First Post Guessing Game

Sorry I was very asleep so I just woke up (10:50am where I'm at).

Since we don't have any conducive evidence of anyone who is mafia yet I think it is a safe bet to vote on pHelix. Unless he comes out to defend himself he is a safe bet because:

1) If he is mafia he is hiding from lack of posting
2) If he is a townie he is snot contributing anything to the posting/discussion
3) If he is afk he's useless to everyone anyways

I need to read some older mafia threads to get a better idea of how to post and tells for who is mafia or not.

So, until other evidence suggests otherwise:
##Vote: pHelix Equilibria

Hi everyone, I hope you enjoy the game.

This is my second game on this forums. My previous game was Surprisingly Normal Mini Mafia VII. To be very honest, I played pretty bad that game T_T and I hope I can play better in this one. You can take a look and check my meta if you wish. I don't mind.

The first lynch is very hard to achieve successfully due to the limited information we have at this moment. The most important thing at this phase of the game is to stay active. Usually, the mafia are able to push out a Townie lynch in Day 1 because inactive or lurkish players don't follow the rhythm of the thread and are prone to make unclear reads and staying out of contributing substantially. Therefore, they are rendered as uncooperative. Plus, they might not have the chance to defend themselves and that pretty much seals their lynch. We obviously don't want this situation to happen, so please be active. Try to post as much good content as you can. This means that you shouldn't post one liners or random fluff to clutter up the thread. Mafia is going to have an easy time hiding if we miss the direction of our goal, which is to lynch scum.

This game has 9 townies and 3 scum. As you can see, this might turn out to a short game. If we can't good lynches in the first 2 days, we will be on a huge disadvantage.

Don't be afraid to accuse anyone. The key is to push your cases and be consistent.

About the lynch policy, I'm totally against a no-lynch, as one is the crucial step to get information. If we don't lynch today, Mafia gets a free kill the following night and we will be on the exactly the same situation as now in day 2.

I'll be on the thread for about an hour or so today. It seems that we don't have a wide variation of Time zones, so hopefully all of us can be discussing at the same time.

You say that you are for a vote, but you state that your other vote was luck based. Considering you said "very luck based", doesn't that mean to say that we are not going to experience the same luck? If we don't experience the same luck, we will very much end up lynching a townie, which makes your "for a vote" seem like you want to lynch a townie.

Also, why are you talking about the last game? You should be more concerned with this game and find out ways for pointing out scum rather than ways not to. This seems more like filler.

The useful part of your post can be summarized by:
We should have a lynch today. A no-lynch would be detrimental.

##FOS: Mordanis

Good evening, everyone. Tapping in for start of game. I see people are already very active about the clues. I've never seen mafia run with clues before, so this should be interesting.

As already noted, there was a splash of hot ink and my name is YellowInk. Let me assure you all that I'm definitely pro town. Of course this only bears the weight of my word at this moment, but it should become clear in the coming days. I don't begrudge anyone for having me on their starting lists as potential red. I see that detectives can determine if clue X points at player Y an unlimited number of times, so a DT could check that if it becomes necessary in the future. Since I'm quite sure that this hot ink doesn't point towards me, such a check cleans me - even better than a role check since the godfather role masks roles.

That being said, I'm wary of the application of clues. Use them as evidence. Use them to pressure people into talking. Use them to make a list that you can come back to in the future. They won't prove anything on their own without a DT check though. Lets get to work with the profile digging.

goddamn u kids are so tryhard

this is how its gonna work

i'm gonna find the mafia, and then i'm gonna kill them. any questions? no? good.
i say we kill gumshoe for being meta
i also say we kill doctorh because i feel like it. i haven't summarily executed anyone in a while, even as a mod

I want to start out discussing newbies. How are we as a town going to deal with players that are not as strong (as we do have a couple in the game)? Personally I think that these players need to be examined for the intent of their posts more than the evidence that they provide. Newbies still need to figure out what types of evidence are valid for examining a person, and we need to look at whether they are trying to draw out info from nothing or if there was actually a scummy read behind it. In the last few games I have played newbies have been lynched from poor evidence when they in fact were legitimately trying to help the town. I want everyone to take this in mind as we deal with newbies.

