Anyway...
(Apologies. Formatting's a mess, but it's the best I can make it.)
mastin2 wrote:Mod-dammit. I liked it better when I was actually TOWN in your blasted games. >_<
*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*
Francis, (survivor) mafia goon.
And this is what went into my head. There's a significant playerlist overlap with Walking Dead, and I'm scum...AGAIN. Toogeloo, ffery, DGB, chesskid (especially chesskid), PeregrineV, Red Coyote, pitoli, Thor (especially Thor), BBMolla, and Nero Cain (I think; I'd have to check the full Walking Dead playerlist to be sure--I could be missing some or putting players in who weren't there) are ALL here to see the same me (see this thought here? "see the same me"? That becomes important to situational awareness), as town. Furthermore, in addition to that, though pie might be a wildcard on his own, with ffery, he could only enhance their skills. ns is no slouch, either, Molla's lethally good at reading me, AP's got perfect accuracy at reading me, Vezok's better than he's given credit for, and Zdenek's even worse than that. (More or less, anyway. It's hard to track my EXACT thought process.)
...What's worse, though, is that Dan and Majiffy were both in that game as town; with them scum here, if they act differently, it could set off alarm bells.
Prognosis: Grim.
...Unless......
Cue mafia QT.
Normally, I insist on no-bussing, but I'm wondering if anyone here for the sake of trolling would be okay with over-the-top bussing of everyone, at least short-term. If need be, we can always suddenly deflect onto a town target at the last minute. Basically, I don't want us to get it so that we're all set up as lynches. I want as many as us to live as possible. But I also don't think that it'll be possible for us to pull off a perfect win. ESPECIALLY not if I flip scum and I didn't bus. (Everyone here has caught on to my strong habit of not bussing.) So if I flip scum (and me being a goon, we can afford to have me flip scum), people will look in my town list for scum. Or if they're smart enough to think I would bus, they'd look in some of my scum/null-reads. They wouldn't think I'd be audacious enough to bus ALL my scumbuddies, though, ESPECIALLY since I've done that before with disastrous results and have called it the most stupid, ridiculous idea a scum player can ever do. Thus, precisely why (in a game literally TEEMING with players knowing my meta) I want to do it. :P
Also, (perhaps as an alternative to the above, though these ideas are not mutually exclusive) I want to basically go in and do things differently than normal. Normally, I have my scumreads more or less make sense with a town-me, and same for my townreads. This game, I sorta want to scumread players I'd townread as town and townread players I'd scumread as scum, just for teh trollz.
But I wouldn't do either of these without your consent.
(Also, AP has to die, since he's the player most likely to figure my strategies out, too. By now, everyone knows that I like to refuge a little bit in audacity. Only AP knows EXACTLY how far into it I can go. :P)
Short version short:
I'm proposing we do exactly what goes against every piece of mafia-playing experience we have, and basically troll by posting anti-town stuff and advocating the most pro-town stances (that is, lynching each other), just for the trollz.
(At least, short-term.
This might seem like borderline playing-against-wincon, but there actually is a methodology present in this madness. Granted, there's a flat-out insanity in said methods, but I think you can see why my idea could have merits. It's the same idea as in Anything Goes, except backwards: we're still doing exactly what players think scum will NOT do. Just the other way around. The idea being that in a weird way, we trick the town into having us all as town. :P)
The basic plan is laid out. (Also predicting the necessity to kill AP, which as it turned out, was spot-on.) If our normal tactics would get us caught...then what we needed to do in order to not get caught is to not use our normal tactics. Conventional play in these circumstances would get us massacred, so we needed to play at least slightly unconventionally. In this case, by playing badly and knowing people expect you to be playing well.
It got added to when asked if we should all bus each other. My response?
Eh, not necessarily. It could be all of us doing it to all of each other. That'd be the most hilarious. But it's not a requirement.
Though...I do think that all of us doing all of each other would make it so that this game would be...
-Either a hilarious town steamroll of the scum...
