DrakeMarshall

Ooh fun okay lets do this It's totally fair to ask me to show my work; I probably should have anticipated it honestly. Here are my calculations: To be clear, I don't particularly mean to end discussion. You might not agree with some of my assumptions, and my conclusion isn't true unless all of the assumptions I listed are also true. I will own up to the fact that some of my assumptions probably even should be controversial (mainly one or two of my trust reads), and I am definitely not opposed to discussing them with people.

Fair enough. I can walk you through the calculation I did, if that would help at all. I neglected to show my work for the sake of brevity, but despite taking up rather a lot of space the calculation is actually quite simple. But I'm also fine with things as they stand. I agree that if Karnage turns out to be innocent then obviously my reasoning was incorrect.

Requiescat In Pace. Anyways the way I see it the village is officially losing the game at this point so lets that around yeah? Three Assumptions I am pretty sure a game with 22 players would have 5 eliminators. That means there are 4 eliminators left. There are a handful of people that I trust: God King - His response to Elbereth's accusation seemed genuine. Kidpen - Thought that the eliminator faction was shades, which I really don't think a mutineer would do. Archivist - Was active at the end of the first cycle but made no attempt to either save or bus Rae. Sart - Flipped the vote against Rae during the last hour of the first cycle. Megasif - Placed the second vote against Rae that made her a serious lynch candidate for the first time. DrakeMarshall - I get to see this guy's role PM. There are a handful of people I don't think could both be eliminators: CadCom has been going after Karnage for several cycles. Joe attempted to lead a lynch on Zillah. Aman tried to break the tied vote against CadCom at the last second. It has occurred to me that this could have been posted too late on purpose, but given the rushed nature of the post I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. Silberfarben arguing with Elbereth about whether El's vote was a poke vote or not doesn't seem like an interaction between teammates. Implications I can do a bit of math to narrow down the suspects. I've calculated every possible eliminator team configuration that has 4 living players, does not include any of the players that I trust, and does not include pairs of players that I don't think could be on an eliminator team together. The possible eliminator teams are: Karnage, Silberfarben, Joe, Aman Karnage, Silberfarben, Zillah, Aman Karnage, Joe, Elbereth, Aman Karnage, Elbereth, Zillah, Aman So, wow. I was hoping this little exercise would let me shrink the pool of suspects but I didn't expect it would confirm both Karnage and Aman to be elims. Karnage I already suspected, but Aman not really. But I'm pretty confident about those 3 assumptions I made, and this conclusion necessarily follows from those assumptions.

...and I actually believe you. Crap. Not that it's going to do any good but Elkanah. I'm not switching to Megasif though because I am pretty sure Megasif is village and I don't want another tie.

I would have zero problems with switching to Karnage, who I have already voted for twice in a row, but yes I think there is a fair amount of information to be had with lynching Elkanah, and I didn't want to fight to switch the lynch from Elkanah to Karnage when Elkanah seems like an acceptable choice to me, certainly more so than some of the previous people who have been lynched in this game. Yeah so I've also been a little on the fence about the degree of opposition to the Elkanah lynch. It's part of why I am reassessing things at the end of the cycle. The vote is 6 - 4 between Elkanah and Megasif, so yeah I would not say the lynch has been too easy, because I don't think any one person had gotten more than 3 votes before this cycle and now the level of engagement with this vote is much higher. Oh, this is such a mood. Whatever comes of this lynch, you've been a good sport about it. I am sorry if I got this one wrong.

