Spoiled Discussion

[cometothedarkside]

Good game, Dizzy. No hard feelings, I hope. You're a great player and it is great to have you in the cult, I mean club.

[dizzymrslizzy]

Oh Hell no hard feelings at all! It's a game, and I don't try very hard not to take it personally.

There are a lot of things I could have done better. You were absolutely right, I did nothing but hang back the first couple of days, because I was trying to lay low.

And I need to learn to be better at building cases. I couldn't vocalize what I was feeling towards you and Johnny, but Diggit said exactly what I was thinking, I kicked myself, that that's what I wanted to put out there.

So ultra frustrating the lack of participation ToDay. Of course, now that I see that it was 3 scum left and me out of 10 players. There were only 6 townies to convince, and well that didn't go over well.

[cometothedarkside]

Scum should have blocked the vig. I realize it is a convenient time for unsolicited advice, but that really would have been my position.

[cometothedarkside]

And Johnny does have a very valid point about knowing whether or not he'd been attacked and survived could have influenced his play. I had actually forgotten he had the ability to survive a kill as well as investigate as Town until Dizzy died and reminded me.

[dizzymrslizzy]

I think part of that is having the Mod change in endgame.

I had the PM MHaye to ask what happened with my N5 kill because Story had sent me a PM to let me know if I had been successful, blocked, or mysteriously stopped. So it makes sense that on N1 Story sent a PM letting him know he had been hit, but on N5 MHaye not knowing that Story was giving that kind of detail handled it differently.

I did tell Johnny that I had gone after him N5, He chose to believe I was just BSing and trying to bring him down. What are the chances that I hit both bulletproof targets. I have to say being blocked N1 was really unnerving and I wondered if people were on my trail after that N1 block, which is why I went for SilverJan N2, I wanted to see if I was blocked or if I had hit a doctor target, and I figured SilverJan was a "safe" not going to be protected target.

[cometothedarkside]

When you're already one scum in the hole due to someone going awol, adding something like that can easily be the difference between winning and losing. Such is the game, though.

[dizzymrslizzy]

I know, it's really tough when players are MIA I don't know if I agree with the decision on how to handle them, but what else can they do without available subs.

[chronos]

Personally, when I host a game, I make clear rules up front about how to handle nonparticipatory players, and then stick to them. Basically, anyone below some unambiguous level (say, one or fewer posts in any consecutive 1-week span) is removed from the game. If it's early in the game (again, by some preset standard, probably something like Night 2) and there are substitutes waiting, the person is subbed out. Otherwise, they're simply mod-killed.

It's really not fair to the other players to just leave nonplayers dangling in there, but on the other hand it's also difficult to make fair decisions about them while the game is underway (for instance, are you giving the same consideration to Scum players as to Town).

[member]

Feb 21, 2013 8:49:02 GMT -5 Frank said:

I'm calling it right here - I think Johnny is a secret returning player, like when Roosh pretended to be "SBrown" in Arkham 2. If he's not, then he's a Mafia natural.

Thanks for the compliment but, no, this was my first game of Mafia ever. Like I mentioned somewhere in the game thread, though, I've played a ton of the Battlestar Galactia board game, which is essentially Mafia on steroids.

Anyway, Dizzy, I thought you were BSing and just trying to drag me down with you. I was banking on a PM about my bulletproof since Suburban got one. If I'd known that you'd actually attacked me I'd still be alive right now, since it would have been a simple matter to block wombat's kill last night. We deliberately allowed him to make his kill, thinking that he'd go after someone else (or he'd bounce off of my bulletproof). Not really a big deal.

I feel like scum played really well this game, but has had some bad luck (or town has had good luck, natch). Stan getting called out so early was really tough for us, and fubbs going AWOL equally so.

First game thoughts:

I think that this was a really tough role draw for a first game. There was a lot of metagame stuff that I had to pick up by obsessively reading over other games and game notes, all so that I could convincingly pretend that I was as clueless as everybody else. I got a little uppity on Day 1, but managed to calm down and play more subtly after that. Not being able to communicate with my fellow scum during the day meant that I couldn't leverage advice about how to react to given situations.

Still, I had a complete blast. Looking forward to the next game.

[suburbanplankton]

Mar 4, 2013 19:01:11 GMT -5 cometothedarkside said:

I do have to wonder too, if Suburban would have actually come forward as he did without my scum data landing on the table first. Some of it was misdirection/manipulation yeah, but there was a lot of solid data in there too. I know Suburban might say that he would have come forward anyway, but I'd love to see the parallel universe in which I don't claim and see how the game might have panned out.

Of course I would have come forward anyway!

Actually, I was hoping not to need to come forward as soon as I did, but my decision wasn't ultimately based on your confession. I thought that the Town as a whole would be more inclined to discuss my Barn message, and I planned to play off whatever discussion emerged. But it seemed that most folks were prepared to dismiss my message as some sort of Scum/SK misdirection...that's why I decided to claim when I did.

I actually considered waiting until the following Day since we seemed to have a self-confessed Wolf already on the block, but I was concerned that I might not make it to the next Day if USCDiver had a Night-kill at his disposal, plus I was concerned about possibly being overrun with reanimated corpses if we didn't take some action to try to stop them..

[cometothedarkside]

Playing scum out of the gate is the best way to learn, and get hooked. You were a pleasure to wolf with, Johnny.

[member]

Thanks, cookies. You were very patient with me.

[cometothedarkside]

If only Babale had been a non-participatory vanilla townie vs a confirmed Mason, scum would have a better chance even with the bumpy game state.

[cometothedarkside]

Answering Astral's question about Meeko here to avoid spoilers...

Meeko has played in many games, and has been dealt a variety of roles.

I think generalizations and viewing the game in abstract rubs him the wrong way, and that if he has a weakness as a player it is a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. He takes general statements about the game like 'the job of vanilla town is to play as best they can and die" too literally in some ways and not literally enough in others. That statement doesn't mean that a good vanilla town is just a warm body to have killed off instead of a power, as he seems to be interpreting it now. And he's definitely not playing as best he can. Even though he was correct in his read on me as scum, it was entirely too easy to contribute to his being marginalized and disregarded by the rest of the Town. My alignment had no bearing on the things that I was saying to him in observation of his play, as I'm confident that I would have said much of the same things to him if I'd been Town, but my alignment had everything to do with my decision to engage in that conversation in the manner that I did and push as hard as I did because my perfect knowledge allowed me the luxury of knowing how wrong he was to just dismiss the investigation results on Stan.

I've gone round and round (and round) with him about the more abstract concepts of the game many times, even trying to use his favored method of communication, metaphor, similie, and analogy. But our moments of mutual understanding are pretty few and far between.

[dizzymrslizzy]

Johnny you really did play well for your first game. And yes this is a very addicting game I'm only on my 4th real game, and I love it. I think being scum in a first game is fun, because you have a little guidance and help....I was vanilla town in my first game and dang that was hard!

I've now played Vanilla town, Scum, Town Cop, and now a 3rd party PFK. This was one of my favorites, because I was able to flip flop however I saw fit. I originally was 100% townsided, but when I saw how town was being killed off I thought Id' have a better shot trying to shoot into town. So I went with you N5, because I thought you were a safe "town" bet. LOL