Live Action Mafia

Okay, so I need to input the spell secrets at some point, but Jackie is doing so many things! She's maybe pretending to be a monk who took a vow of silence, in order to excuse her 1-syllable limit, though she had briefly considered claiming she was playing the game of 4. She made a group chat with Pesto and Jason, both in non-town factions (though Pesto is basically half-town), but then they added m2w, so there's actually a real townie. She has also separately been trying to start plots with Sammy.

I've had to add so many lines to the zombie doc in order to answer her questions about stuff...

So I've nearly lost track of all the people trying to form their own "mafia" groups this game. Jackie and Pesto are in two different "mafia" chats, one with rusch and sammyluo, and one with jasonye and m2w. Then there are some counter-mafia groups, with at least one at ET and one on Floor Pi. And there's a frosh chat.

Rusch admitted to being a zombie in his "mafia" chat. Lucky for him there were no undead hunters in it. There is Jackie though, who was thinking of getting in contact with him, but not sure.

Jasonye is getting a great head start on finding out rumors. He admitted to being in the Secret Cult in his "mafia" chat, but didn't mention the part about wanting to kill people. He also didn't mention the part about being lizardmen who turn their convert into a lizardman too.

Jackie and rusch both seem to be working on ways to bite people without making too many new zombies, because they don't want too much competition for food. So IDK how much of a zombie apocalypse will actually happen. I guess if they don't know about undead hunters, they might not be thinking about the fact that more zombies = more targets for undead hunters that aren't them. Though it's true in general that zombies do want to be at least somewhat careful about spreading too fast.

So, apparently Adam heard from Mollie that Jason was a lizardman. IDK how this got out so quickly. Also, apparently Jason revealed the "Secret Slaughter" spell to a group. I'm skeptical that this is good strategy. In particular, the Cult of Secrets is the closest thing this game has to the mafia.

I had initially thought that the sorcerers were really strong, based on all the groups Pesto was getting into, but the wizards have figured out the trick of combining "blood to mana" and "heal" to get lots of mana profit. Though if Pesto works with Jackie, he can just use "mana fangs" on her repeatedly to get lots of mana as well. Also, turning the opposing wizards into zombies is quite strong.

Oh, but literally as I typed this, rusch sent me the pm "The Mage Competition is rather interesting so far. I'm roughly allied with Jack, and then also in an alliance with his enemy Pesto, but telling Jack almost everything, and now "pretending" to be infiltrating Jack's mafia.

I'll probably get kaboomed." So if rusch is actually working with Jack, then zombifying the sorcerers is a possibility too.

The secret cult don't seem to be plotting anything in particular yet. I mean, Jason has been talking with a bunch of people and flinging rumors everywhere, but they don't seem to be thinking that much about kills yet. I guess if they want to buy conscription right away, that makes sense. But kill are fun... And they let lzahray / cmcclena actually have something to do.

Margarita is almost explicitly incentivized not to kill day 1, because she wants parity to be 2, 4, 6 rather than 1, 3, 5, 7. Unless she's killing non-humans, that is.

Well, there will probably at least be bites today.

In particular, it's worrying that boof hasn't said anything in the Secret Cult hideout so far. Her "Knowledge is Power" spell is great at getting extra mana, especially with all the rumors Jason has been learning. If the secret cult meet up and use "knowledge is power" a few times, they can definitely get enough mana to use "secret scales" conscription as of today. Jason knows an extra 6 rumors and a secret, which is 4.5 mana worth of value.

Jackie has determined she wants Pravi dead, because Pravi wants to kill undead. She also wants to zombify gurev for Pesto's sake and to stop him from interfering in their plots. However, she doesn't have a good chance to bite him today. But tomorrow Tetazoo will be a mana spire, so she could probably get him then. TBH though, as much as I root for Jackie, it seems like gurev and Isha have a great thing going on, and I kind of want to see it proceed.

Lotta and Corwind tag-team silenced and bit Sammy. Corwind plans to bite and sire him later today. This seems pretty good for the vampires. "Shrieking Death" is probably even stronger, because vampires can make up one of the HP lost from it. Also, Sammy will probably have full incentive to activate "Desperate Measures" on day 5, since he naturally gets 0 points for being alive at the end of the game (and only had direct incentive in the form of "2 points per human alive at the end of the game.")

Hopefully Sammy doesn't get bitten by someone else before an hour from now though; that would be sad.

It's interesting looking at the lines of reasoning people are using for determining towniness. Linus has determined that either Anthony or Josh (not sure who he's talking about) is town, due to spell overlap. Which is probably a decent heuristic, although there's actually quite a lot of variety among the town. I just made a 3-researcher stack for the sake of preventing a total zombie apocalypse.