Phew this game is going by quickly. I'd say cycle 5 is advanced enough in the game that I can start really connecting the dots, so to speak. It's been a while since I've done this and I was never really that great at it but bear with me and we'll see what happens. It may be useless to say so, but we really need to stop coasting on a lucky break from the first cycle's lynch. Players Analyses First lets start with the list of living players and run some process of elimination: Karnage Elkanah The_God_King - Their reaction to being up for the lynch a few cycles back seemed fairly genuine for a loyal crewmember. For the time being I am going to call that enough of a reason to eliminate them from my suspect list because there are too many people on the list who I have no read on at all. Lord_Silberfarben Kidpen A Joe in the Bush Elbereth The_Archivist - I trust Archivist on the grounds that they were active at the end of the first cycle when Rae was up for lynch and cast a vote somewhere it would have no effect on the cycle's lynch. I find it highly likely that a mutineer who knew their teammate was up for lynch would either try to save them or try to cash in on village cred by helping to lynch them, but Archivist did neither, so I trust them. Sart - Sart cemented an eleventh hour lynch against Rae, so I trust them rather a lot. Zillah CadCom DrakeMarshall - What you think I'm gonna analyze myself? Nope that's your job. Amanuensis Megasif - I do not trust Megasif quite as much as Sart, but their vote on Rae is still more likely than not to have come from a loyal crewmember. Furamirionind That's a few less people I have to analyze, but still a bigger list than I would have liked. Why did you guys have to go and lynch a bunch of the people I trusted Not that my track record is any better though, since the only mutineer we ever caught got lynched when I wasn't even aware the game had started. Anyway, I will analyze the remaining suspects: Karnage The Mist lynch was an extremely obvious pick for the mutineer team, and I believe some of them would have supported it. I have already stated that I found Karnage's vote against Mist to be the most suspicious of the bunch. In my experience, if you dodge the lynch once it means you're lucky, if you dodge the lynch twice it means you have a team supporting you. Karnage has dodged the lynch twice in a row. This pattern does not always hold true, but it does more often than not. I actually kind of get a village vibe from the tone of Karnage's posts, though. I don't want to put a gut read before actual reasoning, but as much as I'm gunning for Karnage I'm only like 65% sure they are a mutineer (although that is still a decently high probability considering we likely have 4 mutineers in a pool of 15 living players). Elkanah Threw their vote on the Mist lynch fairly late, but in a way I found fairly non-alignment indicative. Observed that few people were defending Mist but was afraid to change their vote because it might create a tie, which I found kind of suspicious since there were quite a few people still online at the time who could have changed their vote. Slight village read from their response when somebody else (I think it was Joe? Can't remember) gave a similar criticism to what I said above about reluctantly bandwagoning on Mist. Created a tied vote which was not a great outcome for the village. As far as attempts to rescue a teammate go this would be a pretty brazen trick to pull, though, so I hesitate to say that is what was going on here. When talking about Mist being lynched: "It was almost like the elims wanted us to Lynch her so they wouldn't have to kill her." I have a hard time explaining why but this sentence comes across as disingenuous to me. Lord_Silberfarben Has pretty much only been doing RP and responded to a vote on them. @Lord_Silberfarben please share your thoughts with us!! I am sure you will have something to say that we haven't thought of yet! Even if you share some reads with minimal effort or explanation, it still helps us a lot in terms of figuring out this game. I am inclined to keep you alive just for the sake of RP, but also the way the game is going we are gonna be forced to start looking for elims in the group of people who are flying under the radar right now. Kidpen Sounded fairly genuine with their reaction to Rae flipping elim. Cast a vote against Mist out of necessity to vote and the fact that Mist had voted for Kidpen in a way that was poorly justified. This thought process to me seems more typical of a villager mindset. Decided that Mist and TGK probably had the same alignment. I disagree with that kind of reasoning but don't actually think its suspicious. Thought that shades were elims, which probably an elim wouldn't do? A Joe in the Bush Showed up with limited time last cycle and said he didn't suspect anyone who was being voted on. This is very understandable as I think it's been particularly hard to find a strong suspicion in this game. On the other hand I kind of want to suspect you for not at least casting a vote against a player not up for lynch if you believed it would be better than lynching the people who were up for lynch. Has been posting this cycle with much higher activity and voted for Zillah. Right now I have absolutely no read on Zillah but we will see if that changes when I reach them on this analysis list. Regardless I am happy that Joe is around more now and that is probably a good enough reason to remove him from consideration for the lynch today. I am reasonably confident that his increased activity means I will be able to get a better read on him, and in any case I don't want to discourage being active. Elbereth I get a slight villager vibe from the way she went about the interaction with TGK. Voted for Megasif this cycle which I don't particularly agree with but I don't think is alignment indicative one way or the other. Zillah Has 4 posts unless I missed one: Two of them are asking for clarification about why xino's code system is helpful, which I don't really think is alignment indicative One of them is checking in to not die by inactivity The fourth one was made this cycle and was responding to being voted on by people, and then voting for the first time on one of the people that voted for them. So, I would prefer if they participated more since their most significant participation so far has been wholly in self-defense, but I also think it would really be swell if our best suspicion at this point in the game were not somebody with such a comparatively small footprint. CadCom I kind of trust CadCom purely on the basis that none of the people I suspect are likely to be teammates with CadCom, because CadCom has listed many of them as their top suspects as well. Amanuensis Said he wouldn't bus Rae, which I definitely believe but is also fairly non-alignment indicative because I don't think he was around at the time Rae was up for the lynch regardless. Has been busy and posting less for a few cycles. Tried to join the vote on CadCom last cycle. On one hand this would have been helpful in the sense that it would break the tie, on the other hand more than anyone I know Aman likes to be sure about people before voting whenever possible so the vote on CadCom is kind of weird for him. In terms of trust vs suspicion this post probably breaks even. Furamirionind Asks people why they were lynching Mist when no real new information came to light since the last time anyone tried to lynch Mist, which... Would probably be injecting more logic than is necessary into village a mislynch if Fura were an elim. So slight village read from this. As much as we usually work well together I feel like Fura tends to second-guess reading me as village a lot more so than is happening in this game. I'm honestly not sure if it's because I'm legitimately giving Fura less reason to second guess me in this game or if it's because Fura is an elim and knows my alignment already. Verdict I'm good with lynching Elkanah. Most importantly because they rank high on my suspect list and already have some votes on them, but it also helps that I'm pretty sure their lynch will be the most informative possible lynch this cycle.

