[INNOCENTS WIN] First Anniversary Fanfic Mafia - Game Thread

[windskull]

huh, there were two last time? do you have a special condition? i do not tbh.

I do not, just that it only takes one hit.

i can’t seem to find a second bulletproof in negrek’s role pm post from the last thread, unless i’m looking right over it.

It was M&F's role before she got recruited to Mafia. If she would have been eliminated at night, she would survive, but her win condition changed.

 

[Equitial]

Full disclosure: I haven't been feeling great the past couple days and don't feel up to making high-effort posts. For RP, Jen gets migraines so we'll say the revelation from last night gave her big stress and triggered one so she's hiding somewhere, the voice in their head can defend them anyway. For non-RP stuff, I probably won't be posting much, sorry.

Anyway, I'm a tracker. If you want me declare actions just ask. The only thing I think is super relevant is that I tracked Elyvorg Night 0 and she didn't go to anyone.

 

[kyeugh]

oooh. i see. do you get informed who hit you?

 

[Dragonfree]

Full disclosure: I haven't been feeling great the past couple days and don't feel up to making high-effort posts. For RP, Jen gets migraines so we'll say the revelation from last night gave her big stress and triggered one so she's hiding somewhere, the voice in their head can defend them anyway. For non-RP stuff, I probably won't be posting much, sorry.

Anyway, I'm a tracker. If you want me declare actions just ask. The only thing I think is super relevant is that I tracked Elyvorg Night 0 and she didn't go to anyone.

That's all right! I hope you feel better.

Who else have you tracked and when?

 

[Dragonfree]

elyvorg not doing anything N0 tracks with her claim, since wasting a one-shot power on N0 with no clues towards who'd be a good target for what would have been a bad idea.

 

[Equitial]

N0 - Elyvorg, tracked to no one
N1 - qva, tracked to no one
N2 - Namo, tracked to no one
N3 - NonAnalogue, tracked to Sike

For reasonings for my tracking, Elyvorg was random, qva targeted Chibi, Namo I thought I could catch in a lie, and NonAnalogue ended up being my biggest suspect for mafia, and I was right! She was also the mafia performing the killings, evidently

 

[Equitial]

Edit: by qva targeted Chibi, I meant she cast a vote for them to get lynched

 

[Dragonfree]

Huh. You tracked qva N1, which is when DawningWinds switched qva and Chibi, so really you were tracking Chibi... but if Chibi was a protector as Tanuki claims, shouldn't you have seen Chibi visiting whoever they tried to heal that night?

All of the results you've listed are kind of conveniently easy to claim - we know Sike died last night and NonAnalogue was mafia, we know Namo can't act on even-numbered nights, qva just claimed to be bulletproof so if you forgot about the switch that'd seem like a pretty safe thing to claim. Doesn't make them false, but it means they don't really dissuade me from side-eyeing the qva result.

 

[windskull]

Sorry about the delay in response. I needed to get something to eat. To answer your question, qva, I don't get to see who target me, I just get informed that I was targeted.

 

[elyvorg]

It kind of gives me pause that jack-of-all-trades is not on Negrek's list of roles; the way she phrased that implied to me that the roles in the game would be either on that list or custom, and JOAT is neither. Maybe it counts as "some variant on" the different one-shot powers, but it does seem kind of odd.

I was surprised when I got this role, too. At first I thought I was the custom role, then I remembered seeing roles vaguely like this in other mafia games and looked it up on the wiki to find it was a known thing, after all. I'll also add that at least one of my powers is something not on Negrek's list, so apparently Negrek just wasn't quite adhering to that list completely? I... should probably have mentioned that possibility earlier, since that might have also affected our deductions about mafia powers, which until now have been very constrained by that list. I guess it never properly occurred to me that my role meant I might not be the only one (custom role aside) with powers not on that list.

I'm kind of excited about the possibility of mafia!elyvorg now because if it's true she's been playing amazingly and it'd be great

Hahaha, I wish I was that good at mafia. Nope, I've basically been playing the same as Tefiren has - trying to do something clever and useful with my "tricks" and not succeeding, trying to root out mafia and ultimately only getting a huge misfire the one time I thought I'd actually picked up on something meaningful.

