Murder By The Book - Ender's Game

What I was pointing out with that quote was that: Granola said at the end of D1 that the fluff posters needed to be looked at, so yeah, you. I'm calling him out on the fact he's all-but abandoned that line of inquiry.

Why is that suspicious? Because the mafia will point out people who look suspicious (because that's a thing a good townie should do), but they rarely want to stick their neck out and champion someone's lynch (because they'll then come under fire when the person flips town). It gives them plausible deniability if a town player starts yelling "Hey let's lynch Slorange!" and they join the wagon.

I'm finding Granola's habit of glaring at nebulous groups of people ("the fluff posters"; "the No Lynchers"), but only committing to the (comparatively) well-established wagons (Eberron and Slorange) really suspect. I'd be less inclined to suspect him if he showed some thought beyond those lynches - i.e. I want him to tell me who we'd pursue next if Slorange/Eberron flipped scum (and also if they flipped town! Mistakes happen!)



Plus plus plus, I still think that this justification is coming from a really anti-town mindset?

but you want to pursue a "lurker lynch" on yet another person who's nowhere near the middle of things?!

Like, ok, we've got twenty players alive; 7/8 who are officially fuckwhere, and nearly as many again who aren't doing much more than peripherally existing. If we lynched Slorange today and one of TrueGreen/Eberron/Akumu/Granola tomorrow, that's two active players killed, plus two more ganked in the night. This puts the game in a position where the only active players will be scum, who can draw all the lurkers into mislynch after mislynch because nobody's got the wherewithal to argue back.

The lurkers won't magically emerge from their cocoons D5 and lead town once the presently-active players finish ripping each other apart. Thanks to the No Lynch and janitoring, we're back to a situation kind of like D1 with no extrapolatable information about people's alignments. From the standpoint of wanting a fun game, I figure if we're going to pseudo-random lynch we should target a lurker.

I mean, best case scenario, they show up and start contributing! Worst case, we lynch someone who was barely even playing the game!

I think Granola really has a really damn solid point on complaining about a dearth of information and telling us we just can't rush to decisions in this environment as a janitor-or-whatever whose entire role is to hide information from the town. Nobody's bothered to address this — hell, you even quoted around it!

The usual format for a Janitor is they get a one-shot ability. Once per game, they say "I'll do the nightkill tonight". If said nightkill is successful, then the target is "vanished" rather than revealing their identity in daystart. If this game's Janitor is an "average" Janitor, they've done their deal and are now vanilla.

Janitors who can janitor multiple times do exist, but they're extremely powerful for the mafia and town would need a fair bit of firepower, roleswise, to balance out the game. Trying to game the setup is rarely ideal, but Fogel said it'd be "Pretty straightforward" so I'm assuming that if there is a Janitor, it's a one-shot. Whoever dies during N2 will almost certainly have their identity revealed, if that's what you're worried about.