-OR, an even more hilariously-epic scum win. :P
Like, I can see, say, a dead Mastin by D4, and survivors saying, "Hmmm...she wouldn't bus ALL her scumbuddies, would she?"
And the dead screaming, "YES. YES SHE WOULD, YOU MORONS!" :P
Which basically added a significant layer of depth to the plan, to make it not only be Mastin-centric, but to extent to our whole team and encompass the whole game as a result. That interaction we had was so intricately laid that it was nearly impossible to pick up on. But I think the quote that best illustrates my thinking this game was this one, after that--
In this playerlist, it's a given that I'll be lynched anyway, Dan.
I can fake being town when I choose to and have it be somewhat-convincing, but against players of this caliber who KNOW me, they'll pick up on something being 'off' no matter my strategy. (Which is why I might as well go for the hilarious trolling. :P) So it's not a matter of if I'll be lynched, but when. Because while people will typically give me a day or two, eventually, they're going to figure out I'm scum.
[stealing from dead QT]
Though my play was trolling, the thought process behind my posting was legitimate. (Just highly scumtastic on purpose, since I had always planned on being a sacrificial lamb.)
[/steal]
Thus, why AP's comments (while not quite correct) were dangerously close. I commented on it a few times in the dead QTs:
Trust in the competency of Mastin to have had a plan, Vezok.
I laid out my plan for this specific game quite explicitly early on, and we as a whole scumteam executed it nearly perfectly. (For instance...pidgey said that me playing scummily intentionally was faked. It wasn't--me playing scummily was part of my plan. But the reason I was playing scummily was not the reason AP gave, of me obfuscating players' reads on me. I played scummily as part of my long-term gambit. The gambit is actually quite brilliant when you get to see it--it's worked. It had the potential to backfire MASSIVELY, and I admit that it was not implemented perfectly. ['Specially since one scumbuddy deviated from the plan, albeit overall for the better I'd say.] Again, trust me to have known what I was doing.)
And ultimately,
Summed up in spoilered dead QT wrote:I figured...strong town. Nearly identical setup to Walking Dead. Me being scum...again. Might as well not bother trying to hide it--and if I'm not going to bother hiding it...why not have some fun and be obvious about it? And not in the "you can't PROVE I'm scum, nyehnyeh" way that I normally do...in the "yes, I'm playing like scum" admitting-it-refuge-in-audacity style. Fully knowing that the result could either make me die instantly, which was something I figured was likely to happen anyway, but had the chance of making me obvtown if pulled off correctly.
...But then, I decided. "Hey. I'm playing bad scum on purpose, basically just trolling the town. Why not take it further, and make it the ultimate troll?" So I told my scumbuddies about the plan, and said I wanted to bus them all, and be bussed by them all. And...
...They agreed.
Trololololololololololololol.
Winning a scumgame by playing a hilariously bad scumgame.
It seems stupid, but...*points to the thread* ...It's worked out so far!
(Okay. So I fully admit it. My plan was not to have us bus each other for the entirety of the game, and play badly for the entirety of the game. My plan was to intentionally start badly, and keep playing badly intentionally, until such a time that I felt like we should begin upping our game, essentially. It's actually much akin to my strategy in Attack on Titan, only much MUCH stronger, in which I intentionally played a sub-par scumgame so that I could improve into a towngame after that.)
As I said. A full, detailed explanation will have to wait for post-game. My full plan was not this simple. I didn't lay it out explicitly. But if you look at my comments in the scum QT...now you also know the reason why AP died--because he was DANGEROUSLY close to having figured out my magic trick. Zdenek was DANGEROUSLY close to having discovered it. And now, pidgey (thanks to actually rereading the thread in hindsight!) has come DANGEROUSLY close to the same, thus why I'd nightkill him.
And, yes. This is how the mind of a scum Mastin works.
Sometimes, the best plan is to make people think you have a plan.
It's so stupid it's
brilliant
.
