Hogwarts Mafia [M] - Night 5 - Insanity!

[fearless]

I did a quick tally. Rob has the most number of posts (11) followed by Tim (5). Seeing as Griffindor's leading by such a big margin it's likely that both of them are in that house. Mostlynormal and Secondshadow have 1 post each, the rest are between 3 and 5.
FOS Mpolo for now

[Lataro]

I think that Lataro is asking us to claim house NAMES, not house POWERS. If there are in fact only 3 scum, one of the powers is unknown to them, and can be actively used against them. If there are four scum divided into all four houses, then the scum can essentially foil any power except for a straight-up cop. In that sense, protecting FAOT to save the doctor power is futile, as scum can easily kill the other non-scum on his team. And then the scum member of the team can prevent any further doctors.

We have to re-establish some of the town control over the town powers. Perhaps the way to do this is to elect the person to carry out the power by majority vote, but give that person complete control over the target, so that (unless we're all hopeless at this) at least some of the town powers go through without scum knowing about them.

RE: Two scum in one house: it's certainly a possibility, though it means that at least one town power is essentially permanently out of town's hands, which would disadvantage us even more. We only have four powers, after all, and very possibly four scum to root out.

Unvote

Bold is mine in quote.

I absolutely think this is an awesome idea in this situation. This way, if scum try and block powers with voting in house chat, they are instantly outed. If we know who is in each house, as he said, NOT THEIR POWER, except, FAOT's case, then we can pick who seems the most likely to be town among the houses, and force the other members to vote in line with that person on how to use the power. I like this, good thinking, it has earned you an unvote.

[TheSecondShadow]

Unvote

Didn't have to tell me to fuck off though. In the first post where FAOT kind of implies he's a doctor, he is replying to something you said in relation to the mafia kill. Thats why I placed the blame on you. Since even FAOT says I shouldn't, my accusation has no ground to stand on.

Someone asked about Methods of Rationality a ways back. They said they were on chapter 71 last time they read. Its now on chapter 77, hasn't updated in 4 months, about a month ago the author said the next chapter is finished, he is trying to finish the next few so he can post the whole story arch at once, and should be posted soon. Again, that was a month ago.

RE: mpolo's idea: This only works for powers that don't return a response. If, say, there is a cop role, and the response is returned to the entire group, while the benfit of the targeting being one person remains, all 3 will know the result. I think its a good idea, just want to point out potential flaws.

[t1mm01994]

3 - Each house also has a factional ability. To use the ability, housemates must vote on who the target is, and who will carry out the action. If there is a draw in this vote, the action will not carry out.

So, how will this go down now? Do we vote for the most trustworthy person from inside the house or in this chat? Does he carry out the action or just delegate it?
But then, the only thing you negate is scum having an influence on the vote. They still know where it's going to go (voting in housechat) so they still can negate all but cop of the roles they know about.

[roband]

Unvote

Didn't have to tell me to fuck off though.

And I apologised. Sorry again. I was very angry though.

[roband]

I think that Lataro is asking us to claim house NAMES, not house POWERS. If there are in fact only 3 scum, one of the powers is unknown to them, and can be actively used against them. If there are four scum divided into all four houses, then the scum can essentially foil any power except for a straight-up cop. In that sense, protecting FAOT to save the doctor power is futile, as scum can easily kill the other non-scum on his team. And then the scum member of the team can prevent any further doctors.

We have to re-establish some of the town control over the town powers. Perhaps the way to do this is to elect the person to carry out the power by majority vote, but give that person complete control over the target, so that (unless we're all hopeless at this) at least some of the town powers go through without scum knowing about them.

RE: Two scum in one house: it's certainly a possibility, though it means that at least one town power is essentially permanently out of town's hands, which would disadvantage us even more. We only have four powers, after all, and very possibly four scum to root out.

Unvote

Bold is mine in quote.

I absolutely think this is an awesome idea in this situation. This way, if scum try and block powers with voting in house chat, they are instantly outed. If we know who is in each house, as he said, NOT THEIR POWER, except, FAOT's case, then we can pick who seems the most likely to be town among the houses, and force the other members to vote in line with that person on how to use the power. I like this, good thinking, it has earned you an unvote.

Was this not happening already? I assumed this was obvious.

So many posts.

