Mini Normal 1857 (Game Over - Mafia Wins!)

[mastin2]

Also kinda annoyed that Titus didn't explain she could only inherit town roles because that was one of the reasons I thought her claim was fake, was that she might inherit strongman

You apparently don't have a good grasp on the definition of Universal Backup.

In Normals at the very least--if not the whole site--"Town Universal Backup" means "any town role", and "Scum Universal Backup" means "any scum role". This is because if you just said Town Backup, there's a connotation that the Backup is for a specific role: Town Doctor Backup (e.g. Nurse), Town Cop Backup (e.g. Deputy), you get the idea. "Universal" means not "any alignment", but "any role".

This is the case across ALL Normals. It's right there in the wiki.

Universal Backup (if self-aware) is considered Normal on mafiascum.net. A Universal Backup can be of any alignment,

but it should only activate upon the first death of a power role

of their own alignment

. A power role in this case is any role that is not Vanilla (so not a Vanilla Townie or a Mafia Goon).

(The underlined clause is the important part.)
It is also the case in every theme game I've ever played.

[mastin2]

Unless RB was double bussed the team isn't sesq/Rask though.

By the way, basic theorycrafting here.

When you lynch scum on D1, it's not an all-town wagon.
Period.

Scum bus, and there's a 50% chance of a double-bus.

On D2 and later, it's more ambiguous. You can get all-town wagons going. (It's still rare, but it's possible.) On D1, though, 95/100 times, if you lynch scum, it's because scum helped you lynch scum.

Going into advanced theory crafting: "How to tell that this isn't the 5%"...
...I laid this out in the dead PT, but think about the circumstances behind the lynch.
Namely?

rb claimed a power role which was counterclaimed.
rb did nothing to fight his wagon.
rb did nothing but lurk around both preclaim and postclaim.

What do these factors tell you?
They tell you that rb is scum, sure. But they also tell you that rb's claim was not done to save his life. It was done to get a counterclaim. (You can posit this thanks to knowing said roleclaim? Transcend? Was the N1 nightkill. So the basic assumption here is, scum claimed a role to get a counterclaim, got it, and killed said counterclaim because they got what they were after.)

Okay. So if rb's claim wasn't done to save his life, what does that tell you about the wagon on him?
rb's claim was done to get a counter, not to save his life...which tells you...scum had no interest in saving his life.
If scum had no interest in saving his life, this presumably would mean scum were not on a counterwagon.
This was supported by...there basically BEING no counterwagon to rb. There were a couple of small things, but never a full, true, proper counterwagon to rb.

So the simple conclusion to draw from these facts: rb knew he was going down. His TEAM knew he was going down. Because his TEAM knew he was going down, they had incentive to...
...Bus!

Placing this game in the 95%. Where to lynch scum, you needed scum.

Now granted, determining that it was a double-bus is harder than determining scum bussed. But this was visible as early as D2. Every town flip only strengthened this. It was stronger on D3. It was stronger on D4. Every day, you had more reason than the last to suspect scum were on the wagon, because that's what real VCA does. It doesn't arbitrarily make a blind assumption, of lynching scum = town and lynching town = scum. It looks at the circumstances behind it, to determine positioning.

[mastin2]

Mastina, did you approve the phrasing of the role PM for the Universal Backup? If so, we will have words.

It came up, but that might've been a slight oversight on our part: looking at the review thread (currently not public but will presumably be made public), JaeReed mentioned making a change to the Universal Backup PM that mhsmith had recommended, but we never actually

saw

the change, which would've been the proper procedure as a formality. There was the concern about wording in the review thread, we just thought it had been addressed as much as possible before the game had begun.