Devotary of Spontaneity

It is, of course, really easy to confirm that I have a Sak and that I'm not the elim engineer. One trapper can roleblock me, but can't stop me from going to the hospital of my own volition. This would either prove I'm not an elim engineer, or force the elims to forgo a double sabotage/sabotage+attack. I'm also kind of confused by how Aman narrowed down his list. It's all well and good to consider the voting players the biggest threat and focus on them as elim suspects. When going for a specific role though, there's absolutely nothing stopping @xinoehp512, @shanerockes, @Mark IV, @Lumgol, or @Ventyl from being the elim engineer. It's great if the two coincide, but there's no reason that has to be the case. I kept my vote on Burnt because I didn't see the point of lynching Ark, and there ~10 minutes left in the cycle so I didn't have time to go back and check whether Drake or Alvron were more likely to be evil.

I'm not really a PM person, and Kokerlii isn't particularly useful except to make it more difficult for the elims to get one. So I went for Sak, who has the potential to be useful if the elims ever decide to attack someone.

The only living people we can confirm are not the elim engineer are you, Striker, BR, and whoever sent that anonymous message. It's possible BR scanned Drake to check if he was actually shrouded, but we won't know that until next cycle. If Araris is the elim engineer, we won't be seeing a double sabotage today. Lopen presumably didn't sabotage the Aviary(though the lab is still possible), as otherwise he would have gotten a full Aviar and Ventyl/his pinch hitter would call Lopen out on his lies. Everyone else only has excuses of inactivity or going for Aviar(or both, in Lum's case. Hopefully the other inactives will claim actions, though it will be too easy for them to have claimed not to have done anything). Sadly, I am no different, as I requested Sak cycles 1 and 2. I got a sooty albatross instead of a Sak D1, which may well have been Lopen's fault. I do currently have Sak though.

It would have been very easy for a Drake/Burnt team to have gotten a lynch off on Stick, or at the very least get a 4 way tie including Stick and Ax rather than committing to a lynch giving them a 2/3 chance of elim death. Taking that risk in the hopes of lynching Ax C2 of what could be a very long game is an incredibly dangerous strategy, especially if one of them is an engineer. One of Drake or Burnt being evil and risky the 1/3 chance of death seems more reasonable, though still a gamble for an elim engineer. There are five airship parts still intact, so it would take at least three cycles of sabotage to take down the ship. It's also possible that we had one active engineer who partially fixed either the bridge or the brig last cycle. @Randuir, if the last airship part is sabotaged in the same cycle a previously sabotaged part is fully repaired, does the game end? BR being evil would mean the elims shut down a powerful role indefinitely and purposefully tried to get her hospitalised with a decently high chance of success. Araris/BR doctor/biologist team requires the elims to put two members out of commission for a cycle, making double sabotage/sabotage + attack only feasible with a four member elim team with at least three roles. This would also require the elims to do something about Araris being exposed as a potential doctor and the lab potentially being rebuilt. Even if the elims do have a doctor and a biologist and Araris is the doctor, there's no guarantee that BR would be the one hospitalised. BR being evil with village Araris means the elims were okay with letting a teammate sit in the hospital for an indeterminate number of cycles. It's probably best to wait a cycle and see if BR returns to health, especially as the possibility that one or both hospital denizens are evil is far from a a likelihood. Drake definitely could have secured his safety by voting for you, or Ark at the last second. Voting for you instead of Alvron may well have caused you to make a retaliatory vote to stay alive, and a hammer on Ark would be a lot more suspicious than risking death by keeping a vote on Alvron. The only people who could have helped Drake are me and you, and we kind of did by not voting for Drake.

Shqueeves, Alvron, Snipexe, Venture, and Araris are still alive. Araris is almost certainly a Forgotten, and used his Shadowblaze to convert someone else to the cause. I'll tentatively assume that Shqueeves was the other starting Forgotten.