Bright text to stand out - hey new people, any chance you could get some avatars, so the simple people (me) can tell you apart easier?

[t1mm01994]

roband, I will do that asap.
Simple question to everyone: would you mind refraining from postcount++ posts and stick to making content? Because right now we have 83 posts of mostly lousy spec.

Thanks in advance.

[fearless]

Nominating the role-carriers is a good strategy...But I'm pretty cynical when it comes to these games. One good idea isn't enough to qualm my suspicions of Mpolo.

The probability of having all the scums in one house is pretty slim. So if we house-claim now and we alternate the lynch between the houses then we have a better chance of getting it right. It is also one way of making sure one house doesn't get eliminated completely in the first couple of days; so there is a lower risk of completely losing that particular house's ability and the information it's gained during the night cycles.

Hope this is the right move...

I'm in ravenclaw.

[TheSecondShadow]

The probability of having all the scums in one house is pretty slim. So if we house-claim now and we alternate the lynch between the houses then we have a better chance of getting it right.

No. Lets Say scum are x y and z, spread across gryffindor, hufflepuff and slytherin (chosen at random). Even with perfect house decisions, we only have a 1/3 chance of lynching scum each day. On D1 we have a 1/4 chance at random of lynching scum (again, above assumes we choose the houses perfectly, we could still choose a scumless house), but that chances increases. Assuming we have killed no scum by dawn of D3, then there will be a 3:8 chance of lynching scum, greater then if we lynch by house at that point. We might as well just randomly group people and lynch one from each group. Except that is basically what we are doing, assuming everything is truly random.

Basically this technique does not increase the odds of lynching scum at all, all it does is make everyone claim. Which is very good for scum.

[mpolo]

I need to move toward suspicions...

fearless - one failure to read the spoilered section of the rules is enough to get an indelible mark against me. Otherwise, has only really been going into refuting the idea that all the scum are in one house -- which I don't think anybody was really championing. Fairly neutral, I suppose.

t1mm - trying to discourage posting? The mod already indicated that he can tell the difference between content and fluff for the purpose of points. Although, I guess he is mostly trying to get us to go over to scumhunting. Which is a Good Thing. Maybe a little bit townie, probably from one of the houses without a lot of points.

AdamH - defended me. Had a kind of weird post about Lataro, accusing him of knowing something about spies -- I understood this as "scum inside of an ostensibly mason-like group are by definition spies", not something about the real number of bad guys. Doesn't understand the great problem we have if there is a scum in every house [because the scum know the target of every power and can act accordingly]. I think this is "baseline" Adam H, so I'm not going to class him as scummy, but leave him neutral.

FAOT - the main thing was the doctor claim. Here we may consider it suboptimal behavior, but it would have been totally pointless behavior for scum [they will all know at nightfall who the doctors are, assuming one scum per house]. Probably townie.

roband - Hyperactive, occasionally rude Seems to be normal behavior. So I better leave it neutral, because I cloud my judgment on him too easily.

Lataro - Thinking pretty clearly. Willing to back down. Seems to be earnest about trying to prevent scum from manipulating/reacting to our power usage. Probably townie.

That's over half. I will try to do some more tomorrow.

Oh, and since this House-claiming seems to be halfway agreed upon: EDIT BEFORE POST - Now there is a voice to the contrary.

SecondShadow seems to think that knowing the houses is going to help scum. At nightfall, unless the scum are concentrated in only two houses, they will know with certainty who is in which house at nightfall. House-claiming only evens the odds a little. There is at least a chance that one power is unknown to scum (if there are only 3 of them, or 2-1-1-0 distribution), which means that claiming powers would be suboptimal.

So, I'm a Slytherin.

[t1mm01994]

I don't want to discourage posting, I merely want to get to actually see the bottom of these very, very muddy waters. Thankfully, that's seeming to happen by know. People are starting to claim houses for no particular reason, even though that can be abused by scum. Rather than randomly killing people, they can now focus down houses.. And if 3 scum, the chances of them being in more than 2 houses are actually roughly 1/2. And without any individual powers that i know of, 4 scum in a 12 player game seems a bit much. Long story short: I think one or more of the claimers are scum trying to haul some more information in.

[Adam H]

Adam, do yourself a favour - stop posting. It won't gain you many house points, but damn do you look suspicious EVERY time you say anything...

