Pirate Ship Mafia [Concluded]

**a completely inoffensive name** · 10-22-2009, 06:05

Originally Posted by miotas

Hey, we all played our role in making the horsemen what we were, you got us to join the game, I made the first contact between all the members after the game started, you wanted to kill specific people but AVSM didn't like that idea, so you came up with the idea of random kills, and Subotan implemented the random choices with such deadly effect. It was a complete shock when so many of our random kills kept coming up as maverns or brits.

Yes, miotas is right, sorry if it seemed like I am taking all the credit. AVSM, Subotan and miotas contributed more to the F.H. then I did IMO.

If it wasn't for my Tavern buddies (I can't even imagine doing something like the F.H. without them) then my chaos spree probably would have been easily tied to me and I would have been dead by day 3-4. They all kept me in check for the most part from going overboard which I almost did a couple of times. And kudos to Subotan for rolling the random people we killed each night.

**miotas** · 10-22-2009, 06:28

Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

Yes, miotas is right, sorry if it seemed like I am taking all the credit. AVSM, Subotan and miotas contributed more to the F.H. then I did IMO.

If it wasn't for my Tavern buddies (I can't even imagine doing something like the F.H. without them) then my chaos spree probably would have been easily tied to me and I would have been dead by day 3-4. They all kept me in check for the most part from going overboard which I almost did a couple of times. And kudos to Subotan for rolling the random people we killed each night.

He he. It was most likely your homicidal rage that kept us going so strong, but things would have gone far worse if we hadn't reigned you in. Remember all those time you tried to convince us to mutiny?

**a completely inoffensive name** · 10-22-2009, 06:53

Originally Posted by miotas

He he. It was most likely your homicidal rage that kept us going so strong, but things would have gone far worse if we hadn't reigned you in. Remember all those time you tried to convince us to mutiny?

lol then we all would have been dead!

**White_eyes:D** · 10-22-2009, 06:58

FourHorsemen get the Townie MVP award....

If CR had not blocked you guys from killing Reenk on night 8....Only TinCow and Split would have made it

CR still did a good job of holding us together though....he picked guys who he knew, would send in there Protect orders on Night 8, to help Centurion1......CR also manage to become Captain and thwart; TinCows ambition to be Captain...

CR and FH might have bucked heads.....but they really cleared house this time

**Crazed Rabbit** · 10-22-2009, 06:59

Gah, the maven got away. I suppose the claim of watchstander by Reenk should have been more suspicious.

And I guess that means I also stopped Reenk from getting killed by the horsemen that night...

Sorry guys, you really were the game changers. It's amazing how random kills got so many of the mafia(s).

I'm sore Tincow escaped the roleblock.

And sorry you had to die ACIN.

At least I kept the mutinies low, kicked Tincow out quick like, and protected centurion1 that night. And voted for ricera over white eyes.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I kept the rabid Frenchman Tincow out of the captain's spot.

Originally Posted by Reenk

14) Getting it together and going forth with a bold plan to eliminate the last two investigators, only to see Centurion1 surviving the hit against him due to CR's cunning. This was the second and deeper gamebreaker for us, we knew we were boned...

CR

**GeneralHankerchief** · 10-22-2009, 07:07

Looks like the epilogue will have to wait until tomorrow. Until then, eat, drink, and be merry.

GH

**CountArach** · 10-22-2009, 07:16

Here is the British quicktopic:
http://www.quicktopic.com/43/H/ERiHPyMsv3d

Very interesting game GH! The Brits would've stood a chance if we hadn't completely collapsed over the course of 72 hours.

**Sasaki Kojiro** · 10-22-2009, 07:20

btw Andres, the only reason I turned against you was that I became mafia and didn't think it was fair to my teamates to go full mutiny mode

**Crazed Rabbit** · 10-22-2009, 07:45

Here's the officer's QT after ATPG was killed: http://www.quicktopic.com/43/H/ngdDhvaSQSHK/p37.22

And the collapse of the British has to be some sort of record.

Here's to hoping I have the most treasure! Besides that lousy maven...

CR

**seireikhaan** · 10-22-2009, 07:58

Argh...

Rotten luck, and well played. I was a bit happy to get recruited, then bummed when the whole thing went kaplooey beneath my feet.

And, of course, congrats to GH on a massive, well coordinated game.

Definitely want to see the bio on this thing.

**Askthepizzaguy** · 10-22-2009, 08:37

Endgame thoughts:

Good team effort. Coordinating things through Crazed Rabbit was a good idea. There were some bad lynches avoided and there were many successful protection efforts. Congrats to random.org for nailing so many mafia.

And the people who placed their trust in it, the four horsemen. I'm happy to have stalked Ricera10 to death.