Without an elim engineer, the sabotage win condition would take seven more cycles even if no village engineer ever bothered to fix anything, extended significantly if engineers do their job and repair things. Even though the death toll in this game is lower than usual, that's quite a long time for an MR, and would make the hospitalisation win con much easier for the elims to achieve. Supporting a lynch on a minimal active versus an inactive makes sense. I was more wondering about your opinion on the outcome of Aman vs. Elandera, whether you would prefer an inactive die over an active you didn't have any particular suspicion of. Equally happy to the point of nonintervention is certainly a view you can have. Ironically, we're now at a three way tie. At this point, it's kind of late to choose sides and we probably won't see any dramatic vote shifts. A 1/3 chance of death is still within the point where an elim might want to defend a teammate up for the lynch, so if we had gotten to this point earlier we still could have seen tie-breaking defences. At the very least, I think creating a three way tie is a valid choice when faced with two lynches that one disagrees with. That does apply more to Striker this cycle than you last cycle, though it depends somewhat on when you were around last cycle e.g. ~3 hours before rollover when I voted for Elandera as opposed to after Stick voted for Drake. And it looks like I'm out of time to make a reasoned decision. I'll have to leave it here.

I suppose I can claim not to be the navigator like the other four five voters this cycle. I thought this would be a slightly bigger problem than it turned out to be. It's not necessarily too late to introduce new candidates to the lynch, but a lot of those people might not see it because I didn't follow Drake's advice. It's also possible we have enough time for impermanent votes, though it would have been better to put pressure on people earlier. Two votes on a person and a couple of one-off votes isn't a lot if the goal is to force potential elim teammates to respond in defence. It is true that the later in the cycle it gets, the more elim teammates should have stepped in. The sheer amount of time it took me to write this has made the option for temporary votes less reasonable. I'll still try to stick around for a little while longer so I don't end up missing responses like last cycle. It's tempting to just have the Trapper(s) deal with inactives, but there aren't enough Trappers around and any inactive hospitalised in this way will probably end up languishing in the hospital unless both they and a doctor are evil. We don't gain too much more from dismissing inactives though unless they're evil. And now I took so long that Alvron has posted, but is apparently too busy to make the lynch a tie. Stick's lack of self-preservation instincts are a point in her favour, as 2-1-1-1 is dangerous even expecting teammate support. I don't know what we're going to do about our many inactives, but I'm not so sure dismissal is the right option at this point. Drake's initial post about village sabotage seemed like a very bold idea for an elim to propose. That trust has decreased somewhat, but not enough for a vote. I suppose Burnt has been around recently, and will hopefully provoke a response at least. @Burnt Spaghetti, what was your overall opinion of a C1 lynch on a minimally active? You seemed to support it, but were equally? satisfied that we'd lynched a player who would provide more information. Are your changed opinions on creating ties via voting on someone other than the two main candidates based on there previously being ties C1, or the fact that Striker's vote this cycle came at a time when the lynch was still wide open while your vote shift to anyone other than Aman or Elandera last cycle probably would have clinched a three way tie? We currently have two votes to repair the bridge versus one vote to repair the brig. With half-repairs not showing up, it's far more difficult to judge our number of engineers by having them choose randomly between brig and bridge. Theoretically this is the best time short of dismissing/hospitalising the elim engineer to risk not fixing anything, but it would still be nice to have something up by tomorrow. If that choice is the bridge, so be it.

