I’ll also point out that I was right to call Luna’s reaction to my vote on Thoth a bus / distancing
I really, really, really wish he had waited for other people's reactions before deciding whether or not to bus me. People were actually buying it for a moment.
I am sitting this one out, sadly.
As peeved as I was with Mikal's recklessness at the time, I guess vigging Magic did at least keep a veteran out of scum's hands.
And that's also why I wouldn't have recruited Magic unless his role made him the grand jackpot recruitment prize. You weren't watching scum chat in Ranger's Apprentice, but Magic and I were not a happy couple.
You didn't have a lot of great choices after Magic's vig, since Vader's activity was sporadic and wylted seems like he'd make for a frustratingly loose cannon scummate (or maybe not, just guessing), but Vader still seems like the better option, unless you were going for a "no one will suspect the newb" thing.
From what I've seen, you would have been the easiest to work with out of my reasonable choices. That's why I would have recruited you, not because of mechanics or people's reads on you.
Or at least my choice. Luna would have had to agree.
You would have been my recruit at the end of day 1 if I knew who I could and couldn't recruit.
Truly one of occurrences that happened this game.
Occurrences happened in this game, to be sure. It was one of the games of all time.
I said that you did know this, but you let Mikal scare you away from it with his bullshit.
You mean his bullshit that I couldn't have known was bullshit unless I played the game and for which my working hypothesis repeatedly matched other things Mikal was saying?
I can't blame this loss on Luna, but I disagree with instantly calling my claim horseshit. I think he should have gauged reactions and then decided which end of the rainbow to go to.
4) He said Strongman would move too. That’s anti-thetical to what a Strongman does. Strongman always reaches its intended target
(Day 2, post #270) I thought Juggernaut was a less common name than Strongman for the same ability of overriding protection but not redirection, and I said Strongman in hopes that it might distance me from Tir if his card flipped.
TL;DR of the Leprechaun claim:
>> Rex offered us three questions about characters in the game
>> Then offered to instead give us a fake-claim character
>> Luna and I agreed and got Lepant
>> I had a wild idea of claiming I could redirect the NK
>> A day later, I was playing Werewolf at a party and saw a role called Leprechaun that can move the NK to an adjacent player
>> I thought it was funny that Leprechaun and Lepant both start with Lep (call them lepers)
>> I had wanted to kill Shining or Pie to "prove" my claim because I thought they were sus, and, hilariously, I found out they were both next to Mikal
>> I weakened the role because it seemed OP in a non-open role setup
>> Leprechaun was weird, so I made the justification sound too outrageous to fake-claim
>> I added Ascetic because I was Ascetic
>> I deployed the claim
>> It got the mixed reaction I expected
>> It might have gotten me through DP2 if I had given better answers about how Ascetic worked
Rex is almost making it sound like I didn't know that Suikoden is about recruiting the 108 Stars of Destiny, which, whether he meant to or not, is basically insulting me by accusing me of not reading the information he posted in game threads and not looking up the most basic information about the game. Mikal said there were factors that determined which characters were recruitable and that you wouldn't know unless you had played Suikoden. You could say that I should have caught that as a likely attempt to scare scum away from recruiting, but I was thinking that the split happened at an exact time in the game and/or its lore, which fit with it being hard to find by Googling and also fit with other things Mikal said, like post #111 in day 2:
If mathias [Mathiu] is in the game he’s scum lock
there are two scenarios
if tir is scum, Mathias can be in the game and on the scum team
if tir is town. Mathias is prob not in the game at all
I knew I was scum-Mathiu and Tir was my scummate, so this fit with my exact-point-in-time hypothesis. Maybe I should have been more skeptical, but what was I supposed to do, play Suikoden from start to finish just to double-check Mikal?
Rex's calculation (post #25) that I had an 83% chance of hitting a recruitable player has two big problems. First off, I wasn't sure that Kohai was Teo. My guess, which turned out to be right for the wrong reason, was that if Kohai were Teo, since Tir got a bonus when Teo died, Kohai's card would say that he would would either get a bonus when Tir died or that Tir would get a bonus when died, hence why he thought Tir was town. Much more importantly, my card said there was an unspecified character for whom recruitment would kill me and the recruiter. I had no idea that was Teo/Kohai. Even if I agreed with Rex's list of six players who were not clearly unrecruitable, I would not have been sure how many were recruitable, and even if I knew that at least five were recruitable, I still would have been reluctant to risk going boom-boom.
I totally get why Kohai thought Tir was Town based on his PM.
I admire the irony of Pie pushing me as scum because my role supposedly made me unkillable.
I hope y'all will enjoy the story behind my Lepant claim.
