performing the nightkill last night, yet the kill went through anyway. Unless Titus is a Strongman, Roleblocker or Ascetic (all unlikely given other claims), she didn't perform the kill last night. Someone did, so someone other than Titus is scum (meaning that if this is 10:3, Titus is town).
  
• It's been confirmed that someone is roleblocking. I have claimed to be doing the blocking, and nobody has counterclaimed. Thus, if it's 10:3, I must be doing the blocking (in a 9:4 setup I could hypothetically be covering for a buddy, but there would be no reason to do so).
  
• I have claimed Alien (Combined Roleblocker+Rolestopper). I was able to deduce that Walter had targeted Titus before he told me, because I knew my roleblock on Titus would rolestop her as a side effect. This is evidence that I'm an Alien rather than some other type of blocking role, but it isn't completely conclusive because (if I were hypothetically a scum Roleblocker) I could have blocked Walter and then made a lucky guess about who he targeted. Even if I am an Alien, that fact doesn't directly prove my alignment.

[callforjudgement]

(There's also a fairly easy way to test for Titus being Ascetic: toNight, have Walter randomize between targeting Titus and targeting someone else, 50:50 each way. Then have Titus claim first on the subsequent Day. If she isn't Ascetic, she'll be able to tell whether she was targeted or not and will be able to determine whether the other player received Walter's message or not. If she is, she won't be able to tell and will have to guess. Walter's night action is no longer needed to confirm him, so this is probably the best use for it.)

[callforjudgement]

@

Frogsterking

: I don't understand what two points you're trying to compare in #1899. I've looked at the two posts you've quoted and are trying to figure out what they have in common.

Is it the mention of Among Us? It's a Mafia dervative that has received a huge surge in popularity lately, so it isn't surprising that it might end up sucking away the time of a Mafia player or two.

[callforjudgement]

It'd make my role almost entirely negative utility, up until the point where the Strongman died. So it would mean I would hurt town while town were losing, and help town while town were winning. That's not the sort of role interaction you typically want in a setup.

[callforjudgement]

I'm assuming I'm an Alien, not a Jailkeeper, to make the setup a bit less townsided. There's a chance of randomly rolestopping the Role Cop or a Friendly Neighbour by mistake, thus toning down the power of the other town power roles. A Jailkeeper wouldn't do that.

Going the other way, if I were hypothetically scum, Alien would make the setup somewhat more scumsided, for exactly the same reason.

[callforjudgement]

A final question I have for everyone: Do you believe Gamma was really on tilt when he died?

Possibly prob had realized outing as tracker was not the right move.

I agree with this. I think Gamma didn't have any sort of grand plan Day 3; just realised that the wording of my Friendly Neighbour claim was off, and combined with tracking Walter to me, decided to test whether Walter was a Friendly Neighbour too. Unfortunately, he didn't realise that it would reveal rather too much about what he was thinking in the process, and ended up digging himself into a hole, then into a larger hole trying to escape from the first one. I guess this is the same category of things as a "scumslip", although not exactly the same as scumslips usually are.

It's also possible that he thought "CFJ will refuse to answer this question, nobody else will understand why, I can get CFJ miseliminated like that", and failed to think through what would happen after I was forced into a claim. That seems less likely, though.

I think Gamma would have been quite annoyed/frustrated when he realised how badly he'd screwed up.

[callforjudgement]

Also, it's quite possible that this game's scumteam doesn't have much in the way of long-term plans. Some scumteams decide on a plan for the whole game, in terms of who's going to survive to the end, who's going to be bussed, which townies to go after, etc.. But most scumteams don't, and even when they do, the plan normally doesn't end up working out the way they expect.

I was townreading Gamma before he started pushing me over my claim to receive a Friendly Neighbour message, and I think lots of other players were also mostly ignoring him in favour of people who were more actively scummy. (Italiano had a strong scumread on Gamma (#1614), but I vaguely remember he was in the minority; I haven't checked.) So it's quite possible that scum were hoping to fly under the radar for a while and that townies would miseliminate each other.

[callforjudgement]

Assuming no power role shenanigans, Titus didn't perform the nightkill.

If she's scum, then who did?

[callforjudgement]

I struggle to buy Looker as scum because that would make 2 scum voting elsewhere while shelley was wagoned.

Gamma didn't post anywhere on site between 07:47:41 UTC on Saturday 4 September and 04:34:15 UTC on Sunday 6 September.

At Gamma's last post before the break, the votecount looked like this:
ItalianoVD (4): RCEnigma, shellyc, callforjudgement, Nosferatu
WaltertheDunce10 (2): Raya36, Not_Mafia
geraintm (2): Gamma Emerald, Frogsterking
callforjudgement (2): ItalianoVD, Looker
Not_Mafia (2): geraintm, WaltertheDunce10
shellyc (1): Tayl0r Swift

As of Gamma's first post after the break (#822; 823, also by Gamma, said "what are the actual votes rn"), the votecount looked like this:

WaltertheDunce10 (4): Raya36, Not_Mafia, callforjudgement, Nosferatu
shellyc (4): Tayl0r Swift, Frogsterking, ItalianoVD, WaltertheDunce10
talianoVD (2): RCEnigma, shellyc
geraintm (2): Gamma Emerald, Looker
Not_Mafia (1): geraintm

Quite a difference. Gamma then disappeared again, and because the game was critically close to deadline, players started consolidating on the top wagons. We also know that shelly had gone missing in this time (having failed to respond to a prod).

What would you expect Gamma, as scum, to do at this point? I would expect him to join the Walter wagon, if online. geraintm changed vote to Walter shortly after Gamma's post. RCEnigma (Titus) had offered to hammer if someone else placed the E-2 vote. If Gamma votes Walter, Walter gets hammered. As a consequence, I think Gamma was probably offline at deadline (there hadn't been a votecount in a while, so he perhaps didn't notice how close the game was to deadline while quickly popping in). I am almost certain that shelly was unaware of this game, both because she was under replacement from failing to respond to a prod, and because she had no logical reason not to cross-vote Walter even if the scum were planning to bus. (Oddly, she was posting elsewhere on site, so presumably she somehow forgot about this game in particular. Note that she omitted this game from the list of ongoing games in her signature, even while she was alive here, so maybe she forgot about it.)

