I'm just glad it's over. That game was
brutal.
But I must say, other than two things (PJ making up factually wrong arguments, and us nearly losing because of flavor-quoting), I had a lot of fun.
We didn't go into the game with any sort of plan or strategy. My personal strategy was just to create enough chaos and hopefully use the town's "scumminess" against them. It seemed to work out well enough. The one thing I was concerned about was that power roles would figure the game out first -- since they'd have abilities, some of which might be (highly?) unusual for Scum Traitors.
Killing MBL was probably a mistake and in retrospect, I don't remember why we decided to do so. I think the reasoning at the time was that it would create a lot of confusion if MBL and Bird both came up scum. If I remember correctly, I wanted to create the illusion of a killi having been blocked and a vig having killed MBLscum. It seemed to work out well enough... most players did something of a doubletake: "What? Both MBL
and
Bird were scum?"
As Stoof indicated, on Night Three, we almost killed Thok. I advocated a Thok kill, but Twito talked me into killing Zindaras, because he appeared to know too much about what was going on. I was upset when he basically claimed Cop and revealed that the alignments were backwards. Several of the players seemed to pick up on it, too... though PJ didn't, which surprised me. I also distinctly remember thinking, "We should test for the existence of a Doc by just targeting him tonight." Sadly enough, N4 was the night that we did not get to make a kill.
Juggling when to kill Thok was rough, and that's definitely where we made the biggest mistake (as I don't think killing Zindaras over Thok was a
mistake
per se... it made enough sense at the time). I figured that if we missed another kill for any reason, we were screwed... so I was trying to decide if there was a Doc or not. I figured three power roles, each of which would be fairly standard/typical. What we ultimately decided to do was to kill off a couple of unclaimed confirmeds who we thought might be potential Docs (SV, then AndrewS). N7 was our breaking point and we had to kill Thok.
For as little posting as Nightson did, we talked an awful lot, especially Night Six and Night Seven. I promised Stoof I'd post the chat logs from our conversations. I will go do that later on... it basically contains a lot of number-crunching and figuring out how to nightkill to best help our chances.
I don't know how the D7 Roleblocker claim appeared, but I pretty much made it up on the spot. I told Nightson that I was likely going to claim to be a Roleblocker partway through the day. As I read over the thread during N7, I realized that post-N4, I had called everybody pro-town or neutral at least once, so I knew I was going to have trouble justifying whichever "target" I chose. I ultimately chose Klebian for a few reasons:
1) I figured that my "I defaulted to Doc and didn't want to overplay my role like I did in Best of the Internet Mafia" excuse would hold up
well enough
2) I decided that the slow turning of "if there's a Godfather, PJ is it" to "if there's a Godfather, it's Klebian" would reflect my changing opinion that maybe I did block a kill afterall.
3) Attacking Klebian and having Thok investigate him as innocent the very next night gave me an excuse to not claim the result for the next couple of days.
4) I correctly guessed that if I claimed to have that result on an "unconfirmed" player, I would probably be lynched on the spot. And going after PJ like that probably would have been equally suicidal.
The flavor claiming D7 was awful. I had absolutely no idea how to deal with it, so I kept referring to my PM, PJ's claim, and the flavor in the opening post. When that pretty much failed, I had to resort to using "well obviously my role is laid out differently" excuse which I honestly did not expect to hold up. There was definitely a period of time when I thought I would be lynched based solely on flavor claims, and that bothered me a lot. As Stoof said, he eventually gave us the Soldier PMs and said we could cite/quote parts of it as we saw fit, but it was way too late by that point. Almost all of the relevant flavor had been claimed already, and I had already patentedly demonstrated that I new nothing of Soldier flavor. Furthermore, the two keywords that I saw which
hadn't
been claimed ("elite" and "capture") were contained in the same line that had "slaughter the crew"... and I had already stated that "slaughter the crew" was not contained in my role PM. (By the way, I think that bit of flavor claiming was the most modkill-worthy. Klebian posted that
exact
phrase, with the clear intention of saying "look, I have the role PM right here and this is how I'm proving it." However, Stoof had said that ending the game on a modkill like that was a sorry way to end a game, and I couldn't really argue with that.)
The whole thing at the end of the game, with PJ's attempt to get me to quick-hammer, was interesting. The reason I didn't quick-hammer was actually because not more than ten minutes prior, I realized that Fritz hadn't claimed to be anything. I actually became worried that he was a Vig (likely One-Shot, as I think he would have been much more active otherwise), and I thought that giving away the scumgroup could be suicide even if I did get the hammer. (Incidentally, two kills thhe next night -- one on scum -- would have basically cleared Fritz with an acceptable reason to have not claimed.) So I decided not to hammer, and the "Not hammering yet." post was actually more of a
reaction
than anything else because I
didn't
want to drop the hammer yet. I wasn't even sure if PJ was testing me either, though I suspected he might have been -- a post with just "Vote: Klebian" is not at all something I would expect to see from PJ if he were actually deciding to determine what could have been the last lynch of the game. My "unvote to think" was genuine -- I wanted to figure out what to do next -- and I used the opportunity to propose some lynch/kill scenarios because I wanted to see PJ's response. When he re-voted Klebian and stated that he wasn't going to change that for the next ten minutes, I figured he was telling the truth. I thought, "Well, he's throwing me a bone and seeing if I really am scum or not." I didn't hammer at first for the same afore-mentioned reason -- if Fritz could somehow stop a kill or kill one of us, we were screwed completely. After a few minutes of thinking, though, I realized that if that were the case and we lynched VitR that day, I was screwed anyway. I'd have to no-kill, get Kleb lynched, then no-kill and go after Dahen... but even if I got Dahen lynched, Fritz could have killed/stopped me.
Incidentally, the reason we killed Fritz on N8 was because we knew the others were claimed Soldiers and just didn't want to take any chances. Fritz being an Unkillable Gorilla didn't make sense to me, and I didn't see any other feasable role.