[[To the people who've voted Chappie so far without expanding on it much, I wouldn't mind hearing more of your thoughts, if any, on how likely you think it is for her to be mafia, and how willing you'd be to lynch her if she still wanted to play. I worry that the fact that AbraPunk wants to stop playing is going to make it too easy for people to go "oh well, let's lynch her because she wants to stop playing" and leave it at that, reducing potential useful reads that could be generated from
what people think about the chance that she's mafia.
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So I was thinking about who Chappie told us she swapped last night: Mewtwo and Namco. Seems a sensible enough choice - swap a prominent trusted person with a nearly-inactive and vaguely-suspected one. Any kill attempt on Mewtwo winds up on someone who's either no real loss for town, or maybe a mafioso.
But... why didn't she try to swap
Arctozolt with someone to protect them, when they were by far the most juicy mafia target? That'd be a near-guaranteed way to keep them alive - a lot less risky than the way the doctors had, given they knew healer clash was a possibility. Even though Chappie trying to protect Lexx (if she's innocent) wound up going horribly wrong, that was due to bad luck; her swap was strategically the correct move for a town bus driver to make to try and protect someone important. She
should have tried to do the same thing with Arctozolt and just hoped to not get massively unlucky this time.
Of course, AbraPunk probably won't be here to answer that question, and that's fine. It's just something for the rest of us to think on - and, I think, some more support for the idea that she's mafia.
But then, also,
if Chappie is mafia - I suppose we can talk about this more tomorrow if she flips that way, but here's my basic thinking on it for now - why didn't she swap Arctozolt with someone to help the mafia
kill Arctozolt?
I think most of us are agreed that for the two innocent deaths, Arctozolt was definitely healer clash, meaning Jesse was the one the mafia went for with their regular kill. So apparently, the mafia thought about killing Arctozolt, figured they were too likely to get healed and result in a wasted kill, and therefore went for someone else. Jesse was a safer bet and still a valuable target, as he'd implied an inforole, but not prominently enough that he was likely to have protection. Not
quite as good for the mafia as killing the cop, but a less risky second-best option to guarantee they'd kill at least someone and not have their kill healerblocked.
Except, if the mafia had a bus driver... they
could have guaranteed themselves a kill on Arctozolt. Swapping them with someone low-profile who's very unlikely to be healed and then firing at that person would bypass any doctor protection on Arctozolt themselves. If they had that option, why would they not do that? If you can be absolutely sure of killing the cop,
you kill the cop.
So, if Chappie flips mafia, I'm thinking this makes it extremely likely that the mafia
does in fact have their own doctor. It was almost certain that a town doctor would heal Arctozolt; knowing that, if the mafia had their own doctor, they could near-guarantee a kill on Arctozolt
anyway, without having to use up their killing action or bother with any swapping tactics. Boom, free easy kill on Arctozolt,
and they still get to use their regular kill on another potential threat in Jesse to boot.
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[[ Ah, we're back to this again. (Where's my anxiety emote when I need it?) Maybe some of the more experienced players can tell me, but do vig-kills normally leave death-marks like this? Because it's not just that there were scorch marks on the ground, it's also that Lusamine apparently lit up like a Christmas tree as she died, which just... says "arsonist fire" to me. So if suddenly we're all aboard the "psychic flavoring is not just flavoring now, it matters" ... I mean, I guess it could be a vig-kill, certainly nothing to disprove that. I just don't want the possibility of another third-party to go unrecognized. (Admittedly, it does feel wrong disagreeing with both you and Dragonfree on this, since you're both nearly-confirmed-innocent-veterans and especially since I've mostly agreed with the rest of both of your takes so far... Perfectly willing to admit I'm wrong and just reading too much into this.) ]]
My response to Equitial was less me saying "this flavour definitely proves it's a vig", and more just trying to offer him an alternative interpretation and point out it doesn't necessarily mean arsonist, since he seemed really stuck on that specifically. I may not have made it clear enough there, but right now my overall feelings on this (and I'm not necessarily right just because I'm being considered one of the veterans here!) are that I'm not really sure what the flavour is trying to tell us, so I personally don't want to get stuck on trying to interpret the flavour one specific way.
...Okay, I know I'm saying that when Tefiren and I were also really zeroing in on the implication that Rascal and Lexx died together yesterday. Maybe that's just because the implication that the deaths were
connected means more to me than the multiple different ways we could interpret the
method of death. Or maybe I'm totally off-base and shouldn't have actually read anything into that! We are all human and flawed and have differing opinions and can even disagree with ourselves from a little while ago. You seem to be thinking of this like everyone (or at least, the veterans) have all "agreed" that the best interpretation is such and such, but I think the real take-home is that there
isn't quite one specific consensus on what's going on with these deaths and we're all just making our individual best guesses, so of course there'd bound to be contradictory ideas flying around.
However! Regardless of what we think about the flavour, it's simply not mechanically possible for Lexx and Lusamine to
both have died to the arsonist. If Lexx died to the arsonist, they doused him on N0 and ignited N1, so they wouldn't have had time to then douse
and ignite Lusamine by the end of N2.
