"Random" voting

[Aelyn]

I like to mix it up a little. Sometimes I'll vote truly randomly, sometimes I'll vote spuriously, sometimes I'll open with an OMGUS, and sometimes - but only rarely - I won't vote at all to begin with.

However, I very rarely say what type of vote I am using. Frankly, I rarely use strong analysis day one unless something very strange is going on - I treat the first couple days as the fun-for-the-sake-of-fun part of the game, and the rest as fun due to the intellectual exercise. Sometimes this leads to strangeness, but I'm relatively unbothered.

[Aelyn]

Again, let's take the most basic situation. You are going to make the first post in a normal (non-theamed) game. Let's say that this game starts with day instead of night, so you don't have a night scene to analyze, and let's say that you are a basic townie with no information. How would you start the game?

That's... actually really quite an interesting question.

Thing is, normally my answer would be, "I wouldn't; I'd leave it for someone else to start conversation." But that's no good, because it's non-reciprocatable; if everyone uses the same strategy, bye-bye game.

I would basically have two ways of starting things. One would be to say "Hi! How is everyone?" or something similarly devoid of content. Not really helpful - but there's no content I can insert, really.

The alternative is to random vote. Again, this probably won't help much, but if everyone random votes, it's inevitable that eventually someone'll get accused of trying to start a bandwagon, or that someone will begin to get irritated about the unneeded pressure on them, or something like that. It's far from perfect, but I can't think of a better way to prompt conversation - and until something new comes up, random voting seems the best way to start things going.