Re: Zombie invasion Mafia game.
Okay, time to post. My inactivity has only had the effect that I have a ton of things to address at once, and I'm not sure where to start. But since this was a direct question to me, I might start from here:
What do you mean by tunneling? You think Noodle planted a potential clue for a false Doc claim down the road?
No, I don't think that, I'm not even quite sure what you mean. I tried to explain it in the post where I voted, it was as if Noodle focused solely on his comment about Ankeli when it became a point of suspicion. He became blind to everything else, hence tunnel visioned. That may be too strong an expression for it, but I felt he explained that comment too often while not talking enough about anything else.
Moving on... While reading the thread, it amazes me that many players are obviously oblivious to the rules and the setup. Thyiad in particular, but she has confessed not to reading the rules, and I can't see that as anything but a null tell - some players just don't care about such details and want to get into the mafia aspect of the game. I noticed this in a game on mafiascum.net, where a town player was mislynched for ignoring the rules, among other things.
Anyway, time to spell some things out. The setup of this game is based on a flash game called
Rebuild. The concept of the flash game is that you are in control of a group of survivors who have barricaded a few blocks in the middle of a city against zombies. They have to reclaim new city blocks to add to their fort, invite new survivors to join them, and of course defend themselves.
This is where it gets relevant to our game here. Whoever thought that the presence of a police station would indicate a cop role, based on the flash game that is probably incorrect. In that game, police stations are simply easy places to fortify and defend, so they serve as duty stations for soldiers guarding the fort, and nothing else. My assumption is that that is what the police station is for in this game as well, I have yet to see any indication that this was not so.
In the flash game, basic houses serve as homes for the survivors, as they do here. In the flash game, the town also has farms to grow food on, and we may not have those here, since the rules clearly said food must be scavenged.
So much for buildings... then roles. The rules post mentions several roles and part of what they do, and based on the flash game you can guess what the others are for. All of the roles mentioned have equivalents in the flash game, though there everyone can do anything, specialists are just better at it. Scouts (equivalent to leaders) can invite other survivors into the town. Scavengers find food. Engineers seem to be equivalent to builders, which are used in the flash game for all manner of construction, be it barricades or new buildings. Scientists in the flash game can research new technologies which aid the fort in different ways, like how to preserve food or distract zombies. Finally, soldiers are used to guard the fort, kill zombies from areas outside the fort, and accompany other roles to make their missions safer. In this game, the only direct evidence I've seen is that soldiers can defend the fort. Many people speculated that they could aid other roles somehow, but I don't know about that. Finally, most survivors are just plain civilians who are not experts at anything.
I can't say I would've kept track of the hints and soft claims of different roles, but I'd guess we have at least two of each of the aforementioned roles. Probably more soldiers than others, those are the specialists that are most useful in the flash game, and looking at the game mechanic here, they are directly responsible for defending the town and ensuring that morale stays up and our lynches work. On top of those, several untrained civilians, the mafia and possible third party roles. I don't think we can look forward to finding traditional mafia roles in our midst, like doctors or cops.
I'd recommend that people pay attention to the posts on page one. The third post in particular is essential. It lists the town status every day and night, and looking at that, it is dead obvious what each power role did last night (well, almost). The scout found another soldier and brought him in. Scavenger found more food. The soldier defended the fort, since the combat report explicitly lists someone on defense. Not sure what the scientist did. On fiture days those reports could become far more interesting. If at any time no new person is invited into the town after a night, it is possible that the player invited was in fact scum.
This may be our only way of positively identifying mafia from night actions.
For identifying town, that idea I posted about passing around items among townies could work, though it occurred to me that it may only mean that citizens can receive items. In that case, the plan would only reveal the town power roles, which would obviously be bad. If however a player who is not yet a citizen receives an item, then we can use that as a means to identify another town player.
By the way, the death of the dog is an event that happens frequently in the flash game. Most of the time, the dog alerts the humans to the presence of zombies before it is killed, sometimes one just dies and everyone is sad. I really think that was just random, and not something to think about too much. There are random events that boost morale too, so I would not worry.
So much about game mechanics. Time for some good old scum hunting.
Though it was a while back, two comments I did not particularly like on day one were from Noammr and Krazeyivan. Noammr said Zarniwoop would be mafia because he had not been scum for four consecutive games. Perfect case of Gambler's Fallacy if I ever saw one. Krazeyivan had something similar, where he said if he kept voting me, I'd be scum eventually. Technically true, based on probability and the assumption that we both keep playing, but also completely useless. These comments may have been made in jest though, so I'm not reading too much into them.
I almost forgot. If anyone mentions Gambler's Fallacy thingie and/or Occam's Razor, they get a nasty post restriction.
I'd like my post restriction, please. I just invoked Gambler's Fallacy for real. You should know I actually
like post restrictions.
What I was referring to in my last post about some people claiming plenty of information, it was of course Asrrin and Valhauros. At first it looked like I could draw some fairly solid conclusions from what they said, but now I realize that I'd misread Asrrin.
Sorry, unless Gorny is lying about his roleclaim, I know for a fact you are wrong. And Gorny has not been scummy in the slightest. So you are wrong on that account.
This was in response to the post by Valhauros, where he claimed to know with a 68% probability what everyone's role was. Curious thing, he never mentioned Gorny in that post at all. Valhauros of course pointed this out, and Asrrin responded that based on his view of things, Valhauros would have to be wrong.
Wrong about what exactly?
I would definitely like to see Valhauros explain his thought process that led to that 68% probability and all, but also what was Asrrin thinking here?
On the topic of Valhauros, he has enough votes to lynch. One more would lock him, so be careful. We still want to hear from him. It occurred to me that there is an explanation for that whole night action thing that would not make him scum, though I'd rather not say it out loud, yet. If he is scum, I'm not going to give him an easy way out. I have to say though, talking about your night action in your first post would be very peculiar for mafia, newbie or no.
The only other thing is he could be a third party - Serial killer or neutral, but nothing in the story has suggested the exsistance of other factions.
Anyone want to bet on a cassock-wearing, gospel-spouting, gun-toting biker gangster? I did not make that up, they are in the flash game.
Who was it that, about a year ago, said they will never lie in a mafia game and that if he is ever caught lying, he won't play ever again (or something like that)?
I remember that Zarniwoop has said that he has never false claimed.