Ruyi Zhuan Mafia Endgame
Winners: Wryly & Lunatic (3P Survivor), Whiteflame & Pie (Mafia)
With Lunatic choosing to side with the scum team, this game would have basically been over DP4. However, the scum team was debating still playing so they could recruit Wryly NP3 and I basically figured that if they did this they would inevitably succeed with no real way for town to stop them, so I just gave Wryly the joint win instead of subjecting town to that whole rigamarole. The scum team theme was scheming women who did not love the emperor (Jia loved the lord of her Yu clan, Wei Yanwan loved first Ling Yunche, then herself).
So it’s really a testament to the scum team that they managed to win. In reality, there ended up being a lot more semi-confirmations among the town players than in the simulations of this setup that I ran. In those simulations, the biggest problems that I ran into was that the optimal move was to always shadow poison the Empress, and that this could lead to false conclusions and several mislynches because the role is very novel. This is why I made the Empress Careful – receiving the info about that specific action helped town to at least have a heads-up trying to understand it. On town side, I originally in my drafts had the Dowager Empress’s spies feeding their results directly to the Dowager Empress, but that resulted in way too much town confirmation. In retrospect I should have just scrapped the idea, it was a bit too cute, but instead I tweaked it.
Pie and Whiteflame won by basically playing perfectly. They figured out the Empress before NP1, targeted them with the Shadow Poisoner, and recruited pretty much the ideal character while NKing the Dowager Empress DP1 (something that didn’t typically happen in my simulations). While the back to back DPs were bad for scum, the loss of the Empress Dowager with her using none of her potent abilities NP1 really crippled town, especially as Supa also waived. The jailer abilities that the Emperor and Dowager Empress had and her rolestopper were like the control rods that stopped this game from being role madness. With one of those gone, Supa had limited ability to counteract scum’s potent bag of tricks. The fact that Awesome and Supa each awarded favor to the scum team while other high favor players like Awesome were seen as too scummy to receive it also helped with scum’s runaway success.
