Mini 692: Boost Mafia (Game Over!)

[Patrick]

Welcome to Boost Mafia, which is located in a small village, in the middle of nowhere, in an unknown time period. What you do know, is that your close knit community believes in, and indeed fears, the supernatural. People hang up those whatsits on their doors that ward off evil spirits, and regularly pray to whatever deities they believe in, in the hope that no harm will come to them. Up until very recently, this seemed to work. Up until recently. People in the village, good people, have been dying, and it's not due to old age. It seems that even in this remote part of the universe, any village, town or city with a population of greater than four has to deal with invasions from anti-town forces. It looks like the only solution is to try and weed out the scum and lynch them in the town square before they can kill all of you. However, there may be something else that could help. Each day, through a combination of strange herbs, placebo effect, and possibly some other force, you can choose to make two of your number stronger and more intelligent. The precise effects are untested and mostly unknown, and great care should be taken not to aid your enemies, but properly used, this could provide your village with the edge it needs to ensure peace again.



Spoiler follows...

Alive

(2/12)

3) Raging Rabbit - Villager - Survived
8) eldarad - Villager - Survived

Dead

(10/12)

11) Jahudo - Mafia Godfather - lynched day 1

4) iLord - Villager - killed night 1

10) Guardian (replacing springlullaby) - Doctor - killed night 1

12) icemanE (replacing RandomGem who replaced fuzzylightning) - Jack of all trades - lynched day 2

1) vollkan (replacing Electra) - Researcher - killed night 2
6) Huntress (replacing Crazy) - Priest - killed night 2

9) Xtoxm (replacing sthar8) - Mayor - lynched day 3

7) Incognito - Vigilante - killed night 3

2) Green Crayons (replacing Mana_Ku who replaced Skillit) - Mafia Encryptor - killed night 3

5) TDC - Mafia Rolecop - lynched day 4

Game Status: Game Over.

[Patrick]

Standard Rules

1.) This game is a day start. Day 1 will start when everyone has confirmed by PM.
2.) During the day you can vote for a player that you think should be lynched. Votes must be in the form

Vote: Player

otherwise they won't be counted. It would be helpful if players unvote when switching their votes.
3.) When a player reaches a majority of votes, they are lynched. I will reveal their role, and the game will move into night. Players can still talk during twilight.
4.) If the day is lagging or discussion is dragging, the mod will set a deadline. No majority at deadline means no lynch.
5.) No talking to other players, dead or alive, outside of the thread, unless your role permits it.
6.) Once dead, you stop posting. A bah post is fine though.
7.) If you have any questions, feel free to PM me.
8.) Try to post at least once every 48 hours. Treat the game as a committment. If you go inactive, you will be replaced.
9.) I'll try to post votecounts as often as possible. Feel free to ask for a votecount at any time. Disappointingly, I may make mistakes. Point them out very gently.
10.) Avoid excessive profanity, flaming etc.
11.) Don't quote or fakequote your role PM. Don't quote any PMs from the mod. Any of these are potentially modkillable offences.
12.) Have fun!

[Patrick]

Special Notes

Firstly, as some of you may have read in the signups thread, Elmo will be helping me mod this game. Elmo doesn't know the setup and roles, and will be modding the game by day, to see if this helps eliminate any mod-bias. I will be dealing with nightactions and writing scenes. Bear that in mind when deciding who to address queries too.

Each day, before you decide on a lynch, you have to decide on two people who you wish to "boost". This can be voted for by posting

Boost: Person

, and works in the same way as normal voting, except that you may vote twice (since two people are being boosted). You can't vote for yourself to be boosted; we like modesty in this village/town. You may not vote twice to boost the same person. A player cannot be lynched until two players have been boosted that day; if someone reaches a lynch majority, nothing happens, and they can be unvoted as normal. Note that if no boost candidates have been selected when a deadline hits, two players will be randomly boosted (and anyone with a lynch majority would be lynched at deadline).

Don't try to determine alignments according to which names, if any, appear in lynch scenes; that's just flavour. Don't try to determine alignments based on wording of role PMs; it's useless in this game and I don't like it as a tactic. Below is a sample role PM. At least one of these exists in the game:

You are an inhabitant of the town.

You win when all anti-town roles are eliminated.

[Patrick]

All roles are out; please confirm by PM. Game starts in day when everyone's confirmed; in the meantime, feel free to ask if you're unsure about anything. Any roles that can nightalk can do so during the confirmation stage.

[Patrick]

Everyone has confirmed, so day 1 is under way. With 12 players alive, 7 is the lynching (and boosting) number. I'll hand you guys over to Elmo

[Incognito]

Vote: eldarad

Sup?

