Gistou (Over!)

[callforjudgement]

Some thoughts here.

Luckily people didn't think of it, but I think the game could have been broken D1 via a faction claim. Normally, in a Mafia game, a faction claim is 100% pointless because everyone claims town. In this game, though, there were six town factions and scum wouldn't know which factions were town or not (and might well be forced to claim before they'd seen all the town factions, limiting their options). Some would manage a fakeclaim (and the mod gave some limited help with this), but others would likely screw it up, giving town a headstart. (In particular, this would pretty much defeat any chance the special town would have to play as scum, thus forcing them to throw in with town.)

Special town were pretty much always destined to win with regular town. In general, if a faction has a choice of winning with town or winning by themselves, they pretty much always want to choose to win with town. Thus, the only thing that could potentially go wrong for the special townies would be if the rest of the town refused a joint win (which could only happen, according to play-to-wincon rules, if they were confused into not thinking it would be a joint win). If I were playing and normal town, I'd have been pretty much convinced that a ratify vote would have given a joint win to both town and at least one other faction, and thus would have had no reason to vote anything else.

I think there were enough clues in the mechanics post for everyone to conclusively determine whether they were normal town or scum, and that there were multiple town factions that won together and thus were effectively just one large town faction. (In particular, without a very strong indication that you're meant to be helping scum, seeing no factional communication or knowledge in your role PM is normally a giveaway that you're town.) I can understand some confusion on the part of special town, though before I saw the ratification vote, I interpreted the wincon as meaning "you win if some subset of scum factions are eliminated" (and thus would have played as town).

I don't think special town were a third party. I'd say they were a fourth party: a faction that has a defined win condition, which may well be compatible with town's, but they have some uncertainty as to what it is. However, I think there were a ton of (possibly incorrect) clues that they weren't scum.