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knives alley hydra mafia

This might be confusing but for some reason i feel like qenya voting us is towny of them - specifically qenya because eir response to the one-head conversation felt very much like a townie trying to make sense of a confusing situation and conversation. Voting us at this moment seems townish of them from their pov. (Although i think there were bits lost in translation - i, at least, wasn't arguing that no tonereads should be happening/that we should pick a head at random, i do admit it's p much all we have to go on rn, i just was hoping to move the conversation to, instead of voting a Hydra we toneread bad, voting a head we (general/game-wide "we") toneread bad. ) Eif was more or less a random vote by mf, sure, and if anyone has a different target they'd prefer let's hear it, we're not married to an eif vote, but also it doesn't seem like a bad vote for us. Just by how neutral they are/how they dropped off. And if my theory is correct (and i really, really think it is) we'll still have Jack in the alma mater spot. (At least as a treestump, that's also an option.) And maybe something fun and shenanigansy, or at the very least informative, will happen.

I'll go over rsp's stuff in just a sec
- h
 
okay, so -
tl;dr, i think this is a dual alignment situation where individual alignments can differ from what the hydra is told.

i'll list my evidence in descending order of importance, strength, and validity, and i'll give a list of assumptions i made at the bottom.

my biggest piece of evidence: last night, i - not our hydra, just me, sande, on my personal/individual account - was targeted with an action that opened private communication between me and another player. i can talk about the specifics more later, but the biggest thing is that this means we have solid evidence that actions can work on one member of a hydra, and don't necessarily need to target both. in other words, mechanically, we aren't just seven players - we're definitely fourteen different people in the eyes of at least one action, which implies the existence of other actions that work this way. if nothing else, we now all know this going forward.
(plus, RSP has claimed that they have an action that's flavor-bound to just one of the two, not both of them.)

my second argument: this is a game designed for seven body slots. the signup thread also specified that it could be shrunk to five. in a setup of seven body slots with two mafia, or five players with one mafia, then the game has to end by ~d3. i ran through various "what if what if what if" things yesterday, and barring the infinite-game worlds where mafia is always blocked and town never votes, town never makes it past d3, even if they get a successful voteout in the first two Days (assuming they don't win because of two successful voteouts). you do have to think about whether rari thought about this - the signup thread specifies she had no help setting it up, so she genuinely might not have - but i have a really hard time believing she wouldn't have thought about this. if it had been designed to be that short, i feel like she would have marketed it as a short sweet bastard game. but she didn't. how else would a game with just seven body slots run? by actually running on the setup of fourteen players. that aside, how would a game with just five slots run?? if this game can be modified down to five body slots and still run (assuming, once more, that rari did think about this and did not design a very short game), it has to actually be counting players.
(plus, the signup thread specified that every signup must eventually become a hydra, and that every hydra could only have two heads. ("two-headed hydras only. no exceptions.") i have no reason to believe this needs to be specified on tcod unless it's already mechanically significant, and having to explain that when saying no to a proposed multi-hydra would reveal mechanics of the game.

third: this game is a bastard game only by "some definitions". plus, "everything i say regarding the game is true.". with this in mind - and setting aside the world where the bastardization is in rari lying her ass off about absolutely everything, which settles us in a world where rari is telling the truth that she is always telling the truth about the game - the bastard elements cannot be anything we were told in text. we were plainly told that our alignment is town, and that we win when all mafia-aligned players are dead. the bastard elements can't concern our paired alignment or our win condition. what else is left? voting mechanics, action mechanics, or... not knowing that your hydra partner is mafia.

"but wait, sande! your argument is about the existence of individual alignment, and you just said that the bastard mechanics couldn't be about alignment!" i don't think the bastard mechanic can be about paired alignment. i think that when hydras are together, that alignment is true. i don't know what this means - it could mean that when we kill an individual their partner may remain to become mafia, or that when when hydras act in pairs they're town and if they're individuals they're mafia (which sheds immense suspicion on the aforementioned RSP flavorclaim). either way, i believe that when a hydra is acting in concert, they are whatever alignment their rolecard gave them, and that this isn't mutually exclusive with mafia-aligned individuals.

lastly, flavor. the signup thread specifies that "flavor is relevant". one of the very, very first lines of flavor in the game - in the signup - is "the first rule of life in the city is that trust is to be built, not to be given". i have a hard time not putting this together with the theory that some individuals are mafia-aligned without their town hydra partners knowing: trust is to be built between partners, in that case, not freely given with the assumption that the body slot guarantees trust. the game start flavor also specifically says "nobody is ever fully safe from being backstabbed", which is either an extremely innocent or very specific word that could support this claim (or, yknow, just be someone writing flavor).

our rolecard also specified that we win when all mafia-aligned players are dead. in sign-ups, rari differentiates at least once between players (individuals) and hydras (body slots). again, this could just be a simple and typical word-choice, or an indication that something else is going on.


in summary, i believe that this game involves players who are secretly members of the mafia without their hydra partner knowing.

critical assumptions in this post that my conclusions rely on:
i assume that...
-- it is possible for alignments to vary depending on whether the player is acting as part of a hydra OR acting independently.
-- rari is telling the truth when she says "everything i say regarding the game is true". i assume that the bastard mechanic is not "being lied to by the gm". i assume that this is a bastard game by only some, not all, definitions, and that most of the game is normal aside from not knowing that individuals can be mafia.
-- rari thought through the length of the game with regard to the player count. i assume that rari did not forget that having only 5 or 7 players would result in a very short game. i assume that rari would have advertised this game as short.
-- there are more actions that target individual players than the private communication action that targeted me last Night. i assume that this action is not unique among actions in the game, and that other actions exist which can target individuals in a hydra.


hopefully laying all of this out makes it clear why i really, really, really want to know whether we can vote out individuals. if we can, that's a really big point in favor of this theory.
 
Despicable Meme said:
This might be confusing but for some reason i feel like qenya voting us is towny of them - specifically qenya because eir response to the one-head conversation felt very much like a townie trying to make sense of a confusing situation and conversation. Voting us at this moment seems townish of them from their pov. (Although i think there were bits lost in translation - i, at least, wasn't arguing that no tonereads should be happening/that we should pick a head at random, i do admit it's p much all we have to go on rn, i just was hoping to move the conversation to, instead of voting a Hydra we toneread bad, voting a head we (general/game-wide "we") toneread bad. ) Eif was more or less a random vote by mf, sure, and if anyone has a different target they'd prefer let's hear it, we're not married to an eif vote, but also it doesn't seem like a bad vote for us. Just by how neutral they are/how they dropped off. And if my theory is correct (and i really, really think it is) we'll still have Jack in the alma mater spot. (At least as a treestump, that's also an option.) And maybe something fun and shenanigansy, or at the very least informative, will happen.

I'll go over rsp's stuff in just a sec
- h
Click to expand...
this is what's nice about being in a hydra where you're mindmelding all the time, I was hustling to post some amount of this and then it was there in the postbox and all I had to do was wait

so yeah, bottom line, we both are reading quetzalhydra positively, and also frankly, I don't care if we get lynched as long as we can find a way to make it not a complete waste of a lynch for town
 
cEBKMXH.png
 
both me and sande are v reading despicable meme, btw
one of them could be mafia but as a hydra i think they're town
 
bruh moment said:
feh the owl said:
last night, i - not our hydra, just me, sande, on my personal/individual account
Click to expand...
well that’s something
maybe i should be actually looking at my main sometime before this game ends 🤪
- m
Click to expand...

sande, in our hydra chat on discord: can you prove to me that you're not mafia?
me, who hadn't checked their main account here since the game started: ...what?
 
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