MTG Salvation

As usual, Azrael has it right and is much more eloquent than me. The conflict of interest involved in undertaking such a gambit while outright lying to the town (in chamber's case) is detrimental to the game. Messing around for personal fun is "fun" for those involved, but frustrating to those not.

Heh. I remember a game on 'tings where Azrael (townie on the verge of being lynched) tried to claim being Masons with someone else he thought was town *hoping* that person would back him up. The other person was, in fact, also town, but didn't get the hint.

Well, I don't think it ruined my fun at all because if you look at my first couple posts of day 9, you can see that I wasn't convinced about MMoD even after chamber came up town, although I did manage to convince myself shortly afterwards. The point is, this game ended up more like an IRC game than a forum game, b/c for any of you who have ever played IRC, gambits literally make and break games 90% of the time there.

"Oh, I'm a daycop with neutral (indicating sk b/c there are almost, if not as many, sks as mafia on IRC) on Player X",
*lynch*
"SWEET, I was actually right!"
"CRAP"
Honestly, just ask loran... he false claims as town almost as much as he true-claims.

My point is, all he did was make the game more challenging for us, though I think it was a legit gambit. I am definitely not saying that I am rather irritated for singlehandedly losing us the game at a point where we pretty much would have won for sure had he not done it (especially since a good analyst at that point will realize that from his PoV, it didn't matter all that much who was scum of me, C_F, MMoD or ZDS, we still would have had a very very high chance of winning minus his claim). I am just saying a) it was a legitimate try, and b) I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVAR, trust him again. Plus, considering all the time and effort we all invested into a game of this size, it's not quite the same when you lose it for the town as when you lose a 10 minute game on IRC.. just sayin'.

So there's my two cents. TBH, I haven't actually cracked a smile at the irony of it all, but I'm curious to see what happens when I look back on it in a couple months.

Quote from arimnaes

Heh. It seems like fair game to me - just making the setup something other than players would necessarily expect. I made an assumption, and when you assume, you make an ass of you and me.

Of course, the reason I ended up pursuing Xyre so doggedly was the fact that he started questioning me for hints of role information. I was pretty sure he was scum trying to force me to out myself as non-vanilla, because I was virtually the only claimed red character. I was surprised more people didn't figure out I was the doc as soon as I certified that I was non-vanilla.

I thought about it, but then decided Brothers Yamazaki wasn't a doctor role. I really was trying to simply drive home the idea that two Brothers wasn't impractical, role strength or not. I wasn't intending to out the doc.

Quote from Axelrod

Heh. I remember a game on 'tings where Azrael (townie on the verge of being lynched) tried to claim being Masons with someone else he thought was town *hoping* that person would back him up. The other person was, in fact, also town, but didn't get the hint.

Heh, yeah. Good times.

In that situation, I knew he was town, and I was hoping he 'knew' that I was town, after the way I kept him from being lynched, as cop. I figured since I was going down anyways, I might as well give it a shot.

So much for that.

The problem as I see it was not that Chamber Gambited to save someone he assumed townie. It's not a play I would have made, but it's decent. The problem is that when a townie is dead there is an assumption that they've told the truth. If chamber had come clean about his mafia gambit when his lynch was immentent, he might still have been lost, but the game wouldn't have been.

I think the point of the word "Gambit" is that there's a chance it isn't safe.

As a spectator, the other thing I would say in defence of chamber's choice is that it didn't really change anything except the result.

The town can see that they would have won if not for chamber's choice. Indeed, if he'd even been able to log back in before his death. So there's really no need to feel that their efforts were wasted. Each town member played as well or as badly as they would have done anyway and should feel satisfied accordingly. Plus, as a bonus, we all get to laugh at chamber.

Has something like this happened on day 2 of a game it might well have ruined it. As things stand, the impact is almost zero (as I see things).

Winning is winning, losing is losing. It doesn't matter that we should have won, it matters that we didn't. And yes, playing the game is fun, but part of why people play is to win, obviously, and having that essentially sabotaged by another townie is infuriating, especially when it is a circumstance like this.

Cyan, I think you're attaching too much importance to the actual win, as if winning a Mafia game were somehow something of immense value. For example, when I play Magic, I play to win, but I don't get all upset every time I lose. In any case, I play Mafia primarily because I enjoy the psychological battle, the trickery and deceit, the behavioral analysis, and so on. Who wins in the end is almost immaterial to me. But that's just personal opinion, and I respect your own perspective on the issue. I'm just hoping you lighten up a bit.

But it seems that people are also making it sound as if chamber intentionally decided that the town should lose. No, he wasn't "sabotaging" the game; he was making a play that he thought would benefit the town. Did it turn out to be an error in judgment? Yes. But in a game of Mafia, people take chances and sometimes they're wrong.