So... do you think I'm scum? Why would you want me to stop incriminating myself? [mutter]Jackass...[/mutter]

I'm not sure that the house claiming can be abused by scum, tim, at least, not any worse than it can be "abused" by town. If we claim: everyone knows everyone's houses. If we don't claim: scum knows all the houses or half the houses, town knows none of the houses. Town gets day kill that can be abused by scum, while scum gets night kill that can be somewhat countered with town abilities. So I don't see why scum benefits more than town from house claiming.

[t1mm01994]

Unless you are able to clarify what exactly the benefits for town are, you just earned yourself a free FoS.
Given that scum are 3, for which explanation is in my last post, the chances of scum being in 2 houses > 1/2. In most of the cases, we're giving scum information they can abuse, while all we gain as town is... Really though, what CAN we gain?

[greenlover]

Unless you are able to clarify what exactly the benefits for town are, you just earned yourself a free FoS.
Given that scum are 3, for which explanation is in my last post, the chances of scum being in 2 houses > 1/2. In most of the cases, we're giving scum information they can abuse, while all we gain as town is... Really though, what CAN we gain?

Eh, well, more than anything we lose. Think about it - Is someone's scumminess determined by what house they're in? No, not really. Is someone's extra win determined by what house they're in? Yes, yes it is.

I would personally advise against mass claiming houses - but I'll go along with the majority on this issue.

[roband]

I don't know where I am on house claiming and whatnot, but I will say this:

I'm looking for a town win here, not a house win. A house win doesn't mean shit, and anyone who says it does needs to look at their priorities.

[t1mm01994]

Apart from fully agreeing with roband on this matter, I will add this:
You aren't gaining anything from this, as far as 2nd win is concerned. Everyone will receive the same amount of information, and it all isn't that interesting information.
And greenlover, I asked for _concrete_ answers. "More than you lose" isn't That concrete imho.

[t1mm01994]

DOUBLE POST: as a matter of fact, for being part of the claiming fangroup and a nice scummy post earlier (I'll go over the details once I have a real keyboard in my hand,

Vote: Adam H.
There.

[Mostlynormal]

Really though, what CAN we gain?

Not much.* The argument for it so far has been mostly that it will give town information that scum may or may not already have. The problem is, the house information is basically useless to town. The suggestion of giving all the voting power to a townie seeming player in each house doesn't solve the problem of the scum being able to anticipate the targets, and it only shifts the issue of scum influencing votes to a larger arena.

Another problem is that it makes any chance of power claiming down the line much more problematic. One of the advantages for town in this setup is that a power role can claim without outing everyone involved. In this case, if (suppose) a cop had a result to claim and we'd already houseclaimed, then not only them, but everyone in their house is outed as being cops. In fact this is already a problem. FAOT's claim was relatively harmless by itself, but asking us to houseclaim will also out all of his housemates.

Also, everyone needs to stop claiming until we come to a consensus. You're just giving scum an excuse to say "well, half of us have already claimed, so we might as well..." and then force us down a path not everybody has agreed upon.

*Yeah, I know that was rhetorical.

[Chandani]

I think that Lataro is asking us to claim house NAMES, not house POWERS. If there are in fact only 3 scum, one of the powers is unknown to them, and can be actively used against them. If there are four scum divided into all four houses, then the scum can essentially foil any power except for a straight-up cop. In that sense, protecting FAOT to save the doctor power is futile, as scum can easily kill the other non-scum on his team. And then the scum member of the team can prevent any further doctors.

We have to re-establish some of the town control over the town powers. Perhaps the way to do this is to elect the person to carry out the power by majority vote, but give that person complete control over the target, so that (unless we're all hopeless at this) at least some of the town powers go through without scum knowing about them.

RE: Two scum in one house: it's certainly a possibility, though it means that at least one town power is essentially permanently out of town's hands, which would disadvantage us even more. We only have four powers, after all, and very possibly four scum to root out.

Unvote

Bold is mine in quote.

I absolutely think this is an awesome idea in this situation. This way, if scum try and block powers with voting in house chat, they are instantly outed. If we know who is in each house, as he said, NOT THEIR POWER, except, FAOT's case, then we can pick who seems the most likely to be town among the houses, and force the other members to vote in line with that person on how to use the power. I like this, good thinking, it has earned you an unvote.