We have two flipped scum, and neither of them were on either of the two main wagons at the time. I think the most logical explanation is that the deadline caught scum as a whole unaware, and they weren't paying attention to deadline voting the way townies would have been. Eventually, the shelly wagon ended up being pushed over the line by players who townread her, simply because we were running very low on options.


@

Titus

: I'd also be interested to hear your opinion on geraintm's vote progression (#824, #830 (just before deadline), #834 (after deadline extension), #859, in fairly quick succession). I saw this as indicative of geraintm as town, but you seem to have a different opinion on it? Note that I consider the hammer in #834 to be non-alignment-indicative because shellyc was inevitably going to be the day's elimination at that point.

[callforjudgement]

That said, I agree with you that this makes Nosferatu probably town. In this situation, it's mathematically possible to stake the game on Nosferatu being town – we only need to identify one townie who isn't currently confirmed to get a 100% forced win (barring unlikely scum power roles, and even those can be played around to some extent), and we can't win without identifying at least one such townie (there has to be someone unconfirmed who we don't eliminate in the final 2:1/3:1).

I think that out of {CFJ, Nosferatu, geraintm, Frogsterking, Looker}, we should probably leave either Nosferatu or me as the designated surviving townie, and I think that suspicion of me is high enough that people are unlikely to let me through to the end. So I'm happy to leave Nosfeatau non-eliminated and non-confirmed, and simply eliminate or confirm everyone else who's currently unconfirmed.

I've ended up losing my motivation for scumhunting a bit recently because it feels like it should be a forced win almost regardless. If anyone here thinks that's there's a significant chance that Nosferatu is scum, now would be a good time to speak up. Otherwise, I'm likely to just sheep because there isn't any particular reason (other than saving time) to figure out which of the unconfirmed players is actually scum, we simply need to find one townie.

[callforjudgement]

It's OK to eliminate me at 4:1 but not at 5:1, if you want the forced win to occur. The theory goes that if we reach a 5:1 setup, I'm town, and we miseliminate, I will by that point know who the remaining scum is (because i'll know it isn't me and will be guessing it isn't Nosferatu) and will be able to block them. That takes us to 4:1, giving us enough time to eliminate both me and the scum.

If we reach a 5:1 setup, miseliminate someone other than me, and there's a death overnight, that would narrow down scum to me versus Nosferatu, and town would end up choosing incorrectly. This is what I mean by that "we have to identify one townie"; the plan results in a town loss if Nosferatu is scum. However, I think we'll lose anyway if Nosferatu is scum (seeing as he's close to a universal townread), and the plan guarantees a win in all other situations, because I'll stay alive long enough to confirm everyone but Nosferatu, me, and the scum, and we will be in a 4:1 ending and have enough eliminations to get rid of both me and them (the order in which this happens really doesn't matter, so if you'd prefer to do me first, I'm fine with that).

[callforjudgement]

I'm interested in your reasoning behind that. What in the wagons pointed you to him?

[callforjudgement]

(PEDIT: re: #1950)

Looking at Frogster's point #7 because I think it's the most relevant.

Frogster's vote on Nosferatu was #180/181/182. The reasoning looked pretty dubious to me at the time (it boils down to "I think a townie would have more substantive prodges despite being drunk, especially with an avatar like that"). So at the time, I didn't particularly scumread anyone who disagreed with it, and then subsequently mostly forgot about it.

Gamma's reaction to this was #201, in a long series of posts that reacted to all sorts of things. I don't think that this is a defence of Nosferatu in particular, e.g., #193 is defending you on very similar reasoning, #199 is defending me (from his scumbuddy!), and #200 is defending SJReaver (= Looker). I think that's just Gamma trying to look town, defending everything he saw as a weak attack. Some of those defences may be on a scumbuddy, but we know that most of them weren't, and it's more likely that he was trying to discredit the attackers than defend the accused.

Banana's reaction was #218. This does defend Nosferatu somewhat harder than it defends other players. However, I don't think there was much that Nosferatu needed defending from; more likely it was Banana finding a convenient excuse to attack you, as you'd made an incredibly weak case on Nosferatu and scum saw it as something they could paint as scummy.

We also have examples of townies reacting the same way, e.g. Walter's reaction in #226, Italiano's in #234.

Frogster then substantially increased/confirmed the read in #255 (apparently thinking that Nosferatu must be scum due to other players defending him for doing something that, as far as I can tell, nobody but Frogster thought was actually scummy), and due to creating a counterwagon on Frogster that distracted from the Walter wagon. This read seems, in retrospect, much more likely to be spurious because we now know that Walter is and was town, so scum would have no reason to create a counterwagon (and in fact, the Walter wagon failing to go through is what eventually lead to shelly's elimination). (Of note is that RCEnigma (=Titus, thus town) immediately townread Frogster for it simply because the reasoning was just that bad. It was so bad that even Not_Mafia commented on it, in #261.)

Gamma later defends Nosferatu more explicitly in #291, and in a very weird way in #349 (this latter post may be worth looking at, it makes me think that either Gamma was scum with Nosferatu or else wanted Nosferatu in particular to look bad after Gamma flipped).

I actually think that this interaction may be more useful for reading Frogster than Nosferatu; if Frogster is scum, then the scum reaction to Frogster's push on Nosferatu was distancing. That said, I have a suspicion that Frogster would have posted his points against Nosferatu regardless of alignment, because his ideas of what is scummy seem to be so different from the typical person's views on the subject are, and the scum reaction to it was most likely their natural reaction rather than something that had been discussed or planned in the PT beforehand.

[callforjudgement]

I'd like to talk about Frogster.

I think Frogster's play was very townish D2, and towards the start of D4. I also, however, think that Frogster's play was scummy D3, and want to go over why.

