fhomess

I've added a few of the notable votes that were later withdrawn, and I've also thrown in a red bar where Esther made her claim. Note that ALL of those who voted for someone other than Esther, cast those final votes after Esther claimed. Sheridan and Boris both voted for Zachary early in the day. I suspect that there are about half or slightly more of the scum prior to the claim and about half or slightly less after it. As for Day 1, the initial move to vote Esther fizzled, then Caleb gradually caught up and surpassed her. The fact that both are now confirmed Town leads me to think that there wasn't any strong reason for scum to try to influence one over the other. The other high vote getter, Michael, was briefly tied with Caleb at 3 votes when Damien voted for Michael. From that point on Caleb took off, although Michael was never in serious challenge of reaching Esther's total vote count. The point at which Caleb's vote total really started to climb was after Patrick voted Connie. Esther had 7 votes and Michael then came in and cast the 2nd vote for Caleb. Did any of the less active people stick out to you in your analysis of the voting patterns? I hardly think Tristan was suggesting there wouldn't be scum found in Esther's bandwagon. You do seem a bit uncomfortable with us trying to narrow down the search to the handful of folks that includes you, though.

Well now, it seems to me that we've got ourselves a bit of a pickle here, eh? There seems to be a lot of talk around here about the fact that only one kill has happened each of the last two nights. I'd say that's more than enough. With lynches during the day, I think there's enough death and dying to go around. Personally, I have found Patrick Devon to be worthy of some additional interrogation. Tony presented a bit of a case yesterday, but Patrick also seemed a bit non-committal in his distrust of Molly. It's very much as if Patrick is trying to walk a fine line of being helpful without leading. As Tony stated, his vote for Esther seemed a bit off given his earlier comments in the day.

The lawlessness in this town is unbe-freakin'-lievable! I'm in.

I know a lot of people love the Star Wars and LOTR themes, but I prefer the non-licensed ones and it always saddens me a bit to see the Castle and space (Galaxy Squad right now) themes have half as many or fewer pages devoted to them. Town/City at least still gets several pages.

I really like the use of cheese slopes in the letter filing system to have them all sit on a slight angle.

If you're really opposed to having the same things in the museum and the jewelry store, you might consider changing what's in the museum. Museums house all sorts of artifacts, and some of the historical themes would be a great source of items with which to populate the museum instead of leaving it as is. Or you could turn it into an art museum populated with additional artwork and brick built sculptures.

This looks great.

I seem to recall you being a named innocent in Gotham City, no? That was the game that was going on when I joined EB and discovered this forum. I guess it's close to vanilla. I think I play best as vanilla since I don't worry about getting lynched or night killed as much. Fun to see Dannylonglegs jumping back in and some of the new players continuing on. Aperture had some good recruits.

I'm not sure I can commit to the game yet, so for now you can put me on the reserve list. 1. Several games, starting with Witchbreed and most recently Mafia Mafia. See my about me page. 2. I have friends and family visiting over the next 8 weeks, so I'm not entirely sure how much time I'll have. 3. Among traditional roles, I think the Town Watcher is my favorite. Their result is extremely useful but it also comes with a fair amount of uncertainty as to the interpretation. That makes it strategically challenging to interpret.

I wasn't quite sure what would happen but figured it would cause some sort of ripple if anyone got on. My main goal was to take Esurient out as the third lynch by being tied with PGO (3-1-1). My fear was that you would switch a vote to Rufus and make it 2-1-1-1, leaving just you alive. Esurient's unvote wasn't something I expected, but I deliberately waited until very late so that whatever reaction happened, there wouldn't be much time to think it through.

