As Chaosraven once noted, I tend to make mistakes in two categories in these games.
First, I overemphasize the notion that folks will play rationally and underemphasize the notion that they'll play based on whims, hunches, and emotions. This sometimes causes me to overlook possibilities that don't seem to me to be in play.
Second-- and this is the relevant factor in the present discussion-- I sometimes communicate ineffectively in the game by leaving things implicit, communicating indirectly, and otherwise playing a language game in which I might be the sole participant.
In this game, that happened, and I didn't recognize it until too late.
I was confident that Remus was a Vampire, because there's just no way that a person not thinking in those terms accidentally types "poke the
innocents". He was thinking of the players in general as "innocents" and therefore of himself as one of the "guilty".
I laid out a clear case against him before toying with Ralph and finally outing Newcastle. I indicted Remus
here and
here and
here and
here. I tried to coax him into emulating the Mage
here, so I could catch him in that lie with my own self-outing and demise.
I even called him
the Tremere (Seer) Vampire, just as I had called Newcastle some sort of Brujah. I again called him the Tremere
here. ("Clear-sighted" wasn't a way of calling him the Good-Guy Seer;
I was that Seer. It was a way of calling him the Vampire Seer.)
So when I typed "...
Remus is currently not a Vampire. As soon as he understood what I was, he was completely helpful and compliant" I was being
sarcastic, especially toward Remus,
with the expectation that he would understand, and
with the reasonable hope that several others would do so, too. After all Remus
knew he had screwed up and that there was no good explanation. I
thought Kelric was keyed into that fact, too.
That's why that one line proclaiming Remus's innocence was
so much longer than my comments on everyone else. It was supposed to come across as
piling on the reassurances, in a rolly-eyed spirit.
Too much subtlety. I do it because I think it's more fun, more gamelike, than simply announcing solutions to puzzles.
(I also dropped a big hint
right here that Ralph and Lassr were probably the Siblings. Nobody got it, though Krash or someone came close.)
I honestly expected that that the crowd would take Remus down next, and would then hunt for the final vamp among { Austin | Genghis | Smutly }. I was totally caught off guard when everyone took my remark
literally, at face value, despite the ladles of evidence I had poured out. It was flabberghastly, after my demise, to see the rest of the game played out
as if nothing we had done on the first day by way of discovery had even happened....
Next time, I'll speak English.
(BTW, I should say that I'm not yet good at reading Austin, and that although I had found him "troublingly Vampiric", he wasn't my top suspect, and (had I been bulletproof), it would've taken me a couplethree turns to pin him down and second-guess his spawning practices. I wouldn't have fallen for his Priest act, but I might've fallen for his chaotic good Normal act.)
Bastage, thats my revenge for killing me in the Light/Dark game. 