Godfather Mafia

On June 30 2010 22:56 Hesmyrr wrote:

Now DarthThienAn confirmed that role, as all good mods should do, were randomized. In this case I believe the town's best choice of action is to lynch inactives or poor townies without any worries at all. Even in normal mafia setup with large roster of Townies this is pretty decent move, but here where d1 target constitutes only Godfather and Traitor, it's a win move. The probability of hitting antitown player by grabbing any random player is equally 1/10, and today's flip is more likely to be determined by roll of fortune than good hard scumhunting exactly because of the difficulty of getting read for today. So why not rid us of a anti-town players and make our lives much easier?

On July 01 2010 11:23 YellowInk wrote:
Also, I can vouch for Korynne not being the godfather. I have it on multiple sources that Korynne is female.

On July 01 2010 13:12 YellowInk wrote:
A few quick points I want to stick into this flurry.

Mass roleclaim is bad. Bad Chez Bad. Hang the Chez for even suggesting. Cahoots!

Stalemates are not good for town. They're not terrible, either, IF the godfather is dead, but since as a non-roleblocking townie it's hard for one to be sure if we're actually in a stalemate or perhaps had a lucky medic/vet in between two role blocks.

Double lynches should be used in the mid to late game, not in the early game. It's a town empowering ability. Right now we'd be shooting blanks. Later we'll need them to clean up the scum.

If I were the godfather, I would have recruited a top player. Remember that we're going to have a very difficult time lynching any of the skilled players to begin with. While the numbers are thin, they're going to play no differently from any other townie. It doesn't matter that we know who the skilled players are, I am not about to bet the game on lynching L or Korynne or BM tonight. If we were to start lynching these players, the godfather would then switch to going after middling players, so there's not much advantaged to be gained by making a plan to lynch top players.

Ok, so that last point wasn't so quick.

Recruiting games are tough. You can't trust anyone - unfortunately especially those who get named as 'strong'.

On July 01 2010 13:30 YellowInk wrote:
Moving on to 'how do we win?'

As should be clear, the godfather needs to be the primary target. Also keep in mind that the mafia don't know who the godfather is. This means the mafia may take out the godfather for us. How do we accomplish this?

Activity levels in the early game are absolutely crucial. I don't care what you're saying, I just want you talking.

If you were a noob-level godfather, you might choose to say almost nothing. The mafia aren't going to hit you because you're not helping the town - they are glad to have inactives hanging out. With an anti-inactivity policy in effect, you're forcing the godfather to talk. So the level 1 godfather would be talking at some moderate amount, but the godfather doesn't want to help the town either, so there are traditional tells to watch for. Being aware of this, just like watching for usual scum, we want to keep a close eye on the middle-of-the-road players that are contributing minimally but being active in the thread. The level 2 godfather might be very active to escape any such scrutiny, though probably not spouting out a plan like I am here.

But we don't even force the godfather to play at this level unless we force everyone to talk. Now since we KNOW almost everyone is town aligned right now, we can rightfully expect almost every single player to be active in thread and putting forth their ideas. Therefore, any player that is playing sub-optimally right now needs to be lynched. If we don't get rid of the inactives now, we'll be plagued with them the rest of the game - and even a DT check won't save their face since they can get recruited.

If we force the godfather to be active, they may get hit by the mafia. If the godfather remains inactive or suspiciously unproductive, we'll lynch for it.

Speaking of DTs, yes, it is worth outing yourself immediately to finger the godfather.

Then, once the godfather is dead, we'll be at a somewhat informed state of the game and be able to immediately go after scum. Hopefully we'll take out a couple scum along the way anyhow - but this should not be a priority. After all, lynching a scum and having one recruited from our ranks is a net loss to us.

Lets get to it, shall we?

On July 01 2010 13:41 YellowInk wrote:
@ proper use of roleblockers discussion

Right now, if I were a roleblocker, I would be targeting Korynne, L, BM, or someone I deemed a strong player. As I stated earlier, if I were godfather, I would have gone ahead and recruited a strong player on night 0. If you block one of us and find that the night hit was blocked, you may have just found yourself some scum. Until the godfather is dead, you can use that person as a block target every other night to reduce the hits. Once the godfather is dead you may want to claim and finger depending on the circumstances - though of course blocking someone and no night kill could mean a medic or another roleblocker or a vet, so this isn't 100% of course.

My declaring this strategy will probably also make it less likely he wants to recruit the top players almost as effectively as town declaring to lynch top players. Once the role blocker passes through the top players they will have cleared some number of us (at least for the time being). It's just a WIFOM game as to whether the godfather will try to target any more of us. But if he does, at least you'll be on to us and be able to point us out when the godfather goes down.

On July 01 2010 13:48 YellowInk wrote:
Alright, just one last word before I head out for a few hours. The best thing every single town aligned person can do is talk. The preference is to talk productively - we're not going to find the godfather or scum today unless we get super lucky. This is the day you can trust almost every single person around you. Make plans. Talk about how the setup works.