Le sigh poor Mist. So the mutineers kill targets are pretty interesting. The last couple targets were all people who were decently low profile and not the easiest for me to read. This is both good and bad, since it means it's harder to learn anything from the mutineer's decisions to target those people, but it also means that process of elimination will be more effective later on in the game. Anyways for now, I maintain that Karnage was the most suspicious vote on Mist, and also I trust most of the other player's I've given much thought more than I trust them, so for now that is where my vote goes.

I do not side with lynching Mist. I think Mist is innocent and that Mist dying will not be very informative. I am going to vote for Karnage on the grounds that their vote seems the most suspicious of all the votes cast against Mist.

The word choice of "fault" may have been wrong, or at least misleading in the context of game meta. Let me explain what I am trying to get at here: We are talking about meta. Specifically we are talking about what different people believe is the optimal way for a villager to play. And for the most part I really don't care if somebody wants to play their game in a way I don't think is optimal. Heck, the way I myself play the game falls quite a bit short of my definition of what the most optimal way to play the game is And for that matter, even if I did care whether anyone played the game optimally or not, nobody should change the way they play based on what I think is optimal So yeah, I am not going to "fault" TGK even if they do something I think is non-optimal. What I am trying to say though is that I don't personally think TGK did anything particularly non-optimal.

This is obviously a meta discussion and not a game discussion, but I will weigh in and say that from a villager perspective I actually do not disagree with TGK sending a PM instead of bringing these things up in the thread. Theoretically, I agree that it shouldn't make a difference whether you have that discussion in a PM or in the thread, and that all things held equal, it is always better for more people to have eyes on the discussion. So I can sympathize with wanting those kinds of discussions to happen in the thread. But people don't actually respond in the same way when you call them out in-thread or when you send them a private message. It maybe isn't very logical, but I do believe there are real benefits to having that conversation in a PM. Personally, I would probably not elect to defend myself in a PM unless I thought a particular person was gunning for me pretty hard, which I do not think was especially the case here, but I also definitely think there is a place for defending yourself in PMs and so I do not fault TGK for making that decision. Game discussion from me will come later.

So, judging by the tally this cycle I think the writeup just tallies votes in alphabetical order, but as it so happens you guys voted in alphabetical order so it works out

Well, Kyne did not show up which can’t be helped. In which case I don’t see much point in keeping that vote where it is at the end of the cycle. I have reviewed Striker’s vote last cycle. The thing that sways me onto one side is that Striker was up front about the fact that their main reason for voting was to protect Rae. But also was not playing up that aspect of their vote as if they wanted people to pay attention to that fact. So I kind of do not suspect Striker as much. Examining last cycle I really am starting to think the mutineers just didn’t get a chance to save Rae. A lot of that lynch happened in the last hour or two of the cycle. Well, I also kind of defended Mist, but since we agree that I am 100% village it’s probably fine So... I was planning on voting but I guess Striker has enough of a lead that it wouldn’t matter? I would slightly prefer TGK to Striker though so I guess I will still make that my vote.

