Live Action Mafia

One thing I noticed that mafia did this game was conscript late. Although I used to think that saving conscription was a good idea, but I now think that it's generally good for mafia to conscript early, ESPECIALLY if mafia lacks a strong, active player (although Isaac was godfather, I strongly believe that role should give general advice / answer questions, not lead/coordinate).

I also think that not using benevolence was actually a good move, because genies actually turned out to be confirmable, in the context of a known kill (like Sam -> Sam)

I think that the two main things that caught mafia were:
1. Excellent early play from townies. Lisa, Victor, and Sam were caught, imo, not from particularly bad play, but from great play from town. Sam in particular wouldn't have been caught if it weren't for Dgrazian being, well, Dgrazian.
2. Making obvious kills. The number one thing mafia should have done was make kills they wouldn't be investigated early for. This caught Alex, Michikyo, Lilly (although Lilly's was partially the bad luck of there being a near-witness), and Pesto. Previous games that mafia won involved such cleverness as having people from West Campus dorms make kills in Random Hall at like 4 am.

Also, Ben, I think you did a fine job as mafia. I know more than most how much of a giant timesuck being mafia can be...

Yeah, I'm probably partly responsible for the assumption that lzahray was don, since I posted the "I gave ksedlar a microphone" thing and didn't bother to check with Haley whether she'd given it to someone else.

Er, rather, I did PM Haley, but the subject was "IC network proxy" or something and I only mentioned the microphone offhand. I also asked Miranda Gavrin what I should do about the microphone information, and she said PM AustinFathman. When I got the negative reply from Austin back I just went ahead and posted about it, and took lilychen's conclusion for granted, which explains messes I made like this.

To prevent something like this in the future, it would be good for town to organize a sort of fact-confirming mechanism, perhaps on the spreadsheet, where when someone makes an unknowable claim ("I think X was don," "this was probably a frame," "I claim cynic," "I think MTP was used twice," etc.), we can track who made it, what their reasoning was, and how much confirmation we have. This would help prevent awkward and unfortunate situations like this where we go "Oh X can't have used mafia power P because previous discussion shows P has already been used up," where "previous discussion" turns out to be claims by X
It would also help keep alive the advice of the recently departed... ahem, no townies AFAIK have read "Suspicions for the future" since my death (the jump in views is probably due only to my feverish refreshing hoping to see someone bump it up).

As for benlin, I guess it was an intuitive sense about the way he carefreely posted his "oh yeah you should probably investigate me I guess" thing that gave me an initial tip-off (I was planning on investigating him if no one did before I got my powers from a genie), and hearing the two negative investigation results on him at the same time (I was with jessk/miles/anpere at the time the mods responded to investigations on Friday) had some weird effect on me that made me suspect something was wrong. But I'd been wrong with such intuitive suspicions before (e.g. anpere with the aradhana-michikyo episode, and ltchin after she freaked out at my message), though I'd also been right (4 counts on ltchin before the message; abergal's fakeness) so I didn't push it too hard after he denied it. I also (the other problem in this case) mistook the three-kill rule for don as a three-day rule (like for rogues), so I thought of and dismissed the don possibility pretty quickly on my last day, leading me to propose a double-mtp conjecture which benlin was able to shoot down somewhat convincingly.

With the existence of the don, negative investigation results should no longer settle the matter if a player has bad alibis repeatedly, even if they admit freely to those bad alibis. Which is why ermain's decision was quite good.


BTW I have some cool (imho) role ideas that I will wait until the game ends before explaining

I actually did have the microphone on me when I died. Lzahray just immediately kaboomed me after she gave it back though.

I was also considering giving you the same full information I gave Haley, but I thought that would be redundant (I figured Haley would live sufficiently long after I died), and I didn't want to give information in more directions than necessary to preserve it after my death.

oh, right, my list was so shitty. I made one for day 2 and then proceeded to not update it until day 10ish when I removed one too many people and took ben off. xD best conspiracy theorist 2014

Ok Frevan should search "vickiew" as keyword instead of author and find that she's on my trust list. Otherwise I'm going to be very, very annoyed with him (and the rest of town if they don't do the research either).

