whiteflame

hey theme knowledge guy: You think we should push for his full claim or not? I kinda wanna push for it

I get the impulse. He’s still pretty behaviorally off to me, but the claim has me second-guessing a bit. I’ll think about it.

It's interesting that you say that. I tried reading up on the character and found that the wikis and other information I could find didn't say very clearly how big a character she was. I even asked ChatGPT (someone's probably going to try policy lynching me for that) how important a character Sung Jin-Ah is, and when I don't trust something ChatGPT says, my first sanity check is to repeat the question to see whether or not it changes its answer. Sure enough, it did, repeatedly.

In a show largely centered on a single character, there aren’t a lot of other characters I’d consider “major” or “main,” but there are some who are more central to the narrative or make more regular appearances. I’d put her in the latter category. Shes not super important to the plot (unless you watch some YouTube videos that… recontextualize their relationship), but she shows up a lot.

Please take a minute to think about this.

Alright. I think I get what you're hinting at.

I'm Sung Jin-Ah

Not fully caught up yet, but I saw this and I've got to give my thoughts.

For those who do not know, this is the lead's (Sung Jin-woo) sister. She is a substantial character in the show, and especially with 17 players here, I'm not surprised she'd show up in this game. That being said, she runs a bit contrary to the basic mechanic, namely the whole "Guild recruitment" aspect as well as the power activation. To my knowledge, Sung Jin-Ah is not and never becomes a Hunter. She doesn't have a rank, so her being recruited and gaining a PR is a little strange. On the other hand, I suspect scum include some boss monsters, which also shouldn't play well with the recruiting mechanic.

Maybe I'm just getting too deep into mod psych and theme knowledge, but I'm still debating with myself over this one. I don't see Mikal giving this as a fake claim to scum if she was the only outlier in this respect, either.

Note: I'm not calling for you to claim your role, as I don't think that would help anyway.

Alright, I'm caught up this morning.

Some basic thoughts for now since I've got to at least get some work done this morning:

I get the push on Thoth, though I'm a little wary of any TMI being used as an excuse for it, especially given that's Thoth's MO. The whole "fear kill target" on Mestari is a little strange. The fact that he's softing a character from the show and is mentioning that it could be the MC Sung Jin-woo is also a little off. At this point, he's confirmed that he likely has some kind of role, though no, I would not automatically push for said role just because he claimed a character. He also said this:

My character and role give me a strong sense that town are the good guys and scum are the bad guys. That's the straightforward part. I don't know which bad guys scum are or if there's reason to believe they are a specific set of bad guys or not.

As someone who does know this show pretty well, while there is some morally gray territory, you have to squint to see it. It would not be terribly hard to tell if a character is "good" in the sense that they haven't done anything remarkably bad. I won't get into the specifics of characters I think are likely to be scum or TPs in this game (it's a topic to revisit later when we've got more claims on the table), but it really shouldn't be hard to Google your character and determine that they're good or villainous. That's part of the reason I believe it's likely this is a simple theme split. That being said, the big problem here is that scum can claim themselves as their character. That's likely to confound any theme analysis, along with the fact that scum were given fake claims (which further reinforces this likely being a simple theme split). So much as I do appreciate the focus on theme that has come up between Luna and Thoth, I don't think it helps us at this stage.

The long and short of it with Thoth is that I'm sussing him a little, but I'd like to go back through his posts today before I start putting more pressure on him.

I haven't seen Max or Shining post at all so far. Hoping that changes soon.

Wylted's going off on tangents about how posts are written. It's pointless, but not unusual for Wylted regardless of alignment, and he's town confirmed anyway by virtue of being a Guild Leader. Not super fond of the fact that he hasn't revealed who he recruited after Luna did.

Nothing rubbed me the wrong way about Luna's behavior to begin with and his push on Thoth has made sense so far anyway. And again, he's town confirmed as a Guild Leader.

I've largely gotten where Mestari's coming from with his thoughts on tactics. It's not a strong town lean, but I think he'd be more inclined to pit the Guilds against one another, or at minimum let them figure it out rather than trying to bring them to an accord. That gives him a slight town lean.

Helz came in with a huge post that reads as pretty good behavioral analysis. First impression's good, but I'm less inclined to see the rejection of the Guild invite as a solid town read. There's both value and risks for joining a Guild as scum. Marginal town lean.

Much of the rest of my reads are just different flavors of null.

Vader posted three times and none of them have added anything. Banana has posted twice, given some limited thoughts and bounced.

