Alicornutopia

In games of werewolf I've played, the wolves won or almost won a lot of the time by encouraging everyone to talk and come up with two candidates for lynching (neither of whom were wolves) until one of the two people was lynched and then whoever advocated most for the lynching of the person who wasn't lynched was killed by the wolves the next night, so the town lynched the second option the next day and two innocent townsfolk were lynched and one attacked by wolves.

I don't really know how well that applies to this game, but that is why I am inclined to be careful about lynchings.

Also I'm not quite sure I understand your math for lynching more people, but there is probably more than one killer, because there usually is in this sort of game, but it seems like if we lynch someone every day and the killers kill someone every night, unless we have a good way of making sure the people we kill are at least probably killers, the townsfolk will all die twice as quickly.

Unless someone can convince me the math and logic actually point toward random lynchings being the best way to fix the killer problem or has a good explanation for why their evidence for who the killer is is good enough to be worth acting on, I'm leaving my vote as no lynching.

After someone dies, is their template revealed?

As I understand it, the pro-lynching argument is thus:

At the moment, neither we nor the killers have much. Let us assume, as is often the case in this type of game, that no townsfolk have any information, and no killers have any information except “this is the set of killers”. Then if the townsfolk don’t lynch anybody, the first to die is a random non-killer; if the townsfolk do lynch somebody, the first to die is a random person who may or may not be a killer (depending on the killer’s arguing skills, the probability may be weighted towards the non-killers, but not as heavily as it would be at night). Thus, the question is: do we want the first person to die to definitely be a non-killer, or only probably be a non-killer?

As I said, this argument makes sense, but I want to do more research before I fully accept it because I previously accepted the argument that we had no evidence and would probably get a non-killer, which would be bad.

I’ll write again when I’ve done more research on the subject.

I second the question about whether roles will be revealed, although: “is their template revealed?”. I see: your role is a template instead of anything else that would make sense for a role. You assume, perhaps correctly and perhaps not, that we all fit in that category. Interesting…

Ok, so the don't-lynch-on-first-turn argument works like this:

Right now we are 20. 20 is even. Assuming the model of the game is we get one lynch per turn, and the killer kills one person per turn (assuming there are no other abilities that change this, which I suppose is a possibility), then two people will die per turn. This means that we'll have 9 chances to find and lynch the killer, since when there are only two people left and one of them is a killer then lynching can't happen -- you need a majority/plurality and there won't be one. If we don't lynch on the first turn, then the second turn will start with 19 people -- and if thereafter two people die per turn -- then this will still give us 9 chances to kill the killer. But now each of those votes will work off of more information -- each time we vote, the killer will have killed one more person, and the choice of who they kill will reveal information about them. If we lynch on the first turn, we do so with a lot less knowledge about who the killer actually is than if we do it on the next turn -- and we still get the same number of chances to kill the right person. If we were an odd number of people, we should totally lynch on the first turn, since if we didn't we'd lose one of our opportunities.

Of course, this is a game with people with powers, so there may be more or fewer people dying per turn than that. So if we're not reasonably sure of the odd/even parity staying consistent, we might want to take every chance we can get to kill the killer. This depends on what the powers are, though.

In general, the best course of action right now is to keep talking -- the more that people talk, the more they reveal about themselves, which will make it easier to determine who the killer is based on who they kill. If we can gain more information about whether it's likely that the odd/even parity will persist we can lynch/choose to not lynch on this first turn based on that.

There is little evidence in any direction so far.
It might be worth it to assign lynching randomly.
Not sure how it could be done in a way where we don't have to trust any one persons integrity, but I'm pretty sure it can.
Too bad this forum doesn't have a dice roller.

9 chances to kill the killer.

That only works if there is a single killer.
Pretty sure that isn't the case.

...whether there are multiple killers or a single one (you're right, there's probably multiple, though as far as I can tell word of god hasn't actually said one way or the other yet, hence confused), as long as we follow the pattern of "two deaths a turn" we still get 9 opportunities to kill either the all the killers or the single one or whatever. Unless you think the killers are going to kill one another -- which is not how mafia games usually work.