If mmod had actually been town and chamber's play had resulted in finding the real scum, would people still be attacking him so harshly? Somehow I doubt it. They might call it a bad play, but in the end, they'd laugh it off. Yet simply because it had the wrong outcome, he now becomes despised.

I've seen it happen before. Townies getting praised for false-claiming cop and having inspected someone as guilty, when the target actually turns out to be guilty. Other similar gambits have happened in the past. We also see Vigs criticized for taking chances and being wrong, while other Vigs applauded for taking chances and being right. People tend to overemphasize outcomes rather than the actual actions. (And I see this all the time in poker, where players justify bad plays to themselves because they happened to win, while also criticizing good plays because it happens to make them lose.)

But if people remain truly infuriated by this, then so be it. Everyone has their own motivations and reasons for playing Mafia, and if they decide that winning is more important than everything else, that's up to them.

Quote from Pod

And MJM wasn't lying about that thing he was supposedly 'caught out' on? Heh.

Quote from Cyan

I also thought that MJM's complete meltdown when he was forced to claim was pretty hilarious.

Lesson here: Don't claim when you're half asleep.

But to be fair, I probably was going to be lynched anyway.

I think what Chamber did was perfectly acceptable play. He used some knowledge of MMoD's playstyle in an attempt to save him from being lynched as town. What Chamber failed to take into account was the fact that MMoD would have done the same thing as town or scum, equating his backing up the false claim to a non-tell (from Chamber's PoV). This non-tell happened to cause the rest of the town to assume he was confirmed. Chamber didn't ruin or destroy the game, he just lost it. That's what happens when you make a bad play in the endgame, it's not a big deal.

ZDS, if the primary issue is one of an out-of-game relationship affecting the in-game play, I believe chamber has already explained himself. He did not make the play just because he knew MMoD in real life; he made the play because his experience with MMoD in real life told him that it was likely to succeed. He could've made the same play with someone else he didn't know in real life if he had sufficient experience with that person to believe it could succeed.

Other players may doubt him, but I personally don't, based on my prior experience with him.

I felt that the town misplayed egregiously on the day that CF was lynched. Arimnaes had been outed, and a dual masonry had been claimed. To me, it seemed *extremely* obvious that one of Chamber/MMoD(most likely MMoD because his character was and because he contributed absolutely nothing to the entire game, and Passdog's content was basically all scummy)..as I was saying..I thought that the obvious correct play, at that point, was to lynch one of them. It would have answered the 'why is the atlseal/cyan/wp masonry green' question and confirmed the other mason at worst, and at best it would catch a scum in a lie(in this case it would have won the game on the spot). Sadly, no one seemed to realize to do this.

I can only repeat that as unexpected as the mason claim was for me, I didn't think a townie would have possibly claimed masons to "confirm" someone whose alignment he didn't know, especially in such a tense endgame.

I don't mean any disrespect to chamber, obv, I just didn't think it could happen.

I just wanted to let all of you know that I came up with the concept for this game, and helped LJ figure out the roles and powers. LJ obviously did all of the hard work for it, so congrats to him for such a great game!

Quote from Cyan

I felt that the town misplayed egregiously on the day that CF was lynched. Arimnaes had been outed, and a dual masonry had been claimed. To me, it seemed *extremely* obvious that one of Chamber/MMoD(most likely MMoD because his character was and because he contributed absolutely nothing to the entire game, and Passdog's content was basically all scummy)..as I was saying..I thought that the obvious correct play, at that point, was to lynch one of them. It would have answered the 'why is the atlseal/cyan/wp masonry green' question and confirmed the other mason at worst, and at best it would catch a scum in a lie(in this case it would have won the game on the spot). Sadly, no one seemed to realize to do this.

I thought I defended passdog fairly well. Kops stated fairly well why I should've been town in one of the last posts, so in all reality, at that point the play was either ZDS or Kops.

I agree with Arimnaes, I didn't think chamber was willfully bluffing. Honestly, I figured that they were a masonry, and that when they died they would show up as 'townie mason' in blue, essentially putting the lie to atlseal. Regardless, it seemed like the obvious best choice to make at that point, especially since one of the 'masons' should clearly have presented a better lead than anyone else.

3 days isn't a Necro is it?

LJ, (or Alfred) was there a pattern to the roles at all? How did you pick the vanillas?

Alfred originally submitted the set-up to me with a pattern to just about everything. I made several changes so that there would be little discernible patterns. For example, the mafia had every color but green - having 2 black cards. The masons were all 2/2s for Wx where x is a unique color. The townie 'enabler' - Llanowar Dead was along the same lines but different enough to be suspicious if his role came out. The townie roles were just cards that Alfred and I thought of. We had some that would be obviously vanilla if claimed (Benalish Hero) and some that would cause question if it were claimed along with vanilla - like Ambassador Laquatus.

Basically, I'm a bastard.