Hey, call me NN, Nab, or NabNab (if you're not into that whole brevity thing).
I saw this game was in deadline when I put in for replacement, so I read the thread on spec. Let's get started.
Thoughts on the quarantine mechanic. Aiming to quarantine town is stupid. All vanilla townies should aspire to be NK'd. It means you played so well during the day that the scum would rather kill you than seek PRs. If we quarantine someone based on their perceived townieness, we're either blocking a PR or keeping a VT from martyrdom. In my experience, scum cannot treat their kill as a "faction ability" until they're down to only one man (Ex. if the last surviving scum was a rolecop, he could both kill and investigate), so quarantining any scum is likely to put pressure on the whole faction. In general, I think the quarantine mechanic has already done a lot of harm by inspiring so much discussion of roles (and good God, a first-post VT claim. Has the world gone mad?) In general, town plays during the day and scum plays at night. Blurting out every single thing about nightplay that crosses your mind just gives the scum more to work with. Furthermore, all this baseless speculation has hijacked useful discussion for the day.
ITT, Espeonage (known hereafter as 'Peon') declares that he plays the game poorly and is proud of it. I've seen people hold back information in productive ways, but in Peon's case, it just strikes me as a way of justifying his predilection for 'argument by intimidation.' (See 120, 166, 182, 192, 226, and 247 for examples). It's also clear that he does not think before he posts, or at least he doesn't copyedit (143 belongs in a book of bad modernist poetry, not in a Mafia game), which helps explain why he hops around so damn much. At the same time, this does not have the character of scum trying to find a competing wagon to take some pressure off, but of genuine (albeit stupid) attempts to scumhunt. Real scum would have taken the lead on BK and driven it hard. Nothing like a lurker wagon to distract. I mostly plan on ignoring Peon.
Guille's playstyle appears to be founded upon chain-lynch speculation. This is terrible, but I don't think he realizes it. His argument with Ser (see post 232) gets to the heart of the matter. Mafia is played neither entirely ex ante nor entirely ex post. We must have a spirited argument about whether we think each lynch is the correct lynch, just as we must consider the results of that lynch in later days. Simply sitting back and projecting the scenarios from a given townflip or scumflip is pointless. When the flip happens, we'll still be here to react to it.
I'm not going to fault Mala for advocating no-lynch early. Most sites have a much more night-heavy meta, so I don't think she understood that MS games are won and lost almost entirely during the day. Jury's out on play after that point. Her trust of Peon has been idiosyncratic but internally consistent, and I notice that it was behind her vote on Defender (which sets it apart from the totally craven wagoning we got from Ser and Shotgun)
In fact:
Unvote; Vote: drmyshotgun
. Sparse posting but attentive enough to avoid modprods. Aims mostly for the easy wagons ("scumslip", newbcard, true newbie). Classic D1 scum profile.
Unquarantine
until I decide what to do with the damn thing. (Chances are we won't even have a quarantine the first few nights. The likelihood of us settling on a quarantine
and
a lynch simultaneously and before deadline are low.)