Full insight into the mind of a scum me:
I plan. I plot. I have a course to victory. And this is basically EXACTLY what I was aiming for. I knew we'd likely lose one or two players, but I wanted it to be our non-PRs and for us to lose JUST those two and not any more. So my plan, my strategy, revolved around that, and on me weighing whether I would sacrifice myself and let my scumbuddies cruise on my minimal-bussing towncred (this is why I am a dangerous scum player: because I am aware enough of my own meta that I can manipulate it in ways that no town player is going to end up figuring out), or whether I should up my game and become town.
Stealing from a later post in there wrote:I teach players that circumstances are everything. And this game is a PERFECT example of that. I analyzed the situation, ran the numbers, came up with a plan, and ran it by my scumbuddies. And them following that plan (even though I never laid out the exact specifics) has left us in a position to win. Normally, I would never bus. Normally, I would never let myself become obvscum in the eyes of town players. (The only player here who woulda caught me is AP, I'd say.) But given the specific game, given what I saw and what I calculated, I realized that this was one time where being stupid would be smart. :P
That doesn't give the whole story, butyeah. Basically, I knew that this was going to be a tough, TOUGH game to win. So I figured that I'd go big or go home, in a very large way, by having fun while also furthering my wincon in a rather twisted way.
In essence...I didn't need to write out the mental math I had calculated on the players. I already knew the results, and how they would normally go badly. So to overcome that limitation...I would need to alter the numbers. Change the equation. The circumstances that I saw. The situation I knew was existing. Was not favorable. So I played around a bit and decided that I'd try something that even if it didn't work, would still be a lot of fun, and something that was worth trying out.
I sent this to Venmar during D1, too, saying as much.
mastin2 wrote:I might have had more fun in Attack on Titan as scum, but I want to say that so far, this game's fairly comparable. Not quite there, but it makes up on it in another way:
Like a good troll, I am finding the game absolutely
hilarious
to read. Perhaps I have a twisted sense of humor, but every time I see posting that falls in line with what I expected to happen with my plan, and every time I scumpost without getting called out on it (and sometimes, even if I am), I am in real life laughing like a madwoman.
Who knows, this plan of mine somewhere down the line could backfire absolutely spectacularly. But right now, I'd say all is going according to my plan, more or less. I couldn't have expected it to go any better than this. And it puts a huge grin on my face thinking about how much of a massive troll I've been so far.
As an aside, my basic plan right now is that we'll continue this epic distancing routine until one of us dies--perhaps two, but no more; that's all we can afford to lose. And after having lost that member(s), that we slowly begin to work together. The seeds on my end have already been planted, but they're so subtle that (aside from maybe Rubicon) nobody's going to be able to pick up on them if I die before employing them.
I'm still playing it by ear on whether I'm among the sacrificial scum or not. At this stage, I'm playing mid-way between the two, so that I can continue going whichever way I need. If I need to die, I'll make it so that my posts continue to be inaccurately read. (AP's the closest to having figured out my plan, so he's my current choice for the nightkill.) If I need to live, I'll make it so that I can continue living without being made obvscum, be it through play or through reads. It's a bit of a risk, not committing to either, but has a decent enough reward that it's worth having done.
It's all just so amusing.
Which got refined N1.
Muahahahahahaha. I am an evil, evil, masterfully EVIL, magnificent capital-b-witch. >:D
That went well.
Like, seriously. This strategy could backfire on us horrendously, but I actually think it's working really, REALLY well for us right now, because no single one of us is strongly suspected by a significant portion of the playerlist; suspicion on us is largely spread out across all of us equally, and said suspicion is mostly of the moderate variety, rather than severe. And given our largely-solid interactions between one another, it is unlikely that those hunting by interactions (with oooooooooooooone exception...) are going to catch on.
Basically, we can't afford to be arrogant about it, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut, I think that if we continue doing what we have been doing (at least, until/unless one or two of us ends up dead--we can afford to lose one or MAYBE two members, but if we lose three [even two is risky], the game is basically unwinnable for us), then we'll be incredibly well-off.
Speaking of which,
I will kill: AngryPidgeon.
