HOW TO PLAY FORUM MAFIA (A primer for drealmer7)
Hello cadet! Welcome to Space Station Epsilon. Please take a few moments to study this handy guide before further interactions with your fellow cadets and superiors. Learning a few simple tips will greatly assist you during your tour of duty here at Epsilon. If you have any questions, be sure to check with your local Protocol Officer. A handy list of common questions and answers is also available by accessing Q.U.A.D. from your barracks terminal, keyword “FAQ”.
drealmer7: We can all see that mchack's intelligence isn't very high, let's not hold it against him and realize that he can probably offer some help at some point. Maybe.
Does anyone here have any useful information? Did anyone see anything fishy going on in the past 48 hours? I'm sure we can figure it out if we WORK TOGETHER.
It is often helpful for station moral not to call your fellow cadets idiots in the first five minutes. In the example above, we can see a newly-promoted “Health and Safety Executive” violating this simple rule in his very first post, beginning a slow and gradual slide to pariah status. Remember, here on Epsilon, the goal is to have enough fun that you want to return for another tour of duty, while ensuring that your fellow cadets and officers enjoy your company enough to invite you back.
drealmer7: I didn't really have much of a choice coming here, you see. It was this or the prison colony, and my grand-daddy did 30 years on one of those and I wasn't about to even give that a second thought.
Remember – always be careful when breadcrumbing! Breadcrumbing is a highly complex and sophisticated art, and adding in role-play elements can confuse or disorient your fellow cadets.
It is often tempting to beat up your fellow cadets with information. If you feel you have a large volume of relevant thoughts so vitally important that everyone needs to read every single syllable, consider breaking it up into smaller posts, or formatting the “wall of text” post in such a way that it has plenty of line breaks so it can be digested in smaller chunks. Many of your fellows will see a phone book post and simply give it a skip.
drealmer7: For those that haven't voted and would like to maintain some civility here, keep an eye out on those who would be fast to kill someone, for they are more likely the intruders
Here on Epsilon, opinions are like buttholes. Everyone has at least one (depending on species) and they all smell like flowers. Take caution when expressing highly generalized statements that anyone with a contrary opinion to your own has nefarious intent – it reflects more upon you than upon them.
Do recall that here on Epsilon, voting requires
bolding or it doesn’t count. Voting without bolding will confuse your fellow cadets, as nobody knows whether you mean it or not.
drealmer7: Krypsyn, please, calm down. We are all locked in here and something is going on on the ship. Let the adults try and talk and figure things out. There is a serious situation at hand and you need to let us focus. Go play on the other side of the room while we all talk if you have to, that would be fine. But if you want to be around us you have to stop interrupting us from dealing with what is going on. Who knows, if you sit still and listen you might learn something and be able to help as well!
It is often thought of as a “Career Limiting Move” to refer to a senior officer with decades of experience with anything other than an at least basic sense of courtesy, unless you want to manage the health and safety of the latrines for the next year.
drealmer7: I mean, I assume we will learn SOMEthing after a majority vote of no-lynch, wouldn't we? I feel like Q.U.A.D. will have to give us something more and you wouldn't simply get a repeat scenario of day-1 minus 1-crewmember from the overnight elimination. That does seem pointless and I can understand why you'd just go ahead and vote for elimination to avoid that, but, how likely is that? I think people are just afraid that that might happen, and, again, any behavior out of fear is no good in my book.)
That is precisely what happens at no-lynch. The station AI is under no obligation of any kind to provide additional information, ever. It is entirely up to the players.
drealmer7: I think intruders might be speaking in code.
It is often helpful to analyze how games start. Here on Epsilon, the game launched immediately upon notification of player PMs. This left no time for a “Night Zero” where the intruders might have colluded. The intruders either do or do not have an ulterior method of communication external to our conversations here in the main section. If they do, they would have no need to communicate in the game in code. If they don’t, how would they recognize each other’s codes?
drealmer7: I'm sorry, a lot of that is hard for me to understand, it's some of the mumbo-jumbo I was talking about. What is "RVS" and "film?" Some more mumbo-jumbo that is very confusing
“Random Voting Stage”. It’s helpful to explore the additional information contained
here. As to “FIN” or “ZOMG” or others, you will have to judge which are acronyms taken from broader experience, and which are game content.
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We hope you have enjoyed this primer and found it useful! Now you should be able to successfully navigate the political pitfalls and intricacies involved with life here on Epsilon. Take care, and remember, if you keep pissing people off, eventually they’re going to blow you out an airlock.
(copyright Weyland-Yutani corp, 3347)
