Live Action Mafia

Meghal: "lolol you got lucky josh didnt catch you then"

Little does she know things would be much better for mafia if Josh had caught onadneva!

Also, both aok and farel22 forgot that they got 2 investigations per day. Additionally, farel22's investigation and Linus's 2nd investigation seem to not have been proxied out yet. Notably, farel22's investigation would save m2w from having to do a check on Linus's investigation of Josh. Good on Mollie for announcing that she is doing that ahead of time, in order to avoid collisions, but unfortunately a collision has already happened and just not been mentioned yet. >_<

More needless investigations:
- multiple investigations of swapnilg when agu1 alibied him as being at Next House
- investigating ama29 when she was roleblocked (albeit the role blocker hasn't proxied out and she didn't bring it up)
- investigating megaol when she was alibied by 4 other people

I think most of this is attributable to coordination problems, e.g. people not paying attention to what other people have said, or not saying things that other people need to know. Still, it's better than people not investigating at all.

Currently ixa is seeming like the town MVP, with good power uses, trying to actually organize the investigations, and actually being the first person to investigate onadneva.

Wow what a vote today. If karengao had died instead, that would have been very strong for mafia, given that she is a gay knight. Hopefully her partner mentions something about how people shouldn't vote for her.

Emma has correctly pointed out mafia's mistake; onadneva publicly had a ouija board, meaning that him not having it upon death is confirmation that he is mafia. The question is, will town notice?

So agu1 did notice this, good job.

Onadneva unfortunately thought the voting deadline was midnight; however, ama29 thought the same, and voted for onadneva.

Overall I am happy with all the new players we got this game! Lots of the new townies are being active, onadneva and emmaw both made good kills, and emmaw has been really on point with catching things (e.g. the item transfer problem, ixa being a good person to target).

So brunnerj has lied about having a splitter investigation when he doesn't, presumably as a signal to mafia. I wonder if mafia will notice this?

Also given the 4 splitter sets from day 2, I wonder if Josh would expect only 1 set (making 5 claims a very odd phenomenon) on day 3?

Hmm I maybe should have been more adamant earlier in poking everyone to post pictures. Micosu not being recognizable to most players is certainly strong.

Ixa wrote megaol on their taser, suspicious of being roleblocked right after having role revealed to her. This is an amusing case of being right for the wrong reasons (townie mhummel roleblocked ixa, but megaol is in fact mafia). Also megaol isn't really making any kills herself...

Micosu seered jasonye as seer, and now megaol is worried about him catching her for not doing investigations.

Meanwhile, town has 5 search warrants, and anyone who searches emmaw would immediately out her as mafia.

Okay, Meghal just proxied for ixa about the splitter set from yesterday. Now will mafia notice that brunnerj is lying about his splitter claim?

Lol mafia are considering framing brunnerj for a kill. Turns out that he is already auto-framed for all kills though, due to Yannick having him on his CT list.

Also Emma is so on point with some of her comments, good job!

Meghal saw Josh at the Career Fair at 12:20 and thus suspected his alibi, then investigated him twice, getting not-innocent both times, so now they have figured out Josh as likely SK. I guess patg is still busy.