He's the only player who's even remotely close to right about me. His exact reasoning is off, of course, but he's dangerously, DANGEROUSLY close to the truth. That he claimed hazmat infected is also a boost; we can kill him without it being much of a risk. (However, that said, there's the risk that hazmat infected = BP, given the nature of hazmat infected and AP's love of 'crumbing BP in unusual ways. Though...I'm arguing it's well worth the risk, and will gamble my life on it.)
I will accept no other kill option for the night. He's never getting mislynched. He has a PR, albeit one likely to be weak. He's unlikely to be targeted by other town PRs. He's frighteningly-charismatic. And above all, worryingly accurate. You might think some other player is a threat, but if a PR we can roleblock them and if on their merits as a player, trust me, AP's stronger than however strong you think that player is.
Tentatively,
Sven Doctors: Rubicon.
Because Rubicon is the player most likely to be nommed among us, and the most damaging nom aside from Dan/Sven. Dan's unlikely to be nommed thanks to his hunter softclaim (Dan, you do need to figure out an appropriate role for that), so that leaves Rubicon and us goons. I'm not likely to be nommed, either. So it's either Majiffy or Rubicon. You can change this to Majiffy if you'd prefer that.
(I am assuming protection from horde kills, though. Why else have that ability? So will wait on mod answer.)
And as for strategy, it's as I said: this game's one of the most fun games I've ever had. It's not quite at Attack on Titan levels of fun, but it's pretty dang close. I've been laughing at this game, like any good troll would at seeing the people having been trolled. (AP's the closest to having caught on.)
I do agree--we should stop consistently voting one another. That's more or less in line with my plan, ESPECIALLY after we've lost a member or two. Gradually backing out of it, and all that. (It could be suddenly, for those among us who wanna claim an investigative PR.)
However, it should not be a sudden switch. That'd make it obvious that D1 was an act. It needs (absolutely NEEDS) to be a gradual shift. I've planted seeds for it already, seeds which can grow. I'm expecting similar. Basically, while we CAN lose one member (especially if it's me or Majiffy), that's it. That's where I'm drawing the line of us winning. Over time, we should be shifting into buddy-buddy mode, now that we've done troll-to-death mode. :P But again, not suddenly; gradually.
Also, there's been a duality in my posting so far. I'm playing it by feel, but I've still yet to decide if I'm a sacrificial lamb or if I'm going to live. I lean heavily towards living, since I think people are gradually going to see me more as town, but it really depends on how players view RC's lynch in relationship to me, and AP dieing. Basically, be ready to bus if you deem it necessary, and I'll be ready to continue trolling if I deem it necessary.
(I'm not going to give you code words for which, but I think that a trolling-me will go into strongarm tactics, trying to force lynches through on little/no reasoning, whereas a living-me will emulate my town meta by trying to work with others and understand their viewpoint, to come to a common ground. This isn't an absolute; I could do one or the other. But be on the lookout for it; I think you'll be able to tell if I'm trolling or not.)
Butyeah. Definitely one of my favorite scum games, not only of the year, but of all time. Really goes to show that the most effective scum strategy is to above all else enjoy yourself. :P (Seriously, that tip has saved my ass as scum more times than I can count.)
Okay, so as you can tell, things didn't go according to my full plan, since I always prefer living over dieing. What you didn't see, though, was that if I had suggested a block (rather than letting my teammates decide), I would have blocked BBMolla, since I knew he was a strong PR, AND that if he were to have investigated ANYONE, his FIRST choice would be me. So when I claimed scum D2 and said that I really knew what he was doing and shoulda blocked him...well, that was just about the only thing I said D2 that wasn't trolling. But I was okay with that, because I had built my posts in a way that made it so that I had a plan for even this, which should have otherwise been a setback.
A kuriboesque (9/10!) troll to catch the town off-guard, making them wonder why the eff I would give up when BBMolla hadn't even explicitly claimed. (Rubicon doing the same was a nice boost.) As I explained in the spoilered dead QT.