If you don't talk in a productive manner, you will be lynched. I will be grading you.

Furthermore, if your 'productivity' slacks off later in the game it could be because you've been recruited. If we don't have a strong baseline for good activity right now, we won't be able to read it later in the game. Either way we lynch you.

So everyone needs to voice their thoughts and provide new ideas. Every single one of you.

On July 01 2010 17:15 YellowInk wrote:

Top players are no more likely to have roles than inactives. With respect to hitting roles, this targeting is completely arbitrary. The rest of this argument just collapses from this fact.

I would argue that top townie players are easily as powerful as less skilled players with roles. Having people who know who they can trust among those who are skilled at deceiving is a valuable thing.

Regarding the pseudovote roleblocking:
Roleblockers should be free to choose their own targets at will rather than putting it to a pseudovote. At least for now. First, we don't know if we have multiple roleblockers. I'd hate to waste town power by forcing them to overlap. Second, pseudovotes would allow the mafia to directly manipulate who is getting 'outted' by the roleblocks. Further, if we were comitting to lynch (or even just continuously roleblock) people who came up scum by this test, every time a medic successfully blocked or a vet took a hit, we could be lynching (or roleblocking) an innocent.

In short, it is a slow and ineffective method. The one benefit it gives us is that we can have the roleblocker target someone with reasonable certainty without the roleblocker being outted. It may be something to use eventually, but definitely not an every day thing.


This is a bad plan. If I were scum about to be lynched, I'd totally claim free mason to force them to out. First off, the scum have nothing to lose by making such a claim and 'forcing' a real mason to out themselves. Second, the masons lose a lot of their power when they are 'out'. The #1 power of free masons is that when the godfather recruits them, the recruiting fails. This is why I also have to object to L's plan.

If we're about to lynch a mason, if the masons feel it's worth it to out both masons to divert the lynch, they should both claim. This way if scum lies to do so, they're giving something up. Yeah, doing this for the town will reveal our masons, but it's better than lynching them. No sole mason claim is going to convince me of anything - nor should it of you. It gives up 0 information, scum can do this at will.



I'd take 1% if I could get it. 10% certaintly isn't paltry. Having a single confirmed townie does not gain us all that much. Further, I would rather not have to necessarily tie up our jailkeeper to a particular target. Consider also that the jailkeeper can target a person they choose at random tonight, and assuming they chose someone town aligned, they can be sure that that person remains town aligned. Regardless of who gets jailed, so long as it's town, that's another person that can't be recruited. This plan throws two of these 'free blocks' away.

Multiple jailkeepers makes this plan even worse similar to the roleblock pseudovote plan.

To masons I would say that the only condition under which you should claim is if you are about to be lynched. In this case you should both claim - that's what gives it credibility.


You always go after the red first. This goes without saying. It's similar to our lynch inactives policy. We're not about to lynch an inactive if we just had a DT point and say, "Yo! That guy's the godfather!"

On July 01 2010 17:36 YellowInk wrote:
To put some numbers on it, if we have 1 jailkeep and 1 pair of free masons, the jailkeep targets a random target, the godfather targets a random target except the mafia already recruited:
The godfather will fail due to hitting a mason 2/18 11.1%
The godfather will fail due to jailkeep protection 1/19 5.3%
After accounting for overlap of these effects, the godfather will fail 15.8%
Outing a mason and jailing them drops the godfather failure to 5.9%
This is the 10% L refers to.

Consider that a second jailkeep increases the jailkeep protection effect by almost as much as the first. Now L's plan is losing us 15%.

Also keep in mind that this 'paltry' 10% goes into effect every time the godfather recruits. The mason effect gets larger over time as well since the godfather won't target the same person twice (assuming the godfather didn't hit a mason previously - if they did, we've won a significant victory). Having free masons unknown to the populace is an enormous boon to the town.

On July 02 2010 00:00 rastaban wrote:
You make some valid points lakrimossa but 2 of them are not.


Since townies can't PM this game (unless you are the mason / lover pair) there is no way to roleclaim to the a Mason without making it public which means the jailkeeper would die that night.



He us adding in the fact that the jailer would have to cover the mason. Who ever the jailer protects can't be recruited (though the percent should probably be lower since if he protects the GF or either mason it doesn't add the third safe option) making 3 people a night unrecruitable.

On July 02 2010 01:06 YellowInk wrote:
A quick note to those of you trying to analyze my behavior:

If you read through the games I've played here (this is the fourth), you will find I have opened each game differently. This is for a few reasons which I might discuss in a general mafia thread, but it is primarily to make me unreadable.

There is no one strategy that 'convinces' people that one is town. If there were, scum would use it and town would be reduced to random voting and this game would be very boring. The best one can do is never be obvious scum. So that's all you're seeing.

On July 03 2010 00:52 Abenson wrote:
One way or another, the GF is going to have to find some way of informing the people he recruited. I I think it's highly possible that there are already clues or small hints the GF has sent to his mafia members in the thread now.

On July 03 2010 14:00 L wrote:
On the plus side, he's succinct.