On the other hand, we have ninager's kill. It looks like this is obviously going to point to her, based on agu1's assessment of her being one of the only other two people in ESG. It's hard to dissect whether this was a good kill or not, because vigilante strategy is so complicated.
1. Obviously, in practice the kill turned out to be bad for town as it stands now (hitting a townie, and a gay knight at that). But this is kind of results-oriented thinking.
2. One crazy idea that probably isn't going to happen is if ninager claims to be bad, and asks for other mafia-aligned players to reveal to her. Because patg hasn't made a kill yet, she would actually look quite legitimate here, potentially getting multiple real mafia-aligned players to confide in her, and then outing the results to town. The fact that she is new would also make people unlikely to think she was faking (but similarly, it is unlikely she will actually do this, because it's hard to think up as a new player, especially as someone who has never played any kind of mafia before.)
3. We should consider whether, on expectation, this was a good move. So far there are 3 players who have done absolutely nothing in town's eyes: iperez, patg, and micosu. As it turns out, 2/3 of these people were mafia aligned, and ninager just happened to hit the only town one. Certainly there is no argument to be made that iperez looked particularly townie in any way. The lack of a 2nd serial killer kill, as well as agu1 not happening to recognize m2w's killer near the kill scene, both would point towards "inactive" players being more likely suspects. And if an inactive is town, well, they aren't actually doing anything helpful for town. Certainly iperez would be near the bottom of mafia's kill list if he were town. So my inclination is that as targets go, well, ninager actually did a pretty good job on expectation.
4. There's also just the general idea that more town kills are good for town. Like everyone hates the task of having to not no lynch, but in practice and in theory more lynches are just good for town.
5. Theoretically talking with someone before you vig kill them to extract info is good; I assume ninager didn't do this. But also, there probably isn't any benefit, because if an "inactive" is town, they don't know anything, and if they're mafia, they might kill you / try to run away or whatever.

The main problem is that there is a good chance she will neither actively fake being bad as #2, nor actively claim it as a vig kill. And in this case, making such a kill is bad because it uses up town investigative power and potentially gets her lynched.

But all of this is a lot more complicated than I imagine most new players would be able to think through, especially someone who has never played even table mafia before! Definitely it is not obviously a bad play, and I hope to talk with ninager more about her reasoning after the game.

There's some minor other factors here, of which I am not sure of the relevance:
- killing a gay knight is better than lynching one, which town nearly did yesterday. The partner gets more time to live, and they can potentially use their kill usefully
- it would have been really funny if, somehow, josh got found guilty of the kill as a result of being perma-framed

Hmm but the downside is possibly causing a priest to lose their powers. Would be funny if patg killed Jason, causing cjq to have all 3 saints on their list die on the same day.

Oh man Meghal noticed that Josh faked getting a splitter investigation, now I can be at peace.

JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE PAY ATTENTION TO PREVIOUS INVESTIGATIONS

Here is the investigation flowchart:
1. Are you suspicious of an investigator lying? Then investigate the same pair as they reported.
2. Are you not suspicious of an investigator lying? Then investigate people who haven't already been cleared as innocent.

Don't investigate with some portions of the splitter as being people who are already cleared.

Wow minor suspicion thrown on micosu, and then aok with the 2 investigations against brunnerj for yyao1's death, deflecting over megaol's fake investigations trying to incriminate farel22. Are people going to forget about the kill that was obviously done by ninager ?

Okay so the candidates for the lynch tonight are, based on people's votes and on discussion:
- brunnerj
- patg
- micosu
- ninager
- bookbinder's random vote for farel22

I wonder what the chances are of landing on ninager? So far (10:53) no two people have voted for the same person. >-<

Meghal, to aok: Who should I vote for?
aok: I'm thinking micosu, patg, or brunnerj

lmao here, aok and Meghal are just watching me randomly laughing and hopefully don't realize it's at them.

Sometimes I think, "gee, this game is mafia-biased, town isn't even close to being able to catch the mafia," and then somehow people lynch micosu without a single investigation against him. With patg and brunnerj as backup options (albeit the brunnerj one is partially warranted with investigations).

So currently there are 19 players, with one townie dying tomorrow night, with 2 mafia and 2 SKs. Somehow this is not actually particularly town-favored, just on numbers? In terms of players though, patg and brunnerj looking sketchy is a problem, though it seems pretty easy to prove ninager guilty of killing iperez.

I am struck by how absolutely easy this would have been for a more aggressive mafia to deal with. No one suspected onadneva in particular for the achester death, so a faked investigation probably would have remained unquestioned. Mafia more aggressively initiating a lynch mob and calling for investigations on ninager could have easily prevented the micosu lynch, and someone claiming tomorrow to poke inactives would have arguably caused people to forget their interest in lynching micosu in the first place, given that there was no evidence against him.

Aah I am a GM I shouldn't need to come up with lies. (For those unsure what I am referring to, pravinas had not actually expressed interest in playing Live Action Mafia, but I thought that patg dropping without using up her 2 kills would be too much of a hit to mafia, and I might not have bothered to replace patg if she was town.)

