Townstumps Mafia (Endgame)

[House]

Eh, I would have happily supported a Gamma wagon.

His interactions with/about me were unnatural.

Wasn't worth trying to sell it, though. I don't have the WIM that I used to.

[Gamma Emerald]

yeah if the clear on me got debunked I was SoL against you

[Titus]

Just how did you bypass the clear?

Why the no kill?

How did the dual kill happen?

[Jingle]

This game was explicitly designed to be scumsided (Approximately in the 60-70% range but hopefully closer to 60), due both to the presumed townsiding nature of stumps and the current site meta of people being really bad at playing scum.

This game was further scumsided by a couple of mistakes I made in the balancing process that I will go over in the next post and was likely somewhere in the 70-80% SW range.

However, mastina:

In a Mini Normal,

Looking at the setup from this lens misses a lot of the nuance involved.

First of all, in a mini normal, scum has access to fakeclaiming as a resource. This entire angle of scumplay was nonexistent here. Explicitly, the power roles for the town were those roles submitted by the stumps, those roles required to make stump roles normal, and the stumps. None of that was counterclaimable. None of that was outable via claiming. That entire aspect of scumplay was simply off the table. Indeed, the town PRs didn't have to claim what they were to be hard cleared. You knew there were either two town PRs or a PR and a mason pair as an uninformed player based entirely off of setup information. Any hard PR claim was town or immediately CC'd based on the presence of the inno child role.

Second of all, the utility of a town hider is not just in it's results, but in it's difficulty to be killed. Your math on the hider hitting the rolestopper was flawed (the hider obviously never targets the IC), but the 10% shot of the hider hitting the rolestopper was not the main utility of the hider in this setup.

Assume for a moment that all three scum live D1 and it's a town elimination. Scum now have a 1/9 chance of failing to get a kill on the commuter IC, a 1/9 chance of failing to get a kill on the hider, and a 7/90 chance of netting a double kill by hitting the hider's target (7/10 the hider targets a valid NK choice, 1/9 scum chose the SAME valid NK choice). With a NK elim D1, that became 1/10 and 8%. The hider had the agency to attempt to draw a NK to themselves (as I assume was N_M's plan). The vig had to live through three eliminations to be able to take their shot, meaning that the utility of the role was heavily gated by Dayplay. If the hider outlived the Rolestopper, they started generating hard clears immediately.

Scum missing a kill by hitting the hider wasn't a surprise, and without the commuter enabler being dead, multiple consecutive missed kills was likely. (N_M softclaims cop, doesn't die to a nightkill. You're informed there's a commuter in the setup. Easy assumption: N_M is a commuter.)

Third, the 1-shot doc wasn't a normal one shot doc. The one shot doc was a strongwilled 1x doc shot that was guaranteed to be alive in XLO which vastly increases the chances it actually nets a save AND vastly increases the chances it generates a hard clear. Saying that it interacted poorly with N_M's role presumes it would be used by a stump who was unaware of N_M's role, meaning the stump who had not yet used their ability to clear a PR would have to be the one to bow out. In order for that interaction to occur it would take pants-on-head levels of bad play.

Fourth, the presumption that scum's only viable course of action is to rolestop their stronger partner assumes an accurate guess of what the stump's submission would be. A role like, for example, 1 shot BP Loyal Checker or nsg's proposed Loyal Neighborizor would also have been reasonably answered with a Rolestopper, and the correct play there would be to target not a member of the scumteam. Not only that, but the stumps explicitly had the potential to WIFOM what they'd submitted to try and influence scum to make a bad call on actions. I'm honestly surprised they didn't.

Fifth, the town handicapped themselves by not even considering that there might be a method of introducing doubt in the clears.

tl;dr Yes, the setup was scumsided, but not as much as you think it was and it was done on purpose to some extent.

[Titus]

Fifth, the town handicapped themselves by not even considering that there might be a method of introducing doubt in the clears.

I did, just not Gamma's.

[Jingle]

The mod errors.

The first one: I did not make it nearly clear enough that all town power was derived from the stumps. That was a major factor in the scumsiding of the setup.

The second one: I made multitasking default in the rules and did not take that into consideration while designing the roles, having forgotten about it. The N3 vig was explicitly intended to not be able to carry out both kills, but I had completely forgotten that they could via the rules set while examining balance.

The third one: The vig itself was non normal. Technically this wasn't outside of my setup rules (I was allowed to use non normal roles) but I very much intended to use only normal roles and included that as a solution to not seeking a normalcy review in the timeframe of a UPick when I myself rarely stick to the normal guidelines and frequently forget them, as I far prefer playing in the theme sandbox to build my setups.

