Live Action Mafia

A game of sneakiness and paranoia
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 Post subject: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 4:14 am 
Well, the real win was that I managed to make it so game ended before the day my 6.813 pset (with two slack days used) was due. You guys don't want to know how much of my play was based on that goal... You see, I REALLY can't properly pset while Live Action Mafia is going on. Even now, I'm punting.

I'm very happy with my play this game: I made like 90% of all of the voting schemes, I got myself banana-breaded super early in both day 1s, I made sure that everyone voted and couldn't pretend they forgot, I correctly identified the day 1 culprit, I made a bunch of useful goodwill questions (importantly, I made the alignment-checking question), I made the "Troy dictates d2 votes in a permutation of players, forcing a mafia to out themself or reveal the double agent" plan, I did a bunch of spreadsheeting and general analysis, I fully convinced pretty much all of town that I was innocent and to implement all my plans, I correctly figured out the exact set of mafia via readings on Isaac and Jackie, I orchestrated a secret mob to provably out all the mafia while leaving our killer alive, I meta-gamed into arranging the boos / goodwill questions to find the day 3 culprit (aok helped), and I correctly noted that killing dpalumbo before he could boo anyone was a provable win.

All of this was definitely aided and implemented by a lot of other players, of course, but basically everything I possibly could do, figure out, and convince people of, I did... except for the fact that the Day 4 culprit was the town key person and so we had to trigger the D2 incident on the mafia culprit. When I concluded that the day 4 culprit couldn't be a KP, I had forgotten that the day 3 culprit being a conspiracy theorist suiciding was a possibility, and when I remembered, I didn't go back and re-check my earlier conclusion. I had been so happy about playing virtually perfectly at the beginning of L2D2, but now I'm sad that that wasn't something I managed to meta-game figure out beforehand.

That said, it looks like given Pesto's statement in the mafia den's "We provably lose this loop," thread of "If you're willing to take an action publicly at any time, you should be able to," we STILL HAD A LEGIT L2D2 WIN anyway. If town were allowed to use this same rule, then Jackie hiding at the end of the day shouldn't even have been a way to get around her getting booed. Also, the condition of needing to boo Jackie at all only came up because Pesto proxy-enacted Lily's banana bread action on Luke before Troy had a chance to make a kill (Troy killing any non-Jackie mafia before they can tap Luke is a provable win for town.) I know as a GM you want to make your players have to figure everything out, but I assert that the only thing that made our L2D2 win come into any doubt at all was Pesto bending the rules one way for mafia taking actions and then saying town couldn't do the same thing. It's not like, an actual problem, but for the sake of pride and testament, I think it's useful to note. :)


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 Post subject: Re: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 9:23 am 
Katie, well done! I don't think I've ever played a game with you for more than one day and I must say you are pretty OP :) It was very much a flaw in game design that we couldn't kill you off to make you stop having good ideas.

I don't think you actually had any readings on me, just Isaac? If I recall correctly I didn't talk to you in person at all that day because you weren't over at ET. I'm sure Isaac did read very town but I'm sad that I didn't get a chance to try to convince you otherwise.

Re: if you're willing to take an action publicly at any time you should be able to, clocking / proxying is only valid if you're not around FOR THE ENTIRE DAY. I was very careful to give Lotta and Pravinas a window in which they could have booed me that day, if town had figured out already that they needed to. They weren't willing to take the action "at any time," they only wanted to take it later that night, when I had already gotten the heck out of there. That's why it was legal for me to hide.

I do agree that Pesto gave lots of help to Mafia and I greatly appreciate it because it was pretty hard to be Mafia this game. In particular, thank you so much Pesto for proxy posting for me when I was sick.


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 Post subject: Re: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 9:25 am 
Also, if people don't get a chance to read all of Mafia den, I hope you do read the "Desperation Mode" thread and comment on the ideas there - some of them are rather hilariously bad but I'm sad about not getting a chance to try them.


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 Post subject: Re: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 10:44 am 
"if you're willing to take an action publicly at any time you should be able to" - Ah, I had parsed this statement as, "if for some time x in the day, you are willing to take action y publicly, you should be able to take action y." The correct parsing may be "if for all times x in a day, you are willing to take action y publicly, you should be able to take action y." However, this is also true for Troy's intent to kill dpalumbo.

"clocking / proxying is only valid if you're not around FOR THE ENTIRE DAY" - The thing is, Pesto proxying for Lily won the race condition against Troy killing a mafia. Game seems very dumb if people not around all day win race conditions against people not around for part of the day.