The discussion D3 became mostly dominated by discussion of Gamma's question #1593. I didn't initially see the question as scummy – I thought Gamma was playing in a scumsided way, but intentionally thought it was by mistake rather than intentional – and tried to dissuade Gamma from asking the question (first by ignoring it, then refusing to answer in #1622 after Gamma presses me in #1618, )

#1608 – Frogster is apparently sure that scum left Italiano alive due to a rolecop report on Tayl0r. That's a bizarre conclusion to draw given that Tayl0r had already softclaimed a power role (specifically, one that was somehow connected to a Friendly Neighbour Neighbour and knew that its action had failed, which narrows things down to about three possibilities among Normal roles). Normally, when a player comes to an excessively complex conclusion when the evidence supports a much simpler conclusion, that player has hidden information and/or is lying, so that leans towards Frogster as scum. I'm not convinced that this is a scumtell for Frogster specifically, though, given that he seems to have something of a complexity addiction.

(As a side note, flipped town Italiano makes a case for Frogster as scum in #1614.)

#1633 – I was wondering at this time if there was some connection between Frogster and Gamma, i.e. that the question that Gamma was asking had somehow caused Frogster to suspect me (this wasn't all that surprising, because seemingly anything I did caused Frogster to suspect me). So I decided to check whether Frogster had a strong town read on Gamma (and thus was willing to sheep a townread who was attacking a scumread). Frogster stated a null-leaning-town read on Gamma (whilst impugning my motivations behind asking the question), so if he's following Gamma, it isn't because of a townread. (This is what I meant by "I was just trying to rule out a possibility, but haven't been able to conclude anything from this. It might make more sense later in the game." in #1635.)

#1640/#1641 – Frogster explicitly calls me out for stalling in response to Gamma's question. I am stalling, and have explained why. Frogster assumes that Gamma will reveal something that will reveal me as scum. So he's attempting to follow Gamma in putting pressure on me. It wouldn't surprise me if Gamma had asked Frogster for help pushing me in the scum PT.

#1646, #1647, #1648 – I assume that Gamma received Walter's Friendly Neighbour PM N1 (I'm wrong in this assumption, incidentally), because I still have a townread on Gamma and it's the only way I can rationalize his behaviour. I try to dissuade Gamma from asking the question, giving enough detail as to why I think answering would be harmful for town. Gamma pushes me very hard for failing to answer in #1648, despite this (we subsequently learn that this is because Gamma is scum rolefishing). In between, #1647, Frogster posts "Hmm..". Why? This feels oft to me, it's like he's trying to shade me despite not having enough information. At this point, I decide that I can no longer rationalize Gamma's behaviour and he might well be scum.

#1664 – Frogster indirectly defends Gamma. He would later list the possibilities in question in #1871. One of the listed possibilities is "motion tracker" which isn't a real role; Motion Detector would be unlikely to make Gamma think "maybe Walter is a Friendly Neighbour targeting CFJ", and Tracker is the actual explanation. The other listed possibility is "watcher", and Watcher would gain the same information as Tracker. The thing is, it takes quite a leap to go from "Gamma has tracked Walter to me" to "Gamma wants to know if I received a Friendly Neighbour PM from Walter". I didn't make this connection at all until Gamma stated it (and once I did, realised that it implied Gamma was scum, as a townie wouldn't use that reasoning). So how did

Frogster

, who is less familiar with Normal mechanics than I am, make that connection? It would be a much easier connection to make if you were already aware (e.g. via scum PT) of what Gamma's motivations for his actions were.

#1710 – Gamma pretty much screws up unrecoverably. At this point, there's almost no doubt in my mind (other than the usual paranoia of "maybe everything I'm thinking is wrong") that Gamma is scum; the only real question is whether I can get enough votes on him without outing the fact that I'm a power role.

Frogster doesn't post for a while after this, but is apparently V/LA so that's null. When he does, though:

I think we all need to drink some tea and calm down.

Yes I would 100% recommend not hammering Gamma.

Hammer outside of Gamma today, and figure out a way to confirm/deny his role.

He's a tracker so confirm him somehow.

That looks a

lot

like a Mafioso panicking because his buddy has been caught. It doesn't look like someone with a null or nulltown read on Gamma.

#1770/#1771 – Cognitive dissonance, "[Gamma] should draw either the night kill or the role block", "If he's scum then he will have to continue to make up reports tomorrow which might make it more obvious to lynch him. If he's town then his report will be useful.". Why didn't Frogster just reason "now that Gamma is outed, he will likely be killed, and/or blocked for the rest of the game"?

#1773 – Indirect defence of Gamma, wanting to find a compromise elimination who isn't a power role claim (this is when lots of people are scumreading Gamma).

At this point, Titus replaced in, and hammered Gamma before Frogster next posted. But Frogster was looking awfully connected to Gamma at that point – I had suspected a connection much earlier, before much of the evidence had built up – and so it immediately lead me to suspect Frogster somewhat.

Frogster's play was rather more townish at other points in the game, though, so my read on Frogster is more "conflicted" than "scum". I'd be interested, therefore, if anyone a) thinks Frogster's D3 play is sufficiently scummy to outweigh any other reads on him, and /or b) Frogster's D3 play is easily explainable, and thus I should follow my townread on him from other parts of the game.

[callforjudgement]

@[b}Titus[/b]: On the subject of day 1 wagon VCA, see #939 for a VCA attempt by a now-flipped townie. Its conclusions are different from yours, too.

I'm not necessarily saying your VCA is wrong, but I think it's worth discussing it because you're coming to different conclusions from many other players, and I'm curious as to which of us is wrong.

[callforjudgement]

Nosferatu didn't really start that wagon (at least, he wanted to start a wagon but did so in a way that gave him no choice as to who he voted for). You should probably read #573 and #574 for context.

[callforjudgement]

Nos town wins us the game, so I want to be pretty sure that that townread is right (especially as Frogster is questioning it).

