Live Action Mafia

So Day 0 started out with a pretty big snafu. Namely, kmath saw that she was lone mafia (with conscription), and realized that she was too hosed to be able to play well in such a role. So, we drafted sammyluo (who had rolled into being mafia in the 11 player world before Tuan joined). Hopefully being natural mafia with Sammy will make kmath sufficiently unhosed to play. If not, at least we caught the issue early, and we're going to try to minimize disruption to game by keeping the numbers as is, but buffing some townies into stronger roles. In particular, we were thinking of turning mnjy and nguyenin into vigilantes. Though I'm actually thinking it would be better to turn mnjy and regirock into vigilantes, because group investigator isn't necessarily weaker than vigilante. Meanwhile regirock didn't submit a priest list before day 1 (presumably due to being sick), and so would have priest lists of size 1 for the rest of game, which seems definitely worse than vigilante.

Mainly, we want to avoid endgame scenarios where town knows who the mafia are but doesn't have enough lynches to get rid of them, which is a big danger in the current 8 v 3 setup.

In other news, Sammy is already plotting in the mafia den despite being town for most waking hours of day 0. I'm excited for him!

Molly is also plotting.


As is Lucy:
"In such a small game with so many evil players, I think the best thing for me to do is to kill someone based on the first kill
Actually it seems correct for a serial killer to immediately kill someone
So I expect day 1 to be very bloody
12 players
3 bad, 9 good
I think I'm going to try and elect myself mayor, investigate the first death and kill someone in response"

I think mafia is actually in a pretty good position, regardless of how the kmath thing turns out. At least in terms of player balance; hopefully the game starts balanced mechanically!

As much as Sammy might think otherwise, he's actually an above average mafia. If kmath doesn't drop, they'll make a fantastic team, and if kmath does, the top conscript targets also look good (jamb is a gay knight and Lucy is a vigilante). Pravina being an activated desperado would be awful, but she still hasn't seen her role and thus is probably not activating day 1.

Mafia is also extremely unlikely to kill m2w, their serial killer. Neither is m2w likely to get randomly lynched. If she manages to pull off a good day 1 kill, she might even accomplish the incredible feat of surviving to make a kill on day 4! I just need to last the whole time without giving her advice, which is super tempting.

The main issue mafia seems likely to face is people being hard to find and kill. Which is a sad issue to have, but kind of inevitable with summer.

Jackie: I should get up now. Here's to hoping nobody's outside my door to conscript me...
Me: I may or may not know whether that's the case.

To be fair, I know that no one is going to conscript her yet, because no one knows whether or not mafia has a use of conscription right now, lol.

Anthony: I'm pretty sure that Mollie is scum
She came into my office looking for me
And no one just comes into my office
Also she was chasing me when she saw that I saw her
But I got away

*sigh* I wish major events wouldn't happen before I sort out the state of who the mafia are.

Also, I feel bad for Mollie getting caught so soon in her first game. I was quite impressed with how quickly she started making kill plans. Most serial killers loaf about more, but here she was being awesome and making kill attempts at the beginning of the first day.

Because Anthony outran her in a chase, this was definitely a good use case for freeze ray, which serial killers don't have access to. I do generally like the idea of serial killers not having special powers like mafia do, but it makes what is already the toughest role even harder. :/

IDK, maybe Mollie can provide some insight when she ends up here.

Also, it's now the case that fixing balance issues in the "kmath drops" case is harder. In some sense, game would no longer *need* the extra vigilantes to compensate for the loss of a townsperson. Moreover, now that a significant game event has happened, there's a greater chance that messing with people's roles might lead to a different outcome than if the roles were assigned that way at the beginning. But there's also the perspective that town *deserves* to have a balanced base setup, even if getting it to that point would mean retroactively changing things to be more town favored at a point when game looks good for town. It would be nice if I could talk to Dgrazian about this, but he went to sleep 6 hours ago and I should probably go to sleep within the next two hours, especially because I didn't get enough sleep last night.

*flails about the difficulty of making decisions as a GM*

Other things of note:
- Jackie and Anthony are talking a bunch in their GN chat, and they think Mollie is more likely to be SK because she didn't use freeze, and because if she had a mafia buddy, they would be more likely to make the first kill.
- Pravina still doesn't know her role (due to not posting an intro), but has made a few game comments. This makes me wonder about the meta-strategy of delaying the knowledge of what your role is.

