Down the rabbit hole: Lucid dream mafia - Game Thread

[kokirion]

...

... *you feel something sharp on your right arm, something prodding you*

... ... ... "Wakie-Wakie" ... "I said Wakie-Wakie"

"No, mum, I don't want to wake up yet. I had such a strange dream..."
- "Don't worry. It was all just a dream. No, really, you just had a dream. .... to be straightforward, you're STILL IN THIS DREAM!!! Huahahahahaha"

A shock went right through you. It can't be, It just CAN'T be, you couldn't believe your ears. You opened your eyes and saw what was just half a meter away from your face:

Spoiler

Monokuma suddenly realized he still had a knife soaking in blood in his hand, which he quickly tried to hide. "I eh... .... let's get to business!"

As shocked as you were, you checked all your limbs and felt a sense of relief when you saw you were unharmed. You looked around you, to see that everyone of you was luckily still there.

But only the place was different. You remember being in some enchanted forest, in front of some door. Now you were standing in some kind of a courtyard.

In the middle of the area there was a small castle. In front of that castle, where you were standing at that moment, was a courtyard. On the right of the castle there seemed to be a graveyard, and somewhere on the left you saw a strange fountain.

All of a sudden, colours started to appear in front of you:

It appeared to be a map of the area.



"Ahem", Monokuma said. "This is the map of the region you will be situated in for the rest of the game. It is subdivided into 4 smaller areas: The Courtyard, the Great hall, the Graveyard and the Fountain of Dreams and Miracles. Every area has its own set of distinct rules and may have additional/different ways to interect with the people around you. Everytime you wake up, I will briefly introduce you to the area and what this means for the rest of the day. Although the area seems to be as wide as the eye can see, there is an invisible wall encircling the whole region (as you can see on the map), so leaving this place is not possible. Not until those that keep this dream from collapsing are still alive.

Oh. And you should be thanking me. You lot passed out yesterday, I had to dragg you to this spot all by myself. And I'm just an old and weak bear, you know."

Living Players (18)
Spiritual Mask Salesman
Foo
Repentance
Dekunut
Sadia
Johnny Sooshi
Crus@der77x
Mido
LittleGumball
A Link in Time
Musicfan
Ari
Mellow Ezlo
Zelda13t
Pendio
Doc
Viral Maze
Frozen Chozen

Players cast into limbo (1)
Shroom - Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, drifter (lynched day 1)

One of you is feeling nauseous... but everyone survived this night!

Spoiler: The Courtyard: the rules, game features and introduction to this area

The Courtyard is the standard area of the region. It is a generally happy area, that means few to no area rules that give the mafia an advantage. Because the Courtyard is the standard area, it has no additional game features.
One thing to keep in mind about the Courtyard is that the weather changes rapidly from day to day.

Weather forecast of today: Lots of sun, no rain. A normal summer day

Additional Area rules:
- Because it is summer, we are at a courtyard full of flowers and because we want to share this feeling with each other, in at least 3 posts you have to add a picture of a flower. This means 2 things: 1) you don't have to talk about that flower or have to over exaggerate it, 3 in the entire day is enough. 2) Yes, this also implies a minimum of 3 posts for every player today. If you fail to post 3 times, you will be modkilled. If any circumstances make it impossible for you to apply this rule, contact me privately.

- At the beginning of the day, one random player becomes allergic to pollen! He/she can no longer speak properly and has to make a spelling mistake in every 4th letter in every post (and every 8th, 12th, and so on…)! As with a real allergy, you try to hide it and go on with life, you are advised to try to make the mistakes in such a way that people still understand you. Be creative. (so don't try to write gibberish. You are encouraged, as with any rule, to find loopholes that you can exploit. To apply the rule in such a way that it is not a nuisance for you and your readers, while officially keeping me happy):
A Link in Time, you have been randomly selected to be allergic today. The rule above only applies to you. Once this day ends, you're relieved from your allergy

Additional Game Features:
- none

* * * * * *

Day 2: The Courtyard (summer)
​

The day ends next Saturday, 12:00 CET

 

[Foo]

Hey folks!

So, again, majorly sorry for my absense last week. I've done my best to work things out with Kokirion, and make sure that things will go much better this time around. In pennance, I've put together a post full of junk that I would normally stretch out over my time with a new community. I feel I owe you guys a major info dump so that you can begin to evaluate me as a player.