Overall, the engineers will probably be more effective in repairing ship parts than doctors in healing villagers. Village doctors are likely to be less numerous than village engineers and are also more vulnerable to attack, especially if they try to heal someone every cycle. Unlike engineers, doctors can mistarget and heal an elim. Their main advantage is that the elims can only hospitalise one person a cycle unless they sabotage the lab with someone in it, the brig with a contained prisoner. Even with a single village engineer and never managing to dismiss or hospitalise the elim engineer, we can last five cycles of double sabotage, six if the gas bag has been partially repaired. This assumes sabotage of the last part occurs before repair, otherwise two village engineers could hold out indefinitely. Even if sabotage of the last part is fatal regardless of whether two repair actions are submitted on a sabotaged part, two village engineers, we can last much longer. Three village engineers, which will be difficult to determine if we ask all the engineers to repair a particular part, are more effective still. Since it's internal affairs who chooses the target, continuous sabotage and repair of the brig would turn internal affairs into an every-other-cycle trapper, though one without the power to target the currently hospitalised. That's not the worst outcome for a village internal affairs role. Repairing the bridge gives us an action scan back, and if the bridge is repetitively sabotaged, a likely village one. Why did you go from supposing Xino as a potential inactive elim to saying there's unlikely to be two inactive elims? I think you're suggesting that if any inactives are found to be evil, the likelihood of any other inactive being evil drops, but there doesn't have to be any inactive elims(though with six minimal actives, the chances are decent). Do you have any thoughts about me?

Nobody being hospitalised means it was the right move for the doctor(s) not to visit the hospital. I'm pretty sure anyone visiting the hospital has to request that the cycle before they want to be there, and since the doctor(s) decided not to risk their identities to heal unknown players, it's quite possible they won't choose to visit the hospital next cycle either. Active enough to post is active enough for an elim to submit orders, and Xino was around even if he never actually said anything. We know for sure that Aman and Striker didn't take sabotage actions. Everyone else is a possibility. The gas bag was listed as 'destroyed' last cycle, which I assumed meant it couldn't be fixed. I see that part is now 'sabotaged' like the brig and the bridge, which suggests the gas bag can be fixed. It's lower priority now, but @Randuir, can the gas bag be repaired, and was that the case last cycle as well? Assuming we have more than one engineer willing to help repair the damaged parts, it's probably best to ensure that one part gets repaired, either the brig or the bridge. The simplest way to do that is to vote on which part gets repaired, though that does mean that if we have three village engineers, the extra action is wasted. I think the bridge is more useful, though internal affairs does seem more trustworthy, if there are any players with that role. I suppose a roleblock gives some of the useful information of an action scan, in that blocking someone corresponding to no sabotage or one sabotage and no hospitalisation implies that the player who was roleblocked is evil(unless the roleblocked player happened to be the target of the elim kill and the failed attack isn't indicated in the writeup). I suppose I'll vote brig for now and think more about it later.

Aman(2): Araris, Striker Elandera(2): Drake, Devotary Lum(1): Lopen Xino(1): Burnt Stick(1): Elandera Back to some unilateral lynches I see. Still, this is more D1 votes then there have been for a few games. The last couple make casting a vote here feels like more than taking RNG into my own hands. Aman hasn't been around since well before the game started. Lum made one post announcing her existence and hasn't come back to post since despite being on the Shard somewhat recently. Xino is/was around, but hasn't posted. Elandera has now switched her vote from Shane to Stick upon being pushed by Drake. Stick suggesting that the elims wouldn't all go for birds early in the game apparently is now grounds for dismissal. It's not quite clear what Stick thought the rules for acquiring Aviar were, whether it was 'submit an action and have a random chance of getting a random Aviar', or 'submit an action and three random people who do so get random Aviar', which is an important distinction if three or fewer people try to pick up Aviar. Both cases would lead to a decently high failure rate if multiple elims tried to grab Aviar, as do the actual rules of choosing a specific Aviar, and as many as possible to a maximum of three Aviar being handed out. One or two elims going for Aviar makes sense, especially in preparation for sabotaging the Aviary and not needing to return the birds. Three elims going for birds is excessive. Failing to vote condones Aman's lynch, and I'd rather cast a vote based on any sort of actual suspicion. Of the active candidates, I would vote for Elandera over Stick, mostly because Elandera shifted from what appears to be the view that slight suspicions don't warrant a D1 lynch on active players to voting for one of those active players once her vote on an inactive was questioned.

