Le sigh. For what it's worth, I actually had a good deal of fun figuring out how to communicate through my restriction. Kept a Word file of anything and everything other people said that could be remotely useful, categorized (opening, ending, transition, response, player-specific material, roleclaim-relevant for when the time came, etc). Andy's restriction was a godsend here, since it provided me with lots of fodder for straightforward responses--I was functionally unable to use people writing in paragraph form because for a long time I had no way to make it clear which part of the paragraph I wanted to draw attention to (adding bold or italics would've got me modkilled--this was the additional restriction I mentioned when Shale asked. Tried to explain it day three, but I dunno if anyone caught it). This forced me to reread the topic obsessively, which I'm normally quite lazy about doing, with the weird result that I was much more talkative and analytical than usual. This may be the first game I've played that didn't see me constantly getting nudged to talk more, and I was frickin' mute. Hah. Also, I'm so very glad Rat didn't kill me for the vote/unvote thing. I had no way to confirm *anything* people asked me before I came up with that. Had the player base been just a little different, I would've been screwed.
As for the investigation targets...I investigated Shale because he was both more verbose and aggressive than I'm used to seeing him be, and because I (like Corwin) had to be a little skeptical of someone being so helpful to me (even if his stated reasons for doing so were sound). Sadly, I didn't think to apply the latter logic to Yakko.
I investigated Andrew because of the similarity between his restriction and Tonfa's "restriction," yes. I figured it was possible one of them was scum and had cooked up a fake restriction before the other posted, not realizing what they'd thought up was perilously close to a townie's real restriction. Andy posted before Tonfa did on day one, hence why I went with him. Right idea, wrong target. Turns out Tonfa was just lazy!
Excal investigation happened because I figured he was going to be the topic du jour on day four, and in the event that he was town I could shut down a mislynch with a roleclaim. I was going to roleclaim on day four anyway, which would've cleared Andy as well had people believed me--I figured people wouldn't have too much trouble believing a power role was tied to such a horrible restriction (apparently I was right about this, since the scum rolecopped me). I was pretty much under no suspicion at all in this game (for the first time ever!), which would've helped.
And yeah, my last post was just a theory, something I thought plausible if Tom did turn out to be scum. When I got nightkilled, I had the horrible suspicion that people were going to infer that my arguments had been driven by investigation results the next day--which is pretty much what happened. So I wound up being in the awful situation of watching the person I'd suspected most the whole game be the only person on the right track and get mislynched. >.< I was hoping people would turn on Tonfa for starting the fallacious day three lynch train, but alas.
Setup might've favored scum, but I gotta say that Town fucked up hardcore here. LAL was really all we needed to go by to get 2/3 scum. I knew this and ignored it. For my own part, I didn't investigate the person I suspected most for his bad arguments...granted, lumping all the people with rough restrictions together and saying "these people look scummy?" What did you think was going to happen there, Cor? It looked to me like scum trying to set up an easy bus for someone who couldn't effectively respond. Beyond simple OMGUS, I had a helluva time communicating through my restriction as it was; seeing someone try to exploit that for an easy lynch? Hell no. I stand by the investigations I did make, though. There were too many people I wanted to look at and not enough time; Cor had enough mud on his face the first couple days so I decided to focus on people I found harder to read.
Main thing I learned this game? The Preview button is your friend! Also, Yakko is scum whenever he manages to convince you that he is town. Seriously, I'd pretty much written him off as being a townie by day three--in the back of my mind was FFT Mafia and how dangerous it could be to make that assumption, yeah, but there were more pressing issues by that point.
