No lynch was achievable, yes, but Yog blew up the likelihood it actually played out to town victory.

Thanks for the bomb shelter bit, I'd missed that.

Ok, here's a short list of beefs:

1) Town way too weak, especially if JMich wasn't even "really" town. Two investigative roles, one slightly gimped and one very gimped. A bomber who can't pick his target and where the prime target has double-layered protection even if Trent picks the right pool and gets the right role [edit - "RNG roll" not role]? That's just insane. We had a doctor - yay! - but she died trying to protect the guard protecting the SK.

People here and in the observer thread critiqued Sage bringing Kryp back, but with 3 people dying a day, what were the odds she was going to live long enough for the role to be useful down the road? Not very.

Vitek blasts town for weak play, but shit, both Trent and Kryp settled on correct targets and due to setup and RNG both fail. Why should town have assumed Flub's claim was crazy (esp. with a town guard) after Sage's claim and Kryp coming back to life?

2) Admittedly it didn't help that the newb got the stronger of the two roles. But parity cop was too weak for 3 factions, and at the very least needed some sort of 'Certificate of Sanity' to start the game or some sort of knowledge that there was no miller/godfather alignment screwage going to happen.

With 2 deaths a night this was going to be a short game even if town didn't lynch like crazy, and I had to waste N1 investigating Cristi precisely because I thought she WAS town. If I'd been able to freely investigate RW on N1 like I wanted, the game is entirely different.

I had to set up investigating Flub a night in advance, and thus wasted an investigation on agentcarr. I didn't bother investigating Yog, even though I thought it was likely he was guilty, because there was too high a risk he was godfather and that not only would I get nothing, I'd then have fucked up my baseline for the next night's investigation.

I don't think that was a miscalculation on my part, it's the limit of the role. Replay the game with me at least knowing I'm sane out of the gate, or that there are no roles with false alignment, and it's at least more balanced.

And that's the main reason I didn't stick to the Mexican standoff/no-lynch end. 10-2-1-1 seemed REALLY unlikely, but shit, my role sucked, and other than doctor I had the second best role. Which points back to point 1 - SK/mafia had a much better integrated set of roles.

3) Too much bad information.

The JMich town thing was only part of the mind-fuck.

Looking at the observer thread Vitek debated whether to reveal the "property owner" thing but it absolutely threw me way off track. Why? Because it was possible there were multiple properties and that even a non-town aligned arsonist might have an unrelated win condition of burning down all the buildings rather than SK. Vitek is clever and that would have been an awesome game design, wouldn't it?

Trent's flavor reveal even hinted he might be one as well ("bar owner" something).

It should also have been more clear Kryp was killed by Mafia given the 'incompetent' in his role. My sense of Sage's play was in part to help us get clarity on WTF happened N1. I don't blame her at all for that play.

4) As for town, the whole "No lynch on D1 is scummy and terrible!" thing is stupid. What did we learn from D1? We learned that maybe Trent looked scummy for hammering the way he did. And while he survived that day, the FoS never really shook off completely. Yes, that was really bleeping useful information.

I do get that sitting on your thumbs and just proclaiming no-lynch right off the bat doesn't help, so yes, that was a mistake on my part, but this insistence that someone must absolutely die Day 1 so we "know something" is just nuts. Especially given how several vets seem to spend D1 just goofing. If you don't have a great lead, let your investigators work, lengthen the game. I dunno, that seems pretty obvious to me.