Personally, my thinking for why I'm willing to bet Lusamine was a vigkill isn't about flavour but is instead just about mechanical logic. After how suspicious she made herself in the last hours of yesterday, killing her is just the logical move for a vig (if there is one, which is pretty likely in a game this big). Meanwhile, the theory that her death was the arsonist just involves a whole lot of unlikely "maybe"s coming together all at once:
maybe Lance wasn't the arsonist and they're still out there, and
maybe they just happenned to douse Lusamine on N0, and
maybe they either somehow failed to douse Nefari N1 or made the suboptimal choice to ignore her and douse someone else (someone who's since died), and
maybe they made the suboptimal choice to risk announcing their presence to us after it looked exactly like we'd just lynched the arsonist.
Possible, sure, but I think it's very, very unlikely compared to the much simpler vigilante explanation.
And yeah, as far as I understand it, Dragonfree is offering the Lexx-arson theory not from genuinely thinking it's what happened, but as a potential not-completely-farfetched explanation to N1's deaths if it turns out that Chappie isn't actually mafia.
(also, <3 Miyako, I definitely need to get in Tefiren's head and figure out how he'd respond to that, but lemme just spend this post covering some of the game-related stuff first.)
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While we're at a relative lull in the middle of the day,
@Equitial , I wanted to ask you something kind of unrelated to any of this. Not suspicious, just curious, and I can finally openly talk about it now that you've roleclaimed.
[[(Oh right, I've been hinting around a role I may or may not have. Lol, I kind of had a plan for that but things kinda turned whoops. I'll still roleclaim if needed, but for now... eh, lemme just say that I don't think Townies should regard me too highly for now. Mafia, I know you're reading this. You could try to snipe me tonight but should you? Hmmm... might wanna think about that.)]]
What was your thinking when you said this on Day 1? You seemed to be trying to hint at something about your role, but... this doesn't really feel like a doctor play to me?
What I thought at the time was that you were also an innocent bulletproof (I've said that I don't think it'd be unreasonable for there to be two), and this was a fumbling, not-necessarily-well-executed attempt to bait a mafiakill onto you. That whole "town ignore me, mafia maybe you want to kill me idk???" feels like you were telling town doctors to not bother to heal you while also trying to make the mafia think you might have a power worth killing. Last game I was a JOAT with one-shot commuter and had had vague plans to bait a mafia kill and then dodge it, which this reminded me of, and of course I'd also been thinking about bulletproof strategies at the beginning of this game before I stopped being bulletproof through pure luck.
...Then I properly interpreted stuff you said elsewhere in that same post, about my softclaim, and realised you already thought I was bulletproof and that any other innocent bulletproofs would counterclaim it, so I realised you couldn't be
that. But there's other innocent roles with some kind of self-protection, like hider or commuter, so I figured you might be one of them instead.
(And obviously I didn't want to say anything about what I thought of it back then, because if I was right, then openly talking about it would render the whole thing useless.)
But, well, it can't have been that after all, because you're a doctor, and you can't heal yourself (at least, I assume not? either way, you healed
me that night). So I'm curious - what
was the idea behind this?
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And also, I want to refute one of my own arguments from earlier, because I've realised a reason why it's a lot flimsier of an argument than I originally thought, and I don't want to suspect people for reasons that don't logically hold up.
Lusamine, Wes and Altair - the three people that I was, after yesterday's voting, suspecting the most - just happened to be the three who encouraged Chappie to softclaim. I just feel like that's a bit of a weird coincidence! Of any three people who happened to decide to coax Chappie into telling us what she knew, it was the exact three that I (at the time I thought about this) was most suspecting of being mafia?
It's not actually so much of a huge weird coincidence that these same three people took part in two separate and potentially-suspicious events (the Chappie softclaim, and the end-of-day Lance voting discussion), when you consider timezones are a thing. The same pool of people are likely to be active at around the same time in any given IRL day. Chappie's softclaim happened at (in my timezone) around 5-6AM-ish, while the Lance voting discussion at EoD yesterday was around 1-3AM-ish. That's only a few hours apart in terms of time of day, such that similar pools of people are likely to be online at those times, while other players simply won't even be there. So it's actually not nearly so much of a huge coincidence that these exact three people happened to be involved in both these events, when they would have been some of only a certain amount of players who even happened to be online at around that time of day.
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[[Another wild hilarious what-if scenario that just occurred to me: what if Chappie is a town bus driver, and Rascal was also a town bus driver, who also swapped somebody with Lexx - either also Spark, or someone else that the mafia would want to target - and then Rascal died that night too for some other reason. This explains why Rascal's death flavor talked about trying to protect someone, how the mafia kill could have ended up on Lexx, and why no other bus driver has claimed. Likely? Not remotely, but at least it involves a series of coincidences rather than people making exceedingly strange decisions. I will laugh if this is somehow it.]]
...I went into a whole meanderingly confused ramble about how I thought that didn't make sense unless Rascal swapped Lexx with specifically Spark, but then I ended up realising that I just really have no idea how a GM would resolve a situation where the same person gets swapped with
two different people by different swappers. I kind of want your insight on this, not even because this is even remotely relevant to the Chappie argument, but just because I am interested in wacky Mafia night-action mechanics. Not that explaining this should at all be your priority over figuring out how you feel about people's posting, but, you know.]]