For fake-claim help, Rex initially allowed us true answers to three questions about whether or not a character we named was in the game. A couple hours after DP1 started, Rex offered to let us trade our questions for a solid fake-claim, which, about eight hours after that, Luna and I agreed to do, and Rex gave us Lepant. I was miffed because I also expected a role guaranteed not to be in the game along with justification, but batteries not included is better than nothing.
In the early morning of 27 September, the wee hours being when I tend to have my smartest and dumbest ideas, I thought of claiming a role that could move the night-kill, and I figured that the best way to "prove" it was by killing Shining and claiming that I moved the kill from Mikal to Shining, but I was not sure of the details or how to justify it for Lepant. Why not just recruit someone? Because Mikal said that we couldn't know who was recruitable unless we played the game, and I bought it hook, like, and sinker. I don't think it crossed my mind that Mikal could be lying. If it did, then it never crossed my mind again.
On 28 September, I went to a party (did I not seem like the party type to you?) where I played, among other games, Werewolf (I suppose it's more believable if it's a party where people play Werewolf), which is different from forum Mafia but in the same family. At least one of the Werewolf games had a role called Leprechaun which sees who the wolves chose to kill and can move it to the left or right. Yes, as overpowered as people were calling my role, I was claiming a weakened variant, although I've only seen Leprechaun in open-role games where wolves can somewhat play around it since they know it exists, and which are balanced with the Leprechaun in mind. I don't recall whether or not the Leprechaun could move the kill off of themselves, but I think they could. When I noticed that Lepant and Leprechaun had the same first syllable, I chuckled. Hey, that could be a justification, right?
My first draft of the NK-redirection claim was that I could see the night-kill target and move it anywhere, but that sounded too powerful and too much like an excuse for never being NKed. "Could Leprechaun work?", I asked myself. Maybe, but only if a plausible NK target and a strong scumread were number neighbors. My favorite pair was Mikal and Shining, but Mikal and Pie was a somewhat close second. When I checked the DP1 player list, I found that, all according to keikaku, Mikal was between Pie and Shining. Fortuna had seen my unfathomable claim, and she had smiled upon me with a rainbow and a pot of gold. Unrestricted Leprechaun still seemed overpowered for a setup not designed to accommodate it, especially since it semi-CC'd even the 1x Doctor we scrubbed, let alone full Doctor, so I sprinkled on that I could only move the kill between three adjacent players of my choice. The final touch was Ascetic, lest someone have evidence that I was Ascetic and accuse me of leaving it out with no explanation. Rex was right that it would have been better to omit Ascetic and let town speculate about why their abilities failed, except that I didn't realize that someone whose ability failed due to Ascetic would get a result that would lead them to think their ability failed for some other reason. My inconsistencies about how Ascetic worked were the result of real confusion.
Ascetic Triple-Crown Leprechaun. I knew, like Luna said, that it would stick out like a sore thumb, so, in hopes that it would loop back around to being believable, I gave Leprechaun a justification so outrageous that people would be reluctant to claim it even if it were real. I hope Rex didn't feel insulted that anyone believed for one second that he made someone a Leprechaun because their name started with Lep. I mean, that's the kind of bullshit I would do. For Ascetic, one of the first things I found when researching Lepant is that he wanted to stay out of the war, which fit well enough to balance out the absurdity of the Leprechaun justification. I was afraid that I misunderstood why Lepant isolated himself or that Mikal would notice this fact is very easy to find on wikis, but not once was I afraid that Ascetic would get counter-claimed.
Again, I consider Mikal the MVP because I only tried my Leprechaun gambit in hopes that it would buy me a day to learn more about who I could recruit. I made my other mistakes because I believed Mikal when he said that I couldn't find recruitment targets with Google. That said, I certainly was not faced with a dichotomy of either recruit or release the Leprechaun. Going all-in on a bizarre fake-claim might have been reckless, but I was laughing too hard at the coincidences behind it to stop myself, and I can't say that I've learned my lesson enough to never again do something similar. Might I quote from Rudyard Kipling's "If":
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
[I skipped the lines from here until the last]
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Yeah, you got me. I had the idea for claiming an NK-redirecting role, then decided this was inherently 'out there' enough that I had to make it so over-the-top it would loop back around to being believable because nobody would dare claim that.
You know the funny part, though? I actually was Ascetic.
I am getting more suspicious of a WF / Thoth theme. That said a few of Thoth’s ATE’s post feels towny
(Post #609) ATE?
I don’t see barbosa and just being aesthetic and I basically told him this before he claimed it. The lepant claim is retarted I don’t think Thoth claims it. It does make sense too and I don’t think Thoth wrote that
(Post #641) So you think my claim is retarded, but it also makes sense? That's retarded, but it also makes sense.
"Strengthening" must be the final boss of pronunciation for English-as-a-second-language speakers.