Alyssa's been a bit more involved in providing reads and clarifying her thoughts on wagons. I get where Helz is coming from as she only called them out for not posting when there have been other inactives, but I can't say I've developed a read on her yet.

Wryly's largely been pretty light on thoughts about the DP so far. Fun contributions and some decent questions, but not a lot to go off of.

Rex has jumped around a bit on his reads, but I think he's likely town. I don't think scum Rex fails to note that he's been invited to the Guild by Luna for that long.

I'm going to do a deeper dive into Pie, Mharman, David and Casey's posts so far. All of them have contributed enough that I should have a stronger impression, but I just don't atm.

Anyway, I'm really tired and I'm going to call it a night here.

At the price of waiving ones that have already been activated. A little now can be worth a lot later.

Assuming they already have good PRs that they can use early, sure. Also, assuming they have unlimited use of their roles.

It can definitely lead to easy mistakes, but that's just one side of the equation.

I'm not arguing that there's no value for scum to be in these chats. There clearly is value to getting insight into what at least one town player (the Guild Leader) is doing, let alone another person.

I know. It's very unlikely, but possible, that they recruited all four scum. But the more they recruit, the higher the probability of at least one scum in each guild grows. (Now I've been nerd-sniped by calculating the probability that at least one scum was recruited on night 0. I know how to do it if they couldn't recruit the same person, but that makes it harder.)

That's actually impossible. Luna already confirmed that the other Guild Leader tried to recruit him. So at worst, 3 scum have been recruited. If there is one scum, then the call is already coming from inside the house. Recruiting more bears limited risk after that point. That's all beside the point I was making, though. I think both Guild Leaders need to do their due diligence to come up with good targets for recruitment based on behavior and, if players put them out there, claims. I don't think there should be a blanket "this is dangerous, do not proceed" placed over the possibility of recruitment.

Nah I liked the Rick and Morty reference too lol

Damn, we've talked more about Rick and Morty than the actual show this theme covers. And for now at least, I'm good with that.

I specifically think that the guild leaders should out who they have already recruited and who they will recruit at night so that we can maximize the number of recruited players for the night where we agree to not recruit at all and use all of our actions at the same time. Wasting recruits by targeting the same people means less roles get activated on the big night.

I get the thinking here, as Guilds shouldn't be cannibalizing each other if we want to avoid getting too much into the weeds of "Guild vs. Guild" wincons. I'm also with you that I don't really care about it. A town win is the priority, full stop. Both Guilds would need to agree to it.

I think it's actually wiser to say fuck recruiting and just use your actions. With probably six people in guild chats, there's a good chance that Mafia have zero wiretaps now and I don't think taking that risk is worth waiving night actions.

I disagree. First off, you're potentially activating more roles for town. Second, you're exchanging more information in the Guild chats, which can allow for a more coordinated plan of attack each NP. That can be a negative if scum or a TP is present, but speaking from experience having recruited Luna in a recent game as scum, being stuck in a chat where you're expected to divulge information and regularly interact can lead to some pretty easy mistakes. It becomes a whole lot harder to hide in a group of, say, 3-5 in a Discord server vs. the whole 17 person game on here. Third, I'm also not convinced "that Mafia have zero wiretaps now". Wylted and Luna went into their recruitments blind. They could absolutely have recruited scum, and especially during DP1, that's going to be harder to determine since there's so little to go off of. The numbers make it less likely than when they recruit more people, but those recruitments will at least be informed by behavior. So, no, I don't think we should assume their channels are clean.

What am I fucking thinking, they're town confirmed

Yeah, both Guild Leaders are town confirmed. That much is a given.

I explicitly believe that enabling power roles and having a night where both sides agree to use roles and not recruit is beneficial to the town.

Been meaning to come back to this. I think this is an excellent idea. I think recruiting NP1 should be a given (no NK definitely helps there, and each Guild needs to build up its numbers so they have more night actions to use), then it becomes a question of how often they would agree to do it. Seems worth considering, especially if the Guilds can joint win with the same number of recruits.

If I correctly understand how guild recruitment works, this could give an interesting game-theoretic solution: If both guilds don't recruit anyone from now on, they will have the same number of members and should all win together. I will ask Mikal whether or not a tie in members lets the guild leader win.

I actually did ask him about this in my PM. He said that the guilds would joint win, so yep, this would work.

Why did Mikal need to specify that dead players don't count toward faction totals

Are there roles that have utility after death and might blur the line enough to require that clarification?

