Alicornutopia

Before I wen't with the random vote thing last game, my vote was for tau. I know at least one other suspected him.
As a result my opinion of human intuition and baseless speculation as a tool of mafia is a bit higher this time.

The problem is that if we do such speculation in thread it is not incredibly difficult for (hypothetical) mafia to influence it.
Thus I'll be writing a name on paper today. Hopefully with some reasons too. I'll only share it and probably publicly vote for it tomorrow. (to prevent my opinion blocking you'r intuition and to establish a protocol)
I hope others will do this as well. Even if you do intend to stick to the random vote. I am curious to see how well the idea works. This is a good time to test it.

The method is likely to work less well the first day because our information is limited, but as said, my (limited) experience does indicate that an semi-demi-informed choice is possible even on first day.

I don't have much to contribute to template discussion regretfully.
Why would that be an alternative to random vote though? None of the names is linked to a screen-name so I don't see how that would lead to a vote.

I'm still suspicious of PlainDealingVillain for seeming to know more about the setup than the rest of us on page two, so I'll vote him for now.

Vote: PlainDealingVillain

going alphabetically, only listing people I can think of something for

Ahin, Tekaal's brother, is a witch. Maybe he can make potions with different effects, for example he might have a bunch of one-time night actions: potion of invisibility (to keep himself safe from a night kill), potion of healing (to keep someone else safe from a night kill), potion of far sight (lets him track one person during the night without having to leave his house)

shrens: maybe they have some limited immunity to nightkills/day kills because they would just lose a form
Apran, Cenem, Ehail, Eret, Finnah who could be a [url=http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Fruit_Vendorfruit vendor[/url], Hallai, Ilen, Jensel, Kenar

dragons: same as above with losing forms. i'm not really sure how dragons/shrens are going to differ in this game if at all
Anaph, Eresti, Feln who is listed as having a classified occupation, Inyneambe, Kaylo, Keo, Korulen, Lhenrath

wizards: wizardy is so versatile they probably have a bunch of different spells they can do including warding and information gathering
Ehail, Kanaat & Keo are probably lovers, Kaylo, Korulen, Leekath who could probably be a tracker because people's clothes will tell her where they've been.

I can't remember which of Leekath's fathers was the mean one but that one could be one of the killers.

kyma:
Kutran,

bored now and this is harder than i thought the character's pages don't have all that much information on them so it's hard to remember what abilities they have or even figure out what colour group the dragons are in.

DanielH wrote:Your reasoning about not lynching our better players, and you being one of them, sounds good. However, if you are scum, you being intelligent makes it even more important to lynch you soon. I’m much more likely to be swayed by the argument you glossed over, about “we’re playing for fun and it’s not fun to be lynched on day 1”; I made that point myself before roles even came out.

So, I’ll ask you this. Assuming you can’t persuade us to do a No Lynch, what positive course of action would you recommend? We don’t have much if any information about role assignments other than our own; we only have information about the players. Taking your line of reasoning to an extreme, what you posted is an argument for lynching the players who are the poorest at the game. This will, on average, increase the ability of both the town and the scum; it is potentially a good strategy as far as getting decent-sounding advice goes, but doesn’t seem like it will actually lead to a win (and is even less fun than random Day 1 lynches for the targets: all the injury of random day 1 lynching, plus insult of “you aren’t very good at this game”, plus “you don’t have the chance to gain experience”).

You told us not to vote for you even if we do have a day 1 lynch. What should we do instead?

I don't advocate taking my line of reasoning to the extreme. Don't do that thing. It sounds cruel and judgmental and not really built towards having fun.

Assuming I can't convince a no lynch, I think that the most useful thing we can do is to poke at our lurkers with a stick. I feel like I'm less of a threat than a lurker, objectively, because you are free to analyze the things I say. A lurker, not so much. I hate going up against things I can't reason with or analyze, and I can't analyze no information.

DanielH wrote:

kappa wrote:I of course swear on my mother's grave that both this and the previous random number were actual legitimately generated random numbers

I’m fairly sure “graves” don’t exist in Elcenia, based on Ivan thinking he was in a weird rock garden. You are probably a dragon or an offworlder. Perhaps you’re Matilda, and your comment about nothing in the sandboxes being here was to throw us off track?

Tamien wrote:The thing that I wondered about kappa swearing on his mother's grave is that like... is her mother dead? Should we be sympathetic? Suspicious? :P

(Though I think Ivan would think he was in a weird rock garden in an Earth cemetery, too; doesn't Barrayar do graves differently?)

Oh my God, you guys.