Rule of thumb- you have to at least lie to me or I'll vote for you. Silence isn't golden. A lot of the fun of these games is lying and lying and lying some more. If I'm going to lose, I generally prefer to lose to a very good lie than anything else.

Here's some more personal thoughts about this game and the general direction of large games, and town organization strategies... (long post)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

I was pro-town all the way up until the night before all the British died. At that point I was considering dropping from the game because I realize that I want mafia games to be more than a simple spreadsheet and organization effort, and I don't really like sending orders to everyone every night, being basically invulnerable to nightkills and lynches, and otherwise putting too much influence on the game. CR was still the lead organizer but I found myself ending up putting the groups together for his approval, and updating the spreadsheet, etc... and I thought to myself... I wanted to role play a pirate. How did I get there? This is nothing like role playing a jolly drunken pirate.

I think it's the competitiveness within me that got me there. I like these games but when I play, I want to play to win. Now if I don't know jack about anything, I'm harmless mostly. But when half or more of the pro-town roles reveal to me privately, all of a sudden I see a chance to win, and I also see myself in a position to help people avoid making bad choices. If you knew someone was a doctor and you knew someone was a detective, would you not put the doctor on the detective? It's just a basic reflex. Same thing with Capo... mostly what I was doing was making sure important roles didn't die, and just waiting for the mafia to be caught in the ever-shrinking web.

But it's a pattern of behavior that's gotten reflexive lately; from Council of Villains to Rubicon to Capo to here. That reflex gets us all into trouble, or it will get us into trouble. It's a bad idea to always trust the same guy with private information. Especially when multiple people do it. And originally, I didn't want to be caught by the mafia (as you can see by the british quicktopic, I'm an early conversion target) and then I'll be obliged to betray the whole town, and then have no one ever trust the pro-town network system again, even though it can work. I was pretty confident, the way things were going with the captain being unassailable and having all the right connections, that town was going to win. I didn't want to end up on the losing team, due to that competitiveness. Well it means missing out on some fun opportunities to do that.

The whole idea is not as fun for people. How many games have I personally been in, for example, where I was indestructible or nearly indestructible, having access to doctors and investigators and vigilantes and roleblockers? I've taken note, and it's been several games. It's a tired refrain for us all; myself and especially the others playing. When it really hit me was when pevergreen noted that it isn't fun to play with me anymore. And I understood why. Even when I specifically ask for people to leave me be and let me roleplay, I often get pushed into a position of being in the know, and then the reflex is to protect that knowledge. There was a point in the game a couple rounds back where you could check off most of the people as being known pro-town roles, having firm alibis, etc... not a lot of mystery left. The mystery is part of the game.

Well there's a lot of backlash against this... the general strategy of having a sole leader with knowledge about everybody (generally contrary to the idea of the uninformed majority, for obvious reasons) the almost unfair coordination of protection roles and investigators, and the idea that if you don't go along with it, you'll die a swift and brutal death. I spoke to many people privately this game about this, and the general consensus is that it is a very effective strategy, but perhaps not so much fun for everyone. When you're town, and you're part of it, you're very enthusiastic about it. When you're town and you've been left out, it sucks and it is boring. Choice between having to follow or die is not in the spirit of fun. And then there's being mafia... the challenge is fine, but it's just not as fun to have your options limited. I know that if I were converted to the other side I'd begin to really hate the strategy myself and so I avoided it very intently. There's also a slight backlash against me in particular; simply I think because I seem to be in the center of it way too often. And I wasn't enjoying it and others weren't, and it was just time to let it go.

It works; maybe not as fast as a random lucky vig kill, but it does work. Good. Great. Put it to rest now. I don't want to be at the center of a pro-town effort for a good long while, at least not the kind of effort which involves several investigators and protectors and vigilantes. It's too easy to fall back into gear for me. If it keeps happening, I'll disregard my role PM and just blab everything I know immediately. That will make it stop.

We just came off of Capo and we were already weary of it. This game in particular just sunk it for me; it is fun to some extent but it's not as challenging and it's not fun for everyone.

So anyways. I realized that I was personally missing out on something, too. I love being mafia. Why on earth was I avoiding it for the sake of being on the winning side? Work hard enough and the mafia can win too. So I decided to solve two of my most pressing problems with one move: I betrayed all the information I had to the mafia. Now I would not be one of the go-to guys for organizing and revealing sensitive information, and it would reveal the huge weakness I warned about when I started ranting about you guys having to either lynch me or make me an officer. Be careful about the concentration of power in the wrong hands. One night's conversion earlier on and the mafia would have had all that information very early on, and it would have been a different game.

After I revealed all that stuff, I would just sit back and hope to see some sparks fly. Maybe it would even things up a bit. That is why I did what I did.... a return to normalcy for me and perhaps a final nail in the town network strategy, while evening up what appeared to be a lopsided game. It didn't quite work out that way... waited too long to decide on that. Next time I won't wait so long. Fair warning.

