Result: Town Victory (Mafia Forfeit)
Actions:
DP1: Whiteflame shoots Magic, Town lynches Whiteflame.
First DP was wild. Though Luna was scum here I agree with his reasoning. The town basically took a TP who offered to work with them and offered to use his 1x dayvig in place of the lynch to kill whomever town decided to lynch and screamed at him that they would never trust him and would kill him anyway. Kind of like seeing that the twitchy kid brought and AR to school and jeering at him that he's a loser. The end result is that he panicked, capped the cop at Mikal's direction, and then got lynched. I do feel bad because, due to Ultra's inactivity (his character was neutral) and Magic's misunderstanding of his own character (Leon was retired and more a freelance guy, not a dedicated Scarlet Moon guy), the neutral character fakeclaim that I gave him came off as super scummy because Mikal was operating off a Scarlet Moon=town assumption.
NP1: Shining and Supa both protect Mikal. Lunatic janitors Shining. Mikal redirects Luna to himself. Wylted poisons Shining. Thoth correctly guesses Kohai's character and rolecops him. Whiteflame 2.0 strengthens Lunatic.
A very wild NP, just goes to show that simulations often don't live up to reality. The NK would have been successfully redirected to Mikal and then blocked had Whiteflame not strengthened Lunatic, causing the redirect to fail. The end result was a jannied doc and a very confused town - though if the next DP hadn't been so hectic, I feel like Whiteflame saying that he strengthened Luna might have caused Mikal to put one and two together. I'd say Wylted wasted his Poisoner but he did pick a good target who was inactive, unlikely to be protected, and whom he saw as scummy, it wasn't really his fault that he couldn't forsee that scum had a janitor and would be looking for similar qualities in a target.
DP 2: Thoth is lynched
So this was basically scum snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The cop was dead, the 1x doc was janitored, they knew who Teo McDohl was, and had a good idea of who to safely target with their recruit due to the mass claim. All they needed to do was ensure that Thoth could survive one more DP and fire off the recruit and then pick off players within the town block with NKs. They would have two juggernaut kills and one more janitor to deal with the protective roles or a roleblock if they wanted to use that instead. Instead, Thoth made the absolutely baffling decision to claim Leprechaun, something I knew would go over like a lead balloon as soon as he mentioned it. Continuing to go through with it as the DP went on just seemed more and more suicidal, it was like a slow-moving trainwreck. The ascetic claim was also unnecessary, and I feel like it just added another dash of unbelievability. People targeting you and getting told that their role failed could be used to fuel speculation about a roleblocker or some other mechanic to distract town.
Thoth's main mistake was volunteering information like a claim out of the blue when it's not a policy claim and nobody asked for it. I don't think this is good to do as scum or town. It is an especially bad thing to do as scum when you have a role which is absolutely critical to your team winning and you need to survive the DP to fire it off. But I feel like Luna also made a mistake here that led to him eventually seeing no way out and forfeiting. He had a janitored flip of a 1x doc and claimed full doc. People rightly pointed out that a BG and 1x jailer and full doc was too many protective roles, and they would be right to think this. Even with just a 1x doc it was very protection-heavy to counteract the possible bad ramifications of the dayvig and poisoner both killing town. A 1x doc claim also would have allowed him to explain why scum hadn't killed him yet, whereas a full doc still being alive would become more and more suspicious as the game moved on.
MVP:
Pie for doggedly pushing the Thoth lynch and securing it which basically clinched the game for town. He edged out Mikal because Mikal's idea to lynch the next day would have allowed Thoth to get off his recruit and keep scum in the game. His fake claim as town was also a good one as it allowed him to push the Thoth lynch more effectively while also possibly baiting scum into wasting the NK on him once he was seen as cofirmed.
Honorable mentions:
Vader for calling out the scum team in his fit of omgus rage. This is the second game in a row he's done this, I'm starting to think it's a rage-activated superpower.
Mikal for using lore to solve so much of the game, which is a large part of what backed Luna into a corner and made him throw in the towel. Also for redirecting the NK NP1.
Wryly for playing very well and contributing despite being a noob, and also for doing great lore research, often having accurate lore-based inputs despite being more of a Legend of Dragoon player (another of my favorite PS1 RPGs btw)