So, I would like some clarification on the bolded idea (mpolo)
First: are you (mpolo) suggesting that all the players in the game elect who they want to completely control the house power?
Second: It sounds like you're advocating for a dictator who doesn't discuss the power (because of the whole 'this way scum won't know what powers are sent it': if scum is in the house and there's discussion, they would know, but if there is no discussion and that one person just picks it up, then they can't. And scum can't know powers used in other houses since they can't overhear the discussion). I'm... not very comfortable with it. Depending on how lucky we are, and how scum are distributed, and their amounts, we could hand all the powers straight to the scum who could do whatever the heck they want. Also, it just doesn't seem... right. I feel like discussion is important for making such decisions, since one player can be very biased/missing key points, but that's less likely with more.

Now, to Lataro's points.
1.Unless you're in the house, you don't know what's happening there. I doubt this is a very likely possibility, but couldn't people misinterpret a situation for whatever reason, tell us that this person is scummy for not doing what they wanted, and then it blows up into a they-said, they-said situation? Voting's a bit more concrete, and I'm not sure how scum could lie about votes in such a way that they wouldn't be caught, but if discussion starts getting dissected... The outside players can't see the actual discussion. They have to rely on paraphrasing and what others say. That wouldn't be very good.
2. Um... how we would force the others to follow the votes? I think house actions happen at night, when the rest of the players can't do anything or discuss. So, I mean, there could be retaliation after the fact, but I don't see how players outside the house could punish others for not following their leader since we couldn't know about it or vote during that time.

(Mod: House actions happen at night, correct?)

Also: it's kind of weird that people don't seem to mind that they're going to paint a big target on FAOT's house with this claiming. It is the doctor house.
And how does knowing who's in other houses help? I mean, I know who's in my house, I'm assuming you guys know who's in your houses, so if you really wanted that win, you would just try to keep your housemates alive, ignoring the importance of scumhunting and all that.
And really: if we ever have to reveal powers, guess what's going to happen then? Scum knows all who have the power and can start to kill them! For instance... let's say all the Slytherins claim their house. They have a cop. They reveal cop result (scum). Scum knows who to kill! YAY. Slytherin dies. And is sad. (ninja'd by Mostlynormal)

Think about it - Is someone's scumminess determined by what house they're in? No, not really.

But but but Slytherins are all EVIL! [/flavour fun]

I have more to say but this post is getting a bit long. Posting it before others start to move away from this discussion.

[Chandani]

Double post:
If there is a roleblock, there is the issue that town could block town powers. (I'm only bringing this up since I thought it was mentioned in-thread; this could be other-game stuff melding with this game, so sorry about that if that's the case). I don't see a way around that, since announcing who would use the powers in-thread would basically paint large targets on them, and even stating who the roleblock is aimed at would allow scum to avoid it. I guess that's something town would have to risk, unless another option is thought up of.

I remember reading something about having a spokesperson for each house to say the results... if all house alignments are known, then it really doesn't matter who announces the results of the power, since then the power is connected to the house and it doesn't really save anyone from scum attacks. Spokespeople sound like a good idea, though if it's a cop result, then there is a giant target on the person.

Basically, it ends up to how much risk we want to put on a person. Most of these ways really don't seem to help that much, though...

[greenlover]

Roband, Tim - I was agreeing with you guys. Throwing out house names is only going to muddy up the waters by allowing people to consider their second win when considering who to lynch. So we shouldn't reveal house names to the public as a whole. Sorry for not being clear before.

I agree, however, that ensuring town control (or at least trying to) over the house powers is a good idea. I would venture to suggest that - instead of revealing the houses publicly - that each house elects within itself one person to select someone other than themselves to use the power each night. That way, if there's only one scum in each house, the town will ultimately have some say in the process of using the power. Thoughts, everyone?

(sorry if this post doesn't make sense/etc - a little rushed right now.)

[Azrael001]

Chandani and greenlover are talking sense.

House claiming seems tempting, but in the end I don't see it as being particularly useful, unless paired with a power claim. In a normal game we would know the alignment of a person based on their role, but here we do not. There is no guarantee that the doctor house is not completely controlled by scum already.

The more I think about it, the less I like the idea of any claims at all. Knowing roles doesn't tell us alignment, and knowing houses encourages people to be self serving and go after people based on their house. Worse, it makes it harder to vote for people who are in the winning house without looking like that is what you are doing, even if you are genuinely suspicious of them.

