Vigilante Mafia Game Thread - Game Over, LoVE wins!

[Eurykins]

Just now, Elieson said:

YEA WELL

You slipped up with your grammar and style of speech when speaking about Cam in thread, which was hella sus

and

You knew Cam was scum all along, just that Cam was in the other faction, which was the information

so my logic was correct, just correct in a way that's like 1 + 2 = 3, vs the actual case of 3 - 1 = 2. Same results, different process. Sensible, but not as direct as you think it was!

I'll be 100% Honest. I'm pretty sure the posts you're referring to occurred before I even realized Cam/Aster had comms.

I don't really recall thinking of Cam as Scum buddies at this time, because I considered other scum team as opposing party just as much as townside.
So the "grammar" or such casing is actually completely invalid at the time I posted. There was no intent or prior knowledge that played a part in any reads on his side. Lol

[Eurykins]

4 minutes ago, Elieson said:

YEA WELL

You slipped up with your grammar and style of speech when speaking about Cam in thread, which was hella sus

and

You knew Cam was scum all along, just that Cam was in the other faction, which was the information

so my logic was correct, just correct in a way that's like 1 + 2 = 3, vs the actual case of 3 - 1 = 2. Same results, different process. Sensible, but not as direct as you think it was!

XD You say "Logic", but the same time your inactivity + awkward logic is part of the reason why people were scum reading you or having issues with it, which kinda made me laugh. But sadly MY SCUM FLIP screwed up reads for the rest of the scum team tbh, so RIP the game.

[Elieson]

1 minute ago, Eurykins said:

I'll be 100% Honest. I'm pretty sure the posts you're referring to occurred before I even realized Cam/Aster had comms.

I don't really recall thinking of Cam as Scum buddies at this time, because I considered other scum team as opposing party just as much as townside.
So the "grammar" or such casing is actually completely invalid at the time I posted. There was no intent or prior knowledge that played a part in any reads on his side. Lol

##Vote Eurykins

[WeaponsofMassConstruction]

5 minutes ago, j00 said:

tbh I didn't really read the Eury/Elie posts so what she did worked on me

 

[Sunwoo]

Eury only really looked town because she was slap-fighting with Elie in her usual wall posts after I went back to read the whole argument, and had her normal town emotion and passion in that argument.

She had kinda little content elsewhere, and that in retrospect should've been the giveaway.

Also the next time I have to carry the entire game's activity on my back (BECAUSE I WAS BEING ACTIVE ON D1 SHINORI) I will just stop posting and let town implode over themselves.

[Shinori]

8 minutes ago, DefyingFates said:

... people were bringing up my on/off vote for Marth until the last minute. O_o

I think this is more based on the situation of this game.  I kind of wrote you off as probably guaranteed town because newbie scum doesn't really play the way you played.  And yeh vote history is something that some people will bring up but I mean it in kind of a different way.  It's hard for me to explain right at this moment I think.

But you shouldn't be afraid of voting, being afraid of voting is more likely to get you in trouble than voting people.  This was initially one of the reasons I tried to explain to you early on during day 1 and why I was questioning you about it at the end of day 1.

A refusal to divulge your thoughts/info can be really bad depending on the situation.

[Shinori]

1 minute ago, Sunwoo said:

Also the next time I have to carry the entire game's activity on my back (BECAUSE I WAS BEING ACTIVE ON D1 SHINORI) I will just stop posting and let town implode over themselves.

Oh i know you were.  You were also the most active overall in the game!  Up until sometime this day phase I think it was I was still like fourth in posts.

[Aster]

That was certainly chaotic, but definitely an experience. XD

But a little play by play re: my actions since they caused a bit of confusion later on:

-I targeted j00 not realizing she was the martyr because I was thinking curveball kills would be more effective, I knock out Fates D1 as well

-Night 2 I triple KO Bart, Percy, and Weapons while Eury goes for Percy, but then dies the same night

-Originally thought Cam betrayed me by shooting Eury so I was blaring Set Fire to the Rain while about to start wagoning them given what I knew, you know, for the drama of it all, but they told me that Jamie's role backfired so I tentatively forgave them. I don't think anything would've changed though XD

[Eurykins]

4 minutes ago, Sunwoo said:

Eury only really looked town because she was slap-fighting with Elie in her usual wall posts after I went back to read the whole argument, and had her normal town emotion and passion in that argument.

She had kinda little content elsewhere, and that in retrospect should've been the giveaway.

