And by "learning" he means "whiskey."

Alright. No reply from Gamma, so I'm taking over.

Signup thread is here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/forum_mafia_52_signup_thread

I hope we can still get 12 players. Do you contact all the list-people, Gogfather, or should I do that?

So, could someone please explain what claiming/cryptoclaiming/massclaiming is. Like you would do to a 5-year old.

I followed the link in the wiki https://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=A_Beginner%27s_Guide_to_Claiming but it seems to be written in a language aimed for someone already familiar with the game.

"First, note that it's fairly common for wagons to die after the wagonee is placed at L-1. Maybe when faced with the real threat of a lynch the wagonee does something Townish, or maybe someone else decides to hold the idiot ball for a moment and everyone's attention darts away. It's common, and not a particularly bad thing...
...

Once a power role is outed, the scum NK is probably going there. "

Ah, I see. "wagonees", "L-1", "power role" and "NK". Yup. Everything is clear.

I'm familiar with the general concept of the game, and Bookwyrm gave me a crash course on how it's played on GOG, but beyond the quick note in OP, I'm still not sure I get what cryptoclaiming means.

Well, the 'wagonee' is the player on whom the wagon formed. So the player that currently most other players vote for (one after the other, thus 'wagon', like something that gets rolling). A "power role" or PR is someone who has some night action (other than the standard scum night kill). In this case a town aligned PR is meant. Can be an investigator or protector or something else.
"NK" just stands for nightkill. The standard night-action for scum which kills off one player.

Claiming is just that: someone claims to have a certain role. Scum will usually false claim, i.e. lie, and say that they are town. Townies usually should tell the truth about their role. Sometimes townies lie too, but more often than not that leads to trouble for town.

Massclaiming is, when a majority agrees that everyone should claim. I.e. everyone says which role (s)he has. Is sometimes useful for town, especially in open setups where all roles are known, because it forces scum to make some claim up, which can be found out. But it holds the danger that scum will know all the power roles afterwards and can eliminate them.

Cryptoclaiming ... well, no one really knows how that works but it is forbidden. :-) Theoretically that would be some code agreed upon between a subset of players that confirms them as town to each other, or tells them each other's role without the others knowing, breaking the game. Or, in games where the alignment PMs are not public, something like 'tell me the third word of your alignment PM'. Basically the cryptoclaiming rule means: don't try to break the game.

Lift has covered the others fairly well so here's a few more definitions of the other terms used;

L-1 - One vote away from being lynched. L-2, L-3 etc. are also used but less frequently.

Flip - The role and alignment reveal usually given on the death of a player.

NK - The Night Kill (or a Night Kill if there is more than one) in almost all set ups the Mafia / Scum team get a factional kill at Night, NK is the short version.

Hammer - The last vote that lynches a player. Often the most scrutinised spot on the wagon because of what it can tell you about a player's alignment. For example a quick hammer (one that follows the previous vote very quickly and with little explanation) is often viewed with suspicion as scum trying to finish off a townie (or silence a team mate).

Bus - A short version of "throw under a bus", basically when scum turn on one of their own to try and gain credit when they die and flip.


Those are the important ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Thanks, both.

Lifthrasil had it essentially right, but here is where cryptoclaiming was discussed a long time ago, on a forum far, far away.

Obviously, this is pretty game-breaking. Massclaiming, in general, can suck the life from many set-ups, but adding near certainty to the claims just makes the game pointless for scum.

I've always seen crypto claiming as disclosing data in a certain way so only people who have the correct "key" can decode what you're trying to say. For example, if I know Town PMs have a very specific wording that is not publicly available I can says something like "The seventeenth word of the second sentence is "aluminum" which would automatically net me a bazillion Town points since other Townies will have the key which in this case is their own PM. Something like this.

I see Lift already mentioned the exact same example, so I think we are aligned.

Well, this would be quoting PMs, which is a different rule (but can be just as game-breaking).

Nah, cryptoclaiming is the specific instance where an outside encryption is used to force all claims to be made without foreknowledge of any other claims (essentially making them all blind first-claims). This puts scum at a severe disadvantage, because they can't base their own claims on what has already been claimed by legitimate townies. It bypasses the whole reason for the game: back and forth discussion to determine who is guilty.

That's why I said they need to have the "key". The key can be anything really, as long as some but not all people have it and can use it. The PM was just an example.

Fair enough. In the classic example, each person has their own key though, and they only reveal it once every player has made their encrypted role-claim.

Regardless, it doesn't much matter how broadly it is defined. The Cryptoclaiming rule was just made to doubly rule out one of the most egregious ways to break a game.

Ah, so THAT's what Cryptoclaiming originally referred to! Thanks for the clarification.

It's funny how reading through that thread everyone talks about how mass claiming is good for scum when in my experience it's the single act most likely to swing a game in town's favour and more often than not breaks the game.

But then we do tend to role heavy games here so maybe in more vanilla games mass claims are less useful.

Yeah, I was also just rereading it, and I had forgotten this aspect of the discussion. As you say, in games with fewer roles, where claiming 'vanilla townie' wouldn't immediately brand one as immediately mega-suspicious, then a mass-claim would essentially just point out the town power-roles to scum. In role-madness games, it would be more hit or miss for scum, but I think the ability to verify claims with Night actions would tip the balance towards town.

So this would mean that crypto-claiming is only game-breaking in games with special roles. Otherwise everyone just crypto-claims "I'm a townie" and no one gained any advantage?