Mr Doctor

I have mixed opinions of the arguments so far. I'll point out what I do and don't like, and then give my own thoughts on the matter of Rand. I agree with this. There’s no way that you can ever know if a claim is legitimate until they’re revealed, and therefore the only person you can trust is yourself and the dead. Would Rand really sacrifice himself to save a Villager when the arguments against him aren’t even that convincing? It doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t agree that you should expect Rand come to that conclusion, since he was in the firing line. If you’re a player looking from the outside, you might decide to vote either way based on how much of a utilitarian you are, but if you’re one of the players in question, then would you really think that a single kill by someone who has a win condition that doesn’t even align with yours is worth your own life? Remember that at least two Elims are likely to be revived this game, given Max's win-con, so the value of one kill goes down even more. I think that’s a pretty significant question. The Spaniard’s win-con is to kill the Count. That means that the kill won’t necessarily be targeted at the person that the Village wants it to be. The Count is the weakest of the Elims because he has no special abilities beyond being able to be revealed, so having a counter to him isn’t as high-value as everyone is making it out to be. The Elims can plan to distance themselves from him early on, to mitigate damage when he goes down. This relates back to Sart’s point that I mentioned earlier. I think it’s pretty easy to figure out whom to value, and so if the only person you can trust is yourself, and you have an option of letting an already-suspected person live or saving yourself, is it even worth asking which option you choose? Note that Devotary’s claim was not enough to save them, so people may have still suspected them, which lowers the utility of letting them live. Of course, it might have just been too late and people weren't on to rescind their votes. This makes sense. The Spaniard would be too juicy of a target to leave active. Even if they get resurrected, the Spaniard is the last of the roles with actions who is closely linked to the Village. Although, I don’t believe as strongly as most that the Spaniard would act in the interests of the Village. From an Elim perspective, the Spaniard would naturally be worth killing, but from a Village perspective I’m not sure if they’re worth sustaining. In terms of Rand sacrificing himself, I imagine that it’s certainly possible that he would decide that. But as I’ve stated above, I don’t think that it’s necessarily indicative of anything, because Rand might have some reasons for letting Devotary die because he values himself higher. But I agree that it’s not a point in his favour that he did it this way. I don’t think that his tone was alignment-indicative. Given what he said, he seemed pretty irritated that people had organised a kangaroo court against him while he was inactive, and were close to lynching him without him even knowing. The point about the lack of defence is interesting, though. The real Spaniard would kill the Count, and the Count above all else. The Spaniard is a Villager, but a Villager with a separate win-con. So why would the Spaniard suspect that the one claiming to be them is the Count? As hilarious as that situation would be, it doesn’t make much sense. Overall, I agree with Dalinar’s logical progression up to their discussion of the elim!Rand, village!Devotary case. The arguments there don’t strike me as especially strong, and certainly not enough to say that “everything makes sense”. @Dalinar Kholin would you mind expounding on those thoughts a bit given what I've said? Given all of that, I don’t especially like the fact that Rand has remained in the background for so long. He’s never committed to much, as others have pointed out, either in votes or arguments. I think that it’s too late in the game to let someone sit back and refrain from taking a decent stance. Rand is experienced enough that he wouldn’t need this long to form significant opinions on people. Most of what he’s shared has been brief analysis of everyone, and so it’s hard to glean any sort of alignment from it. It does rather remind me of Elenion's behaviour. Len remained mostly active from the start, offering meta-discussion and RP without much deeper analysis, perhaps because he felt like people would be scrutinising him closely. He didn’t do much in terms of analysing other players, except in a couple of posts. Looking at it now, he was probably trying to remain active enough for people to feel familiar with him, but not so active that he ever drew attention. There are parallels between that and Rand's behaviour, and I think that's worth considering. Insofar Rand seems to have distanced himself relatively equally from everyone. I’m finding him very hard to read because he spreads his opinions so broadly and offers little in his analysis compared to others. I can’t really read anything from this behaviour because it looks like an entirely neutral player. Anyone have any thoughts on that? It seems remarkably similar to Doc12, and no one's suspecting him at the moment. I think that I'm of the opinion that neutrality and the occasional suspicious vote may not be worth the lynch, especially if Rand flips Village and we lose a good player. Rand hasn’t offered any substantial defence of himself yet, although I've seen him post just now as I'm writing this. Perhaps the lack of defence is just because he hasn’t had time to, but he might also think that any defence is going to be picked apart, and so the best thing to do is to let the Village argue itself into making a bandwagon against a different target. I'm not sure, that really feels like a stretch to me. Note that Rand has consistently been trying to bring all the players into the game. Virtually every cycle he's encouraged people to share their opinions on various developments, and addresses them specifically to do so. This could be him being a good sportsman regardless of alignment, but wouldn't a less active thread help the Elims more? The less that the Village knows, the better the Elims do. Back in C1 I voted on Araris rather than Elenion because Elenion offered some form of argument, and had been contributing more than Araris. I now recognise that this is a poor method of analysis, and I blame it on my inexperience. Rand has given comparatively shallower analysis than other players, but I shouldn’t consider that to be a tell of Elim-like behaviour. There are a lot of inactives and slightly-actives who have posted less, and I since I don't suspect them, Rand shouldn't be suspected solely for that reason. I think that it's pertinent that he has a smaller dataset for us to analyse, and that he's the only one who can fix that. Given this talk about additional win-cons, have there been any games with more than two factions? How did that work out?

