Mini 1214: Box Office Mafia (Game Over!)

[chamber]

Entanglement
08-10-2011
03:17 PM ET (US)
You quoted someone mentioning 3 people, yourself, us, and darox, in your responce you only talk about darox. It doesn't mean anything right now, I doubt anyone seriously uses it before either of us flip, and maybe they wont notice after either, but its a good thing to avoid in my experience. So it was just a polite requist to avoid it in the future, or at least mix in mentions of us in the future.

Yes, I'm a paranoid coward as scum as a general rule.

[Darox]

I feel like this game was one giant storm, and I was stuck right in the centre.

[UncertainKitten]

So, anyway, I was the other head of Entanglement and lots of stuff was happening when I decided to replace out. I still should apologize for such things, since it's kind of rough on the game. So, I'm sorry I wasn't able to give my best.

[ooba]

Setup

The design process started after watching A-team and wanting to make a mini-theme on movies. Early on, I decided that limiting it to one role per actor would make a standard theme game with maybe a few unique role twists. The Past\Future mechanic was copied from Tar's "Legend of Ocarnia" theme game. However, in that game, he gave the power of switching time zones to a townie (and had a backup for that townie). Public voting leads to a more dynamic game than night actions.

After that mechanic was decided upon, it was tough call on narrowing down on the scum teams. The theory of two separate scum teams for Past and future was debated but was dropped because there was always the possibility of claiming scum in the end. Also, scumhunting goes for a toss if alignments aren't constant for both time periods for most of the scum.

Matt Damon

- The traitor in one period and town in one time period role had a lost of promise. Does he play towards his town wincon in the future knowing that he might be at a disadvantage if there is a time shift. During N2, LC said he was initially thinking of using his ability like a rolecop but then decided to use the tracker till MoI is alive to figure out scum and then help town depending on how it goes. I think keeping the info about the block part of his role (he never clarified if steal=block with me so he knew) went a long way towards the last mislynch.
Also, if he had sided with town, he could have stolen the Watch from IS's ability. So really a powerful role with a built in balancing act.

Jack Nicholson

- The double-vote granter was an obvious balancer for the traitor turning town in the future. It was also added in because of "Battle for Olympus" mafia. Everybody automatically assumed scum will not receive such a role and declared Chronopie town there. I was surprised this game that scum decided not to give the Double vote to anybody else. It nearly hurt them in the end when Quilford declared that he was simply a scum doublevoter instead of doublevote granter.

Tom Cruise

- Thematically, I did not want to make both the scum actors whose "evil" roles are well know (Nicholson, Al Pacino, De Niro). The redirector in the past was a vig-counter to capitalize on the situation if the vig became out'd. Had a tough choice deciding on the other role until there was a MD post on night actions which involved choosing the targets pre-game. I thought it was a great concept and the mechanic of two different eras lent itself well to that. I had already decided on the role from "Collateral" so it was a perfect fit.

Eric Bana

- The concept of a SK who could switch timezones to play the town and mafia off each other fit in to the setup. Thought this role had a lot going for him - one, he was the only actor who had only one role (i.e from the same movie) in both the past and future; two, I was hoping someone would mention\research that both John Connor and Henry from this movie had made it to my previous game "Time Travel Mafia". But couldn't escape from the fact that he was succesfully RB'd N1.

Liam Neeson

- The first role I designed. This was the super power role which gave scum someone to shot for. Did not want to split Vig\Cop to different players as it would make it too hard on scum. It was unfortunate that he was hammered on N2 but given that you were changing the time period to past, he would have been redirected and it would have been even worse for town.

Both

Russel Crowe

and

Samuel Jackson

were roles which let townies override the town. Powerful but swingy roles depending on the ability of the individual player. I really thought the Dueler would be considered to be mostly-town so had to make the executioner a miller since that would increase paranoia about that slot.

Both

Al Pacino

and

De Niro

had the same ability in both time periods. As mentioned above, both thematically have roles which could fit scum and their abilities were generally those which could be scum powers too.

Already had a doc role fixed for the Past since there was an extra kill in that time period. Considered others but finally cast

Robin Williams

in this role.

Had a tracker role fixed for the Future to make up for the slighly weakened cop role.

Hugh Jackman

was a good fit.

There was no way

Bruce Willis

was not going to be there in this setup. The bulletproof followed from the rest of the roles in the Past. The DeadSpeak ability was town's counter against the partial reveals.

And

Christian Bale

was the vanilla role and red-herring for Mafia in this game. I was hoping for some Christian Bale=Batman=Awesome PR spec but charter died on N1 due to the hitlist.

