Mini Normal 2209: Musicals II [Endgame]

[ChannelDelibird]

Hi all! My username is usually abbreviated to CDB. I'm an old fogey from back in the day and this is my first game for a few years, so I'm definitely going to be rusty and probably quite bad. Apologies in advance!

Do we know how many mafia there are in this game?

Why did you ask this question, boxxy?

VOTE: bloodhail

[ChannelDelibird]

VOTE: T3

For answering seriously!

Do you think T3 is more likely to do that as scum than town?

1. What’s your mafia experience?
2. Do you like playing as town better? Or mafia better?
3. Is it hard for you to lie? Or can you do it with no problem? Both in real life and in mafia?

1. Lots of it, but ages ago. I was only intermittently any good, though.
2. I don't hate being scum, but I strongly prefer being town.
3. I'm pretty good at lying, and I blame mafia for it. The key thing about it is that keeping up the facade for extended periods of time drains my energy pretty rapidly, which is why I prefer being town, especially in forum games which take longer.

CDB why the bloodhail vote?

CDB why the bloodhail vote?

We’re in RVS are we not?

Why assume the reasoning for my vote instead of letting me answer the question first, Italiano?

My vote wasn't random. I'm a big believer in getting to the meat of the game as quickly as possible - which is the stated purpose of 'random votes', a convention which arose as the most reliable way to do that - so I always try to do the most useful thing possible with my vote even if it's very early. For that reason, I voted for someone who already had a vote; creating larger wagons quickly is likely to lead to more interesting reactions than an even distribution would. Chose bloodhail over NM because, to my recollection, NM is the only player here with whom I'd played before, so I wanted to start with a player about whom I knew nothing in order to try to get a feel for them as quickly as possible.

For that reason, I really liked seeing Anya put the third vote down soon afterwards.

@Anya

, did you know that you were only putting bloodhail to -2 rather than -1?

It's kind of a shame that bloodhail essentially ignored the votes entirely.

[ChannelDelibird]

It's kind of a shame that bloodhail essentially ignored the votes entirely.

why would you expect me to react to a no content page 1 bandwagon

Not really a question of whether or not I expected you to react; more 'it would be nice if bloodhail or someone else had reacted to it in an interesting and/or useful way, although it was always possible that nobody would'.

[ChannelDelibird]

UNVOTE: bloodhail
VOTE: ItalianoVD

Not a fan of this:

My vote wasn't random. I'm a big believer in getting to the meat of the game as quickly as possible - which is the stated purpose of 'random votes', a convention which arose as the most reliable way to do that - so I always try to do the most useful thing possible with my vote even if it's very early. For that reason, I voted for someone who already had a vote; creating larger wagons quickly is likely to lead to more interesting reactions than an even distribution would. Chose bloodhail over NM because, to my recollection, NM is the only player here with whom I'd played before, so I wanted to start with a player about whom I knew nothing in order to try to get a feel for them as quickly as possible.

Okay good. Although for me wanting to get out of RVS is nai. I’ve caught scum before trying to get out of RVS because it’s what town would do. Plenty of town do it as well to so I won’t be able to use this to fully read you, but I’ll keep it mind coupling it with the rest of your play.

I do agree however that forming a wagon early on someone gets reactions as well so I can dig it.

Feels like it's going a little bit far too almost apologise for his lack of townread on me. Like, my 28 isn't exactly framed as demanding that people townread me for what I've been doing (it's a pretty basic behaviour to be describing) but Italiano seems weirdly placatory here.

--

In other news, townvibes from UNOwen so far; looks like it'll take a little longer for me to get more of a feel for most of the rest of the playerlist.

[ChannelDelibird]

I can't tell you how many times now I've gone back and forth on what to think about this post.

CDB what do you think about Lemons or boxxy?

Directly follows me voting for Italiano for being placatory, in which Italiano pointedly does not address said vote. Is that scum trying to get me back on side by making a show of trying to scumhunt me right back, or town who simply has faith that their genuine pursuit of the wincon will shine through before too long anyway?

The ignoring of what I wrote extends to asking me about two players moments after I just stated that I didn't yet have a handle on either of them. I cannot decide whether or not I think that this comes in good faith; I can understand why someone would want me to say more about more players as I don't have much content but, on the other hand, what the fuck were you expecting? I literally just told you that I didn't have a read either way yet. If that's genuine, then I don't have anything to add, and if that's not genuine, then I'm not about to say "oh actually I think X, Y and Z about them", am I?

