Short Stories Mafia Game Thread

[DanielH]

I’m not sure the “town don’t get as defensive as scum” rule of thumb works as well here, given BSS first game and Aestrix second game. Then again, I would totally be expected to say that if I were defensive because I were scum.

So, this is going a bit slowly. We have almost no evidence. Let’s talk about strategy, something that can be useful for the game but doesn’t directly involve suspecting anybody; we can see how people behave in both discussions and then we’ll have stronger suspicions later. Last game saw two changes to standard strategy, list posts and suspicion posts. Both were actually proposed by the townies, but were much more useful to the Ryganaavlanik (primary scum faction). However, there were good pro-Town motives behind them; does anybody have any idea to capture the supposed benefits without the drawbacks of their actual implementation? I have some ideas for fixing suspicion posts (which I got because somebody else mentioned this first, I think in the post-mortem), but no ideas for fixing list posts.

For those who weren’t there, the list posts were where people wrote about their suspicions of what powers the various characters had, and promised to include their own character and power on the list. Ideally, this would help town identify what the powers of dead players were (by looking up the revealed character name in the list) without telling the scum anything (because of the noise of the other list entries). In actuality it was almost as scum-beneficial as people actually roleclaiming, because the scum had a name cop and because people weren’t always very good at making fake entries.

The suspicion posts were where people wrote down on the first sidereal day of the Mafia day who they were suspicious of, without reading anybody else’s suspicion posts. This was to help them form and stick to independent suspicions, to combat groupthink. Instead, the scum read the suspicion posts and were “independently” suspicious of all the same people as other people were; since people came to these suspicions “independently”, they were seen as more likely to be reasonable instead of groupthink. This also caused delays in discussion and voting, negating some of the benefit of the long days.

My (stolen) idea to fix suspicion lists is twofold: First, generate and write down your suspicions in the game night; preferably write down the whole post. Then you could keep the benefit of those suspicions not being influenced by groupthink, while discussing them right away. Second, don’t forget that anybody can post their suspicions after reading everything else; there are people in this game who are out to get you and will happily lie about what they have and have not read. If people listen to this idea or something similar, most or all of them will claim to have written their post before reading anybody else’s. Some of them will be telling the truth and some will be lying; ignore this claim like you would ignore somebody outright claiming to be town without evidence to back them up.

Does anybody have any other ideas for suspicion posts, or any thoughts on why my proposed alterations could still be dangerous? Does anybody have any thoughts on capturing the benefits of listposts without handing the game to the scum (unfortunately, “make better listposts” and “hope the scum don’t have a namecop” are not viable suggestions)? Does anybody want to cast suspicion on me by pointing out that scum often give sound-seeming strategic advice to town because this is an easy way to look town (which is totally true, but we as town still need to have strategy discussions)?

[pistachi0n]

The flaws you see in suspicion posts are an inherent part of mafia. That's the idea of the game--the scum faction is small but they know who's on their team and they can collaborate and plan responses, while a townie will have almost nobody they can be 100% sure isn't scum. So you talk out your suspicions, knowing that some of the people making well-reasoned posts are not on your side. Like you said, scum probably will make their posts based on which townies are acting the least town-like and it'll sound reasonable on their end. And that's just something we have to deal with.

But I think that if we hadn't had daytalk in the last game, we might not have done so well. The suspicion posts probably would have helped town a lot more. Because during the day, we could comment as things were happening and plan responses quickly in the scum thread before posting them in the town thread. But at this point, the game mechanics are already planned out. It's something for Alicorn to consider in future games, but for now we have no way of knowing how much power the scum has and when they can talk. So I'd say--don't be afraid to discuss your suspicions, but at the same time, don't assume you can trust someone unless you've confirmed then as town through an investigative role or through a similar mechanic to Keo/Kannat, Ilen/Hallai, and Mallyn/Rithka in Elcenia mafia.

[DanielH]

Yes, the problems with suspicion posts are inherently part of Mafia, but they had gained a measure of trustworthyness from Town which was not deserved. You all—or at least some of you; I could be misremembering the details—made your suspicion lists to be suspicious of who Town was suspicious of, but for different reasons. For reasons of supposed independence of suspicion posts, this led to more distrust for the targeted people than everybody discussing suspicions openly from the beginning likely would have.

