Here are the facts as I understand them.

In the vanilla mafia game the mafia is outnumbered 3:1. Additionally, the town side has the only power roles: doctor and cop. In spite of these advantages, the odds of the town winning are still only 50%.

In this game, we know we have additional power roles. However, the mafia is apparently permitted to have some of those roles, and not every townie begins the game with a useful power, or even a power at all. Even the items in the pool have, for the most part, proven to have no effect. In other words, this is not a vanilla game, but it is not as far from it as it could have been, and the additional town powers are counterbalanced by possible mafia powers.

To date, we have had three of the twelve players step forward claiming to possess a useful item: spurge, mario, and prof. The claimed items are protection, investigation, and other, respectively.

Spurge has claimed that his protective item is bound to himself, but he has also separately stated a, quote “what if” scenario in which he might get a different item, and when pressed stated that the item might not be bound to himself “for all [he] know[s].”

Mario has claimed that his item not only determines guilt and innocence, but also acts as a sort of flavor cop, i.e. it additionally tells him what item the target possesses. This latter revelation was made as a correction to his earlier statement that he actually took the item. He has labeled this as a misunderstanding of his PM on his part. This investigative item is bound to him, at least until death.

Prof has claimed that his item, a fortune cookie, had an initial description which was vague, but that upon use it made him “feel” invincible, and later provided him with two messages. To quote, “The one who kills will get the possibility to pick up the item his target held at the moment of his strike." and “Trucks.” In essence, this means prof’s item acted as both self-protection and as a clue. He finished by saying that, upon being consumed, his item turned into a note.

Our moderator has previously hosted at least one game. In that game, he assigned the mafia a passive ability which could potentially have permitted the mafia to learn the identities of every pro-town power role in the game on Night One, all without any active effort on their part.

Mario claims that he used his item on prof overnight, and the result was that prof was pro-town. Additionally, he reports that prof’s item at that time was a piece of paper.

No one has counter-claimed as either the cop or doctor yet. It is currently Day Two. Assuming three mafia, the town can currently afford a minimum of two mislynches.


Here’s what I conclude from these facts.

I believe it is quite plausible that both mario and prof are telling the truth.

My stance on prof may spring partly from the fact that I already leaned towards him being pro-town, but his behavior generally matches his claim, i.e. I believe it is plausible for him to act as he did if he had the information that he claims to have had.

Additionally, he has been ‘cleared’ by mario; it is possible that mario is lying scum, of course, but I’m less inclined to think that two of our theoretical three scum are going to openly and publicly link to each other like this so early on in the game, when we have enough time to question and test their honesty. Simply put, for prof to be scum, mario would also have to be scum, and the two would have to be bold enough to risk exposure long before we reach do-or-die time.

This being the case, I believe that prof’s message was real. Prof does have a long history of gambits, of course, including one in this very game, but in general he comes clean shortly after making a mess of things. He has not “come clean” yet. His fortune cookie does seem wildly overpowered, but as Linkzmax informed me earlier our moderator has a history of making roles which are wildly overpowered, so I do not see this as fatal: after Linkz’ report, and stefl’s confirmation of it, I actually believe it to be par for the course.

So, what to conclude of the messages. “The one who kills will get the possibility to pick up the item his target held at the moment of his strike." This seems pretty straightforward. I’ve looked at it up, down, and sideways. All I can conclude is that this message is meant to convey its clear meaning; a previously unstated rule of this game is that a killer can pick up his victims’ items. Although that outcome was already a possibility, since FF held scrap zinc at the time of his death, but the zinc did not enter the item pool. In other words, his killer likely took possession of it, which leads me to believe that either the killer had no item of his own before then or he was willing to gamble that FF’s item was better than his own.

Which brings us to the reverse message, “Trucks.” This is far more ambiguous. Presumably it refers to TruckOSaurus. Although maybe we’ll learn that the killer turned Final-Fan’s scrap zinc into several zinc pick-up trucks, in which case I hope the fuel costs kill them for us. But the only meaning I can take from this is that Trucks was in fact FF’s killer. Any other explanation seems to me to be a complete non-sequitir. I’m willing to hear any ideas that can make a logical connection between the two and that don’t mean that Trucks is a killer, but I don’t think I’m going to get one.