Well, I knew that was going to be bad no matter how it turned out. Devotary seemed genuine, but we’ll see when she flips. Elbereth going down means that she had to use the Pill on herself (assuming she’s telling the truth, which I think is all but confirmed) which means that Devotary can’t be revived (someone correct me if I'm gravely mistaken). I don’t believe that she was an Elim, and even if she was, the past day was pretty bad for the Village, as I’ll get into. People didn’t state arguments, didn’t offer discussion, and didn’t come to any sort of reasonable conclusion when the Day ended. Devotary stated that she was the Spaniard, and provided a decent amount of counterargument to the people who voted on her with justification, and yet she was still within lynching distance. I imagine that it’s an issue of a lot of people not being available to be active, and so the lynch happened with no good options. The important thing now is to not bandwagon yet again. The vote on Rand was pretty unfair, because he wasn’t here to offer any justification and the cases against him were shaky to begin with. If you suspect him, tell us why. Even if it’s not a great argument. Maybe it’ll give everyone else some ideas that will bring more things to light. Currently we have no options, so let’s consider some. Personally, I suspect Eternum the most. As Rathmaskal points out: This is supplementary to my views on him throughout this whole game. He’s been quiet, but just active enough to provide justification for his votes, and hasn’t contributed to much of the discussion and analysis. There have been prompts for him to share his thoughts more and give us a decent read on him, but in my eyes, he hasn’t fulfilled that. His post against Devotary felt shaky at best, contradictory at worst. I’ve gone into more detail here. The crux of the argument is that he is acting in a way that is just active enough to provide an effect on the game, but not so active that he becomes transparent. That’s the easiest route for an Elim to take because it means that they don’t need to go into all of the effort of creating Village-like arguments, analyses, and posts. If they’re lucky, they slip under the radar because everyone is looking for contradictions in larger posts. I’ve already talked about how it’s better to encourage more activity and more arguments, because it makes it harder for the Elims to lie. A Villager knows that they are a Villager. They know that they are honest. Therefore, they might fall into the bias of believing that their honesty will protect them. All they need to do is provide as much information to people analysing them as they can, and honesty will be shown. In a lot of cases, this can work, and in my mind it's a tell of Village-like behaviour. An Elim has to either feign honesty, or be honest about specific things. Naturally, that’s harder. When under pressure, it’s in a Villager’s best interests to provide plenty of information to show that they have nothing to hide. That would be done in the form of responding to votes and suspicions laid against them. Eternum hasn’t done this. He’s remained in his semi-active state, and I’m starting to wonder about why. Is he actively avoiding analysts like Elbereth? Does he feel that if he is forced to defend himself, it will wrongfully incriminate him for some reason? If he knows that he is innocent, the best way to prove it is to become more active. It’ll give us more to work with, and if he is innocent, then we should be able to read that in his words. I said that I'd mention a post of Sart's, and here it is. Sart’s reasons for voting seemed…strange in this post. Self-preservation is certainly a good enough reason, but it would be nice to hear that from Sart himself. In terms of his arguments for Elenion: defending Araris was not necessarily a Village thing to do even though Araris was Village, unless Sart is saying that everyone who voted on Araris was an Elim, which is infeasible inconceivable. Any Villager who defended Araris would not have known that Araris was Village, and so there was nothing but the weight of Araris’s own arguments to go on. Sart hasn’t offered his opinion on those anywhere I can see. The second point of Sart’s is about self-preservation. This makes sense, you can only be certain that you are Village, and so naturally it’s not worth letting a lynch happen on you when you can prevent it. No issues there. I don’t like the vote on Roadwalker D1, or at least I don’t like these reasons for it. A longer game means that more information can be brought to light, and more chances for the Elims to slip up. Assuming random lynches every cycle, this is a war of attrition where one side outnumbers the other significantly, and therefore is favoured the longer things go on. But it isn’t random lynches, it’s information gathering, and longer games mean more information, which makes it harder for Elims to provide consistent lies. I’ve also already mentioned how Max can give us people who are all but confirmed to be Villagers by resurrecting those hit by the Elims. So why is Sart threatened by Max? As for why Sart would have voted on something which almost got him lynched, I’m not sure how good this defence is. He couldn’t have known that people would react the way that they did. And frankly, if several people distrusted him because of it, I’m willing to consider Sart in a worse light because of it, because they might have seen something I didn’t. There is a saving grace, however: why would Sart vote on the apparent Max when the Elims could (and did) reliably kill him that Night? It did indeed draw a lot of attention to him, which definitely helps Sart’s case. So, what does this mean about my opinions of Sart? Well, his reasons for voting on Elenion are logical (bear in mind that I'm considering the information level at which Elenion was not known to be an Elim), but self-preservation really isn’t enough to save him from the fact that it looks like he’s distancing himself from an Elim and ensuring which one goes down. Perhaps they agreed that Sart would be able to escape scrutiny better than Elenion, and so Elenion took the fall. I’d like some more justification from Sart. He’s on the watchlist, but he’s not going to get a vote from me until I know more. I’m going to take a look at the arguments against Rand, and see whether or not I agree with them. My feelings from yesterday were that they really didn’t justify the lynch, but we’ll see. Cadmium Compounder Does being difficult to read make him inherently bad? I suppose so, and I would probably argue something similar given my thoughts on the Village honesty bias that I mentioned earlier in this post, because that’s what I’ve observed in myself. But Rand is probably a skilled enough player that he doesn’t fall prey to that bias easily as a Villager, and would probably get more out of analysing and sharing his thoughts than hoping that someone sees something honest in his posts. It’s a matter of brute-force versus crafting responses to prove trustworthiness. I imagine that is what makes him hard to read, because of the level of lucidity. I agree with this the most, although I would have liked to see more of how you got to that conclusion @Cadmium Compounder. If I've missed a post of yours that explains it, please point me there. Your analysis so far has been good, and I'd like to see what you have to say about Rand. It’s worth noting that this discussion never happened, and CadCom never rescinded that vote. Dalinar Kholin I agree with this. He did seem to shy away from voting on Elenion despite having suspicions. Acting on a gut reading, yes, but there isn’t much to go on. This is still early in the discussion, so it’s reasonable that this vote occurred also to generate discussion. Devotary of Spontaneity Self-preservation here. It’s reasonable to vote on the next-highest person in the hopes that it saves you. The suspicion of Rand being protected makes sense, also, but it doesn't have any additional reasoning. Sart Mmm… Nope, don’t like this. If Sart believed that Rand was Elim, then the only vote manipulation that would take place in the original scenario would be a Villager attempting to solidify their vote. If he believed that both Rand and Devotary were Village, then he might have been trying to mitigate damage or something. If he had neutral reads on both of them, making it an iocaine situation doesn't really gain or lose anything. I don't really know, and I'd like some explanation. The potential argument here is that Sart believed that Devotary’s claim was legitimate and voted accordingly, but Sart didn’t say that. Avoiding vote manipulation is a poor argument. This actually invites vote manipulation, as anyone with either of the two manipulator items can guarantee the outcome of the vote. Looking through these, only two of them seem to justify a potential lynch against Rand specifically, and they aren't particularly detailed arguments. Make sure that the next Day has a lot of discussion before voting, and actually let the accused defend themselves. I do have my own suspicions of Rand, but it's late and I've spent long enough on this post that I'll save them for the next Day (both in and out of game ).