First, I mostly agree with the Zodiac List, with the possible inclusion of GGQ.

Second, everyone please be hella careful about what you post for the rest of Night 0. Mafia has nothing to work with for their first kills, unlike most games, which start on Day 1. The last thing we need is to give them a quick blue read. In fact, I highly recommend that everyone wait to mason until at least Day 1, otherwise you run the risk of your PM buddy being popped before either of you can do something useful. Remember, if you think he's worth talking to this early, the mafia probably feels the same way.

Third, can we please for once avoid the clusterfuck town that we've had for the past few games? Everyone who hasn't, go read the first ten or so pages of Pick Their Power Mafia and XL. This is exactly what we don't want. It's an environment where the mafia thrives, skating by on minimum contributions while the town tears itself apart on threads of suspicion. Try to say a lot with a little, and try to focus on one or two suspects at a time instead of posting big lists of pro-town and "maybe scum" reads. (see Qatol's advice here)

People I don't want in LYLO with me:

• Mattchew
  
• Bill Murray
  
• VE
  

I vote we start this game off by lynching one of them, because getting a solid read on any one of them is rather difficult.

This list has been generated based on my experience with them in previous games, which means at worst, we've got a 22% chance of hitting scum. And if not, I don't want them in my town at lylo anyways.

Who's with me?

Lets get this show on the road then. Activity is not going to create itself, and we need to make sure we have a working game.

Basically allow me to start with this little tidbit. Lurkers, this is your first and final warning. I will *not* allow you to lurk. If you aren't going to be active you are *very* quickly not going to be alive anymore. Consider it my... promise... to you.

gtrsrs. Hi. Pull shit like you did in SNMMIV, where you essentially sabotaged the town by creating a horrible day 1 atmosphere and I will absolutely *relish* your death. I don't want to kill you, but if you threaten this towns chances at victory I will.

Players who want to be trolls. Same applies to you, I will not allow it, period, not happening, not on my watch.

We will win this, we will kill scum, and no one is going to keep that from happening as long as I have the power to impede it.

Any questions?

Alright, straight off the bat people are saying that we need good posts.

No shit.

Not only is the concept of the game surrounding the idea that poor play will be punished, but there's also the notion that we've got relatively few players. in the game. 5 to 15 or so. This means that best case scenario, we can win day 5 through lynches alone, but that's a rather long timeframe to close out a game. So poor play seems to be some form of game accelerant, and the 'poorer' the play, the less in our favor it seems to be.

So! What do we do? Post with content and condense your points. Keep your short posts to yourself and clump them up to make substantive comments. I'd say that posts between 6 and 15 lines are large enough to be substantive, but short enough to be read. But that shit is obvious. There's a bigger question here, however, which is what we're going to do with the first vote.

RNG is probably the worst possible idea; gives us next to zero information regarding how people argue and its practically an excuse for people to not post anything because there's no element of responsibility attached to it. Either way, we're going to want ideas down on the table asap. And not like dicks, either. Cut it out bum/prplhz.

If any of you ever make a post that contains something along the lines of "I would like to hear from foolishness more...we all know he's an experienced player and I want to see what he thinks about the current situation" you can be sure that I will devote all my resources to finding a vigi/hatter to get you killed at night.

If you do not understand the above paragraph, I'd advise just taking my word for it, and rest assured you will figure it out eventually.

I'm running for mayor.
There's not much to say in regards to why I'm a better candidate than everyone else , but here's why I'm not a worse candidate than any you're thinking of voting.
The only guaranteed way to know I'm not mafia or anyone else is to have a detective check me up.

But at the moment that's not feasible, so all claims of not being mafia are moot until the election is done it seems.

I don't know any of you guys because I'm new. But that shouldn't be a disadvantage because people you know could just as easily be mafia.

