[Mr. Wednesday]

Originally Posted by hoopsguy

There was an element of the good guy analysis that I thought was missing here, although it is always easier to talk about this kind of stuff when you are moderating the game.

The "trust list" is the most important tool that good guys possess. However, a second component that I rely on when doing my analysis is the relationships between players. So, who is linked with who and why?

People will clearly look to align themselves with someone trusted - both good and bad guys as a method of self-preservation. That much is obvious, but the thing I try and do is look for who seems to be leaning on one person and shying away from another person.

Example - Blade vouched for NTN at the start of Day 4. No one was able to confirm/deny Blade's story. But both of these people moved up trust lists as a result.

Day 5 - both Blade and NTN are still around.
Day 6 - both Blade and NTN are still around.
Day 7 - both Blade and NTN are still around.

If they are trusted by everyone, wouldn't evil be incented to take these guys out of the game? In this one, perhaps you could argue that neither was a member of the 12. But with a full complement of 20 players, the chances of that are 8/20 * 7/19 = 56/380 = 15%. Which is a much lower percentage than the 40% play that Barkeep made against Thomkal in the one time I saw someone use probability as an action driver.

I hear people talk about Occam's Razor in these games and think it is a useful concept to keep in mind when doing the analysis. But I tend to trust my gut + math to help me with my reads. And trying to understand how people interact (or, in some cases never do) supports my gut and gives me an opportunity to do math.

Does this always work? Nope. Could I come up with examples in this game where relationship mapping probably would have given bad info? Yep. But I think it is an important concept to have in your arsenal when trying to figure people out in these games.

I've never really gotten into the associations like that, although maybe I should. I did keep track of who was vouching for who, somewhat, and the thing of it is, until relatively late, there were a bunch of associations being kept around.

The problem we had with ntndeacon was how marvelously evil finessed the sacrifice of Captain Marvel. I never even contemplated the mechanic in use where she was intentionally sacrificed by Apoc.

With Blade, I kept talking myself out of him because of the attacks on Doom and Marvel.