In particular, I'm going to discuss the pre-commitments I make and policies I follow in all Mafia games. Hope it's... illuminating!

---​

Why Pre-commit?

“One constrains the partner’s choice by constraining one’s own behavior. The object is to set up for one’s self and communicate persuasively to the other play a mode of behavior (including conditional responses to the other’s behavior) that leaves the other a simple maximization problem whose solution for him is the optimum for one’s self, and to destroy the other’s ability to do the same.”
- Thomas Schelling

Game theory is absolutely rife with problems which, though bafflingly complex, are solved instantly by a pre-commitment. The readily available example if that presented by the Prisoner's Dilema, while the most significant example might be the case of Newcomb's Box.

Mafia is no different, and I “communicate persuasively” my mode of behaviour by asking you to yourselves commit to lynching me should I ever deviate from the style of play indicated here, in this or in any other game you should play with me.

Know also that I see the invoive of precommitments as fundamentally “pro-town” behaviour, and all other things being equal (caveat: they rarely are) I will keep someone following policy over someone who's playing to their own whims.

Key Commitments:

1) Lynch players claiming Parnoid Gun Owner as soon as possible.

This is a fairly universal treatment, and is supported by the mafia scum wiki, but it's a good place to start to show the utility of these sorts of policies.

This claim is nigh unverifiable, by the role's basic nature. At night, investigative roles are understandably weary of taking an actions that may result in their death while during the day the claiment can explain their continued prsence in the game by pointing out that scum would be loathe to target them.

The town may concoct a plot to smoke out the truth, but even the simplest require participation from a sacrificial townie, along with a doctor to make sure the scum doesn't kill the sacrifice and a tracker to make sure the sacrifice actually goes through with it. That's a townie and two powerful night actions down for information.

Usually, the town must simply decide if the PGO is trustworthy... and while correctly identifying a friendly PGO is a great boon, misidentifying a false claiming scum as a friend can be absolutley diasasterous, and that false claim will take them straght to LyLo.

Unfortunately, inexperienced town PGOs are often priced into forcing that decision on their team mates. Seeing that they've been assigned the PGO role, they begin to worry about accidentally killing all their side's power roles, and assume that they should just claim. They give up the chance to stop scum, sure, but they might otherwise have done more harm than good.

I'm not interested, under any circumstances, about giving scum that free pass, so I make this commitment to change the calculations for townies. Town PGOs, I believe in your ability to attract more scummy attention than friendly attention; I believe that you have something big to contribute to this game. Help me remove a stupidly easy safe claim from the lazy scum players of the world and keep your abilities secret.

Cause then, they're the only ones who die ^^

2) Lynch players claiming Nexus, Miller, and Bullet Proof prefenetially.

These are all similar cases to above, again supported by the wiki. If you'd like details on any one in particular just ask.

3) Lynch all liars, preferentially.

Another classic, but one that's often misundertood. A town commiting to LaL isn't saying “don't lie”, it's saying “if you lie, plan to die”.

Planning to die isn't a bad thing. In a given mafia game, 80% + of players don't make it to LyLo. Most die. Many should die on purpose, their sacrifices enhancing the cause of the town. Some of my best plays in Mafia have been deaths.

When the town gets to the end game, they went clarity wrt the set up and they want to be confident of their own abilities going into the night. Liars do not provide the things, often quite the opposite. Scum lie in order to make LyLo as confusing and impotent as possible, and town lies almost invariably do the same if they are not discovered and tested early. We kill liars to make the last day playable

But before that end game, if you're confident that you're role is not meant to make it to that lastr day anyway, for the love of god gambit away. Vanilla townie wanting to draw scum attention so that they kill you over the doc/watcher/vig/cop? Trump yourself up as much as you want.

Just know that if it all goes wrong – if you fail to get that factional kill you're asking for and your lies are laid bare – we do have to kill you. Ballance of probability, and now (hopefully) exactly what you were expecting.

4) Lynch players claiming “random” voting without sufficient displays of rigor, prefferentially.

This is a harsh policy, but its an incredibly common mistake that's too often left uncorrected.

The fact is, truly random behaviour is very, very difficult to identify in the small sample provided by a mafia voting record, and yet people continually claim to be making choice “at random”. Making random choices in itself is not a bad thing – by any means – but claiming that your decision was not determined by any game factor provides a large degree of plausible deniability, and if that deniability is not earned than we have a problem.

