I know that my little twerp StragoYoshiKenBart thinks he's the star, but he's got another thing coming when/if I leave the stage. Reality will come crashing down, along with ratings. You were warned!
Don't say you weren't warned! You (sorta) killed me, and look, it's all over! Burns, you could finally have moved up in the ranks and become Number 2, and you threw it all away.
Also I'm surprised you all fell for the Maggie doll that I buried in the mud flats next to the big sign saying "dig here for body." Obviously wouldn't kill my own daughter! She was just grounded until she's 13 or so. Out after her bedtime helping daddy kill the principal? I'm flattered she wants to take after her dad and run around killing people, but Marge insisted that there be SOME punishment for that kind of behavior, so she's not leaving her room for awhile.
Pretty fun game all in all (with one exception), even if a bunch of extreme longshots somehow managed to misfire. I hope that Andy isn't mad. I should preface this retrospective first with a bit of Mafia philosophy: the goal is to
win the game, not survive the longest. It's easy to apply when you're town - if you're a cop, reveal your data at some point even if you'll die for sure the next night - but somewhat trickier as Mafia. As the Godfather, I figured it was likely I'd be one of the last scum standing. There's no point in surviving until the last 3 / last 5 and then getting voted down there; to survive the final showdown, the mafia needs two things to happen: the cop should be dead, and you should be squeaky-clean. Like, not just "not under suspicion," but "actively towny." As a result, I resolved to basically play a straight-up town game, possibly with the only difference being steering suspicion away from my scumbuddies at opportune times. (Nothing new in this, I'm sure.) So... a short-term play for a scumfriend's survival makes no sense. It might save them for one round, but I wanted to have an impeccable record of opposing townie lynches and (eventually) supporting scum lynches to make me less likely to be lynched at the end.
Well, that was the plan, at least.
Okay.
Day 1: Okay, this is the one exception mentioned above. I had no idea that a mere one-hour extension request would get turned down. The scheduling ended up being profoundly bad here, as I missed the entire second half of Day 1. If Day 1 had been 72 hours (like apparently will be true for Pokemon mafia), it wouldn't have been so bad, but I ended up only contributing on the mostly worthless first half. And I was unable to affect the situation until we were in SD. General maintenance request for future GMs: Yes, scheduling is important and all, but.... this kind of thing should be avoided.
Of course, the biggest change in hypothetical better-for-scum Day 1 wasn't actually my play, but Meeple's. In retrospect, the fake copclaim needed to be earlier (or at the same time with the extension). The extension would have given us time for Carthrat to switch his vote (which happened before 7:00), but so would copclaiming earlier, I suppose. I probably would have been willing to jump on the anti-Xanth train as well if we'd wanted to avoid having to fake copclaim, but there was no time.
As for my play? Well the Bardiche mistake was a legitimate, SnowFire mistake. I'm not sure why El Cid and some others thought things like accidentally voting Bardiche was scummy (the lurker-hunting idea in general, perhaps), especially when I instantly reversed myself. I dunno, I don't really see comments like that can even potentially be part of some DARK SCUM PLOT. That was me being blind. (Same with failing to notice Delta's vote against Excal on Day 3, too.)
Why didn't I hammer Xanth? Meeple had already copclaimed and Xanth had already fallen on his sword, with Alex offering to hammer. Somebody hammering a copclaim? What are the odds of that? What could possibly go wrong?
Oh.
That.
(Tough rules call, I admit. Really no good answers for that one. Though I'd have picked the "retroactively grant an extension not in sudden death anymore" one, obviously, which is why I was trying to switch the lynch at all.)
It wasn't a total disaster since neither Andrew nor I were on the Xanth train and we got some minor cred for that, but argh. I will say that my response ended up being the same as Townie SF - I really wouldn't have bought the anti-Xanth case as a townie, so to thine own heart be true.
Also, Xanth's reluctance to roleclaim told me at least that he had a role he couldn't reveal for some reason. The biggest of these would be Miller and Bulletproof. Either way, I wanted to leave Xanth alive, so he dropped way down on the "to kill" list. (In retrospect it makes total sense that Xanth would want to save that ability, too.)
Another comment: a bit of a metagaming, but I was expecting far higher roles than there were. My original PM said Meeple was vanilla, then in IRC Sopko mentioned how he used to be a slowcop but got upgraded to a rolecop. I figured that there had to be, at the very least, a cop or a doctor. Maybe both.
Bardiche was first on the Meeple train and was being complimented by people, and we didn't really have any read on where power roles might be.