BBMolla getting a guilty on me made that decision an easy one, so I decided to plant a seed of doubt in the town about his legitimacy, knowing my team had a roleblocker and knowing that the town players would be suspicious of a scum me rolling over so easily. ('Cause a scum Mastin NEVER gives up.) Throw in that bit of trolling about Molla being my buddy being a slip, and the stage was set.
[borrowing from another QT post]
[On D1, days before the lynch], I was already considering how I'd handle a guilty claim on me, should one come to exist. (I mentioned this before, but basically, I strongly, STRONGLY suspected that between cop/tracker/watcher, there'd be SOME way I'd get caught via night action.) I considered redirectors. I considered counterclaiming, dismissing it since it didn't work last time. Then, I thought of a plan:
"What if, instead of me fighting, I admitted it?", tying that into the above. So I did, figuring that if there was a guilty on me, I wouldn't bother trying to fight it. Because it was something that'd paint a narrative heavily, heavily, HEAVILY in scum's favor, especially given it's not a typical Mastin move...
...Oh, and because the town lynching a strong town PR that had caught scum, specifically because said scum admitted they were caught, would be really, really funny. :P
(Which is why my timing couldn't have been more perfect. BBMolla hadn't claimed it was a guilty. Heck, he barely so much as hinted it. In fact, I wasn't entirely sure he really had a guilty result on me. But I was willing to take the gamble that, yes, he did. I didn't know what type. But by admitting in-thread I didn't know what type, and admitting that we shoulda roleblocked him, and admitting that we could stop him, I basically set the gate up for the paranoia down the line.
I don't think there was any player more surprised by my reaction than BBMolla himself. We'll have to ask him about that, butyeah. ScuMastin plans things out well in advance of them having actually happened.)
[/borrow]
Obviously, I didn't get a chance to communicate the full extent of my plans to my scumbuddies, even though I informed them of my basic plans. But they were smart enough to more or less figure out the generalities of what I was doing. So when BBMolla claimed a result on Rubicon, Rubicon ALSO rolled over easily, reinforcing the paranoia on BBMolla. So now half the town thinks Molla's scum, largely in part because of events I set into motion D1 and N1.
I've warned people about this before.
A scum me might not be impossible to catch, that's true. But I make DANG sure that if I'm caught, there's a clear path to victory. And that's exactly what I did here. I let myself be scumread. I let myself be caught. I let myself be seen as scum--enough to be heavily suspicious, but juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust town enough to dodge the lynch. And with my reads being put into place on D1 and knowing players in the game are familiar with my no-bussing meta...
...Trolling becomes masterful scum play.
And it worked out well. Players were left misdirected. Players didn't know where to go. PV was left deeply, deeply paranoid of BBMolla's claim, and BBMolla likely had to make that gambit in part out of fear of how I handled his result on me. As I explained in the dead QT.
I think you're underestimating the effect of me-as-scum, Vezok.
PV derp-gambited explicitly BECAUSE of me. He's a part of the town, so his paranoia helped generate additional paranoia thanks to him gambiting off of the paranoia. He was correct to have suspected two scum rolling over so easily, because that is NOT something scum are naturally going to do. But it was by design-of-creating-paranoia rather than design-of-clearing-scumbuddy. The gambit might have been taking things too far, but was not unjustified a thought.
And Molla most likely claimed the way he did largely because of me. Remember my post about him being my scumbuddy-faking-guilty on me? You'll have to ask Molla if that influenced him on D3 with his claim, but to me, it did visibly look like my words influenced how he felt forced to claim.
Yeah, it seems like I had only a minimal influence over things if you look purely at an objective angle. But when you throw in player psychology and how they have been playing the game since my demise, you can see it all there. The seeds of doubt might have sprouted thanks to others, sure--but they most definitively were planted by me.