It is entirely *on you* to make it easy for us to observe that your truly letting chance dictate your actions. This isn't easy. A convincing and permanent record of randomization is difficult to establish over the internet. In general, the community needs to be worried about you repeating the same “random” process over and over and then only posting a record of the result you're happy with.

If you're interested in making rigorous random selections here is what I suggest:
a) Find a public leger for random number generation. Plenty of these exist for use by online traditional RPG players, I often use http://orokos.com/roll/
b) Set up a campaign with an intial role of a 1,000,000 sided die. Report the role back to the thread, have another player confirm.
c) Before making a role, clearly explain what each die face will mean in terms of your subsequent behaviour. Wait a reasonable period of time between this explanation and the actual role.
d) Make your role in the same campaign as the original d1million.
e) Hold to the behaviour dictated by the role until something major changes. If you had any doubts about a given course of action you should not have included it in your original action plan.

5) Lynch people who vote for themselves.

Because it makes for bettter games and better communities.

6) Investigate claims one-at-a-time, and without asking for further complicating information.

It looks like you guys already have some rules enforcing this, and that's interesting. I'm not sure I'd go so far, but I certainly agree in spirit. Nothing serves the mafia more than having many town roles claim at once, and I look at attempts to incite mass-claims as enemy action.

7) I support efforts to cordinate the town to early mass strategies, but do not initiate them.

If you want to divide the town into voting blocks or have everyone repeat a phrase to check for truth-restricted roles or support lie detectors, I'm precomitted to joining in noncritically. I believe that that the town could always use a little more trust in the first days. I'll never intiate these sort of things myself though: they're often just too much a source of unnceccessary conflict in the recruiting stage.

8) I do not respect the idea of “common scum tells” or similar and will never vote of these bases.

Amateur mafia strategy guides and even articles on the wiki will make claims along the lines of “Overly detailed, descriptive posts and frequent posts often means that the player is mafia.” These are almost exclusively bull****. Mafia is anti-inductive.

What does that mean?

A major assumption of science is that the universe should be "inductive": that is, for some event A, observing A should increase my confidence of seeing A again later. I was almost entirely certain that the sun would come up this morning, because it had done so without fail on so many days prior. Now that it has, I'm going into tomorrow the teeniest tiniest bit more confidant it will do so again. After you get past all the semantic BS, the answer to the old question is that a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it almost certainly does make a sound; every other tree we have observed falling in a forest has made a sound, why shouldn't the next?.

This sort of thinking is extremely beneficial when you're trying to overcome a non-human opponent. When you recognize that everyone who's drank from the towncenter well since last Tuesday now has cholera, you can seal off the well and beat the infection. Because it's so effective, it has become *natural* for human civilization to resort to inductive thinking to solve our problems. It just feels right.... unfortunately, Inductive thinking isn't nearly so useful in helping us best other humans.

Let's say that, for whatever reason, serial killers wear red more often than non-serial killers. Officer Blue recognises this fact very quickly, and begins arresting people wearing red more frequently, greatly increasing his investigative efficiency... but as this happens Officer Red gets noticed by the public and other officers, and more and more people draw the connection between stylistic preference and murderous intent. Now the next edition of the police manual has a whole chapter on the red phenomenon and there's a red expose on the six o'clock news.

Serial killers everywhere get the message, and begin going out of the way to hide their natural taste for red. After some trial and error, they learn to display no greater predilection for the colour than the average shmuck. Officer Blue's initial advantage disappears, and all those young cops who had to write a test on the dire implications of maroon have essentially wasted their time.

I'm sure there was a time when mafia were less likely than townies to accept certain bets, but it almost certainly stopped being the case the moment searching "mafia tells" brought it up on google.

9) I will do my very best to keep you notified of my absenses and be present for the days end.

Never really felt the need for this in partiuclar before but given how day one played out I'll gladly make this claim on pain of lynch >>

---​

And with that, I think I'm ready to finally start playing this game!

 

[LittleGumball]

Sssssssssoooooooooooooo, Shroom obviously has terrible teammates.

wow that's certainly a long post from Foo, nice to see you back. any reason why you posted lyrics in your first post? Any thoughts on alignments based on yesterday's lynch?

