To expand on the logic for everyone:

We considered Skyshroud Elf could do more. But with his actions being day actions, and the queue rule being hidden, we thought we could keep him neutered by controlling the day and robbing him of the opportunity to perform day actions until we could work out who was saving him (We had theorised that NeoSilk was actually a doctor, or Odd day doctor with phasing functioning as preventative.)

We knew there were 2 revival roles in town hands, and felt the need to shut down the birthing pod before things got out of hand. Sharazard has an unknown moving piece, so we set the charges on it to 0.

I was targeted N3 by Thallid via Mindslaver and we thought I would be back and slamming onto Rubik before he could react to my revival, because Scar cleverly kept that information out of our hands. This is the only part of the equation I consider to be a great play, rather than dumb luck with town getting Rubik's card.

So yeah, how was our logic missing, given my previous points?

Robbing the day put 2 of you in a very bright spotlight. Sure, you would've kept the investigator away. But at the cost of 2 mafiates. It would've taken the same investigator 2 days (4 possible death opportunities) to get that same information. I think at that relatively soon point of the game, it wasn't yet worth it.
After all, the focus of the town was with the Evil Twin.

And when your role got blocked (yeah, you couldn't have known about that possibility) it just backfired spectacularly.

But I agree with the general sentiment that a strong role for a Self moving towards town means that mafia was screwed. Same if it would've gone to mafia though, in that case Town would be screwed.

The voteblock was a total wildcard though. A roleblock wouldnt have affected me as I lacked a night action. Without it, it wouldnt have mattered we were exposed, because we thought we could keep ending the day within minutes. And we thought we had Thallid to rely on if things went south for me during a night phase (Again, well played Scar).

Oh the unstated thing here is that we twinned razor N1. We had all of your confessions about what roles do, a list of who had those roles, and control of the vote. Voteblocking was just a total wildcard.

I had made it clear day 1 that I was going to investigate evil twin and any other roles I deemed powerful. Given that fact, those two players were already at risk and their play made sense to me.

The only thing I disagree with is not killing me. Even if I was only a cop who knew every role name and had been protected that night. You could have suppressed knowledge that you had 2 kills night 1 and gotten rid of a player who clearly stated that he had gotten a powerful self-aligned role.

My card added 3 different colors of mana. From an outside perspective I would have assumed that the card probably had at least 3 abilities to match that, and the fact that one of them was a day action meant that it was possible that I had other day actions.

gg, guys.

@Eli

Not criticism, just an honest question: why you guys went for Scar in the D2 lynch instead of Rubik after seing that he got protected? It seems that removing the cop should be your number 1 priority, since it keeps the rest of the Mafia safer if your plan backfires, and you had the power to control the lynch, a kill that can't be protected. Sure, Pod + Reya is good, but it's more a delaying tactic than a way to win once your plan can't be disrupted. And you could always NK me, because there would be no way I would be protected before Scar, since I already spent my ability.

Seconded.
I would've killed Rubik during the day and JAC at night. Especially after a failed NK.

Well, keep in mind everything said is done so with the assumption we didnt know voteblocking was a thing.

We thought Rubik was being protected, not self immunity. With that in mind, our focus was off of him until we worked out the solution. We wanted birthing pod gone from the table, because its ability to refresh revives and keep us on our toes trying to stay ahead of potential unknown town perks by undoing our damage too often. Being the ex-holder of your role, I knew there was nothing left in the tank. Killing the pod removed so much potential, whereas killing you simply removed a player who had no further value to the game other than conversational/debating.

Essentially we thought we could avoid Rubik for a day or two until we had to deal with him, and didnt want birthing pod running amok fuelling strong town powers.

Obviously in hindsight, we made the wrong call.

Cmon guys, its easy to say that now, seeing how top loaded Rubik was, but at the time he was a daycop with maybe a bit extra. Not the powerhouse he turned out to be. A daycop in a time when the day lasted like 4 minutes.

And if anyone is curious, had Mafia won, I would be voicing issues of balance over my own role. Skyshroud was broken as hell in anyone's hands, and Pit Lord was broken as hell in Mafia hands. Given all the roles should have been made with each other in consideration, including scrambleverse....I dont think either should have made it into the game as they did.


Also no one ever addressed my complaints about Alt bypassing his role's downsides with utter silliness.

In my eyes I wouldn't have worried aobut the pod that much. Because they still needed to find the people with the revive abilities as well.
IIRC nobody seriously knew who other people were at that time?

I didn't bypass anything. I tested my theory and it checked out.
It's not silliness. My ability didn't target it literally granted the last person to vote for me the ability to kill.

Just because I didn't trust anyone else doesn't mean I really bypassed anything. I played within the rules.

I mean the fact your votes were worth 0 on the last player voting for you.

That was clearly originally intended to be the last player maintaining a vote on you. Not just a quick vote an unvote to complete remove any downside to your double vote. Giving yourself a kill is just cherry on the top.

That really didn't matter at that point, because I was also able to double vote due to HW's gift.