I, Kappa, the actual real physical person, actually had a real physical mother who is actually dead, and sometimes I semi-facetiously swear on my mother's grave because when she died she had some friends who shall remain nameless illegally dump her ashes over Niagara Falls so her "grave" is a somewhat questionably defined location and I like the occasional bit of black humour. Do not pick on my phrasing to try to find in-game or in-universe implications. There are none. The phrasing predates the game by nine years. Here is a blog post I wrote about my dead mother in 2008. I do not require outpourings of sympathy but I am kind of laughing incredulously about people picking on it as a worldbuilding detail.

Okay, and now that that's over with, actual legitimate game considerations coming in a followup post.

This post is long; I shall make use of informal section breaks to separate topics. Also I will use purple for emphasis where I'm tempted to bold things but am not addressing the mods.

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My opinion on Aestrix: I have no way of knowing at this time whether or not she is scum. I am not even going to try to engage with the question of What The Mods Would Have Done except to say that it's reasonably likely they introduced real randomness into at least some of the role assignments, especially the ones that might otherwise have led to a lot of What The Mods Would Have Done second-guessing. Aestrix's intelligence and value as a player is therefore either on our side or not and we can't tell until it's too late. Aestrix's entertainment[ value as a player is not a strategic consideration, and I have blown my soft cuddly heart quota for the game already. I stand firm on my vote.

Furthermore, I explicitly stated that I can be argued out of my day 1 random kill plan by a well-explained and sensible alternate strategy, and yet Aestrix's defense is totally devoid of alternate strategies and focuses on things that do not appear in my quoted terms for departing from my precommitment. That's, uh, odd.

Also, her post contains a claim with no citation that "Alicorn admitted that our roles are not up to the random number god, but picked based on what would be interesting and unexpected". I have skimmed the first posts of this and the OOC thread and found no such statement, and I don't remember hearing one. I acknowledge that I could be forgetting and failing to find it. Can someone find the citation, please?

Perhaps Aestrix's post is poorly argued because of insomnia. I acknowledge this as a valid possibility. It is true that she was staying up inadvisably late.

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My opinion on day 1 random kill, further explained:

It is my understanding that the argument in favour of day 1 random kill goes approximately like this. "In a game of mafia there is usually at least one evil murderer who can make at least one evil murder per night, and they're not going to murder themselves for us. Our odds of getting a killer by random chance may not be great, but they're better than the killer's odds of committing suicide without our intervention, and if we just sit around waiting and don't kill anyone, we give the evildoers more time to do evil and leave ourselves in roughly the same position except with more dead townies (or converted cultists or god knows what else)."

I buy this argument. But I am absolutely willing to hear alternatives.

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I also don't think public role speculation is going to do us that much good in terms of figuring out what powers have actually been created. It's not like last game where there are clearly defined obvious character archetypes like "the Sherlock" and "the Chelsea" or even "the Libby" (I really think it should've been more obvious after Aestrix died that when she listed early on which templates she ~just thought might be killers~, the real ones were in there). If I say "the Rhysel" or "the Keo" or "the Ehail" or "the Hallai" or "the Ilen" or "the Talyn" or "the Finnah" or "the Mallyn" without clarifying, you don't really get the same kind of instant associations springing to mind. And a lot of the powers last game were really surprising even though the kinds of powers you give to Effulgence characters are generally more obvious than the kinds of powers you give to Elcenia characters.

HOWEVER.

MTC wrote:All this talk of randomizing targets is probably distracting from what seems like it would be more useful: speculating about what roles and powers might exist in Elcenia mafia. If everyone contributes and includes their own role among their speculation (even without specifying which one it is), we will at least have every town role included in that speculation, and probably some of the scum roles too (through a combination of good guessing and maybe scum deciding to include their real roles among their public speculation). Anticipating one of the arguments against this (it was raised as an argument during the Effulgence game): Yes, this can benefit scum as well as town. I think that trade‐off is probably pro‐town.

(Purple emphasis added by me, of course.)

I think that if we go about this in a systematic fashion, we might be able to get some use out of it. I remember that one of the most frustrating things about last game was nobody paying attention to the dead Sherlock's prior speculation about suspicion or, as I said, the dead Libby's list of possible killer templates.

I suggest the following:

1. Every player who agrees to this scheme composes a list of a bunch of characters that they personally think might be in the game. If you are town, you should agree to this scheme, because this scheme will eventually provide useful information to town. Make it a longish list, and include some characters in there that are a bit of a reach in case some of the roles given out were minor characters. Include your own character name in your list somewhere. Making it a long list makes it easier to disguise which one you personally are.

2. Every player who agrees to this scheme makes the following commitment: If I am town-affiliated, I will describe my own real power attached to my own real character in this list. If you are town-affiliated there is no reason to falsely make this commitment.