This ganging up on Devotary is precisely the sort of behaviour that I said we wanted to avoid. There are very few arguments that I’ve seen that justify this dogpile. People have been voting “just because”, or because other people are doing it. I’m really not seeing why we should vote on her. It looks like people are voting in the dark because really no other options; people haven’t been all that active this cycle, and I’m guilty of that myself. I don’t think there is enough evidence on Devotary to justify any sort of vote or bandwagon. People are outright stating that they don’t know what their reads are, and so they’re willing to vote in an attempt to get information. It’s a vain attempt, because this isn’t getting us anything. It’s spending resources that we’re getting virtually nothing out of. As I said in my previous post, setting a precedent of being able to lynch someone without proper arguments allows the Elims to lie easier and gives them free reign. It’s self-destructive, and I’m disappointed that we went down this path so quickly. That’s several voters that all state that they aren’t sure or that their vote might change. A lot of them have rescinded their votes in lieu of better discussion, which is good. I understand voting on someone to generate discussion, but this shows a bit of a problem. It really seems like you’re looking for an excuse, and neglecting to back up your arguments will mean that Elims don’t have to either, which makes their votes opaque, which makes it harder to spot them. If Devotary or Rand gets lynched today, what do we gain? On D4 we learn whether or not they were actually evil. What do we learn of the players? Not much, unfortunately. I also think that the logic on Rand is a bit shaky. Other than Doc’s testimony about him in previous games, a lot of this is coming down to gut feelings. As I think I’ve made clear, this is really bad when we have multiple bandwagons forming and people are jumping on them with no reason. And now Devotary has roleclaimed. I think that this is enough in her favour that a bandwagon against her is ridiculous, and I see that a lot of people are rescinding their votes. Good. I think that people haven’t looked enough at Eternum, who I dislike as seen in this post. I think that we need more discussion on him. Actually, he really does help the Village. When people get hit by the Elims and revived, they effectively get cleared as Village, because they got hit by the Elims. The alternative is for the Elims to kill their own player in order to have them maybe revived and cleared. If that gambit fails (because there are 2 people to revive each night), then they lose 1 of 5 players and waste a kill. Max can make certain Villagers almost immune to the lynch because of this. So he’s actually a massive asset to us in that regard. Believing that Max is an asset is not suspicious. Trying to convince the Village that he’s a threat to us is suspicious, because currently he’s neutral, as you say, but with a massive amount of potential to help. Could you explain why you suddenly go from agreeing that alienating Max isn’t great to thinking that such a belief is suspicious? It really doesn’t make sense to condemn someone for pointing out that Max is more helpful to the Village the Elims, because frankly he is. If Elims die, they’re already suspicious and can be lynched again. If Villagers die (at least not to the lynch), they can be cleared when they come back and Elims have to waste a kill on them to get rid of them again. Pocketing being attempting to defend a particular player? I disagree that this is pocketing, although there isn’t much of Devotary’s argument to analyse in this regard. But condemning a Villager for being unsure about whom to trust is like condemning a fish for swimming. Villagers being unsure is what this game is about. In terms of not wanting to commit, look at all of the players that I’ve quoted up above. None of them are especially sure, but we’re not going to lynch them because of it. Elims are by nature surer, because they know what the field looks like. Pointing out that someone is wavering on an issue is more of a Village tell to me. But the way you argue it, it makes it sound like Elim behaviour. Elims having some big overarching plan sounds pretty shaky to me. No plan survives first contact with the thread. If you look like you have a plan, it looks like you have more information, and that is incriminating. Framing is possible, but I really don’t think that it would come out in the way that you’ve described. If there was a coordinated discussion between Devotary and some other people, then I’d been inclined to agree with you. But there isn’t, and Devotary is on her own. I think that this vote is throwing unfounded suspicion in an attempt to take an innocent person down. I don’t think that Eternum is showing the behaviour of an upstanding Villager. This isn’t going to lynch you, but you are currently highest on my suspicion list. In terms of Rand, there really also isn’t enough information there. All of my arguments about Devotary's bandwagon also apply to his. Where’s the discussion? Don’t let apathy take over. If you can’t back up your argument, should you really be voting? Vote if you think so, but I don't think that you really have the grounds to do so.

-------------------------------------------------RP------------------------------------------------- The Dead Private Hobbert came running up to the group of pirates. He’d had to detour to find some heavy-duty glue because his ear had fallen off again, and you really don’t appreciate directional sound until it’s gone. “Don’t worry, I’m back,” he said, shoving his way through the gang of pirates. Well, he attempted to shove his way through. They parted for him on instinct, having all learned quickly that they really didn’t want to touch the Dead Private for any reason. He looked around, counting on his remaining fingers. When he got the mouse, it squeaked and told him that he’d counted a pirate twice. So he had to start again. “Twenty…three?” the Private asked the assembled pirates. “How many are we again?” “Twenty-five!” someone shouted from the back. “Naw, we were twenty-seven when we got here!” “Nineteen.” “Four!” The mouse on Hobbert’s finger squeaked again, and he held it up to his ear. It let out a barrage of squeaks, and Hobbert nodded. “Then we’re missing someone. Where’s the king?” “Which king?” a pirate asked. “The Shree King Eelz,” Hobbert said, looking around again. “He was right here.” The pirates glanced at each other guiltily. Hobbert rubbed his face with a hand, dislodging his nose. “At this rate, we’ll never capture the castle if we keep on arguing! You need to stop killing each other! The Captain would sort us out, but we killed Buttercup and now he’s sulking.” “Eelz was one of Humperdinck’s cronies, though,” a pirate pointed out. “Says who?” “Max. The little bugger should be around here somewhere, but he left a note that proved it.” Hobbert felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, but this time he knew that his stomach wasn’t actually being dislodged. These were regular feelings. There were traitors in the ranks. But a true soldier would not be deterred at the first sign of a mission becoming complicated. Hobbert slapped his nose back onto his face decisively. “Alright, maggots!” he said. “Why are we here?” The pirates glanced at each other. Most of them were halfway pickled, so being questioned by a walking corpse did not quite inspire thought. A few of them chortled at the irony of Hobbert calling them maggots when he had more than a few himself. When no one offered anything, Hobbert said, “We’re here to take a castle. But why are we here?” Again, silence. Something dripped in the dim corridors. Something dripped off of Hobbert. “Well, I’m here because I’m a soldier,” the Dead Private said. “I’m here because when war is brewing, my soul gets grabbed by a big old meat hook and shoved back into my body. I have a purpose. That’s what we’re lacking, and that’s why we keep on killing each other.” “…So?” a pirate asked. “So we need to find a purpose! Dying is terrible. Try not to do it. But I can die, I can be cut up and shredded and served up as kebabs at the fair, and I’ll just come back. I’ll rise from a grave come the next war. But I have a purpose.” Some of the pirates were looking a bit green. Maybe mentioning the kebabs was a bit far. “If you have a purpose,” Hobbert said, “then you have so much more. You become something more. Right now, we’re all just floating in this world, but purpose gives us direction. It makes your actions shake the foundations of the world, instead of just changing yourself. A purpose is man and meaning. And meaning is worth anything.” The pirates were nodding. Some of them were even looking Hobbert in the face, which was a big improvement. “When you have meaning,” Hobbert said, “then anything becomes worth it. Look at me, I’m a walking, decomposing lump of grey flesh and grave mud, my clothes were stolen off a scarecrow, I’ve got a mouse for a finger, my nose is stuck on with pins, my left arm with duct tape, my right ear with glue, I can’t taste or breathe, and I’m only able to talk because necromancer magics that I don’t understand are making my waterlogged lungs move. But I have purpose! I’m here because of my purpose.” He paused, looking around the gathered pirates. “And if purpose gives enough meaning that a dead man can live, it can make us work together again.” -------------------------------------------------RP------------------------------------------------- Sorry that I wasn't active last Night. I've got a lot of university work to do, but I'm dedicated to making a couple of decent-length posts each cycle. I do seem to have set a bit of a standard for myself, haven't I? I'll do a big analysis later today, as someone in a PM was asking about my opinions on some people I hadn't really mentioned yet, but for now I'll just leave some basic thoughts lying around. Elenion was evil! When the votes were going down I wasn't entirely convinced that they were justified at all well enough, but hey, progress. First Elim death that I've witnessed first-hand. I now know that I was completely suckered when I preferred Elenion back in D1 because he provided arguments. I don't think that I could have done anything better, and the vote wouldn't have been decisive against him D1, but still... Currently my main suspicion is on Eternum. Reasons for that should be pretty obvious based on my last post, but I'll expound on them more when I do my big analysis. Minor suspicions on Fifth, because of how he acted early-game. He was quiet for a while, then suddenly cemented the Araris vote with little justification or time beforehand. He's offered explanations, but I'm going to look at him further. Sart is going to get a writeup, but I really don't know if he could be considered suspicious. His post where he vote-switched from Straw to Elenion just feels weird. It's also weird that his vote was integral to getting Len lynched, even though his reasons for doing so were really shaky. I don't want to imply any of my thoughts about him until I've actually written them out in full, because it's just a strange scenario. I also want to do a deeper analysis of Bugsy. It will be good to hear his thoughts on how things have developed. At some point in the future I'm going to write up an explanation of all of the biases that I've noticed in myself. Hopefully vocalising them will help me avoid them better, and it will also let people understand my thought processes more. Not much to say on the Day insofar. Eternum has posted just as I'm writing this, but I'll leave a dissection of that until later. I hope that everyone who's voted Devotary is willing to provide good reasons for their votes. Sart's appears to be a poke for explanation, Fifth seems to understand that well, and Eternum has his reasons. While this is good to galvanise discussion, letting your poke-votes turn into real votes without enough discussion is how we get mislynches. As I've been convinced by Elbereth and others, voting is good for information gathering, but I still think that decisive votes need to be backed up. If we don't get arguments with our votes, then it defeats the point of voting to gather information. And that means that we're spending players and breaking trust for very little information. The scales just don't tip. If we back up our arguments, then the analysts can do their work to sort out the good from the bad. And a vote without justification leads to arguments about motive, and that's less helpful to most people than arguments about content. The number of players who can reliably pick out suspicion from behaviour is significantly smaller than the number of those who can determine if an argument contradicts itself, and so giving too little justification is reducing the number of people who can give us good analysis. And it also makes it easier for the Elims, because they don't need to act as hard if all they have to do to look genuine is write a single paragraph in a single post that justifies their vote. The Village's job is not just to analyse, it's to make the job of the Elims hard by making it harder to lie. And when they slip up, we can catch them. That was Mr Doctor's rationale on voting Araris Day 1... When you look at it like that, it's a fair suspicion, but this is part of my rationale, and indeed is out of context. I go into a lot of detail about it in other posts. Fifth is also correct, I took the three main players and voted based on what information I had on them. Bugsy had reacted and provided justification, and I thought that his side was correct anyway. Len had provided justification, which I respected even if I couldn't quite agree entirely with it. Araris gave comparatively nothing. And again, as Fifth says, since then I've added quite a bit to my opinions on Len. @Rathmaskal given the arguments that I've made for and against Elenion between that quote and now, what do you think? If you want me to explain a bit further, I'm happy to.

