[Werewolf] Main Thread - SOOTSHADE IS HERE!

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My home site and a couple of others I used to play at are also dead, people are consolidating into other communities when they want to play.

Lots of folks migrated to Mafia Universe, and that is where the main werewolf activity is happening, except on independent sites which have massive player bases.
 
Makes sense, I suppose. For me Werewolf has always just been a Taleworlds thing. I doubt enough people check in on the forum anymore, but I'm going to do my best to scour through my Steam contacts for people, like last time.

I don't suppose you'd stick around for a couple of games, in case something actually comes of it?
 
Since I last played here, my wife and I have a 1 year old son and a daughter due literally any day now. Surprised she has not come already.

So I have to hard pass on being in a game at the moment, because I would probably miss entire phases. That's never fair on the game hosts and last time I played here, game hosts always had inactive peeps.

I swung by because I was gathering up links and records of every game I have ever played anywhere, as I am writing a player's guide to being town and werewolf in the game of werewolf or mafia, whichever we call it. The project has no deadlines and can be put on hold indefinitely if need be, so thats what I am doing since I cant play werewolf right now, and maybe not for a while.
 
Since I last played here, my wife and I have a 1 year old son and a daughter due literally any day now. Surprised she has not come already.

So I have to hard pass on being in a game at the moment, because I would probably miss entire phases. That's never fair on the game hosts and last time I played here, game hosts always had inactive peeps.

I swung by because I was gathering up links and records of every game I have ever played anywhere, as I am writing a player's guide to being town and werewolf in the game of werewolf or mafia, whichever we call it. The project has no deadlines and can be put on hold indefinitely if need be, so thats what I am doing since I cant play werewolf right now, and maybe not for a while.
Well, that's entirely fair! I wish you luck, and maybe we'll get a chance to play together some other time.

I am still alive and probably able to play, thanks Moose for letting me know.
And with the two of you, that makes three of us! It's already going better than I expected.

I've bugged Xardob, Eternal and Mahud on Steam as well. Still waiting on replies from the first two. Mahud isn't up for all the reading, but he suggested the idea of playing games over Discord voice, which isn't a bad idea either. Maybe a Discord server for Werewolf in general could work actually, both for more easily organizing the forum games and for quicker games over voice chat, which could maybe even help keep interest long term.

At some point I'll message anyone else I can think of, on the forum, but if anyone has better means to contact other people that used to play here, you definitely have my blessing for that.

And of course, it'd be great if we could get at least a couple of new players this time as well!
 
If you are going to do 7 players, suggest just one of them as scum and 6 townies, no additional powers, (or) two of them as scum and 5 townies, but they have no off thread chat, and no idea who the other one is, and no murder.

Then you will have a game that at least lasts a few Day phases.

It has been a very long time since I hosted or played a game with under 9 players, but I do remember that the game is basically already over on day one if you do not take steps to ensure that town can execute incorrectly and still continue playing.

Besides, then it is almost like the wolf or wolves had to do some work to win if they do. Powers not needed and/or broken in games this small.
 
There is also a kind of variant to mafia called popcorn, where there is a mafia team, but no vote to execute. One townie randomly is given a gun, and they shoot. If they shoot a townie, the shooter dies instead, and the townie they shot gets the gun. The townie keeps the gun if they shoot a scumbag.

If there are 2 townies remaining and one shoots the other the game is over.

So it could be a setup of 7: 3 mafia and 4 town, and one of the townies begins with the gun. You have the Day to decide who to shoot, and you must shoot. Everyone can talk.

Town shoots town, it is now 3 mafia and 3 town, and the original guy with the gun is dead.

Town can misfire one more time, and if they do, it is 3 mafia and 2 town.

At that point, the townie with the gun absolutely must shoot all 3 mafia back to back and not hit the townie remaining, or town loses.

There is no Night phase or night kill, and no chat for the wolves separate from the game chat. They do know they are wolves together.

It is like mafia except due to the size and time-length of the game, there's no need to fuss over voting mechanics or worrying about majority of votes.

Town gets 2 safe misses and potentially 5 overall shots in the 4 versus 3 setup. The game otherwise proceeds very similarly to a mafia game, especially a turbo or a "micro" game.
 
If you can get 9 players, a fun game is Town Cop, 2 mafia goons, 6 vanilla townies.

The cop begins the game with a freebie randomized cop result of innocent on one actual townie, because in games this small and quick, the cop often dies before they can even get a single scan result, so this is intended to buff the cop a bit.