3. Every player who agrees to this scheme writes a post with the list, perhaps spoilerboxed for length, and assigns precisely one plausible power to each character. "Vanilla townie" is a legitimate plausible power, and so is "combines power X and power Y", but don't write "could be power A or power B" because the point here is that any list item could be you revealing your very own power. Try to get a little creative with it, because if you list your own real power among a bunch of things grabbed unaltered from mafia wikis, it'll probably stand out, and if you have a list entirely composed of vanilla townies and things grabbed unaltered from mafia wikis, it would be plausible to conclude that you are one of the vanilla townies you listed.

4. Now whenever a town-affiliated character dies, we know they were town-affiliated and we can go back and check what their power was. We'll know what we lost, and if they were an investigative role who had a chance to do any investigating, we can scrutinize their posts for possible hidden information.

(5. I actually think it might be worthwhile for a bunch of us to make occasional spoilerboxed posts saying "Here is some information. If I am a town-affiliated investigative role that can tell this sort of thing, that information is verifiably true. If not, it represents my own personal suspicions or the output of a random number generator." But of course since scum traditionally has better information than town, this runs the risk of the mafia noticing that someone's information is too good to be false. And it would be a lot of effort for everyone to go around pretending to have three different plausible investigative roles in order to conceal the genuine intel of whoever among us actually has one, and some of the things people might pretend to find out could be knocked out by revelations upon the deaths of players.)

Does anyone else have thoughts on this plan? Particularly, are there ways I haven't considered that it might backfire on us? It seems pretty solid to me, but I could be missing something.

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Haha holy shit I'm sorry I'm so long-winded, guys.

I haven't read all the posts so I'm not sure if anyone has already linked but here is the dramatis personae for Elcenia so people have the list of characters to go through. I'm going to start writing up a list now and will post it when I'm complete unless anyone comes up with a convincing reason why this is actually a bad idea (or I think of one myself I guess).

It occurs to me that we technically don't know for sure yet that dead players' character name and affiliation will be revealed like they were last game. I apologize for making this unwarranted assumption. If that turns out not to happen then I suppose my proposed scheme won't be enormously useful.

I'm still going to write up a list. Thanks for the link, Paradox.

Ooh that sounds like a cool idea! I can't think of any problems with that, as long as people are reasonably good at making up plausible powers for ones who aren't them and makes up enough different people that if a handful of people on the list have private contract with each other they couldn't just rule almost all if them out because they know the roles are already taken.

I've been re-reading Elcenia, but I've only gotten through Summons so far -- so my guesses are probably going to be slanted towards the characters in that book. So here, in semi-approximate order of appearance:

Rhysel -- kama, though I'm not sure what powers a kama would have that would be relevant in this game.
Korulen/Saasnil -- possibly vanilla, possibly something interesting due to the fact that they are wizards. Not sure how wizardry translates into mafia roles.
Kanaat -- probably linked to Keo if both are in this game, maybe as part of a very small masonry
Keo -- I don't think she'd be in this game, but she'd have to be vastly underpowered if she was. And probably linked to Kanaat if both are in the game. Possibly used as a cop?
Narax -- dragon, very strong wizard (though no idea what that would mean)
Neris -- dragon, likely vanilla or nearly vanilla
Samia -- mayyyybe linked to Narax in some way? Mayyyybe scum?
Kolaan -- vanilla.
Revenn -- incredibly powerful Kama... except I have no idea what that would mean for the game
Maeris -- dragon, probably vanilla.
Runa -- baby dragon, likely vanilla or innocent child
Tekaal -- possibly some link with Rhysel, both a wizard and a kama.
Aziel -- god. Almost undoubtedly not in the game.
Eret/Theedy -- shrens, possibly linked somehow. Maybe some kind of hiding power?
Jensal -- shen, probably vanilla
Talyn -- also kama, uncertain of his powers but he might be a killer or something else scary due to how he ended up in Blood, if I recall correctly. Possibly some kind of lifestealing power? No clue how that would work mechanically.
Leekath -- possibly capable of doing more analysis on crime scenes, some kind of CSI-like-cop? Uncertain what else to do with the fact that she's a hearer.
Kaylo -- dragon, he really likes figuring things out about magic if I recall correctly so possibly a power cop?
Ahin -- witch. Can possibly create potions to give himself or others one-shot powers?
Ehail -- shren, wizard
Rhysel's family, non-parents -- probably vanilla
Rhysel's parents -- possibly vanilla and mafia-aligned? Want to kill the unnatural magic users? Meta-analyis suggests the mafia will have powers, though, so this is likely not the case.
Eryn -- death kama -- can summon the dead to gain information from them? This seems strong however.

I think that's all the major/interesting people in Summons? I may have missed a few. And none of these people make particularly good candidates for the scum, I think, with the possible exception of Talyn. But that's my list/speculation. So far. More to come when I've read Blood.

Also I started this list before the most recent few posts. so it might not quite conform to spec, but should be close enough.