Elcenia Mafia Game Thread

[Paradox]

Didn't Aestrix say there were five Mafia counting her? So there should only be two left.

She said "There are five mafia members, besides technically myself" so I think the count of 5 excluded her.

[Shoal]

I have two completed games on mafia scum, both times I lost as town. If that counts as more experience than everyone else then I don't mind sharing.

The first thing about LYLO is that it's really super stressful. It's stressful as town because only one us needs to vote wrong and then the mafia can just vote the wrong person -- on mafiascum the day ends at simple majority, so 4 votes would end the day. One person votes wrong and then 3 people pile on and game over mafia win. Here, we will have 3 days regardless so it is safe to vote and to unvote and to talk to each other. There probably will be a mad scramble at the end regardless of what we do I guess.

On mafiascum, you can greatly increase your chances of winning in LYLO by not voting first (whether or not you're town), because of this hammer mechanic where the day ends early. For example in 7 player LYLO each townie has a 50% chance of guessing right: there are 5 townies and 3 scum and each townie knows that they themselves are town so they know there is three scum in the other six. But if someone else votes first then they can consider what that person said while voting or who they voted and how those two players have interacted all game. If the game doesn't end right away that means either the person voting or the person they voted for is scum and that can be enough to figure it out based on previous interactions.

Similarly if you're scum, if you vote first then it makes it harder to quickhammer.

I think not having quickhammers here is going to make it very different from on mafiascum but there will probably be a mad scramble at the end of the day with both town and scum voting and unvoting in chaos. chaos is bad but i'm not sure there's anything we can do about it. Anyway, I don't think there's much danger in voting first here since we could all vote for somebody and the day wouldn't end for a few more days, which is enough time to talk and reconsider and stuff.


In my last game, which just completed a few days ago, I was the town tracker. There was a girl from my previous game in this one, and I was pretty sure that she was town but not 100% sure, but I figured I was sure as I was going to get so I wrote to her a sentence the town cop had said in our previous game because I knew she'd understand what I was saying to her and I knew the other players wouldn't understand. She'd actually figured out I was tracker on day 1 because I had been leaving some breadcrumbs. The scum didn't figure it out because they hadn't played with me before and I guess I was subtle enough, though I really lucked out that she was town if she'd been noticing since day 1!

Anyway that was day 2 that I crumbed my role to her and she crumbed back that she understood. She did it very subtley and nobody else knew what we were saying or even knew that we were saying something; it looked like we were talking about something else. That night, I knew that if she were scum I'd die so I didn't bother tracking her. I also figured the most experienced player in the group would have picked up on some of my crumbs too, so I didn't track her either.

That left 3 people: someone who I was townreading, someone who had been pretty lurky but they seemed widely townread, and someone who was pretty lurky and seemed widely scumread. So I tracked the one in the middle, because I thought that if it was the two lurkers then the kill would be assigned to the townier one. He didn't go anywhere that night so I thought it meant those two couldn't be scum together BUT I was wrong about that. In the mafia private thread that was released at the end of the game, the two mafia thought it was the other way around and that the one I tracked was more likely to be tracked because they'd been lurking more. So I tracked the one they thought I would track but for the wrong reasons. :)

Night 1, the person I tracked was nightkilled, and we only had 2 nights and 3 days (it was a 9 player game) so not a lot of chances.

[Tamien]

Yeah, I definitely interpreted it as 5 mafia + Aestrix. Which means there are three mafia left, not two.

I'm glad we don't play by mafiascum rules but NO KIDDING THIS IS REALLY STRESSFUL AND THE DAY HAS BARELY STARTED

[jalapeno_dude]

So I keep starting to write long posts, getting interrupted in the middle of writing them, and then coming back to find that my half-written posts are nonsensical. I'm just going to throw out some short observations, then.

-I hope we didn't need Talyn to kill the demon. That's what happened in Blood, right?
-Either michaelblume is a mafia member or he isn't. If he is, then the four of us in Town can control the vote. But if he isn't, then the mafia can force a 3-3 tie and a COINflip. I worked through the math assuming there wasn't a demon and in that case the mafia has a pretty good chance of winning--in order for Town to win they either have to win three COINflips in a row or somehow stop a nightkill. Modrony said there's a light, so maybe that's possible. But the demon makes everything much more complicated. Depending on how demons work and what their win conditions are I think what the demon does today and tonight could control the outcome of the game.
-If there are 3 active mafia members left, there are some pretty perverse incentives at work here. I read Shoal's post and I think it's *worse* than the situation with "quickhammers" they describe--no one has any incentive to vote *at all* until someone else has voted. I guess the only exception is if one of us remaining Townies can make a credible (power-based) accusation of someone else's guilt. But even in that case it still seems like the mafia can force a tie. Argh.
-I wrote a whole bunch more bullet points on demons and Talyn and what might be up with those excess kills on Nights 2 and 4 but they were incoherent so I deleted them.
-I feel like anthusiasm's post getting the number of mafia wrong should make me find them either a lot more or a lot less suspicious, but I keep going back and forth on which one of those it is.

[jalapeno_dude]

Oh, also, I should mention that I asked Alicorn to move up the start of today because I have a candidacy exam on Friday at 2 PM and I didn't want to stress out about this game during it, and she kindly agreed. I hope that doesn't inconvenience anyone else.