Absolutely maddening. No idea whether or not to keep my vote here. I've skimmed the rest of the thread but am going over it again for the next few minutes and will see if I want to move it by the end of that.

[ChannelDelibird]

It's kind of a shame that bloodhail essentially ignored the votes entirely.

why would you expect me to react to a no content page 1 bandwagon

Not really a question of whether or not I expected you to react; more 'it would be nice if bloodhail or someone else had reacted to it in an interesting and/or useful way, although it was always possible that nobody would'.

first quote is talking about me in specific doesn't seem to imply you wanted reactions from other people

Fair quibble, but you're always the most likely person to react to a wagon on you. I went into more detail because you prompted me to talk about it more; first quote was more off-hand.

[ChannelDelibird]

I think I'm happy pencilling in boxxy as town for the time being. I don't really agree with a lot of what's happening in 118 but I think the reach to go after a possible scumpair feels like town who really thinks they might be onto something.

Surely we can all agree it would be fishy to say sure I'll answer my questions, and then never actually answer?

Not especially. Given that the questions are relatively spurious and only minimally likely to be genuinely useful to solving this game. The downside of actually answering them is negligible, so scum doesn't really gain anything by very obviously not following through on it.

[ChannelDelibird]

I'm not really at all surprised, given my limited recollections of playing with Not_Mafia, but I

am

annoyed that, in a game this small, one player is essentially making themselves unavailable for reading. Always tempting to make that vote but I have no particular confidence that it'd actually get any more out of him.

@Anya

do you actually feel like your vote is doing anything useful?

[ChannelDelibird]

@Lemons

, what's your read on bloodhail at the moment?

[ChannelDelibird]

General state of my reads atm; some more specific responses to follow.

I'm generally pro-policy executions where they're warranted and could do with being better about actually following through on that conviction, so I don't imagine I'd complain about offing NM today, but I don't see myself actively arguing for it while we still have time to draw out information elsewhere before deadline gets close.

Lemons reads as kind of scattershot to me but in an unguarded way that I think is quite difficult to fake convincingly. Might be that I'm inclined to think better of them because they thought similarly to me w/r/t Italiano and boxxy, but I think I'm comfortable with them for the time being. I don't agree with Lemons' reasoning for a scumread on bloodhail at all but could imagine some town players reacting to bloodhail that way. But I've also been tempted to just wagon Lemons anyway because I kind of dig bloodhail as town and I'd be interested in exploring his conviction about scumLemons.

I'll talk about and to Italiano more specifically in a moment but I'm leaning towards the unvote. The more that I see of his general play, the less that the mindset that I thought I might be seeing in that early post seems to be present in his game here.

Wagons I wouldn't support right now: boxxy, bloodhail, Lemons, UNOwen, Italiano
Wagons I'd therefore consider: Anya, T3, NM

UNVOTE: ItalianoVD

Will place a vote on one of those three in a few posts' time once I've addressed some other points and checked the vote count.

[ChannelDelibird]

I'm not surprised to see a bit of blowback to my game in general and to #140 in particular. Seems reasonable, and I'd expect players of both alignments to be considering a vote on me right around now.

cdb probably scum too

can you elaborate on this please?

i could troll you and just say "gut"

but in more words feels somewhat underwhelming, seems mostly like he's trying to not ruffle feathers, and 140 feels like he's making a show of being uncertain with how many times he mentions it in the post - like he really wants you to think "ahh gosh guys this is so hard i just don't know"

Reading CDB in iso I agree with this. Lots of nervous uncertainty on where to vote, town don't tend to display such nervousness, it feels more "performative" to use the word of this game lol.

Not to mention the majority of the rest of CDB's posts are just defending and justifying his play and then asking other people "what do you think about X"

For context, I think a mild case of culture shock is important to note here. I came into this game expecting the general playstyle to be different to what I'm used to, and it's certainly been that (although I'm VERY grateful that this game isn't spamming dozens of pages per IRL day) - I'm definitely still on the learning curve when it comes to getting used to reading players like bloodhail, T3 and Anya, and it means that parsing out what kind of posts are more likely to come from scum than town is more difficult than I'd liked. I typically prefer to be quite aggressive on Day 1 but have struggled to find a lot of ins on this one. What I don't want to do is to make pushes about which I don't feel at least a little bit of confidence, because I don't want to feel like I need to manufacture confidence (as that is obviously not a helpful thing for town players to do when the whole point is to work out who's bullshitting). That naturally leads to a reliance on discussing my own play. I agree that it's not ideal, and I would expect it to trend better as the game goes on.