I don't think there would be a single, elim, doctor, as that would mean villagers could never leave the hospital except possibly as cover for healing elims, and hospitalisation would end up being a slightly more vocal death. It's entirely possible that nobody would ever leave the hospital. @Randuir, what happens if a doctor and a trapper both target the same hospitalised patient? I'm guessing permanent hospitalisation, either by the trapper taking effect first, or by the trapper's attack cutting the patient's brief stint of health short. Sak seems to be decently useful to those without anything better to do, but while the Aviary still stands, would require the holder to have spent an action to protect against the possibility that they'll be attacked next cycle, which requires a good deal of prescience/paranoia. I'm guessing Kokerlii blocks navigator and possibly biologist scans, which is useful at any time for an elim planning on attacking someone or sabotaging something but would require a villager to waste an action just to hide their role. If the Aviary is sabotaged, both birds become far more valuable to both sides until the Aviary is repaired. Say we have two navigators, as indicated by the fact that two different people's action targets are revealed in the writeup. If one of those navigators is lynched and revealed to be a villager, a village engineer might decide to sabotage the bridge to prevent the other, plausibly evil, navigator from using it, and possibly identifying them if they were in the bridge at the time and can't vote without revealing their role. It usually won't be obvious whether there are two of a given airship role though, I think internal affairs is the only other one that gives evidence to others.

Trappers are the only ones who can ensure that hospitalised patients never leave, so if multiple people get attacked in the same cycle and then one of them is attacked again, that should tell us which one was the Trapper's target even if we don't get informed in the writeup. Doing so would narrow down the Trapper's identity though, between being present in the Hospital doc and not showing up to post in thread. The same is true for a Doctor who wishes to heal a patient. I don't think the best way to hide the identities of these players is to have them not visit the hospital/visit infrequently, or to ask several people to visit the hospital every day as cover, but I don't have any good ideas either. Nine airship parts is a lot if the elims don't have an engineer in addition to the option to forgo an attack in favour of a sabotage. Still, even with a dead or nonexistent elim engineer and plenty of functioning airship parts, it's dangerous for a village engineer to sabotage something as it takes twice as much work to fix the part afterwards. The most reasonable cases I can think of are if an engineer is sure that there is only one remaining [Airship dependent role] and that they're evil, or an engineer and internal affairs team up to hospitalise someone instead of letting a trapper take responsibility. Both of those require a high degree of confidence that the benefits will outweigh the damage.

Concealment is the default, but there's still a choice between visibly taking an item or not. Currently, all three people who are up for the lynch are choosing to take books. None of us(Sentry, Duelist, Silencing) have any backup, and the Book of the Guardian is still unclaimed. And here comes CadCom claiming that unlike other iterations of Thieves, he does not have a game ending win condition. This essentially confirms Snipexe's claim of targeting CadCom with a Line of Making, which would seem to be a very odd thing for elim!Snipexe to do. What was your plan to stop one of your two claimants from killing you instead, allowing the camp to be overrun and hiding their identity? Claiming not to have a hostile wincon was always going to be a hard sell, even if you had claimed before being outed. Having the thief be hidden does support a non game-ending win condition though, as secret lose conditions aren't really fair to everyone else. Having a player who collects items for five turns, dies, and may or may not return items to the supply is also an odd mechanic. If we don't vote for you though, then what's the best target? Snip is out, and I'm not going to vote for me. I really don't see why Araris is voting for Snip; lynching the accuser in a 1v1 situation isn't a good idea except at LyLo. Aha, and now my post is nearly useless, but I'm not going to rewrite it. I'm still wary of Araris, but the choice is making sure CadCom dies or starting a new lynch on Araris and allowing CadCom to hammer a lynch. I guess lynching CadCom is safer.

