Live Action Mafia

Woo go team! All of us have made good kills before so this should be fun. I think Jordan has only been mafia in a small ET game a long time ago, though, so Jordan if you want some mafia advice I could link you to some past forums? IAP's How To Be A Serial Killer thread is pretty good.

As was discussed at kickoff, we're an annoyingly disunited team. Let's be really clear on this: town is going to steamroll us if we're killing each other off or playing a complicated chicken game on who's making kills. We need to work together if we want to get even the one point. But with 4v9(?) we're in good shape to get that point if we cooperate. More thoughts on this coming.

-- posting in the mafia den

Are all of you happy about using gchat? I'm pretty good about making sure no one looks over my shoulder on gmail during games, but this has been an issue in the past.

Let's try to keep track of who our priority kill targets are and tell each other *any* information we get, even slight hints, about townies' roles. (There's no disincentive to share that here, we just want to keep our own roles private as a guard against MM, right?)

Here's a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0 If you request access I'll add you but I'm paranoid about people seeing the invitation email over your shoulder so I won't grant access for now.

I'd be happy to make the first kill (day 1) as a token of cooperative goodwill. But I think that whoever makes the first kill should get to RNG the order in which the other mafia have to make kills for the next 3, so that the MM can't try to hide and wait to be the last one to make a kill. Sound fair?

I need to go post strategy thoughts on TS now to look like a good townie because it's known that I'm on forums. In general I probably won't have as much time to plot as is ideal until I get back to ET on Tuesday at ~18.

Things we should discuss: What should the 3 mafia townies on this forum be doing with whatever our roles are? We shouldn't share our roles, but we should still be using the info we get from them somehow; any investigation-style or gravedig-style results should probably either be proxied here or to TS, depending what they are. Also, who are our priority kill targets?

Gchat is fine.

Priority kills are: everyone. Seriously pretty much everyone terrifies me. But a rough list:
Dgrazian
Ksedlar, lilychen
Sammyluo, achester, isaacg, brunnerj
lukesci
line

A bit unrelatedly, I'm planning a bit of mischievousness. I was planning this before rolling mafia, so I think I should do it anyway. It might make people want to lynch me? I'll abort if you all want me to though.

From jamb from awhile ago:

On mobile so forums are hard and I don't have long to type without Pesto getting suspicious. Mischievousness sounds fun and is fine by me but can you tell us about it? Would rather leave DG+LC alive from sympathy of not playing often; would rather leave LC+ACH alive because they're sketchy and better as mafia than town thus shouldn't be hard to get lynched. Brunnerj scares me so I want dead. Post this for me?

Also what are people's thoughts on killing a new player relatively early, and what thoughts are people known to have on this? (People generally update based on who "wouldn't have killed a new player on day 2" etc)

dgrazian and lily wouldn't kill each other day 1, nor would brunnerj or ksedlar. dgrazian would not kill elaine.

I'm happy with jamb's plan, but I think I'd prefer the following: mafia vote on who should make the kill, and we punish the person if they fail to make the kill.

I'd be a bit sad if we killed dgrazian on day 1 but he is terrifying. He's caught two mafia just by talking with them before. He needs to die and he needs to die fast. We're not getting another free kill until at least Day 3, we have to do it now.

Ksedlar had brunnerj killed day 1 when she was mafia a couple games ago; regardless of whether she "would" do that again it'd be easy to throw suspicion on her. And my understanding is that Lily has a long history of getting dgrazian killed when she's mafia. Relatedly: I don't particularly want either of my boyfriends dead since it might throw suspicion on me, and lying to them is fun.

How would you implement the punishing? Also we should obviously decide this soon. Like, if someone wants to make a kill before I get back then great, and otherwise I'll see if I can pull it off (maybe by wandering into squares wearing a disguise? seems risky though).

I mean, Town Mafia might be nice enough to do our dirty work for us. We're probably not the only ones who'd like him gone.

Speaking of Town Mafia... achester is on his phone "reading Google news" significantly more often than usual. But I'm bad at reading people so I don't think this is more than a minor update for him being TM.

Also, if at any point someone is considering defecting (i.e. revealing us all to town):

1) Remember that it's only even possibly worth your while if you think your expected number of points is <1. Right now I think we probably have at least 75% chance of winning Mafia v Town IF WE COOPERATE and 50% winning the inner game, so your EV is likely to be above 1.

2) Please tell us here if you're feeling that it might be worth your while to defect; I could go on at length about why I think it's a bad idea but I'm sort of assuming none of us are actually considering it because game is more fun if we play for real.

3) Note that aok and I have a plan for how to screw over people who defect in this way, so defecting might backfire on you badly. Rest assured that if I think I'm guaranteed to lose because of your defection, my new goal will be to minimize your score.

4) Now to the fun plots... strategic pretending to defect! I think if one of us is on the chopping block, we should claim "I'm mafia mafia and if you agree not to execute me until after them, I'll out the other mafia" and then make up a completely different set of 3 people so that town starts fighting itself. Partly because this is hilarious, partly because it might actually work, partly because it would undermine future credibility of mafia attempting to defect.

PSA: banana bread apparently didn't make it into the rules. So.... if you see a townie coming to kill you on any day that we have a kill, bang 'em first.

Relatedly, if we are able to trap someone whom we think might possibly be a TM, we should kill them on a day when we have a kill (i.e. not a day that they have a kill).

Also, since we don't get traps back if the target dies for unrelated reasons, we should only set traps right before using them.

I overheard ksedlar and dgrazian negotiating in the kitchen last night. They both claim willingness to work with any faction, and they both claim town town. I don't know if I believe them on either count.

I think it's in our interest to look as town townie as possible to as many people, to avoid getting killing by town mafia. At the same time, looking like less prominent townies is probably important as well. If the town mafia doesn't come after us, we should easily win.

On that note, one cool trick for getting people to trust you is to repeatedly tell them how much you trust them. Psychologically, people are inclined to reciprocate trust.

Lol 4 mafia v 7 townies and isaacg wants us to defect

Keep dreaming, dude... I'll take my > 1 EV from playing this out the legit way.