I wonder what Mollie is up to now? She should make a kill soon in order to avoid getting tased / vig killed before her kill can be of use. Killing Anthony (so he doesn't look good from accurately calling her bad) or killing someone else and beefing Anthony (prompting the use of an investigation) would be good. I think in this case the former is better, because based on intros and the fact that she's new, Mollie->Anthony is more likely than Anthony->Mollie. Also from secret god perspective, killing Anthony is especially better because it comes with a free dead Jackie.

Of course, because she's a lone serial killer, Mollie doesn't have anyone to give advice about avoiding tasings / who to kill now. And presumably Sammy won't contact her due to the risk of it being a secret plot (possibly orchestrated by Jackie).

Mollie's thoughts/adventures:





Also, there's an unfortunate thing where people like using gchat, but either Mollie doesn't have a gchat or no one knows it, so there's a gchat with all of the players except her. :/

Lucy's also considering trying to kill Mollie, but doesn't feel super up to it.

Kmath dropped, so we converted regirock into a vigilante. It's probably under what we should have done speaking from a mechanical perspective, but other players are interacting with their roles more (we want to minimize disruption), and from the non-mechanical perspective, Mollie is pretty much caught, so we can get away with giving town a smaller buff that disrupts game less.

Me: The reason I think Tuan as GI might be worth keeping is because town doesn't have that much investigative power.
Like it's just Luke + elected positions otherwise.
Vigilantes aren't any good if they don't know who to kill.
I guess the main worry is what happens if Sammy conscripts Lucy.
We probably shouldn't have a setup where town is screwed if that happens.

*high fives past me*

Mafia conscripting a vigilante is actually quite strong. Probably better than a gay knight in this size of game. Definitely it was good to change regirock's role.

I think Lucy should have told the truth about the mafia count. Now town knows that either Lucy is bad, or conscript exists (and Lucy and Sammy are both reasonable conscription choices). Saying 2 would have given town a lot less info IMO, especially because it doesn't rule out someone else being conscripted already.

Though I guess this leaves town paranoid.

I don't know what mafia are up to. I feel out of the loop. I guess no-killing today, isn't awful, given that town decided to vote no-lynch. But it seems probably bad for tempo (e.g. town will have investigations today, and they didn't yesterday since Luke used his investigation early. Also, day 1 kills have a strictly lower chance of hitting activated desperadoes, compared with day 2.

Also, I'm curious about what Lucy is really thinking. E.g does she really expect to definitely be the only vig in game? I think 2 at game start would have been reasonable. And of course, there is another vig now with post-kmath role adjustment. I would expect mafia to expect a greater chance of town having strong roles now, given the mysterious rebalancing we did.

Also, people in discussions left out the possibility that ritagram was vig. Well, Mollie knows she wasn't due to shoveling, I guess. Also, no one has asked Mollie about if she has ritagram's shovel. I would think Jackie would catch that.

I wish town had an investigator besides Tuan, since Tuan seems to not be doing anything in game...

Town has the mayor. And Pravina's investigation. And the PO list (which triggered today). Jackie has investigated Luke's death (which is a 2-way beef) and regirock is investigating agrebe's death (which will later get investigated by Jackie as GN). So town doesn't really need to use more investigations today anyway, even if they weren't already going to side against Lucy in the beef.

In other news, there will be 2 townies dying at the end of tomorrow, with Tuan, mnjy, and regirock as the non-dying ones. Mafia suspect Jackie is an activated desperado (which is close for the wrong reasons, since she is a dying GN who will be immune to kills once she investigates Lucy, but they think it's more likely she's dying tonight. Mafia also very slightly suspect mnjy of being an IC. If Sammy makes a kill on one of the non-dying tomorrow, doesn't get lynched, and then makes a kill after day rollover, mafia could win before Sammy has to leave on his flight. But regirock is a vigilante, so that's a pretty big danger. Also town might regain tempo if Jackie or regirock makes a kill, letting them lynch a non-Mollie tomorrow.

Overall I think game is going to end in a town win, but who knows?

Huh, town is really looking into the idea that Lucy didn't kill Anthony. If Jackie and Pravina both investigate that rather than anything today, and Tuan stays not very active, then Sammy might be likely to make a successful kill.

In other news, I'm really impressed with Mollie! Both for surviving this long and for generally playing well. Though I guess she has played forum mafia before.

Also agrebe and mnjy, who are the next least experienced. They've had good insights, and mnjy even corrected the more experienced Pravina about rules. And of course agrebe managed to escape a kill on him.