As a result, it is often the case that townies pretend to have a cop result of innocent on other players, to give the cop some cover. But pretending to have a result on a mafioso will blow your cover. Also, the cop might choose not to claim any result yet.

That's the setup they used in turbos on Two Plus Two for ages. Very fun, doesn't get old.

You can also just play it 2 goons 7 vanilla townies, or 2 goons, 1 town Doctor, 6 vanilla townies, or 2 goons, 1 town roleblocker, 6 vanilla townies.

With 9 player setups you can have some fun. But if you can only scrape together 7, yeah, those were the most fun variants I ever played. Micro games and popcorn mafia turbos.
 
There is also the Dethy setup, but there is a known optimal strategy for town and with perfect play by town, the mafioso can only have a 50/50 chance of surviving the game. Because there is one optimal strategy it is not all that interesting unless, perhaps, you were playing it as a turbo on a discord chat or by voice and taking hand notes.

Dethy setup: 5 players. 4 townies, 1 scum.

Sane cop: begins with a random correct scan result, gets correct scan results
Insane cop: begins with a random incorrect scan result, only gets incorrect scan results
Naive cop: begins with a random "innocent" result which can be true or false, only gets "innocent" scan results
Paranoid cop: begins with a random "guilty" result which can be true or false, only gets "guilty" scan results.
Mafia: Has to pretend to be one of the above, is allowed to murder at night.

Town is allowed to vote to Not Execute during the day. Optimal strategy is to get as many scan results as possible, deduce who is which cop, and figure out which cop is the impostor.

When players are murdered or executed their real alignment is revealed, but not role.

Forgot to mention, the town cops do not know which kind of cop they are all game until it is over. Obviously...
 
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@Askthepizzaguy: I imagine I'll be referring to these suggestions a lot if this effort gets off the ground, thanks!

BTW, I'm currently rereading the game that we played together. And man, it's one of my favorite games in retrospect. Mind you, at the time I was so sick of playing a villain again, and it was unfortunate that almost everyone else was also struggling with motivation. But I still managed to pull off perhaps my best villain move ever. Right now I'm about chuckling how you actually managed to come up with a theory where I was bussing both of my teammates almost from the first page - because that's totally something I would do if I had the chance.

Ahh, the nostalgia.
 
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One of the things about me is, when it comes to sane, straightforward things, I am one of the last townies to get there. A lot of people have a lot better gut instincts than me. It is why I usually do poorly on Day One and in turbos. When you're making soul reads based on no data, boy, I am no good at all.

If it is something simple like "the inactive people are scum, everyone talking is a townie" I can't figure that out.

But if there is some sort of plan for the scums to bus or distance from one another, I am all over that like crazy at a QAnon meeting.

My very first thought at all times is how the scums are going to put some distance between each other so even if one of them dies, the team still wins because no one guesses the exact team. That's step one of solving the game, to pizza man.

And that is essentially the last thing anyone else thinks of, so I am over here like this

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And everyone else thinks I am crazy. But if that is actually what the wolf team is doing, I look like a genius after the game, and basically, only after the game, because during the game people are going.... "what?"
 
I honestly don't recall how it went down after I died, because I wasn't really following afterwards, and only read up later. What I do know is that so much of the credit goes to Llandy though. Actually the scariest villain I've ever had the pleasure to play with or against. She took the initiative to buss me hard, so that I could actually make the case that she was never my packmate, and then actually carried it all home after I basically committed suicide to make the point.
 
Llandy is good. Any time a wolf fools an entire town and even makes me doubt myself, that's a strong wolf.

It's just in my nature to have a big old tinfoil hat on my head at all times. I learned by experience that the tinfoil is necessary because literally every game, the werewolves are trying to eat my brain or infect it with wolfy lies and deceptions.

But sometimes those tinfoils make me look like a maroon.

The Season 2 Finale game that Adaham and the others voted to send me to, I looked like a maroon, because there were 2 inactive scums on Day One and the only active wolf was getting lots of votes, and I was trying to find a conspiracy that did not exist. The game was straightforward, the struggling wolf was caught on day one and the rest of the wolves were inactive and my town core legitimately was not infiltrated, so there was no conspiracy to find, just low activity and struggle to get town read by the woofs. So tinfoil hat pizza's rubber band broke and I derped hard and we didn't hit any wolf for a while, and I died N1 because no one in the entire game besides coolkid even entertained the notion I was not town based on my Day One, which was blindingly villagery. Just not very good at finding the exact guilty parties in my pile of nulls and suspects.

