Archer

My apologies. I'll work to get that right going forward. My read of the situation was that I was at 3 votes, Elandera was at 2, and Somebody was at 1. Condensation threatened a vote on either me or Elandera that never materialized. Let's suppose Elandera and you are elims. In this situation, you're fine to do nothing, although you'd keep tabs on the situation in case Condensation votes Elandera, which would tie us and give them a chance of being killed. But if that did happen, and you broke the tie, that would be suspicious. Suddenly, Illwei switched from Elandera to Somebody and said some very nice things about me (Thank you, by the way. You're cool too!). Araris switched from Experience to Somebody at the same time. Now I'm at 3, and Somebody is at 3 too. I've been under a cloud of suspicion, so there's little value in killing me when you can get a different villager. So you voted Somebody, pushing me out of elimination contention. That's a risky gambit, because if I flip elim, you'll be suspected later. Would a villager do that? Unlikely, isn't it, unless you were worried because they had poke voted you earlier in the round. But here's the rub. I don't think Elandera is an elim. I've already listed my reasons for that before. So it appears that this was more of a gut read that I'm villager and that Somebody was sus. Why would I want to penalize you for thinking I'm safe? Experience on the other hand has a habit of last minute voting that makes it hard to read votes until right near the end. I don't like that, even though I've been guilty of it myself, so I'm sticking with them for the time being. Also, I just now got the joke in the title.

Guys, those Last Post Wins fellows are closing in much too fast. Girls, the Last Post Wins ladies are nearing their thread's page count. And declared it was a planet

Crasher looked down at the dead body in front of him. "Wow, you all really just stabbed him in the back, huh. I guess he never... Sal it Cómin." Welcome, Dannex! I'm gonna guess Dannex is safe because no elim would abandon the chance to play elim. My vote last time was defensive, because for a while there, it was looking like I might get lynched. I was worried someone would switch at last minute, so I wanted to be sure. Voting for someone else risked angering them and having them switch to me. So I band-wagoned so I'd have a vote in. Because as I always say, it's important to vote. Even I think the Vapor vote looked suspicious, and they defended me. People who come in at last minute and throw in important votes without long explanations seem suspicious. Which is why I am voting Experience for now. Their reasoning has been shallow so far. Let's look at why Vapour might have done cast their vote when and how they did. Maybe we're both elim and he was protecting me. If so, it was likely opportunist. Maybe they wanted to avoid being active without voting, so they just hopped on a bandwagon. If so, they chose not to railroad me or Elandera. Maybe they really thought Somebody was an elim. Maybe they trusted I am a villager and wanted to avoid my lynching. Maybe they're elim and wanted to pocket me. Vapor, would you like to commit to one of those options?

Crasher held out a small radio to Sal Cómin. It flickered between channels for a moment, playing static, before settling into the opening chords of a popular Queen song. 'Caaaaaan AN-Y-BODY... find meeee... somebody toooooo loveeee?' As the opening piano bit played, Crasher shook his head. "Nothing personal, mate. I just don't feel like dying right now."

Very little. I remain unconvinced it's them. My thought on that are here: "I'm ignoring gut reads and AIs this game. There's no good way for me to do them because I don't know y'all or the game well enough yet and three of you are likely spreading misinformation. I absolutely believe that votes are the best way to determine roles. But sure, maybe I'm tunneling on the plan. Let's imagine the different scenarios. If Illwei was innocent and Elan was a Reckoner, Elan cast the deciding vote for an innocent person. That puts the heat on them, which is why they’re on the chopping block. That doesn’t sit right with me. That said, maybe they were counting on the Gears lynch happening instead and they wouldn’t be questioned. If Illwei is a Reckoner, and Elan is an Epic, they got lucky. If they’re both in on it, maybe it was planned from the beginning. Rereading Elan's defense, they said "Illwei was in the lead at the time I placed the vote on Quinn. She then removed her own vote of Illwei, putting herself in the lead and removing the tie I created." Perhaps they never intended to cause a lynch they were connected to and Quinn just messed them up. The more I look at this, the more it might have been a misplay. But I'm still not entirely convinced." If you want to vote someone for last minute vote switching (besides me), I actually recommend Experience.

