@vehemently just want to mention I kept on almost mentioning you, but what ultimately led me not to was how you gave everyone nicknames and named each day. You appealed to my emotion and I hate I didn’t see it coming!
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I am extremely likable and cool and no one could ever hate me!
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you called me charming…
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That was one of the many true things I called out from my Throne of Lies
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I do want to give myself credit for two things in my play:
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Starting to push we shoot for “low-information” (this is such a me term) targets to keep the Town in a state of confusion
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Getting really into the math:
(apologies for chicken scratch)
No one’s seen my paperwork yet so please don’t call me a Nerd
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we rambled in a google doc for a literal hour about this game* so the writeup will be coming soonish
*I guarantee there’s stuff we missed
this is my favourite post in this whole thread
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The literal worst timeline! BTW way way early on on Day 1 I made a comment questioning if we should exile saying we had a 75% chance to hit a battler. At this point I didn’t realize the exact number of knights were not revealed. When another battler, I thiiiink @Cody, was speculating to the number of knights, I thought someone was going to call me out on why I was so sure about the % chance of hitting a battler.
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this was my favorite
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this is the funniest sequence of posts I have ever seen in my ~15 years of playing mafia
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my third, fourth and fifth favourite posts in this thread
I’m still amazed Cody didn’t actually check serbroseph. It really was just dumb luck in the end.
I wanna say to y’all though like… very earnestly the gameplay in this thread was extremely impressive. Even though you just happened to miss us all, the amount you were able to get done with virtually no information was pretty awesome. If it weren’t for just a few twists and lucky shots we would have lost. Cody’s role and CGR’s role were just hunches, and SuperBiasedMan’s role was pretty much just lucky.
Speaking of which, I need to admit something to you all
@robowitch keeps crediting me with targeting SuperBiasedMan, who I did think was a good target, not too conspicuous but still a meaningful force
…But when I suggested it
I think I might have been confusing him with Cody
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3 Main Takeaways From Game 1-
Visual Cleanup-
We could have done better on formatting ahead of time, and probably could be linking back to a single post with roles and players at the start of every phase. This wasn’t too much of an issue with relatively few players, but a 25+ game will absolutely crush the forum posting records, so organization will be key.
2. Rules Need More Clarity
This one is entirely on me. I was assuming too much implicit knowledge on behalf of the players. My wishywashy language was also probably a reason CGR got killed a second time, I could have been clearer on replacement policy. Ultimately it was fine for game 1, but I need to do better. Small addition: We’ll do dead threads from now on so long as we have players willing to be reserves.
3. Better Defined Day/Night Cycles
We were basically winging those every time which like a lot of stuff on here, ended up working due to the brevity of the game but in a larger game that lasted longer it’d get WAY out of wack. We intend to set up a strawpoll link so users can tell us where they’re at for future signups so that we have a better idea of how to structure timezones and the time to fine-tune.
All of these are totally accomplish-able goals! But I wanted to let you know that we really, deeply enjoyed running this and want to keep making it an even better experience.
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Game Observations:
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The Mafia won this game because they managed to get the perfect kills in the perfect order. The town played as well as they possibly could have considering collective experience levels and the only thing that kept them from winning was luck, and a less than complete understanding of the other layers of the game. We’ll go over some of them here!
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Someone is going to die night 1. No matter what happens, unless you get insanely lucky with your specials, someone’s going to be watching the vast majority of the game. It sucks, but it’s almost unavoidable.
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Following up on that, WLV and I were stunned that the town was so bloodthirsty for votes. Not Voting is not only a viable strategy, it’s generally the right one to make early game, because you save on your two most valuable resources: bodies and time. These two resources together are your biggest assets to fill in the information gap between the town and the mafia. Otherwise Cody’s prediction comes true that much quicker.
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The Town could have done a lot better at protecting its specials. We both absolutely loved the aggressive play on the town’s part- it’s absolutely the right way to play as a vanilla townie. But you can harness that aggression in more productive ways. Remember, the only person who actually claimed a role was the Vigilante, which is maybe a first for me in over a decade of playing forum mafia. You can fake a claim! It takes heat off the more valuable specials, and if you get killed as a vanilla townie in the process, it’s not a huge loss. In some ways, that’s the primary job of the vanilla townies: using their primary resources (bodies and time) to protect the specials.
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Role claiming is not just a good strategy for town players! Mafia players that are paying attention to the tempo of the discussion can single-handedly change the game with a well-timed claim or counter-claim.
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Generally, one of the things that sunk the town was the instinct for self-preservation. Remember, you’re a team! The person accusing you of being mafia is mathematically most likely to be a blue/vanilla townie. Your aggressive play is a good quality to nurture in mafia players generally, but don’t assume everyone is out to get you. It’s only like, 25% of everyone.
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Several players seemed fairly content to hitch their wagons to players who were either confirmed town or made a lot of sense (Robo took major advantage of this later on in the game.) Remember to prioritize your own suspicions too! Erica made a very good call late in the game when she said she was going to reread the entire thread, even if it didn’t bring forth the right conclusions. This is especially important in a forum mafia setting, where you can go back and reference everything a certain person has said or done.
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What’s equally important is what a person hasn’t done. In a more experienced game, Cado would have been caught by day 3 or 4 for a repeated habit of showing up just to throw a vote on whoever happened to benefit the mafia faction the most. Robo and Vehemently only became more active as number began to shift heavily towards the mafia and they had no specials to worry about. This level of reading between the posts is essential to understand if you really want to master the game in a forum setting.
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Glorgu’s careful bookkeeping is a great habit to form when playing hidden role games like Mafia. Voting records are valuable for both town and mafia players alike, but they are not gospel. Especially when including votes from earlier in the game, it is pretty easy (and was a common technique used by the town in this game) to point to any individual voting record* and massage the data to make an accusation stick. Keep track of what’s going on, but never take another’s work for granted! Even hard statistics can be manipulated to say whatever you want.
*The key to this game specifically was noticing how the mafia consistently voted as a block when they needed to. Vote records can be very valuable, but you always have to pay attention to the bigger picture. -
The roleblocker being inactive night 1 was pretty rough for the town, not to mention having a townie inactive immediately.
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If you want to run one of these yourself, let us know! For now, you should have a mod co-run it with you so that we can make relevant PM threads public if need be and other housekeeping things.
With all this said, we’re going to keep this thread open for 2 more days to answer questions and solicit feedback. Confused about lingo? Want more specific advice? Think there’s other stuff we could have done better? Let us know!
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pictures and big text courtesy of our google doc
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oh god!!! i just realized The Moment We Lost The Game and i am SO mad. i’m sooo mad.
weed lord…the serbroseph vote…
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I almost bit my knuckle in half watching it happen
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real talk though @Clyde jaguar and I were rooting SO HARD for you there is not a hint of irony in that big text
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ZERO irony. the monty hall post was like… that’s my favourite shit in mafia honestly. when a vanilla townie throws down a seemingly ridiculous ultimatum that no one has any actual way to disprove. for a while i was convinced that by posting that you had actually just single-handedly turned this game around.
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coming back to this @Anime i said in our google doc “anime is going to be a terrifying player in about 3-4 games”
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