Meanwhile, this is how my last several games as town went:
Return of the Clowns: identified the entire mafia team about one full Day phase after subbing in, identified the entire town, correctly described how the game was in Zugzwang in final 7 lylo, an extremely rare endgame position in werewolf that even veterans of 10 years might never have seen before, and the scum team conceded after I got my first suspect launched because every other townie agreed with my solve exactly.

Pleonast experimental: identified both scumbags on Day One and correctly sorted the other 3 townies exactly. Described what the scums were doing as a scum plan (delaying) and what clues they were giving away and why it was scummy of them (a mindset of having all the time in the world, and a far too relaxed and not worried mindset, and there were probably 2 scums alive and only 6 players in our realm, and there were other scums and other townies in other realms, so town was basically at LYLO in all three realms from game start, so town had reason to worry). I fixed my tinfoil on one townie merely because she was having a lot of trouble comprehending what I was saying, and inability to read for comprehension is stuff that townies do because they do not know the other player is not mafia and therefore do not know if they are lying or obfuscating, so because they don't already know the other player is being truthful and sincere, that makes it harder for them to follow what someone else believes a lot. I threw out all my suspicion on her because she was giving away telltale signs of genuinely not knowing I was town because she thought I was saying stuff I wasn't saying and wasn't following what I actually said properly.

Colby11 untitled (aka King Bowser game): Correctly generated an uninfiltrated town core of 11 players and launched 1 scumbag on Day 2 and had a second scumbag as my top scum after that name, had the others as null. No cops, no special roles, just vanilla town versus 4 scum. Also, because my towncore was so incredibly good, the wolves tried to discredit me specifically by murdering my top suspect on night one. A different townie thought that this was the move, because the kill was so completely irrational for any other reason. That player had few posts and was not threatening at all, and was widely suspected, and there were no power roles. Therefore, the conspiracy WAS the only explanation for why that kill happened. And one of my other top suspects was executed Day 2 and was indeed scum, and my towncore turned out to be completely correct. I had that many townies because I dragged a townie to death on day one based on a massive case, and townies believed my case was legit, but scums tried to look better than townies and doubted it, and I always expect that they do that because that's werewolf 101, look better than townies, so I essentially cleared most of the giant wagon on my suspect and those clears were ALL correct.

War of Princes: Led town to 5 out of 6 scumbags on 2 different teams and saw the 6th get blasted by opposing mafia, all town powers survived the game, almost all townies survived the game due to my jailkeeping and Ace Marvel being a doctor. No cops. Correctly called out the busser on the wagon that killed the first wolf, because that is the only way a wolf usually survives that game, is to not be considered scum on either faction. One faction knows for sure they are not on their team, and if they bus convincingly, well, that eliminates the other option. But that is literally conspiracy tinfoil pizzaman's first thought, so it was my first guess for who was bussing if there was bussing and I expected bussing.

Fight of the Mafia: Correctly identified almost everyone in the game as town, named the 2 and 2 scums in a list of 5 suspects, because on Day one when most of the town was inactive, the 2 scum teams almost openly colluded to destroy obvious townies because they clearly had a voting majority outright among the active players, so all 4 scummos were actually readably scummy and literally conspiring together in a visible manner that people do not usually suspect from opposing teams of 2.

Haunted by Slep: Correctly ID'ed a scum on Day One based on doing stuff that other wolves have been doing literally every game for the past year (Saying "I agree" in order to blend in with town, and describing actions which would cause you to vote for them as "interesting" instead of scummy, and LITERALLY every scum team in the past year did both of these things), executed them, correctly called out two people for fake claiming guilty results on Day 2, fake claimed cop with a correct innocent peek, died (Just like Season 2 Game 3 with Adaham, this is like my signature move at this point...) and when I died, the real cop arrived the next day with a real guilty cop result. Basically a clone of the Season 2 game, all over again, except the wolf I destroyed, I never thought was townie at all, ever, and got them dead Day One instead of Day 2, and I stopped all the fancy plays by town by not falling for their claims of having guilty results and hard claiming cop "because they forced me to, by playing fancy". And I drew the kill for the cop because no vanilla townie knows enough to correctly call out other townies for having false guilty peeks. Except, I do, because I've been in a dozen games where townies have done that and it is really bad and the townie you falsely accused never reacts like a caught peeked scumbag would, and there are serious visible differences, which you can pick up on if you play with townies who claim false guilty results all the time. That's just experience with bad town play coming in handy.

So now I am writing articles on how to be a good townie, mainly because all those wacko conspiracy theories keep coming true over and over again.

Yeah, if your pack mate busses you hard, it is just my personality type and my experiences that have taught me to expect that and prioritize it as the most likely outcome.

