GG all! That was good fun, though went downhill a lot sooner than I hoped.
In retrospect, I should have been okay with lynching Naturegirl on Day 1. But to be honest, I'm not sure if things would have gone just as well as it did now with her being the final scum. I still believe NJW's whole maneuver of implicating Superdorf and I were to avoid Naturegirl being lynched. If she was already lynched, I'm guessing he would have resorted to a more subtle attack vector that would have worked in his favor.
The maneuver was something I kind of trapped myself into... it ended up being the most plausible claim I could make to save myself. I wasn't actually too concerned about Naturegirl being lynched, though I would have preferred that it didn't happen. I'll explain why I did it:
I didn't realise a massclaim d2 was likely, and didn't prepare for it, or even read up on massclaims. This meant I was badly prepared for d2, and didn't really know how I should play it. I've never been scum before, and didn't really understand the key concepts behind falseclaims.
At night, I did the nightkill and Naturegirl protected someone. We planned that Naturegirl would just look like a doctor, and I would react to whatever came up during the day. Unfortunately for me, it became clear that I was most likely to have performed the nightkill very early on. Naturegirl had barely escaped the lynch d1, looked a lot like my scum partner, and had the arguably weaker scum role, so I decided to try and survive.
Due to my ascetic ability, I knew that Superdorf had been roleblocked when he tried to target me. I didn't know whether or not Pooka was an actual roleblocker or wasn't a roleblocker and was going to claim against Superdorf. I gambled that he wasn't a roleblocker, said I knew this, and planned to claim follower to explain why I knew this. If Pooka turned out not to be a roleblocker, my claim would be substantiated, and Superdorf would look like they made a false claim and did the nightkill. So it was a gamble.
Perhaps forseeably, Pooka did turn out to be a roleblocker, so Superdorf being roleblocked was overdetermined. At this point, the only explanation I could think of was to accuse Pooka and Superdorf of being in cahoots, which I did.
I wasn't happy about how Naturegirl supported me so readily, but her leaving the vote on Pooka and showing that one of them was scum kind of forced that to happen. I did kind of end up bringing her down with me, but I'm not sure things would have gone differently otherwise.
In short, I pretty much knew I was going to get lynched and was fairly sure scum would lose by the time that last argument started. What lost the game was lack of planning and a poor response to the massclaim.
Also, any thoughts on my play style? I think I did well, but there's certainly areas where I can do better.
You seemed like a really strong player, I was scared of you. Well done for
mentioning the correct scumteam d1!
One thing that I might say about your scumhunting is that I never consciously tried to "pocket" you - I just mentioned your early mechanical speculation to make it seem like I'd done more than skimread it. But my motives there weren't entirely townie in any case, and you picked up on that.
@Superdorf, I think I was a bit hard on you at certain points. This was mostly to help me as scum.
IcyTea, thanks for running this! It felt like quite a balanced setup, though I don't know much about these things. I think the ascetic role blew up in my face slightly, but as I understand it scum had plenty of powerful options in that game.
I liked the flavourtext too.