Sorry... this will be a long post! Comments on Game Setup First let me say that I don't think Zepher should get a free pass on the game setup simply because it was open and we signed up for it knowing that. Zepher took feedback, but ultimately the setup was his responsibility. That said, let's not attack Zepher so much as analyze the setup. A host can never fully predict the implications of a setup, and the important thing is that future hosts learn from what worked well and what worked less well. In my case, I was extremely apprehensive about the setup but wanted to participate anyway, and am very glad I did. I thought the game was going to be very swingy, and expected one side to run away with things. The thing with swingy games is that I typically expect them to swing one way and then STAY that way, but in this game it seemed to swing back and forth more. When the scum first started outing themselves by taking the good pills, I thought they were doomed. What ended up happening was that they were able to swing things completely the other way to the point where I thought we had no chance. For that reason, I think that despite the swingy nature of the game setup, I believe it was balanced. The pivot was more volatile than a traditional setup, but it went both ways. The JOAT role essentially meant that the town didn't have the typical nightly doctor and nightly investigator. The lack of a tracker/watcher type role was also a weakening effect. The Inventor, on both sides, was weaker in their ability to do anything due to the fact that it took 3 nights to make use of an invention (invent, gift, use). I thought making them unkillable led to interesting lynch decisions and added to the strategies that each team had to consider. That said, I would have liked a way for the town and the scum to kill an inventor at night with some consequence. Perhaps the consequence would be that the player's identity was revealed. Perhaps the consequence was that the team's inventor would have to create an armor piercing bullet and gift it to their team's killer, meaning that it would take a few days after discovery of an inventor to actually night kill him. I thought the SK's role was a good fit for the game, too, and didn't have any problem with the SK being bulletproof. I think the pill cart added to the swingy nature of the setup, and it was dependent on the right people being on at the right time. This was not an aspect of the pill cart that I liked. That said, both teams used the cart to their advantage and by changing the timing of the cart, I felt like it was fair. I think the scum's decision to out themselves by picking desirable pills was a reasonable strategy. Town PR's outed themselves in the same way, and both decisions wound up helping and hurting both teams. As for having too many bulletproof abilities in the game, the only night that really mattered was night 5, when the only killable players at night were WBD, myself, and mostlytechnic. Given that there were no watchers or trackers, this was not going to give away any killers. The only real problem with the number of unkillables, IMO, is that the town inventor HAD to be lynched, and if that didn't happen early, then it probably wouldn't happen, and a role claim could still avoid it. Bulletproof townies are pretty powerful, but we've seen them in other games and, for the most part, they haven't thrown off the balance too much. Comments on Game Play Grrr....I haven't seen the deadboard (can someone post a link?), but I assume Hinck already knows that I ended up thinking he was almost certainly scum after "stealing" a bunch of ideas from our PM conversation. Along with Rufus' suspicion, that led me to hunt for things that confirmed this belief, and I found them in spades. I believe I suggested to the town block that scum did us a favor by killing him when they did because I was going to spend the next day trying to get him lynched. Sorry, Hinck! Rufus brought to my attention a rule violation that no longer mattered. Technically, PirateDave didn't edit this post, but the content was changed so in my mind, it was edited from a "spirit of the rules" standpoint. The image that he included of the pill selections was removed from its posted location, making the content of the post meaningless. I hope WBD understands that my needling him to vote for Esurient on the final day was partially intended to help fill the day with some entertaining banter. The nature of open setups is that towards the end of the game, most player roles and alignments will come out. It's usually the best town strategy after enough time has passed. At that point, there really isn't that much to discuss. While I appreciate that dead players want to be entertained, it's not really what most of us involved in the game play it for. You can tell that by how quickly roleplaying tends to exit the game as the game moves along. That said, I really was hoping to convince WBD that I wasn't the blocker and to take out the SK instead. I realize I have no idea how to identify an SK. After the scum started outing themselves, I had Esurient as 95% town because he'd been accused by most of the scum team. Naturally, I was ignoring at that time that he could be the SK. I was really impressed with the scum this game. They made some moves that were really well thought out and could have worked out brilliantly for them if other circumstances hadn't gotten in their way. I'm not sure I would've been as eager to grab the good pills so early in the game, though. Ultimately, the best weapon that non-townies have is hoping to stay secret. It was also pretty impressive to get the SK to side with them. The one thing that I think was unfortunate was that Esurient had to out himself in the vote for Tammo and had to do so too early in the day. That all members of a tie get lynched was known to the town block several days earlier as someone asked Zepher about it. That said, the alternative is usually that the first to accumulate the required votes for a lynch is the one taken, which would've left WBD alive. In that case, we would've blocked him and then lynched him on Day 6, so it didn't matter. I assumed that Esurient (and therefore the scum team), knew as well due to the way he reacted to my vote. It doesn't defeat the purpose of the God Pill's function (who's to say what the purpose really was anyway) because when I voted for Esurient, my goal was to get purpearljellyblob and esurient lynched along with myself, leaving Rufus and WBD in a draw. The reactions of Esurient and WBD were not something I anticipated. I actually wanted to vote closer to the end of the day but couldn't due to another obligation. The God pill's voting impact added a lot of strategic options to the game, and I think it enhanced the game experience because of that. At times it helped town, and at times it helped scum. As I said above, the game was swingy but balanced. I think it's hard to argue that a game is unbalanced when scum publicly outed themselves by Day 3 and the difference between any of the 3 parties was a last minute vote. Like I said, when I voted I fully expected a Town/Scum draw. Overall, I felt like this was a well played game on all sides. There were moments when people made mistakes or things didn't work out as planned, but it seemed like there were a lot of people engaged. Perhaps the pill cart and the open nature helped the vanilla's engage more because they had something tangible they could access easily. That's certainly a point in favor of the setup.