My main argument against geraintm as scum is that all he'd have to do at the end of D1 is to stay on the Walter wagon, and the shelly wagon would have been unlikely to go through. He didn't know that the mod was about to turn up and freeze deadline, after all; and the behaviour wouldn't have been suspicious because nobody can be online constantly. It just seems like a really weird situation to bus in.

Even if he was planning to bus, why wouldn't he move earlier, rather than voting Walter, and only moving to shelly after I pointed out that she wasn't posting elsewhere?

[callforjudgement]

You have the sequence of events wrong. He voted Walter in #824, at 8:09:51 UTC.
I pointed out that shelly was posting elsewhere in #829, at 12:22:54 UTC; there had been no further votes on either Walter or shelly in the meantime.
geraintm moved to shelly at 12:32:17 UTC.
Then deadline (which was 15:18:30 UTC) was suspended at 12:45:41 UTC, and geraintm unvoted.

Why would geraintm make one deadline vote (on a townie), then move to a different deadline vote (on a scumbuddy)? Walter and shelly had 4 votes each without him, it's not like deadline effects were forcing him onto shelly rather than Walter. In particular, staying on Walter – or moving to shelly – would effectively dictate what deadline votes other players got to make.

[callforjudgement]

For what it's worth, I interpreted shelly not paying attention to the game as a reason to townread her, rather than scumread her (if she were paying attention to the game she would have cross-voted regardless of alignment, and she likes playing scum, so I thought she'd be more likely to forget about a towngame than a scumgame). It's hard to see how my callout forced anyone to move; it would always be possible to just not post and pretend to be offline. Most players didn't move in response to my post, after all.

[callforjudgement]

(For reference, Titus is talking about #1758.)

I agree that geraint's generally voting sheepishly/lazily. I'm not sure that that's necessarily scum-indicative, though? Like, I'm not sure what the difference is between town lazily putting a vote on caught scum, and scum lazily putting a vote on caught scum.

One way you can sometimes detect bus votes (as opposed to town-on-scum sheep votes) is when the stated reason is both new, and weaker than the others. I see some of that in 1758's reference to #1749, but don't think it's very strong (and #1749

was

a bit weird; why would Gamma assume that Walter was a power role

other than

a Friendly Neighbour, given the gamestate?).

@

Nosferatu

: who/what was #1759 referring to, and do you think it implies anything about their alignment?

[callforjudgement]

Also, #1769 makes me think it's not purely a lazy bus. If it is a bus, there was some force put into it.

[callforjudgement]

…and a thought.

Titus, is your townread on Frogster entirely based on #1786? Or are there other components to it?

#578 seems really plausible as a bus, given the circumstance in which the vote was made. That wagon was highly likely to collapse, so scum wouldn't see any real risk in it.

[callforjudgement]

I would like to make a suggestion as to where to go from here.

Based on collective reads, it seems unlikely that either geraintm or Frogster will be considered the towniest out of the unconfirmed players. (I've seen enough scumminess from Frogster that I wouldn't be happy letting him be the designated surviving townie, even though I've seen a lot of towniness too; and I'm not sure enough in my geraintm townread to want to overrule everyone else.) Therefore, I would suggest:

a) Today, we eliminate Frogsterking. I think this flip gives the most information of any; Frogster's reads and indeed reasoning are miles away from those of the typical player, and it would be helpful to know whether they're coming from a town viewpoint or simply just fabricated.
b) Tonight, I use my Alien action on geraintm. If geraintm is scum, this will prevent a nightkill. If geraintm is not scum, then scum will either have to kill and confirm him, or else holster (leaving him unconfirmed but leaving more townies alive).
c) Tonight, Walter randomly targets either Titus or Nosferatu, without making the choice of target public. (This is to guard against the possibility of Titus being Ascetic.)
d) Tomorrow, Nosferatu and Walter stay silent about Walter's night action until Titus has claimed it. If she's a VT, like she claims, then she should know whether Walter targeted her or Nosferatu. If she's Ascetic, she will have to guess and will guess wrong half the time, warning us that my understanding of the setup was wrong.
e1) If someone dies overnight – confirming geraintm as town – we eliminate me, and then we reach an ELo with one confirmed player, Looker and Nosferatu. The confirmed player will have to choose correctly in order to win; but note that we only reach this situation if we're wrong on both geraintm and Frogster (and me).
e2) If nobody dies overnight, we eliminate geraintm. I will attempt to block scum overnight. If I am successful in this, it's a forced win (you eliminate me and the player I blocked, in either order). If I fail, it will reach a 3:1 ending with me and one player unconfirmed; I will probably be eliminated for a town loss, but think this scenario is unlikely to occur (as we will, at that point, have missed three tries to find scum in four players: Frogster, geraintm,

and

my top scumread).

This plan won't work as written if scum kill me or Nosferatu overNight, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure out where to go from there. Just in case, I'll bold this so that there'll be no doubt about my target in that situation:

Unless I say otherwise before the thread is locked toDay, I will use my night action on geraintm.

(As a side note, trusting that I'm town is sufficient for a 100% forced town win, but I don't think this is viable because I don't expect enough players to believe that I'm town. So we'll have to go for the 3-in-4 strategy instead.)

VOTE: Frogsterking

[callforjudgement]

Frogster is one vote from elimination.

(Mentioned to ensure that anyone who hammers is doing so knowingly, not accidentally.)

[callforjudgement]

There is literally no point in accusing me of scumminess at this point. It's incorrect for theory reasons to vote for me toDay, and I'm almost certainly going to be eliminated on a future Day (unless we win first). So any useful scumhunting should be based on the assumption that I'm town.

In particular, the game is, at this point, entirely about identifying one unconfirmed townie, not about identifying scum. Town just needs to find one town-aligned player to win. At the moment, it's looking like that's Nosferatu, so the most useful thing you can do is a) explain why Nosferatu is scum, using reasoning that isn't outright insane, and/or b) find an unconfirmed player and try to prove to us why that player is town. Voting you make sense because there's no way you're the towniest of the five unconfirmed players, and knowing your flip will help us work out whether your Nosferatu read is at least based on genuine reasoning, or whether it's scum trying to avoid immediately losing the game.