[["My tricks aren't just the best ones, you know. They're also the hardest to use. All the rest of you idiots don't need to worry about wasting anything because you're too boring to have more than one trick and too stupid to know not to do something twice, so you can just do the same thing every night without a care! But me? I've got to think about things, plan things out, be creative."]]

...yes, thank you, Tefiren, I see you conveniently not mentioning the part where you and I have both completely failed to be useful at all so far because of this. JOAT is a very fun role in theory - I was so excited for the possibilities when I got it - but ahahahaha, it can easily be a lot less so in practice, it turns out.

elyvorg not doing anything N0 tracks with her claim, since wasting a one-shot power on N0 with no clues towards who'd be a good target for what would have been a bad idea.

Indeed, I didn't act that night because I didn't want to waste anything. Not that me claiming this now exactly gives me any more credibility, but. It does mean that someone claiming they tracked me that night and saw nothing is a pretty safe fakeclaim for the night, though.

Was the big analysis post you were going to do yesterday evening just that, Dragonfree, or was there more to it? Something about what Dave said beforehand suggested he had something in mind other than just reviewing the evidence, like this might have had something to do with your custom role. (In fact, because of that, I started to vaguely suspect you might have been the custom role before you claimed today.)

I also suspected qva was probably bulletproof after she asked nobody to heal her that one time, which, even if we didn't have a million other things clearing her, would also make me believe her more than I believe windskull's claim. Two bulletproofs seems too much to me - sure, Mia was technically bulletproof in last year's game, but that was just as a part of her third-party role and not the whole role itself.

Equitia's results on qva(/actually Chibi) are also suspect, though, hmm. Maybe there really are two left and it's both of them?

 

[elyvorg]

Specifically re: windskull's claim - it's odd that they don't get told who shot them but qva does. If Negrek was going to put in two of the same role, they'd presumably be identical like I imagine the doctors were, or at least different in equally useful ways, rather than one version just being an indisputably more powerful variant of the other.

 

[Dragonfree]

Was the big analysis post you were going to do yesterday evening just that, Dragonfree, or was there more to it? Something about what Dave said beforehand suggested he had something in mind other than just reviewing the evidence, like this might have had something to do with your custom role. (In fact, because of that, I started to vaguely suspect you might have been the custom role before you claimed today.)

I did write in a hint related to my role, but unfortunately, the thing Dave was waiting for did not happen; the post would mainly just have been going over the case on DawningWinds (I was going to vote for them, for the record).

I'm going to claim later but it's going to be an RP post and right now I'm a couple minutes late to a virtual birthday party, so. Later!

 

[elyvorg]

Hmm, I can think of one way in which Equitia's claim could be genuine other than that Chibi just happened to forget to send in an action N1 (or also got roleblocked, but I really don't think we were ever dealing with two mafia roleblockers). It's possible that Chibi was not a regular doctor but a seraph knight, aka a doctor who can only heal the same person all game. If that were the case, maybe Chibi only got counted as actually targeting someone on N0 when they chose a target for the rest of the game. Tanuki has been oddly quiet about precisely who he's been targeting each night, which might just be out of Tanuki being Tanuki, but could also be because he doesn't want the mafia to learn that he can only protect one specific person.

Tanuki, if you've been holding back on us for this reason, now's the time to tell us. Are you a regular doctor, or a seraph knight?

 

[elyvorg]

(If I'm right about the seraph knight thing then I guess that kind of moots my point about two different bulletproofs where one is inherently better than the other, since seraph knight is essentially just a worse doctor, huh.)

 

[kyeugh]

Specifically re: windskull's claim - it's odd that they don't get told who shot them but qva does. If Negrek was going to put in two of the same role, they'd presumably be identical like I imagine the doctors were, or at least different in equally useful ways, rather than one version just being an indisputably more powerful variant of the other.

yeah, this is kind of where i’m at too. on the other hand, if windskull is lying, why wouldn’t they just say they had the same role as me? that would raise less alarms imo (although i agree two bulletproofs seems like a lot anyway), and i don’t see any real disadvantage in doing that. wine in front of me, i guess.

 

[Tanuki]

Tanuki, if you've been holding back on us for this reason, now's the time to tell us. Are you a regular doctor, or a seraph knight?

