First, a little background. I played mafia games on another forum before this. A lot more casual, random. The Innocent Child, as used there, was the sort you PM the mod when you want to have your role confirmed. I discovered this site while looking for alternate setups on google. At first, I thought playing a game where a single day can take several RL weeks seemed incredibly slow paced, but I still had some interest.
Anyway, eventually I decided to try playing here, but figured I should read through one game first. A recently completed micro game was "Kids With Guns" (you can even see it finished fairly close to my join date of March 5), so I decided to read through it.
Page 8 of Kids With Guns
Notice- Innocent Child as a role is activated by PMing the mod. When the player who has that role did use the mod vouching ability, he said this (exact quote)
"Maybe I've been hinting because I don't feel like getting killed N1. Imagine how beneficial it would be for the IC to get to like LYLO or something. "
This resonated with it, it made perfect sense, and when I saw this game potentially could include an IC role I naturally assumed it worked the same way. I honestly had no idea that the exact same named role could use different mechanics depending on the setup. Even the wiki was no help- looking up Innocent Child on the wiki it says that the mod announce upon PM type of IC is the most commonly used.
I guess it was a newbie mistake to overlook that part of the setup, but it was one that other players made as well. I mean, if I saw a game that included mafia goons and masons and the setup explained that the "mafia goon" role was actually town aligned doctors, I would be completely confused by that as well. I'm not blaming the mod here, I guess if anything I am blaming the setup for using the role in the less common way.
As scum, wouldn't you rather nightkill the IC the very first night, rather than see him announce in LYLO? That is why a "jokey" fake claim looks scummy to me, it's the perfect way to weed out the real IC in a counterclaim.
I also think the joke excuse is rather scummy. What better way to play as scum? Just joke a lot, then if you actually do slip accidentally, you can just claim it was yet another one of your many jokes. Some players aren't native english speakers, some players are young, some players might just lack a sense of humor. Joking as town can only hurt town. If you do joke, the town thing to do is admit the joke immediately, rather than keep it going for several dozen posts.
Ultimately, I could have accepted ploben's "joke" explanation if that was it, but it wasn't- he decided to change his joke into a trap and claim he did the whole thing to catch scum... even though he later claimed scum would NEVER make that mistake because scum would obviously read the setup before playing. All in all, I am still heavily leaning toward ploben being scum. If it was a joke, he could have had his laugh and been done, instead he is trying to use it as an excuse to lynch a townie.