I for one will not claim.

[Chandani]

I agree, however, that ensuring town control (or at least trying to) over the house powers is a good idea. I would venture to suggest that - instead of revealing the houses publicly - that each house elects within itself one person to select someone other than themselves to use the power each night. That way, if there's only one scum in each house, the town will ultimately have some say in the process of using the power. Thoughts, everyone?

That's a good idea, but considering the fact that there are only three people there, it's not much of a choice. And then it really doesn't work when there's two people in the house or less. Which will happen after this night, since there will be a kill and a lynch. It also doesn't work if there are two scum in a house. If there is no scum in a house, well, then it doesn't really have an effect.
I'm more supportive of collectively deciding who to target and handing the power to someone, though I know scum can have an effect on the decision. Unless you go a dictator route, I don't see any way to avoid scum influence other than not having scum in the house.

[fearless]

The probability of having all the scums in one house is pretty slim. So if we house-claim now and we alternate the lynch between the houses then we have a better chance of getting it right.

No. Lets Say scum are x y and z, spread across gryffindor, hufflepuff and slytherin (chosen at random). Even with perfect house decisions, we only have a 1/3 chance of lynching scum each day. On D1 we have a 1/4 chance at random of lynching scum (again, above assumes we choose the houses perfectly, we could still choose a scumless house), but that chances increases. Assuming we have killed no scum by dawn of D3, then there will be a 3:8 chance of lynching scum, greater then if we lynch by house at that point. We might as well just randomly group people and lynch one from each group. Except that is basically what we are doing, assuming everything is truly random.

Basically this technique does not increase the odds of lynching scum at all, all it does is make everyone claim. Which is very good for scum.

I'm not a maths nerd so maybe I'm wrong.. but I just want to articulate better.

The way the mafia can gain control in this game is by eliminating all the townies that are in their houses first (thereby controlling the houses' abilities). if we know the house-members, it'll be more difficult for the mafia to go about eliminating a house completely without exposing themselves in the process. And I think it's important that we retain the house's powers for as long as possible.

i.e. If we're ignorant of everyone's positions, the mafia can go about targeting their own houses in the night cycles. But if we know everyone's positions, the mafia have to spread their targets more evenly, so then we would at least have one townie to vote against the mafia during the night cycles.

[Lataro]

All those against this obviously good idea, care to have an actual reason that isn't playing against a town win in hopes of some extra win that isn't really much of an achievement compared to a town win?

I mean, most points basically equates to, "We were active, yay! We killed towns chance to win, but we got our win that means next to nothing!"

Really here, suck it up, don't come at it from an angle that plays against a town win for an ulterior goal, and give me a real reason why this isn't a good idea, or at the very least, isn't a neutral idea. Since people have already started claiming, there is no reason not to finish it. I'll push it further.

Az is also in my house. Ravenclaw is me, Az, and fearless. I trust neither one of them, and doubt they trust me any more just because we're in some arbitrary group that collectively controls a power with no guarantee of having the same alignments.

With what is out there now, it's very unlikely that scum don't already know whose in what house at this point. Any reason you can come up with not to claim is either:

1. Town playing against a town win, and realistically, being stupid.
2. Scum not wanting town to have the same info they already have because it may prove useful down the road.

Either way, I'm about to start throwing some votes out there on this, because it's damned suspicious, or blind on the part of people, to not see that this move won't hurt town at all in the vast majority of probable situations.

[t1mm01994]

I'd call Poe's Law there. I have honestly very little of a clue which part of it was meant. Thing is, if there is no scum in you house, they know every house now.

Really, I am confused. You seem to be very opposed to it... Is that true?

[mpolo]

t1mm seems to be 100% certain that there are only 3 scum, which strikes me as pretty unusual, considering that we have been discussing the possibility of 3 or 4. I'm wondering if there is a slip here.

As to the two scum in a house theory, I am assuming that the design of the game is not made to totally hose town over. If there are two scum in any one house, that town power can all but NEVER fall into town hands. If we happen to lynch one of the two scum in that house, the other can block the use of the power completely by voting for different targets, and then kill his housemate in the night to permanently keep that power out of town's hands. It would be letting the RNG decide that town only has 3 of the 4 powers that were allotted to it at random. (On the other hand, such a setup might leave 1-2 powers completely in town's hands. I'm not sure if that makes up for this weakness.) So, I guess that I think that it is possible, but rather improbable that there are two scum in one house.