(I snipped out the question about Italiano as I broadly addressed my read there above and it's not entirely relevant to this particular post)

[ChannelDelibird]

I know that I just said I wasn't interested in an Italiano wagon for the time being, and I think that's still true, but this doesn't quite make sense to me.

If I'm wrong and Lemons is not scum than I think ChannelDelibird is. The easy jump onto my wagon was opportunistic and felt like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Specifically, the "easy jump onto my wagon was opportunistic" bit. I've reread that part of the thread and that just doesn't look like a reasonable description of what happened; I was only the second vote on you, the first one wasn't all that recent, and nobody else apart from Lemons was really talking about you as scum at all. Indeed, Lemons was actively receiving pushback for making a very similar vote on you to the one that I apparently went on to make "opportunistically". Indeed, you pretty much actively ignored the vote when I made it; it sure didn't seem like it rubbed you up the wrong way at the time, so what's changed?

[ChannelDelibird]

Dunno where the fuck I'm gonna put my vote, to be honest. The state of the vote count isn't very appealing in terms of adding pressure somewhere that interests me, and my 'would vote' pile is mostly PoE with no particularly compelling reason to pick one or the other. Could park it on NM for a while but that feels suboptimal for reasons aforementioned.

UNOwen's #205 is the post that makes me most interested in the boxxy wagon of anything I've seen.

@UNOwen

, what did you think of boxxy's #206? You carried on the conversation with him a bit but didn't follow up on that particular caught-from-the-wrong-reasons angle.

[ChannelDelibird]

Specifically, the "easy jump onto my wagon was opportunistic" bit. I've reread that part of the thread and that just doesn't look like a reasonable description of what happened; I was only the second vote on you, the first one wasn't all that recent, and nobody else apart from Lemons was really talking about you as scum at all. Indeed, Lemons was actively receiving pushback for making a very similar vote on you to the one that I apparently went on to make "opportunistically". Indeed, you pretty much actively ignored the vote when I made it; it sure didn't seem like it rubbed you up the wrong way at the time, so what's changed?

This is what I mean…

Feels like it's going a little bit far too almost apologise for his lack of townread on me. Like, my 28 isn't exactly framed as demanding that people townread me for what I've been doing (it's a pretty basic behaviour to be describing) but Italiano seems weirdly placatory here.

I mean what is this? It seems like you were just trying to throw anything out there and trying to make it stick. I just didn’t say anything about the vote. Sue me.

OK, so you meant 'reaching' rather than 'opportunistic'. It's not opportunistic if there's not a, y'know, opportunity on which to capitalise. If anything, as mentioned, I was going against the grain at the time.

I disagree that it was reaching, obviously (at the time, anyway). As mentioned, I don't think it's an assessment of your post that fits as well into larger context now that I've seen more of you.

[ChannelDelibird]

I'm definitely still on the learning curve when it comes to getting used to reading players like bloodhail, T3 and Anya

you can just ask me questions i dont bite

Oh, I know, but I like to be able to just eyeball the thread and see a post and be like 'yo that's alignment-indicative', at least as a starting point, y'know? Anyway, we're getting there, I think - hence me actually having an explicit townread on you now, as opposed to the resounding 'idfk' I'd had a few pages ago.

Wagons I'd therefore consider: Anya, T3, NM

however let me ask you do you have actual suspicion of anya and T3 or is it just not townreading them (NM is NM, not worth asking about)

Oh absolutely the latter; I thought that was clear based on how I've never actually expressed any specific kind of suspicion on them and have only really talked about my townreads (plus whatever Italiano is).

[ChannelDelibird]

UNOwen's #205 is the post that makes me most interested in the boxxy wagon of anything I've seen. @UNOwen, what did you think of boxxy's #206? You carried on the conversation with him a bit but didn't follow up on that particular caught-from-the-wrong-reasons angle.

I too would like to hear UNOwens response to this.

@CDB what do you mean by "caught-from-the-wrong-reasons angle"

'Caught for the wrong reasons' is an interesting scumtell that it seemed like UNOwen was trying to see if you were exhibiting. It's when scum players get annoyed in a condescending way that they're drawing votes for what they think are bad reasons, especially if they thought they were doing well at going unnoticed.