[Shoal]

list posts were bad and any form of mass claiming played into our (the scumteam’s) hands last time. The place for massclaiming is in LYLO — right at the end of the game. sometimes claiming early if you’re about to be lynched or if you’re pretty sure you’ll be nightkilled anyway is okay but it’s better to not give away too much information about the setup to the mafia. town needs to find mafia, the mafia needs to find who the power roles are and eliminate them. as town, it’s part of our job to protect people we suspect might be power roles by not outing them and not claiming ourselves for no reason (claiming vanilla townie narrows the nightkill pool. falsely claiming a power role as vanilla town is bad because the real power role can counterclaim you because it’s unlikely there will be 2 of the same thing, especially for certain types of roles.)

Suspicion posts are good. write them during the night phase. you aren’t withholding information from the mafia because if they put enough effort in they can figure it out based on who you’re agreeing with and who you’re pushing /anyway/. and you’re helping the town because forcing the mafia to commit to stances on people means that when they change their mind we can ask them what’s up with that. i ran into trouble last game because I’d been townreading anthusiasm all game and then in LYLO I had to either turn on her or turn on one of my buddies and there was no reason to turn on her because she’d been townie all game so I wrote this really lacklustre post about "how maybe she’s town maybe she’s not i dunno.” I painted myself into a corner by townreading anthusiasm like that.

And there are a bunch of other things we can look at with suspicion posts but i don’t want to give too much away because if the mafia knows what things i’m looking for then it is easier for them avoid slipping.

The problem with the suspicion posts was that we spent 1/3 of our time, a full 24 hours each Day, not talking with each other. we posted our suspicions in spoilers and you all trusted the mafia to just not open the spoilers or something and the effect was that everyone was in their own little walled garden trying to solve the game all by themselves and not having enough interacitons to solve the game /with/.

[pistachi0n]

Yes, I agree with that. Interactions between people and how they change are important, and the spoiler boxes cut down on a lot of that.

[pistachi0n]

And I do think it's towny to put thoughts in the open and discuss them. It's good to contribute to the game, analyze other people's posts.

What I would be suspicious of is people who seem to be acting opportunistically. But I think they won't be apparent until after we've seen some flips.

[DanielH]

I agree that listposts are probably counterproductive, but somebody might have had a clever idea which would actually stand up to scrutiny. I’ve had a few thoughts, but all of them were either terrible ideas or boiled down to either “write better listposts”; that doesn’t mean nobody has some idea. Remember, if that game had gone differently the listposts could have also been a huge help to Kaylo; it was only the mafia’s amazing luck that meant the lists did not help Town at all. Still, I remain skeptical that the idea can be fixed, wishful thinking or no.

I think we mostly agree about the spoilerboxed suspicion posts: they cut down on interaction and many people treated them as more trustworthy than they actually were. However, being in a walled garden trying to solve the game by yourself can be useful sometimes, as long as you leave your garden occasionally. The spoilered suspicion posts were counterproductive to the goal of preventing groupthink, but that goal is still a good one. Hence, the suggestion to form suspicions at night which you can then update during the day.

[DanielH]

Also, a bit of tactical advice to everybody, scum or town. Don’t post after midnight in your local timezone unless you have an odd sleep schedule. It’s not especially relevant now, when nobody has had a chance to gather much nonpublic information (other than their own role), but it gets more important as the game progresses.

I should probably take my own advice, here.

[Shoal]

@Pistachi0n: yeah.

@Daniel: About the defensive thing: Town and scum both do get defensive but they do it differently. Aestrix was in a weird position because she knew who the scum team was but could win with the town. BSS was feeling that “people think I’m bad and I don’t even know why and nobody will tell me” feeling which I have felt as town before and it’s an absolutely awful thing to feel, I had a game on the other site that I literally could not load the game thread without crying actual real life tears for over a week in early June. That game’s over now thankfully.

What I’m seeing right now is that you’re defending yourself to accusations, and you’re talking about strategy and that’s all fine, and I realise that it’s only page 4 so it’s hard to find something to grasp onto, but I would feel more comfortable with you if you were trying to interact with people and figure out their alignments by asking them questions about what they’re saying or trying to get them to react to you.

preview-edit: about the listposts, we could have datamined them pretty effectively even without the rolecop, though the rolecop did help a great deal. I don’t know if it’s possible to write listposts that cannot be datamined. We were really on point last game.

I have opinions about groupthink but I want to wait until the scum team slips up to share them. For now, I’ll say that we should definitely ask ourselves why we think the things that we think but part of the game is figuring things out and then convincing other people that you have figured them out.

[pistachi0n]

Why is it important not to post after midnight?

Is it because we might say something stupid if we're tired? Or we might say something odd, go to sleep, and leave everyone else wondering until we can follow up on it in the morning?

I don't see how it could indicate alignment or powers.

If you answering this question would give scum ideas that they might not have considered, I'm willing to stay curious until the end.