The fourth one: There was an actual mod error that impacted the endgame. I missed M&M unvoting prior to the second to last VC and was unaware of this. It was brought to my attention after the flip had been posted, but I failed to catch it in my hammer count because I assumed the previous VC was accurate and did my standard double and triple checks using it as a base. I do not believe this would have changed the outcome of the game, but it was a major error.

[Jingle]

Just how did you bypass the clear?

Why the no kill?

How did the dual kill happen?

Scum had a rolestopper who targeted Gamma, thus N_M's action never happened.

The no kill was an attempt to kill N_M directly, which obviously failed.

The three kill night was a N3 scum vig on DGB, a regular scum kill on jjh, and a guilty result from N_M hiding on M&M.

[NorwegianboyEE]

and a guilty result from N_M hiding on M&M.

They target the hydra?

[NorwegianboyEE]

Now hold up just a minute here, so we had a guilty all along but because N_M didn't crumb his result it got wasted?

[NorwegianboyEE]

I'll compromise

If cyrus flips town, I'll check jjh
If cyrus flips scum, I'll check Feydra

[Not_Mafia]

I brainfarted and either thought I had said I was targetting the Fey hydra or misread my own post where I said who I was targetting, I forget which

[NorwegianboyEE]

Well, if you had actually target JJ you would have died anyway.

[Jingle]

Spoiler: Important Links

Rules - Maf Topic - Mod Topic - Spectator Thread - Signups

Maf topic will be made public in approximately 48 hours (although no earlier). Scum will be given mod access to the thread to make any redactions they desire in a moment. All other game topics that might exist (notes and whatnot) are at the sole discretion of the topic owner to release or acknowledge, as per usual.

[Jingle]

N_M not targeting that night would have actually been a really strong play, tbh. He was pretty well outed and he could basically turn the scumkill into a vigshot by just not doing anything.

[cyrus62]

Good game

[Titus]

I still think scum vigs are bad design. :/

[NorwegianboyEE]

At least it was an obvious scum vig.

[Jingle]

On a whole, the experiment here failed, btw. I was hoping to change the townstumps paradigm to give the players more agency in choosing the stumps, thus making it less likely to fall into a toxic shitshow when the game started. Instead, the stump selection phase seemed to just be unfun for everyone. I do think nixing the idea of a mason hood for the stumps was a positive step as it made the emphasis shift back into the main thread and away from "This game is all about two people, the rest of you are seat warmers".

I will say that I think you went about choosing stumps entirely wrongly as I touched on in the dead thread. The general consensus was to choose the stumps on the strength of their reads, but all that really accomplishes is tying the stumps' hands behind their backs. They're respected because of their reads because they understand how people interacting with them and the game in general is likely to shape the game. I would have approached the stumps in one of three ways, in descending order of preference: Someone who had the skill and talent set to keep the people in the game interacting in a wholesome way (nomnomnom is the name that comes to mind), someone likely to leverage mechanics to town's advantage (jjh), or a N0 cop shot on someone who is very hard to read (N_M, Cyrus, Kori). I think Norwee and nsg are both bad choices by all three of those criteria (as would be the Nancy/Dk hydra and mastina FWIW) and that stumping them actively prevented them from having as meaningful an impact on the game as they would have as normal players.

[Jingle]

Jingle himself would know this considering that he ran a game with one and it was the freest scum win of my entire life.

I will point out that that setup was fairly balanced and you had the free-est win of your life because your partner GOAT'd the shit out of that game while you had a role that was functionally a license to meme.

[cyrus62]

Wait you think I would be a good stump?

[NorwegianboyEE]

Wait you think I would be a good stump?

So nobody needs to solve you.

[jjh927]

I wanted Mastina or NSG or preferably both as stumps because of the statistical likelihood that I roll town and how I was pretty likely to play an active towngame
I overestimated how active NSG would be and underestimated how much people would listen to NSG's read on me

[Jingle]

Wait you think I would be a good stump?

Yes.

You have an unorthodox approach which makes you a default scumread, but you're likely to continue trying to generate content. You're unfamiliar to most of the players which means scum is going to be on the back foot trying to play around your presence making them easier for everyone else to catch.

I strongly believe the purpose of a Townstump is not to catch scum but to make it so the rest of the town has an easier time catching scum.

[jjh927]

Honestly, stumping someone because they're hard to read is basically just taking them out of the game

I wouldn't have listened to a word said by any of the players you listed in that category, Jingle

[jjh927]

Also, I can see how being a stump would reduce scumhunting effectiveness, but if you have an adaptive playstyle that doesn't rely heavily on people's evolving reads on yourself then you could still be a powerful scumhunter but with the influence of a conftown and guaranteed survival to endgame