M 90: Shootout at the Pretty Good Corral

[brainbomb]

It meant back to Holliday. All
My posts at start of game were from tombstone - specifically by doc holliday. Not crumbs just fun

[brainbomb]

I did however try to bait the kill at eon 1 when the phase got extended. i pretended to claim I hadnt seen the flip yet but I had news

[sweetandcool]

It meant back to Holliday. All
My posts at start of game were from tombstone - specifically by doc holliday. Not crumbs just fun

Hmmm, okay.

[brainbomb]

Welp, it's Day 1. Should we kill Damo or Hamilton Brian?

Right after food voted damo balki supported the idea. On top of damo already being pretty towny im gonna say this is reinforcing the pressure and not bussing

[brainbomb]

VTs do not know if they are VT or not. This would be bad play.

In fact it is bad play whatever so ##vote sweet.

Do you think scum is more likely to make bad plays then town?

I think that it would be wise to be less reliant on this "too scummy to be scum" defense.

Sweet's did not claim PR, he claimed "I am going to play in a way that is bad for Town."

That works as a scum play only because the prevailing view around here is: "too scummy to be scum." And it is a very easy ploy. It has also allowed him to avoid talking about alignments. He just keeps telling everyone how hard his claim is.

Balki is very smart; able to fake things at a masterful depth. But scum balki has absolutely no reason to explain in the game thread - to scum rivera about why sweet is scum. Im ruling out any chance that rdr and balki and sweet are all scum here. I think this explanation would never be necessary to convince your own teammate of your reasoning.

Thoughts?

[brainbomb]

You dicks want to hound me out of the game on D1 because you don't like me in person?

I'm on the absolute cusp of asking to sub out.

you do realize the jamie wagon was CREATED and DIED last game for the same exact reasons? People who go after you ARE the ones we should be looking at because their taking an easy pot shot, but you freaking out over it is WEIRD to me because this happens to you every game, and ends the same way every game so how can you say THIS is the straw on the camel's back?

Flavius was Towning all over Page 9. Unfiltered. Solvey. Town.

This however absolutely is a free pass balki would give to a towny who was not helping town OR to a SCUM partner WHO is running OBSTRUCTION for the scumteam.

[brainbomb]

Balki
Brainbomb
Flavius
K-POP

You guys can all be in my Towntree.

Yea flav and kotp are scum here.
And then its one other person; probably Jamie.

Im independently finding reasons right and left why bunny is town; sweet is potentially town as well, damo has always been town to me, lfischl still doesnt seem like scum, and that doesnt leave a whole lot of other people.

I still wanna try to make this that one time ever I trust RHK to the end. Like I want it to be real.

[brainbomb]

If damo is scum this game id say its the best performance ive ever seen by him

[sweetandcool]

Balki
Brainbomb
Flavius
K-POP

You guys can all be in my Towntree.

Yea flav and kotp are scum here.
And then its one other person; probably Jamie.

Im independently finding reasons right and left why bunny is town; sweet is potentially town as well, damo has always been town to me, lfischl still doesnt seem like scum, and that doesnt leave a whole lot of other people.

I still wanna try to make this that one time ever I trust RHK to the end. Like I want it to be real.

Hmmm, you forgot about brainbomb here (;

[brainbomb]

Jamie,
When you think of lurkers and low participation; below what post total do you consider someone to be scummy?

If I were to vote a lurker here who do you most suspect is mafia?

It depends on the overall level of activity in any given game.

Lurking is not just low posting, it's low posting whilst also seeming to have an eye on the game.

As to question 2:
Worcej, Lfischl, maybe Eden.

Jamie tries to muddy the waters on what a lurker actually is; then takes worcej and eden who had 10 posts at this point and tries to then throw them down into the category of “lurkers we should consider”.

The addition of lfischl here and omission of chaqa and kotp and rdr demonstrates perhaps not wanting to prod people into activity. He seens kotp getting alot of townreads from vecna-myself and others and probably doesnt want to single out kotp at all. Doesnt want rdr to awaken to him. And especially doesnt want to rouse chaqa- instead choosing all game to list chaqa as his top town

[brainbomb]

Okay so im completely forgetting bozo exists also.

Ill reread that next before I assume its kotp or Jamie because bozo being scum was something ive been very against.

[BunnyGo]

OK, my thoughts on games.

Games like tic-tac-toe are not that interesting. This is because it's always possible to (fairly easily) know you're making a move that is guaranteed to not make your position worse. (But I find opening on a corner a nice counter to this when playing children or people who just think "always take center and corners")

Games like chess and go are similar to tic-tac-toe in the sense that it's theoretically possible to do know you're making a move that is guaranteed to not make your position worse, except that they are too complex for humans to solve. So they're interesting again.

Games like basketball are interesting not just for the incorporation of physical skills that most do not possess, but because they incorporate teammates; teams that coordinate better will almost always win. But coordinating is worth more than doing "good plays" that have no support. This is why there's playbooks and the idea that people should be "team players".

But now we take a diversion into "meta games" and "good plays". In chess and go and tic-tac-toe, there are definite "good plays" (whether we know them or not), and there are definite "bad plays" (usually easier to identify) that are just going to make you lose.

In games of non-total information (or some sports where information is total, but hard to react to as a team in the moment) there are plays that are good "in context". Like in MtG a deck that is not great objectively, might be very strong if you know what deck it's facing. This is what is often called part of the "meta game"; moves that are strong in context if you know what others are doing.

In Poker, there's a mix of both "good solid plays" and "meta context" plays. Most players will tell you that you should aim to avoid "obvious error plays" and do your best to make "good solid plays" and just do reads and meta plays as you have them. But this is a game where nobody is on your team.