Pravina (about Tej): I mean, he's probably been explained about mafia games before.

He's played a mafia game before, actually. Fall 2011. If I recall he was quite a strong townie in a very mafia-biased game.

I guess I'm kind of surprised he didn't recognize Lucy, but it's probably been like 2-3 years since he last saw her, and she presumably didn't stick around that long?

Sammy: oh, when Jackie and I were discussing role distributions earlier
Jackie said that Katie would definitely not have had there be no succubus

Gee, looks like I'm pretty predictable. To be fair though succubi keep dying early in the games they end up in. In the spring game I put in 3, with 0 gay knights, just to make sure they would get used, and only one was (Linus), though that use was quite good. Really all I want is to see some cool plots with the role, because there's a lot of possibility for it. It's certainly a role that I would like to have.

Sammy is spot on with some things (mnjy being IC and Tuan being an investigative thing), but completely backwards on other things (Jackie not being a gay knight, there not being a vigilante left). He even mentioned that he thought I would change stalkers into investigators from kmath's drop, but not the idea of changing someone into a vigilante. Fortunately for mafia, the things he is wrong about matter a lot less than the things he is right about, because of traps. Unless he bets too hard on there not being a vigilante left in the endgame.

I think it's the case that if Sammy kills regirock tomorrow and Sammy manages to look like at least like less sketchy of a lynch target than m2w, then mafia win, because Pravina and Jackie both die and then Sammy can publicly kill one of mnjy or Tuan (and he even has a slaughter he can spare on mnjy). Tuan presumably won't be able to tase him first, and setting up a favorable tiebreak tonight is easy if m2w gets lynched.

However, town has some pretty smart cookies lurking in it, and correctly hitting the vigilante is not all that likely. If regirock lives until day 4, then Sammy probably has to tase regirock, otherwise town will likely win with how few options regirock will have for people to shank.

I think game could definitely go either way at this point.

(On agrebe's and lukesci's deaths)
Jackie: "gosh it's gonna be embarrassing if the answer is just that Lucy made both kills"

Wow it seems like town kind of snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Also did not guess regirock vigilante. I guess she didn't get to do too much due to being sick. :/ If she manages to kill sammy town would still win.. but if anyone she'd probably go for mollie? in which case she'd still get out-voted cause she voted for herself yesterday (rip).

For those wondering what the heck I was up to all game, particularly with the townie plot:

Day 1 - sick and lazy. Texting with agrebe a bit.

Day 2 - my Gay Knight partner agrebe died. Pravina and I interviewed witnesses at his kill site who implicated Lucy but seemed prepped. Guessing Lucy seemed kinda useless because she was already on the execution block, and also it wouldn't make much sense for her to have made both kills. I considered lying about my mayoral investigation and actually spending it to narrow things down on my partner, but I figured it was more important to make sure Pravina was on our side so I did. Then I revealed to her and we teamed up to try to figure out who killed agrebe with our combined powers. (We "proved" possibly with some holes that mafia would lose if they conscripted pravinas; I'll post that soon.) We asked others to reveal so we could avoid wasting investigations on innocents and save them for later in the day.

Day 3 - pravinas and I did more plotting. Investigations + IC mnjy meant everyone except pravinas, me, Lucy, and sammyluo was clear for agrebe's death, and sammyluo seemed pretty sketchy, so I GK guessed him but was wrong. ;( I figured Lucy must have done both, implying that either she used a trap (unlikely, but if it happened, sorta pointed to Sammy) or was a conscripted SK/vigilante (more likely in my thoughts). There was also a weird edge case where m2w killed agrebe and was lone mafia and conscripted regirock after my mafia count day 3 to investigate and lie for her, but that seemed dumb enough to ignore. All this is on the Pravina-is-good assumption of course. Anyway, I told Pravina I was going back to being a sick lump, having used up all my potentially useful powers, and good luck, and if I had to guess on the remaining mafia it'd be sammy. About 40 minutes later Mollie came in, and Sammy froze me and killed me in front of her.