Also the next time I have to carry the entire game's activity on my back (BECAUSE I WAS BEING ACTIVE ON D1 SHINORI) I will just stop posting and let town implode over themselves.

Oddly enough, most didn't read me well for Elie v Eury that occurred from what I recall.

And if I'm to be honest, I did respond to the majority of questions/considerations in D1/D2. The fact that many other reads weren't given was largely due to a few handful of players who were basically non-existent or otherwise not really contributing reads/cases for the most part, so.... lol. 

Also I will say I never once posted in thread with the consideration to fabricate reads or such. The only person I lowkey ignored was maybe Aster? Anyone else I didn't have much reads for (IE. ELIE) was because they were non-existent lol.

[Aster]

We were also all scared as heck of targeting Sun because we thought she was like a revenge arsonist or something and would kill us if we dropped by, lol.

[Eurykins]

SIDE NOTE: I'm not ashamed to admit that I probably aggravated Elieson's absence on D2, as we were doing FFXiV Raids and shinanegans (Shinori was part of this as well). 

But of course, I had no reason to mention the above, so opted to avoid mentioning any reasoning for his disappearance in prior day phases. 😄

[Eurykins]

*He was involved with moving stuff out/in to his new place, but we also kidnapped him for FFXIV shinanegans, so time was not always on his side depending on how much he opted to game lol.

[Sunwoo]

2 minutes ago, Aster said:

We were also all scared as heck of targeting Sun because we thought she was like a revenge arsonist or something and would kill us if we dropped by, lol.

Lol

Nah, just the dumbest watcher of all time.

If Grace hadn't subbed out, I was going to drop a Mystery 2 reference, in which this exact type of watcher was used before.

Also, despite Bartozio being a misvig, I stand by that it wasn't the worst choice of a vig because no matter how I looked at it he just looked the worst to me. Which is why I don't quite get why Cam shot him even now ?_?

[Aster]

5 minutes ago, Sunwoo said:

Lol

Nah, just the dumbest watcher of all time.

You just said "Don't target me or else" and me and Eury and Cam all went "OH SHOOT SHE'S GOT A BOMB" X'D

Hindsight is 20/20 just like not (trying to anyway) avenging Eury when I had the chance.

[Prims]

this entire game was less pages than d1 of the last one. rapier should have joined

[Shinori]

Just now, Prims said:

this entire game was less pages than d1 of the last one. rapier should have joined

The real reason I was killed night 1.

[Sunwoo]

2 minutes ago, Prims said:

this entire game was less pages than d1 of the last one. rapier should have joined

You should've joined tbh

CYOR3 when

[BBM]

Postgame Part 1!

This is more focused on general game design and thoughts on how the game went, while Part 2 will have full role PMs and player analysis.

Game Design

Spoiler

When Neighbours first started showing up on SF, they were nearly always both town. People soon realized this made them close to defacto Masons, so we had a whole run of town/scum Neighbours, where it started becoming almost certain that one Neighbour actually WAS scum. Then I thought... "why not make both of them scum???", and so the central idea of Vigilante Mafia was born. They worked pretty similarly to how Cam suggested they worked, with the added tweak that they shared a single BPV between them. I know there were some quibbles about how this is not how Neighbours are supposed to work, but afaik there's never been a game with two scum of different alignments whose alignments were revealed to each other. Almost nobody in this game had a perfectly standard role, so I don't really understand why "neighbours aren't supposed to have alignments revealed to each other!" drew more complaints than "watchers aren't supposed to fail when they're targeted" or "gunsmiths are supposed to give physical guns as items and aren't compulsory", etc etc.

Beyond just being funny, I thought scum/scum Neighbours really worked because it resolved one of the key tensions of multiball (and games with SKs), which is how swingy they can be. Anti-town crossfire in most games tends to be random, but the scumteams having a direct line to each other made it a game mechanic that was inherently self-balancing. If scum suffered an early lynch, the scumteams were more likely to work together through desperation, while if things were going well, they were more likely to backstab each other. We essentially saw this play out, where on N1, the scumteams coordinated NKs and BAT actually helped Cam out, but on N2, Cam got paranoid about being down a person and killed Eury. Shinori mentioned that theoretically, in the worst-case scenario with mislynches and misvigs and full kill coordination, town could have been in a kingmaker position by D3. However, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that would happen, and it's probably more likely that town could lynch one of the neighbours D1 and completely sever the communication and then win in a romp.