When I first went to Two Plus Two and discovered the meta there was wolf teams actually hardcore defending each other and not bussing, I was a bit thrown off by that change for a while.

Then I learned how to read the signs because all of that is super duper visible behavior and the wolves should have murdered within the group of people who keep getting others executed and keep town reading each other, because if the wolves were outside of those names, they would have ample evidence to conclude they do not win that game unless they begin killing within the group of townies that all town reads each other no matter how wrong they are.

That is just logically where the wolves are always if they keep at it all game. That's not even a difficult brain teaser. It's literally suicidal for the wolves not to shoot the townies that refuse to see each other as scum even if they keep missing.

It's also kind of not very usual for townies to maintain a belief that another townie is town when they miss all game long and guess your alignment right, because that is classic pocketing behavior. The wolf town reads a townie, and votes with them on all their wrong suspects.

So when the townie never suspects being pocketed, that's not a townie anymore. When the bloc is never killed, the bloc is never all townies anymore, and is usually the entire wolf pack or most of them, and one is just hanging out elsewhere doing other disconnected things.

Thanks to two plus two meta, I now quickly identify wolf packs defending each other and trying to win the game without losing a single member, too. So when they bus, I smell that, and when they don't bus, I smell that, and when they try to get distance from each other without killing, that's really weird because townies want their suspects dead today, not some vague day in the future, so all of that gets your wolf pack dead now.

The only stuff that has been effective against me in the past 5 years is where the wolves don't defend each other, don't bus each other, don't distance from each other, and don't acknowledge each other's existence, and town has a lot of people they don't interact with or have an opinion on, so I can't read the differences in behavior between the townies and the scums. It looks identical.

But that's what the wolf team did in Return of the Clowns, and once I got my townies to have opinions on every player, the wolf team tried distancing and bussing, and when I called that out as the likely plan to win the game, they all piled on me after cross suspecting each other, and that's when I called Zugzwang because they had all accused me of being scum with everyone else accusing me of being scum and the suspicions went in a complete circle, and none of them could name a team of 3 scums that had my name and did not include 1 or 2 of my accusers, and I couldn't even get executed that game unless I was deliberately being bussed by my wolf pack at LYLO, and why would that happen if any of the three of them were townies and I could get 4 votes on any of them easily?

their own cross suspicion made their accusation logically impossible, and because it was LYLO, they would need to self preserve and vote for literally anyone they can get executed other than their own body, if they were up for the execution that day. It would be their villagery duty, and each of the 3 of them refused to execute the other 2, which a villager should never do when they are about to be executed instead.

Thus, it was Zugzwang, they had no wrong executions left because they all cross suspected each other and all suspected me and they needed the rest of the town to vote with them to win so they couldn't accuse the townies outside of my body either. The situation was so bad that I was the only wrong execution that was possible anymore, and that meant they could not afford to murder me at night even if I guessed right every single day, because they always lose the game once I flip town at night, due to the unique nature of their supposed suspicions all overlapping with one another on each other and on me, and because I am town, at LYLO, if 3 people were voting for me out of 7, and the game did not end, at least 3 people on the opposing wagon are known townies. So literally every other wrong execution is impossible after I die, the game is locked, scums always lose.

It is a unique situation that I had seen happen once before with a team of 5 that had defended each other all game and led town to ruin, but town got wise and executed one of them at final 11, and that meant that the opposing wagon was either on a scumbag and it did not matter who died that day, or, the opposing wagon was on a townie, and that meant that it had cleared almost everyone on the wagon that hit a wolf instead, because the wolf team could have just won the game otherwise, by moving a single vote and changing the outcome of the round.

So all 5 wolves died back to back to back to back to back because they were forever forced to cross suspect each other after that and there were no wrong executions left.

Since I had seen it happen once before, I identified it when it happened again a decade later, with 3 wolves.

I figure, my experiences might be worth reading. If anyone cares. (Nobody cares)

When there is an actual wolf plan, an actual conspiring together of two or more wolves, I am a bloodhound.

If the wolves are disconnected and not enacting any wolfy plan, when it is just a solo scum (serial killer) situation, or when the wolves are inactive, I am blind as a bat. I am looking for the wolf plan and since there is no wolf plan, I am inventing wolf plans and assigning it to townies behaving normally. So I look like a moron.

It is just that in literally any other situation, I can tell you what the wolves are doing and why, because I have seen the wolf team do those things a hundred times each by now. Bussing, distancing, or defending, I have seen it too many times, I know what it looks like, I vote for it. As soon as the wolf team does anything together that vanilla townies don't do in that way, I am on it.

