Mafia of Revelations ~ Game Over!

[Porkens]

I caught VPB on page 12, I caught auro on page 14, and I had the town choose between one and the other by page 22. Hoopla, Llama and others helped me seal the deal in one of the fastest day 1s I've played in the last year.

The setup wasn't town-sided, we just outplayed by far. Reck did well at the end and the Gamma track was excellent.

Whatever, you didn’t even want to eliminate VPB day 1 even though I told you how scummy he was, don’t try to front.

[AGar]

Oh yeah, well done VPB. I had you written off as town until Vi gave us the drop in the dead thread.

[Albert B. Rampage]

I caught VPB on page 12, I caught auro on page 14, and I had the town choose between one and the other by page 22. Hoopla, Llama and others helped me seal the deal in one of the fastest day 1s I've played in the last year.

The setup wasn't town-sided, we just outplayed by far. Reck did well at the end and the Gamma track was excellent.

Whatever, you didn’t even want to eliminate VPB day 1 even though I told you how scummy he was, don’t try to front.

I set up a situation where one of them was going to be lynched no matter what, a blind monkey would have hammered scum. Your performance was OK.

[Albert B. Rampage]

Holy shit. I don't get a single well done or any respect, only insults for an epic Day 1 performance. You should all feel bad about yourselves for being ABR Greatness Deniers.

[Vi]

WHAT?

starbuck didn't even have a true 50/50? did you misread your role PM? or were you gambiting? that could have ended badly if both farside/porkens were town.

The Mafia had a copy of Starbuck's information and could have gently coaxed her into noticing a misunderstanding... except specifically because of when and how Starbuck claimed - after a Mafierson died the previous Day (so it couldn't be discredited as lolgambiting) and with such insistence that it was a 1v1 - that was politically infeasible. Oh, and the other person in the 1v1 was hm-that's-a-very-Townlike-question-about-their-Role-PM-on-Page-2 Porkens. Under that extremely specific set of circumstances, it was going to be catastrophic for whoever that other player was, and this time it was farside.

--

I just wanted to hear that you weren't actively lying to me and possibly others in role PMs and the refusal to say literally anything (Something like "Roles/Mechanics/etc. may or may not interfere with your role or its results, but I didn't intend to lie to any player" would have been perfectly fine with me) really, really set me off.

First, we have to get into "what is a lie". The definition of "bastard mod" in MD shows a wide variation of opinions and I don't agree with many of them (Miller without Cop is bastard??). Perhaps more importantly, my ruleset specifically states that lies

are possible

(as is virtually everything else). The limitation on it is my judgment as a setup designer, living up to an admittedly-implied responsibility to run a game that at best is enjoyable and at worst doesn't get me run off the site (oh

hi

Large Theme List Mod in my player list).

What I mean to say is that I took your reaction personally, because regardless of what the ruleset says, you accused me of breaking that social contract of treating my players with respect and, more to the point, not making cosmic jokes out of players for my own amusement. You essentially proclaimed to the thread that it was more likely that I chose your role specifically to punish (Tracker sanities?? I would not voluntarily be a part of a game with them), notwithstanding the evidently functional other Trackers in the game and the fact that your four prior "no one" results could be explained by you tracking people who had claimed Vanilla, than that you should believe your incriminating result on someone you were

already touting a case for independently of what your result said

; and then took the extra step to make sure you called me historically shitty. Which... given our long history with this game, if there's anything that could happen to push you to that point, there's probably something larger going on, and I'm kind of glad it's out in the open now.

[Nahdia]

ya did good, ABR.

[AGar]

Holy shit. I don't get a single well done or any respect, only insults for an epic Day 1 performance. You should all feel bad about yourselves for being ABR Greatness Deniers.

Weren’t you on a sabbatical?

[Porkens]

Holy shit. I don't get a single well done or any respect, only insults for an epic Day 1 performance. You should all feel bad about yourselves for being ABR Greatness Deniers.

My teasing was intended as a compliment fwiw

[Albert B. Rampage]

after a Mafierson died the previous Day 1

basically I set into motion a chain of events that confirmed Porkens, validated Starbuck, and fucked farside.