This is the post that I started earlier today but could not finish before now because I was away from my computer. I wish you all a happy Mother's Day. Recap of last cycle (and by recap I mean multi-quote literally everything and inundate a page in all of my thoughts to make up for my silence last cycle whoops): Sorry to see you go, Devotary. I guess that means... We will now be killing each other without Remorse I don't believe we've met, so I extend to you my greetings. It is possible that Straw desires an unusual distribution of items, or even that the distribution was randomized. But if not, I would further conjecture that the mutineers probably received a medical kit. At least from where I am standing, the tactical implications are a little too juicy to pass up: The mutineers have a chance to predict and counter knives from loyal crew members. But only a limited number of times. The balance of this dynamic seems favorable. The mutineers have the option to throw away their protection in order to play various mind games. And who doesn't love mind games? I am not at this stage in the game going to treat possession of any particular item as alignment indicative, but I could conceive of a situation later in the game where it would be alignment indicative. I will do my best not to die of inactivity I would ordinarily oppose you and support a tied lynch, but on a closer observation of the rules, ties result in no lynch happening, so yes I agree lets not have any tied votes. Would you happen to be one of the players who start most games with role analyses, or is it this setup in particular? This gives me a very and exceedingly minor village impression. The way you phrased this implies that you were actively searching for something to object about. At the outset of the game, I believe a loyal crew member who is attempting to solve the game would be slightly more likely to be possessed of a critical mindset, whereas that is not as much the priority for a mutineer. However, I will stress again that this is only slightly alignment indicative. It is ironic, to say the least, that the person who expressed the greatest interest in the mechanics of the shade doc will be one of the first ones to join it. Tonight excepted, we can probably expect the shade's role block to be controlled by a majority of villagers, but the main quandary arises in communicating with the shades. Even if the shades manage to block the mutineer's kill and thus identify a mutineer, they would have no way of communicating that fact with us (although they could at least continue to block that one person). I suppose we might be able to devise a rudimentary form of communication with the shades in the event that they identify a mutineer. It would lag at least 1 cycle behind any major discoveries though, and would be susceptible to mutineers tampering with it if we are unlucky. @Straw are living players informed that they were role blocked even if they did not attempt an action? What do you mean by "worried about your own survival"? This is not a question of major significance, I am just curious what you had in mind here. With regards to Striker's comment about there being plenty of time in the game to find the mutineers, I really have very little to say about it that hasn't already been said. I don't particularly agree with the sentiment in Striker's comment, but on the other hand, Striker actually voted last cycle unlike many other players (unfortunately including myself), so I would hesitate to accuse him of trying to stall the game discussion. At least to me, the most likely interpretation for Rae's advice about item usage is that it was primarily camouflaging. My memory is a bit hazy as far as Rae's propensity towards stabbing other players in past games is concerned, but I get the feeling she would have given this advice even if she were a villager. It is rather more of interest to me that apparently she was inquiring after the different kinds of tricks you are allowed to pull in the shade doc. Reading this, I can more readily see where The God King was coming from with the theory that the mutineers conspired to get Rae lynched on purpose. I still do not think that is what happened, but it does help me better frame the mutineer's apparent reluctance to fight against Rae's lynch. CadCom, you cad!!!! I can't believe you would pull the wool over our eyes like this!!!! These rules are most intriguing. I earnestly await reading the shade doc when this game ends (but all things held equal, I would prefer that I do not get to see the shade doc until then ) Oh dear, I seem to have only narrowly avoided copying Fura almost verbatim a second time. Phew, that was a close call reeeeee all of my best points are getting stolen If Straw were on the fence about running the game with 4 or 5 mutineers, I could see how 4 mutineers + 1 knife might be a good compromise. I would definitely lean towards running this game with 5 mutineers though. It's a good amount for 22 players. So I agree that it is unlikely the mutineers got any knives. One of us!! One of us!! Oh, I see!! A rudimentary hashing algorithm is a very elegant solution to the shades identity problem. Very nice!! It's a shame you died before this could really catch on. If we are working under the assumption that the mutineers had plans for controlling the shade doc, then this proposal might even be what got you killed. Fair warning though, creating a hash system that I would be unable to break given a few hours would probably be more trouble than it's worth. I am not going to attach very much significance to a poke vote like this, but it is probably marginally less likely that Rae would poke a teammate, if only by sheer dint of distancing patterns. I do not believe Joe was significantly in danger at this point? Combined with the fact that Rae also kind of pushed back against