As I think it is unlikely that there are two scum in one house, that means that there are scum in three or four of the houses. Thus the scum know the complete roster of every house (they cleverly use process of elimination to get the fourth one in the case of only being in three, obviously). The only way that they wouldn't know this is if there are only two scum, or two scum in one house.

It is probably correct that there isn't a lot of help for town in claiming houses, but it is also unlikely that it is a particular help for scum, and I would rather that town had as much information as scum does, inasmuch as that is possible. The possibility of having one or two houses untainted by scum is enough to suggest to me that claiming house powers could hurt us more than help us.

Sorry, t1mm, for going back to rules questions, but I seem to be being attacked quite a lot on this front, and had to make my reasoning clear.

[roband]

I'm not posting as much as I would normally. I feel that I don't know what is going on. I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the posts, even.

Sorry. I'll try to sort this out ASAP.

[fearless]

I think we all agreed that having 4 mafia is too imbalanced, and the probability of having 2 mafia in one house is 50%, so i don't know why mpolo is saying what he's saying.

Also, we are not role-claiming house POWERS. Just the names.

[t1mm01994]

So given that [there is 1 scum in each house] we are probably up for a vanilla 8/4 game. Mislynch day 1 common, then day 2 already is LYLO. I'm not buying it.
I hereby reject the 1 scum per house hypothesis and as per tradition put an FoS on those who suggested it.
Digitum Suspecti!

I think I explained there why 4 scum is very unreasonable, so yeah.. Unless you disagree that mislynch day 1 means MYLO at day 2, we can agree on 3 scum.
Lataro's post still strikes me as odd. I re-read it 3 times, reread it 5 times, still can't see whether he is attacking me for opposing the idea or the ones starting the idea. Some clarity on this would be very nice.

[fearless]

Maybe... there really /are/ two mafia in one house, so they're trying to see who belongs to the other two houses?
Question: Have people who are in the same house been PMing each other to discuss things or not really?

[mpolo]

There have been one or two emails in House Slytherin, but very little else.

I can buy that four mafia is unlikely. That would mean that either we have:

three powers that the mafia will know exactly how they are being used tonight (if we go according to the letter of the instructions -- majority vote for target, majority vote for person carrying it out), one power that will be used with impunity. In this case, the mafia know all the members of all the houses.

Or there is one power that the mafia control completely, one that they know exactly how it is being used, and two that are mysteries. In this case, they wouldn't know for sure who is in the other two houses. If they killed one of those and decided to wipe out the house to remove a particularly worrying power from the game, it would take a couple of days (possibly 3 or even more, if town is able to defend against it) before they could completely eliminate that power from the game. Here there might be some advantage to not revealing houses. I think that this one is unlikely, but could be convinced otherwise.

Or all the mafia are in one house, and the whole "conspiracy" thing is to make us paranoid. In that case, the house in question would presumably simply have a kill as house power. I think this is highly unlikely.

[fearless]

Or there is one power that the mafia control completely, one that they know exactly how it is being used, and two that are mysteries. In this case, they wouldn't know for sure who is in the other two houses. If they killed one of those and decided to wipe out the house to remove a particularly worrying power from the game, it would take a couple of days (possibly 3 or even more, if town is able to defend against it) before they could completely eliminate that power from the game. Here there might be some advantage to not revealing houses. I think that this one is unlikely, but could be convinced otherwise.

If this is true then knowing who's in the other two houses isn't going to help them because they don't know the powers. So, let's say they want to get rid of the most dangerous power (whatever that may be) and that power belongs in one of the houses with 3 townies... How will they know which house to target?

Unless they have control of a watcher ability. Hmm. In that case... revealing the houses might not be a good idea.

The reason I asked if there has been PMs is because in a house with 2 mafia and 1 townie, I doubt there is going to be much house interaction - The 2 mafia would want to communicate with the third mafia during the night cycle instead. And discussing pro-town strategies with the remaining townee doesn't yield much benefit for them...

[roband]

The reason I asked if there has been PMs is because in a house with 2 mafia and 1 townie, I doubt there is going to be much house interaction - The 2 mafia would want to communicate with the third mafia during the night cycle instead. And discussing pro-town strategies with the remaining townee doesn't yield much benefit for them...