[[“Y’all just wanna give’m all th’info, don’t you?” Desper grumbled. A moment’s thought, though, and he realized he had little to lose. “I ain’t some ‘bsessive boy in ir’n. Target’s by the night.”]]

He is saying he’s not a Seraph Knight. Just a normal protector.

 

[Dragonfree]

[[Dave rubbed his eyes, sighing. "Okay, so. This time in the board game hellscape, I've got this... ugh." He rolled his eyes. "This power to fucking talk to dead people in my sleep. Supposedly. One per night, ask them a short question, answer can only be yes/no/don't know. Assuming this bullshit is any kind of real, because who even knows with this fucking place, last night anime man with the dragon dick told me Diyem was right and he really was a seer. And before that, you know, I was trying to find out if the cowboy was telling the truth about the ability he got from Chibi, except apparently Chibi is a fucking asshole who didn't answer me. Like I didn't have better fucking dead people to talk to in the dimension where ghosts exist. Fuck you." He glared at the formless sky.

"And yeah, both the Sneasel and Jen's claims are pretty dodgy."]]

I'll do some reading on both of them to guess which might be our mafia (or both).

Incidentally, the post about the waiting was an attempt to signal to Chibi in-thread that the message was me, and to please answer now - my message started with "Okay, let's try this bullshit", and in the post I wrote "Why did he try this bullshit", in the hope Chibi would recognize the phrasing and catch on. I've now started to think maybe I was just blocked; I asked Negrek if I'd be told if I was blocked, and interpreted her answer as a yes, and she went on to sound like she was equally confused by why Chibi had not responded, but maybe she was just pokerfacing because rereading what she told me she didn't actually indicate I'd be able to tell (the way the power works, I ask the question during the night, the dead player receives it at the end of the night, and then has until the end of the following day to answer; I was kind of assuming that if I were blocked I'd be told at the end of the night that I can't get through instead of just getting silence, and that's what I was trying to ask about, but when Negrek said she would tell me there was no response, she may have just meant she'd tell me at the end of the day that I got no response).

[["What the fuck are you talking about. Who the fuck is Negrek?"]]

Never mind, Dave!

[["Eat shit."]]

For the record, and for fun, here's roughly what I was going to say in the post that never was, since I'd been collecting quotes and then noticed the thread was closed pretty much as I was about to start writing my comments on them, and the posts are still in my multiquote:

Retracting my vote until Sike speaks. Frankly I've read this thread twice and still can't say I understand what's going on. I would feel much better casting a vote after Sike speaks up and more experienced players than I can analyze it.

I was going to remark on this as a bit more evidence that Sike was innocent - the way Persephone pushed on Sike was kind of cautious, not wanting to be the one to lead an innocent lynch exactly. Obviously irrelevant now.

Tefiren's gaze snapped towards the white-coat Human as she spoke up for only those few words. "That's it? That's all you're saying? No asking what my reasons are? No trying to tell me I'm wrong? Just 'oh, I don't mind if you get rid of me, because I'm definitely not one of Them anyway!'? That's not what someone who's not one of Them would say!"

I really did think it was pretty odd for DawningWinds to not be interested in Tefiren's reasons.

Why did you switch the two of them? qva had indicated healers should not heal her; this switch would have the potential to direct healers towards her, or conveniently ensure there'd be no healers on Windskull.

DawningWinds never responded to this concern that I had, which I found a bit dodgy.

"The Backup role can potentially be mafia-aligned, per the rules," Diyem said. "Technically, they could assume that if the mafia has a backup, perhaps the town does not. If Desper is the backup, or anybody in mafia is the backup, they can take out a player, and then state that they are the backup. Their claim to innocence would be the lack of a counterclaim. If there is a role that reveals what someone's power is, but not their alignment, that would further increase Desper's credibility, should such a gambit pay off.

I was going to argue a mafia backup that can back up originally innocent roles is very unlikely - it shifts the game balance significantly depending on exactly what the initial kill of the game is, and half of the town's potential roles aren't even useful in the mafia's hands.