I was just thinking about that. I think we'd have to assume that there's a Restless Spirit/Tree Stump or the like among the roles in this game based on that line from Mikal.

Cut him some slack, he has quick-lynch PTSD lol

You know... you have a point.

Character - Kohai

Role - Currnelty VT become ascetic upon being recruited

Justification - as a moderator nothing gets past me

Really don't get just straight up claiming this under limited pressure (I see 3 votes leading up to this), but here we are. I would give you some towncred for claiming this early, but given the info in the OP, everyone knew that peoples' characters could just be themselves.

I'd like to suggest that we DISCUSS softing whether we are a show character or ourselves. Not that we do it, but that we discuss whether or not we should do it.

Solo Leveling isn't exactly a series known for having a lot of main characters, so no, I don't like this idea at all. Softing this game seems especially pointless given how many people are likely to just say their characters are themselves.

This whole game feels like that episode of Rick and Morty where new characters started popping up everywhere but the main characters remembered them always being there, and they turned out to be brain parasites that implanted you with long-term memories of themselves

Basically Mestari is Sleepy Gary

Just send me to Gary, I want to be with Gary!

Damn, I’m through 4 pages and this is still expanding. Was hoping to get through it all before I posted something, but I’ll have to come back in a bit, so here we are for now.

I’m mainly just checking in at this point, providing a few minor thoughts while I’m at it.

I can at least understand Mestari’s thinking, even if I’m more in line with Luna’s, about claiming that you are the Guild Leader. I can see the value in having a town confirmed (yes, they are alignment confirmed at this point so long as no one CC’s them) player or two is valuable to some extent. I can see the value in trying to garner behavioral info from ppl who hop on their wagons, but given how large this game is and that those would have to develop this DP and not just be the usual cluster fuck DP1 lynch wagon, I’m hesitant to put a lot of value on it.

Regarding the VTNL, that may be something we discuss later in the DP, but it’s pointless to argue for it now. The goal is to get information. Assuming a VTNL doesn’t do that, so while the numbers may balance, it’s not reason enough to be talking about it now.

Also, slight town lean on Kohai. Given I’ve been scum 3 games in a row before I took a breather and he’s the only one to VTL me, dude comes off authentic if nothing else.

Damn, 17? Easily our biggest game, this should be fun.

I’m down. /in

And you know that only happened because you were me and I am sus.

I'm considering it. I can be in as a backup for now, might join if there's a need.

Given that this is a couple of games off, I'll go ahead and be /in for this. That way, everyone will have an obvious scum to eliminate DP1 when the RNG selects me again!

The item could only be used the night after it was given. That's what I was trying to say by "it has to be locked in on the day it's given or it will expire." But that probably wasn't super clear about what I meant.

Ah, must've missed that. Might have made the same choice anyway, hard to say.

I was actually going to give you the bomb NP1 but didn't think the DP would end that soon and was away from my computer - didn't submit a night action in time. Good thing I didn't lol. I doubted for a moment that you were the Mafia RNG God's Job, silly me. Did you figure out my role somehow DP1?

Behaviorally, I figured it would be hard to get you VTL'd, so I made the call to check your PM with my role DP1. Good thing I did, even if it led me down the wrong path later thinking you'd given something out that no one had announced. If you'd have given me that Bomb, that would have been hilarious and not affected the outcome at all.

Nah theres no way you'd be scum again the tenth time in a row.... RIGHT?! RIGHT!?

*takes notes on the argument he's definitely not going to make*

Yeah whiteflame has rolled scum so much he is quitting lol. You mods are fucking him. Lowkey dont blame him, I would too rolling scum that many times back to back

I'll come back to it at some point. Absence will make the heart grow fonder... so I can get voted off DP1 for being perma-scum in a few games.

I was wondering about the lack of a kill. I mean you could have killed Thoth and then have it be four players remaining with a larger POE, rather than final 3.

Couldn't really see a world in which things improved with Banana in play, especially since the bar for elimination would have gone up by one vote. Maybe that would have led to more uncertainty, dragged things out, but we would also have had one less DP, which meant little time crunch. It was a riskier choice not to eliminate Thoth, but I'd make it again.

Why was Thoth lynched?

I mean the night death was from the POE. It's pretty obvious scum isn't looking to narrow town POW and that it was a vig shot?

Was surprised anyone bought the possibility that scum also shot Mago. I knew very well that Mago was a terrible target. A fake Vig would be a ballsy ass claim.