Alicornutopia

Shoal wrote:He gave us permission to share stuff from the private communication channel posthumously because in this hypothetical (which is now our reality), he has already lost, so there's no reason for us not to try to use whatever information we had there to our collective advantages.

I don't think it's true that you've lost the mafia scum wiki cult article says that the cult wins when it has a majority regardless of whether it the cult leader is alive. The cult is severely weakened but it could still win. Obvious strategies are for known cultists to share helpful information and give off the impression they're harmless now that Danielh is dead so that we ignore them and for Danielh or his cultists to claim to try and have spent multiple nights recruiting one person but to have failed so that we underestimate how many cult members are left and they attain a majority before we think they would. He'd have had days to think about it so there are probably other things he has come up with. If 2 non-cultists die per day and there is a hidden cutlist they'll have as many players as the rest of the game within three days. If you add in the fact that we've constantly had at least three people not voting it could happen sooner than that.

Paradox wrote:

Shoal wrote:He gave us permission to share stuff from the private communication channel posthumously because in this hypothetical (which is now our reality), he has already lost, so there's no reason for us not to try to use whatever information we had there to our collective advantages.

I don't think it's true that you've lost the mafia scum wiki cult article says that the cult wins when it has a majority regardless of whether it the cult leader is alive. The cult is severely weakened but it could still win. Obvious strategies are for known cultists to share helpful information and give off the impression they're harmless now that Danielh is dead so that we ignore them and for Danielh or his cultists to claim to try and have spent multiple nights recruiting one person but to have failed so that we underestimate how many cult members are left and they attain a majority before we think they would. He'd have had days to think about it so there are probably other things he has come up with. If 2 non-cultists die per day and there is a hidden cutlist they'll have as many players as the rest of the game within three days. If you add in the fact that we've constantly had at least three people not voting it could happen sooner than that.

*I* haven't lost, but Daniel has, because Daniel is dead. The chances of the cult winning when you guys know who all the cultists are is pretty small. I have a small chance of making my win condition still but it is pretty small. My win condition requires a lot more than a majority.

Yet it doesn't seem urgent to take down the leftover cult and considering we haven't managed to take down a single mafioso, I really think we should leave them alone for now. Also: the failed vote against Alpha show that cultists can't vote against each other, so looking at the votes against daniel we can be pretty sure of many ppls non-cult status.

To whit:

DanielH: 7 (Aestrix, Alphabeta, jalapeno_dude, michaelblume, no.head.chicken, Paradox, tau)

only kuu, BSS, Ozymandias could still be possible secret cultists.

Shoal wrote:Anyway, Aestrix, the other day you were talking about how you wished you'd gotten access to a private communication channel where people can share information with each other. I would like to point out that this thread, right here, is a communication channel. It's not private, no, but if we all share our speculations -- even if some people are lying because they're mafia -- we'll all have more information than we started with. And if some people start to change their behaviour as a result of certain speculations about what suspicious behaviour looks like, that in itself would be suspicious. However many non mafia heads we have here, that number is better than 1, everybody working by themselves keeping their cards close to their chest.

It is definitely a communication channel, but the allure of a private one is that it's a place where you can trust all of the people in it. People's speculations can be wrong, but you don't suspect them of deliberately trying to screw you over. This communication channel doesn't have that thing, I can feel free to speculate, but while I am genuine, no one knows that.

But that's never stopped me before, now has it.

I have bad feelings about kuuskytkolme and Paradox. I was a little nervous of pistachi0n, but now that I'm aware they're cult, that can go down the tubes. Ozymandias never made a good impression on me, because he didn't talk very much, but maybe anthusiasm will give me a better idea of her template and whether or not I should viciously kill her with zero remorse or not. I trust BSS a very bizarre amount. I thought Shoal was constantly mistaken about every thing he thinks, which was both hilarious, and also really troubling. I think jalapeno_dude should stop blatantly chasing after investigation roles, whether I am one or not, because we are already really low on useful templates, and I suspect that he might be doing it on purpose to sow chaos and gather information for mafia killings.

