Right, and now a serious introduction.
I don't like how stalely this has started. I realise that we have this great big impasse of new players here being wary of the established players on account of feeling that there is a disadvantage when playing with no information against people who have some data in mind from past games, and established players are in turn suspicious of new players as they have no information on us, and we could easily gain a psychological advantage by reading some of your old games, especially when we could, so far as you know, have built sizeable profiles on each other from #gg or who knows where else. This is all meta-gaming, I know, but that's nearly all we have at the moment and it's an invisible wall that's stopping us from getting anywhere. Maybe we're all just anti-social or lazy instead, who cares, it's all the same in this position.
Even I immediately took the position of 'wait and see' to try and get a better grasp on what's going on, and out of not wanting to commit anything to this when it could easily just go up in smoke without getting anywhere. The problem with this is that when everyone decides to wait and see we wait an awful lot and see nothing much. In this case, I think it's much better to stimulate discussion of both the serious kind (to keep the game progressing) and the less serious kind (to at least try and have some fun, especially when we seriously need to break some ice around here) and to have at least have seen a fair amount regardless of how long it is before death knocks on one's door.
Being more cynical of my position, yes this is clearly an appeal on my part to look good. With the last post and this one I want to make an impression that I'm someone who's not a terrible bore to play with whilst also making the point that I'm not a brainless moron who likes to RP but not to G, nor a goit pretending to be such in order to be underestimated or something. Forget the layers of displaying to the established players that I'm just like them and understand what's going on here and so shouldn't just be arbitrarily tossed out of their territory as a clueless outsider, forget the other layers of trying to build links to other newer players as well, at its heart this is a plea trying to convince people that on any given day that I should still be here this time tomorrow and, at the very least, that arbitrary decisions should land in my favour (or, rather, not against it).
More relevant to the game, the immediate suspicion that should flag up in people's heads should be the fact that I am spending quite a lot of effort here doing so far what seems to be little other than trying to dig my own grave as quickly as possible. With this much effort I surely must have an interesting role, right? Right? Well great, with that thought in mind at best I'd be granted reprieve for the first day phase, at which point the mafia kill me at night if I'm not a mafioso, and the town strings me up in the second day phase if I survive, assuming that if I've survived the night then I must be mafia. Flawless game play, well done Xanth. With that in mind I would like to attempt to reduce those odds by pointing out that my only motivation behind this effort is that I wanted to make sure this game turned out fun and it was growing ever more likely that it wasn't going to happen if I didn't make it happen. I'm the sort to put a lot of effort into something that grabs my interest, but I'm going to jump off of this meta-gaming thread before it goes anywhere for obvious reasons, but at least consider the fact that I did instinctively start by playing with my cards close to my chest rather than just fly out with all of this, although I have nothing to prove that I didn't deliberately orchestrate the first post to be followed later by these two posts other than that would have been retarded.
In any case, I'm a) going to claim that I'm vanilla in this game, and b) dance with meta-gaming danger by saying that my favourite kind of victory is that attained whilst being a simple townsman. Not that it matters when general trends show that a lot of people get more active when they have roles, but just for the record.
Now that I've quite finished my campaign to get myself lynched (it's an odd place to get discussion started, I know, but I'm now hoping to have until at least day 2 before I have to start worrying about it coming back to me again), I should probably discuss the rest of the game.
Silver is little more than an instinctive vote. It's a stupid level to vote on, but as of this point there's not been nearly enough from most of the game to form much of an opinion. Based on the little information I have up to that point, he sticks out from carrying on the 'silly' votes into the start of a wagon that might actually work if things went on so quietly, especially with EvilTom around to take the blame should that become an issue. No, I don't hold too much weight on that and will have few qualms in changing my vote after some dialogue actually gets rolling, but I'm going with my gut, and it's impressive enough that it has something to go for when there were only crumbs at the time.
Oh, go figure that there have been posts between my second one and this one. I think I'll respond to those separately, but these two posts are supposed to form a pair. It just wouldn't have read well to have my stupid storytelling right next to this diatribe. The same goes for the future - if the last post you see of mine is some mindless gibberish about cross-dressing, assume there's going to be another more legible post after it, possibly discussing the psychology of cross-dressing in mafia.