Sorry for the inactivity for most of D2. A lot has been said, and I’ll get to most of it eventually. For the moment, here’s my thoughts on the earlier posts. I want to explore CadCom’s discussion with Fifth, but I really want to get this done before D2 ends. I want to get to everything, but I might not have the time. (Discussion about Len) 1. Yes, I think that his lynch was bad because it lost us two powerful roles. 2. Yeah, fair point. Elenion seems more logical because he provided a lot more background to his thoughts than Araris did, the primary example being talking about Bugsy’s opportunism. But since you raise that point, it’s hard to tell, because an Elim would provide more background to a thought than just idly throwing votes out there. As contradictory as it is, Elenion seemed more genuine because he justified himself more than Araris did, but as I just said above, seeming genuine is exactly what Elims do, and as I said about Eternum in the post you’re quoting, I believe that a Village tell would be to act sporadically and more casually. Either Len was justifying himself because he genuinely believed what he was saying and was informing us of his opinion, or he was trying to make it appear like this evidence was his reason for voting the way he did. At the time, I believed it to be the former. Now, I’m not so sure. That’s why he’s top for suspicion, but that has been changing since my last post. Len had arguments, and so I respected the fact that he had some logic, even if I didn’t necessarily agree with it. But looking at it now, I may have been quick to believe an argument that backed itself up over one that did not. This is probably related to the issue where I preferred Len to Araris partially because Len was contributing. In that case it wasn’t a tiebreaker, but it was a factor. In analysing my own biases, I think that I am more likely to favour a good argument on merit of it being a good argument, and I am less likely to consider the bigger picture. This is probably because observing a couple of posts is easy, but matching that to a game-wide persona is a lot harder. 3. Fair point. I’ll concede to your experience of working with/against him before. 5. Yes, that’s true, he stated that it was indeed both reads which informed his vote. However, I’m curious to see whether his read of Araris was actually more important to him than his read of Bugsy. The reason I disliked his play in D1 was because a bad read on Bugsy seemed less believable to me than a good read on Araris, but as you say, the difference is probably not especially noteworthy. 5a. I wouldn’t put it past him to be aware of that. Oh look, another IKYK! 5b. It felt heated because of how quickly it turned into factions and vote-slinging. I was expecting something slower-paced, and as is probably all too clear now, I feel like it all escalated from pretty much nothing. It got the discussion going, certainly, so I suppose that Araris’s death was not in vain (as you mention elsewhere in your post). Now that I’ve had some time to digest what I’ve gathered on Elenion…I don’t know whether I actually think that he’s suspicious. I have a lot of information on both sides. I don’t agree with him that Bugsy was acting suspicious, and I find that the rest of his posts aren’t especially relevant to the discussion. Not to mention that here he never actually states why he thinks that Araris is Village. He just says that he is, in accordance with the idea of him voting because of Bugsy, which we seem to agree on. Additionally, Len mentions a few times how 3rd and 4th votes are typical of Elims. Whether or not that’s true, it shows that Elenion believes that. And he wants us to know that he believes that. Wouldn’t a vote in 2nd, then a reminder that specific votes that aren’t in 2nd are correlative with Eliminator behaviour, imply something about what he’s wanting us to think? That’s not any sort of tell, but it’s another thing to consider. Gut feelings and a few arguments are on his side, though. I agree with him that Bugsy’s reaction was Village. And you’ve already discussed that my first post of D2 was mostly in support of him. I think that he was in a position to continue his attack on Bugsy, given the way that the first lynch turned out, and he didn’t. I know, this isn’t especially solid or decisive. My opinions definitely have potential to change because of that. Given the fact that he was centre-stage during the Araris affair, and now has some unpleasant light shining on him, I would expect an Elim to attempt to deflect blame and distance themselves from the issue. However, he hasn’t. He’s remaining on the side that he chose, and is now analysing the bandwagon for suspicious behaviour. That’s risky for an Elim, and you can’t exactly justify it under “aggressive Villager” like he has for the previous actions. It’s not aggressive at all, it’s rational for someone who believes in their argument. So, I don’t know what to think. As you can see, Elenion is the one I have the most thoughts on, and so naturally my profile of him is the most conflicted. (This is the discussion about Bugsy) 2. I think that Bugsy had ample opportunity to defuse the situation and didn’t, which is something that I thought was noteworthy. He explained himself, yes, but focused more on the fact that Araris was going after him than the original issue. 3. No, I meant that our hypothetical elim!Bugsy organised a trap by trying to bait one of the aggressive Villagers, and Araris happened to step into it. They wouldn’t have known whom to coordinate against until someone sprung the trap. (Discussion of Rand) 1a. Yes, very true. It’s becoming quite evident that with two kills every cycle, we don’t actually have that much time, and I don’t feel like I know anything concrete out of it. A positive that this last cycle has had for me is the realisation that this game is a lot like complicated resource-management: we spend players to gain information. It’s a heartless economy, yes, but I suppose that economies are heartless by nature . 1. I stand by my assertion. If a player gave us a good read on their thoughts, then I would be less likely to suspect them due to their vote, on average. They’ve shown that they’re not afraid that we see what they think, and they also have to act accordingly or be called up for being inconsistent. Eternum didn’t do this, he hasn’t really given us much to go on. As I said, that looks like shy Elim behaviour trying to get things done, but also wanting to escape an early lynch. 2. Alright, this makes a lot of sense. An alternative theory is then that Elims can reveal information over a period of time in order to simulate progression of thought, but I guess that it’s probably very hard to fake. Yeah, you make a very good point. 3. It was mostly that he hasn’t covered for himself or justified anything. He’s just…ignored a lot of this. At the time of writing that original post I believed that this was indicative of Village, because an Elim would try to defend themselves against analysis. But now that it’s been around 24 hours and he’s had a chance to provide new content, I’m starting to wonder if my beliefs here were really all that well-founded. When faced by a lot of analysis, I would expect an Elim to attempt to cover for themselves with some kind of response justifying their actions and arguments. But Eternum hadn’t done that, and so I thought that it was a Village read. But given your clarifications, I don’t agree with that so strongly. Would it be logical for an Elim to, when faced with biting analysis, avoid posting so that they gave less to analyse? There are a lot of experienced players here, and Eternum might not be confident in his ability to argue well enough to counter the analysis. The counter, then, is to give them nothing to attack. I find myself coming around to your side a bit more, but I’ll get to that later. 4. Fair enough. That does make sense, and I’m starting to agree that voting is definitely a good way to get discussion going. 5. Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. But from a certain perspective, someone did die mostly at random. Or, at least, the discussion that led to their death was at random. Araris initiated with what seemed like a random vote, and then doubled-down when he thought that Bugsy acted suspiciously. While we found justification eventually, things did begin randomly. But I can’t really see things kicking off in any other way, so your point makes sense. (Discussing votes and mislynches) I think that I’ve been convinced that voting is good, because we’ve got a lot of information out of the first lynch. Since we’ve already had one fake roleclaim, it really makes no sense to fake-claim again. Unless you’re Village and are trying to cover for the real Max because of the threat that Max poses to both sides, and you think that a living Max is better for the Village than a dead one. That would be a pretty big self-sacrifice and act of trust in your fellow Villagers, and given that fact and that you haven’t been “good” for a while, I don’t believe that this is the case. At this stage, when Pills are being made and distribution is expected, everyone is going to be looking at Max for revives, and that level of scrutiny would be awkward for any player if they don’t deliver on promises. So a fake-claim at best gains you a small aegis from both sides (I think that I’ve mentioned this in an earlier post), but that lasts about as long as you can avoid handing out Pills. And if you aren’t agreeing to help either side, they’re going to decide that you’re probably helping the other side, and off you for itf. I did say that it felt very convenient, but after considering the stage of the game, the risk of fake-claiming Max is far too high for either Village or Elim. Eternum I said that I’d give some more thought to Eternum, so here we go. Elbereth’s arguments have made me rethink mine, so let’s do this. He hasn’t posted much, either in terms of post or word count. I’ll show how my opinion is changing, so let’s discuss the thoughts that I originally had regarding him and where I stand now on them. 1. He appeared to be reading the field before stepping in. Now that he’s had two full Days and a Night to provide some sort of significant analysis and has come up with very little, I think that this is no longer valid. His inactivity may then be something else. I stated above that he might be simply trying to avoid the fire of the analysts by not giving them a target to shoot at. Elbereth has proven herself to be very good at pulling posts apart (as I can see firsthand), and so Eternum, who is already in her line of fire, would not want to give her anything. But I think that this is telling in and of itself. 2. His progression of thought implies that he has some greater plan, and therefore more information than he’s letting on. I no longer believe this. Looking at it now, I’m surprised that I even thought that in the first place. I agree that it’s a very risky strategy, and I imagine that it would be ridiculously difficult to pull off simulating progression of thought. This is now infeasible. 3. He would have backed away from the issue if he was an Elim. He…sort of did. At the time of writing that, I had given him a grace period to reply because he hadn’t been all that active initially. I hoped that he would come forward and clear up some things, but the Day is almost over, and he hasn’t. That doesn’t reflect well on him. 4. Suspecting the three core members is not suspicious. I stand by this. Sorry Elbereth, but if you’d taken a solid position like they had, I would suspect you as well. Even though I was on Bugsy's side during that affair, I suspect him now. I agree that you wouldn’t have to be certain, but acting aggressively just gives people more to analyse, and therefore more potential ground to form conclusions about your alignment. At that stage in the game, those initially active players are the ones we have the best information on, and so naturally at least one of them is going to be suspicious, especially if they stand on opposing sides. Only one of my arguments still stands, and it’s not an especially strong one. I don’t consider stating suspicion to be any sort of tell either way, because suspicion is what this game is about. I now believe that Eternum’s lack of response says more than anything else. He hasn’t offered much analysis, hasn’t really responded to Elbereth’s point, and isn’t giving us anything to go on. If he was Village, I would at least expect something to defend himself, unless he’s trying to avoid analysis now that a spotlight is on him. I’ve already discussed this, though, and this is going to be a long post so I’ll refrain from repeating myself for the sake of everyone’s attention spans. A gilded cage, I say. This is a lot of fun. I’ve been looking for a cool community to join for a while, and I really hope that this is the one. I’ve refreshed my posts, too. Twice now. I now write up my posts in Word because I don’t trust myself to not be an idiot. Fair suspicion. If we were in each other’s shoes, I would probably come to the same thought. It did feel really strange (not Elim-strange, just regular strange) that no one had mentioned it, and yet it was someone who I would really not consider to be kill-worthy based on their actions. Given Val’s explanation, though, I understand better now. Alright, I’ve blabbered for a couple thousand words, and I don’t feel like I’m all that close to finding a decent vote. Eternum is suspicious from his inactivity and Len’s on my list, but I don’t think that I have enough on either of them to make any sort of solid decisions. I honestly hadn’t suspected Eternum all that much before Elbereth pointed it out, and so I’m not sure if I have the grounds to vote on him just yet. That might change, but I’m really not sure at this point.