Thoughts about play in a few ..

[popsofctown]

MoI, wtf. really. You announce at the beginning of the game that you're going to sheep me because you respect my reads. Then you ignore me to sheep scum instead, and lynch my TOWN read instead of my SCUM read.

Then I get shot and ask the mod if chamber is scum. And I don't get to find out because of Darox's mechanic but I was right .


I am not a happy panda at all.

[chamber]

I was -reaally- close to laughing at you over aim, but then I figured I shouldn't just incase -this- was the game that had death mechanics in it *sweat*.

[popsofctown]

and it was.

[chamber]

I think I would've 9 times out of 10, I don't know what stopped me really.

[chamber]

Maybe I knew something was wrong when you didn't contact me about it. Shrug.

[MagnaofIllusion]

MoI, wtf. really. You announce at the beginning of the game that you're going to sheep me because you respect my reads. Then you ignore me to sheep scum instead, and lynch my TOWN read instead of my SCUM read.

Pops I wasn't going to sheep you Day 2 after you came out of the block calling me scum. DERP to that.

Eh this set-up was a real mindtwister (as I expected). I would probably at endgame pushed for Chamber simply because he was a doublevoter in what I thought was a 2-Mafia set-up. Doublevoter makes sense in that context as a scum power.

Good game ooba. I like how much effort, as always, you made in having great flavor and Mod-meta busting roles.

This is the first of three games I've played in recently with modified flip reveals (not revealing in a timely fashion or with incomplete information) and it reminds me how damaging to Town not having full reveals is. It's much more damaging to Town than to scum and I don't think generally mods give it enough weight in set-up design.

I can't fathom LC's play from a Town perspective. I suppose he was playing to his traitor role in the past with his choices but will have to see if he weighs in.

I'll be reading the role PMs and actions in full.

Good game scum, especially Chamber.

[PeregrineV]

First, my apology to pops for thinking you were scum.

Secondly, my apologies to the entire town. This was my most horribly played mafia game ever. Granted there was some mechanics to change things up, but my every read from start to finish was utter and total crap. Even when I thought LC was scum, I was slowly coming around to him being town at the time of his lynch. And any analysis I did was wrong, since I made some wrong assumptions.
So my correct reads in this game were a stunning 0%. Even my first games I could guess one correctly before the flip.
Ah well, I've learned something, so hopefully can use that to improve my play.

Interestingly enough all the day1 talk about traitors with Darox and such, and in the end it turns out there was one (or a half of one).

[Riceballtail]

Should have stuck to my original plan and shot Pops N2 anyway. I had, at that point, figured he turned GF and was bulletproof.

/sigh

[popsofctown]

MoI, wtf. really. You announce at the beginning of the game that you're going to sheep me because you respect my reads. Then you ignore me to sheep scum instead, and lynch my TOWN read instead of my SCUM read.

Pops I wasn't going to sheep you Day 2 after you came out of the block calling me scum. DERP to that.

I thought you were scum because you weren't sheeping me.

[popsofctown]

This is like "I continued engaging in antitown behavior because you thought it was antitown behavior".

Plus, I can't have one read incorrect and the rest mostly accurate? It's not like my performance in a game is going to oscillate between 0 and 100% accuracy.

[popsofctown]

First, my apology to pops for thinking you were scum.

Secondly, my apologies to the entire town. This was my most horribly played mafia game ever. Granted there was some mechanics to change things up, but my every read from start to finish was utter and total crap. Even when I thought LC was scum, I was slowly coming around to him being town at the time of his lynch. And any analysis I did was wrong, since I made some wrong assumptions.
So my correct reads in this game were a stunning 0%. Even my first games I could guess one correctly before the flip.
Ah well, I've learned something, so hopefully can use that to improve my play.

Interestingly enough all the day1 talk about traitors with Darox and such, and in the end it turns out there was one (or a half of one).

About the time you started saying I was scum after having invited me to neighbor QT I was thinkin, "This peregrine cat has just gotten to into this game and now he's getting cabin fever or something".

[PeregrineV]

First, my apology to pops for thinking you were scum.

Secondly, my apologies to the entire town. This was my most horribly played mafia game ever. Granted there was some mechanics to change things up, but my every read from start to finish was utter and total crap. Even when I thought LC was scum, I was slowly coming around to him being town at the time of his lynch. And any analysis I did was wrong, since I made some wrong assumptions.
So my correct reads in this game were a stunning 0%. Even my first games I could guess one correctly before the flip.
Ah well, I've learned something, so hopefully can use that to improve my play.

Interestingly enough all the day1 talk about traitors with Darox and such, and in the end it turns out there was one (or a half of one).