[borrowing relevant parts from next QT post]
That seeds metaphor is really the best way of describing it. If there's one thing a scuMastin knows, it is the psychology of players. I might not be able to predict power roles--but I can predict behaviors of players aside from PRs, which extends to how they'll be in a game. (For instance, a PR who's on my mislynch list isn't likely to get mislynched...but IS likely to get outted forcefully as a PR.) It goes for individual players, and it goes for teams as a whole.
Heck! I even predicted getting a guilty on me, knowing it happened to me last time. (Albeit faked, from my supposed ally.) And built my play around it, so that when the time came, I could do whatever I wanted, be it counterclaim, plea that it was role shenanigans and an inaccurate result, or (as I ultimately ended up doing) not fighting at all and simply trolling.
[/borrow]
Basically, there was a fairly strong number of direct consequences to my actions. Things were orchestrated in such a way that the town would be placed in a position where they weren't scumhunting, they were shooting in the dark. Confusion, chaos, and a healthy dose of misdirection, all part of a simple plan. Consequence two? Listed above, town paranoia of their own lifelines, their power roles. Consequence one? The direct cause of two...
Yeah, the quicklynches on scum--ironically enough--were just about the most damaging thing that could have happened to the town. You have no clue how much that actually hurt you; it left D1 as the only true info day, and it wasn't until D5 that you had anything, because D4 had role shenanigans that made it short, too. Basically, in a large theme, you'd expect there to be a fair amount of discussion.
The town has had a grand total of two days, neither of which was really in their control. Still don't think we're going to win. It only takes one dead scum to screw us over, one surprise from the town to make us be deaded. But this game is an example of the scum (quite literally) letting the town eat themselves. (Scum's actions haven't been necessarily bad, just not stellarly good.)
...A lack of information to find scum, and what little info there was pointing in the wrong direction.
Consequence three?
Town didn't lynch Majiffy again largely by design. Both Rubicon and myself had him as scum, and he had both of us as scum. The natural thought is not cross-bussing--maybe from newbs, but from EXPERIENCED PLAYERS, nobody would make that callout.
If you meant on D1, well. Also design: scum's bussing was explicitly such that while we were bussing, we were bussing smartly. We bussed hard enough for it to be more than mere distancing, but not hardcore enough for us to be the only suspects for the day. Ultimately, there were only a few slots that came up as viable lynches, and of them, Rubicon and myself were the only scum, and through bullheaded town lack of coordination, and scum not helping the town correct its flaws, we got an RC mislynch. (This was another key: we walked the walk, but didn't talk the talk. Meaning that while we bussed, we didn't make the wagons on one another look particularly appetizing. Looking at our reasoning on each other in hindsight would reveal that. It's subtle! But present; we voted and pushed each other, but never provided actual strong cases.)
When I saw the playerlist, I knew it was going to be a tough game, but I also knew that if we got them paranoid of each other and shut down any townbloc efforts (no townbloc formed this game, at all), it'd be a landslide victory for us.
(Which, again, is precisely why I made the move, knowing nobody would make that callout. :P)
Scum didn't die, thanks to the other consequences.
And consequence four, the game was a blast. All summed up with what was ironically one of my first dead QT posts.
There are multiple reasons I let myself die.
-Who my scumbuddies are and what their powers are contributed to my decision,
-As did realizing that I was likely getting lynched even without a claim,
-Me getting lynched was one of two plans I presented to my scumbuddies,
-And I did a fair bit of D1 trolling so that people were likely to draw the conclusions I wanted them to.
I don't want to spoiler things, but basically: It
was
a risk. It was a gambit. Lynching myself always is. It could backfire horribly. But there's a TON of rewarding things that I'm HOPING will come about because of my death, payoff on D1 dividends, you could say. Basically, D2 was so short and worthless that nothing good could come of it. I shut down scumhunting instantly. D1 was so long and filled with info that people are going to be forced to use it as their model for the rest of the game...and are very likely to fall into my traps.
