Re: Villainous Team Choice Pokémafia - Game Thread
People are talking! And I didn't even have to yell or threaten fatherly disappointment this time! :D!!!!
I'll be fair and say that it's entirely possible that ILS's role is anti-town. Superbird and I were mafia together in E4 Choice Mafia, and Superbird's additional, non-mafkill power allowed him to communicate privately with other players. In Superbird's case I don't think his contactees could speak with one another, though, so there wouldn't have been anything quicktopic-like. I don't know if the fact that ILS's power lets other players speak with one another makes it more or less likely to be town. I'd hazard a guess that it is, but I can't base that on anything solid.
And yes, ILS could be innocent and have had the bad luck to hit one or more mafia, or could be mafia who chose to recruit one or more of his partners just to make things more convincing to any innocents he may try to fool later. Both of those are more likely than ILS making such a silly gambit if all of us are communicating mafiosi. I'm not defaulting to trusting either of them, and I'm well aware that I haven't made a proper claim or done much of anything other than talk in circles, so it's perfectly reasonable to keep me on a suspect list. (I mean, I know I'm not mafia, of course, but while I'm in the business of making meaningless statements I should also mention that I'm an astronaut and own a pet unicorn, etc., etc..)
ILS is Gengar, by the way, not Ice.
That said, I have no particular opinion about ILS himself either way. We haven't really said much in that thread, tbh. Hasn't been much to talk about until today! I was recruited second, so I don't know if he and Alti spoke via PM or some other means before that; I assume so, given that Alti said he explicitly told her he was innocent and I don't see that in the quicktopic. (Doesn't make the statement meaningful, just means there was probably discussion I wasn't privy to.)
Alti... eh, I don't really know about her, either. I can't make much of an argument about whether her behavior is typical since I've only been in one game with her recently iirc. I appreciate that she's making an effort to be talkative and keep the game moving, especially outside the joking around, but that doesn't say much IMO. I would be a tad suspicious of frequently starting the abstain train, but that's really more of an issue when people are talking than when they aren't. Presumably a day with no one voting anything at all would default to no lynch anyway, and if no one's talking and it happens when MF is close to ending the day it doesn't seem like an attempt to stifle discussion or somesuch.
re: VM: I agree that that's a really bizarre power with few obvious benefits to town; the only cited examples that sound likely to be scummy IMO are the roleblocker, the framer and the vote thief, and only the roleblocker strikes me as particularly dangerous out of those. And yeah, now Negrek mentions it, it would definitely be completely broken as mafia, so it's either a truthful but baffling innocent claim or an outright lie. I'm trying to think about why someone might make up a role that potentially unhelpful as a false claim. You'd assume that scum would make a more useful/traditional fakeclaim, but this early on there's a high risk of counterclaim, so making up a role isn't a bad idea. It's possible he went too far in the other direction and made it too unusual, though. It is also kinda convenient that it's a role that mafia would see no immediate reason to kill off, so him staying alive later in the game could easily be explained as not being worth a nightkill as opposed to him being mafia and therefore not a target in the first place.
If he is innocent then it does seem like the sort of role you might as well ask for advice about before acting... so it's just a question of how willing we are to believe that such an outlandish, mostly-detrimental role would exist. I am tempted to see if I can come up with uses for it, if only because it sounds like a fun exercise, but logically there's not much point because we don't know for a fact which potentially-blockable roles are in the game to begin with.
For that matter... only two claimed roles match the examples listed (Flora/vig, Jack/redirector), and the other claimed roles (VM's, if we believe him; ILS/mason; Zapi/broadcaster; Superbird/rolecop; ???/rolethief, since someone else is running around with Superbird's power now) do not, and don't seem like they'd be switchable. In total that's seven roles, or just over half this game's players. So, another question: out of the remaining five roles, how likely is it that one or more of them match the cited examples? How likely is it that they're some other kind of role that would be affected by such a switch? I guess it's not unreasonable that the mafia might have roleblocking, vote stealing and framing in addition to their nightkill, and given that a lot of people are claiming weird roles or roles with drawbacks, I don't see why we wouldn't have a CPR doctor instead of a more reliable one. I'm starting to get tired now and can't decide whether that actually says anything or remember why I went off on this jag in the first place, but idk, maybe it'll be interesting again when I'm more awake.
The only other reason I can think of to include such a role as an innocent is to balance out a town that is otherwise overpowered, kinda like a miller in a more traditional game but with a useless/dangerous power as opposed to a misleading flip.
re: Flora: Also strange. Normally vigs with restrictions like that die if they hit a townie, not a mafioso, and there are ways to make vigkills one-shot without effectively punishing them for getting it right. I guess it's a little like a terrorist, but I'm not really sure what to make of it. It seems less overtly convenient/bizarre than VM's claim, so ultimately I'm still slightly more suspicious of him, I guess.
re: Butterfree and Negrek: No idea either way, although I did enjoy that in-character post from the other day. :D Both insightful enough, neither one claiming an utterly baffling role, but iirc neither one has claimed at all, so there's nothing to go off of there. Negrek's currently being more helpful solely considering the number of posts, whereas Butterfree has only posted twice so far, but there are plenty of other people who fit those descriptions/similar descriptions at this point.
BUT YES I am tired and still have stuff to do if I actually want to be able to use my bed tonight and there have already been several additional posts while I typed this so I'm just going to post this for now and be done with it. Everyone keep talking, it's great :D
