Was watching the Croatia-Russia game in the pub yesterday, didn't get enough sleep and not feeling too well. But here goes.
trentonlf: Yes, but his third and fourth posts he specifically says he was town before, in the first two he didn't mention anything about alignment. Why mention it unless you are trying to convey "I did this before as town so I must be town now"
My mentioning that I was town didn't come out of nothing. I specifically mentioned that because I was specifically accused by Joe of shutting down discussion being scum-indicative and didn't want my post with refusal to give names to be interpreted as such.
Ditto for random.org accusation. I even wrote in post 120
"And I was replying to the person who wrote that specifically mentioning random.org is scum-indicative: I did that in my only other game and I was town."
In both cases I mentioned I was town to refute a specific accusation ("Action X is scum-indicative"). It wasn't out of thin air: Hey look at me! I did this before when I was town - so I'm town.
Also, while everyone is going: "Hey, remember when Bookwyrm did X in flub's high school smurf game; he was mafia then. (hehehe good times), my previous game is the only one I can refer to; it's a bit sad.
ZFR: OK, since I've never played with power roles I read up on some mafia tutorials. It surprised me how for a quite a few number of them, the strategy suggests to claim early if you're town (yet no one claimed here so far). Is it because of a non-open set up so you shouldn't claim not knowing what other powerroles are there?
bler144: I ISOed your posts in this game, then looked through the QT you linked, and it made me curious so I looked at the actual game a bit. Don't tell HSL I did that though, ok?
You didn't ask this question in your previous game that I can see.
The first game seems odd in certain respects, so I'd cut you some slack in a number of areas moving to what at least appears to be a more standard closed setup, but your game had roles - [url=https://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Category:Roles_Main_Page]mason is exactly a role[/url] in much the same way that vanilla is a role.
Need to think about how/whether to proceed with this prior game/this game thing. But I can mostly see what you were trying to do in that game (admittedly, I know your alignment while reading)...
We did discuss about Masons claiming both in the game thread and amongst ourselves in private chat.
I know Mason can be a power role, but in the previous one I was one of them and I knew exactly how many of each where there. Over here I have no idea even what kind of roles to expect and how many of them
bler144: So...lay out how you think this if-then method works iyo. And how do you know which facts are facts, and which are merely gambits/feints/mistakes that others have made because they don't know what your experiment is? How do you know your hypothesis aren't built on pre-conceptions or understanding of setup that turns out not to be true? Again, don't ask about the orc bodyguard story which involved an experiment AND tunneling! Yay!
At some point, even if trying to be methodical, isn't this game more like poker where you have to choose to play the odds, and all your gambits and experiments are simply an attempt to shift the needle on said odds?
Example (off the top of my head; I'm not going to go through the QT to get the specifics): In the previous game I made a case about about trent being a scum and adalia being his buddy by noting some interactions between them: shouting at each other, accusing each other of being scum while at the same time refusing to vote each other, and trent even unvoting adalia. So for a time the duo was reading scum to me.
But it was based on the hypothesis that the interaction between trent and adalia was highly suspicious, and when trent was all of a sudden cleared from being scum, my case against adalia fell too.
Contrast that with mchack's, another mason, method who'd make his reads based on (very good) observations, but would not keep the connections. Instead he'd keep a list of top 3 scummiest players (we assumed there were 3 because 1 died) and if he noticed something scummy about someone, he'd drop the least scummy of the trio and replace him with the new candidate.
For me, I refused to give my "top 3" list because I could be even 1 or 2 or even 6 suspects, regardless of the number of actual scum. In fact the hypotheses against my most scummy players could be contradictory, but that's OK, because if one is proven true, another is automatically proven false.
Of course I can't be 100% sure of which hypotheses are true and not. Figuring that out is the poker part of the game (and in my previous game I made a terrible job of it; almost all my reads turn out to be crap; mchack did a much better job).
(And this is not saying that my method is better or anything; Let each person investigate in whatever way suits them).
littlerabbit: & How can sharing suspicions NOT be helpful to town? (I don't care if it was in another game). At the 13 votes stage, we have to point the gun somewhere.
Wait, I never said that. I said I refuse to make "top 3" lists, not sharing my suspicions/hypotheses.
elebutterfly: Also, for the record, I dislike referencing behaviour in completed games as "proof" someone is town in this one.. what's to prevent a scum player from deliberately copying their own behaviour in a game where they flipped town?
Exactly. Everyone here is intelligent enough to know that if doing X is town-indicative then they should do it. Regardless of their alignment.
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Now a little bit of something else. I almost always, based on my numerous Resistance in-person games, found that "be-friendly-to-newbs" is a sure scum tactic. Which makes me lean town on trent (though we played before; I'm I still a newbie to him?). Not sure about Joe. But bler's behaviour is firing off all the warning bells that friendly-scum adalia did in the previous one. I'm hoping it's just because he is one of the few people here who with whom I was friends outside mafia, but I can't shake that feeling.