Also, there was one thing that I'm not sure would have mattered, but you guys might have failed to account for(I was planning on using it night 3 if elijin was still alive) the day starts as soon as all players have submitted their night action unless they say otherwise, so if you didn't ask zinger to postpone the day there was a chance that a town player would have made it start in a hour where ejilin would not be able to post.

We withheld night actions every night to control the start of day.

Didn't notice it in the qt,sorry.

I will be available to address more and discuss more when I get home from work in a few hours.

When I say the Pit Plan was inacted too soon it's based solely on the notion that they didn't have enough information about the towns capabilities to stop such a plan. Naturally there's some risk to Pit if you do nothing but the question then becomes is it better for the end game to just sacrifice him to make the rest of the team look better? At that point in time I did not nor do I now feel like they had adequate information to answer that question.

As a side note, both sides are lucky I didn't stay in the game as skyshroud for long. Just saying.

Hey all. So I thoroughly enjoyed watching this game unfold. I hope you all enjoyed playing it. Here's some of my thoughts on the game, as well as some development notes you might want to know about.

Outcome:
I'm glad Town won, if only for the fact that Town, historically, has not won too many games on these boards. I also feel like they earned the win too, because they were mostly active and used a lot of good reasoning to out scum, while simultaneously working together to gain a better understanding of the game they were playing (more on this in a bit).

Mafia's outcome is slightly less pleasing, only from a Mod point of view, because it sucks to watch people playing your game just give up. I understand that the situation looked bleak near the end, but Popular Pariah's choice to just give up on the last Day is still something I found disappointing (albeit, not unexpected).

15377's outcome is hilarious. Winning in the first hour of the game like that (has to be a record) because of a random chance. Literally a 1 in 164640 odds of occurring, if not more. I couldn't be happier with his outcome, which is direct evidence of the successful design of Scrambleverse's card. More on this in a bit.

Overall, I am happy with the way the game played out. I'm obviously disappointed that my game upset one player to the point of asking to be replaced out, but you can't please everyone. I consider this game a success.

Plays:
I won't comment too much on plays because my view of them was obviously from an omniscient perspective, and my departure from Day 3 to Day 5 also made it difficult to follow some of the game in detail, but here's my thoughts on a few of them.

Revealing old roles post Scrambleverse was a smart play to get as much information as you could out in the open, even smarter though was revealing most of the info but keeping key things secret (as Just_a_Cleric did with Thallid). In the end I think it contributed big time to Town winning the game, because the Mafia got overconfident, believing they knew mostly everyone's roles. They started picking off the few that they didn't know (out of fear of what they could do, maybe), ignoring the more prevalent threats like Rubik which they did know about (but didn't know everything about them).

Rubik's decision to keep the bulk of his role secret (like, the fact that he was his own protector, or that he had Night abilities), provided that he knew the original owner was exiled and couldn't out him, was also really smart. If the Mafia had an inkling of how powerful he really was they could have banded together to off him (they did posses two killing roles for a while there, enough to punch through his regeneration if they both targeted him at once). But alas, he was allowed to live long enough to spell certain doom for the rest of the Mafia team. He was single-handedly a cop who could protect himself and voteblock the Lord of the Pit all in one. Broken? Perhaps, but I would argue not. He had limited uses (remember: he needed help from another to mitigate that problem), had opponents with equally powerful roles to Pit (ha!) himself against, and let's not forget the role was originally in the hands of a Self-Aligned player. What did that matter? Turns out a lot, but I'll discuss that more in a bit.

altimis' decision to test how his role interacted with itself to give himself an ability or to try and mitigate his drawbacks was smart, but he did play this game very defensively and guardedly. All that work to take more advantage of your role, and in the end you didn't really take advantage of it.

I don't remember any specific plays from KingdomofDominaria, but I do recall finding most of his posts to be well thought out.

Mafia on the other hand had some weird plays at best, and some godawful ones at worst. Impersonating Thallid? That, for one, was straight up putting the noose around your own neck. And revealing not one, but two of your players in a bid to try to steal the Day away with Lord of the Pit's ability? Sure, it was bound to work once, but why none of you predicted that Town would have the tools to stop you from doing it twice is beyond me. It was incredibly arrogant to assume you had the game in the bag, which most of you did around Day 2. Your misconception was that you knew enough of the roles to be able to reliably assume that nothing out there could stop your all powerful Lord of the Pit role, and that you could just Night kill any roles that you didn't know enough about to make them a wild card. I feel this was a foolish mistake. I even tried to throw you a bone by hinting in your quicktopic that you shouldn't be making complaints about roles that you don't have any clue how they work in a game revolving around deception, to which one of you replied "I guess I just took it for granted that Player X was telling the truth." The fatal flaw of the Mafia this game was in underestimating the abilities and the resolve of the Town, and overestimating their own abilities, while taking for granted that the Town wasn't withholding crucial information. Almost all of their plays are reflected by this mentality.