Regarding the idea of trying to frame me for Isaac's death, I think it was very good play to NOT do that. I'm not sure how the Ethan thing after claiming Isaac would have worked (I might have been confused, and at least distracted), but trying to directly blame me would have resulted in something similar to when someone accused my in the fall Mystery Mafia game: viewtopic.php?f=138&t=3906 Excerpt: "And even more relevantly, I was working at desk at that time. As I mentioned, not doing that would get me fired. Several players even came by desk over the course of my 2-6 shift, I recall. If you want, you can ask Luisa Barerra, the Random desk captain / my boss. One would think that someone trying to frame me would have bothered to pick a kill I had a bad alibi for. Tsk tsk, sloppy work." I was in fact working desk during Jackie's kill, so my response would have probably been to link to that thread and say, "This has literally been tried before; note that to guarantee getting to Kresge in time to catch the 4:55 end of a class, I would have had to leave Random at like 4:47, WAAY before the end of my shift." Also, by that point, multiple players had outright said, "game is easier if I just think ksedlar is 100% innocent, so I'm doing that." XD

Jackie, when I say "read" on you, I mean more of a combination of meta-gaming about game structure and noticing your post rate was significantly lower than what I thought a town Jackie would do. Isaac thought this could be explained away by you being sick, but given the contents of mafia den, I think my assessment was accurate. I don't think there was anything you could do about this; my reasoning was that you suffered from "the ksedlar effect" AKA being so involved in game as town that it takes up literally all your time, so when you're mafia, the time you spend doing mafia things has to take away from time spent doing town things. In other words, being an active/good townie when you're town actively makes you look worse when you have to be mafia (Note: You are still much better at being mafia than I am).

Also, I totally agree that this game was very hard to be mafia in. I am extremely glad I didn't get stuck in that position.


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 Post subject: Re: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 1:38 pm 
Just read through the mafia den (had only read a bit earlier). I am very impressed with all of Jackie's planning. I think mafia had solid plans, and the only major, reasonably preventable mistake mafia made was having Adam claim to not have received goodwill day 1. This was the functional equivalent of claiming, "These two other mafia, dylanhen and dpalumbo: they're mafia! Also, even if you know I'm mafia, I can't be lying unless Isaac is mafia too!" Which is terrible.

The other mistakes, which were less reasonably preventable:
1. Adam getting outed for killing Dgrazian (however, it seems like Dgrazian had to be killed near Tech Squares anyway, and Adam couldn't avoid Josh following him; once they were seen together, Adam not following through on killing Dgrazian doesn't make a difference.)
2. Dpalumbo arriving to the van too early, becoming alibied for Jackie's death (this was HUGELY important info for town, but easy to overlook)
3. Lily getting outed?? (I don't even know if it was possible for her to not be outed on day 2; the only way to save her is to have an outed mafia still alive, which wasn't happening)
4. All mafia looking psychologically bad; it says something that we had a L1D1 chat "I think you're town" consisting of all townies except for Tin. (However, it's really hard to prevent this; faking being town is high energy and low benefit, possibly even helpful to town. Jackie seemed to be the mafia trying the hardest, but unfortunately still looked bad, at least from my perspective, due to the ksedlar effect of literally not having time in the day to resemble her town self sufficiently closely)
5. Dylan not making a kill L2D1 (you had no way of knowing that he should do this)

The other major factors influencing game are:
1. Town generally playing well and not making significant mistakes other than insufficient meta-gaming/case analysis for d4 culprit (Note that trying to trigger the D1 incident was not necessarily a mistake at all, because doing so is excellent in the case where both KP are town, and that seemed like a reasonable scenario at the time.)
2. Town meta-gaming our way into trusting aok and Troy early on, as well as having some amount of distrust for Jackie.
3. Town pretty much 100% trusting me for psychological reasons, resulting in all beefs with me being automatically resolved, everyone listening to my plans, and aok banana breading me ASAP both day 1s.
4. Me being able to psychologically read Isaac as being good.


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 Post subject: Re: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 3:47 pm 
Ksedlar, good points. I think in the future I'll try to spend more time doing things that are sketchy and not public but still good for town (e.g. fake claiming rogue to outed mafia, getting involved in other private plots) so that I stop suffering from the ksedlar effect so much <3

Does anyone have other ideas for common sketchy but town-useful things to work on during regular mafia games?

Anyway, yeah, a lot of these mess-ups weren't really preventable, and I seem to recall my goodwill-claiming advice was better before the goodwill scheme got changed last minute. I feel considerably better about losing now that I see Pesto's idea of a balanced game was one in which mafia never screw up and town gets no psychological evidence :P Also, town got lots of bits of meta-gaming info.

Also, I don't think your "let's activate d1c" was a bad strategy in all scenarios, it just happened to play nicely with our strategy.


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 Post subject: Re: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 3:51 pm 
Jamb's correctly pointed out that I didn't bend the rules. Sorry for the unclear wording.

That my proxy-bananabreading of lukesci won the race over Troy's killing of a mafia is unfortunate. (Race conditions are unfortunate in general, though.)


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 Post subject: Re: Postgame Thoughts
PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2016 4:21 pm 
jamb wrote:
Does anyone have other ideas for common sketchy but town-useful things to work on during regular mafia games?


This is something of my specialty, so I'll give some ideas :D There may be some tricks I want to keep more secret, but I can share them in person or something if you really want to know.

-The main one: Fake claiming to troll mafia trap-setting (and cause mafia misplanning). This may involve getting more proxies / longer proxy chains than necessary, faking / delaying investigation results, claiming fake reasons for true information, etc. It's generally nice to have several layers of fake roles in store and obscure the sources of all info you get.

-Luring mafia into banging you when you're invulnerable (or kabooming you when you're vulnerable).

-Setting up secret trust/planning networks. It's fine to have fake GN pairs and such sometimes, if you trust someone enough ;) Though secret lynch mobs are generally discouraged under normal circumstances.


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