My biggest concern before running this game was that in the many years between when I designed this game and it finally ran, I was afraid that I had revealed the scum/scum neighbour idea casually, so much so that I actually revealed it in the opening ruleset:

On 7/14/2024 at 2:11 AM, BBM said:

1. You may assume that RAT and BAT have some method of out-of-thread communication.

I probably could have worded it a bit more explicitly, but tbh given that the initial idea was for it not to be revealed, I'm glad nobody bothered reading the rules properly!

Once I knew the game was going to be multiball, about half of the roles in the game came together pretty quickly. Each of the scumteams were basically only part of a full scumteam, with one team having a disabling role and the other team having an info role. The non-neighbour on both teams had one ability that could simultaneously counter either the other team's neighbour or a town role. The team with the hooker was always going to be stronger in a head-to-head matchup, so the other team had less obviously scummy roles that could have an easier time moling.

In terms of the town roles, I think none of them were super-strong but they all had their purposes and niches, even Ascetic and Safeguard. Also, what they lacked in power, they made up for by being generally very provable. My first thought was that a funny twist could be that since everyone's characters were vigilantes, nobody would actually BE a vigilante. Ultimately I decided that was kind of lame since the whole reason for this theme was that vigilantes are cool. Instead, I made it so that there were no hard protective roles. Vigilantes are around for a good time, not a long time, so the only defensive methods of stopping a kill were the Neighbour BPV and the Inventor commute, both of which were items. Beyond that, there was the offensive method of the scum Hooker, and the town protective role was a Martyr who only redirected kills rather than blocking them. This definitely increased the swinginess of the setup but I found it a fun thematic tie between flavour and roles.

Gameplay Comments

Spoiler

When I first created the game in 2019, I had expected that most of the players would be pretty experienced. It was also designed to be Anonymous, which is why I had the gimmick of having people pick their character. The idea was that your anonymous account would be named for that character. In hindsight however, when I made the setup non-anonymous because it wasn't going to fill otherwise, I should have just randomized characters/roles. I typically don't like having new players roll scum in their first game, and I especially wouldn't have wanted a new player to have a critical neighbour role. I also knew Cam had been scum a few times in a row, so I probably would have re-rolled that as well.

That being said, Cam broke through scum malaise and played really well in-thread, and Aster tried her hardest and blended in for long enough to let a lot of the central game mechanics play out. Like I said in the game design section, I thought the scumteams swinging between cooperation and backstabbing/lying covered the full gamut of possible interactions, so I was happy about how that worked out, even though Cam definitely pulled the trigger too early on the backstab. 

When the setup finally filled, I got so excited that I definitely started the game at a poor time. Sunday after midnight EST was probably not optimal, and through a combination of mismatched schedules, travel, sickness, new players, and scum lurking, the game got off to a really slow start, with RVS probably taking approximately 20x longer than in Revival. Town got their act together by the end of D1, but then D2 was pretty slow again. It seems like multi-ball really threw people off for the first few day phases, even after a scum flip it feels like people did not use that to their advantage on D2. D2 obviously ended up being a clusterfuck at the end and probably the nadir of town's play. Beeboat definitely claimed too late, but even beyond the fact that town didn't realize an extension was available, I think there was enough time to turbo someone else. Turbos aren't ideal but it's better than just resigning yourself to a 99% likely mislynch, which I think most people realized by the time it happened. I felt like town wasted a critical 30 minutes going "uhh I don't think we have enough time" whereas if someone had taken the critical first step to starting another wagon, it might have been possible given that only 1/3rd votes were necessary and about half the game was around in the last hour.

By D3 I think town did figure it out, and that combined with the newbies figuring things out a bit more and all the inactives either dying or coming back made things a lot better. I really enjoyed as a host how D3 and D4 went; it felt like the correct amount of activity where nobody got demotivated and people figured out how to use interactions in multiball. Barring some very questionable rolespec, town played really well on D3 and D4, and took advantage of some N2 luck and closed things out even though none of their roles actually ended up doing anything. It wasn't always pretty, but I think it ended up being a well-deserved victory for town.

Ultimately, none of the factions played perfectly, but mafia games are more fun when they're a bit messy. It was basically a close game throughout even though town won one day early, nothing became toxic, and a bunch of randomly funny things happened, so that's all you can really ask for as a host and spectator. 

MVP: Sunwoo / Boron for keeping town going on D2 and D3 and coming to all the right conclusions in the end. Honorable mention to Cam, who I think played a stellar in-thread scum game, but just made one too many mistakes with night actions.