Sart's vote on Joe this post raises my eyebrows a little. Yeah, this checks out. My eyebrows have descended back to their resting position. Feel free to ignore my eyebrows and carry on with what you were doing. All of the ninjas This does not read to me as how mutineer!Elkanah would most likely go about defending mutineer!Striker, but I cannot really say much more than that. I do not get any kind of read from this, but I am willing to follow El's request to its logical conclusion and also not lynch her for a couple cycles, and she has expressed intent to be active in PMs, so I should be able to get a more definitive read over the next few cycles. I do not recollect your voting habits from previous games but I will happily take your word for it. Your advice about items seems solid, but I will also only put so much stock in discussion that is not about other players in the game. I definitely cannot fault not feeling up to casting a vote on the first cycle, particularly since at the time I was not yet clued in to the fact that the game had even started. I hope that you weigh in some more this cycle though since I don't think you've posted yet? One of us!! One of us!! I very much agree with your point about the newer and older players meta, but you are also selling yourself a bit short I dunno, apparently I am a fair hand at saying some of the same stuff that you would say Although even then I probably would have fairly different diction. Ah, so that was why you cast a vote against yourself. I was wondering. Anyway, while it is probable your playstyle has adapted in certain ways over the past few months, my experience of you would indicate that voting for yourself is not very alignment indicative. Yes, that is correct. Any such code for the shade doc would only be single-use, as a way to deliver a single important message and make sure people know who it is coming from. If you guys really want to do this securely then what you want is a digital signature, which is actually completely doable within the rules of Sanderson Elimination because RSA is not very difficult to implement compared to most other cryptosystems, but it is still probably more trouble than it is worth for a quick fix game. It would seem that this is the beginning of the chain of event's that lead to Rae's lynch. Occam's razor being what it is, I am going to trust BR, and will probably not stop doing so unless future evidence weighs fairly strongly against her. Yeah. Hi. If I understand the shade rules correctly, you will not be able to role block anyone this cycle unless you and Rae can agree upon a target. Which I find interesting, to say the least. Elkanah will definitely not be the only person breaking ties though. Fair enough. Now that it is a cycle later, are you feeling any better about voting? This is the second of three votes on Rae. It is pretty much what you would expect from a cycle 1 vote. Did we pretty much just get lucky with this lynch? If I am reading the chronology right, when this vote was cast it put Fura ahead of Rae in terms of votes, which is interesting. I cannot speak for anyone else who is returning from any length of hiatus, but do not feel like you need to avoid lynching me. If you do try to lynch me, I will absolutely still defend myself to my fullest ability, but I would prefer not to be treated any differently. Since Kidpen did not end up voting last cycle, I will probably give their reasons for retracting those votes a second pass. The vote against Kidpen is clearly sheepy, and at the time could have saved Rae from getting lynched, which makes me trust Kidpen more and Mist less. I could also see how maybe Mist's main purpose in posting this was to keep their promise about retracting the vote from Fura, so who they changed their vote to after that didn't matter as much to them. I do not strongly suspect Mist based on this, but I do somewhat suspect Mist based on this. Well, breaking the tie in a way that kills a mutineer is one of the more trustworthy things a person can do, which for now is enough of a read on Sart for me. Well, props to you for still casting a vote, even if you did not feel like you had the most to go off of. Also, I do not think a mutineer would put their vote somewhere it would make no difference if they were aware a teammate was on the chopping block, so I am inclined to read this post as coming from a loyal crewmember. Recap finished. That was kind of a long post and I am feeling tired. I apologize if the quality and coherency of this post has declined as you get further into it. I do not feel great about casting a vote right now but I will still do my best. So it seems like Rae's lynch came late in the cycle, which in my opinion is most likely what accounts for the fact that Rae's lynch experienced unexpectedly little pushback. Mist's vote tying Rae with Kidpen was not sufficient on its own to make the mutineers feel safe about the lynch vote. And I have been fairly satisfied by Mist's responses so far. Which put together means I'm kind of willing to give Mist a pass for now despite circumstantial evidence against them. Lynching Mist would not be the worst outcome but probably not my first choice. But now I feel kind of at a dead end since Mist seemed like the only real lead attached to the Rae lynch. My instinct right now is to throw a vote at somebody who has not been drawing a bunch of my attention since I don't feel strongly about lynching any of the louder voices, so for now @Kynedath Kynedath. This is kind of a poke vote in the sense that I will try to remove it if you post more of your thoughts on the game before the cycle ends, but since it is my first cycle in the game I guess a poke is not entirely out of place, and my vote is still fairly serious in the sense that I genuinely would prefer not to lynch the other people who have votes right now.