If you'll be sorry if I die, you probably shouldn't keep your vote on me. Especially as, so far as I can tell, your vote is for me telling you that Alvron likely wouldn't shoot anyone last cycle(given that Alv had proposed for the gun owner to pass the gun to another player) and that anyone who does shoot someone should claim. Venture's vote last cycle seems really odd for an elim to do, but it is technically possible it was an elim who didn't bother to consult with his teammates first. Not likely at this point, but perhaps more probable if Araris is evil. And now, Snipexe has made a very exciting post. The only secret role I've ever seen in a Rithmatist game is the Thief, who has to accumulate a certain number of items and has a wincon hostile to both village and elim teams. Such a role wouldn't want the camp to be overrun, but wouldn't be willing to spend a piece of chalk on a LoW. The thief could very much prove their role by stealing items from other players, though the existence of Lines of Revocation would make it slightly harder to prove. CadCom never responded to my question about how many LoWs were supposedly drawn, but if it was only two others, then CadCom couldn't have been too worried that one of them was an eliminator. If CadCom is evil though, he could have made sure the camp was overrun unless he thought Snip and one of Striker/Lum would be drawing LoWs . @Snipexe, is there any particular reason you decided to neglect the Line of Warding you thought we needed in favour of drawing a Line of Making at CadCom? Let's see. CadCom has a bribe, and two other people took bribes last night. Striker has claimed not to have done anything last night; Araris or I could have bribes if we made an active choice to conceal that fact. Not impossible, but somewhat less likely.

Currently, we have Araris going for the Book of the Bouncer, me going for the Book of the Sentry, @Lumgol and @Ventyl going for the the Book of Artistry, Snipexe going for the Book of Silencing, and CadCom going for the Book of the Duelist. Would either Lum or Ventyl like to switch to the Book of the Guardian?

It will be fascinating to see how the books improve their corresponding lines, and whether that improvement justifies using chalk to do something other than draw a Line of Warding. I'm hoping for multi-use chalk. The Book of the Sentry is probably the most useful, so I'd like to take that one. So you believe that there were three Lines of Warding drawn last night, one by you and the others by the second and third people to contact you about the possibility of drawing LoWs? Or did the tentative person also put in an action? The activity tracker showed that you had been around ~1 hour before the end of cycle, which meant you could have at least read every post that was made last night, even if something prevented you from posting. Other than the people who claimed LoW to CadCom, this may be difficult. We can't even say for sure that this claim means they didn't submit the elim kill, as one of them could have backed out and the camp would still be protected. The fact that CadCom apparently organised the entire defence and the camp wasn't overrun makes me think he did draw a LoW. It's difficult to tell which items were taken from the supply due to the influx of chalk, but we can at least be sure that two people took bribes and one person took a bucket of acid. It's probably useful for them to claim after they use their item.Then there's Venture, who may or may not have used a crab.

Right now, we have a theoretical two Lines of Warding, and four people we can blame if things go wrong(Xino, Cadcom, Xino's 'contact', one of CadCom's two 'contacts'). @xinoehp512, @Cadmium Compounder, it might be worthwhile if you post the names of your contacts ~30 seconds before rollover, in case one of you dies. The disadvantage is a successful protection means we've outed people who don't have chalk anymore, but it does prevent a scenario where an elim offers to draw a Line of Warding, then kills you so nobody finds out who they were. It also stops elim!Xino and/or elim!CadCom from making up a contact who doesn't exist.

We seem committed to the idea of lynching an inactive then. @Sart, is it possible to grab the items of the player who is lynched today? If four different players go for chalk, would the fourth one get the chalk dropped by the player who gets lynched?