Now, up till here, I expect most of you are saying "yes Bunny, stop explaining what we all know" but Bridge is different (and mafia different still, but similar to bridge).

In bridge, you have several differences:
1) you have a partner that you've (hopefully, but not always) prepared with, but once the game starts you're no longer allowed to communicate.
2) there is an amount of luck and randomness (less than you might think, but more than nothing) so just because a play failed doesn't mean it was "bad" it just happened to be "wrong" that time
3) Being clever is valued and good, but if your teammate is lost then it will cost you more often than not.

To this end, being a good teammate is harder than in basketball. In basketball you can (and should!) continue to communicate during the game. Same with most other team games. But in bridge, you have to make inferences about what your partner is thinking, what they know, and how they'll react, and do your best to protect them from themselves. There's a number of times it's very correct to make prima face absurd plays (like throwing away an ace, or intentionally playing the king of trump under the ace of trump) to help you partner wake up to a danger.

Bridge is also complicated. My partnership's code and strategy guide and mutual understandings was 60 typed pages. But it was always more important to make sure the benefit of adding to the code outweighed the mental costs and possible errors and strategic costs of doing so. Just because we'd hit an issue where having a different code would have helped didn't necessarily mean it was the right modification for us.

Now to mafia: here we don't know our teammates and that makes it harder still. But we do know that a big part of this game is to try and make it easy for them to find us (while we're trying to find them). One good way to do this is to be yourself; being yourself is easy for you and hard to fake. And in a vanilla game, there's basically nothing else to do.

With mechanics, there adds some extra stuff on top of it. And here's where we end up combining all the previous things. There are some times that there's an "obvious bad" or "obvious good" play (don't vote off an "innocent child" whom the GM has publicly announced is town). But then there are some meta plays (how long to hold information, how to claim, whether to crumb, whether to shoot, whether to role block), where town has been reluctant to fake claim a power because it muddies the water. Brainbomb has claimed in the past (I still remember when he fakeclaimed MY power day 1 when he was on the block and got me speed wagoned. My power was "when you die, you have the option of shooting someone". I decided not to shoot brainbomb because just because your teammate screws up doesn't mean you should compound the error, and I believed he was town).

Having this meta agreement has some costs and benefits:
1) It makes it harder for scum to muddy the waters by fake claiming and get away with it
2) It makes it harder for town to protect a power by fake claiming
3) It makes it harder for some players where being themselves would involve claiming like this

But once the community has this idea, trying to fight it ends up causing troubles in its own right. And it's not obviously a "bad play" to have this agreement, but rather a "meta play", and changing it is not obvious good or bad, but changing it without agreement is obviously bad for the chaos it causes.

Now a big caveat there: if the chaos it causes ends up helping town reveal themselves...well...mafia is a bit unique in that we don't know our teammates and getting them to reveal themselves somehow *is* the game.


OK...that's probably both a bit wordy, a bit too vague at times and had too many digressions. But hopefully something made sense about how I think about all this.

[BunnyGo]

If damo is scum this game id say its the best performance ive ever seen by him

Agreed, and he's had some very good ones.

[BunnyGo]

Do you think scum is more likely to make bad plays then town?

I think that it would be wise to be less reliant on this "too scummy to be scum" defense.

Sweet's did not claim PR, he claimed "I am going to play in a way that is bad for Town."

That works as a scum play only because the prevailing view around here is: "too scummy to be scum." And it is a very easy ploy. It has also allowed him to avoid talking about alignments. He just keeps telling everyone how hard his claim is.

Balki is very smart; able to fake things at a masterful depth. But scum balki has absolutely no reason to explain in the game thread - to scum rivera about why sweet is scum. Im ruling out any chance that rdr and balki and sweet are all scum here. I think this explanation would never be necessary to convince your own teammate of your reasoning.

Thoughts?

Disagree. We've seen several games recently (I recall one with worcej/ghug) where scum seemed to be enjoying having conversations like this day 1 in public.

[BunnyGo]

Balki
Brainbomb
Flavius
K-POP

You guys can all be in my Towntree.

Yea flav and kotp are scum here.
And then its one other person; probably Jamie.

Im independently finding reasons right and left why bunny is town; sweet is potentially town as well, damo has always been town to me, lfischl still doesnt seem like scum, and that doesnt leave a whole lot of other people.

I still wanna try to make this that one time ever I trust RHK to the end. Like I want it to be real.

why flav & kotp?

I know I'm town...I town so hard that I'll never roll scum again. I don't even remember how to play scum.

[brainbomb]

In a game with a desperado who can kill the entire mafia team in a flash I think scum Balki goes to work right away using his prestige to force multiple scum buddies into the towncore

[BunnyGo]

In a game with a desperado who can kill the entire mafia team in a flash I think scum Balki goes to work right away using his prestige to force multiple scum buddies into the towncore

fair enough

[brainbomb]

And for those of you wanting fodder for why I should die; I just gave you the best argument to use against me!

Enjoy

[BunnyGo]

In a game with a desperado who can kill the entire mafia team in a flash I think scum Balki goes to work right away using his prestige to force multiple scum buddies into the towncore

Oh right! The desperado shooting day 1 was part of the "protecting your teammates" thing. Regarding my wall post: giving the desperado license to shoot and wondering if they should shoot sweet, or use him as cover by shooting near EOD was giving him a chance to screw up. Shooting day 1 when not in any likely danger was a "bad play" in this mechanic (I was sure food was the desperado when a shot rang out because there was basically no other reason to shoot).

[brainbomb]

If RHK and bozo are scum then the strategy is sheep brains worst reads and use them against others; townread brain and then let brain take the heat for when they go wrong. More this applies to bozo than RHK however