You have my sincerest thanks for your leniency on my deplorable habits of thievery It has been a few months hasn’t it. It’s fun to be back in the game with everyone. Yesssssss trust me unconditionally. This could not ever go wrong in any conceivable way no siree That’s fine. Agreeing with other people too much is usually the opposite of my problem in this game, and I am far from being finished this cycle, so I doubt this will continue to be a problem for very long. For now though your observations about me probably aren’t wrong.

It appears that last cycle’s voting discussion will be thoroughly interesting reading, and when I am back at my computer I will finish the half-completed analysis of last cycle that is saved on it. In the meantime, I have a spot of idle time, so I will still try to weigh in on this cycle’s happenings, even if I am not yet “caught up” all the way. Forgive me if I am found to be unwittingly hashing over old news or asking people to repeat themselves about things I should know already. Throwing shade... Was that a pun Could you please explain to me how you think Xino’s death makes you suspicious? No, this is the part where you say this is the part where you get suspicion for attempting to start a train that was not Rae. I had forgotten the extent to which you guys are self aware about these sort of things No, that’s actually fair. We already have the mutineers on the back foot, so we can afford to prioritize accuracy over speed at this point. With that in mind, we also theoretically possess a lot more information about the mutineer team than we did last cycle, so I would probably still support going forwards with a lynch vote this cycle. I would caution that this early in the game, the mutineers would have no need to target somebody they had anything against, whether openly or privately. I would not be entirely surprised if their reasons for attacking xino consisted solely of xino being the first name on the player list. But I wish you luck in your analyses. This rather completely mirrors my own reaction to the writeup. Thank you!! With the disclaimer that I have not actually read BR’s posts yet, I would like to play devil’s advocate: If a mutineer were voting on a team mate, they would want to get noticed doing it, so a vote cast against Rae with low confidence might be even better for clearing BR. Personally, I am inclined to trust every one of the voters who lynched Rae last cycle. I am not going to clear anyone but I trust them considerably more than I trust anybody else. Greetings fellow distracted person Personally I am excited about all of the shenanigans that could take place in the shade doc, so I hope you will forgive me for hoping the rest of the deceased is anything but peaceful I already gave my thoughts about Sart and BR. If what you are proposing were true, then the tactical advantage gained by the eliminators by controlling the shade vote would only last for a short time before the dead villagers piled up. This is definitely a silver lining to losing a teammate on the first day, and probably a small additional incentive for proactive bussing, but do you truly believe that this is something the mutineers did on purpose? Ack Fura I literally just typed that you thief!!! Ruuuuuuuuuude Or I guess technically I stole them from you since you posted first. Please forgive my shameless plagiarism. Observing the voting patterns alone, I got the impression that Mist was one of the most suspicious people, as the prime candidate for defending Rae. But since I have not yet read any of the context behind Mist’s vote, I will for now withhold my judgement. Depending on what I see I could go either way on this. I reiterate that I am not going to pass conclusive judgement on Mist yet, but I can’t find much fault in this response. Okay I can understand your logic here. I do not fully agree with it but your elaborations were definitely helpful. I am curious why you removed the from Striker’s comment because I did not read it as being very serious? I will grant that it was maybe half serious but still.

Holy smokes did I seriously miss the beginning of the game? Hi guys. Give me a sec.

Greetings. I would like to sign up as Verity.