Turning Point: Cam shooting Eury N2 was definitely the biggest swing of the game. Honorable mention to Bartozio leading the Aster wagon on D3, which I think was the single best town scumhunting of the game.

Most Memorable Moment: Bartozio being misvigged and killed by scum at the same time. Honorable mention to town lynching a Friendly Cop. I'm not sure off the top of my head I can remember an alignment cop or friendly townie ever being lynched, and town did both at the same time!

Edited July 26 by BBM

[Prims]

I was really confused when the neighbor flipped and people were speculating about nobody having claimed it as if scum neighbors weren't suggested in the OP lol

[Sunwoo]

Just now, Prims said:

I was really confused when the neighbor flipped and people were speculating about nobody having claimed it as if scum neighbors weren't suggested in the OP lol

I can't answer for anyone else, but I read the OP and immediately forgot most of the mechanics

[Eurykins]

11 minutes ago, BBM said:

Turning Point: Cam shooting Eury N2 was definitely the biggest swing of the game. Honorable mention to Bartozio leading the Aster wagon on D3, which I think was the single best town scumhunting of the game.

@Aster 😭

[Aster]

@Eurykins

I'm sorry. I totally fell for it. 😞

[CT075]

god damn it

[Percivalé]

i was gonna case eury d3 if I lived because my interactions with her on d2 pinged me but I didn't say it in thread because arguing scares me I actually had a post written up questioning her why she was so adamant on df elim (and focused hardcore on his play being anti-town rather than scummy which I think is a scumtell) but gave aster so much slack, I chickened out cuz I was tired and anxious

[CT075]

okay, so some postgame thoughts

- @Eurykins Aster revealing hooker to me was the catalyst of me shooting you. People have been roasting me for the decision but I will die on the hill that FMPOV I had to shoot you the moment she claimed hooker to me. Even setting aside the fact that I always lose in a 2v1 shootout, your hook basically guarantees control of the night, and you were (IMO) more townread than me, so I would have had no way to control the day phase either. Basically I thought that I a) needed to introduce some chaos into the game (this was my running strategy in general tbh) and b) had to double-cross you strictly before you chose to double-cross me, so my shooting you was the best way I could think of to accomplish both goals at once. In hindsight I could have lynched Aster D3 and claimed the track on you D4, but idk.

- I shot @Bartozio N3 because he was the only person who really thought twice about my awful D1 Marth vote, I should have just pretended to be away. Yes, it was a bad shot, but it didn't actually end up mattering (maybe if I'd shot Jamie, but my next choice was Weapons anyway). By then I was totally lost and the moment Boron posted her rolespec saying that it had to be me I knew I was cooked. I like to think I almost got away with it (I probably would have been lynched D5 no matter what) but them's the breaks. If a different combination of roles had made it to endgame I think I could have won.

- @Elieson continuously reaching the correct conclusion through the most batshit conspiracy theories was pissing me off the entire D4 (to this day I think this grammar argument is complete bullshit). Like, Elie claims it's 1+2=3 by way of 3-1=2 but the way I see it is that it's 1+2=3 by way of "the sun revolves around the earth twice, an apple falls into the sky and the word 'sun' has three letters so the answer must be 3".

- If people had believed me on the scum/scum neighbor (this was hilarious with knowledge by the way) it wasn't impossible for people to notice how Aster didn't really know what to do about me (this finger-of-suspicion into immediate backoff when pushed was really sus)

Speaking of @Aster and @DefyingFates, I hope that you had a good time and continue to play with us! Some specific things I have to say:

- Aster: You kind of got dealt a brutal hand in your first game. IMO rolling scum in your first game is already rough, but rolling scum neighbor in multiball is just really difficult. I felt really bad about the backstab (I would not have felt bad if Eury was partnered with anyone else other than Fates) because I had the thought that, as a new player, I could intimidate you into backing off even if you didn't trust me.

- Fates: Well done for reaching endgame and correctly voting me! You mentioned earlier that you think that scum is easier because you know who you "can" case, but IMO this is a backwards way to think about things -- town's job is to Lynch The Bad Guy, not to survive, and this is a crucial distinction. Knowing who you "can" case means that you know who you have to case, and writing a natural-looking case when you already know the answer is harder than it sounds. Looking for this difference is basically what "old fashioned scumhunting" is doing. A few others have said this too, but I think you could improve your play pretty dramatically immediately just by sharing more of your original thoughts and not worrying about what other people will think of you. For reference, I genuinely cannot think of a single opinion you had during the game that was not just "yeah, I basically agree with [Boron]".

Edited July 27 by CT075