Yep, D1 nolynch causing us to be off-parity worked strongly in our benefit there with making it believable that mafia wouldn't target us for the NK.

Wow what a unique game set up.

Thank you so much for hosting. You did a great job!

I agree with this statement. I expect you had a lot of people talking/yelling at you after Scene's claim of copy/paste on D1. I know I had some words to say. XD

Nice game Joe and gogtrial! As for when I realized the tragic lover part was after I was lynched and scene messaged me saying he thought that was the case, I told him he was probably right but I didn't think y'all would make it to the end and needed me alive for one more day to pull it off. Nice job on averting suspicion after y'all claimed so early, if I was town and not mafia I think I would have been highly suspicious of the claim and y'all still living when it would have made more sense for y'all to have been the NK.

Thanks ZFR for hosting, I had a lot of fun!

As I said in the admin thread, I will be unavailable to play or host until after the New Year starts.

What's your idea of neutral lovers? I did think of neutral lovers, but that would have made them extremely difficult to play. An SK is hard to win as it is, and a neutral lover pair is basically a nerfed SK with a larger hit target. If any of the two players slips, it's game over for them.
An SK-lover-pair should have some advantages to overcome that nerf. Maybe (not talking about C9++ anymore) an SK-lover-pair that knows who (some of?) the mafia are. Or be investigation immune, 1-shot bulletproof or something.

Not really. In a prisoner dilemma situation, there is an advantage if neither player betrays. In a tragic-lover-with-the-ability-to-win-separately, there isn't. If I were a town lover and could win immediately by giving up my partner I'd do it without a second thought. A setup where a player has a win withing easy reach but you count on something (good sportsmanship?) for him not to choose it but to go for the more difficult win condition is just bad game design.

*****

I don't think the Lover team was that much overpowered overall. If I were doing this again, the only thing I'd change would be to exclude Godfather from being lover, but ultimately this didn't matter in this game.

As I said, they have only one life. Any mistake can be fatal. There is no bussing. It's not like a 2 player scum team, where a mistake means your partner can vote you and earn Town points for it.

They would be acting as a neutral survivor with Night Chat. They are more vulnerable (having two slots that can be killed), but they also have twice the brain power with Day Chat and they also have twice the votes of a standard survivor. Yes, both players will have to work to be read as town, but they can support each other (as you saw here, Joe dodged a lynch mostly on Gogtrial's credibility). Once you give them a factional kill, they're on the line between SK and their own Mafia team.

To my mind: If a player doesn't win with Town, then don't give them a Town alignment. That goes double for Mafia, since the Mafia expectation is that "all these people on my team are indeed on my team". Violations of this should be done cautiously and intentionally.

True, it isn't an exact fit. There is definitely an element of working together and keeping both happy until a chance to betray arises, so both lovers have to cooperate towards not letting either one have that advantage.

Also, this isn't a one-off game. Much like an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, if you gain a reputation for screwing your potential teammates, that may come back to haunt you in the future when they remember and try to screw you before you can do it again. Maybe they'll never have a chance, but the memory is there. :)

This is true; some of reaction is making use of hindsight. I think the lover should only have been a Goon, so as not to deprive Mafia of one of their PRs.

I wonder whether the lovers might have been lynched after their claim if the setup had been entirely closed.

I would have called your implementation neutral. Alignment is pretty much defined by win conditions. Without an ability to win with town/mafia, Joegtrial were already neutrals.

What's in a name? That which we call a neutral
By any other word would still be a slippery bastard;

- Wilbur Sharksburr


Also, looking at the mafia chat I'm shocked by how fine Trent seemed to be with Joe's revelation. Of course, that could have just been for Joe's benefit, maybe internally he was expecting to be betrayed.
If I was mafia I would also have been highly suspicious! Moreso perhaps, given the discovery that one of my team-mates isn't on my team.

Just read the admin thread.

-I like the chain of command addition. That alleviates one of the glaring problems from our usual way of doing things, and it gives the mafia a necessary hint that something might be wrong.

-Adalia: "I'd recommend adding a copy of the vanilla town PM in the opening post, makes it easier for mafia to fake claim if required and less likely to get caught out on format and wording.
We've had a few games where the lack of such has become an issue later in the game."

And we immediately hit a game where posting it might be an issue. XD

-Trying to figure out what to say in mod-action situations can be quite rough.

-Typically, people aren't specifically told whether their action is successful. If they are an investigative role, they'll be told their result (if they got one) or told some variation of "No Result". It becomes up to the player to determine whether their action did what they tried to do based on who is and isn't dead, etc. There are plenty of roles, like the Bus Driver, that might not block a result but does mess with the outcome; did the Doctor's patient die because the Doc was RB'd, or were there too many kills to block, or maybe the Doc's patient wasn't his patient at all.

You can do it how you like in your game, but I believe this is the default.

Heh, yeah... but without scene would almost certainly have been lynched D1, so it did serve the purpose of helping mafia fake claim, just a little too well.

I see what you all mean now.

The only reason gogtrial was "vanilla town", or "tragic" for that matter, was because the C9++ setup drew him as such. If this was a closed setup with exactly the same roles, there'd be no reason to call him such. He'd simply be a neutral lover, with access to mafia chat. Calling him a "vanilla townie tragic lover with a separate win condition" in this case would be like calling a mafia goon "townie miller with access to mafia chat and a mafia win condition".

So yes, I think "real" tragic lovers is a bad role because as I said they have no real reason to play for their common win condition. Neutral lovers (like the ones in this game for example) on the other hand can be quite fun if balanced properly (and the balancing wasn't so bad in this game).

what the? ... oh... oooh... Holy crap, great game Gogtrial + Joe!
uhm, glad to have been a distraction for you?! oh, well. never believe any claim is the lesson I guess. (well unless I do the claiming, then it's fine of course ;)

Thanks for hosting ZFR, I had loads of fun. :)

Liberation for Arstotzka!

By far my most stressful mafia game; I was quite glad to have been banned from work so I only had to be super-super tense for about 2 hours per day.

Well done vitek and HypersomniacLive for seeing right through me. Shame on you for letting gogtrial walk all over you! bahahaha.


It occured to me that me and sprimal and bookwyrm were all at the endgame of #53, which also ended a day earlier than town was expecting, but whereas that time sprimal was in the know, and I was deceivèd, this time I got you! Revenge!

Bookwyrm, sadly, has suffered it twice now. Sorry. Maybe game #56, eh?

The one thing I think I did right was deciding to claim lovers, and deceive trent. Which I still feel very bad about. Especially joining in the "For the greater evil" rallying cry. I felt proper dickish.

-Sprimal - if Trent had claimed cop and gone for me it would have looked very bad when I turned out to be a godfather... His best option would have been forcing me to nightkill myself, and then continue to do a really good job at playing mafia. He did have a tough job, but not impossible. It would have been easier if we hadn't lynched supplementscene over the first two days... sorry about that, too!


Thanks ZFR, thanks gogtrial, and thanks everybody for playing! It was loads of fun and horribly painful.

Oh, c'mon, poor sweet innocent gogtrial would never "walk all over" anyone! I'm sure there must be a very reasonable explanation, and if you'll just focus on the sleight of hand over here for a second, I'm sure you will agree that my extensive analysis will show that it was entirely your own idea that it really was all a big misunderstanding.

:D

Well Trent didn't know that, didn't I read you telling him in the scumchat that revealing your "bro" cost you your godfatherness? But yes, making you nightkill gogtrial would have been hilarious.
I don't think you can take the blame for scene's lynch though, scene basically lynched himself. ;)