Wall of text for the scum point of view for those who care.
Funnily enough, I cocked my game plan up horribly and only felt comfortable acting as scummy as I did by filtering in a ton of misdirection. I would've had to play completely differently if not for the mass inactivity. Apologies to Excal/Filburt for repeatedly getting in his way.
My general plan from the start was to be a town leader with just enough suspicion against him that it wouldn't turn heads that I'd still be alive, but not enough suspicion to get copped (or, in this case, tracked - practically the same thing when you're the goon on the kill). This almost worked day 1, but only Dooku took my bait and then made a terrible case out of it. Day 1 was looking fine for us in general with a few potential lynches and the low activity making it a total crapshoot (and harder to draw anything on day 2) until Haruhi hit. She shot herself in the foot somewhat by setting up this irritating and useless persona from the first few posts, as that stopped a bunch of people from reading into the incisiveness that then flowed, because Crocker fell right into that trap but only scumFilburt backed her up on that. But hey, distraction arrives in the form of Buzz, lead the wagon, collect lynch. I tend to act a little bit oddly at times like just before lynching town because it seems to throw some people's scumdars way off.
For night 1, we spent ages deliberating the pros and cons of various plans, in that we really needed Haruhi dead but were wondering whether the doctor would have seen through the veil and saw how important she was or just thought she was a bit of a nuisance. We knew that Sylvester had an active role and so was the other choice for that night kill, but decided that Haruhi was just too dangerous and that it was worth taking a risk (with the bonus that she liked me at her time of death, in case people did start reading into her thoughts deeply). Dooku was then roleblocked just in case he was the cop and went for me (as Sylvester, as much as he looked most likely to be cop, was far more likely to blow it on town), and Hank rolecopped on account of being another prominent town figure who'd probably be in for a while. Sylvester was then the plan for NK2 for obvious reasons.
I knew we were killing the star of the game, but a huge sigh of relief went around as Haruhi's kill was confirmed as day 2 started. I jumped on Crocker immediately as I was sure that someone re-reading Haruhi's case on him would pick that up, but that paranoia was a terrible screw up as I'd forgotten that Filburt had been on him yesterday and would then need an excuse to vote elsewhere, which he did by reading too much into Coop's slip up. The day 2 plan hadn't been to bus Crocker at all - it had been to address the case against him in a controlled environment and defuse the charges, eventually moving elsewhere as another distraction showed up. Trouble was, Crocker only managed to dig his hole deeper and I had no chance to get off of him, and the inactivity eventually just led it down one path. A lot of my paranoid long term plans involved having rolecop for two nights, so I got back to pointless levels of despair at that point.
For night 2 the kill basically had to come from the Crocker train as the obvious angle to push is that people on it were highly likely to be innocent and wanted the kill to highlight this more so. As the choices were me, the bulletproof, Cosgrove and Dooku, it was between the latter two. Cosgrove had been absent for ages but had returned and was showing signs of being very competent, with bonus points that he'd only observed half of the players and that the kill could look like rolefishing (not that anyone reads much into night kills, I know). Again, felt bad that we were snuffing activity from town, but that's kind of what we're supposed to do. Oh, and because Sylvester escaped the night kill again, he got the role block this time.
Day 3 was basically the time to cash in lurker points and polish my unintentional bussing for all that it was worth now that it had happened. The entire day revolved around Coop and Bender, with a side of Shaggy, which I was perfectly happy for it to do knowing that they were all town. Threw in some suspicion on Sylvester in the meantime just to make it look like I was actually trying and not just following the easy cases, but it's not like it stopped most other players. Obviously I didn't know that Bender was going to get modkilled, but I didn't know until late in day 3 that Filburt was going either (Excal had been having connection problems earlier, but didn't expect them to last so long), so I had been trying to work out my end game strategy on an expectation of five days, not four. In any case, even with Bender's modkill no one seemed to care much about non-lurkers, so Coop was just stuck there by the end.
Night 3 left me with another bucket load of worry, as the natural NK would have been Dooku (Crocker train but not bulletproof - else Hank would have been top to go), but unless Sylvester copped (still thought he was cop) my night kill we'd be hitting LYLO with too much information on the table, whereas the problem with killing Sylvester is that it only left one real lynch target - Shaggy - which I felt was far more likely to make people scratch their heads and look at me than if there had been two targets to argue over. The tipping factor was that I was still scared of a doctor (I'd been pretty confident that Bender was the doctor based on his actions, but that theory had just been shot out), and that while they may protect Dooku, they were very unlikely to protect Sylvester, so that's the way I went.
My initial plan for day 4 was to turn the one target situation into a two target one - misdirect Shaggy into voting for Dooku, see which way Hank fell and then follow him, although after putting my strength behind the Shaggy case just to keep safe-footed. Then after nothing followed we hit the plan of modkilling Shaggy without the game ending, which buggered me up a ton, but decided I may as well play on hard mode and get a lynch from the Crocker train that wasn't me, so made sure that I looked like I was munching the situation for town's benefit the most. I also felt okay about that by then anyhow, as Dooku and Hank had already had a spat, and I was sure that the poison I'd been leaking about Dooku would be enough to get Hank to vote for him over me. The most obviously stupid thing I had to do was support Dooku's Crocker vote alibi, not because it reduced my potential targets, but because I'd been so heavy-handed in painting that train as purely innocent to keep attention away from me that I'd completely failed to spot that yeah, it would have been a really simple scumDooku move in that position, and I somehow had to be consistent on that, but felt it read absolutely terribly. Also managed to get away with the fact that Crocker had spent the entirety of day 1 and most of day 2 buddying up to both me and Filburt, and some of the weird interaction between me and Filburt by shuffling it away behind the far more conspicuous Crocker-Dooku pairing, and no one really checked up on what I was saying. I didn't expect Dooku to crack and vote for Hank - it was the reverse vote that I'd spent ages working on so I would have been fine if Dooku had voted for me instead (if still suffering from a constant panic attack in the interim) - but hey, a win's a win.
Apologies to the active part of town - the complete lack of activity was terrible for all of us. Condolences to Kilga, who did absolutely nothing wrong with the set up to deserve this.
Mage: other than your later disappearance, well done, you seemed to play a whole lot better this time. As noted during the game, you could do with leading a bit more and following a little less, but admittedly this time your one case starter was against town and sticking to your guns in following my day 2 case netted scum, so who knows.
Zakeri: your day 2 insight made it look like you were going to have a scary day 3 where you either got us or would have thrown us a lot closer to lynching. You might not think so, but it was basically simply because you were the scariest looking townie from scum's perspective.
Alex: sorry man, sorry. Just wish we could have got away with not killing you.