Without the laser accurate day 1 lynch, you remove the first domino that sets off every other event. This is the Ned Stark beheading that starts the entire ASOIAF saga. Without me, town is not in the position it finds itself in.

[Green Crayons]

I don't get a single well done or any respect

You know I'm a fan. I thought your D1 was excellent play.

[petapan]

WHAT?

starbuck didn't even have a true 50/50? did you misread your role PM? or were you gambiting? that could have ended badly if both farside/porkens were town.

imagining a world where the randomization fell on a town player and gammagooey gets abarat ptsd all over again

[Porkens]

Your performance was OK.

I’m genuinely touched, thank you for saying so.

[Nahdia]

WHAT?

starbuck didn't even have a true 50/50? did you misread your role PM? or were you gambiting? that could have ended badly if both farside/porkens were town.

imagining a world where the randomization fell on a town player and gammagooey gets abarat ptsd all over again

that world exists 75% of the time, lmao.

[Gammagooey]

WHAT?

starbuck didn't even have a true 50/50? did you misread your role PM? or were you gambiting? that could have ended badly if both farside/porkens were town.

imagining a world where the randomization fell on a town player and gammagooey gets abarat ptsd all over again

that world exists 75% of the time, lmao.

uggggggh I even mentioned specifically that in-game as something I was worried about

I uh also am honestly more concerned about the possibility of Starbuck fakeclaiming because she's that convinced that Porkens is scum than her being scum making this claim because I have been burned very hard by that shit before but if Reck comes by and tells Starbuck hypothetically that it would be very not ok then I suspect everything will be fine

Why do you think Reck has this phenomenal cosmic power?

b/c you two like and respect each other and being told something like
'fakeclaiming this as town is the equivalent of telling everyone else in the game to fuck themselves and die because me getting the lynch I'm sure about is worth a potential mislynch and is more important than everyone else's opinions on the game combined'
by someone you respect would tend to make someone reconsider, whereas if it's told by a jackass like me that you don't know very well it's probably pretty easy to shrug off.

and again I don't think that's actually what's happening here but MagnaofIllusion decided that he was better than everyone else one game and kept up a "1 out of these 3 players are scum" claim through multiple days of different people asking him to confirm if it was true until I used a fake-claim checker role on him and he got guillotined for lying to everyone for the whole damn game.

[Albert B. Rampage]

ya did good, ABR.

I don't get a single well done or any respect

You know I'm a fan. I thought your D1 was excellent play.

Thanks guys! I endeavor to please you, to make the town win, and to make Reckoner and the other non-believers appreciate my jaw-dropping, breathtaking strengths.

I'd like to hear Vi's thoughts on how killing the player with the most posts who hard carried Day 1, did more good for scum than their own lackluster pick!

[petapan]

abr is a beautiful shooting star

[Albert B. Rampage]

Your performance was OK.

I’m genuinely touched, thank you for saying so.

At the end of the day you hammered scum, and that is praise-worthy in itself. Made for a more focused game.

[Albert B. Rampage]

List of the 3 greatest things to have happened this game:

1) Starbuck initiating a Porkens vs. Farside 1v1

This was a massive gambit, a fakeclaim really, that made this game a walk in the park for town. But it's so damn risky. It's like an 2008 ABR play: insightful, effective, and potentially blows up in your face and ruins the game once in a while. Incredible that this even happened. Farside was not on my radar at all until this claim, which is coincidentally exactly what it would have taken to lynch farside. Great timing. Not sure if completely ethical lol.

2) The track

Others touched on this. Bang on job. Single-handedly closed the game out.

3) Scum cross bussing Day 1

I feel like I created this scenario where scum were losing of two very good players. Events after Day 1 built on what I achieved, and although the least crazy curveball of the game, it set the tone and launched town odds of winning into the stratosphere. Bussing has unintended consequences. Mafia had really tough choices to make. I'm not over the fact that they didn't choose to NK me after I nailed two of them right off the bat.

[Blair]

Thanks for hosting, Vi!

For the record, the only real reason I seriously entertained the ideas of Tracker sanities and unreliable mod communications was because you refused to state otherwise - not because I thought you were some sort of fiendish bastard mod.