That's a later round way of using votes. Early on, they are largely used for poking and establishing a record. I understand some people have gut reads on Day One and may use their votes to actually try to kill someone, but that strategy doesn't make sense to me. And ah, that's correct. My mistake. I get Elandera and Quinn confused. I'm a villager and voting me means you have one less teammate, if you're a villager. *pew pew finger guns* This dichotomy diverts suspicion from you Condensation, and for that reason I'm suspicious of it. Or it could be we are both elim and you're trying to avoid suspicion for saving me by doing it like this. But if people remain unconvinced by my answers so far, here's the brief version. It appears that what makes Elandera suspicious is they voted for Quinn, then in Day Two, quickly voted for Illwei, who Quinn trusted. What makes me suspicious is best articulated by TJ: "Third, and most important thing that makes me suspect you - First, you voted for Gears, a player easy to vote on, and easy to defend against in the event they get lynched and flip village, then as soon as someone votes on Gears making them tied lead, you shift to Experience. Then as soon as Araris votes on Experience making him tied lead, you shift again to SfS. Seems like you're very worried of how you'll look if you're involved in voting out the person who'll possibly get lynched and flip village." As he said, I had a good excuse for voting Gears (he claimed elim). I switched and caused a village lynch anyway. If I am elim, why would I care which villager died if I am going to be blamed for both? I was the first vote on them, it was unsuspicious. Experience came late to the party and set Gears up to possibly die. I was okay if a truly random death happened because there was surely some one vote elims in the mix and we might get lucky, but trying to push a particular death early in the game didn't seem right to me, especially since Experience didn't really engage with any arguments and analysis but the most recent ones at the time.

So far, Araris voted for Experience Elandera voted for Illwei then removed it Archer voted for Windrunner Supreme Somebody voted for Vapor Illwei voted for Somebody Elandera voted for Somebody Illwei voted for Elandera (forgot to remove previous vote) Experience voted for Araris Liranil voted for Elandera Gears voted for Elandera then removed it Joe voted for Archer TJ voted for Archer Vote tallies: Experience 1, Windrunner 1, Vapor 1, Somebody 1, Araris 1, Elandera 2, Archer 2 It appears that my poke vote on Windrunner has accomplished nothing. The filter is going to replace them at the end of this round and we’ll have to begin our read of them all over again. That’s unfortunate, but at this point my vote would be better suited elsewhere. I’ll admit I’m tempted to vote Elandera to save myself from elimination, but I’d like to be able to justify that and I’m not sure I can. As I said before, they voted out a villager in the first round, which is too bold for a Reckoner. I’m ignoring discussion of people’s previous behaviours because I can’t personally verify it. Three of you are lying elims, so there’s bound to be some misinformation out there. Oooooof There is no good way to respond to that. Well played. Speaking of throwing shade, TJ, I find it suspicious that I say this ^, then you retaliate vote and say this: It's an excuse by proxy for your own retaliatory vote and it makes it hard for me to vote for you without it looking like I'm just trying to appear like a villager. As for your second point, you did cast a second vote on someone, but the first vote was ultimately removed. It could have been an eliminator plan the whole time. They're planning something, they have to be. That could have been the play last time. I'll just note that so far Gears has yet to vote for anyone. This one was promptly dropped. Analysis without a lasting vote is suspicious. For the record, I do not encourage random voting beyond the first round. Now that we have locked in votes to look at, we can base our votes on those. Unfortunately, I'm currently fighting some bad optics. The question becomes, do you believe it is strange for a villager to not want to kill someone and do you believe it is okay for villagers to vote in self-defense? I suspect those questions will define the next round. I'm ignoring gut reads and AIs this game. There's no good way for me to do them because I don't know y'all or the game well enough yet and three of you are likely spreading misinformation. I absolutely believe that votes are the best way to determine roles. But sure, maybe I'm tunneling on the plan. Let's imagine the different scenarios. If Illwei was innocent and Elan was a Reckoner, Elan cast the deciding vote for an innocent person. That puts the heat on them, which is why they’re on the chopping block. That doesn’t sit right with me. That said, maybe they were counting on the Gears lynch happening instead and they wouldn’t be questioned. If Illwei is a Reckoner, and Elan is an Epic, they got lucky. If they’re both in on it, maybe it was planned from the beginning. Rereading Elan's defense, they said "Illwei was in the lead at the time I placed the vote on Quinn. She then removed her own vote of Illwei, putting herself in the lead and removing the tie I created." Perhaps they never intended to cause a lynch they were connected to and Quinn just messed them up. The more I look at this, the more it might have been a misplay. But I'm still not entirely convinced. In conclusion, I don't really have a lead.