Anyhoo. Long text, apologies for that, but here's the quick summary:

1. The protown network is very dangerous in a game of recruitment. Especially when you reveal to a recruitable.
2. I am now "in retirement". I will not hide your secrets anymore or organize a group. Don't ask me to.
3. I'll be attempting to play for ships and giggles more often, not always solely for the win.
4. As the vigilante groups taught us, add more random kills for the lulz. Maybe even for the win by blind luck instead of by spreadsheet.

**pevergreen** · 10-22-2009, 08:49

Its up to the host to now accomodate for this, either make it so its balanced with that, or take out the option to do so.

My upcoming large will not allow this, both in rule and role layouts etc.

**Askthepizzaguy** · 10-22-2009, 08:55

Already spoke to Seamus regarding Capo IV and avoiding such a thing, minor tweaks I suggested which I know would personally trip me up.

I spoke to GH and basically since it takes so long to host a game and since Capo was so awesome, hosts feel like they have to make complex games to compete with that, giving basic townies abilities and so forth but with the handicap of having to work together. Capo/Rubicon/Pirate ship style games where townies can do that lend themselves to victory by spreadsheet because presumably, you can't do a group action and then go off and kill someone. That is where it all begins. Frankly you don't even need detectives and so on, there's ways to root out the mafia just by doing that.

It looks like large game hosts will simply have to let go of townie-group style games or at least space them out. Many have already chosen to do so. I was considering something like that, but actually I am thinking of going the total opposite direction and removing detectives too, or at least limiting them.

**pevergreen** · 10-22-2009, 08:59

Thats why the Mafia (x) games worked so well.

Everyone wants to host themed and special games. This is great, but there is precious little vanilla mafia these days.

**Death is yonder** · 10-22-2009, 09:00

Good game to all, and a round of applause for GH for hosting this very fun game that sucked me in.

**Askthepizzaguy** · 10-22-2009, 09:05

Perhaps there could be a separate queue for vanilla games versus themed games, so there's always at least one vanilla game playing?

**Subotan** · 10-22-2009, 09:10

We honestly assigned everyone a random number. If you were killed by us, it was down to chance. Our original plan was to kill as many townies as possible, then flee the ship laden with gold once we had been rumbled, with a mafia victory allowing us to be the perfect victors. By killing random sailors, we figured that our actions would be untraceable But by about the fourth night, we realised our plans had gone horribly wrong, as we seemed to be killing exclusively mafia. We didn't account for the fact that by rolling for random crew members, we might not only hit one or two mafia, but snuff out a mafia on the first night and singlehandedly destory our own plan. We were so successful, we were unsuccessful. We eventually decided after the British were wiped out to take a more pro-town role, since it was A. Obvious who we were, and B. We had failed in our original plan, since a Mafia victory was now impossible. We tried to run rings around you some more in a desperate, last ditch plan to confuse you (E.g. Like ACIN saying he wasn't a member of the four horsemen, and misleading CR in Pm's), but it didn't really work.

@ACIN You twit, why did you vote for mutiny? It was mentioned previously in the thread that everyone who had voted for mutiny (Andres, Chatoix etc.) had been killed by "Bess".

Originally Posted by GeneralHankerchief

Before I forget:

One for each of the Four Horsemen, for being the single-most exciting thing in the game, the biggest game-changers by far, and for sending me the most-looked-forward-to PMs every single night. Congrats guys, you earned it.

Thanks GH, not only for the balloons, but for hosting a great game whilst you're so busy, complete with excellent writing. If we hadn't been around, who do you think would have won?

**pevergreen** · 10-22-2009, 09:12

Originally Posted by Subotan

@ACIN You twit, why did you vote for mutiny? It was mentioned previously in the thread that everyone who had voted for mutiny (Andres, Chatoix etc.) had been killed by "Bess".

I must ask this question myself. I told him what the trigger to activate the serial killer was (vote mutiny) then about 8 PM's later i told him to vote for a mutiny, and the PM where I told him the trigger was quoted as well. All this in like 40 minutes.

**Cultured Drizzt fan** · 10-22-2009, 11:15

I am still alive!

YES!

man this was fun.

**Subotan** · 10-22-2009, 12:00

Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

Yes, miotas is right, sorry if it seemed like I am taking all the credit. AVSM, Subotan and miotas contributed more to the F.H. then I did IMO.

If it wasn't for my Tavern buddies (I can't even imagine doing something like the F.H. without them) then my chaos spree probably would have been easily tied to me and I would have been dead by day 3-4. They all kept me in check for the most part from going overboard which I almost did a couple of times. And kudos to Subotan for rolling the random people we killed each night.