I think that the mafia knows more than we do. Two nights in a row, they've killed really useful people, and not the obvious ones. Alphabeta has been out for a while now, and is unmolested. No, they went after the Sherlock, and then the Chris. I don't know if they're lucky, or if they're better at reading people than I am, but either way, I suspect the mafia is very smart. Or it's got a smart person in charge that's giving instructions to more silent mafia minions, and those mafia minions are smart enough to listen. I think that if we are aiming for anyone, we shouldn't aim for Shoal, pistachi0n, or Alphabeta, and I think we need to aim for people that are smart and know how to play the game.

I think random voting is an awful idea and we shouldn't do it. We have opinions, for good or ill, let's put them to use. By talking. Endlessly. And then killing someone today.

no.head.chicken wrote:Yet it doesn't seem urgent to take down the leftover cult and considering we haven't managed to take down a single mafioso, I really think we should leave them alone for now. Also: the failed vote against Alpha show that cultists can't vote against each other, so looking at the votes against daniel we can be pretty sure of many ppls non-cult status.

To whit:

DanielH: 7 (Aestrix, Alphabeta, jalapeno_dude, michaelblume, no.head.chicken, Paradox, tau)

only kuu, BSS, Ozymandias could still be possible secret cultists.

that's a good point. so if at some point (not necessarily today but perhaps today), the three of them could vote against alpha if they don't know who else to vote for. i think they (like the rest of us) should vote for whoever they think is most likely to be mafia, but if they don't have better ideas then they could use their votes to clear them if they want to. If they don't actually want alpha to die they could wait until the last minute to vote for him if the tally against him is low enough. I really think they should only do that if the alternative is voting at complete random.


@aestrix re

the allure of a private one is that it's a place where you can trust all of the people in it.

we could, yeah, and then we got a new friend named Addy, and we trusted Addy, and everybody knows how well that went for us. In the end, it was only a little bit better than the public channel.

I thought Shoal was constantly mistaken about every thing he thinks, which was both hilarious, and also really troubling.

The most troubling part is that I'm genuinely not trying to be mistaken about anything. The only deliberate misdirection I've done this game so far was a lie of omission when I wrote that there was nothing preventing me from typing vote Danielh. I'm pretty sure you can figure out what was omitted there by now.

But It's like I drew the insane cop[1] card in real life. at least with insane cop, once you figure out you're the insane cop, you can just do the opposite of whatever the GM tells you. in real life it is probably not actually the case that I'm wrong 100% of the time. The one time I'm right about something, people are going to assume that I'm being wrong as usual and it's going to bite us. I'm like a reverse Cassandra.

[1] insane townie but that's not a real mafia role.

So, how about, if I have an opinion about somebody, I try to explain my reasoning as best as I can, and the rest of you can either congratulate me on once again not knowing what I'm talking about or can invoke the "even a broken clock is right twice a day" clause.

I'm also not correcting your pronoun usage because I can't reliably use my own pronouns correctly either. The strategy I've had the best luck with so far, with regards to trying to self-pronoun correctly, is to just omit them entirely when speaking of self in third person, using "own" instead of my/his/hers/theirs/its/ and "self" instead of my/it/her/theirself. i'm not requesting other people to use those terms for me -- own and self aren't my perferred pronouns they're just my workaround for avoiding pronouns when i have to use 3rd person to talk about myself.

the problem, i think, is that my brain doesn't attach gender to any of the pronouns and has its own private meanings for each one, which is a terrible for communication because words mean things and i can't redefine "blue" to mean "apple" and expect to be understood. but i will keep trying to gender others correctly and i believe that everyone else is also trying.

I agree that random voting is the wrong thing to do at this point, especially since we need to go about killing the mafia and have enough people left over to kill the cultists at the end once we get rid of the nightly kills. We're going to cut it pretty close, assuming we don't lynch townies. My current thoughts are: I'm pretty sure BSS is town, Aestrix is likely town or very good at acting, and Ozy/anthusiam is likely town (partially because I expect that Ozy would have kept playing if they had a more prominent role, but that could just be me). Alpha we know is likely neutral in one way or another (though still capricious and dangerous and possibly capable of siding with the cult but we're still the biggest game in town (no pun intended)). Shoal is almost certainly cult, and pistashi0n is very likely cult (pistashi0n has no reason to lie about being cult that I can think of). And assuming shoal is telling the truth, we've accounted for all four of the DanielH-night-actions so there probably aren't any more cult members. Probably. Shoal has a very good reason to lie about extra, hidden cult members, though. And assuming shoal is telling the truth, we likely have a roleblocker of one form or another in our midst, who I agree is probably one of the mafia.