Well, first of all, thank you! No, I haven’t. But I’m really enjoying the mystery and analysis so far. I have Steel to thank for convincing me jump into this. Hmm, I suppose. Then the difference here is that Araris’s was entirely to generate discussion, whereas now there is actual evidence. I guess that any vote does seem pretty damning to me, even if you can rescind it. Personally, I think that voting intention should be all that is required, and voting itself can come later once it’s been discussed a bit. That’s how I want to play for the moment, as hindsight is making me feel like I jumped onto the Araris bandwagon when I really shouldn’t have. Good to hear that you’re coming into the fray this cycle .

-------------------------------------RP------------------------------------- The Dead Private Hobbert lingered in the doorway as the Captain wept over the body of Buttercup. He considered offering some comforting words, but he knew that the last thing that a grieving lover wanted to hear was the wet, grinding tones of a walking corpse. Maybe once things had settled down, Hobbert would recommend a place where the soil was soft and the beetles didn’t bite too hard, where Buttercup could be buried. Yes, the Captain would like that. He was sure of it. And if he got offended…well, it took a lot of stabbing and dismembering to make Hobbert stay down. He was sure that any man would give up after the corpse they were beating kept talking even after head had been severed from body. Hobbert turned away and walked after the others. He found himself walking in step with the Shree King Eelz. Hobbert said, “Good day, Majesty, One known as Shree.” The Dead Private paused for a moment, having not quite affiliated the words in his head with the ones on his tongue. He tried again regardless. “Do you think that the murder Which has just transpired Was caused by an error Or by villains, devised? I’d hate to suggest And point fingers (or mouse) But if traitors exist And already they pounce... We cannot let them persist Lest it is us that they trounce!” The small part of Hobbert that held his last dusty vestiges of decency let out an agonised gurgle. Had he really just rhymed “pounce” with “trounce”? And it wasn’t even in any decent meter! But…at least he was free of that blasted lisp. He was sure that this “True Love” was affecting them all somehow, and now he feared that his mouth would begin spouting elegiac couplets. Maybe the Shree King would offer something on the matter, or perhaps that strange little girl with the crayons who kept following them around. As Hobbert limped after the group, he glanced back at the kitchens. A sad thing indeed, their love cut short. But sadder still that Buttercup’s tendons had proven too difficult to detach quickly. Ah, well, it would have been strange to wear a woman’s leg anyway. -------------------------------------RP------------------------------------- Wow, I am...very bad at poetry. If you survived reading that, here are my thoughts and analyses insofar: Elenion Currently on my suspicion list. Of all the players who have been active so far, Elenion is the most suspicious. As I’ve said, Elenion actually had reasons to vote against Bugsy, whereas regardless of Araris’s alignment, Araris seemed like too much of a risk to keep around, hence the way that I voted. I can see now that it really wasn’t worth the lynch, but I suppose that it happens. This seems logical, but Bugsy wasn’t suspicious. He clarified himself, but Elenion didn’t withdraw his vote. However, Elenion does have a good point about Bugsy creating a target of opportunity, and his vote against Bugsy does seem to be based on some logic. Elenion is acting aggressively, but if this was Elim behaviour, then I think he’d be a lot more careful. In the space of a single cycle he’s created a division between himself and Bugsy, which either looks like distancing or genuine distrust. It would certainly explain why he jumped so quickly onto Araris’s side. However, he also distanced himself somewhat from Araris by going after Bugsy, rather than immediately defending Araris. Ignoring Araris’s reveal, I would say that it would be a very blatant (almost too blatant) act of Elim protecting. But since Araris was Buttercup, that naturally doesn’t hold. I don’t trust Len to not be the Man in Black, as it’s the only way to explain why he was so aggressive, other than an Elim tying himself to a sinking ship. But that also seems overly aggressive, especially in the first Cycle. Given that there were two vigilante kills hanging around, if it didn’t work out then Elenion paints a target on his back. It’s a bit strange to see him suddenly turn around and start to act like a regular analyst after taking a lead role in the crem-show of the previous Day. But I suppose that he might have been doing something similar to what I did: taking a side not because the person on the other side is bad, but because the person on his side is good. In this case, he would have had a better read on Araris than Bugsy, and took sides accordingly. Just because he didn’t spent time lamenting the loss of the other person on his side doesn’t mean that he’s an Elim. I have to say that the change in gear is good, because as I said earlier, having this escalate would have just ended badly. Bugsy Seems genuine to me. His reactions are defensive, as one would expect, which is either masterful acting or actual innocence. The shape of the interactions so far has all been a result of a small disagreement between him and Araris. I think that it’s too much of a stretch and has too many variables to consider that to be setup for a vote. I don’t believe that he could have known that Araris would have jumped on what he said and had it lead to this. However, I wonder if his original statement was a bit of a bait to see who would jump on him. He got Elenion and Araris, but Araris was Village. So that might mean that he and Elenion were working together to try and bait Araris, but that really feels like a stretch. Given the developments of Araris’s alignment reveal, I would say that it paints Bugsy in a bit of a negative light solely because of how quickly things spiralled out of control. It’s hard for me to tell, though, because it seemed like Araris was the instigator, and I don’t believe that Araris would let himself be baited so easily. Logically, then, there was something happening on the other end, and some of the votes on Araris might have been coordinated to ensure that he went down. So either Bugsy was the one chosen to escalate the situation, or everyone took advantage of a genuine disagreement between two Villagers. Doc12 Nothing solid so far. He’s completely neutral as far as his posts go, and his actions seem reasonable. I would be a bit hypocritical if I said that his justification for voting on Araris was suspicious since some of my own reasons were based on his analysis. Something that is bugging me is the neutrality of his arguments. Do players often sit in the background and offer analysis like this? Doc seems very nice and entirely neutral, which is making an alarm bell ring somewhere for me. Almost everyone else who posts an equivalent amount justified their votes a decent amount. Doc didn’t spend