Day 2:
Things went better today. I was pleasantly surprised that Alex and Xanth nearly called me confirmed townie. And... better to find out about the masons sooner rather than later. Unfortunate that Andy didn't return in time to recast his vote and thus look townier, but I can guarantee that this was a coincidental issue - he did make it back, but mentioned to scumchat that he was completely zonked from the day.
Also, I suppose it would have been better for scum for a dual Excal lynch - Ryogo modkill, but meh to modkills, so I'm glad things happened as they did.
Why kill Sir Alex? El Cid was somewhat on point when he thought that a newbie might have taken Alex to be a weak copclaim. It's not quite that - both Andy and I thought he was a mason - but it didn't matter. I had no confidence in making a case against the Alex / Tom combination (i.e. they're mafia pretending to be masons) and figured it was likely for the cop to investigate them if we left them alive. So we had to kill one of them off, and Alex was
potentially the cop trying to slide under the radar as a mason. Best to play it safe.
Day 3:
First off, very nice work Yoshi. I realized as soon as I wrote the Andy piece that I'd been a bit too defensive of him, and you hit on that well. Picked up what was going on completely. Then for some reason people started suspecting you for the same reason people suspected me on Day 1- meaningless minor mistakes. I... wouldn't have bought that at all as a townie (hence my excuse of "gut" to vote you.)
But what a late-day disaster for scum. Partially my fault, I will admit. I framed the discussion fairly well, I thought - the logic that El Cid hit on made sense. Xanth thought that one of Yoshi or Andy was scum, so I initially favored an Excal lynch at first to drag things out. However I got greedy in the morning as I saw the Yoshi lynch gain steam. Excal had already claimed vanilla, but I had no read on Yoshi's roleiness. If I pushed Yoshi's lynch, he might feel obligated to roleclaim, even if Excal eventually died. It was 4-3 Yoshi-Excal when I left, with Yoshi yet to cast a vote - so 4-4. What could go wrong?
Amusingly enough, I actually was back for a bit around noon when I saw things moving toward sudden death. I had returned because I figured that either Excal or Yoshiken would be dead, and I would confirm who looked the most cop-like as to kill in the night. And... things still looked okay! Yoshiken, citing self-preservation, could have hammered Excal. Instead he boldly stuck to his guns. Wow. Andy needed to get back, hammer Excal, then be lynched the next day (well, really shot by Xanth (?), but I didn't know that)... but he didn't make it back in time. And if I stepped forward to confirm Yoshi's theory by "protecting" Andy and hammering a townie.... yeah that would get me killed in the later rounds after Andy flipped. So many things could have lynched someone else - but ack. And Yoshi instantly nigh-proves himself a townie, too.
The plan had been that I'd turn on Andy to prove my towniness either Day 4, or, if people were more pro-Andy, Day 5. Then coast on that. Well... there goes that, as Yoshi / Xanth / El Cid collect the credit.
Why'd I ax Carthrat? Yeah, hunting for power roles, pretty much. The worst possible case is the cop revealing himself and saying "J'accuse, lynch one of us and see the flip!," and letting that happen would be suicide. Alternatively there was a doc sitting on Tom. Alternatively both of these were true. So yeah. I almost shot Deltaflyer because Carthrat had spoken up in favor of Andy, but Andy just got lynched, so I suppose that wasn't an issue anymore. And... at this point, I was absolutely certain El Cid was vanilla, so that left only Delta & Carth of unknown role.
Day 4:
Collect Excal lynch, curse my bad luck, prepare for the bitter end. Still, my other shot target would have been Delta, so it's not like the dual kill was that bad. And it was cute, at least!
Xanth needed to die for catching on to my game, and the fact that he was possibly lying about having only one shot. He was about as cleared as Tom after he revealed his breadcrumbs anyway. And no, I wasn't bulletproof when doing a nightkill, so you could have shot me toward the end, I believe.
Day 5
Pull an Excal's Day 4, because that's the townie thing to do, hope that people freak out and have bad vibes or something. Good on town for discipline to ignore that, plus eventually putting the pieces together that Day 1 wasn't nearly as Day1y as it looked.
Had we lynched Delta... I'd have shot Tom, of course (now knowing there were no docs), and prayed Yoshi bought my "El Cid is an evil genius" theory. Which likely would have worked, actually, had it been true, so somebody should definitely try that sometime and actively lynch all their buddies.
Well, that's my story at least. Good game; events like Day 1 and Day 3's finale are pretty darn rare, so it's fun to see how they turn out.