We have one 50% gun claimant then, giving anyone else a theoretical 25% chance of death for going after the gun. This seems to be a reasonable enough deterrent to a Forgotten. How sustainable is our chalk use? We likely have 10 pieces now, up to three that can potentially be gained from the supply, and a bucket of acid that can replicate the most important chalk function. We'll get new items every day, but not enough to bring the number of items back up to 12. We'll probably get a few more pieces of chalk and acid as the game progresses though. With only 13 players, assuming an average of one death per turn we have at most six cycles, and can 'afford' to fail in protecting the camp twice. If we have four mislynches in a row and neglect to defend the last two cycles, that's 2+3+4+5=14 pieces of chalk needed, which is doable with good coordination and being lucky enough to avoid roleblocks. It doesn't leave a lot of room for Rithmatists to be using chalk's other abilities though.

Voting on who gets the gun does drastically decrease the risk of accidental deaths, if the winner is comfortable with making themselves a target. At this stage, it also increases the chance the Forgotten end up with a gun, as the chance of one of them winning the vote is higher than them risking their lives and being lucky enough to be the only one who goes for the gun in the absence of a vote. Acquiring all the chalk is definitely useful as chalk is more vital than in the last couple Rithmatist games. I think it's more likely that the Forgotten would use chalk to negate Rithmatist actions, especially those of any gun wielder and people who they believe will be drawing Lines of Warding. This is one of the big disadvantages of publicly coordinating who gets the gun and who draws Lines of Warding. The Forgotten don't have too much chalk to throw around, so the risks of being roleblocked on any particular cycle aren't too high, but we still can't count on success with equal number Lines of Warding and chalklings. I doubt we can afford to spend an extra piece of chalk every cycle either, so we have to somehow make sure there are exactly enough Lines going up without letting the Forgotten know who is drawing them. I don't have any good ideas here. The other interesting thing about the bribe is that it narrows down the possibilities of who used it to one of the players who voted for the person that bribed player switched their vote to. I think this is an advantage, as it increases accountability without making the briber a target. The bribee might well be a target in the later game though. The lantern is permanent, which is nice. I believe Alvron's clarification means that a lantern owner can pick up a bucket of acid during the day and then use it to increase the camp's defence that same cycle. The benefit of having a lantern and a crab is lesser, but does let one use information gained during the day to determine a target.

I can sign up as Auseor, a merchant working with a group of salvagers.

There was little work for a veterinary doctor these days with the war dragging on in Nebrask. More and more non-Rithmatists were being shuffled off into combat to patch up the holes left by shocking amounts of Rithmatists slain in recent battles. There just weren't enough children to sacrifice against the Forgotten threat, and so the army was forced to recruit those who had already served their time on the front lines, and those without a scrap of Rithmatic talent. Jenoue had signed up as a medic shortly after the skirmish which wiped out an entire unit of Rithmatists and supporting soldiers. She hadn't been expecting to be sent directly to the Tower, but perhaps here she could make the biggest difference. Do we get one action per cycle, or one action per turn? I'm assuming the latter.

The Straw/Snip tied lynch D5; if Snip/Coop had been randomly lynched instead of Straw, Stick would be the only elim left against six villagers. If Stick chose to hardclear Ventyl by killing someone(though probably by killing Ventyl to avoid this), there would be five villagers left against her. I don't know if you used an actual coin to decide who died though.

And so it is decreed that a single random coinflip decides the game instead of a best 2 out of 3, so as to not drag the game on for up to six more days. At least, I really hope we would have won with five against Stick, or six against Stick if she wanted to leave open the possibility of an evil Ventyl. I do have to apologise to Aonar for letting Aman think you were the Coinshot. Also to Rath for forgetting what Sart said about there being elims on both sides of the D2 lynch, which could not have been the case if Aman was telling the truth about being an alignment detecting Kandra. @Fifth Scholar, what was your final gambit? Would you have voted for Stick if you'd known that any mislynch would be instantly fatal? That wouldn't have helped though since Ventyl Soothed your vote.

I suppose you were immune, so it's not like you could have become a Zombie even if you wanted to. But Maill, what possessed you to make sure as many people as possible lost the game?