I'm not sure what I would do if I were to GM a fall game in the future. Certainly I like the idea that roles are basically just randomly assigned, and that a new player that no one knows has the same chance of being serial killer as anyone else. But it is definitely a problem for balance if a serial killer drops without so much as making one super obvious kill. Maybe I'm failing to see some option, but I don't think that there is a better option, even in hindsight, than either compromising game randomness or letting inactivity make game notably unbalanced in some particular direction.

I guess one thing I will say is that it is good for GMs to be consistent about how they handle inactivity issues, and not just only fix things if it's a mafia dropping. I think this would be sketchier if I hadn't already replaced a dropped townie, and if I hadn't previously compensated for dropped townies with balance changes, rather than just saying that dropped townies didn't matter. I'm not sure, but I think counterfactual me at least with good probability would have done something if a townie said they were dropping as well. I am now more convinced that even if it's not very important in terms of balance, it is important in terms of consistency.

Meghal at least said, "oove, another active player we gotta gao," so I'm hopeful that other people won't be suspicious either!

So mafia was planning on having Meghal kill aok and have Josh take the blame, then have Josh honey jar some people at ET. Unfortunately, aok and Josh have just decided to start another 4 hour board game, after having spent the past 6 hours playing one long board game. Josh also hasn't checked his phone very much at all. Not that Meghal has *actually* claimed mafia to Josh (who probably wouldn't cop to being SK without that).

Julian (a non-player helping scout for Emma): ok apparently this is what occurred. Ixa walks down to yell fruit bowl. ONLY cj follows, jokingly puts hand near shoulder and says “I can could kill you on floorpi and nobody would know” or something
then emma comes and actually kills ixa

So game is a bit of a shitshow right now. Emmaw and brunnerj are basically outed, but so is ninager the vig, who looks completely like a serial killer. Mafia think they know what's happening, but then pravinas is going to publicly kill two people tomorrow and everyone will be completely surprised. Or even better, not quite publicly kill two people, and then mafia will be even more confused. Unless of course, they forget to submit their planeswalker option. Or if mhummel roleblocks someone involved.

Weirdly, consider the following:
- ninager gets lynched tonight and karengao dies, leaving 16 people alive, 4 of which are mafia-aligned
- emmaw and pravinas make 2 kills each. pravinas gets lynched. 11 people alive, 3 mafia aligned
- brunnerj and emmaw each make a kill. brunnerj gets lynched. 8 people alive, 2 mafia aligned
- emmaw makes another 2 kills because planeswalkers are OP. Emmaw finally gets lynched. 5 people alive, 1 mafia aligned
- Meghal makes a kill and frames someone. If mafia can get a townie lynched here, this means 3 people alive, 1 mafia aligned. Then Meghal kills someone such that the other person loses tiebreakers on the lynch vote with her, and this can still be a mafia win without an unreasonable amount of hardship.

There are of course a number of ways this could fail; town would basically have to lynch in the pessimal order here, mhummel would need to not roleblock someone doing these kills, dtxiong / agu1 would need to fail to use their planeswalker bang, and people would need to fail to tase. But IMO this is not a crazy plan. Of course mafia won't realize the part about pravinas.

Oh, I just realized that I fucked up, in that I forgot that gay knight set investigations are not technically infallible. So karengao's investigation on {jasonye, brunnerj, megaol} should have returned positive, because brunnerj is perma-framed. But of course, using an infallible investigation on brunnerj would have failed.

I think this is basically irrelevant to the game state, but this is an unfortunate interaction between gay knight / secret admirer and conspiracy theorist. I am not sure what the best fix is in the future...

Mafia are very convinced ninager is serial killer (for good reason) and are going to have emmaw message her. This will make tomorrow even funnier.

I hope pravinas remembers to submit the planeswalker ability. It would be awkward if not.

I'm amused that 0/5 people with search warrants have died yet. If everyone with a search warrant used it, this would have a pretty good rate of catching mafia.

OMG I actually got into hysterical laughter from this, what a pro move.