[Shoal]

at the end of the day, sure. but right now on day 1 i could type vote shoal[1] on its own line in bold and nothing would happen because we have 3 more days before anything will happen. so we could do practice votes or something, or we could talk about our suspicions.

In both my completed games where we saw lylo (just completed a third since my last post! and won as town but not in lylo so it's off topic) we did this thing where we all said who we would vote for before anybody was allowed to vote. this was trying to circumvent the quickhammer mechanic to force people to make up their minds and be as sure as they could before voting for real. both times we lost anyway but I think the principle was right, and we have that principle by default here because the day isn't going to end yet.

[1]I think it should go without saying that voting your self in LYLO is stupid. As either alignment. less stupid here without quickhammers but still dumb!

[anthusiasm]

Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong about any of this (I'm on my phone so going back and fact-checking is going to be really time-consuming), but we know futurevision was Ilen, we know she claimed to have some kind of connection with michaelblume (she said that if he died she would have to do something anti-town), so from that it is probably reasonable to conclude that michaelblume is Hallai. The question is, do we think Hallai is mafia? On the one hand, she's not exactly a morally upright character, but on the other hand, all of the mafia killed so far have been Ryganaavlan (I think Mekath was Ryganaavlan?), so it wouldn't fit the pattern. Also, michaelblume has functionally quit the game.

If it weren't LYLO I would say we should kill him just to be on the safe side, but it is LYLO, so if anyone has better suspicions we should probably go with those.

[modrony]

Still working on who to suspect, but I think it's really important to make choises based on as much information as possible today.

Also I think the mafia being Ryganaavian is pretty probable at this point.
That casts some suspicion toward the non-powered people. (Not a huge amount. Kappa is on that list. But so is Tulip.)

So here is what I have so far.
night 1: Kappa: no action.
night 2: *** targets BSS.
night 3: Shoal: no action.
night 4: jalapeno_dude: no action.
night 5: Tulip: no action.

[modrony]

-I hope we didn't need Talyn to kill the demon. That's what happened in Blood, right?

The game would have ended with demon win already if this was the case.
I don't know the story between Talyn and demons. Would someone care to elaborate on that?

-Either michaelblume is a mafia member or he isn't. If he is, then the four of us in Town can control the vote. But if he isn't, then the mafia can force a 3-3 tie and a COINflip. I worked through the math assuming there wasn't a demon and in that case the mafia has a pretty good chance of winning--in order for Town to win they either have to win three COINflips in a row or somehow stop a nightkill. Modrony said there's a light, so maybe that's possible.

Oh that is right. I brainfarted and counted michaelblume among the dead for some reason. :(
I think it is probable that michaelblume is town because futurevision is and claimed connection to michaelblume.
That makes it even more important that town reaches an unity of vote.

I don't think the 'mad scramble' is actually necessary.
If mafia members are fleeing from the leading candidate that means we have chosen correctly and should stay fast in our choice. We can always vote for the last minute vote-changers next turn.

But the demon makes everything much more complicated. Depending on how demons work and what their win conditions are I think what the demon does today and tonight could control the outcome of the game.

Good point. It is possible that MTC chose a mafia member to transfer to. That would make town way less screwed if we make it into the morning.

-If there are 3 active mafia members left, there are some pretty perverse incentives at work here. I read Shoal's post and I think it's *worse* than the situation with "quickhammers" they describe--no one has any incentive to vote *at all* until someone else has voted. I guess the only exception is if one of us remaining Townies can make a credible (power-based) accusation of someone else's guilt. But even in that case it still seems like the mafia can force a tie. Argh.

I don't see how that follows. Voting won't cause any damage here before the end of day.
Just because things look bleak for the town doesn't mean we should give up hope, doesn't mean we shouldn't still do our damnest to win this thing. Winning is still possible even if it is hard to do.

-I wrote a whole bunch more bullet points on demons and Talyn and what might be up with those excess kills on Nights 2 and 4 but they were incoherent so I deleted them.

That sounds really familiar. Makes me less suspicious of you.

-I feel like anthusiasm's post getting the number of mafia wrong should make me find them either a lot more or a lot less suspicious, but I keep going back and forth on which one of those it is.

For what it is worth I townread them pretty strongly. And I made a calculation error myself, people make those.

[Shoal]

Unofficial vote count:
not voting: 7 (anthusiasm, jalapeno_dude, michaelblume, modrony, paradox, shoal, tamien)

Navigation:
Morning 1
Evening 1/Morning 2
Evening 2/Morning 3
Evening 3/Morning 4
Evening 4/Morning 5
Evening 5/Morning 6

I mean that I think a mad scramble will happen regardless. Everyday we've tried to avoid one and everyday we've played musical chairs in the last half hour or so. It's possible that some people taking part in the mad scramble will be town. I think precommitting to not mad scramble may tie our hands if it becomes a winning strategy. I mean that if we look over previous days some of the people mad scrambling have since flipped town and they had town motivations for doing what they did. On mafiascum one guy won a game as town because he unvoted in the middle of the scum quickhammering because he realised what was happening. If he had precommitted to not change his mind, he would have lost.

Not having to worry about a quickhammer means we can feel each other out and talk to each other and try to pull together as a town. There are no consequences for being wrong today or tomorrow. We have until Friday. So I guess we should still try to avoid a mad scramble but there probably be one anyway and maybe we can read something from it but it probably won't be clear cut.