My thoughts on how to throttle the mafia, for even if I'm not elected mayor:
- A detective should investigate me should I get the job. Once cleared that the mayor is not mafia, the detective should PM the mayor the role the mayor originally got as evidence he is detective, of course it doesn't make for strong proof, but should the mayor have an exotic role, then its pretty strong evidence that the detective is a detective if he got the role correct.

From there a team can be developed, people with roles should PM the mayor, and he sends detectives to investigate them to be sure. Only mafia would fake roles, so investigating them serves as hard proof of their legit role, or will reveal a mafia faking a role.
Sure this wastes the detective's valuable limit of 2, but its served a good purpose than a blind investigate once the mayor is investigated. Jacks should be recruited first.

Once this network is built, then the detective privately relays their findings to the mayor who announces findings while safe from mafia hit so medics are not needed and assuring the anonymity of the detective.

This is just a brief idea of some of the plans I have as mayor. I'm happy to answer any questions or queries. Feedback on my plan is also appreciated.

Candidate Ghar. Lets kill mafia.

OK, role pms are out, which means we're underway. I haven't played for a while, and haven't played with most of the players in this game, so I don't know the respective skill levels of many players here. However, seeing how this is a bootcamp game, here are general tips for new players.

Be active. By active I don't mean post every thought all the time. I mean follow whats going on in the thread and go back over previous posts. I highly suggest keeping a spreadsheet with all the players on it, and keep track of your thoughts on each player. Track possible connections between players, activity levels, etc. Keep track of what everyone claims and flips as you go. Being 'active' is mostly an out of thread thing.

When you post, post content. Make one long post instead of many short ones. Don't get sucked into arguments, they derail the thread and do little to help find mafia. Most arguments(especially day 1) are between two townies.

Focus on posts and not on PMs and plans. Balanced Mafia games are won through behavior analysis, nothing more.

Lastly, if you're a townie you have one very important job. Take a hit! Every townie that dies, is a blue role saved. If you can be a threat simply through good thoughtful posting, that leaves the blue roles enough time to co-ordinate.

Well alrighty then. I guess if we have to have a mayor...

I will run for it, as I believe I am not mentally handicapped (arguable) and my role can help in a way, but I'll get to that if there is a likelihood of myself being the actual mayor. I will rule with an iron fist, that occasionally sprouts moss, so my hard hands do not feel so violent on my small kittens.

I am fantastic in these RNG situations, because I am extremely lucky. And I am most definetly not a mafia. And I can prove it! I think.

Sup people, I'd like to propose a new policy this game.
Instead of lynching lurkers and liars, which produce no info whatsoever, we leave them to be shot at night by our vigs, if they exist. We can adjust acordingly if they fail to do their job.
The policy is to lynch all non-sense. People are getting away too easily by throwing random acusations that make no sense to pretend to be scum hunting. This is to pressure mafia into skilfully captalizing into people's mistakes if they want to suceed and survive. They can't lurk, because they will be getting shot, and can't pretend to be dumb, cuz they will get lynched. Of course pressuring people is okay, but if you are pushing hard a lynch for a lynch based on shoody evidence I'll tunnel you into oblivion.

Ok, so the way I see it everyone has at most 10 matchups to vote on, and depending on how many times you advance you may have less (some might only have 7).

So I think everyone should be voting for each matchup - there shouldn't be a matchup that you don't vote in (so only use 1 vote on each matchup, not more) and if you acquire more votes than there are matchups left for you to vote in, you don't use the excess votes.

Now two reasons to do this - one is accountability - no one should be allowed to withold their opinion on a matchup and not say who they think is more likely to be scum (merely announcing it isn't good enough, a vote is more solid and carries actual weight). That's why you use only 1 vote on each matchup - then you can't say that you don't have any votes left to take a stand with. The reason to not use excess votes is simple - the people who will acquire excess votes are those who pass through in matchups and are considered more likely to be scum - there is no reason for these people to have more voting power than others.

I'm running for Mayor.

Why?