In response to anyone saying I backtracked about being Ascetic: I just wasn't clear on how best to describe it or whether or not visitors on me would be roleblocked per se. If you have any questions about how exactly my Ascetic works, ask me so I can forward it to Rex and give you his answer.
Why is that not possible? Scum JOATs and Town JOATs have coexisted for eons
(Post #626) I may have misunderstood you slightly. I thought you were saying that I can't be Ascetic if you are Ascetic. If you were just saying that, if you were Ascetic town, then I could only be Ascetic if I were scum, I misunderstood you, but I get the feeling that other people did too.
What you’re claiming is that you cannot be NKed though. If you pick 3 names including yourself, it means that you’re immune right? If REF tells you that you are the NK, can’t you redirect to a person above you or below you? You’re saying that you’re unkillable.
The way Thoth is describing his role is that he’s immune to dying except by lynch. I don’t know why he’s concerned about dying. He can’t be targeted by non-lethal actions. He can’t be strongmanned. He’s basically immune to everything except being lynched
Have you asked Rex if you're allowed to include yourself in a 3 player selection
I'm not unkillable. I still die if the kill ends up on me. I can include myself in my selection, but I wouldn't necessarily want to depending on WIFOM and who I think the kill target will be. I can move the kill onto or off of myself as with any other player, if I'm in my selection.
Honestly I am trolling guys. The justification for the leprechaun is ridiculous LOL. I was hoping to piss somebody off and go back and forth with them for a while and nobody took the bait. You guys aren't fun anymore there is no way ref is like your name kinda sounds like leprechaun so I guess you have a pot of gold power LOL. I am proud of the claim though, definitely something I would try
VTL Pie
The best-laid plans of wolves and town go oft awry, but my working hypothesis is:
From my perspective, knowing that I'm Ascetic, I want Pie voted out because I strongly doubt that he is Ascetic, although from another townie's perspective I would probably prefer a VTNL and collective Ascetic-check of myself and Pie. However, y'all need to harden your hearts for the possibility that both Pie and I will have been confirmed Ascetic tomorrow. In that case, speaking from an outsider's perspective, you should assume that exactly one of us is scum because two Ascetics make more sense on opposite teams. We couldn't both be Ascetic scum because scum wouldn't have counter-claimed each other. And we should VTL Rex.
I have a test due at midnight, so I'm going to ask, despite the scumreads on me, that I be allowed until after then to respond to everything.
I asked Rex right after I got my role card how Ascetic would interact with some hypothetical roles. He told me that the investigative roles I named would see no result and that the protective roles I named would be told nothing. I inferred from that actions are not roleblocked per se because I presumed that would inform whoever targeted me that they were roleblocked, which may not be true, but Rex hasn't responded to my most recent questions yet.
As committed as y'all are to blindly following Pie's counter-claim, I hope you can delemmingize yourself enough to consider the following things. Audiatur et altera pars. No, I'm not backtracking from anything (post #575), I've just been busy.
My ability can still either shift at least one kill to where it does less damage to town or force scum to NK a relatively sus group of three players due to WIFOM. With luck, I could save a townie and hit scum. If you think there is even a small chance I'm telling the truth, don't vote me. Killing me cuts off possibly the strongest power role claimed so far.
If I were scum and made this up, do you really think I would kill a top scumread for the sake of going all-in possibly the most unbelievable fake claim in recent memory? Actually, the answer could be yes, except that no scum partner would let me do that without bitching and moaning more loudly than I could stand.
Most importantly, I had no reason to claim Ascetic. None. My claim and justification would have made just as much sense, even if you think that 'just as much' is zero, without Ascetic. The only reasons why I would claim Ascetic are being Ascetic scum, which still contradicts Pie's claim, or if I had reason to believe that I needed to claim it lest someone accuse me of omitting the fact that I am Ascetic, which would presumably mean that I am Ascetic scum and we would have gone full circle since, if I were an Ascetic townie, I would have no reason to lie about being an Ascetic townie. You're all operating under the assumption that there can't be more than one role with the same modifier. Pie might be Ascetic or he might not. You can't make assumptions about the mod constructs the game because you don't want it to be that way.
Lynch me and lose your strongest asset because of a counter-claim that isn't. Have fun falling off that cliff.
I have a question for y'all. Let's say one of us died right now, flipped Ascetic scum, and the day kept going, so you don't get a chance to test the other Ascetic claim before the next lynch. Would you vote the other claimed Ascetic out? If not, then why do you think Pie's claim counters mine?
Thoth are you able to be visited by a role or is it blocked? Why is the word ascetic in your PM if not?
It doesn't block them. I think I can be visited.
Mechanics thought: Thoth may be town. If Thoth chose Mikal, shinning, and pie then scum probably attempted to janitor pie and then it directed to shinning. I need to think about this.
Well, I hate to break your town-read but they actually didn't. I knew Mikal was the NK.
