Pokémon Mafia: Arceus - Game Thread

[haneko]

it was a fun game even if i was not good at playing it! thank you qenya

 

[qenya]

yeah but a) we only had one actually useful role and b) our wincon was to be the last ones standing, not to just kill one specific player

plus herbe had a villager rolecard that wasn't part of the villagers faction and foxes had a card of a character who's not a villager or in the game at all actually but was a villager and was this revenge for frenzy plant. i feel like this is revenge for frenzy plant

i definitely see the parallels! but it wasn't intentional, no. i just found it tough to link roles with flavour... several of them were quite a stretch. though there were others that weren't picked that were a lot more thematically appropriate, like volo, who would've manipulated nightkills and investigation results to trick people into killing each other, or iscan and palina, who could also win together if all other diamond/pearl clan members died.

personally i would just see this as a general feature of mafia games with flavour. an implausible flavourclaim is less likely to be false, because someone who makes it up has a vested interest in it not arousing suspicion, whereas the GM can just do any shit they like. (i guess it could also be WIFOM, but I don't think our metagame has hit the point where that would be a good strategy)

 

[Zori]

because someone who makes it up has a vested interest in it not arousing suspicion

me in mafia choice mafia 2

 

[JackPK]

personally i would just see this as a general feature of mafia games with flavour. an implausible flavourclaim is less likely to be false, because someone who makes it up has a vested interest in it not arousing suspicion, whereas the GM can just do any shit they like. (i guess it could also be WIFOM, but I don't think our metagame has hit the point where that would be a good strategy)

relevant note that if y'all look back at my fakeclaims in this game, I was doing a lot of stressing about attempting to make implausible things sound plausible by overexplaining the reasoning... which is not something that existed in my real role PM, my real role PM was very terse about it, so after I fakeclaimed I panicked that I looked more like I was justifying a fakeclaim than reporting a realclaim

don't know if that'll ever be relevant again in future games but it's worth perhaps keeping in the back of one's head, balancing the difference between what's plausible versus what's implausible in a GM way versus what's overexplained-to-justify-plausibility in a fakeclaim way

 

[JackPK]

all of which, of course, boils down to WIFOM as you said kate

 

[Eifie]

stop doing setup spec dot mp3

 

[M&F]

yeah, it's like -- I don't think it's an inherently invalid line of inquiry, but you can't really be 100% sure you have the GM's number any more than you do the players'. it's something you can take into consideration but it should seldom be the single or foremost thing that your decision is based on. (plus, as has been extensively pointed out, you also need to not just lather up a Lynch All Liars frenzy where if the GM "lies" someone also gets it; you have to weigh whether lying about flavor actually benefits the player in some way in this situation if they do turn out to be scum.)

as with all manner of setup speculation, really -- I'm not of the mindset that it's absolutely useless, but if you could scumhunt just by unraveling the setup, then you're not playing a well-designed game.