Because I'm never suspicious as scum, and always suspicious as town. I would never in a million years run for mayor if I was scum. You might say "Oh, he's trying to WIFOM; this is him actually being scum, running for this shiz". I would say that's slightly logical, but let's be reasonable; I could easily destroy all of you without needing to be mayor, if I was scum. Am I running off of a high from Liar Game Mafia, where I crushed a plethora of legendary scumhunters? You bet it.

Another point to notice; the mayor and pardoner do not get bodyguards. Usually, the purpose of the mayoral election is not so much to control the lynch, but to protect your strongest scum hunters. Since there are no bodyguards, putting someone like [insert vet here] into that spot is just asking for them to be shot up, if they aren't scum that is. What I will do as mayor is be open and forthright, not do a lone wolf lynch. If it turns out that I look way too fcking townie, then I'll get shot by scum, and that's NBD; I'll have done enough by being denying scum the initial lynch, and taking a bullet for better townies.

Last thing; I never ignore the newbies. You'll see a bunch of people run for mayor who will be like "I'm bad as scum, good as town, so I'll lynch right and this will all be good kk", but only I will actually consider cases put forth by newbies and actually judge if they have merit. While I might not be the best at hard scumhunting, compared to other players in this game, I pride myself at being able to separate "bad townies" from "newbie scum". Some examples of that are FourFace in TL Mafia LI and gumshoe in Surprisingly Normal VII. Tons of people were calling for vig shots, lynches, etc. and I just said STFU, they are townies. Let's focus.

In summary, since the mayoral election does not confer protection, it is more optimal to elect someone who is open, aggressive, and tranaparent, but not necessarily the strongest town player. Therefore, I think I should be mayor. I'll do a standard scumhunt (build a case) to determine the initial lynch.

1. Out of the mayoral candidates so far, I like ET. It's hard for me to encapsulate why, but it kind of has to do with the idea of taking things seriously. I feel like BH and VE are hard to read because they troll half the time and spam a lot. That doesn't mean ET is easy to read by any means, but I feel like his posts are more likely to be able to be subjected to ordinary analysis rather than gut reads.

(In case it isn't obvious, I think it's important to be able to hold the mayor at least somewhat accountable, and that means you have to be able to analyze their posts in a serious way.)
2. That segues well into why you should vote for me for vice leader! I take things seriously and am easy to subject to analysis. I don't mean "hey I'm always transparent because I suck at scum"; people running for things always say that. What I mean is that when I post I'll do my best to include my reasons and background, and you all can do your best to tear them apart or find corroboration.

So, why am I running for vice leader/pardoner? Well, last game I played was my first time being a blue role, and it was really fun; I want to try something new this game as well.

Last thing: my platform for vice leader. The vice leader's only power is to nullify a lynch once per game. I'm not gonna say "I'll only use the pardon if town wants me to" because that would be retarded since town voted for the lynch. What I will say is that if I ever use the pardon, I'll announce that I'm considering pardoning the person loooong before the lynch happens and I'll discuss it fully. There's a 90% chance that I won't use the pardon at all during the game, because in general flips on suspicious players tend to be pretty helpful for town. The only case where I use the pardon would be one where I'm very sure of my town read on someone, and where there are at least a few other people who think I'm making sense.

So, vote for me!

It is optimal to claim self aware miller in a set up with known rolls or something like C9++ where it is known how roles are determined. In a closed set-up self aware millers can or cannot claim but a miller claim is a point against someone not for them.

I would argue with DP though on the possibility of him claiming miller as scum. Miller is an easy role to claim as scum specifically in a closed set-up and while DP is a good scum player I still find it quite possible he would fake claim the miller role, there is at least one example of scum fake claiming it on this forum (marv in Normal IV) and that was a good mafia player whose fake claim helped his team quite a bit.

For the moment DP is an excellent day one policy lynch based on the claim alone in a vacuum I'd say he is more likely scum than town but we have time to figure it out so I'm not too fussed.

If anyone claims miller at any point after n0 we should auto-lynch them, if scum wants to fake claim it they had better do it today (or have already done it today).