I think we all complemented each other really well. ACIN came up with the idea, and his thirst for unspecified vengeance kept us going, AVSM was excellent at holding ACIN back when he went a bit crazy, miotas was excellent at coming up with other plans, and I was just very, very lucky/unlucky.

**TinCow** · 10-22-2009, 12:04

Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

I'm sore Tincow escaped the roleblock.

Heh, I was roleblocking split to make sure no one stopped Reenk from abandoning ship. Who gets their orders in when everyone's roleblocking each other? In any case, like I said, the game ended for me the instant that all Brits and Mavens were dead or off the ship. My escape is for sequel storyline purposes only; I lost, straight up. The question remaining is whether Reenk brought back enough gold for a minor victory.

**Louis VI the Fat** · 10-22-2009, 12:07

Lovely game! I loved the piratey atmosphere! Thanks for hosting, GH. And thanks to all those many players who turned this into such a fun game.

Special thanks to:

- Beskar, Andres, SSNeoperestroika, Yaropolk. Who each in his own right made this game more fun for me.

- The Four Horsemen. Their kills of Gibson and Scottishranger were great bonusses for the town.

- KukriKhan. Why is he always the man with the big gun in mafia? It was great to have him in our protection groups, and to see him sneak off occasionally to do his thing.

- Pizza. Yes. Despite his later betrayal, he was pro-town until he was relieved of his officer position.

- Crazed Rabbit. The Presence's great captain. I remember his opening post. Perfect pirate talk, his own little gif, reminding people he starts the annual Talk Like a Pirate thread in the frontroom. I knew I was beat for captain's position. So instead I PM'ed him and applied for First Mate. Which proved to be a very succesful partnership.

**Louis VI the Fat** · 10-22-2009, 12:08

Not to be mean, but the 4H as MVP? Gibson and Scottish were great lucky shots, but many innocents died needlessly too.
All the other mafia were pinned down by the town. Sigurd was presented on a silver platter by Tincow. Even if Sigurd hadn't been receiving sensitive information from us ever since the first night anymore. Ricera was Pizza's work. Sasaki was a matter of time and a clear suspect to both Pizza and me. CountArach was roleblocked already on the night of his death and ready for the lynch. Tincow was the work of Rabbit and me. (What is it with scum seeking the QM position? It never took CR and me more than two days to clean house). Reenk was identified as scum two days ago, but was given some respite because we couldn't risk losing a possible detective in case the maven had pulled a clever trick at some point.

**TinCow** · 10-22-2009, 12:13

Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

What is it with scum seeking the QM position?

GH told me at the start of the the game that I would find it beneficial to my goal to get myself into an officer spot. I didn't know what that meant, but since a mutiny seemed impossible, that's what I worked towards. I expected to be able to kill CR when I got to QM and replace him without an election. When I got there I realized that (1) I couldn't kill him without the FO being in on the plan and (2) even if I did kill him, I still had to be elected. At that point, I felt my game was over. Everything had worked perfectly according to plan up until that point... it just turned out that the plan itself was flawed.

**Andres** · 10-22-2009, 12:22

Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

I CREATED THE FOUR HORSEMEN **** IT! This is how I am treated! I better be mafia next game so I can take you all out.

EDIT: Here is the entire story of the Four Horsemen. I was pissed that at the very end of Capo I got killed by a random person and I disliked working for ATPG and town leaders in gneeral (I will never follow them ever, for future reference) so I decided to get my Tavern friends to make a vig group that would create choas for the town just for the sake of messing with everyone. We assigned everyone a random number and every night used a random number generator to choose who we would kill for the lulz. That's everything about the F.H. somehow probability ****** me over and we killed the bad guys and I end up being killed in the exact same way as Capo.

i swear, next mafia game someone better make me a serial killer or a mafia don because I have a lot of revenge to deal out.

This game is evidence that random vig kills by townies, even if they are done to sabotage the town, are not necessarily bad.

Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro

btw Andres, the only reason I turned against you was that I became mafia and didn't think it was fair to my teamates to go full mutiny mode

No need to apologise. I'm just a bit disappointed that we never got a succesful mutiny.

I found Louis' total lack of comprehension for my quest for mutiny highly amusing

Cher ami, there was no logic, no good reason, nor special motivation in my role pm. I'm Belgian

**Subotan** · 10-22-2009, 12:39

Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

Not to be mean, but the 4H as MVP? Gibson and Scottish were great lucky shots, but many innocents died needlessly too.

That was our original intention.

Originally Posted by Andres

This game is evidence that random vig kills by townies, even if they are done to sabotage the town, are not necessarily bad.

Oh yeah, I totally agree. I was pressuring you so much early in the game so that people wouldn't connect me with my night actions

. So sorry about that

**Yaropolk** · 10-22-2009, 12:44

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it get together with 3 of its buddies for bloody murder.

Originally Posted by miotas

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: