Indeed. Good choice and quite obvious.

I on the other hand was absolutely terrible.
I never got into the game, all my reads were poor and I did little to help.

I think only players I got really right was Joe and SPF otherwise I was entirely useless.
In fact, some things I was questioned about I couldn't even answer as I was well aware they could be easily considered scummy but it was because they were just bad.
I also spent most of the time in trent's pocket. It was nice and confy there but I should have seen that.
I was like, "he had no problem with scene's claim, tried to cast doubts on mchack later while voting same as him and seemed to skirt by most of the time but on the other hand, he is nice to me so he must be town".

Well, the reads are kind of excusable in the last Day as we all (with an exception of SPF) discounted lovers and so we were chasing after threat we believed must exist in place where there was none.

I honestly can't tell you.
This is first time I have encountered the role and TBH, right now I think they mostly are not good role not only here but overall.
Either one can bus other or they have easy time screwing mafia over and fairly good saving claim from lynch (who wants to potentially lose 2 players at once).

Here it was slightly worse because we knew there could be masons and there could be twist so they had easier time in being accepted.

But where lies our fault is that we were willing to accept lovers who know each others alignment. That is very unusal thing and we were bit too eager to just go with it.


I would like to know what trent thought of it when they were forced to claim. :-)

That would be actually quite fun. Swingy as hell and much harder for lovers but fun. :-)

My hunch says it should be left out as it provides one of few options to get them.

Thanks for hosting ZFR!

I agree that the lovers were overpowered/mafia underpowered. I wonder what Trent's internal monologue was when the brothers claimed?

I think that having the mafia Bro the godfather might have been overpowered.

Oh, the game is over? Sorry I wasn't more useful as Cop. Interesting twist at the end. Although I don't exactly understand why Town lost. Didn't they still have the majority?

So HSL x SPF back-and-forth was T-T, HSL x BW was T-T, HSL x me was T-T, BW x mchack was T-T, Lift x Poppy was T-T and I bet I am forgetting some more of really useful prolonged arguments. :-)
Gogtrial wasn't town, he was only called that. He was neutral together with Joe.

EDIT: That made me realise. They were even neutrals with influence on NK and full NK after other mafia died thanks to Joe getting benefits of mafia. Yikes.

Ah, OK.

This got me for a moment too. It's because the town lover wasn't really town. So with HSL dead there would be another nightkill and then the lovers would have been 2/4.
Yeah... The mafia thought they were the informed minority, but really there was an even more informed minority behind them.


Just thinking, if I was trent I would have claimed second cop and bussed the godfather when the "brothers" claimed.

Hmm, very good idea.

It would put him in very good spot but it could become problematic if there was claim and there would be no letters left for a cop anymore.


Pre-post edit:
Hey, they were not even brothers? Filthy liars!

Yeah, it could have easily backfired but I think it was the only chance for the mafia to win at that point.
Even then I really didn't think it was likely so I basically discounted it.

Realistically, if HSL had swayed us, the lynch would have gone to you or Vitek instead and we'd all be just as dead.

Yeah, in hindsight it looks like the Lovers were too OP.

Partially my fault as balancing etc. was my job as assistant mod, but I really didn't expect the lovers to go for the rest of the Mafia straight away (or to succeed without the Mafia distracting town).

Perhaps allowing a SK would have been better and have given the lovers something more to worry about.
I think town were overly trusting of the lovers and distrusting of each other, I know how it is when you are so convinced someone is scum you will happily swallow any lie that fits and furthers that narrative, and gog and Joe being town allowed HSL and Bookwyrm to continue believing the other was scum.

I was pretty sure they were Tragic Lovers after Joe jumped on our Scum buddy Trent's wagon. It made Scum victory incredibly unlikely and given him and his lover both voted at the same time I could only think that they wanted rid of a Scum victory because they were Tragic Lovers

TOWN I thought you might have questioned why Joe was first on my wagon and never really analysed while lurking with all kinds of excuses.

Not sure, Joe was in night chat though. I think Tragic Lovers have 2 win conditions but primarily must protect their lover.

I'm guessing most aren't familiar with Tragic Lovers as I wasn't until reading up on them. The clear lesson for Town is not letting lovers go late in the game.

You did, I thought Town would and should have tunnelled hard on this possibility because if they were lovers that won by being the last remaining players they would win this turn. Realistically why would Scum not have lynched 2 town lovers? To get an extra mislynch?

There, all read up. Amusing to see in the admin and observer threads how much I still missed, despite being the most informed minority in the game.
This was a lot of fun for me. Hadn't expected to do quite this well in my first ever scum game.

Wrt to setup/balance: I started the game thinking we were pretty overpowered compared to mafia, but generally balanced against town, as we were basically just a 2-vote SK who could only start killing once mafia was dead. (I'm glad I concluded correctly that ZFR would've excluded a real SK, though never completely trusted in it.) As the game progressed, I realized the balance against mafia was pretty okay as well. If Joe had had to claim much earlier in the day than in the final hours, we would've been questioned more extensively, and trent would've had all the pieces necessary to order us gone. Also the moment we started going after trent for real, we only had one shot at convincing all of town to follow along. Joe's godfather aspect was a lucky break in giving us some confidence, but in the end didn't end up making any difference.

Poppy/Hunter/Dessimu: I'm sad you didn't get to play for longer. Hopefully we'll meet again in some future game, under better circumstances!
dedoporno: Did we interact at all on D1? I don't think so, but I remember being amused by you. Kinda glad I didn't have to face off against you at any point!
scene: Given ZFR's observation in the admin thread about your inconsistency wrt reading the setup document: Was all your misunderstanding really just an act? If so: *whistles in admiration* Also the whole "you're going to get me in trouble here!" for posting "during a meeting". Nicely done! Makes me feel a whole lot less bad about targetting you so deliberately right from the start. (I wasn't planning to! Just tossed you a softball to be seen to be doing things; but then you fumbled it and so I had to keep following up. I was really worried that town would be concluding things about how efficient I was at tracking down scum!)
Lift: Your loss was a big loss for certain. Me and Joe were counting on you, man! Now we had to take trent down all by ourselves, plus we lost the whole you vs Poppy/Vitek distraction!
Ixam: Yep, you called it. You did make it pretty easy, though, so I really had no hesitation in abusing that. :)
mchack: I think you said in the observer thread that you keep reading people based on their roles in previous games. I wonder if you had a bit the same with me? In any case, thanks for being such a good distraction to let Joe coast by for most of the day.
trent: Oh man... *shakes his head* You were nearly flawless! As I said in my chat with Joe, you deserved to win this, but yeah... "very trusting". >:D I'd be quite interested to know at what exact point you first suspected what exactly was happening? Immediately after my full claim? (In which case: respect for choosing the tack of publicly trusting us and making yourself hard to lynch! You definitely made me work hard to find a PoE that allowed me to target you, and convince all of town, and I had to fudge several of my connection reads there in order to come to the foregone conclusion.)
flub: I'm really glad we were able to eventually free you from the torture of this game. ;P I don't know if town lucked out by not having your usual play style as a distraction, or lost out big time by having you less interested. (Were you actually? Or was that play-acting?) Thanks for voting where we needed you to! *g*
HSL: I was quite amused to see that you attempted to protect me on N1. And then were blocked. And I'm inordinately proud of having fooled you. I think you over-estimate my ability to observe/analyse things a bit, and that that worked to my benefit here. FWIW, dodging your questions near the end there really was due to me needing all my time to nail trent, but all the same I was glad I could risk not having to continue sparring with you, as I'm not certain I wouldn't have slipped. Finally, my apologies for having accused you of playing on my pride are real; but crawling into the skin of town-me to have felt that, was very easy.
SPF: I had such an easy time scum-reading you, and I was so disappointed that Vitek made that impossible. You really gave me a big scare with figuring out tragic lovers. I'm glad you talked yourself out of it! On behalf of Joe: "ner nerner ner ner"!
Vitek: I just love that you were the first one to run with my narrative of 2 remaining scum in the tiny pool of 4 players. I was worried that people would pay more attention to the messenger who planted that idea in your minds. I also hadn't expected to be so successful at taking away your suspicion from Joe. You were dead on there, and he was right to be terrified of you!
Bookwyrm: You're scary! My D2 starting narrative wasn't quite as you were seeing it, but you were very right to be suspicious of it. That post, plus my D1 townread of you, were two definite mistakes. I'm glad to have given you some chance to do game-setup theorizing, though. Very enlightening! :D
Joe: My brother! My tragic lover! I couldn't have done it without you. I hope I wasn't too overbearing in our chat! I had the feeling that - especially after you lost the ability to post from work - I was posting so much as to overwhelm you a bit, but I really needed the vent for fancy theories. I'm really glad you didn't have to get a replacement and managed to stick it out for our victory!

Finally:
ZFR: Thank you ever so much for running this game. Whenever I manage to scrape together the time to play, I have a lot of fun, but this was definitely the highlight.

Out of curiosity, was this a breadcrumb? I noted this down in the few notes I took, but ultimately I decided it was either just a joke or else you were preping for a scum claim later.

-----

Since they were neutral, they should have just been made neutral. I suspect that part of the tension in that role is the Prisoner's Dilemma: wondering whether your partner is going to cooperate or betray.

As it was, they were a neutral faction that both had the Godfather power, and (as indicated above) they knew exactly who the Mafia were, and they had to eliminate all mafia, and they were effectively immune to the mafia NK, and they got a NK when mafia were all dead.

-Amusingly enough, SK would probably have been the only thing that would have given Mafia a chance to win.

Other thoughts:
-I don't think I ever really had a chance of catching them. I was staying too close to the setup-as-stated.

-Maybe we should stop letting people claim at lynch? XD
Another Town Guard-Of-Arsonist scenario?
And heaven only knows how THAT would have played out the next day. Trent would have obviously lied about being a cop because of the godfather aspect, but maybe he could have tried to spin it as "I dunno WTF the mod is doing there. I got a guilty result".
Agreed. Especially toward EOD, I was pretty sure that I was gambling the game on being right about HSL. If he didn't flip Town, I figured I was almost certain to be next.

Joe pretty much rode it out on Gogtrial's town cred. Gogtrial was doing a good job of looking town most of the game.

During the game , I was counting votes, and the way the numbers worked out, they were effectively a single vote. Presumably the lovers are going to vote together. While the two of them caused an extra vote to be required for lynch, they had the extra vote to trigger that lynch.