So, I'm going to start off by saying that I'm running for Leader/Vice-Leader. I'd prefer if I can hit the vice-leader spot out of the two, and I'll explain why further on.

I'm not going to go too deep into my past performance since I've always felt it's a waste of time and doesn't really say anything. It doesn't matter what you've done in past games, it matters what you're doing in this game. But, for those who really want it, I'm a decent enough scum-hunter, I'm town, and I hope I'll be able to demonstrate those to you and get elected.

I don't have a kill target right now, but if I'm in line to be elected leader, I will let the town know what I'm thinking with some advance notice, so as not to surprise anyone with my choice for the lynch. I'm going to play out Day 1 as normal, and as soon as I develop a decent scum read, I'll let the town know, and we can discuss it. In the end, I'm hoping we can base the game around actual discussion of scum targets instead of the trend I've seen lately of someone making a case, no one commenting on it, and then people just calling others scum with no reasoning to back it up. If you want to lynch someone, I expect you to actually come up with reasons why it's best to do so, and not just blatant sheeping. As well, if you disagree with a lynch, actually speak up. I don't even care if you're wrong, because the point of discussion is to discard the bad or wrong ideas and move forward with the good ones.

If I get elected as Leader and so obtain extra votes, on further days I'll just use them to apply additional pressure to who I want to lynch. I don't want you to sheep me just because I got elected to leader. If you agree with my ideas, great, if you don't then that's good for you, but hopefully you actually discuss why you don't, than turn into a brick wall.

However, like I said at the beginning of my post, I'd prefer to actually be elected to the position of vice-leader, since I believe that position can be abused much more by scum being elected to it, and has the potential to generate a ton of confusion. I also don't even trust most townies to it, since lots of people will misuse the role and cause as much confusion as if scum had it.

The role of vice-leader is much more powerful than leader, and I believe it's the position we should actually be focusing on today. The leader picks the day 1 lynch, which will hopefully be influenced by town, and after that they only have 1 extra vote. The vice-leader on the other hand, has the ability to waste an entire day, cause an extra round of night actions to go through (which is bad for us in most cases), and also generates lots of confusion. If they use their power in an anti-town way, it means we potentially have to spend two extra days just to lynch the vice-leader and the person we were trying to lynch in the first place. This ties up our primary KP for a long time, and we get the additional WIFOM of if the pardoner pardoned his scum buddy or not, and whether the pardoner is actually scum or just a stupid townie. Basically, the pardon ability causes a ton of trouble that we won't want most of the time.

As vice-leader, I promise not to use my power in 99% of cases. Basically, the only exception I can come up with off the top of my head would be a MYLO situation where I was going to be lynched as town, and pardoning myself means we don't auto-lose. Outside of a situation like that though, I really don't see a reason where I would ever want, or need, to use the pardon. So, I want to be elected, because I know my own alignment, and can trust myself not to frivolously use the pardon, or use it against the good of the town. I can't trust others to do that, since I can't know you're not scum, and beyond that, even with a town read, lots of people have the capacity to do something silly because they're convinced that it's a good play. However, this normally results in more bad than good, and in the mislynch of the player who did it, which isn't a desirable outcome.

I'm planning to play the same regardless of which position you put me in, or if you elect me at all. However, I believe I can use the Leader position effectively, but would prefer to be able to safekeep the position of Vice-leader, to keep it away from not only scum, but also compulsive townies. I'd like it if you vote for me, but you should also consider a second person you would like to be elected along with me, since for whichever role, we still need to have either a vice-leader or leader to go along with it.

Now, as for myself, I'm going to vote in a candidate based on who I think is most likely to be town, who I can trust to be the most transparent with what they're thinking, who has the best reads, and who won't go Rambo at the end of Day 1 and cause a huge mess for Day 2. Those four things are the criteria by which I will determine who I support as the other candidate for office. I'll keep you updated with what I think once most of the candidates come out and make their posts and we get past super early game posting.