My last two opening votes in games have landed on scum. Do you feel lucky?

[TDC]

vote: Raging Rabbit

Vote: eldarad

Sup?

My last two opening votes in games have landed on scum. Do you feel lucky?

I want proof for this before I mindlessly hop onto the wagon!

[Skillit]

vote:crazy

for being

juuuust

crazy enough to work...

for the mafia

!!!

[Jahudo]

Boost: springlullaby

for being above me on the list

Vote: fuzzylightning

for being below me on the list

[Incognito]

vote: Raging Rabbit

Vote: eldarad

Sup?

My last two opening votes in games have landed on scum. Do you feel lucky?

I want proof for this before I mindlessly hop onto the wagon!

Here's the proof:

• A good, solid vote on Erg0-scum
  
• A very sXc vote on ZazieR-scum

Now join me on the path to salvation.

[Electra]

Now I'm going to skip to more serious discussions very quickly because I want to talk about boosting.

I'm going to theorize that there's three types of people in this town.

1) People with roles - if they are boosted, then they get an additional night choice, or night kill immunity, or something like that
2) People without roles - if they are boosted, they acquire a night choice, or NK immunity, or gain some piece of information or something
3) Mafia - if we boost them, they probably get things like investigation immunity or an extra night kill, or a NK that overrides doc/boosted NK immunity

So obviously, boosting Mafia is very bad and we should avoid doing it.

So to try to aid this, I'm going to put myself up for being boosted, and also claim-ish. I don't have a role, so I'm vanilla, however my role PM says that if I'm boosted, I'll gain information about the town (reworded, of course). I don't mind claiming since I'm not a power role, and if I'm not boosted, then Mafia have no reason to kill me, and I think that if I can get information, then it's a smart choice for a boost.

I considered the possibility of Mafia just killing me if I get boosted, but I decided that between the potential doc, the potential NK immunity, and the fact that it would be silly to have boosts in this game if whoever got boosted could just be killed (rendering the boosts useless) the Mafia doesn't have a really good case for killing whoever got boosted if they want their NK to go through.

So that's my case, do what you want with it.

Also, random

vote: skillet

[Skillit]

Electra = Mohinder Suresh lrofl

[sthar8]

Vote: Skillit

Die, scum, Die!

I have a theory about the setup that does not conform 100% with electra's, but it is close. If I'm right, early massclaim might be a game-breaking strategy for town. Unfortunately, while electra's post does support my idea, I don't have enough evidence to be sure, and I can't reveal the reasoning without showing the scum how to mitigate the damage.

So, I'd basically have to ask the town to trust me on a huge risk, which I'm not willing to do without more concrete evidence. What I'll do instead is ask everybody a question.

Do you feel that massclaim might be a viable strategy at this time?

[TDC]

3) Mafia - if we boost them, they probably get things like investigation immunity or an extra night kill, or a NK that overrides doc/boosted NK immunity

So obviously, boosting Mafia is very bad and we should avoid doing it.

So to try to aid this, I'm going to put myself up for being boosted, and also claim-ish.
[..]
So that's my case, do what you want with it.

And how would we know whether or not you fall in category 3?

Do you feel that massclaim might be a viable strategy at this time?

No.

[eldarad]

Vote: eldarad

Sup?

My last two opening votes in games have landed on scum. Do you feel lucky?

rawr.

I'm fairly sure Patrick will have considered the impact of a massclaim when creating the setup, so I am sceptical of the claim that there is a game-breaking strategy.

Having said that, Electra gets bonus points for making such an early move.

Boost Electra

[iLord]

I'm wary of Electra - what she's doing is way too easy of a scum gambit for me to trust.

Additionally, didn't Patrick give us the vanilla town PM? It said nothing about powers after boosted. It'd be kind of odd for vanillas to be different from the mod example.

Having said that, Electra gets bonus points for making such an early move.
Boost Electra

Um, no.

Vote: Eldarad

My proposed strategy is for us to just play normally, and then choose two people to boost after we find our lynch, based on how they played during the day.

[Electra]

@ sthar - I can't think of a reason that a massclaim would be definitely beneficial to the town, so I'm not sure where you're going. It might be the case, but I can't see why it would be based on what I know of the game.

@ TD - you don't know. I am hoping the fact that there was no night (aka the mafia would not have been able to discuss this as a strategy) and that I did it so quickly works for me. In addition, mafia would not know that there would even be roles where it's stated what type of general thing a boost might do for you.