MVPs:
I'm going to split the nice shiny Town MVP award in half and give it to both Rubik and Just_a_Cleric. Their plays this game were exemplary. Both withheld crucial info about their roles from the Mafia, leading the Mafia to make poorly informed choices. Both were active (until demise), both were critical thinkers and scumhunters. The two managed to quickly combo their roles together in a way that made Rubik's role way more powerful. JaC even managed to draw a kill from the Mafia team, which only came back to haunt them later. Good job guys, you were both shining examples of good Town players.

It is with some reluctance that I give the Mafia MVP to Elijin. Litterally all four Mafia players did something ridiculous that instantly got them lynched, but at least Elijin's idea, while foolish, cost the Town an entire Day. The idea had merit, too, but as others have said before me, it would have been better used later in the game.

SelfMVP goes to 15377, for not only winning the game in record time, but stepping up to being an awesome back-up mod for me when needed.

Skyshroud Elf:
Ah, the good ol' Mafia swiss-army knife. I've always been a fan of the Jack-of-all-Trades type roles, ever since I played one to awesome effect way way waaaaay back in Tales of Symphonia Mafia on the mothership. I typically include a JoaT in most of my games, and they are usually more than a bit of a powerhouse. When I saw Skyshroud Elf hit my inbox I knew this would be the JoaT of this game. I started thinking about all the things this little guy could potentially do...and the possibilities were countless. I mean, from one perspective you have a tiny 1/1 creature who can produce mana, but from another perspective this simple little Elf could cast Giant Growth, Shock, or Gaze of Justice all on his own. The uses for his mana output aren't even considering the fact that he could also be used to stand in front of a 12/12 Death's Shadow and take all that damage for you (and even survive the hit if he happens to be enchanted with Regeneration). The possibilities seemed endless, and thus I created a role with similar far-reaching aspirations. The roles was very powerful, but was only made moreso by the fact that the randomizer decided it would be the Self-Aligned role. While the alignment didn't alter what abilities the role provided, it DID alter the amount of uses each ability had (more on that below). Add Birthing Pod into the mix and you create a very powerful combo.

Was it a combo too powerful for the Mafia team to deal with? Well, that's up for debate, but I don't think so. Mafia had some powerful roles as well, and conditions were present to be able to snuff out Rubik if things had gone their way. But that wasn't the case.

Scrambleverse and 15377:
The one downside of the very versatile Skyshroud Elf is that it is a very frail creature, who can be killed by a simple Engulfing Flames. Usually it won't live long enough to pull off half the awesome things it could. Given the number of abilities at 15377's disposal, it made sense to make his custom win condition be to exhaust those abilities before dying, or to survive to the endgame. A task that a Self-Aligned player with multiple threatening abilities should have a hard time doing. However, when Scrambleverse hit the board and he wound up with the very card that caused the chaos, he suddenly had exhausted all his abilities. Had any other card landed on him he wouldn't have won so quickly, but because it was Scrambleverse itself, his game was finished. Personally I was grateful it happened that way, because he took the dreadful card with him when he was exiled. I had fear that Birthing Pod might make a second instance of Scrambleverse possible later in the game.

Balance & Development:
One thing none of you knew going into this is how exactly I tweaked the game for balance when I was designing the roles before alignments were chosen. How could I keep one team from getting all the best roles when I was designing the roles before choosing teams? Well, I alluded to it earlier, but I kept # of uses as well as timing of uses in flux until after the teams were chosen. The roles and abilities were decided before the alignments went out, but the timing of the abilities (whether they were Day or Night) and how often they could be used was decided after. Usually (but not always) I made Town players have only Day abilities, and the reverse was true for the Mafia team. As far as # of uses, I gave significantly more uses of kill abilities to Mafia players who possessed them. For example, the Deathrite Shaman role, in the hands of Town, would have had only 2 uses of their Kill/Protect ability, whereas Mafia had 5. For the Self-aligned player, I straight up doubled the number of uses of any abilities they had. I kept this design decision secret so as to not make it obvious who was what alignment based on how their roles worked. I feel like I did an okay job balancing the game. I normally spend a far greater amount of time developing roles than I did in this game (the "You Pick" nature prevented me spending weeks designing them), so given the quick nature that I had to evaluate them I feel like the balance was held up fairly decently. There was a couple role interactions that I did not foresee, which I attribute to the lessened amount of time planning the roles, but for the most part nothing stuck out as insanely broken.

Final Thoughts:
The game ran well, and I think everyone had fun. So Success!

If I seem a bit harsh towards the Mafia players, I apologize. I'm only being honest about where I saw the flaws were in your plays, I'm not trying to offend anyone.

This is the second time I have run a rendition of "You Pick the _____" Mafia (the last one being You Pick the Role). If I run a third, at some point down the line, it will be a "You Pick the Alignment" Mafia, cuz that's a bag of worms I definitely probably shouldn't, but obviously must open at some point.

Thanks for taking the time to play and enjoy my game. Hope to see you all in the next one!

If you have any more questions about the game, feel free to ask and I will answer.

For the record, the fact that I hated scrambleverse so much had something to do with me going with the strategy.
I knew it would end the game quick, one way or the other.