[ChannelDelibird]

T

3

U

N

O

w

e

n

A

n

y

a

C

h

a

n

n

e

l

D

e

l

i

b

i

r

d

I

t

a

l

i

a

n

o

V

D

b

o

x

x

y

b

l

o

o

d

h

a

i

l

I

n

s

i

d

i

o

u

s

L

e

m

o

n

s

N

o

t

_

M

a

f

i

a

Having bloodhail and Lemons as one's top two scumreads seems like an ass-pull.

[ChannelDelibird]

Catching up. Votes on me make sense. I'm definitely not as invested as I'd hoped to be, frustrated that I haven't found a foothold in the game, and you're entirely right to think that my posting patterns match up with 'just doing enough to get by' because that's kind of what's happening here. Very hard to tell the difference between it happening for those reasons and it happening because I don't want my alignment to be exposed.

I feel like this just ends with me voting for Not_Mafia, boring as that sounds.

[ChannelDelibird]

I remain pretty steadfastly uninterested in going the direction of a Lemons vote. They keep being unafraid to state out loud opinions that seem, to me, the kind that will inevitably draw attention for being cop-outs. Opinions like "maybe NM is just scum because we're finding it hard to find a lot of genuine scumreads from the players who actually post" are never going to be popular opinions in this thread. It's the kind of opinion that I've actively been resisting myself from letting develop because I feel like I must be able to do better than that from the information available. But Lemons just posts them, whatever the pushback ends up being. I have a really hard time seeing the kind of image-consciousness from them that is usually the best indicator of scumminess.

[ChannelDelibird]

Boxxy, I want to know if you think you're going to be able to make a UNOwen execution happen and, if not, why your vote is there. We're at the point in the Day where we need to start consolidating and, despite your stated scumread on UNOwen, I can't see any momentum there at all. You've seen votes arriving on me and I'm now the biggest counterwagon to your own, but you haven't commented on those votes despite bloodhail and Anya both clearly stating their reasons for it. Do you see yourself jumping aboard?

[ChannelDelibird]

If I go look for who joined my wagon opportunistically, there's scum here for sure. I'm rereading the whole thread now to see if I can find anything useful to share before I go.

Did anything come of this?

[ChannelDelibird]

VOTE: Not_Mafia in the interest of actually having a vote down. May move it in a bit.

Unofficial vote count, in the meantime:

[0] Not Voting : n/a

[3] boxxy : Not_Mafia, UNOwen, Italiano
[2] CDB : bloodhail, Anya
[2] Not_Mafia : InsidiousLemons, CDB
[1] UNOwen : boxxy
[1] InsidiousLemons : T3

[ChannelDelibird]

I'm a VT.

There's only so much 'compare my execution to the patented non-entity's execution' that I want to do here but what I will say on the subject is this: I think I'd be able to contribute more with some flips. Knowing a couple of alignments should help me to pick up trails based on who I think seems to have already known those alignments. Do you expect* N_M to offer a quantifiable improvement Tomorrow?

*I'm not asking you to

expect

it of me for sure if you're already doubtful about my contribution. But I feel like we

know

what the answer is for N_M and those voting for me, at best, don't know what the answer would be for me.

[ChannelDelibird]

Anya so quickly moving from the vote on me to N_M feels likely town. I would expect scum in her position to see where the wagon on me went because it absolutely looked like the most likely thing to come to fruition at that stage and I don't think anyone would have given her any grief for staying on me.

[ChannelDelibird]

Of course he never actually places a vote on them, not until just recently in 345 he votes N_M. Why? "in the interest in actually having a vote down."

In fact the more I read this the less I like it. By 345 it may have been clear that the boxxy train wasn't arriving at station and that a policy elim on N_M was likely. He gets his vote on N_M early and can now coast to day 2 as town is forced to pull the trigger there.

Feels pretty opportunistic to me.

I don't see how 'be generally not that useful, openly acknowledge how votes on me would be a reasonable thing for players of both alignments to do, then explicitly not get on a wagon' makes sense as

opportunism

. If you've read my iso, then you already know that I'm well aware of what my behaviour looks like. From where I'm sitting, this wagon looks like a pretty fucking predictable consequence of my actions in this game; if anything, the behaviour you're discussing is me

inviting

it to happen, and you're saying that was me taking advantage of an opportunity to get away with something? The psychological profile that you're trying to apply to a scum!me here doesn't make any sense at all. It only would if I had been feeling significantly more secure about my position in the town's estimations at the time.

[ChannelDelibird]

This isn't about me looking for sympathy. I'm not trying to say that me acknowledging that I don't look great makes me town. (And if anyone were actively arguing for that in this thread, I'd say as much to them.) I'm saying that it makes me aware that I'm the obvious choice if people want to Note Vote For Not_Mafia, a viewpoint most actively espoused by ItalianoVD but which was unlikely to be limited to him. Generally speaking, a lot of people have a real resistance to policy executions, and that's more or less what this is.