[Hoopla]

*Information as currency - So I'm actually kind of livid about reading a respected Mafia theorist say that Neighbors are worth almost nothing for Town power.

this person is a goose. quite often, the value of a powerrole isn't always the actions it succeeds in doing: a tracker who finds out nothing, or a doctor who makes no correct saves doesn't mean the role was useless. being able to assess a player's motivations in relation to their role can sometimes confirm them and remove them from the PoE pool - as can confirming them via setup spec. this is often more useful than the actions they succeed in doing - if anything, a successful action is a bonus.

Was the setup balanced? Who knows? It's too swingy to tell based on this single run. farside thought it was 95% Town-sided; cfj's last comment was that it was still scum-sided enough to be concerned about. And, honestly, that's kind of the point - because so much of the game's balance was intentionally not based on roles and (standard) mechanics.

we will never know.

it is tempting to be results oriented and base conceptions of balance based on what happened. we had good fortune this game; starbuck misreading her role could have ended in disaster with us chain-executing two or three townies in a row. instead it hit mafia and pseudo-confirmed two other townies. that was by far the biggest inflection point of the game.

*Revelations - It's been said that people are easiest to read when something surprising happens. This game was designed to facilitate those moments.

i 100% agree with this.

if you wanted to argue that this game was town-sided, it would have been because there were

too many

of these moments. the way reck and CLAP trickled out their revelations, and the way agar and GC played when the tracker claims all came out made it fairly obvious they were all town. it takes a creative scumbag to simulate something surprising or to thrive in chaotic gamestates - most of the time scum will be reactionary when something surprising is unfolding, rather than be the instigators.

it still requires savvy town members to parse these moments and draw the right conclusions, and there is still room in the setup for scum goofiness if they wanted to be proactive. but i think most scum won't, and that ought to be factored into balance considerations.

it's easy to say in hindsight (because it kind of happened this game), but with the potential for these surprising moments to confirm, removing scum's ability to kill obvtownies could have boxed them in more than they were.

i don't necessarily think this game was unbalanced though. an interesting corollary to consider with large games; all is takes is one scum to play a blinder and scum will win if town don't lucky with PR choices. and the larger the game, the larger the scumteam - more of a chance of drawing

one

really good scum player.

but as i said, we will never know the true balance. and that's okay. it was a fun game, and i think both sides did have a reasonable chance of winning if things fell their way.

i do feel sorry to farside, and felt that was a strangely inelegant design for someone like vi. i'm glad to see that wasn't the case, and it was just an unfortunate railroading.

[Albert B. Rampage]

me too

blair who's your top scum right now

I really don't have a firm case on anyone right now. ABR is being weird about Auro/VP, but I don't think weird is a valid tell for ABR. Starbuck still bothers me because I feel like she's peppered little barbs into her catch-up posts to try to reignite the 1v1 she claims was so terrible. I'm not really convinced Porkens' reaction to ABR was genuine townie outrage.

But if I had to day-vig someone and end the day right now? I'd probably go back to IAAU.

You know what?

VOTE: Albert B. Rampage

Porkens isn't the hero we deserve, but he's the hero we need right now.

BLAIR admit I am your mafia role model right now

[Porkens]

You know what?

VOTE: Albert B. Rampage

Porkens isn't the hero we deserve, but he's the hero we need right now.

all right, blair makes me brave, i don't want to keep holding my vote, ill try this wagon

VOTE: albert b rampage

These really helped me by the way, thanks. And thanks to MT for checking in too.

[Blair]

BLAIR admit I am your mafia role model right now

You had a strong showing in this game.

[Albert B. Rampage]

BLAIR admit I am your mafia role model right now

You had a strong showing in this game.

Thank you. It is difficult to give me a compliment, I know. This game puts me at a 70% win rate in 21 games in the last 4 years, excluding the serial killer game.

I win 70% of the time since 2016. This is an insane stat, helped by a lot of good partners, who I would like to take the time to thank as well as my parents and Mith for paying the server bills for this site.

[AGar]

Curious to see the mafia Pat if it’s gonna be divulged at any point.