Alright, down to business. With Sart acting as a lead, we should have a decent shot at figuring this out. welcome to the madhouse I love me some good dueling and all the dramatic flair of public challenges, but, reading the "final draft" of the rules, there's nothing about dueling in there? I think it got removed when there weren't enough players. Sorry for not responding to your PM, by the way. Are we still allowed to use it? Would the elims have a way of knowing Elandera had a pain knife though? It sounds like I need to read day 2 closely. I stand corrected. Well, at least this makes it easier for me to get caught up. For the purposes of this cycle I only have a pressing need to analyze two people and decide which one I think is more guilty. I can agree with the logic of encouraging activity / picking the least of the evils in a lynch. My question is, beyond not liking the alternatives, did you have a reason to suspect Xino in particular? Insofar as I have a sense of your playstyle / thought process, I feel like you tend to play mostly hands off until you have a positive suspicion of a particular target. Interesting. From a purely meta perspective I would be slightly surprised by an elim artifabrian, particularly since it makes the elims much more powerful by giving them 1.5x the number of kills, but I'm not going to put very much stock in that, given the devious disposition of most SE GMs. Also, I wouldn't necessarily expect an elim!artifabrian to hand out stuff to villagers. Aman is certainly capable of using this as a ploy, but this is sacrificing multiple extra kills in exchange for a fairly nebulous benefit, and the simplest answer is that it doesn't make sense for an eliminator to play their hand that way. I also note that you made a spanreed, which is likely one of the safer items to grant to another player. Is there a particular reason for that choice? ...and the cycle is nearly up I don't like being a slow reader. I am voting for Elbereth: If I were an eliminator with a shard, I would 100% issue a challenge. It's a high profile way to control what happens in a cycle, and with the likelihood of vote manipulations the outcome can be controled. While the fact that her playstyle has changed is not inherently suspicious, I feel a bit off about her new playstyle. I don't think Aman is evil. Evil!Aman would have to be an artifabrian, and then would have to choose to either include other teammates in a very risky gambit or sacrifice the use of what is probably the elim team's most powerful item in exchange for trust. I may be biased by my the last game I played with Aman, but then again, I am getting really similar vibes right now with people second guessing everything Aman says to what went down in that game, when he was a villager and I lead the charge against him.

Ekard strolled into the group of assembled Brightlords and Brightladies. He yawned. It felt like he had been asleep for quite some time. "Ello friends. What'd I miss?" Terribly sorry, I've been busy and not putting the amount of effort into the game that I wanted to I'll commit to making a comprehensive post during the next day cycle with the best of my analysis in it. In the least, we are far enough into the game that I am reasonably confident I will be able to narrow the playing field. I don't especially appreciate apparently being voted up, but I'll withhold my judgement until I read through the reasoning behind it. For now, that is all.

Kind of? I'm fairly optimistic about finding a better lead this cycle, but for now, you may consider it a vote in retaliation to a vote in retaliation to my vote, yes. Right now I'm mostly just concerned with progressing the D1 lynch past choosing people at complete random.

See, this is where I would have removed my vote because you explained yourself, but then you voted on me Edit: I thought it was an exact rerun of LG20(?) so I doubt there would be secret roles.

Interesting. I had figured it would be a survivor-type role with gravy, but this puts it more in SK territory. Something to watch out for. I could see the thief win con sneaking up on us and ending the game if we aren't careful. You are pretty much right. I wasn't drawing conclusions about the individual chances of either Araris or El being elims, just that they almost definitely aren't both elims. Which, I feel is still a useful takeaway. "It is sadly a well-documented fact that the best way for Alethi nobility to get to know each other is by plotting to kill each other," Lord Ekard commented dryly. Very good, join the dark side Anyways, I am voting/poking/stabbing/whateverit'scallednow Butt Ad Venture (@Butt Ad Venture) at least until they elaborate upon their vote a bit more.

When was the last time you've seen two eliminators vote in rapid succession of each other? Especially when those votes lead the lynch and are placed less than three hours into the game.

It's good to be in the game. It feels like it's been a while. Unusual, for a vote to develop in such rapid succession. I'm going to rule out Araris and Elbereth being on the same team, because eliminators are usually more cautious about that sort of thing. I have no intention of placing a third vote on Elandera though, so Sart, consider yourself poked.

I pick option 3 More seriously, I don’t mind if signups are extended or not; I say do whichever you would prefer / works better for your schedule, and I’m sure you’ll put on a good game either way.