After rereading the setup, I think that the Pacifist route (with the option to switch to the Neutral route) is better than the Genocide route (with the option to switch to the Neutral route). As Chennisden pointed out, a lot of scum games are won because there were enough scummy townies for scum to get the number of mislynches that they need to win, as opposed to them winning because they were all top-tier townreads. I think in general it's more difficult to become a consensus townread as scum than it is to push a mislynch on a scummy towny player. The Genocide route is essentially a standard a game of Mafia, where scum can win when the core is reached as long as there are four scummy town players that get mislynched. With the Pacifist route scum can only win when the core is reached if both scum are among the four or five players that are spared.In post 69, Oversoul wrote:I don’t think that’s true. Sparing is like doing the scums job for them. We are removing the townies player then they have a chance to remove the second towniest player. It accelerates the race to the bottom which is typically why most scum teams win.
And considering that we don't have players like RadiantCowbells/Auro/Flavor Leaf/Mastina/etc. in this playerlist, I don't think that it's going to be easy for both scum to be townread enough to get spared. Especially considering that one of the four or five people that are spared should be the PR (although I don't think that the PR should come out today -- I think that they shouldn't come out until day 2 or day 3, and the person that is spared today should be a consensus townread). And if there is a PR CC or concerns later down the line that one scum has been spared, we can always still switch to the Neutral route.
I also think that Chennisden is likely town. I've played with town!Chennisden somewhat recently in two different games (Nomination Mafia and Starcraft III), and I don't think that scum!Chennisden would have the confidence to immediately come out of the gates at the beginning of day one, self-heal himself, and strongly push for his own slot to be the first slot that is spared. Beyond that I think that his push for the Pacifist->Neutral route is towny and I agree with him in that we should definitely spare someone rather than kill someone today.