especially long on his initial argument against Araris, and spent far more time on analyses of everyone else. That looks like him focusing more on building trust and interaction with everyone else, and less on the outcome of the initial lynch. As for what that means, either he is Village and wants to prove that he’s engaged and trustworthy to everyone, or if he’s Elim then he’s trying to do the same thing to tie himself to everyone and become harder to lynch, and he also wasn’t especially concerned with Araris going down because he knew that Araris was a Villager. …Argh, this is doing my head in. I want to trust you, Doc, but I don’t know what to think. Randuir Another neutral, albeit more focused on game mechanics rather than individual posts like Doc is. I’m not getting anything on Rand, other than the fact that I’m not getting anything on him. It’s a similar situation to Doc, where I’m not hugely aware of his alignment because the predominant focus of his posts has been elsewhere. Is that what experienced players tend to do? Since the first lynch is always based on very little information, is it best to just let it happen and accept that you can’t really get much out of arguing it? So far, he’s seemed a lot like a mediator and facilitator of the argument, and not tried to swing it either way. It seems innocent enough, but as I said similarly about Doc, playing neutral analyser also sounds like a nice cover for justifying Elim-like behaviour while still seeming neutral. I’ve noticed myself falling into the bias of "no-read == Village" when a base case should really be distrust. I wonder if Rand is aware of that, and is attempting to escape attention by staying close to the wall. At the same time, Elim-like behaviour would have likely been an attempt to sow discord among existing arguments, and I think that Rand’s distance from it probably means that he’s clean. Either that or he’s thinking at a level higher than me and wants me to think that. I know, extremely helpful analysis: “This person could be an Elim. OR they could be a Villager!” That’s everyone that’s posted enough for me to say anything meaningful about. The others I haven’t noticed quite so much, at least not enough to say anything more than “seems neutral”. I’ll grace you with my unfounded ramblings soon enough! I agree with some of your points here. He’s been quiet enough that it might be an Elim trying to read the field before stepping in, and hoping that his vote gets ignored under the weight of more vocal players. If someone like Elenion or Bugsy had done something like this, it probably wouldn’t be suspicious, because they’re so active. But someone hiding in the background and only remaining active enough to determine easy targets smells fishy to me. Claiming to have only skimmed the thread, and claiming to have only skimmed it when Doc called him out on it, sounds like he was only too glad to accept an excuse for staying quiet. From that, Eternum is either acting like a hunting Elim or he’s genuinely quiet. I’ll leave it up to experienced players to give a verdict about whether this is in-character or not. I disagree that progression of thought is any sort of tell for Village. An Elim naturally has more information to go on, and so they are more likely to have solid progression of thought. Something that I would consider to be a Village tell would be acting sporadic and focused on individual interactions. Calculatedly revealing pieces of a plan over time sounds more suspicious to me. If anything, this condemns him more in my eyes. However, I don’t think that he’s Elim. Any Elim worth their salt iocaine would probably become uncomfortable after wavering on an issue like that, and the safest option is to back away, which would be in-character for a quiet Elim player. And suspecting each of the three core members is frankly quite reasonable. I’ve certainly suspected all three of them, and I think that it’s healthy to suspect anyone that takes a solid stance that quickly, since there isn’t anything else to go on. I don’t think that this is sufficient evidence to vote. It might be that I want to be less quick-firing with my votes, but I feel like stating your opinion and discussing it before voting is a better approach than starting more discontent. While attempting to galvanise the discussion with a vote is certainly effective, it didn’t do us much good last time. Seems…convenient. That can protect you as an Elim because you’re trying to proactively reduce suspicion, and it can also protect you as a Villager because the Elims don’t want to get rid of Max given the two revives. But I suppose that is the point of Max. But over a year always being the bad guy sounds a bit rough, so I’m willing to believe you in the interest of letting you actually play. The fun of the game is, of course, why we are doing this. Except for those who draw their daily energy from misleading other people, of course… Woohoo, the first official analysis on me! For whatever reason that makes me happy, even though it’s not quite as stellar as I’d like. Only 5.5? Ah, I’ll take it . It’s not quite that I didn’t see anything wrong with Bugsy, it’s more that I felt like he was being unfairly vindicated for stating a technical truth: suspicion went up by 1%. When there was an overreaction against him, I sympathised and took the side that I believed was the underdog. When Araris didn’t back down after Bugsy justified himself, and Bugsy acted as I would expect of a Villager, then I decided that there wasn’t much to be suspicious of. But the greater part of it was that I believed Araris was either (to use D&D alignments ) Chaotic Neutral and therefore unreliable, or was an aggressive Elim. As it turns out, he wasn’t the latter, and I’m still not sold that I was wrong for the former. As for the contribution factor, it’s partially that, and partially a case of a greater dataset versus a smaller one. I had more from you than I did Araris, and since what Araris said painted him in a bad light, I voted accordingly. I simply had more to go on from you, and read it better (although there might have been a bias towards helpfulness there, I recognise that). I was hoping that he would defend himself more, and if he had the same amount of content as you, my average read across all of his posts would likely have leaned more towards Villager. Since he didn’t, all I had to go on was the worse stuff and the intent which I gleaned from it, which is naturally unreliable. Hence my vote on your side of the debate. Uh…this is a bit premature, isn't it? As I said about Elbereth’s vote, I think that given what happened on Day One, voting on quiet players without opening it up to discussion first is just going to end up with more mislynches. I feel like you’re firing blindly in the dark, and we only need to look at the Araris bandwagon to see how quickly that spiralled out of control. We’ve seen the price of being willing to vote on a player to initiate discussion. Also, why is no one talking about Kidpen’s death? What happened there? They barely said anything, and now they’re gone. Unless I missed something, that was completely unjustified, unless something happened in a PM. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