And because my weakness, not being able to see wolves behaving in a very disconnected fashion, kept losing me games from 2017 to 2019, I began compensating for that by asking every townie to have a "larger footprint" meaning, have an opinion and vocalize that opinion and give reasons for those opinions on every player that you can, and by day 2 or day 3, no townie should have any more nulls. Every townie should have an opinion and lean, wolf or not wolf, on every player.

That utterly eliminates the deliberate strategy of wolves to be disconnected, and the weakness (you are not town reading your fellow wolves) is something I picked up on exploiting. You put 2 votes on any wolf and that wolf often dies, because the wolf team is trying to act in a disconnected manner. Not bussing, not defending. Then they aren't getting villagery credit for bussing, and they are not stopping the deaths of a fellow wolf.

So now, I have a counter to disconnected wolves, too. And there are only those 4 moves, bussing, defending, distancing, or being disconnected. There are literally no other strategies, except mixing and matching.

Since it is merely a matter of experience in identifying those strategies as they are being played out, I have been using my game archive as the examples of each wolf strategy being played out, and what the visible indicators were.

Ultimately you need to be able to tell it is a wolf voting a wolf, a wolf "suspecting" a wolf, a wolf defending a wolf, and not a townie doing it. That's where the experience comes in, and you need to know where to look for clues on why it is being done dishonestly or with an agenda. And there are always visible clues.

Since those are the only strategies and once the wolf team is not behaving disconnectedly, all their moves are always visible, and there are ways of visibly identifying that behavior as not being townie behavior instead, I am now at the point where I am just showing others how I did it, so they can replicate my methods. Once it is peer reviewed and play tested, it stops being my wacko beliefs that by pure fluke and coincidence keep coming true, and becomes more like a scientific approach to how to play.

I know for a fact I am not lucky. I can get 11 out of 13 alignments correctly, get the remaining two backward, and town loses that game a LOT. That was my entire experience of the game from 2017 to 2019 and even into 2020. It never seems to pan out for me that town can catch a lucky break and fix my few mistakes in time. So it's not "luck" on my side that is getting me this far in games.

And if it isn't luck that means I am doing something right that is replicable. Therefore, I show everyone my methods, write the guide, break it up into readable chapters, and then they go replicate it.

Given how well basically every town I have played with has been doing for the past year, and how well those players have been doing in games afterward even when I am not in those games, I have to think I am on to something here. History will be the judge. Peer review will do its thing and my peers will judge my methods as valid or invalid by scientific test.

I am prepared to look like a moron or a crazy person if they can't replicate my methods and have success. That, I have never had a problem with.

If you want to win, and town has not already solved the game, then you have to take the initiative and propose a solution to the game that no one else has come up with yet, so there is even a chance one of the proposed solutions is correct.

Otherwise, town just sort of follows the wrong theory that has been proposed and starts imploding and blaming each other when it didn't work. A better approach is to have multiple competing solutions and trying to find the one that fits the evidence the best. The correct theory is the one that will have the most accurate predictions, so it is good for there to be several competing theories being discussed, because then one of the theories is more likely to contain accurate predictions, and that puts pressure on the wolf team even if town does not make that particular guess that day. And the wolf team often has to kill the player with the accurate prediction or deal with them hammering their prediction in your face at LYLO and generally being an annoying buzzing noise that entire day that is very loud and never shuts up.

Hmm that was a bit long winded. Good thing I correctly labeled the spoiler so nobody has to read that.
 
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Hey, I genuinely enjoy reading your ramblings. I'll have to get back to it once I'm done reveling in the glory of our wolf quicktopic first though. I think it speaks volumes about our pack that I was able to make this prediction less than 24 hours into the game:

"I don't really have any qualms with lynching my packies, but I'm afraid that I'll be lynched next anyways even if I do. I think we are going to have to count on Llandy to carry us this game. :grin:"
 
Hey, I genuinely enjoy reading your ramblings. I'll have to get back to it once I'm done reveling in the glory of our wolf quicktopic first though. I think it speaks volumes about our pack that I was able to make this prediction less than 24 hours into the game:

"I don't really have any qualms with lynching my packies, but I'm afraid that I'll be lynched next anyways even if I do. I think we are going to have to count on Llandy to carry us this game. :grin:"
Yo.
 
So, I have a busy job, a house that needs gardening, a 3 year old Perpetuum mobile, an 8 weeks old daughter, concerts to play, articles to write...so yeah, I guess a game of werewolf is just what I should do right now. ?
 
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