This is a really interesting point. I haven't heard much of anything from my housemates, but it was me who shut discussion down.
Mainly because I didn't have anything to say to them which I didn't want to say in public. Hmmm.

[fearless]

I have receive NO PMs (apart from one asking the mod to clarify some rules) from my house-mates. NOT saying they are dirty or whatever. It seems Gryffindor & slytherin are the same... I think I'm just being overly paranoid D=

Right now, I don't know who to vote for. I am willing to forgive MPolo for his over-sight with regards to not reading the rules. His recent posts seem pretty pro-town. Although that could very well be a defence mechanism.

Maybe just go for the lurkers. idk.

[mpolo]

This was all a ploy to fill up my Inbox, wasn't it? Actually I misremembered a little. Before your question there were three PMs here, there have been 3 more since then. We are discussing strategies to keep the conspiracy from knowing who we will target with our power.

[Chandani]

I'm going to repost my questions in a neater manner so i can get some answers.

Mpolo (on your suggested idea waaay back when):
First: are you (mpolo) suggesting that all the players in the game elect who they want to completely control the house power?
Second: Are you suggesting a dictator over house powers?

Lataro:
1. How would we force the other house members to follow the votes?

(Context here)

The way the mafia can gain control in this game is by eliminating all the townies that are in their houses first (thereby controlling the houses' abilities). if we know the house-members, it'll be more difficult for the mafia to go about eliminating a house completely without exposing themselves in the process. And I think it's important that we retain the house's powers for as long as possible.

i.e. If we're ignorant of everyone's positions, the mafia can go about targeting their own houses in the night cycles. But if we know everyone's positions, the mafia have to spread their targets more evenly, so then we would at least have one townie to vote against the mafia during the night cycles

Point taken. I don't think it's a strong point, since if there is one townie, one scum, and a tie occurs, then the action doesn't go through, which could be considered neutral since nothing happened, or helps scum since town can't gain information/do stuff to block kills.

After thinking about it a bit, I find the whole revealing house thing neutralish. I can't figure out a way for scum to use it against town, and it would help town to track stuff easier. I don't see how it would prevent people from going after the second win though. Most of my issues lie with the fact of how people want to use that information, mostly mpolo's and Lataro's ideas (context post has my issues). The other issue is that it would reveal all the members of the doctor house, which most people don't seem to have a problem with (it just bugs me that we're risking the doctor like that), and later risks if powers would be revealed, though that risk could be minimal depending on scum strength and people number at the time. I think Az's point about paranoia about why people are voting for someone is relevant, though: people could wonder why someone is voting for someone in their own house ("is the voter scum, or do they really think that?") or against the leading house, or be prejudiced against people in their own house. In that way, the extra information could serve as wine.

[Gopher of Pern]

(Mod: House actions happen at night, correct?)

Yes, all actions are carried out at night.

Votals:
Adam H - 1 (T1mm)

House Points:
Gryffindor - 34 points
Hufflepuff - 13 points
Ravenclaw - 20 points
Slytherin - 15 points

Grumble getting ninja'd means adjusting house tallies grumble

[mpolo]

I'm going to repost my questions in a neater manner so i can get some answers.

Mpolo (on your suggested idea waaay back when):
First: are you (mpolo) suggesting that all the players in the game elect who they want to completely control the house power?
Second: Are you suggesting a dictator over house powers?

I think that we should elect a member of each house (in house) each night to execute the power. We can discuss our target all we want, but then we vote to allow the person with execution to make his own decision about the power. I have no idea if this is permitted behavior, so maybe I should ask:

Gopher: Would it be permissible to elect a member of the house to carry out the power without specifying his target? That is, a majority of the house members agree that Player X can use his power as he sees fit.

I am not saying that one person should dictate all house powers or anything else in that direction.

If the strategy I outline above is acceptable, it leaves scum guessing as to where the powers are going to be applied, making it much more likely that a tracker will track a scum player, a watcher will watch a scum victim, or a doctor will protect the scum victim. Cops and vigs were less manipulable by scum, other than directly in the house. I don't really know what the four powers are, so this is pretty hypothetical, I suppose.

[Gopher of Pern]

As long as there is some consensus (in bold) on how the power is used, that is fine.