Here’s a breakdown of how the voting happened in Day One. Illwei and Elandera are responsible for the villager death. However, as explained in my previous post, I believe Illwei is clear because Quinn was not a Reckoner. If they had been one, I would have suspected a scheme to fix their accidentally both being on the chopping block. I do not believe that a Reckoner would want to be caught casting the deciding vote this early in the game. There was no information to go on, so it would have been suspicious to hop on someone. For that reason, I believe Elandera is cleared as well. I may have to revisit that decision later though. It might have just been a misplay, but I will assume for now the Reckoners are cleverer than to call attention to themselves on Day One. Experience causing drama right at the end also makes them less suspicious to me for the same reason. Everyone who didn’t vote is suspicious. That includes the four people who got warned, but also Gears interestingly. They didn’t defensively vote even when they had two votes against them. I’m not sure how to read that. Condensation is another talker who didn’t vote. Araris, Elandera, Joe, TJ Shade, Liranil all acted pretty uncontroversial, which is the most suspicious to me because that’s how I’d play it if I were elim. I’d guess that two of them are elims and the other is one of the people who got didn’t vote. Out of the five, Liranil seems the most trustworthy and TJ Shade strikes me as the most likely elim contender.

I feel that if you are going to talk, you should vote. Otherwise you’re avoiding taking responsibility for your words. My initial vote on Gears was pretty arbitrary. They remain on my suspect list for now, but they did not do anything overtly suspicious. Besides overtly claiming to be an elim. Hm. Anyway, I switched that to Experience when they entered the thread with under an hour to go and cast the deciding vote against Gears. (Or what I thought was, based on my assumption of the plan.) For the first round, I believed a random lynch would be the fairest way to go. So far I have maybe two people who I am more inclined than not to trust while everyone else seems suspicious. That’s not enough to go on, so our best bet was getting lucky. Judging talk is not a good way to decide things, at least not early on. This time, we have the opportunity to evaluate who people actually voted for. That’s about the only real way to judge people’s loyalties. Speaking of which, it turns out Quinn was innocent after all, which is unfortunate. I really thought Quinn/Illwei/Experience were covering for each other after blowing a scheme to establish a record of voting for the Reckoners early when it was unlikely to kill them. I believe that Illwei is now cleared because they did not go along with the plan and no Reckoner would allow themselves to cast the deciding vote at this stage in the game. It invites early suspicion. Experience ultimately tried to protect Quinn, who is innocent, with their vote, so I also somewhat trust them. Although their timing remains suspicious. My final vote on Somebody was a random selection from the group of four or so people who have been inactive. I suspect that every Reckoner will be active enough to avoid the filter, because it’s a rare opportunity to have lots of power in a game. However, at least one of them may lie low to avoid having a questionable voting record. I’d like to discourage that. If it served as a poke vote to make them talk more, great. If it just added weight to my words, that works too. Either way, there was no way I could not vote for someone in that round. So it had to be someone who didn’t already have a vote on them. Sticking with that, I’ll poke Windrunner Supreme for now as a filler vote. I need time to figure out who is actually most suspicious. I'm still high on adrenaline. Experience voted for me! I mean, **** "The NERVE. Look at me! It's very obvious that I'm a superhuman. How else could I control radios, huh? You don't see Hugo the Human down the street magically making people's boomboxes play smooth jazz when they're trying to work out. I'm glad we were able to channel our rage into something productive, guys, but we killed the wrong person!" Crasher said. "That's the best radio pun I can come up with right now. I'm under a lot of pressure."

Will explain better later but don't want to double when Illwei drops

Experience Somebody

I wasn't going to mention this until next time because it was looking like it would end in a bunch of people having one vote on them and the lynch being decided randomly, which is what I view as probably the best case scenario with so little information. It looks like Quinn and Illwei have a scheme going where they accuse each other to deflect criticism from real Epics then they drop their votes last minute, leaving someone, in this case Gears, on the chopping block instead. Experience's timing is suspiciously convenient for that kind of a plan to work. As it stands, Quinn and Gears have two votes each. I expect Illwei to drop their vote on Quinn shortly, so to even the field, Gears Experience

Having recently read the SE Glossary, I had noticed that 'lylo' isn't in it, despite coming up a fair bit in discussion. I think that would be a helpful addition for someone like @Elbereth to please make here

In response to the Sam Riegel-style pigeon coos from the audience, I retract my attempt at number crunching. The odds are apparently 3/15 in Round 1, 3/14 in R2, 3/13 in R3. That's about one in four and it doesn't get much better until we lose half our people to Reckoners kills. If they kill 3 at the end of R3, then it will be 3/10. That's still really lousy. I am now less optimistic about our chances but feel like I've learned a valuable lesson about game theory.

