atak on seer play, chapter two.
So, how to leave hints?
There's the Nich method, of course. I understand the theory, but I still don't like it. I think a seer should use disparities to his advantage when possible, and there's a big one here: time. In practice wolves, or just some of them, spend a couple of hours per night pondering ten or twenty candidates. But when a seer comes up dead, the entire village can spend as long as it wants going through that single player's posts. There's the disparity; this is why I believe peeks should be hidden, and hidden well, because it really is possible to make them hard for wolves to find but possible for the village to decipher.
There are a lot of tricks that have been used. The basic rule, which a village will default to if it doesn't have good reason to do otherwise, is to take unambiguous language as being a peek, ambiguous language as not being. Another possibility is that adjectives and adverbs are not peeks, nouns are.
Suppose I am seer, and I leave this paragraph on d2 (when I would have two peeks):
Alpha is totally wolfy; Bravo never plays like this — something's off with him, and I'm worried; Charlie and Bravo always fight even when they're wolves; Delta is here, and I trust him; Echo won't live to end game; Foxtrot is a wolf for saying Charlie is lazy; Golf has been uber-villagery all game; either Hotel is a villager or everything I've said all game has been wrong; India is playing his villager game; Bravo's read [which was wolfy] on Foxtrot is backwards.
What were my peeks?
That single paragraph is easy, but if those were spread out over a hundred posts, then I would trust a good village to find them but think wolves might miss them, particularly if I were careful to make many other strong (but not absolute) reads.
There are other ways, but I think this is the best until people know you well. Just don't say anything that can be misconstrued as a peek by careful villagers, but isn't — a mistaken wolf peek loses a tempo almost always,a and a mistake village peek can easily lose the game. better to risk being night killed and err toward clear peeks.
Last edited by atakdog; 11-23-2009 at 03:21 AM.