Yakko: I understand why you were frustrated, yes. Not much I can say to make you happier, though. Role heavy is the name of the game, and yes, that means some traps and off-sanities here and there. The scenario that wound up occurring was indeed part of my plans, and the reason that I worded those PMs the way I did - I sure as heck didn't want the masons claiming doctor that easily, the idea was for them to be a powerful force if and only if they managed to survive and somehow trust each other. I think it was not an unreasonable trap and could have been avoided with better play - granted, mostly not on your part, you did the smart thing for the situation, but it's not an individual game and sometimes stuff happens. It is actually standard for masons to not be 100% confirmed town to each other; unless the mod explicitly says so, you should always keep the possibility of a mason traitor in mind. If you think that being masons with someone of unknown alignment is useless... well, I can only disagree, but that goes into a long debate. Your situation, like the entire game, could have very easily traveled an entirely different course.
Just as an example, things that could have worked out differently:
- Either one of the masons could have decided to ignore the warning about alignment and roleclaimed to their buddy. Least likely, and would lead to an entirely different set of possibilities, but not impossible.
- Eph, being a doctor and a mason, could have done more to keep his head off the block day 1. This would have been ideal but life sucks and sometimes you find yourself on the block day 1 for no real reason.
- Eph could have claimed doctor to Yakko in private first instead of just dropping it in the thread.
- Eph could have claimed masons and not mentioned doctor at all, rather than the other way around, and/or not claimed anything at all before seeing Captain K get vigged. A mason claim should be sufficient to keep someone alive, at least in the early game, since it's provable and testable later on. This would have been the smart play in the situation.
- Town could have considered the possibility that indeed there were two doctor masons, and/or that Yakko was scum trying to get a quick Eph lynch. The latter wouldn't have worked out so well, but in general it's a smarter idea to lynch a counterclaim first.
Similarly, on the scum side, scum had an inherent incentive to send their lone man on the kill - they didn't know who he was, and were explicitly told he had no protection against accidentally being killed by his buddies! Even barring that, Bus Driver is a very, very powerful scum role that can sow a lot of confusion and obfuscate the usefulness of many town roles. If Andrew had chosen to bus people and let Cid do the killing, scum would have had a much, much better chance at winning.
I am pretty satisfied with how the setup turned out, overall. There was still a decent element of old fashioned scum hunting, but for the most part the role game was most important and playing the role game well (or at least better than the other guys) was required for any faction to succeed.