That leaves speculation on everyone else. I've had unfounded suspicious feelings at pistachi0n and jalepeno_dude, though pistachi0n is now likely cult. I've had very slight suspicious feelings at kuuskytkolme and no.head.chicken. And I don't feel like Paradox or thatwasademo have talked enough for me to form a good impression of them, Paradox especially, so I'm pretty neutral on both.

I think that covers everybody.

Also, I didn't really want to share this because I felt it would make people less likely to think I could be right about any opinion I might have, but it's clear enough that I can't pass for even normal levels of ineptness, so some of the being bad at reading people is due to autism but most of the rest of it is probably due to a mild traumatic brain injury that I had last year. I lost a lot of language when that happened and it's only recently started to come back. I was really really surprised that I was able to post as much as I have in this thread -- I haven't been able to blog much or use AIM or write e-mails or letters. On average, I participate in 1 real time conversation a month.

It had been slowly getting better, and I had been having more clear days, but when I signed up for the game I was still expecting to only be able to produce intermittent sentences. So I'm really happy to have found something that I can write about and I'm hoping that being able to write in contexts like this one will make it easier to write in other contexts too and maybe practice in games like mafia will eventually make me better at reading people too. I still have bad days where it's hard to rub two thoughts together, but I've spent a year thinking "okay, well i don't use language anymore, that's just how things will be now" but now i'm coming around to "maybe if i practice using language i can regain some of it". since i seem to be able to write paragraphs in this context maybe if i do that a lot, i'll be able to write paragraphs in other contexts too. so i signed up on some other mafia sites for more language practice.

I thought I was doing good at passing for normal but a year after the injury my mother asked me if I'd had a stroke (I hadn't wanted her to worry so i hadn't told her but that backfired if she thought i was a stroke victim!) and then again with you guys I thought I was passing for normal here but now I don't think I have been if it's been this obvious that i'm more inept than most newbies. I think that if I try to show my work about why I think things that I thinks then maybe it'll be easier for people who are less inept to spot how i'm going wrong, or where i'm going wrong, or whether i happen to be not wrong for once.

Okay yeah now that I see the reasoning I agree I should stop voting at random sorry for wasting the time.
Also I was expecting to get more useful over time because of my template but now it looks like that's not happening and there are vanilla townies who are templates so I'm probably less important than I thought I was.
I currently am most suspicious of Paradox, second most of Anthusiasm (used to be Ozymandias).
@Pistachi0n, were you informed when you were Chelsea'd?
I think I will vote for Paradox unless more than 3 people want me to vote for one of the cult to prove I am not a cult member.

no.head.chicken wrote:Yet it doesn't seem urgent to take down the leftover cult and considering we haven't managed to take down a single mafioso, I really think we should leave them alone for now. Also: the failed vote against Alpha show that cultists can't vote against each other, so looking at the votes against daniel we can be pretty sure of many ppls non-cult status.

To whit:

DanielH: 7 (Aestrix, Alphabeta, jalapeno_dude, michaelblume, no.head.chicken, Paradox, tau)

only kuu, BSS, Ozymandias could still be possible secret cultists.

That would be true if the only thing effecting the votes was cult membership but I'm nearly sure there is either a double voter or vote thief (currently think vote thief is more likely). I originally thought it was Alphabeta (because of Danielh having two votes cast for him here but alphabeta being the only one who voted for him) and didn't post as I didn't want to draw attention to him if he was town and on the off chance nobody had noticed it. Now it's obvious that he borrowed the power for someone and I think that the town knowing that there are multiple factors influencing votes is more important than the possibility that the mafia hasn't noticed this.

This key:

Paradox wrote:

random noise or something

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Alphabeta is a doublevoter based on alicorns vote tally. I will be suspicious if the mafia don't kill him. It's important to kill him if he's mafia because the wiki says that mafia doublevoters are very powerful for mafia in endgame.

reveals that I had earlier said that alphabeta was and that I'd be suspicious if he wasn't killed (at the time I assumed a lot of people had noticed and didn't post publicly on the off chance the mafia had missed it). I am less wary of the doublevoter being a mafia member now but I think it's important to know that multiple things are influencing the vote count (I still think it would be just as bad if they were mafia but I think it's less likely that they are mafia).