Thoth

Mod psyche argument but I can see David wanting to throw max into the fire since it’s been years since he played and just making him outright scum

(Post #56) Jesus God Christ, do mods on here not assign roles randomly?

My justification isn't obvious. It's not completely disconnected, but this is not a character I would expect to see with this role.

My justification makes complete sense, but is probably not the first thing you would think of for my character.

We’re scum given fake claims and/or roles?

As much I want to vote Pie for "We're", I will instead seize this opportunity to suggest that we write

Commit [Playername]

to signal that we are willing to vote someone but have not yet voted. I, of all people, know what premature elimination can do.

No, I'm not commiting to voting Pie.

So cryptography is allowed. I feel like we could abuse this but at the same time I kind of don’t want to because we have seen it ruin games before. Thoughts? I’m down to use CMS though is everyone else is, just isn’t that fair to scum lol

(Post #22) What is CMS?

I am mildly townreading Mikal for saying (post #11) that he wins when all threats to town are eliminated, since my card says the same.

when he was doing ddo mafia a long time ago he had a role in it for ima bench where he had to continually shit post or he was mod killed. This seems to be taken from that

(Post #19) Big-brain strategy: Perpetually be an asshole so nobody can tell when you have this role.

Given how sternly kohai warned us all that claiming is at your own risk, I'm curious as to whether or not town could have any anti-claim mechanics, although, for obvious reasons, I am emphatically not asking any townies with anti-claim mechanics to say so.

What it do my Lyncher

It's going good my

Nah. Not gonna do it.

Hello world. I just got to this thread and am catching up now. Hopefully there's not too much to catch up with.

As Pie said in twilight of Alien DP1, we need some way of expressing that we are committing, at least conditionally, to voting someone, but not yet voting them.

No, I wanted you to not make an assumption. Did alarm bells not go off in your head about why if Xenomorphs and Facehuggers are the same species that it makes sense Xenomorphs won’t attack someone with a Facehugger on them?

No alarm bells went off in my head because my head, unlike yours, has a brain inside of it.

Your role card can’t include every single piece of information lol. If you did a little research, you would realize why the Xenomorph doesn’t attack someone who has a Facehugger on them. It’s not cause they’re going against each other.

My card gave a reason why a Xenomorph would not attack someone with a Facehugger, and I assumed that Lunatic got that correct. If Xenomorphs are performing the night-kill, which I ascertained from my role PM, then impeding the night-kill is going against their interests. What did you want me to do, skim a wiki article and think I understand the lore better than an Alien fan?

Again, that’s not necessarily true. And the only reason they don’t attack is cause they’re reproducing in the host lol. If anything, attacking them would go against their interests. You gotta do a little bit of research homie

I would think that my role card supersedes all other sources of information.

Also your PM dude, common. How did you get going against the interest of Xenomorphs from that PM?

"A xenomorph will not attack someone who is impregnated by face hugger, buying the victim of this unfortunate event slightly more time than usual."

This made me think that Xenomorphs were performing the night kills, in which case buying the victim more time would be going against their interests.

Clearly the latter given what he did to Casey. I just caught that. Fuck, that was brutal.

Do not put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to fire.

The problem I have with flavor claiming is people tend to read far too much into the flavor rather than their actions or behavior.

You forgot about the essence of the game! It's about the cones.

If nothing else, it generates activity when the game would otherwise be at an impasse.

Could whiteflame's tailor have altered any parts of the flip, or only the role, e.g., Tailor, Apportioner? I would think the entire flip since otherwise the role might not fit with the character and justification.

Opposition to the use of the word is, imo, moronic, and a reflection of the shambolic state of American education. The word 'lynching' was specifically coined to describe a specific type of execution which was extrajudicial. It was coined around the time of the Revolutionary War, likely when a man by the name of Charles Lynch was performing such extrajudicial executions on people who were suspected British loyalists - mostly white.

