futurevision wrote:I don't really understand how voting "No Lynch" is any better than explicitly abstaining, and I don't see anyone getting lynched for recommending that. I actually thought that it would prevent the mafia from having the extra control over the voting, since if "No Lynch" is the majority they couldn't force us to lynch one of our own. Could someone explain to me why it is bad for townspeople? A majority of us voted not to kill anyone on the first day, so I'm not quite sure why it's so bad.
At this time, there are 16 people alive: (cribbing from BBS's list because it's right here in front of me)
Alphabeta, DanielH, michaelblume, BlueSkySprite, Aestrix, futurevision, jalapeno_dude, kuuskytkolme, no.head.chicken, Ozymandias, Paradox, pistachi0n, Shoal, Tamien, tau, and Thatwasademo.
At least one of these people, and probably more, in a game of this size it is almost surely more than 2, but probably less than or equal to 4. If there are 4 mafia, then choosing at random we have a 1 in 4 chance of getting the right person. All the rest of the numbers assumes there are 4 mafia. The odds are slightly less good if there are only 3 but I think they are still good enough. If we narrow it down just a little bit: each person who is not guilty knows for sure that they are not, people who have night time actions may know that a few other people are not guilty, then our chances become better. If we use our intuition and our knowledge of players from how they've been behaving in this thread, we can do a little better still, and if everybody was a little bit more active then we would have more knowledge for that last step and more to base our opinions on.
So based on some combination of intuition, the statements of some people like Alpha and Ozy* who have roleclaimed, night actions (if I have any, which I likely don't: 3 of the 4 revealed templates who were killed either in the night or in the day have not been power roles), and ruling myself out because I know what my own alignment is (innocent in case anyone was curious), I think my own guessing odds are about 1 in 3. Maybe some other people with better intuition or night actions other than sleeping could get the odds down to 1 in 2.
*I'm not sure why I'm inclined to believe Ozy when they said so little but maybe it is the way they phrased it, how they said that they just wanted to make sure that we weren't left wondering if a Darcy would have had powers after they died, because we definitely would have wondered. They were sure that they were going to die and so they gave us information that would have helped us posthumously.
Anyway, however the numbers fall out, I think the numbers are fairly good that we could kill a mafia guy today.
But what if we voted no lynch? Well, during the night 1 innocent person will die, so then we'll be down to 15 people. If we continue to vote no lynch, we'll next be down to 14, and 13, 12... It's true that we might get a little bit more information each night from Addy, if he can clear people for us the way he cleared Daniel, and that will help in the days to come.
voting no lynch is basically saying "we don't know, but maybe tomorrow when there are less of us around we'll know more, and we'll know enough more that we can do something then that we can't do today". I think we all did feel like that on day 1, but it's not day 1 anymore, we've already lost 1 power role and we may lose another tonight, or the following night.
tl;dr: no lynch means there is a 0% chance that we decrease the numbers of the mafia. if there are 4 mafia then we have a 25% chance just by picking blindly and that might be improved to 33% or 50% by considering the people we've gotten to know so far. if there are 3 mafia then we have an 19% chance of hitting one if we pick blindly and maybe double that if we think about it.