Right, so. The other thing that is super suspicious, aside from yesterday's voting, is the way they acted upon receiving Espeon's info that Sike wasn't seen near Chibi. They just immediately switched their vote to Sike. No doubt expressed over "oh but Sike's roleclaim seemed genuine". No nervousness expressed over "if we're wrong we lose a doctor and that's a risk". No trying to think of any other possibilities that could explain this while having Sike be innocent. Just immediately trying to get a claimed doctor lynched now that they had a reason to. This included an obnoxiously large block of text trying to drill it into everyone's heads that either our claimed doctor or our claimed watcher has to be lying and we should definitely lynch one of them. They dropped that once I pointed out there could have been a mafia roleblocker, but of course they did; to refuse to acknowledge that possibility once it'd been brought up would look way too ridiculously suspicious.

I wasn't quite sure about whether it was exactly suspicious not to express thinking Sike's roleclaim seemed genuine, but yeah, just kind of immediately jumping to vote instead of appearing to be confused by the result or surprised by its implications or visibly considering which of the two might be lying was weird.

(Here's Sike's post just before DW's roleclaim - and note that there's a long enough gap of time between their posts for DW to have been able to think over what Sike's post meant and respond accordingly.)

I wanted to point out that Sike's post had actually brought up switching, so that could've prompted a fakeclaim.

This bizarrely threatening post promising to "look into" everyone (well, nearly everyone; they apparently overlooked me) who'd been advocating no-lynch on day 1, as if only they could possibly be mafia. Everyone else, despite their differing opinions on the best approach, had generally agreed that there are valid reasons for either side of that debate and that being on one side or the other did not inherently mean someone was more or less likely to be scum. Except DW. Something about that lack of acknowledgement of the rest of the discussion we'd been having struck me as odd and made me begin to side-eye them.

I agreed that yeah, framing it as if here's a definitive list of who might be suspicious and worth looking into could be a mafia-motivated attempt to steer the discussion, although I could also see someone innocent posting this.

The way they brazenly said they were trying to get Chibi killed with their swap N1, because they were apparently so sure Chibi was mafia after Chibi had advocated no-lynch the day before. No regret expressed over having been wrong about Chibi and way too hasty to judge based on almost nothing. No surprise expressed over having been right that the mafia shot at qva. Just a callous "yeah I wanted Chibi dead and now they are". This was such an incredibly anti-town attitude and demeanour that if it wasn't for the fact that circumstances made their claim look completely legit at the time, I would have been all over them with suspicion for it. Tefiren sure as hell wanted to be.

I also agreed with this - surely if your action gets an innocent killed, most people revealing that would include some kind of whoops, while a mafia member engaged in constructing a fakeclaim might focus on justifying their actions, giving a reason for swapping these two people in particular, over how someone with a towny perspective would actually feel about it.

...DW's switchclaim also happened to directly follow a post wherein I brought up the possibilty of a switcher. That's kind of damning timing on DW's part in hindsight...

Just added this to the multiquote to note that Sike already pointed out the thing where the switcher claim followed her post talking about a switcher.

[["Dead people...?" There was a spark of hope at those words. She thought to tamp it out... but wavered.

If there's some way to bring you back, just as you did for me...

She approached Dave. "You said the dead were walking around. Tell me more."]]

[[Dave pressed his lips together. "Look, last time I was here, someone I know was here. Someone very fucking dead. Except something was wrong with her, so who knows what the fuck that even was. And then there's this fucking power. I hate this fucking place."

...Why the fuck was he talking to an empty spot on the ground.

"This was you, wasn't it."]]

Um. Maybe? I kind of wanted you to answer that and never got the chance.

[["Yeah, awesome. Great puppeteering. Fuck you."]]

Is it really puppeteering if...

[["Fuck off."]]

Okay. I'm done.

 

[Dragonfree]

In case it's not obvious, I didn't do anything on the first two nights because I couldn't, because nobody was dead yet. This has been a frustrating power to have in this game.

 

[Negrek]

[["What the fuck are you talking about. Who the fuck is Negrek?"]]

Hi, Dave! I suggested that God send you a fruit basket once.

 

[Dragonfree]

Hi, Dave! I suggested that God send you a fruit basket once.

[[Dave blinked. "Wait. What. The fuck are you talking about. That was in my fucking universe. There aren't any... rrrhghhh." He clutched at his hair. "Nope. Not indulging your creepy shit. Sure, whatever, take credit for some kids' fucking prank. Congratulations. I hope you're all very proud of yourselves."]]