Day 4 - zombie resurrection as Sammy's body double (reminds me of him killing me in Alex's game when I became his friendly ghostly helper - <3 Sammy). Sammy/Mollie gave me instructions on what to do, which basically amounted to "tase anything that could possibly be regirock in disguise; freeze and kill mnjy if you see her; attempt to kill regirock if you get a chance but don't spend freeze on it." I think I followed these pretty well, including using freeze in my kill even though it was blatantly unnecessary. Anyway, I was pretty paranoidly on the lookout for regirock, and Mollie and I got to YOF about half an hour early (in disguises!) to make sure we could kill mnjy, which went flawlessly. Mollie is really awesome at mafia btw and I had a ton of fun being a body double aligned with her.

Also, I'm at 12 kills total now! (and 3 games being naturally evil, 1 game conscripted, 2 games with townie kill powers, 1 game body double for mafia)

The proof they shouldn't conscript pravinas, assuming she was good at the time and that she'd be unconscriptable until after she had time to make and reveal investigative results:
Case Lucy=Mafia: she'd be executed that night, and pravinas (based on receiving role info the next day only) would be able to make at most 3 kills (1 free + 1 slaughter + 1 trap) before dying of desperation... admittedly they might have been able to pull a mafia win off if there were a SK who hadn't killed yet and they voted together, we didn't think of that case where they just finished off game day 3. I think we glossed over cases where mafia could kill more than half of game in one day before pravinas died and that was a flaw.
Case Lucy=SK: then she *didn't* kill agrebe, so a mafia did. Between us we had enough investigative power (assuming she had 2 desperado investigations which turned out to be wrong but compensated by PO investigations) to figure out his killer, I could GK revenge kill, and pravinas still dies end of that day.

I stand by it being a legitimately good strategy for us all to have revealed to pravinas *if* not for that she leaked a ton of role info to me and also kind of to mafia. This honestly is the biggest drawback of all-to-one reveals imo, that the one leaks info, and it's happened in many past games. I'd like to have some stronger mechanic preventing it and am open to ideas for rules improvements.

By the way, here were my role guesses about 30 minutes before I died:
"nguyenin - investigator
m2w - vigilante (if town)
pravinas - desperado
mnjy - IC or *maybe* succubus
me + agrebe - GK
regirock - priest?
sammyluo - mafia?
Lucy - conscripted SK???
luke - GI?
ritagram - succubus?
these are getting pretty made up by the end
I guess we'll see how I did"

not bad eh? I even got ritagram (on the logic that Katie certainly would've put a succubus in game and we hadn't seen any evidence of one so they were more likely to have died early)

Amusing things:
- sammyluo killing me in front of m2w, clearly planned, after which we all started laughing awkwardly (btw sammyluo sorry I took a while to say whether I died, thinking of words I'm allowed to say is hard when I've just died)
- pravinas immediately denouncing m2w as scum in the m2w-sammyluo beef over my death, despite that my practically-dying-words to her were that sammyluo was sketchiest
- sammyluo this morning in mafia chat: ~"we can almost certainly prove a win. we just need to shovel jamb as not-GK and trap regirock to show she's not vigilante"
- mafia freaking out when I shoveled as GK, convinced that a partner was out there

This was such a fun game, for me at least, and I think basically everyone played really well. Have I mentioned I'm super impressed with Mollie? I also thought Lucy put together a really compelling defense for her innocence and seemed psychologically to be telling the truth, even if the evidence stacked against her. And Sammy as always put a ton of time into thinking out a plan for game that totally worked. Also Anthony successfully escaped Mollie; Misha was active and made a ton of smart points, etc. <3 you all.

Yeah, RIP my brief tenure as succubus... don't know what I was thinking, announcing my location with a challenge to come kill me, without any particular way of defending myself, resolving to focus on work instead of game while the perpetrator of a failed kill attempt roamed free to presumably seek success in her next attempt...
Anyway, congrats on your first kill, Mollie!

Wow. This game happened. It was a very game game.

And it... could've been so much worse? I have no idea how I survived that first lynch. After getting my phone back I ignored the "communicating with the town" situation for a couple hours because I couldn't really think about it productively, then decided on my story for sure while walking to the town hall. I guess it helps when you can claim complete ignorance of the meta.

I feel like I should apologize to agrebe, but the lesson for the future is I gotta go fast (and not trip and lose things)

also ohmygod I sat outside simmons for so long before regirock posted a contact, trying to get someone to let me in. no one did. it was so frustrating

Shoutout to Sammy for reaching the obvious conclusion and being helpful it was fun to go back and forth asking for proof on each other. ritagram as succubus probably wasn't the most exciting information I could've extorted kill info out of you for, but y'know. also thank you ritagram for providing me with something to do other than sit outside of simmons frustratedly, and for the congrats just now!

also lucy I wasn't really well integrated with the mafia team while you were still alive but it was cool and you were cool. super good defense, even if it didn't end on your side

in retrospect lol killing the dying gay knight

and I was so worried you'd be bang immune too (you could've been, but you weren't, I guess)

actually just. ET. at that moment. "oh no, what has happened in front of me, I must start start a beef" ... "CAN I POST THE BEEF NOW"

but being framed!!! framed, I say!!! made me feel so helpful lol
(see, I totes didn't do it, pravina!!! I actually can't say I'm not a murderer, but I'm a lot less of a murderer than expected. almost sad I didn't make another serial killer kill)

pravina and sammy and jackie all actually plotted circles around me whoops. shenanigans are always great, I approve. but damn that end of game

I honestly kept waiting for regirock to show during YOF. shoutout to luke for sharing a lot of awkward glances when I made sure she wasn't sneaking up on me or jackie, I'm sorry the show was great but mafia was on the line

but yeah!!! generally great game!!! everyone is great and also/especially ksedlar for writing these commentaries that I appreciated reading just now

Given that mafia should be able to kill you at any time and not just when it would be convenient for Town, I support your schedule update that resulted in your death.

Why did Mollie and Sammy beef over Jackie's kill? Like, why tell town anything true at all?

My understanding was that Mollie and Sammy would be the top suspects anyway (given that Pravina was a dying desperado and other players weren't around ET.) So, mafia imagined what the universe would look like if Mollie were bad and Sammy good, and tried to play out that universe. Mollie acting like a mafia who made the kill (by beefing Sammy after she "realized" Jackie had paranoia texted) would be much more likely to have Sammy not get lynched than just saying nothing.

I think we didn't want Sammy to look like the only suspicious one, which was likely to happen if I didn't show up at ET. Sammy was generally concerned that any kills he thought he could make were going to implicate him. So the goal was to make me look responsible/suspicious. Tiebreak votes piled up against me didn't matter, because I already had a ton of them and was going to lose a legit tie, but they could've actually impeded Sammy if tiebreak/stall scenarios showed up (not sure we were actively thinking about that at the time, but it came up later).

After I showed up at ET, Jackie paranoia texted me, and Sammy killed her, I think we just started the beef because it was a natural thing to do at the time? I did stay silent the last time someone accused me of attempted murder, but that was probably a one time only working thing and generally a bad idea. I couldn't claim this actual murder and maintain the truthfulness of my vig claim (unless I retconned myself into saying ritagram was mafia).

I'm not actually sure what part of the beef you think was unnecessary. The truthful bits that were mostly confirmed by the GM (time and location of death)? Containing Sammy in the beef (probably could've picked another townie, sure, but it wouldn't've made any sense as a beef and could have been more suspicious in the thought provoking way)? Me saying words at all (mostly because I thought it would seem weird not to, but I might have been biased to want to create a beef in a "safe environment" where losing didn't actually matter)? (You did see how laughably obvious we were about the collusion in person. Should probably git gud at acting for next game.)

... ^ yeah, what ksedlar said, basically.

Yeah so the plan was to:

1) hopefully successfully lynch tuan (which primarily required him to forget to vote, and if not could maybe be helped if there was a vote split between m2w and me)

2) if that failed, to have no votes on me (or failing that, fewer than on tuan), so that I could make two kills the next day (mnjy+someone) and win tiebreaks.

I forgot to account for remaining vig/seduced/dying GN and for extra tasers, so option 2) would've been riskier than I thought. Fortunately it didn't come to that (even though avoiding that required me to, for example, ignore tuan's message of "did jamb die?" for 6 hours).

I was pretty sure the artificial beef favored me because Mollie was known to have killed before, and Jackie's paranoia text was convenient. Also I generally psychread fairly good not-in-person, so anyone other than Jackie would probably trust me more than she did.

-------

Anyways, good game everyone! Lucy and Mollie, you were awesome teammates, and you two being there to plot with made being mafia a lot more okay! (Lucy, sorry that game was frustrating / stressful after I conscripted you :/ hope you're feeling less stressed now <3 )
zombie Jamb, you were a great and obedient body double and welled played, town! That was a close game for a long time.

Whoooo my first time not resigning as mafia

(I am feeling less stressed now, thanks My stress started before I was conscripted and some that happened after would have happened even if I wasn't conscripted.)