First blood... ----------------------------RP---------------------------- The Dead Private Hobbert stared down that the broken form of Araris—or was it Fade? He stroked the mouse that was tied to his hand in place of his right ring finger. The mouse bit him, and he imagined for a moment that he could feel it. The Private had seen his share of death. A military man who found himself dragged back to the land of the living with every major conflict always would. But he knew death better than most, what with actually being dead. It wasn’t all that fun. Oblivion tended to get a little bit tedious after the first few eternities you spent floating on the lightless sea. And when you were above ground, you kept on having to run away from the dogs that thought you were a nice piece of mobile jerky. He felt a sort of kinship with the corpse on the floor. A few of the other pirates were getting happily drunk on the late Araris’s liquor. Private Hobbert took a cup and drank to show his camaraderie, even though he couldn’t taste it and it leaked out of the hole in his oesophagus. Then, while he thought that the others weren’t looking, Hobbert knelt down by Araris/Fade and started to tug on the body’s left leg. His own was starting to show some signs of wear, and you could never be without too many spare parts. “Waste not, want not, mate,” he muttered as he looked for the best way to detach it. He smiled—a hideous sight to anyone who had eaten in the last few hours—as he realised that he’d managed to say an entire sentence without that blasted lisp going off. ----------------------------RP---------------------------- I stand by my vote, even though I don’t like the outcome. Araris was the worst of the bunch, but that doesn’t mean that he was bad. He was just unreliable. As I said in my last post, either he was willing to sacrifice Bugsy to get things moving, or he was making a coordinated move. But that’s the only behaviour I have to go on, and I don't feel like it completely justified a Lynch. I suppose that the first Lynch is always a bit like this, with misunderstanding and overreaction. I think that the Bugsy-Araris fight got blown far out of proportion, and it looks like we already have animosity brewing. I think that everyone should take a step back. The last thing we need is a Bugsy-Araris fight turning into a Bugsy-Elenion fight, because I think that both of them have just been caught up in something non-constructive, and neither of them have any reason to suspect each other or to be considered suspicious by the rest of us. Did Fifth Scholar get two votes? He’s listed as voting for Devotary and Araris, despite rescinding his vote on Devotary in the same post as voting for Araris. And speaking of, it was a little strange to see Fifth get on that bandwagon despite having said virtually nothing all game. I suppose that it’s reasonable that he wanted to cement the vote, as he said, but I haven’t seen any other evidence of him wanting to gather intel. It’s not condemning, but I think that it’s worth pointing out.

No, there is only one poisoned cup, as I understand it. The cup that gets poisoned is determined by the choice of whomever comes first on the scoreboard out of the two people. The person who chooses is the second person on the scoreboard.