For me I can't decide if Johnny is scum or not scum. He could be scum for purposely bussing a buddy at the end of the day, or not scum for making sure the lynch goes through. Personally I'm leaning toward not scum due to the timing of his vote not being immediately at the end of the day for some town cred, and not scum for Viral as well since he removed the chance for someone to tie up the lynch.

As for someone who could be scum I'm looking at Ari for jumping on the bus.

also, rules.

 

[A Link In Time]

Whas? I home I'm poinz thit riget.

 

[Foo]

Will post flowers when I'm off mobile.

My opening post day one was just a check-in, style without substance.

I generally don't post early reads. Not that I don't believe in them, its just a weak part of my personal gam

 

[LittleGumball]

Will post flowers when I'm off mobile.

My opening post day one was just a check-in, style without substance.

I generally don't post early reads. Not that I don't believe in them, its just a weak part of my personal gam

Feel you 100% breh

That being said, what's your plan for the day? I guess another way of putting it is when are you going to start scumhunting lol but that's a bit harsh way of putting it.
(I really do know your feels though, I gradually get more useful the longer I'm alive)

 

[Foo]

Robin Dawes wrote:

Norman R. F. Maier noted that when a group faces a problem, the natural tendency of its members is to propose possible solutions as they begin to discuss the problem. Consequently, the group interaction focuses on the merits and problems of the proposed solutions, people become emotionally attached to the ones they have suggested, and superior solutions are not suggested. Maier enacted an edict to enhance group problem solving: "Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any." It is easy to show that this edict works in contexts where there are objectively defined good solutions to problems.


Maier devised the following "role playing" experiment to demonstrate his point. Three employees of differing ability work on an assembly line. They rotate among three jobs that require different levels of ability, because the most able—who is also the most dominant—is strongly motivated to avoid boredom. In contrast, the least able worker, aware that he does not perform the more difficult jobs as well as the other two, has agreed to rotation because of the dominance of his able co-worker. An "efficiency expert" notes that if the most able employee were given the most difficult task and the least able the least difficult, productivity could be improved by 20%, and the expert recommends that the employees stop rotating. The three employees and the a fourth person designated to play the role of foreman are asked to discuss the expert's recommendation. Some role-playing groups are given Maier's edict not to discuss solutions until having discussed the problem thoroughly, while others are not. Those who are not given the edict immediately begin to argue about the importance of productivity versus worker autonomy and the avoidance of boredom. Groups presented with the edict have a much higher probability of arriving at the solution that the two more able workers rotate, while the least able one sticks to the least demanding job—a solution that yields a 19% increase in productivity.

I have often used this edict with groups I have led—particularly when they face a very tough problem, which is when group members are most apt to propose solutions immediately. While I have no objective criterion on which to judge the quality of the problem solving of the groups, Maier's edict appears to foster better solutions to problems

---

Generally, I like to wait until we've had all players check in before deciding on a course of action. I have nothing to add, based on the night. Hopefully someone will.

 

[LittleGumball]

Fair enough.

 

[A Link In Time]

Foo, zour mostz seef to ba a whele let of zotheng. Yuu wrete a zandeose rarazrapz to cemmumicale a briif poent.

 

[Foo]

I er on the side of caution when it comes to inferential distances.

 

[Johnny Sooshi]

Posting flower for now, gonna read Foo's long posts, then gonna wait for more people to jump in since the day just started.

 

[DekuNut]

Whoa... Foo showed up
And no deaths... Either GF is inactive or the Doctor/Roleblocker made a good choice last night. Good show friends!

 

[Doc]

Nobody's died yet, but one of us is feeling nauseous. So there is a potential poisoner, mafia or third party. At the moment, I'd guess that the mafia have a poisoner just due to the lack of a NK.

 

[Johnny Sooshi]

It looks like you guys already have some rules enforcing this, and that's interesting. I'm not sure I'd go so far, but I certainly agree in spirit. Nothing serves the mafia more than having many town roles claim at once, and I look at attempts to incite mass-claims as enemy action.

Mostly just came about from previous games where the game flooded with claims, which just shut down the games and ruined the fun for the most part.

 

[Foo]

Yeah... I mean, competent scum in a fair game *should* win after a flood of claims amyway, but I get the point of a rule to keep things honest. I do see rare occasions where it would be overly restrictive though.

*shrug*