Ethics: Type-2 Metagaming

[Yosarian2]

Lynch All Liars is sort of a sledgehammer, in my opinion. Sometimes it's useful to bring it out and smash someone with it, but it's often not the right tool for the job. There are many situations where lynching a liar is not the best possible pro-town move.

There really are situations where the correct thing for a pro-town person to do is to lie. For example, say you're a role-cop, and just found out person X is a doc. Further say that you are 100% sure that if the doc lives two more nights, the town is guarenteed to win. Now person X is being bandwagoned. You don't want person X lynched, but you also don't want person X to have to role-claim and you don't want to out person X. If you can lie in order to protect person X without revealing them as a doc, shouldn't you do so?

More generally, the real problem with absolute hard-and-fast rules like lynch all liars is that they simplify discussion, which makes it easier for scum to blend in ("Yup, lynch all liars, sounds good to me...") while generating less information. When possible, it's better to just assume the person was acting in a rational way, and then try to reason out the person's alignment from their actions (why would a scum like in a situation? why would a good guy? which makes more sense?). It's more work, but it's also more useful.

Lynch All Liars is useful as a general rule of thumb, it's a good starting point when you don't have anything better to go on, and it's a useful debating tool to drive your point home, but it should not be treated as a completly 100% hard and fast rule, in my opinion. Nothing should, mafia is too complex for that. It certanly shouldn't be followed for "metagame" reasons.

[Yosarian2]

No. You don't need to lie and you don't need to reveal that he's doc. You can simply say you are a cop and you know X is innocent. I don't think that full role claims are required in most cases. If you lie then, and later you find supercop... you lied about Doc (and the mafia have killed that "known innocent") then why will people believe you? In fact, if you lie and the person turns up Doctor, why would anyone assume you were who you said? You might have just picked random person that you know wasn't mafia with you.

(shrug) Well, you would have to already be a confirmed good guy rolecop by either giving the town multiple scum or be 100% confirmed in some other way in order to even try a gambit like that, sure. However, if you are in a position where you don't have to worry much about getting lynched, it might be better to lie and tell the town that the doc is a vanillia townie instead of either telling the town he's a doc or telling the town you're not going to reveal his role. It's a tricky situation, sure, but if a lie keeps the doc alive for a little longer, therefore keeping you alive and giving you time to find the rest of the scum and win the game, it might be worth the risk.

Or, here's a better example. You're in a endgame where when it goes to night, there will be 2 town and 1 scum left. Scum wins if they get 50% of the town. You're an unkillable role, but if you claim that, the scum will kill the other townie and win, so instead when you have to claim, you lie and claim doc, hoping that the scum will target you and then you can lynch the scum tommorow and win.

As to LAL being a sledge hammer, sure. There are clearly times when you want to keep a scum a live. Like keeping SK alive so that mafia don't auto win, as has been discussed before. The sentiment is supposed to say: Don't assume your opponent is stupid, assume they are scum. Anyone who lies, should be considered scum.

-JEEP

Why?

If a person lies in one of the rare situations when it would actually make good logical sense for a good guy to lie, why would you assume that they're scum?

[Yosarian2]

Saying untruthfully "I'm a cop and X is scum.. lynch them!" (just because you think X is scummy) is stealing away each townie's job of thinking for themselves about who is scum and voting accordingly. That's OK when it's your role to do that, but if it's not your role, then it's an unfair strategy (no matter the outcome).

That's not an unfair stratagy at all. I doubt it would often be a good stratagy, but part of the game is trying to manipulate other people into doing what you think will help your side win. They can choose to either believe you or not.

[Yosarian2]

I'm still waiting for a scenario when it makes sense. I firmly believe you don't need to do a full role reveal. So clearly you don't need to claim that you are a vest. You can claim Townie, because you are.

But if you claim townie, and the other good guy claims townie, there's a only 50/50 chance that the scum will try to kill you instead of the other guy, and thus a 50/50 chance the town loses. On the other hand, if you do claim doc and are convincing enough so that the scum believes you, then the scum will target you (as he'll assume the other townie is protected by you), his kill will fail because of your bulletproof vest, and the town will win.

It seems to me like a clear-cut example of a case where if you can lie convincingly you can significantly increase the chances of a town win.

An interesting side effect of LAL is that it actually makes it more likely that scum will believe townie lies, because everyone knows that good guys never lie.

[Yosarian2]

We're looking specifically at a situation where we're relatively sure the liar isn't scum, but we lynch him anyway purely to maintain the metagame strength of LAL.

This is a contradiction in itself, You cannot be "relatively sure he is town" if he is caught in a lie, exactly because of LAL...

Sure you can. For example, if a person gets investigated as innocent, gets multiple scum lynched, but then later admits that he lied about his role day 1, you can still be relatively sure he's town, even though he lied. So, do you LAL, or not?