Ok now they're just accusing arbitrary inactives, which I guess is the best thing they can do, but this is a point the game shouldn't have to get to. I suppose they don't have too much reason to trust me on vickiew even if they actually searched thoroughly and found my posts mentioning her, but I REALLY hope they don't try killing jingyizz next because she's actually been helpful in the game (mostly to me and jakob), just not visibly on the forums.

Mods, do you want to just officially ask mafia if they want to concede? Town is silly, but letting this drag on would just increase the silliness.

I hope the remaining mafias make some play, tsims hasn't killed anyone yet :/

Lol town has 2 prophets left but they're both incredibly inactive. They should actually just go do something before they get killed.

The desperados though can probably wait until more kills happen before activating (hopefully they don't all go investigate the benlin kills over again, that would be incredibly silly)

Lol I really like anpere's post though

Even if Taylor killed her (with a kaboom), this is still a bad move. One of the following:

1. Regirock posts in the forums, disputing this -> they both (cstubbe, regirock) get lynched.
2. No regirock posts -> regirock gets lynched, game doesn't end. Town knows that either this was a mistake or regirock was recently conscripted. Town thinks [who would have conscripted regirock?] and decides to lynch cstubbe.
3. Nobody realizes what's going on. Repeat for 2 weeks. Graveyard cringes in horror.

Why would town think cstubbe conscripted regirock and then threw him under the bus?

So if things had gone as planned, town would probably conclude that regirock must be rogue. As is ... mafia had the bad luck of hitting a conspiracy theorist.

cstubbe had to kill Frevan after tsims tried with a 'Bang'. So cstubbe shows up guilty and regirock isn't framed.

The one good thing is that there aren't any investigators at Simmons. So regirock probably gets lynched today, and cstubbe tomorrow.

Oh, they're working together to make kills... that's pretty good! If they were playing like this since the beginning of the game, I think they would have done much better!

so frevan suspected tsims? that's interesting. were both of them there at the same time, or did frevan just not post? also can cstubbe even kaboom as a rogue?

Both of them were there at the same time. Frevan didn't have cstubbe on his list because she (mostly) convinced him that she was a prophet.

Frevan also sent me and presumably other townies a message suspecting cstubbe, so I guess it makes sense to allow kills by cstubbe to catch her.... I guess.

If mafia doesn't make a kill tomorrow, there will be a publicly revealed innocent!

No worries. mafia hired a hitman for today.

Who did they hire?

Oh man, I just realized I won't be able to follow the mafia's planning anymore, because there's only one...

Nah, she should still post a 'diary' in the mafia den. I did that when I was a 'last mafia'

I asked Taylor to keep a diary with his plans so ghosts cab watch. He said "lol plans".

I know tsims hired a hitman in Random to try and make waves over there.

Lol I think everyone left in Random is a conspiracy theorist or something, so they can't protect against hitmans

Also, mafia probably could have reasonably guessed that dininno is a conspiracy theorist, given that he is still alive, and given that superheroes are more likely to be investigators.

Well, the day ltchin tried to kill him was the day after achester killed qql, so cynic is also a reasonable guess.

Ah, you're right, cynic would also be reasonable.

Kinda glad its ending now. Woulda been pretty boring to see this play out much longer I think.

Yeah. I was starting to look forward to wrapup more than any game developments.

Hmm so in big games, early game tends to be a large number of times as exciting as late game. Is there some way to sustain early game excitement throughout the game? Maybe just make games end after the excitement is gone, like have end conditions like mafia:town ratio drops below x?

In this game, for instance, town made almost all good lynches (either mafia-aligned or strongly implicated), and mafia made mostly high-profile kills, so very quickly it was down to a few less-active mafia and a large horde of mostly-inactive townies. By that time it's hard for interesting things to happen.

Townie strategy. Be sketchy enough not to get conscripted, but not too sketchy to get lynched
Unless you are desperado, don't be sketchy, and activate when you feel mafia are about to use their conscription.