About the time you started saying I was scum after having invited me to neighbor QT I was thinkin, "This peregrine cat has just gotten to into this game and now he's getting cabin fever or something".

Yeah I was so sure I had found something totally overlooked by the scum team.

Turns out - NOT.

[chamber]

Thoughts about play in a few ..

If you can get to it I'm actually really interested to hear this.

[ooba]

Thoughts about play in a few ..

If you can get to it I'm actually really interested to hear this.

Hey sorry - didn't have consistent net access to post this yesterday.

First off, a big thanks to Faraday for this game. I basically had a train to catch during the start of this game - and gave him all the role PMs without notice. Given that there was a 4 day delay for pre-game, Faraday made sure everything went off like clockwork without any hitches.
Secondly, he also told me that the setup was tough on scum at the start. I went ahead due to the fact that they had the partial reveal system and paranoia going for them. Towards the end (esp. the last day), I did feel that this was a bit hard on scum.

- I think the players got into the Past vs Future debate pretty fast. Not sure it helped scumhunting at that point. I think Zod's push on IS and IS's replies set the early game for scum. IS came out the townier of the two in the exchange.
- The "traitor" mechanic coming out of nowhere from Darox was nice. It would have really amped up the paranoia levels if LC had been lynched in the Future.
- entanglement was setting up JAMFTW for the fall later. But I never understood the kill on him? (I mean even if you thought Darox was bulletproof, why JAMFTW?)
- I thought RBT did a good job not drawing too much attention.
- Spring's timing was unfortunate on asking Zod to claim before reading the thread. I think that more than anything drew attention to her. Although hammering without a claim was pretty bad (Why Per?)
- I think Zod didn't game the delayed PR mechanic as well as scum played according to their pre-determined kill. For example, I thought the "Why push for X's lynch when you were supposed to be investigating that person" tonight would have been pretty suspicious to me if I was another townie.
- Pops was on the ball on most things this game - RBT, Zod's Cop\Doc split on the setup making him town and chamber scum. Like I said before, lynching Zod was actually a good thing for town since scum would have used the redirect on his kill but I've decided that if you're replacing in or don't have reads in a game and pops is in it, he's a good person to sheep.
- Btw, Darox & Per both did a good job of QT'ing people and making people believe they were town. Darox had no trouble getting the other roles from the dead townies.
- Zod's town flip probably made IS look bad with both tracker MoI & the SK targeting him that night. I would have liked to seen how IS would have staved his lynch off. The cross kill along with the thread on multi scum teams in MD will make me think about 2 scum teams or introducing a SK more in future setups. (@RBT, did you think IS was Mafia when you made the shot?)
- After that, chamber used his pro-town cred to manipulate the last two lynches. His only bump was in the last day when Quilford was quite convincing in his arguments. I thought it was a close call in the duel and won't say it was obvious.

Town was hurt by the sheer number of suspicious characters. With the exception of MoI and pops, I don't think anybody had a town read from most other people.
RBT was unlucky that pops happened to be the roleblocker
I think LC's strategy of playing it safe with the tracker to determine who the mafia were was a good one. Also him not claiming traitor paid off in the end.
Scum played a great game - est. protown cred early and used that successfully for the win.

Overall, I think everyone played a good game - not marred by bad play. I really had fun reading the game and some of the PMs sent to me were funny. (like pops sending "We used to have a nice big television here" afte the Zod lynch). Hope you had fun too!

[chamber]

I mean even if you thought Darox was bulletproof, why JAMFTW?

His ability scared the shit out of me. If he was the first person to see the thread he could've come in voted then used his ability, to effectively dayvig, and he was such a wild card.

[popsofctown]

I had a town read on zod, and a moderate townread on peregrine. But the game did have fewer obvtowns than usual.

[Darox]

And yeah sorry Quilford but writing up the mundane reasons why I thought you were scum wouldn't have gone anywhere. Nothing you could say in response to them would have changed my mind so it was largely a waste of time. I was sitting on a pivot that entire endgame, and the only thing providing significant weight was the roleblock.

Now if you'd said traitor that would have destabilized me.

[Riceballtail]

Yes, I did think IS was scum. That's why I shot him instead of Pops. After not killing Pops N1, I thought I'd hit one of his buddies at least.

[ooba]

Oh. By the way, any objections to releasing the following QTs
- Scum QT: chamber, IS or UK
- Darox's dead QTs: Darox (or) spring, charter, MoI
- Per's neighbour QTs: Per (or) Pops, Darox

[Darox]

Nope.

[MagnaofIllusion]

None.