Oh, and because it was really, really fun. :P
Basically, this game has surpassed Attack on Titan for my favorite-scumgame-of-year award. Not ONLY has it surpassed Titan for this year, but ALSO has earned its spot as one of my top-five favorite scumgames of all time, just because of how much fun I had. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut, this game is also a solid example of my manipulation. Small spoiler alert, I never got to do the profiling. (I wanted to do it N2, but I ran out of time, thanks to life and other distractions.) Which means my scumteam could go wrong. Yet I really think that in spite of me not having drafted a horribly-overcomplicated plan, that the plan I DID create (which my scumbuddies basically rolled with) will be highly productive in the long-run to our chances of success.
My scumbuddies (mainly Majiffy) would be able to carry the team. Me getting lynched was something that I had accounted for. The entirety of my D1 posting was one great big troll, designed so that players would draw conclusions about my scumbuddies that I had chosen them to. It was a big risk to do, but basically every reward I was hoping to get ultimately ended up coming true, as the consequences demonstrate. Players thought what I wanted them to think. Because I was more than aware of what they would be thinking, of their assumptions, I was able to basically control their minds. And it was really, really fun, both alive and dead.
If I have one gripe this game, it's this.
People's reasoning for thinking I was scum was kinda BS, because they were largely off-base in ways that legitimately frustrated me--however, this is where the danger in my scumgame lies. In that I was smart enough to PREDICT this factor and compensate for it. In this case, with trolling. I knew that they were off-base with their ultimate reasoning, even if not the read, but because the read was correct, it'd be a pain to deal with. I predicted that factor. So I played in a way that would manipulate that to my advantage--such that if I dodged lynch/investigation, I'd be in a position to obvtown myself (because the players would be objectively wrong even if subjectively right), but where I could choose to become scum and get myself lynched.
People's reasoning for having me as scum were WAY off mark. Right for the wrong reasons. I weaponized it quite effectively, by setting up my interactions in such a way that town players became suspicious and scum players looked town, butstill, it's a bit annoying all the same that people think they have you figured out, even though you know for a fact that they do not.
Some of my overall thoughts, on what the ultimate gamestate was?
My plan allowed for two scum dead. We lose another, our chance of winning drops essentially to zero, but as long as we have *number of current scum alive* scum still here, we'll be fine. Town gained a HUGE advantage with the back-to-back scum lynches that were handed to them, but the scum aren't down for the count, yet. I'm Mastin. I made sure of that.
Overall prediction: town win, but not landslidingly so; it'll be a close fight until the end, with the town's PRs saving their asses until they've got no more PRs to save them, at which point POE and interactions will do the rest of the work for them.
Scarily close to accurate, albeit not quite true. Butyeah, Mastin has backup plans for her backup plans. If something hits me I didn't expect, I made a plan to deal with it anyway. (Also, I'm very apt at improvising. :P) And that gives you a great insight into my mind.
Basically, my scumplay is best described by this bit.
I really know how town players think. I know how scum players think, too--that's one reason I knew I could trust them to survive without me; knowing who they were (especially Majiffy, who the majority of our nightkills have been dictated by, with a side of Dan), I knew that they would be able to not screw things up royally without me. Meaning that while they don't know it, they've followed what I would do if I was still alive.
Then by also knowing how town players think, I can create scenarios. The mental calculations only take me a few seconds to make. I'm a writer; my imagination is my strength. But these evolution of psychologies progress over the game, and I see how things go. I saw that my plan would work, because players here are familiar enough with me as a player to know the basis of my scumgame. (Basically, because they know my habit against bussing...I could bus more shamelessly.) I saw that they wouldn't be able to lynch me, but that I could get what I want either way fairly easily.
So I played in a way that I knew would sow the seeds of discord in the town, as they'd get paranoid of each other and clear my scumbuddies. It's what I DO. I basically won both my mini theme scum games by using this tactic. In a game appropriately called Paranoia and in Book of Shadows (I think? It was run by Kit, a Malakittens modding alt), just with me as the one cleared rather than it being a scumbuddy.
I really know how to work that out.