Thanks for the tips! I'm happy to RP with anyone who asks. A zombie pirate will be a great addition to any character interaction! -------------------------------------------------------------- “Twue wuv has power,” Private Hobbert said. “That’s what evweyone is saying. Wook at the Captain! He was dead, and Miwacwe Max bwought him back!” He snatched the handful of fingers out of Senfalo’s hand and stuck them haphazardly onto his stumps, then gave them an experimental wiggle. Half of them bent the wrong way and one of them was actually a rather disgruntled mouse, but Hobbert had worn worse attire in his many days. “As for mysewf, I was meant to be wessuwected on the Eighth Day of the Eighth Year of the Eighth Decade since my wast wising fwom the gwave. But the bwoody witual didn’t go wight! Now I’m onwy Mostwy Wessuected! And it’s the Ninth Day! I swear, I’m weaving a one-star weview on those usewess necwomancers as soon as we sort out this mess.” The Dead Pwivate—ahem, the Dead Private, sorry—Hobbert pulled himself to his feet and took off after the King Eelz. “Come on, Senfawo, and you too, Fade or whatever you are! Stopping a mawwiage is what we’we here faw! Stopping the Pwince’s mawwiage, so that the Captain’s can happen instead!” As his uneven footsteps flopped down the hallway, Hobbert called back, “And maybe we can fix this damnation wisp!” -------------------------------------------------------------- It's currently 3am for me, but I'll be up in time for the end of Day One. Until then, I'll leave my thoughts and my vote here. I don’t like the way that Araris and Elenion jumped on Bugsy in the way that they did. Bugsy made an innocent statement that didn't seem at all suspicious from a technical standpoint, and justified it well with a follow-up post, but they haven't yet rescinded their votes. That may change, but it currently smells unpleasant to me. Araris was willing to vote against Bugsy for virtually no justification, based on a statement was entirely reasonable on Bugsy’s part, and Elenion followed him. As Doc, my fellow medical practitioner, pointed out: that’s unsustainable. I can think of two potential conclusions from this. Firstly, they are happy to sow distrust where none needs to exist in the name of getting the ball rolling. Secondly, and perhaps worse, they’re coordinating. Either option is not nice in my books. If they will happily sacrifice the integrity and net trust of the Village, then I’m not sure if they should be considered reliable, regardless of roles. If they’re coordinating, then we have a bigger problem. However, Elenion has offered helpful posts earlier, and appears to be well-engaged in this game. Since the vote against Bugsy only a small part of his activity so far, and the bulk of it has been discussion on the game mechanics, I’m more willing to trust him to try and move things along with a vote. Regardless, this has earned him a place on a list. Araris was the instigator of this attack on Bugsy, and he doesn’t nearly have the saving graces that Elenion does. I can’t say that I have any idea about Araris's alignment, but as I stated earlier, either conclusion from this is not good, which means that voting on him is my best option. I hope that everyone’s names can be cleared and we can resolve it before this turns into something worse.

Max is already extremely powerful, as others have pointed out (and I'm a bit concerned about the power that he gives the Elims if they get him on their side, but that's not my point). Given how valuable he is, the only way that he'll go down is by accident or if one side decides that keeping him around isn't worth having the other side benefit from him. The Elims have less members, so he's probably going to be a greater asset to them. It might be worth it, then, to lynch him and deny them that advantage. But at the same time, our roles are all quite powerful, and having Max on our side would be very handy for keeping them around. If he has protection from the lynch, he can resurrect known Elims that can be chain-killed again. If he's with the Elims, though, they have naturally less members so a resurrection is more valuable to them. The point of all of that is to say that Max already has a huge advantage, because pretty much everyone wants to keep him alive. That means that his job is made all the easier, so it makes sense for there to be less Elims. I can see a Max in a game with 6 or 7 Elims just sitting back under the aegis of both sides and biding his time. 5 Elims means that he would need to act faster, and makes the role more interesting. It's entirely reasonable that he has been made more difficult to play, in the interests of stopping him from being so passive. That said, and given Araris's good points, I think that there's too little information to speculate much further. The arguments of nerfing Max and Steel adjusting for the player count are both pretty decent. I do think that Steel was expecting a lot of people for this game, given the fervor with which he advertised it and the number of roles, so retrospectively adjusting doesn't make much sense to me. The plot thickens! I'm sorry about all of those horrible things I said regarding lynching you earlier in the post.

I don't believe I've talked to you before. Hello! There can never be too many medical personnel, I think, especially with the amount of death and Mostly-Death that's going to start happening very soon. I'm not sure how the Dead Private became this. He was meant to be just a pun, but I suppose that the idea of a mournful zombie pirate was just too entertaining to pass up. Feel free to have your character accidentally lop off a limb or extremity. He'll just stick it back on. What is the etiquette around making other peoples' characters say and do things in your RP? I don't want to try and take over anyone's character, and so I'll be avoiding it, but if someone could let me know what the general feelings are on the matter, that would be great. Personally, I'm fine with people making Hobbert do what they want, but he's sort of designed to be a bit of a punching bag. ------------------------------------------------------- Private Hobbert sighed in relief as Senfalo fastened his arm to his shoulder. Twine be damned, he would be sure to seek out some of this wondrous adhesive tape. They hadn’t had it last time he’d risen from the grave. “You have my thanks,” Hobbert said, flexing his left hand. “Would you mind handing me my nose?” “Where did it go?” Senfalo asked. Hobbert saw him turn a little bit green. People always seemed to do that around him. “It feww between those fwagstones,” Hobbert said, pointing. He hesitated for a moment. “I mean, it feww between the fwagstones.” Senfalo gave his ears a quick clean with the point of his cutlass. “So you're heawing this, too?” “Fwagstones,” Hobbert muttered. “Fwagstones. Maybe the mortician sewed my wips on wong. Wast time, they were on upside-down!" Hobbert heard Senfalo make a noise of pity, but it might have just been the other pirate fighting down a bit of vomit. "But you're speaking funny as weww," Hobbert said, kneeling down and scrabbling between the fwagstones—ahem, I mean flagstones—for his nose. He levered it up and slapped it on his face. It stuck there, secured by a pair of metal pins. "Maybe it's the mawwiage. Do you think that wuv is in the air?" The Private was not a believer in the power of love. He’d had all thoughts of it drilled out of him in the army, and more cycles of death and undeath than he had remaining teeth had left no room in him for compassion. But…if if there was love in the air, and they were all being affected like this, then perhaps he wasn’t quite as dead as he thought. That was enough to make his heart consider beating. It didn’t, of course, but the thought was there. Hobbert didn't know how to recognise true love in the air, but perhaps Senfalo, who still had blood and bone marrow and all of those good living-person things, would be able to judge it better.

Does this mean that I'm now on negative votes, and so I'm immune to one person's vote?

I'm keen, if you think that our characters would work. Dead Private Hobbert is a gloomy, partially decomposing, Mostly Resurrected corpse with a respect for authority. What sort of person is Elenta?

I'm here, I'm here! RP: At Vable’s command, the Dead Private Hobbert ran as best as any Mostly Resurrected man could. The twine that connected his left arm to the rest of his body kept on coming undone, so he had to stop and fix that no less than three times. “That’s the last time I go to a mortician for help,” he grumbled. “Next time I need to be put back together, it’s straight to the taxidermist.” As he hobbled down the corridor, shedding a toe or two, he made sure to follow one of his fellow pirates. He couldn’t quite see who it was, but he knew that he would soon need some help to reattach his leg or something equally irritating. “Wait for me!” Hobbert called after the pirate. He really didn’t want to have to tie his bits back together on his own.

First game for me. Expect rookie mistakes. Sign me up as the Dead Private Hobbert. A military man who never rose high in the ranks, Hobbert was slain when he fell off his horse during parade and fell into the ranks of pikemen who were marching on either side of the cavalry. He's now returned from death after being summoned by the impending war. Now to go and research by rewatching the movie...