(Besides, why are you assuming that my desire to eliminate you isn't based on sheeping? There are several players who think you're scummy, in addition to some dead townies like Italiano. My plan involves eliminating geraintm too, and that's pretty much pure sheeping, as he's my top townread.)

[callforjudgement]

EBWOP: top townread among the unconfirmed players.

[callforjudgement]

@CFJ, Frogsterking is literally the towniest of the unconfirmeds.

He made a lot of posts trying to save Gamma on D3, despite not having a town read there.

That would normally be enough for me to vote him out of hand, but his play D2 was the sort of thing that only normally comes from town (summary: he spent pretty much the entire day tunnelling me, with reasoning so bad that it's hard to believe anyone would make it up, so it was probably genuine). So I had a rather conflicted read.

(A side note: last night I was dreaming about this game, and Frogster flipped scum in the dream. So at least my subconscious seems to think he's scum. I've never had a dream like that before, so I don't know how accurate their reads normally are.)

[callforjudgement]

@CFD, why don't you join the two conftown on geratim and block Frogster if it fails?

First, just to make sure there's no doubt about my night action:

Tonight, unless I post a different plan later toDay, I will use my Alien action on geraintm if he is alive, or on Frogsterking if geraintm was eliminated.

My main motivation for eliminating Frogster and effectively investigating geraintm, rather than the other way round, is that if the investigated player is not scum, they end up confirmed town. I fear that Frogster's reads are really bad; he's spent much of the game tunnelling me, often for reasons which are really dubious. (See #1364 as an example: geraintm had made a hypothetical read based on Walter being town, I disagreed with the read because I didn't think that assuming Walter as town would lead to that conclusion, Frogster decides that, because I scumread Walter and am trying to follow a hypothetical in which Walter is town, this must be evidence that I have secret knowledge that Walter is town and therefore I must be scum.) I was torn between using my Alien action on Titus and on Frogster last Night, but decided on Titus because scum will have to carry one confirmed player to endgame, and I didn't want it to be Frogster.

Another motivation has come up recently, though. There are five unconfirmed slots (Frogster, geraintm, Looker, Nosferatu, me). We can only check/flip four of them. I would like to check/flip, at the minimum, Frogster and Looker (I townread both geraintm and Nosferatu). I'm happy to add one of my townreads (i.e. two including me) into the pool of players we check, because we have four attempts to find scum; I thought that Nosferatu was a universal townread. Now that Frogster is seriously questioning Nosferatu's alignment, though, there seems to be doubt about which of the five slots should be left alive, and we may well need more debate about this so that we don't end up losing the game later. (Additionally, if we don't hit scum toDay or toNight, the game will end up in a 2:1 ending with one player confirmed; if Looker is scum, all he'd need to do to win if Frogster is confirmed is to aim for an ending of Looker/Frogster/Nosferatu and let Frogster pick incorrectly in the 2:1. Eliminating Frogster rather than geraintm removes that option.)

It also seems more elegant to eliminate a player who could well be scum, than a player who I think is almost certainly town.

[callforjudgement]

As reads may well suddenly be necessary again, some thoughts:

a) I still don't understand the case for geraintm as scum, even after Titus explained it to me. In particular, I don't think there was any particular motivation to bus D3; in a 2:7, you would bus only if you think the elimination of your partner was inevitable. Apparently at least Frogster (who, if geraintm is hypothetically scum, is hypothetically town) thought that the elimination could and should be avoided. If geraintm were scum, why would he lazily join Gamma's wagon rather than try to save Gamma (e.g. either by agreeing with Frogster, or by trying to create a counterwagon?).
b) #1991 was not intended as a reaction test, but it can still be used as one. The plan listed in that post, in effect, creates a forced win for Nosferatu; so for players who are not Nosferatu, I would expect them to fight against the plan if they are scum. I think Frogster's reaction to the plan has been by far the scummiest of anyone; he reacts by pushing Nosferatu, which is necessary for scum in Frogster's position to not lose; and he posted #2022 which looks a lot like Frogster cares about surviving more than he cares about town winning.
c) Titus brings up #808 / #816 as a reason to townread Frogster. I think that this is correct, but not definitive; Frogster introduced shelly as a compromise wagon, but pushed it only moderately hard (implying that he would be happy to switch to geraintm instead). The most likely explanation for this is that Frogster is town. It's also plausible, however, that Frogster is scum and wasn't expecting the wagon to go through. (Bear in mind that if scum had been more active at the end of Day 1, it wouldn't have done.) So it may have been a distancing attempt that backfired.

[callforjudgement]

@

Frogsterking

: Do you have any strong townreads? It doesn't really matter who the scum is, as long as we find a townie.

(For what its worth, I think your last few posts have been pretty townish. #2030 is an explanation I wasn't expecting, but it makes sense in retrospect.)

[callforjudgement]

UNVOTE:

[callforjudgement]

@

Looker

: Do you have any strong townreads?

[callforjudgement]

I don't see how it's likely to have any impact on my survival?

The important thing is to find which player we're going to stake the game on being town. People's scumreads seem to be all over the place, and at least your townreads are very different from mine.

If everyone is satisfied that Nosferatu is town,

including

the player who ends up making the decision in a 2:1 ending (even if it's Frogster), I can vote geraint because the order in which we eliminate people really won't matter in that case. But I'm not convinced that everyone is actually satisfied with that, and I don't want to risk the game on a bad 2:1-ending decision when we could be making the decision now.

[callforjudgement]

@

Titus

,

Walter

: Do you want me to hammer geraintm? Or is it better for someone who scumreads him to do that?

I fear the day is stalling because it's hard to come to much of a consensus on anything, especially because the order we eliminate people doesn't really matter.

(Additionally, should I choose a different target tonight? Just to be clear on who I'm targeting if I'm nightkilled, I will be targeting geraintm, or Frogster if geraintm is eliminated, unless I say otherwise; but if you'd prefer a different target, I'd be interested in your reasoning.)