But as I said before, since this is a game with powers, the parity thing is hardly guaranteed; we may get multiple deaths per turn or we may get nighttime deaths prevented or somesuch -- so maybe we would be better off lynching at every opportunity. I'm not sure yet. I was just stating the argument as I understood it, and it would (I'm pretty sure) be correct in a standard vanilla game of mafia.

kuuskytkolme wrote:Oh hey, we have our first appeal to emotion in this game! But it's the first day and there's much you can say about my vote, so I'll let it slide.

I apologize, it was early and I have the habit of working too hard to broadcast my feelings, because I have a problem where if I don't do that I fail to broadcast them at all.

Your vote feels like it's based off of slightly questionable logic. The third person to vote for something feels kind of like an arbitrary number. I think that lynching someone right now is far more likely to be friendly fire rather than actually nailing one of the people we want to kill, but you're right, it could be worth it to try. I just think I'm a bad target, because I know I'm not a merry murderess.

But I genuinely think the best thing we can do is what we're doing right now - talking. It's day one. I'm not advocating only talking, I think that if we fail to lynch people in the future this entire thing's going to crash and burn and the villains win, but for the first day when we have no evidence but words? Let's talk, before lynching.

Would there be any value in trying to figure out the possible templates of the killers? There aren't many killing templates in Effulgence, we might be able to figure it out, and then figure out their powersets from there.

@tau,modrony From my readings on Mafia strategy, there is a potential flaw in your plan of “lynch iff odd” for vanilla Mafia. The Mafia have a No Kill option, and they can also see that killing isn’t actually in their best interests. Then, nobody ever dies. This is normally a pretty good outcome, except for two things:

1. We still don’t know who killed Cricket. We should at least find that out, even if they’re really sorry and will never kill again.
2. The game’s not as fun that way.

@everybody
In any case, that reasoning depends on it being vanilla. Since a more appropriate flavor for this game is mint, that reasoning doesn’t hold, as you pointed out.

So: the question is, is the better chance of getting a killer with lynching worth the extra probably-townie dead, when we ignore or at least discount parity arguments?

If we do decide to lynch, I again point out that “lynch” won’t beat “no lynch” unless everybody votes for the same person. I’d generate a random number and use that, but nobody would have any reason to trust my randomness unless it landed on myself. Does anybody know a way to generate a number that verifiably was chosen randomly?

@Aestrix
That kind of metagaming might be a good idea, but it might also get us stuck in dead ends. Going out of scope for an example again and pretending this is Incandescence Mafia, perhaps one of the killers is an Adarin; we know Adarins can kill if they need to, but we probably would not have considered that possibility in an Incandescence version of this game. We might fall into that kind of trap here.

@Daniel
I don't know, I don't see what we lose by trying to figure out what's going on metagame wise. Yes we can get ourselves caught in some logic traps and dead ends, but I don't like how we're wandering blind. If we make sure not to get lost down the rabbit hole, I think it's worth the effort, and it's another opportunity to get people talking, which as I've pointed out is one of the main things I want.

So, with that in mind, let me start us off.

Main templates in Effulgence, picked off of the wiki (Thank you Marri): Bell, Joker, Sherlock, Tony, Libby, Kingfisher, Virginia, Chainsaw, Eights, Steven (Voice).

Bell's blatantly not a killer, Joker's unlikely, Sherlock's unlikely, Tony's blatantly not a killer, Libby's iffy (I could see one in a Godfather role, but not as a killer themselves), Kingfisher's likely not, but might have a Rayne that is, Virginia's blatantly not, Chainsaw likely is, Eights likely isn't, Steven probably is.

Bells might be the equivalent of a doctor role in ordinary Mafia. Or, they might be able to bring back the dead. Sherlocks scream investigator to me, but I might be hilariously wrong. Everyone else, I have no idea.

DanielH wrote:@tau,modrony From my readings on Mafia strategy, there is a potential flaw in your plan of “lynch iff odd” for vanilla Mafia.

My plan?
I've been arguing against it.

Theoretically random number could be done if we can use online random number generators.
Dice roll could be declared and identified in advance and done publicly.

Nevertheless, I am going to go ahead and vote lynch tau. Combination of late arrival and advocating suspect math makes me suspicious enough to consider him a good target.