Talk:Outguessing the Mod

Wacky: The trick is to outguess the moderator's planning for your outguessing. If you know the mod has a tendency to put in ImprobableRole s and Someone claims such a role, don't be too quick to dismiss it.

PolarBoy: But by now you've hit critical mass. From here on out you can say "but maybe that's just what he wants me to think" about every thought that enters your head. All other things being equal, you have no way to gauge what the mod has actually done.

Wacky: That's debatable, I suppose. You could typecast mods to some extent. Some mods don't plan for second guessing - it's usually obvious whom by looking at their mod posts and playing skills elsewhere. Most mods try to counter second guessing with around 1 or 2 Improbable Roles (max).

Most attempts at trying to replicate that often miss out on style or simply the role is badly designed (with a number of exceptions, e.g. Dourgrim 's LGHS). OTOH when a person with an Improbable Role claims, they almost always get lynched. It's strange... you'd think that players would have more or less caught on to the idea.

I'm not saying that you can second-guess all of the mod's setup, I'm just advising people when appraising claims to be aware that many mods do throw a spanner in the works.

PolarBoy: I agree, it is odd how improbable roles are lynched so often. One must remember though that the reason the role has been revealed in the first place is usually as a last defense against lynching. At that point many players do not care how probable the role is.

I think it has to do with a misunderstanding as to the purpose of roleclaiming as a defense. The claim's underlying argument should not be "Doesn't it make sense that we'd have one of those?" so much as "Don't my suspicious actions make sense now that you know that?". For instance, the reason JereIC got lynched in TexasMafia was not that his invented role of Coroner seemed improbable, but because the only conclusion from his role was that a particular player was scum, and that he had known it since the night before, yet he still wasn't voting that player, and because of various scummy things he had been doing since the beginning of the game(Like I said, role claims are not everything).

Wacky: While I agree that while the main purpose of a claim should be "Don't my suspicious actions make sense now", when responding to another's claim, we should probably also take into account "Doesn't it make sense we have one of those?", especially with regard to metagaming issues. I would like to distinguish my use of ImprobableRole from Norinel's in that I'm talking about a role unlikely to be in the game (e.g. Pirate in Texas) but reasonably designed rather than a role that is likely to be made up (e.g. stuffed dog as a one-shot cop, which doesn't quite make thematic sense if you think about it. If someone claims a badly (unbalanced, doesn't make thematic sense e.g. knights of duloc pro-town in a game where duloc = mafia, contradicts actions e.g. JereIC) designed role in a game with a good mod, you'd want to lynch them.

But if someone claims a well designed ImprobableRole in a game with a good mod:* a) that person is experienced - I'd probably lynch him/her anyways as experienced players avoid major suspicion generally. b) that person is a complete n00b who, by the looks of things, is the type who might drop off the face of the earth mid-game - I would probably believe him.

However, even in case b, the momentum of the bandwagon often tips it over, and we have lots of comments like "Well, I believe you, but you are probably going to lynch anyway, because the day has been going for ages and we are all very, very tired." I guess this makes sense on a human level, but it is strategically unsound.

If its a well designed ImprobableRole with a newbie mod, chances are the mafia scum is trying to look good. Lynch! lynch! lynch!

Norinel: I don't recall making an official definition for ImprobableRole; I'm the last updater for that page, but that's just because I made a few tweaks; PolarBoy made the original one.

It's somewhat ironic that you're now describing actual MetaGaming. Of course, that strategy's far from perfect - the first game I modded had a moderately ImprobableRole. (Almost all of the roles were standard except for the Outsider - essentially a role investigator, but he'd show up evil to investigations.) Its holder died Night 2 without having to claim, though.

Wacky: Perhaps that last idea should be changed to newbie mod who you have a low opinion of?

PolarBoy: Sounds nice Wacky, but where is this low opinion coming from? This discussion started from the assumption that we do know something about the mod in advance. The one thing you can be sure about with someone who's brand new is that you don't know anything about them. On top of that new mods often receive help from old hands.

At any rate, roles are often balanced from a broader perspective than one gets from knowing two roles(his own and that claimed). A role may seem to push the game too much in one side's favor, when in reality it is balanced by a proliferation of variation cops or traitors or some other device that the town has no way of knowing about. On top of that the role itself may somehow be incompetant, insane, or otherwise hampered in ways that the player is not even aware of.