@ iLord - I don't think scum making a gamble page 1 day 1 is a common thing, but I could be wrong. :p Anyway, I'm including the example role PM vanilla under my second category. I assume that even those vanillas would get a boost in some way, although I don't know what it would be. In my case, it tells me I get information, and I love information. :p

I disagree about playing normally. I think this boost thing can be used to help the town, and it is to the town's advantage to figure out what's the best way to use it. Ignoring what boosts might do and just blindly voting for whomever we think is least suspicious seems like a waste. For one, these people might not get useful boosts. The second thing is that scum can also appear innocent, especially on day 1. They also have their scum buddies to support boosting them. Finally, we're going to want to know what the boost did to the best of the boostee's knowledge, so we can continue to use it effectively, so if we do boost a protown power role, then we would potentially have to out that role the next day.

[sthar8]

Fair enough, I just thought I'd get it out there and see what you all thought. Just in case I'm right, though, somebody remind me to explain the theory when we've either claimed or finished the game.

I'm with iLord's strategy: Normal play until we've got clear candidates for a boost.

Electra: How would you choose the second person to be boosted?

[iLord]

@ iLord - I don't think scum making a gamble page 1 day 1 is a common thing, but I could be wrong. :p Anyway, I'm including the example role PM vanilla under my second category. I assume that even those vanillas would get a boost in some way, although I don't know what it would be. In my case, it tells me I get information, and I love information. :p

I disagree about playing normally. I think this boost thing can be used to help the town, and it is to the town's advantage to figure out what's the best way to use it. Ignoring what boosts might do and just blindly voting for whomever we think is least suspicious seems like a waste. For one, these people might not get useful boosts. The second thing is that scum can also appear innocent, especially on day 1. They also have their scum buddies to support boosting them. Finally, we're going to want to know what the boost did to the best of the boostee's knowledge, so we can continue to use it effectively, so if we do boost a protown power role, then we would potentially have to out that role the next day.

"Scum can't gambit on the first page" is exactly what makes such gambits effective.

I get what you're saying about your role, but it just seems weird and inelegant to include vanillas that don't know their boost power, and vanillas that do.

How is boosting before having enough information to discern who is town going to help the town?

[Incognito]

eldarad pretty much covered what I thought as well -- I could imagine Patrick-mod placing a pretty good amount of thought into this set-up to prevent some sort of a game-breaking strategy from cracking it open by having something as simple as a mass claim. I can also think a number of other reasons for why an early mass claim might do more harm than good.

Electra = Mohinder Suresh lrofl

Why did you immediately accept Electra's claim?

I'm wary of Electra - what she's doing is way too easy of a scum gambit for me to trust.

Really? How so?

[iLord]

Scum - claim vanilla with guarenteed benefit if boosted - take advantage of early game confusion to rally enough support for boost. Provide/"Provide" information.

Notice that information is one of the easiest abilities to fake as scum.

[Skillit]

Sthar8 you should post your idea on a fake myspace and make it a blog or something obscure so we know you had the theory

now

when we see it later and that you are not just retroactively creating the theory. just remind us to have you link us

then

to the page/blog post you can make

now

.

oh i reread again today because i thought there was something

'odd'

about what electra said:

1) People with roles - if they are boosted, then they get an additional night choice, or night kill immunity, or something like that
2) People without roles - if they are boosted, they acquire a night choice, or NK immunity, or gain some piece of information or something
3) Mafia - if we boost them, they probably get things like investigation immunity or an extra night kill, or a NK that overrides doc/boosted NK immunity

people with, people without, and mafia.

Electra if the mafia aren't people, what are they?

There are likely either only 2 categories, or 4. it seems presumptuous to assume that all mafia members would be in one category when everyone else falls into one of 2. I agree that people either have or do not have roles, but to assume that either all or no mafia have roles seems like it would require some extra information to assert. you don't...have extra information about the specifics of the mafia members powers...

do you?

If im being confusing on this just tell me, i get a lot of sass for that.

BTW - im patting myself on the back for my odd lil pun.

[Skillit]

Why did you immediately accept Electra's claim?

umm i was making a joke.

Mohinder Suresh is a character from the show Heroes who basically injected himself with a serum that was unsafe because he wanted a superpower so badly.

I was saying that Electra just wants to be special

[sthar8]

@ skillit: You, of all people, should know you can trust me with something like that. But verifiability is always good, so I'll take your suggestion.

[Skillit]

Should Banesh Hoffmann have allowed Al to make

his

proofs unverifiable???

I think we would all agree that he would not, sir...i think we all agree that he would

indeed

not.