Not to deny that the American public education system is shambolic, but the problem with lynching is the connotation it has incurred, not its etymology. The infamous N-word, the one that the Boondocks version of Martin Luther King Jr. rightly called the ugliest word in the English language, comes from the Latin niger, which means black. If I called a black person the slur that starts with N and explained that, if he had paid attention in Latin class, he would have known that I was only calling him black, do you think that black people would crown me King of the Black People a la Peter Griffin? The slur for homosexuals that starts with F can also mean a cigarette or a bundle of sticks.

In this sense, it acted as a sort of ersatz justice system in areas which were still 'wild' and untamed, and I believe the overall estimated 'accuracy' of such trials hovered around 66%. At its best the practice erased the privileges granted by wealth and political connections and acted as a 'mob's veto' on the unbiased ruling of a corrupt judge or of the abuse of pardon powers - to excuse those with power who had behaved in a way which would have seen a normal citizen executed. At its worst, it fueled witch hunts or represented an escalation of factional opprobrium, racial or religious or otherwise, to a deadly pitch.

I can't say that any of this is wrong, but it does not change the fact that people associate lynching with racism because, within memory much more recent than the American Revolution or even the Wild West, lynching was largely a method by which white people terrorized black people and maintained white supremacy. Slavery has been almost co-extensive with civilization throughout history, many non-black people have been enslaved, and black slaves were often sold to white traders after having been enslaved by other black Africans, yet, when most Americans think of slavery, they immediately think of black people picking cotton for white masters. Whether or not the word slavery should make people think of that is irrelevant because it conjures thoughts of racism and oppression still relevant to our society, which, if you ask me, is undesirable.

Yeah, lynchings can be an ugly thing. Yes, lynchings have a complicated history in the US. But lynchings in mafia are also ugly. We often kill the wrong person, persecuting the innocent while the guilty go free. It's an often inaccurate, emotionally charged, and driven by paranoia, or personal animus, or by results which have been tampered with. I loathe the pattern of neutering language in a way which makes it inaccurate. Calling it an 'elimination' is sterile and less accurate. The problem is that any word that accurately reflects what is being done - eliminating someone by mob rule often in the absence of hard facts - will have ugly real-world connotations because any such process will be ugly and prone to historical abuses.

There is no escaping that the flavor is voting someone out is killing them, which inherently has ugly real-world connotations and can bring nasty thoughts to mind, but 'lynch' sprinkles racism on top of murder.

I agree that a better alternative than 'elimination' is wanted, but not that elimination is less accurate, although it is perhaps less precise, using the scientific definitions of accurate and precise. Voting someone out eliminates them from the pool of living players. If whatever word we use to mean, "vote a player out during the day", becomes accepted vernacular, then implications like potentially killing the wrong person, voting based on unverifiable gut feelings, and relying on falsified evidence will transfer to the new word unaccompanied by the racist connotation of 'lynch'.

Using the word lynch is good because it impresses into players' minds both the fact that they are engaging in an inexact process that is easily manipulated by both high emotional tides and nefarious actors.

Players should understand that anyway, no?

At the same time, when you leave the game and go into the real world, the word 'lynch' will be accurately tinged with an aura of unreliability, injustice, doubt, and finality that is far more visceral than any connotations imparted by the dry historical record. You will also understand why lynching happened and why it is historically a tempting process because you would have engaged in a simulacrum of the process yourself. You will remember being absolutely convinced that someone was guilty, gathering up a mob, pushing their lynch, only to sheepishly see the flip and realize how wrong you were.

As enlightening of a classroom exercise as this could be, whatever lesson in herd mentality 'lynch' imparts is outweighed many times over by its potential to instigate thoughts of racist violence, almost like a trauma trigger. Should we start every post in the day thread with Heil Hitler and flavor getting voted out as being put on a train to the gas chamber so that games will double as reminders that we can be susceptible to fascist propaganda?

Hang seems better than eliminate. Distinguishes what town does from what scum does a bit better.

Hang is better than lynch, but still carries some racist connotation. If only there were a verb meaning, "stabbed to death with a pitchfork".

