I'm hosting a game!

[Ishmael]

It's wonderfully refreshing to wake up and see a lengthy analysis against oneself. Very nostalgic. Anyway, for now I'll quickly sketch out why I'm voting for 'khaan - I'll get around to GH's accusations against myself, but that will have to wait a few hours.

Firstly, here's the position I'm starting from. I consider landlubber to be almost certainly town. If he's not then congratulations are in order and I've almost certainly thrown the game, but at the end of the day I feel confident eliminating him from my list of suspects. Of the remaining three players, two must be scum. As stated earlier I feel I don't have enough evidence to rule on jht one way or another. He might be scum or he might not, but I'd prefer to look at the other players rather than effectively flip a coin. Which leaves 'khaan and GH, of which at least one must be scum, and the one I find most scummy is the former.

I'll give a summary of my reasons for voting him to start with (in case I run out of time writing this up before I have to head off). Firstly, process of elimination - as mentioned above I believe at least one of he and GH must be mafia, and 'khaan is the better fit. Secondly, he has been giving the impression of taking the 'easy' vote most days, whilst building up his townie credentials and justifying his vote by dissecting the arguments of others, rather than putting his own forward. More on this below. Finally, I've been getting flashbacks to Vespasian all game, and that worries me (I don't expect this last point to sway anyone other than myself, obviously).

Now, on to some posts in a chronologically jumbled order:

Vote: Winston Hughes

You were quite rarin' to go on D1 and were quite on board with the Visor lynch. You 'bailed' off it and then switched back later, allegedly to stop a townie lynch, but your phrasing of "has to be" seems very off to me if that was indeed your goal.Since then, you've simply sat on voting for GH without really putting much explanation into it, a tactic I've used myself plenty of times as mafia. It makes you seem less random and like you actually have a goal when you really just want to toss a vote somewhere so people won't accost you.


Also, silly kids these days. I'm *always* scummy.

On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable justification for a vote. However, at this point I feel like Winston had already laid out quite clearly his explanation for voting for GH (I didn't and still don't necessarily agree with his arguments, but he'd definitely made them). In this case 'khaan's argument flips on its head - rather than Winston taking the easy vote without explanation, 'khaan is taking the easy vote with an easy, but flawed justification.

I am now going to proceed to ask you to back that up.

Would you please back that up?

I have now asked you to back that up

I will now vote for landlubber.

Vote: Landlubber

I have now voted for landlubber.

Yes, I know you like the symmetry, but at this point there was no justification given for voting landlubber. That only came retroactively, by attacking landlubber's arguments in response.

Your logic is bad because we said so. Since that seems to be the requirement for actual analysis instead of, say, thinking about it, here, I'll justify my vote for you.

It's fine, I can vote for you because monty is innocent and he said you are one of the potential mafia pairs.

The quoted post is just representative, as there were a fair few posts where 'khaan rebutted landlubber's arguments. I was trying to put my finger on why this whole sequence didn't give me the same vibe of 'townie analysis' I'd attributed to Winston and landlubber, and I think the reason is that 'khaan has for the most part been trying to pick apart the arguments of others (and therefore implicitly justify his vote on landlubber, at least), rather than promote his own cases. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with this - if somebody makes an argument, it needs to be open to scrutiny - but it is almost always easier to find flaws in somebody else's case than to make your own, and so it doesn't give off the same townie sense. Again, this is not a point against 'khaan - it's just stating why I'm not counting these exchanges as a point in his favour.

So is everyone having fun?

As a final aside, this post made me very, very nervous. Honestly, I was half expecting the host to reveal that there were three mafia and the town had lost that phase, just because of how much it came off as 'scum confident of victory.'