Mollie is arguing against Jackie's (made up) claim that Pravi is sketchy, because Pravi can use heal. This is also pretty legit reasoning. To be fair, the serial killer has "regeneration" as a spell, but she's a town serial killer.

I wonder how long it will take for people to realize what the different colors do? Probably the toughest color to categorize is blue, because it's sort of the grab bag for things that aren't directly damaging, but are often nosy / mischievous / misleading.

Woo, in class Live Action Mafia game tradition, Sammy is the first person to no longer count as "a human alive at the end of the game."

Unfortunately, he still can't talk about game. Though he can gesture / draw pictures if he wants! I love that loophole. I was briefly worried about a silenced person searching a picture of their attacker and just pointing at it, but then I realized I can call that electronic evidence, and just force people to charades/pictionary hilariously.

Wow, Linus used "research" on Jackie with the guess of "zombie." That seems pretty strong. He learned that zombies can't use spells or items and that they can't vote. The question is, will he push for her lynch? Will I have the execution methods sorted out by then? Will I regret ever putting in a "write-in answer" section? Will Jackie bite someone before that? (probably) Will Pravi be able to kill her with "righteous justice" before that (probably not, due to lack of mana)? Will the undead hunters *not* want her lynched in order to kill her themselves? (They should, except maybe Pravi if she expects a high enough "lack of humans alive" as a result of Jackie.)

I don't know who made this up, but it's pretty funny. Probably town will eventually figure out that in their "survival horror" themed game, zombies are bad. I'll be sad if they don't. Though I do kind of want Jackie to live for more shenanigan potential, and so that Jakob and Adam aren't just sad, zombie-less necromancers.

I totally forgot that giving a commanded undead an item was pretty OP for necromancers. On the other hand, I wanted necromantic command to only have a visible effect on zombies/vampires, but I didn't want the incanter to have to ask the target if they were a zombie/vampire, so I made it "you need to get the secret from the GM," but I forgot to tell necromancers "tell the target to wait to get a secret from the GM." Hopefully they balance out for Adam? I guess this is a worse result for Lotta, but even without the incant result, Lotta could probably guess that claiming python was sketchy would make him claim she was sketchy, so I think this is an okay result for Lotta.

So Adam realized that he could teach vampires the "necromantic command," which might make my GM work way harder. And be incredibly good for the vampires. Game is going to be hilarious if there a bunch of vampires commanding zombies. Also, commands from different people stack.

Relatedly, Sammy is in the chat that knows that rusch is a zombie.

Hmm, if the cult converts someone who is turning into a zombie into a lizardman (either bitten earlier that day or zombified), do they stop turning into a zombie? I think no??? It's sad for the secret cult, but I think that's what's most consistent with my rulings.

Okay, it seems like people with the ways of generating more mana have all been pretty successful at getting a lot out of the methods:
- gurev and ixa have set up a "blood to mana" / "heal" combo to get lots of mana. Gurev is also going to teach the spell to Isha, plus Jade and Natasha, who will be helping the wizards. So hopefully the wizards aren't *totally* screwed when gurev turns into a zombie.
- achester and jasonye both have been biting zombie Jackie to get value out of "mana fangs" without the health loss
- jasonye and soon maybe boof have been using "knowledge is power" on the secrets that they have learned from "teach spell"

Also, I had initially forgotten to put a "times per day" limit on "knowledge is power." But I fixed it now. 4 is still a higher limit than either of the other mana-generating spells though, because it has the "unique rumor/secret" limit, and because I designed it expecting fewer secrets to be put in, vs rumors put in.

Okay, so zombies are being surprisingly contained. Namely, since gurev was turned into a vampire, there won't be any new zombies tomorrow. It turns out that "turning into a vampire first" is a pretty good way to avoid turning into a zombie and losing wizard goals. The other vampires just drank all of the infected blood right out of him, and it of course has no effect on them, lol.

On the other hand, vampirism is spreading surprisingly quickly. Though maybe less so if secret cult does, in fact, kaboom gurev? Though that might not happen if the vampires first sire Josh, who is now a lizardman, turning him into a vampire lizard.

In other news, I am really glad I reduced vampires' bites to 2x per day, rather than 3x per day. That would have been busted.

So the undead hunters are particularly sad right now, in terms of both Pravi being dead and in terms of likelihood of getting things done. Also, ritagram is kind of hosed and says that she doesn't want to kill a townie, but also "I don't really want to disrupt the zombie/vampire neutrality town seems to have going, but I don't think "bang" is enough to kill anything more threatening... ", so she is not using her kill. I was hoping to see cool Margarita kills given the flavortext of doing it to protect her children. Of course, not killing is actually totally fine for her, given that her "blackmailer" is actually just a series of prewritten messages representing a semi-sentient artifact trying to threaten her into sating its bloodlust.

Fun fact: Everyone in town is kind of a gay knight. By which I mean all townies have some loved one who cares about them being alive. To be fair, vampires and undead hunters also have this, along with exactly one of the secret cultists, but "not having a loved one" is certainly a significant tip-off for someone being a necromancer, zombie, or a lizardman. This notably means that town is somewhat better at avoiding bad lynches (e.g. brunnerj defended fischerj pretty hard yesterday, possibly being the entire reason she didn't get lynched). Of course, it's also fairly reasonable for town not to announce all of this, in case there exist spells that target relationships as a weakness, e.g. Silence.

In other news, the rate of humans alive at the end of game has been decreasing, but actually not that quickly. For the record, here's what's happening so far:
1. Sammy was sired.
2. Gurev (a zombie to be) and Ixa were sired. Josh was converted to the cult (keeping his town goals on top of that though). Pravi and dylanhen were killed.
3. None so far
4. Linus and Pesto will turn into zombies.
5. Fischerj will turn into a zombie.

Also, in other news, Jackie has been publicly a zombie for like 1.5 days now... Also, she half-lives (lol puns) at Random, where both of the undead hunters are, they know exactly how to kill her (i.e. bang, headshot), and they have the mana to use Righteous Justice on her. I have no idea why they haven't done so. Or how people were convinced to not lynch Jackie by guillotine yesterday...

Lotta is also known to be a vampire to a decent chunk of ET, but people seem to mostly have forgotten this? In particular, no one has further brought up Adam using "necromantic command" on Lotta, and thus the fact that she's probably the person he stashed his phylactery with.

Adam (like everyone) is known to be kaboomable, but I guess Jason doesn't have particular issues with him, and Margarita was being guided by Pesto (who wants Adam to command future-zombie Pesto into following current-Pesto's goals), I guess none of the kabooms so far hit him.

Relatedly, all kills so far have been kabooms, wow.

Lucy and Lotta are both plotting to kill one another. Lotta was initially planning on bite-mobbing Lucy today with Sammy and Isha, but the vampires might end up waiting until tomorrow instead, to have corwind kaboom Lucy. Lucy is also planning to use kaboom on Lotta, which will also blow up Adam's phylactery, instantly killing him as well.

So, my understanding is that Jason is coordinating mass vampire murder for the following reasons:
- His secret cult goals get him more points than vampire goals; in particular, a secret cultist killing someone is worth 7 points, whereas a dead undead hunter is 5 points.
- Killing vampires allows the Secret Cult to claim the kills are "vigilante" kills and prevent town from investigating / wanting to lynch the killers.
- Josh, the converted secret cultist in the whole chat planning these kills, cares about humans being alive (though he still gets 5 points every time the cult kills a human), and having the Secret Cult all on the same page is more helpful.
- Jason doesn't have specific motivation for keeping the other vampires alive, because he doesn't realize that they're making useful progress at finding the identities of the undead hunters. In particular, Lotta dying makes it a lot harder for Jason to get points for the undead hunters being dead.

The vampires, while they realize that Jason is sketchy and has some sort of lizardman goals, don't realize the extent to which he values them over vampire ones / how much more easily achievable they are over vampire ones.

In other news, Adam has finally moved onto thinking Jakob is the most likely candidate for being the other necromancer, as he has seen no sign whatsover of the other necromancer doing stuff in game, and Jakob is the only player who hasn't done anything all game. Though Jakob finally looked at his role today, and expressed great sadness about the fact that he was too hosed to be playing mafia (it's tech week), because it looked like he had a really fun role.

So it wasn't publicly known, but there was a pretty amusing series of events earlier.
- The secret cult planned to kill Lotta
- One of Josh/Jason (not sure) told Jackie that Lotta was going to be killed
- Jackie told Adam this, and reported back to Josh/Jason that they maybe shouldn't make the kill, but definitely shouldn't use kaboom because Lotta had an item, and one of them told Lucy.
- Adam told Lotta that she was a kill target.
- Jackie told Adam to not tell Lotta this.
- Lotta told Sammy, David, and Casey that she was a kill target.
- Lotta discovered Lucy lurking outside Walker (without Lucy seeing her), and determined that Lucy was there to kill her (particularly from thinking that Lucy was the one to kill gurev earlier).
- Lotta told the vampire chat this, aiming to get Ixa to come over so they could both bite Lucy and get her down to 1 HP so she couldn't cast spells.
- Jason told the lizard chat that Lucy had been discovered.
- Lotta informed the vampire chat of her location and Lucy's location in order to meet up with Ixa
- Jason informed the lizard chat of Lotta's location and the fact Ixa was there.
- Ksedlar imagined Yakity Sax music playing in the background.
- Things concluded when the test started and Lucy had to go away
- After the test, something happened where I think Jason lured Lotta to where Lucy was while pretending Lucy was frozen, Lotta bit Lucy, and Lucy killed Lotta.
- Lucy got the phylactery, not knowing what it was, and noticing it has "pm the gods if you want to destroy this"
- Lucy asked the lizard chat if she should destroy it, and Josh said not to do anything with it yet
- Lucy pondered if it was python's phylactery
- Jason pondered if destroying it would give them credit for the kill, saying "probably," but that they should save it
- Josh confirmed that python was a useful ally and to please not destroy it

Also, I knew that Josh was definitely having a significant influence on game, but I think he's calling the shots even more than I had thought. Namely, he is explicitly using python as a way to no-lynch as much as possible, leaving more non-humans alive for the Secret Cult to kill (thus maximizing both his town goals and his secret cult goals).

Margarita also suspects that her item (the Assassin's Wand) is a phylactery. This is not technically accurate, but to be fair, it's a pretty good guess. At the very least, the Assassin's Wand is a powerful, cursed, evil artifact that questionably has some sort of soul stuck in it. Given that Pesto bit Margarita after turning into a zombie today, Margarita has today and tomorrow before turning into a zombie herself. So she'll either want to pass the Assassin's Wand onto someone she trusts (maybe biolife?) or just destroy it. If it were to get into the hands of the Secret Cult (especially if they could learn fire bolt or hellfire blast), all of town would get massacred.

Cmcclena posted such a great question with the "vig kills" post. Relevantly, all of the "vig kills" have basically been the mafia going after acceptable targets first. But no one seems to actually have a good explanation for her (maybe because she's right).

I love Sammy's melodramatic rant in Day 4 Death 3 about having a vampiric lover.

I'm pretty unconvinced that killing all his vampire allies was the optimal thing for Jason to do, in terms of maximizing the number of kills the lizard mafia can make. The vampires were totally willing to work with Jason, and probably also cool with him going around killing people, and probably would have been cool leaving all the actual kills to the lizards and just transferring mana to make more happen. They could have even provided more kills for Jason in the form of bite-mobs where Jason gets the last bite. So assuming that the Secret Cult's current rate is less than "everyone in game," working with the vampires would have increased that rate.

Though killing humans would have been sketchier, having vamp allies to cover him would have mitigated a lot of this (in particular, town might lynch you even for making "vig" kills; your vampire buddies won't). It's also the case that while Josh prefers killing undead over killing humans, killing more people total is even better for him. So there wouldn't have been an issue there.

Finally, in terms of non-kill points, keeping the vampires alive is better. It might actually help him locate undead hunters, you know? Even though that's a relatively small fraction of Jason's points. And having allies means it's a lot easier to learn rumors too.

To be clear, Jason definitely *is* working towards his goals; he is racking up huge numbers of points. He just has an extremely high maximum number of points he can earn, and I think he could be slightly more efficient. I think mostly he planned on killing acceptable targets (undead) first, then became a vampire, and didn't see a strong enough reason to switch from his initial strategy.

I hope Margarita isn't going too OOG-insane from the messages I'm sending her (on behalf of the Assassin's Wand). Like, flavorwise the Assassin's Wand is kind of supposed to drive its wielder insane, but that's hopefully confined enough to being in-game? When it was getting close to day end and it looked like Margarita wouldn't be able to kill in time, Margarita was considering kabooming herself just to be able to destroy the wand (which she thinks is a phylactery). Though this would be appropriate flavorwise (evil artifact driving its wielder to suicide), this would definitely make me OOG sad for Margarita.

I do kind of want to see Margarita kill the lizardmen (who were responsible for her children's deaths), because that would be cool.

I'm amused at the number of instances of people being warned that someone is planning to kill them. First Lotta being warned, then Jason being warned.

So here is the following stroke of irony:
- ritagram went 2 days without killing, so the Assassin's Wand threatened to kill her last child (biolife) today
- completely independently, chiller decided to kill biolife, for no reason
- ritagram will stop getting anonymous messages tonight; this might look like chiller was the blackmailer or something, but actually, it's because she will turn into a zombie, and thus the wand will lose its connection with her mind

Jason just kaboomed Luke literally in front of Lisa. Not sure if he remembered that Lisa was playing...