Lord have mercy. You all chat something fierce. I turn away for an hour or two and come back to novels. Are all mafia games this conversational?
As noted in the post I voted the Elephant, probably town with the response you gave. It's too inflammatory to be a scum answer. they like to coordinate in their chat. I've no clue why hector made that last post, they should have been able to guess that?
I tend to gloss over your posts. The way you format them is… I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term “border gore” in games like Crusader Kings, but that.
I was about to make a Stronghold: Crusader reference until I re-read your post and saw you mentioned Crusader Kings. A game I have played that I think is interesting, but am too smoothbrain to fully sink into. All the Paradox games are like that for me. Sid Meier on the other hand? Civilization all day. Those games tend to be slow as all get-out, but I love me some Civilization.
Good News: I'm inching closer to the idea of a D1 lynch, based on what others have said about needing to kill SOMEONE so that we don't have an eternal lynch-freeze and lose the game.
Bad News: I don't know enough about anyone in this game to point the finger at. So I'm still in no-lynch mode. At this rate, I might get lynched by everyone else just to move this along.
So, this may sound like a smoothbrain take, but I have a tendency to overthink and complicate things. Work in progress. What helps me realign and get back on target is revisiting the basics.
1) Mafia is about social deduction/interaction/deception.
2) There are two sides; mafia and town.
3) One is an informed minority, the other an uninformed majority.
4) The goal for both sides is to eliminate every member of the opposing faction. (Yes, yes--neutral/third party factions exist but I'm keeping it simple.)
5) The "meta" is for everyone to maintain a town identity.
The fifth point is important, because it reminds me that everyone will lie about being town, unless they're aiming for some kind of Xanatos Gambit (see TVTropes.org for definition). This means, no one will come out and say they're mafia, which means I only have their words to go off of. The problem here is that I have not seen anyone say anything that might betray their allegiance. It's been pot shots back and forth between veterans, with plenty of inside jokes and such to add that fuel. Player X might always do "this thing" in mafia games, and they might have done "this thing" in a previous game as mafia. But we're in a new game. They might not be mafia
this time, can ya dig it? I'm afraid I'm no L, Light or Lelouch. I don't think I've even seen anything mildly suspicious yet. The only player who comes remotely close is TricMagic, and even then I admit it could be a gambit play. It could be his Lelouch/Geass move, and I'm personally getting a kick out of his fall-on-my-sword-for-the-good-of-the-colony antics, if only to keep the game moving at a steady pace. I want him to stick around just for my own amusement. Every game needs a Joker.