An excellent game all around. I had a lot of fun this game and was quite surprised at what happened at the end of the final day. WBD, I was indeed the blocker, so I would've blocked you last night had you not gotten the penalties. I do think the scum and SK played very well, and felt like this was one of the better played games I've been a part of that really could have been won by any team. I made a few mistakes along the way, but overall am happy with how the game went. I'll have more later.

This has a really nice retro lego meets modern lego feel to it. At least, I think so, and perhaps it's just the traditional minifigs mixed in. I'd put the grate flush with the rest of the sidewalk. Someone's gonna trip and sue the railway!

Seriously? Nonsense I say! You know, you'll win this thing, but you deserve at least one vote along the way these last few days. So there. Vote: The NPC (Esurient)

In that case, you will be sorely disappointed in the conclusion to learn that I have received nothing from him. You're giving the game to the SK when you don't have to. Perhaps your partner in crime will look at it a bit more logically. There is 100% chance you will both lose by voting out a townie. It is unavoidable from a purely probabilistic standpoint. From the same standpoint, there is 100% chance we will lose by voting out the SK, which is why our vote has to go to scum today. The nice thing about those probabilities is that they are compatible. We can choose not to lynch the SK and you can choose not to lynch one of us and we both move from certain defeat into a draw. Yet you see this and are taking the path of certain defeat. I would think a witch would be able to divine the gravity of the situation and understand these things.

Nope. Mafia standard is that blocks happen before kills do. Look it up. There is an order of operations to these things otherwise it's sheer randomness as to what happens first. Our host may be a flesh eating nightmare of wolfish villainry, but he is at least logical. He didn't, although I would understand if you don't believe me on that. We won't vote off the SK. That's your job if you want to have any chance to not lose. You actually do have a chance if you vote off the SK as it'll be 1 to 1 tomorrow. You will lose to the SK if you vote me off. For us, we are guaranteed to lose if we vote the SK out since you will not vote for one of yourselves, so there's no incentive to vote the SK out. The options are limited for all of us at this point, but I'm just thinking about logical probabilities. You are deciding for a 100% guaranteed loss over all other options. It's a poor choice.

No, you killed the blocker last night. Blocks happen before kills, so the fact that you were blocked despite killing the Talking Animal doesn't mean I'm the blocker. I'm not actually sure what happens if 1 town versus 1 scum are left on the final day. I suppose it would be a draw as the remaining players would vote to lynch each other, but to me, that's preferable than losing outright.

If town votes off a scum, then the ball is back in the court of the scum in terms of game end. You don't have to vote a townie off. Vote off the SK and the game will continue to the night phase yet again. You can kill me at night.

It didn't really seem to matter at that point. Kind of like our votes today. You guys are gonna be kicking yourself if Candace eats one of you. 50/50 chance for town, 50/50 chance for scum/sk. I assume Candace won't eat the Cult Leader while he has the Mystery Pill. You can't win if one of you gets eaten, and you're risking that on a coin flip.

I'd be more worried as scum. While there's a higher chance Town would get taken in a random Candice eating, there's still a pretty good chance of a scum munch, which would pretty much blow any chance scum has. I will cast a vote since it's the right thing to do. Vote: The NPC (Esurient) Scum munch scum munch scum munch!

Magical Pill please

The Kaadu does have a point. The SK can't win with both scum alive, and is unlikely to survive a lynch tomorrow. The SK will not side with scum for long, and the scum can't win with one remaining member if the SK lives. One of you has to kill the other relatively soon. I doubt the SK will simply let scum win when they're so close.

Well, we could continue the brilliantly witty banter of "town suck"/"scum suck" from yesterday.

It's worth pointing out that the SK can't win with you, either. Oh, yes, you can win with the SK, but they can't win if there are two of you around. And you can't win with one of you and him around. The SK's best chance of winning is to fight against both of us by hoping to stay hidden.

Thinking out loud here... It's currently 7-3-1, and we are guaranteed 1 scum lynch. The worst case scenario for town is 4-2-1 tomorrow, but that requires the SK to reveal themselves (if they haven't done so already). The problem is, that if the SK reveals themself, then they've become a direct target for both scum and town. We both need to kill him or her. I would think that with a need to eliminate 8 more players, secrecy would be the SK's best approach. Yes, they need to whittle town down a bit, but they also could stand to reduce the scum team. I actually think the SK has a pretty good shot at this if they vote with town since it's going to be hard to eliminate 8 players in two days. The SK wants this to drag out as long as possible, and revealing makes the SK an immediate lynch target.