[callforjudgement]

I'd be happy with eliminating Looker first. He's my top scumread by PoE. I vaguely remember seeing actual scumtells, too, but it was so long ago that I've forgotten what they were at this point.

I was hoping to do a Looker reread at some point, but it became mostly pointless when we ended up in an almost-solved gamestate. I can do it anyway if people are interested (not right now; I need to go to bed).

[callforjudgement]

Deadline's in 24 hours, and nobody's doing anything. I will hammer geraintm if required to avoid a no-elimination. Sorry for not being able to focus much on this game.

[callforjudgement]

@

Mod

: The Mafia PT is not public yet. (I assume you're waiting for redactions or the like.) Could you let me know when it's public; I've been interested in reading it all game!

Mafia Watcher explains where the setup balance is coming from. I was wondering if the scum had an extra investigative. (Much of my reluctance to eliminate geraintm was that I was seriously considering the possibility of a 9:4 with Frogsterking and Titus as scum, something that could be guarded against by eliminating Frogster first. Eventually, my setup balance knowledge overrode that read, "it can't possibly be a 9:4, surely?", but I get so paranoid as town. At least eliminating geraintm first meant that we could get out of this game faster.)

My reads were rather off this game (although I caught Gamma, and my reads were at least good enough to win, as I would have eliminated geraintm over Nosferatu after the Day 4 discussion); I think I townread every member of the scumteam for much of the game. I am, however, generally happy with my play apart from my reads. I found #358/#359/#360 hilarious; as VT I normally don't care at all about surviving the nightkill, but because I had such a late-game-oriented power role, I was (for the first time in my townie career) actively playing to dodge the nightkill, and it ended up paying off (after the Gamma elimination, scum couldn't nightkill me without automatically losing, so I got to confirm all the players but one).

I still don't understand pretty much anything that scum did, which is why I'm so eager to read the scum PT. #352/#354 was also pretty funny in retrospect; Nosferatu thinks "scum playing in too townsided a fashion and getting caught by PoE" is something that doesn't happen, but I think it ended up happening this game (not in the same way that I discussed in #352, but it still happened).

I should mention that this was a pretty difficult playerlist to play with, not in terms of personality (there's nobody here I hate talking to and many of the players were a lot of fun to be around), but in terms of readability. There were players who rarely explain anything (RCEnigma, Not_Mafia), players who naturally tend not to scumhunt much and are hard to read as a result (geraintm, Nosferatu), players whose thought process is completely alien to me (Frogsterking) or familiar but sufficiently different from mine that it's hard for me to follow (Titus), and a large number of lurkers. That might help to explain why my reads were so off (I did end up reading Tayl0r and Raya, two players who play more "traditionally", correctly, but that might be coincidence). Or maybe I was just being bad at reading people again.

[callforjudgement]

The dead chat's been released already.

They thought you were town, for what it's worth.

[callforjudgement]

@

Titus

: Did you figure out, based on how townish the entire playerlist was looking towards the end, that scum had probably been bussing? In retrospect, that might have been the step in your VCA reasoning that I was missing.

(One problem I have with VCA is that although it often works, it can in many cases be hard to explain the reasoning. Incidentally, if the VCA is coming from someone unconfirmed, scum can take advantage of how difficult the arguments can be to follow to make up a VCA scumread on pretty much anyone, and it ends up looking like an argument that could genuinely have come from a townie, even when it doesn't convince the other players. I'm pretty glad that I chose your slot to confirm overNight!)

[callforjudgement]

I need to apologise a bit for the slow Day 4, too. This is the third time I've organised a breaking strategy as town (the first two were in Theme games), and I'm not really used to people not just immediately doing everything I say (in between the scumhunting to discover who goes in what slot on the strategy). When Frogster started scumreading Nosferatu, I realised there was potential trouble where nobody could agree who should go where, but town were winning by so much at that point that it was hard to get up the motivation (especially as I'm a little short on sleep at the moment).

[callforjudgement]

I should probably react to the "CFJ is focused on optimal play" posts from earlier in the game: there are two main reasons I take care to explain what optimal town play is, a) so that townies who don't know it will play better, and b) so that scum who are pretending to be town have no excuse to do something different and then say "oh, I didn't know". b) is probably the larger reason, here; it's much easier to be confident in a "

player

is doing something scummy" scumread if you know they know that it's scummy.

[callforjudgement]

Subject: Mini Normal 2159 | Cinder Block Mafia | Mafia PT

Trying to work out a path to victory left

7 left alive. CFJ, Walter and Titus are town and should be seen by all as town.
I believe I have to kill CFJ tonight, I cannot risk leaving them alive to either clear someone else or target me

Oh wow, it did work.

There was some evidence that the scumteam was making theory mistakes, and so I was hoping to bait scum into nightkilling me (e.g. my breaking strategy posts were clear on what would happen if I survived, but intentionally vague/worried about what would happen if I were nightkilled; and I made sure to stress how powerful my ability was). But a successful nightkill on me would have lead to 3 confirmed townies in 5 players, which is a 100% win rate ending no matter how bad your reads are (just eliminate the unconfirmed players), better than the 80% strategy that was available at that point anyway. So as an extra chance, I was hoping to be nightkilled and guarantee a town win even if Nosferatu were scum.

I can be disappointed in my reads this game (they were so bad I ended up looking scummy by VCA!), but I am really happy with how well I played this mechanically (this is probably my best mechanical play ever, although admittedly I usually end up drawing VT and having no real opportunity).

[callforjudgement]

(Also, I agree that I should have been obviously town after my claim – as scum, there's no way I don't claim VT in that situation – but given that the town as a whole wasn't seeing it, there wasn't much point in pointing it out, especially as pointing out your own towntells makes it look like they were planned.)

[callforjudgement]

Err, lost my train of thought there, I meant to say that because town wasn't seeing it, I could have been a viable miselimination for scum to aim for.