This would make our course of action clear: lynch Trucks. And in fact I’m going to

Vote: TruckOSaurus

right now. BUT. But I admit to being displeased with this item. If I am reading it correctly, it lets a player automatically learn the identity of scum. That seems unfair, to say the least. On the other hand, if the name there is purely random, or simply unrelated to the contents of the flipside, it seems like deliberate misdirection from the moderator, which is also not fair. At the moment I’m going to reserve judgment, since perhaps the flaw lies with me in overlooking something, or with prof for withholding information/ making this whole thing up, etc. And this unfairness is an important point to note, since it implies that the note may not be what it seems. Still, I’m willing to follow this trail of breadcrumbs for the moment, and hope it doesn’t lead me to some gingerbread house in the woods.

Next up, mario. I’m also inclined to believe him. Again, this may partially be bias on my part, but I was already leaning towards “town” for him. Moreover, having a cop in the game does make sense: judging from the sample we’ve gotten most items seem to be worthless, so for the moment I’m willing to believe that this is closer to a vanilla game than it is a power-laden one. Even in power-heavy games there is usually at least one “cop,” often more. I judge it unlikely that we lack any cop this game, and since no one has counter-claimed so far I am willing to subscribe to the idea that mario is ours.

The flaws that have been pointed out in his story can largely be explained away, in my opinion. The main criticism is that he changed his story.

The idea is not without merit, but the majority of the problems caused by this change do mesh with making one simple error: mario claims that he misread his PM to read that he had a role rather than an item, but that he could take the first item he scanned, and that that item would henceforth be bound to him. The key words here, for me, are “item,” “bound,” and “scan.” I can see how a sloppy reading of a PM can make him think “If I scan a person, I also get their item, but it is bound to me.” The ‘bound’ makes it natural to conclude that this part of the deal is a one-off, since the rules state that each player has one inventory slot: if an item is bound to you, how are you going to get a second one?

So I am willing to accept this part. The only issue I have, and it is a big one, is the one raised by nen: item PMs state the name of the item, which should greatly reduce the likelihood of him thinking he had no item. In order to miss that, he’d have had to skip the first part of the description in his role. Which is possible, although I’m disturbed at the sloppiness it would take to make it happen. The only other person who has stepped forth with a bound item, spurge, made it clear that the item was bound to him. Well, he eventually did, anyways.

All in all, I am willing to give mario the benefit of the doubt for now. While it does strike me as unusual that a cop would also be a flavor cop, I am again reminded of prof’s apparent dual-role, and of the passive-mafia-who-knows-who-you-are-power-townies. Moreover, it seems to me that making the latter claim would put mario in more of a hole than anything: faking vanilla cop is easy enough when you’re mafia (accuracy of report: 100%!), but faking flavor cop would take much more luck. Moreover, I believe he specifically named prof’s item, in quotes even. Refresh my memory, but did prof ever do that? If not, is the quote accurate, prof?

tldr.. oh you voted Trucks, okay

So you DID read! LYNCH ALL LIARZ!!!

I'm going to write exactly what I have without looking "small piece of paper", is that what he quoted?

Oh btw, that wall was very well written btw.

I especially like the "small bread crumbs leading to a gingerbread house in the forest".

Are you a writer? Read a lot?

I went and took a look back, he actually says piece of paper before I do!

He said "piece of paper." He left off the "small."

Thanks! I basically write for a living, although I rarely edit what I write on this site.

So we have at least confirmation that he definitely knew the item.

That's helpful. Was it the time when he said "Pretty much, but just his "piece of paper" since he already used the cookie beforehand apparently"? If so, the quotation marks make me strongly believe that he is a 'flavor cop' at the very least.

yes, that was the quote I saw, unless I misspelled it somewhere. He definitely at the very least is flavor cop.