Yes, it means that scum are able to chat during the day; also there might be other roles like masons or neighborhoods that would also have day chat.

I am not familiar with the term neighborhood. Do neighbors differ from masons in that the latter know they are all town?

This is an example of what that is

In my opinion, that's so transparent that it hardly qualifies as bread-crumbing.

/in

Vote: 90s and early 2000's nostalgia

What is bread-crumbing?

I have an idea of what cryptography is, but I'm not sure how I could encrypt something so that only certain people can read it unless I can communicate with them outside the game, which I presume is still banned.

All factions have day chat.

Does this just mean that scum can talk in scum chat during the day?

What is multiball?

MS and MU retired and banned the lynch word years ago.

I take it you mean MafiaScum and MafiaUniverse?

Someone might call the term lynch harmless because, for instance: lynching is not necessarily racial; many white people were lynched; lynching victims had often been convicted of a serious crime and sentenced to death, and capital punishment was normal in those days. None of these facts change that lynching was a means by which white people terrified black people into subjugation, and therefore that the word lynch could, especially for black people, bring to mind unpleasant thoughts. That's why it needs to go.

Well, it cuts both ways. The racist connotation is largely because it's usually used to refer to racist killings (even if it doesn't only mean that). Everyone who was lynched was hanged and killed, but those words don't carry the same connotation because we choose to continue using them in other contexts. I'd say the racist connotation behind the word "lynch" depends on intent, but again, the game is supposed to be fun, so if using a different term makes it more so for most people, then we should do that.

I don't think it's worth getting excessively worked up about, but it also would not be excessively difficult to change.

Most sites use Vote: Playername to eliminate someone. We shorten it to VTL

I'm fine with eliminate, and my only complaint is that I think new players would naturally assume it means all kills, like with my other group, where 'eliminate' includes ly... being voted out during the day, guns (one-use kills during the day), night-kills, et cetera.

'Lynch' isn't in the rules there. It doesn't need to be. They are much more left-leaning than Debatecraft. None of them would dare use the L-word. I remember Lunatic calling something "fvcking retarded" in Ranger's Apprentice. He probably would have gotten banned for that. At least a stern warning.

I hope this won't be seen as influencing the ongoing game, although Kohai closed the last thread I made and I did not think that topic would be a problem.

I don't like the word 'lynch' for voting someone out. Lynch has a strongly negative connotation, partially because it implies that the person was killed without due process, but mostly because of its association with racism. People hear 'lynch' and think of a white mob surrounding a black man hanging from a tree. That does not mean that 'lynch' is inherently racist, but it is unsalvageably steeped in racism, much like 'plantation' just means a big farm but brings to mind black slaves picking cotton.

I know that lynch become the accepted term in Mafia to the point where it mostly does not sound racist any more than the name Mafia makes us imagine that the night-kills are done by Italian men in suits, but I still don't like it, and I'm not sure whether being so used to it that we overlook the racist connotation makes it less problematic or more insidious.

I'm not trying to be a PC snowflake, but a change in terminology is overdue.

Tagging Kohai because I quoted him.

This is from post #170 in day 1 of the currently running Mafia game, but I think the topic is general enough to discuss here.

We're one of the few sites where flavor claiming occurs. I almost never see mass flavor claiming. But that's a separate issue completely.

Besides my curiosity as to how many sites Kohai has played on, I would like to know how well mass flavor claiming works. The idea is that, by having everyone claim some aspect of their character early on, later fake-claiming will be harder because each person will have fewer characters to choose from. That sounds great, but is there empirical evidence that it works? Have you ever wanted to fake-claim a character as scum and then found out that doing so would have contradicted your soft-claim? In Ranger's Apprentice, I brought up gender soft-claiming (post #124) as scum because I knew that there were few important women in this series, and, with Evanlyn claimed, female claims would probably mean Alyss Mainwaring or Madelyn Altman.

Just because an idea sounds promising does not mean that it will withstand scrutiny.