[callforjudgement]

I promised Datisi I'd give my own thoughts on the setup.

We can compare it to this, a very boring setup that should be close to balanced:
2× Town Friendly Neighbor Neighbor
1× Town 1-Shot Cop
7× Vanilla Townie
3× Mafia Goon

The actual setup had two changes to the town roles, compared to this one: a PT Cop compared to a 1-Shot Cop, and adding in an Alien. Meanwhile, the scum were given a Tracker and a Watcher (either of these can catch the PT Cop, but only the Tracker can catch the Alien because the Watcher will get rolestopped if they try).

First, let's look at the setup with a hypothetical full Cop opposite the scum power roles. That's obviously going to be better for town than the 1-Shot Cop version; maybe not that much better, though, as the full Cop is likely to get caught by scum quite quickly (either through power role usage, or due to claiming a guilty, or due to being forced to claim for unrelated reasons). In particular, they may well fail to get more than 1 shot off. There's also a risk that the scum discover who the confirmed players are "early", compared to when they would with a pair of Masons (the Friendly Neighbor Neighbors are targeting). So it's better for town, but only by a moderate amount.

Now replace the Cop with a PT Cop. As long as the PT Cop keep getting innos, nothing is different. If the PT Cop gets a guilty, though, 60% of the time it's exactly the same (scum will have serious trouble claiming out of it in this setup!), but 40% of the time it hits one of the Neighbours. This is a disaster for town, outing their pseudo-Masons and their PT Cop at the same time, and meaning that the power roles all get tangled up with each other. So we started with a balanced setup, made it a bit more townsided, then added a random chance that things go massively wrong for town. That's "balanced" in a sense, but the levels of swing are much higher than they could be.

Finally, let's add in the Alien. This generally creates chaos in the setup. It's possible that the Alien will prevent two kills, and benefit town that way (especially with confirmable players in the setup); it's also possible that the Alien will screw with the town power roles even more than the setup is doing by itself (this actually happened in practice, with me accidentally blocking Tayl0r; the block on Italiano was intentional, because I was hoping he would draw the kill and his night action wasn't required for anything that night). It's also possible, but unlikely, that the Alien will outlive two scum and end up solving the game by themself (this is much more likely if the role goes to a mechanically-minded player who knows how powerful town blocking roles are in the endgame, and intentionally plays to survive longer than normal). Maybe, in pure nightplay terms, it makes things a bit more townsided on average, but there's clearly a lot of swing that will overwhelm the win/loss balance effects on the setup.

(It's also worth bearing in mind that the Fruit Vendor properties of a confirmed Friendly Neighbour have some minor uses for town that can help to

However, after thinking about the nightplay, there's also the effect on the dayplay to consider. With things like the (admittedly, properly clued) duplicate role, multiple scum investigatives, and an Alien that looks out of place in the rest of the setup, what we have here is a setup that is very hard for players to believe (especially if they don't know how powerful the scumteam is; Tracker + Watcher is a long way beyond typical scumteam power for a 10:3). I've seen competing balance theories about this sort of unbelievable setup. Back in the early days of mafiascum.net, Mr Stoofer had a theory that, past a certain complexity limit, adding extra town power was actually bad for town; players would have trouble believing the setup, and draw incorrect conclusions as a result (and there would be general confusion, which Mr Stoofer hypothesized was good for scum). More recently, I was talking to Vi about setup balance, who came to the opposite conclusion; Vi's belief was (probably still is) that moments at which facts about the setup were revealed, or when something surprising happened, made players much easier to read, and ended up benefiting the playerlist as a whole.

I think we saw some of both of that in this game. The reveal of Italiano and Walter having duplicate roles made it fairly easy to catch Gamma as scum (Gamma seemed to believe that outing a confirmed townie would be perceived as a townish thing to do, apparently without realising that Walter really were a Town Friendly Neighbour, he would be pretty easy to confirm regardless; Gamma had incorrectly assumed even-night, but even so, there really wasn't much chance of me getting nightkilled and losing the information). Meanwhile, the complexity of the setup lead most players to give up on setup speculation entirely, and/or hedge their reads (quite a few players were seriously considering a 9:4 setup, although I eventually ended up rejecting that idea because I couldn't make it work without additional town power); in particular, that meant that I wasn't being perceived as town when I really should have been purely based on claims (as scum, it really wouldn't make sense to paint that much of a target on myself, and Gamma and I would have had no reason to create the interactions that we did, because they put scum a very long way behind).

All in all, I don't think this setup was unbalanced from the win/loss point of view. It was, however, a lot more swingy than I would be comfortable with, with two separate (and very large) potential sources of swing. If town did well early, they were likely to steamroll. If the town power roles got tangled early, winning from that point onwards would be very difficult.

(See also my balance discussion during the game in #1744; that was partly an attempt to get Gamma eliminated, but it's still intended as a genuine balance discussion.)

[callforjudgement]

(It's also worth bearing in mind that the Fruit Vendor properties of a confirmed Friendly Neighbour have some minor uses for town that can help to

EBWOP: (It's also worth bearing in mind that the Fruit Vendor properties of a confirmed Friendly Neighbour have some minor uses for town that can help to determine facts about the setup, e.g. I used it to probabilistically demonstrate that I was most likely an Alien specifically rather than some other power role, and if the game had lasted another Night, we could have used it to probabilistically test whether or not Titus was Ascetic and thus handle one of the potential scenarios in which she could have been scum.)

[callforjudgement]

I'm assuming I'm an Alien, not a Jailkeeper, to make the setup a bit less townsided. There's a chance of randomly rolestopping the Role Cop or a Friendly Neighbour by mistake, thus toning down the power of the other town power roles. A Jailkeeper wouldn't do that.

Going the other way, if I were hypothetically scum, Alien would make the setup somewhat more scumsided, for exactly the same reason.

In retrospect, my theory here was probably wrong; I didn't know at the time that there was a Mafia Watcher.