In those circumstances, me getting voted is as likely as people defaulting to N_M,

and I clearly knew that

. It's not opportunistic behaviour if it doesn't improve my position. I'm not gaining any advantage by putting my vote "where it will be scrutinised the least" if I'm already staring down the barrel of scrutiny,

especially

when that scrutiny is coming for being low-effort.

[ChannelDelibird]

If I were scum with N_M then my play in this game would be so anti-wincon that I think I would have just replaced out from the sheer shame of it. 'Shrug, no idea where to go, guess I'll just whine and policy my partner' is a straight-up losing play in that scenario.

[ChannelDelibird]

(But if N_M flips scum and you want to execute me for it then, sure, whatever, 1-for-1 trades are good)

[ChannelDelibird]

I don't think that there has ever been a point in this game at which 'voting for Not_Mafia' and 'implicitly supporting a policying of Not_Mafia' are different things, but I understand your point even if I don't think that it's really worthwhile to quibble over a flippant, off-hand dismissal of an argument which we both think is bad.

[ChannelDelibird]

Oh, cool it with the 1v1 talk.

Quickly checking in before a proper contribution later this evening but that boxxy kill is really strange. I feel like it's presumably designed to implicate either me or UNOwen, but taking out a viable misexecution target who'd already claimed VT is baffling to me.

I think I want to start with a VOTE: Anya.

[ChannelDelibird]

Anya so quickly moving from the vote on me to N_M feels likely town. I would expect scum in her position to see where the wagon on me went because it absolutely looked like the most likely thing to come to fruition at that stage and I don't think anyone would have given her any grief for staying on me.

come again?

literally forgot about that entirely, my bad 100%. Wasn't wild about your posting so far Today but the quoted is still valid

UNVOTE: Anya

[ChannelDelibird]

@CDB - what's your take on the game?

I'll be honest, when I came back in after an unexpectedly busy weekend to find that an entire execution had happened while I was unavailable, I took advantage of the opportunity to sit on my backside and fail to catch up a little longer over the Night. It's pretty wild to me that bloodhail got killed, especially as quickly as he did, but I couldn't right this second claim to know enough about how it happened to have a strong opinion. (Working on it.)

Eyeballing the thread extremely quickly, it seems to me like T3 kind of woke up after the N_M death in a way that makes me wonder if it's an 'oh shit, I have to actually try' situation, but I won't be voting before reading more properly. I still feel like Anya is unlikely to be a N_M partner, so there's that at least.

[ChannelDelibird]

I look forward to CDB's catch up. He's currently the player I'm most suspicious of, mainly because of this:

Anya so quickly moving from the vote on me to N_M feels likely town. I would expect scum in her position to see where the wagon on me went because it absolutely looked like the most likely thing to come to fruition at that stage and I don't think anyone would have given her any grief for staying on me.

This is presumably his justification for Anya not being partners with N_M. Unless Anya has a dark history of ruthlessly bussing her teammates then I agree it makes her very likely to be town but I'm not sure how this conclusion is reached before we knew N_M's alignment? At that point it was possible from CDB's perspective that Anya was switching from one town wagon to another, which doesn't seem particularly unlikely behaviour from scum.

The point - which I think is pretty clear from the original post - is that it would be the easy thing to do for a scum-Anya to stay on my wagon, which looked at the time more likely to gain momentum than N_M. Scum like easy ways to progress wagons on town that don't endanger their credibility. Anya actively opting for a more difficult choice was a strong pro-town indicator, and that was true even before we knew N_M's alignment. And now, when talking about that post retrospectively, I can just use "not N_M's partner" and "scum" interchangeably because of course I can.

This feels word-twisty.

[ChannelDelibird]

Channel I'm less sure about but he seems to be producing a lot of content.

...

do I?

[ChannelDelibird]

I already claimed VT on Day 1 but agree that it's unlikely that there is anything to be gained by us holding off on a massclaim at this point.

[ChannelDelibird]

Hi pals, sorry that I disappeared at the end there and necessitated my execution - a bad case of the Real Lifes coinciding with a point at which I was already feeling disconnected from the game. Definitely calling this a failed experiment in terms of my own return to forum mafia but thanks to all of you for making it a pretty positive experience overall anyway, and well done to my fellow townsfolk for getting the job done!