And when it came to integrating that this game, I summed up my scumplay this game as such:
A tl;dr version:
My scumplay this game was anti-Mastin scumplay, a total deconstruction of how I normally operate. I bussed instead of defended my scumbuddies. I made myself obvscum rather than making myself obvtown. I rolled over and died, rather than putting up a fight.
I did everything that a scum me never does, essentially as the ultimate weapon against players thinking that my scumplay is easily predicted. That my scumplay is easily figured out.
When the truth of the matter is...as scum, I am a really, really dangerous player. And even when I die. Even when I intentionally let myself die! I still control the game from the grave. Because a scum me cannot be easily pinned down. You can figure out a few quirks that are more likely to come from a scum me. (For instance, that I'm calm under pressure. Scum-me goes "whatevs" like I did this game, town me shouts and rants.) You can generally figure out something about me being 'off'. I have a few giveaways.
But none of them are easily defined. And even when defined, even when my play gives away that I'm scum in spite of my efforts to mask that...I still have a plan. I can tell you right here and now that basically the only games I come close to losing as scum are the games where I don't have the chance to execute my plan. (I always, ALWAYS have a plan. But sometimes, life interferes with my ability to actually integrate the plan, dragging me down.)
And said plan? Said plan...the town will never. EVER. Actually see coming. Because while they think they understand how my mind operates, they have a fundamental failing--they don't realize that above all others, I know how my own mind works. I know what I will and won't do, better than they ever could. Furthermore, knowing my scumbuddies, I know how my scumbuddies will act. And knowing the town, I know how they will act and interact.
And I am capable of situational awareness that is uncannily accurate. Above all other skills, that is my strength as scum. To read circumstances, and be able to weaponize them. So that even when I'm taken out. Even if I don't live, and my scumbuddies are put into the firing line. That ultimately, we come out on top.
[Added from other post]
All it takes is a little bit of audacity, a little bit of planning, some amount of clever execution, and most importantly of all, a window opened to them by the town.
[/add]
[Resulting in?] I['ve barely lost any] scum games this year. And it's for precisely that reason: people think they know me. But they know the me of a past game. The only players who pose a threat to my plans are the players who don't get caught up in the past and think of what a past-me has done, and think about what the current-me would do in the current circumstances. Thus, the nightkills I'd have advocated.
(In other words--MASTIN:
Such a badass scum player, she can still control the flow of the game long after she was lynched.
:P)
(As later noted, I did lose Attack on Titan, but it was DANG close.)
You're right, Vezok, that the gambit I came up with sounds stupid and had an incredible risk attached to it, but I took a calculated risk and knew the large reward if what I planned managed to be pulled off.
The plan took into account, for instance, the competency of my scumbuddies, and for me to die and yet for them to still win in spite of (rather, not in spite of, but specifically BECAUSE of) my death. It maximized the lifespan of our PRs and made it so that we had a significant chance of winning, which I think we can. My scumbuddies are competent. So saying this is all on me would be a lie. (My scumbuddies probably think it's all on them for the win, and they'd not be unjustified to think that.)
But regardless of how much I contributed to the win directly (I happen to think I've done a decent amount), I set into motion the ball of their scumplay. I got us going in a particular direction, and that direction has objectively proven to be a massive success. A lot of mislynches/misvigs were a result of my posting. And my scumbuddies are maneuvering into a position to win the game soon.
Soyeah. I'm not going to claim credit I don't deserve. But I am going to claim that events going on (in spite of not being my exact plan) ARE essentially precisely what I was aiming to have achieved. Like...I look at things, and this is exactly what I was wanting to have set up. So while my scumbuddies have been thinking on their own, they've still been following my will.
And if you actually bothered to read that wall of text, congratulations, you now know how my scum mind ACTUALLY operates, and
exactly
why it is as dangerous as it is, not to be underestimated so easily. Situational awareness, utilized at its absolute maximum possible power. Able to direct the flow of the entire game, in spite of having been a part of it for a mere fraction of it. THAT is how a scuMastin operates. By anticipating your expectations...and then screwing with them in a way incredibly favorable to me.