The rolestop was most likely intended to reduce the chance that scum would discover me to be a power role via watching, and thus counterbalance the Watcher somewhat. (Of course, that just makes the setup even swingier, by increasing the chance I survive into the lategame.)

[callforjudgement]

Anyway, something that's still confusing/bothering me: why didn't shelly cross-vote Walter at the end of Day 1? I'm not sure it ever got explained how or why she flaked from this game specifically while continuing to post elsewhere.

[callforjudgement]

I tend to use the "subscribe" and/or "bookmark" features in order to make sure that I don't forget about games I'm playing in ("subscribe" sends you emails, "bookmark" doesn't, otherwise they're much the same).

Funnily enough, I townread you for forgetting (I thought you'd be more likely to remember the game if you were scum), and so was particularly surprised at the flip.

[callforjudgement]

[quote="In post 2120, geraintm"]Question
Night 2
• callforjudgement is Alienating ItalianoVD.
• ItalianoVD is Friendly Neighboring Looker.
• Tayl0r Swift is PT Copping RCEnigma.
• WaltertheDunce10 is Friendly Neighboring CallForJudgement.
• geraintm is Watching ItalianoVD. [No result]
• Gamma Emerald is Tracking WaltertheDunce10. [targeted CFJ]
• Gamma Emerald is killing Taylor Swift

Why did I not see CFJ going to Italiano? I targeted italiano explicitly to watch a doc/protection role going there. They then were targeted and I didn’t see it happen./quote]

You didn't see my night action because I rolestopped your action (unintentionally, but it happened); an Alien action protects its target from

any

other action (not just kills), as long as it doesn't specifically pierce blocks. So although I was trying to protect Italiano from the nightkill, my action worked just as well at "protecting" Italiano from being watched, or indeed Titus from receiving Walter's Friendly Neighbour PM.

[callforjudgement]

I don't get your logic. where does my thinking fall apart? who would have been the extra confirmed town player apart from walter and titus if I had killed you?

The player that I targeted overnight. (If I had targeted you, you wouldn't have killed me.) That's the reason I was leaving the clearest possible messages in the game thread as to who I was targeting.

The player that I targeted would be confirmed for the same reason as Titus was: someone (me) died, and the player I was blocking couldn't have killed them.

[callforjudgement]

Like, imagine a hypothetical alternate universe where Titus was less vocal about eliminating you, so I decide "OK, Frogster and Looker are the scummiest players here, we'll sort the rest out later". We eliminate Frogster, and I block Looker overnight (telling the thread that I'll do so).

If you nightkill me, then the next day, Titus and Looker are confirmed (due to me blocking them while someone else performed the nightkill), and Walter is still confirmed via his Friendly Neighbour ability. That would create a PoE of just {geraintm, Nosferatu}, and town would have enough time remaining to eliminate both players.

[callforjudgement]

Thoughts on the set up

Mods have come in and said it was fine and balanced.
It didn’t feel balanced playing it. I realise losing one of us day 1 really helps town’s odds, but it felt like our 2 roles just didn’t help us at all. They don’t allow us to break up the advantages that town had. Once they got ahead, we had no way of coming back. It didn’t matter that we knew who was going where, there were a pair of confirmed neighbours, there was a Cop who, if they had targeted either of us it was a straight guilty, and the alien again was another role that once town was ahead we couldn’t interfere with. We could have been 3 goons and would have had just as great a chance of winning that game than with (almost) perfect knowledge of what town was doing.

Actually, this is an interesting point. The setup's pretty swingy (i.e. random events, especially early on, have a large influence on who will win, so it is likely to feel very townsided or scumsided depending on how the early game goes); that's a common issue. There's a second issue, though, too: there's very little scum agency in the setup, in that the way the setup swings is mostly not under scum control. (Imagine what would happen if Tayl0r announced a guilty on Italiano D2, compared to if Tayl0r announced a guilty on Gamma D2; there would have been quite a difference in how the game played out, and scum has very little influence on the targeting because cop-alikes normally aim for null reads.)

In the past, I've gotten annoyed at a setup in postgame due to lack of town agency. Lack of scum agency is a comparable issue, but one that reviews often don't focus on much. Perhaps they should.

[callforjudgement]

The town's roles were strong, but had significant anti-synergy,

and scum had reasonable safeclaims to claim that also gave them a significant edge in terms of information gained.

I agree with much of your balance review (as far as it goes), but have to take issue with the bolded section. 2× Town Friendly Neighbour Neighbour + a full Town PT Cop + Town Alien + Town Tracker isn't balanced opposite any reasonable scumteam. Change the Town Tracker to a Town Watcher, and it's even less balanced. So what you considered to be a scum safeclaim wasn't safe at all; making that claim is inevitably going to lead to a 1v1 at massclaim time, and possibly sooner.

Evidence for this is that Gamma did indeed claim Tracker, and I correctly read him as scum based on the 1v1.

(That is, unless the claim you had in mind was "VT". That would have been a perfectly safe claim in the setup, and it was clued as a safeclaim by giving scum two different power roles, but I think most scumteams haven't yet cottoned on to the principle of "the more power you have, the less power you claim".)

[callforjudgement]

For what it's worth, I would expect a Watcher claim to be scum in the vast majority of contexts, unless there were strong clues in the setup that it were town. Town Watchers really warp setups around them, in ways which normally become fairly obvious by massclaim. A scum Watcher is much less specific in its usage.

[callforjudgement]

Shortening deadlines increased town win rates

in Newbie games

. I suspect that the reason for this is that it reduced the rate at which players replaced out, making people easier to read.

I'm pretty sure that longer deadlines are beneficial for town if players stay focused and all the time is used, but that isn't always the case in long-deadline games, and sometimes the focus advantages of short deadlines outweigh that.

I recently ran a game in which town had control over deadlines, and they chose to set the deadline of each day to the minimum of 96 hours. Although they caught scum D1 (both scum, in fact), it ended up in scum winning (from 6:1!), with at least one elimination happening as a consequence of deadline expiring rather than being intended by anyone. I think town would have had more chance if the deadlines were longer.