I am suspicious of any time someone says lol. It's a way to soften a sentence so you can play it off as not a full fledged accusation while still throwing shade. However, some people just like saying lol. So I'm watching you, but I'll let it slide. This time. lol You sound so disappointed about that. I haven't read enough old games to tell if Illwei and Quinn are being honest about their analysis of each other's behavior. What I have gleaned however is that Gears genuinely does claim elim every time. Even so, at this point, speculation that they might be double-bluffing is better than random guessing. (Also, I'm hoping that given your strategy, Gears, you'll be less vindictive than anyone else will be if I vote for them. *puppy dog eyes*) I believe that to win, we must vote each time and get lucky. Our odds are better than not that on third vote we will get a Reckoner. (First guess has 1/5 chance, second guess has 2/5 chance, third has 3/5 chance, which is better than half.) We can improve those odds through reasoned analysis. We also need everyone to vote, in order to provide some basis for that. I'm going to treat any speculation people make without voting as suspicious. The best Reckoner strategy would be to fly under the radar and let everyone pick each other off. Assuming the first vote is a cremshoot, they'll probably be able to avoid elimination for one or two more lynches by having a clean (non-existent or band wagony) voting record. The more we force people to defend themselves and take positions on lynches, the more we have to work off of. Eventually we'll accuse a Reckoner and we can judge people's reactions to that and crack this case wide open. So to promote this, from here on in I will at least be poke voting anyone who doesn't vote. If I think we've got the right choice for a lynch, I might switch, but that's my strategy for now. And wouldn't you know it, Gears hasn't voted yet, so my choice this round is doubly validated. (Sorry again.)

"You risk jeopardizing our mole's position, over." "But I can make it! Let me take the shot, over." "Permission denied. It's against the Reckoners playbook to make a solo-" "So that's what your little group is called! No, don't go taking off your earpiece. Pardon the interruption, I just want to talk. I've been watching you follow me around all day. If you're so eager to meet me, why don't you come down off of that dark rooftop and we can meet face to face? Careful with that trigger finger, at this range you might miss and hit some innocent civilian. Or do you not care about that kind of thing? I'm so curious a-" Crasher glared up at the apartment building across the street from him as he sensed the earpiece turn off. "Well that wasn't very sporting! Still, you seem ever so interesting." The Lesser Epic reached into his pocket and pulled out a ham radio with a long antenna. "This is Crasher. It appears a group called the Reckoners has infiltrated our ranks. Meet me uptown. We need to talk some things out." *** Now I'm picturing you as that Baby Yoda meme. You're all highly suspicious! Shame on you! We're supposed to be aloof, maybe even scary. But disloyal crosses a line. Edit: having googled it, Yoda says haha yes, die trash in the meme, but I still think it's funny and you can't stop me

Thanks for the examples, Straw. They were a helpful read. My character will be called Crasher. He has the power to monitor and modify radio messages. He uses it to spy on people who are foolish enough to use walkie talkies and to randomly blast loud noises at drivers from their car radios, causing them to crash. His weakness is travelling at over 80km/hr (50 mph).

Thanks for the ping, Mat. I would like to sign up please! OOC you can call me Archer. I'll brainstorm a character and get back to you shortly with it. Also this is my first time doing SE. Does anyone have an old game PM they'd be willing to add me to? I keep seeing references to roleplaying but I'm getting the sense it happens mostly behind the scenes. I'd like to take a look at an example to see how it's done.

Well that rules out you being The Lord Ruler. Good to know! Welcome to the party, have you considered collecting 16 cats and naming them after the allomantic metals? I'm pretty sure you'd be able to find ones that match the colour of the metals too, which would be excellent. Actually, scratch that question, what's your favorite Reckoners character? If you say Prof I'll let you pet my feline companion Mittin (emphasis on the tin ).

Petition to rename this thread something else so I stop losing the game based on the pop up notification and instead lose when I come here to investigate why I got pinged for a thread about Important Intellectual Ideas or something

Kingston was a very sensible lad. So he continued running up the stairs, to where he thought the exit was. But Kingston was also a Smedry, so as fire chased him up the corridor, he disappeared from sight, lost in the explosion. "Oh no, I've died!" came a faint cry. Then- Kabam! Explosion noises! Ambiguous fate for our fair hero! It's what he would have wanted.

*nods* So all you hear is silence.

Verily, obviously tremendous, each fine individual shown here. For leading our outstandingly delightful terrain, heed easy wisdom: only real leaders delight.

Edit: Seriously, all of you are fabulous. I look forward to reading the roasts of those of you who return, even if I won't be competing again for a while. All the upvotes to Ghander for keeping this thing going.

TIL I am unable to write I love you without putting two typos in the sentence, so we'll be unpacking that in therapy a few years down the road.