IIRC the light/dark thing netted us a DF on day 1, and FT and I had a list of 5 prob-DFs compiled that night, 4 of whom were the surviving 4 DFs, so I'm inclined to put that one in the plus column

I actually doubt it will be useful, but I'm more concerned if it will be harmful, e.g. how to hijack it, if I were a DF. One alternative would be everyone pick a hypothetical investigatory role and we HC that way, but I think that will let the ninjas cherry pick for the cop, this is probably a raw 2-faction game, maybe a SK or something but we'll know tomorrow and I don't see a full blown third faction on the deck, so if three or four of us HC as a hypothetical cops, and do it right, they'll have it narrowed down to a couple candidates for their night 2 strike. So no good there, they wouldn't know they had killed the cop, but not a good benefit for us.

We may have to abandon HC altogether, but I'd like to brainstorm alternatives first. If we did "hyporole" five roles each we could report who we did what to with each hypothetical role, including hand-sitting as a vanilla. We would want to distribute the theoretical roles, everybody claim at least one vanilla or near vanilla role, everyone claim at least one investigatory role, preferably two, and everyone claim at least one other high profile role (high profile = more likely to be NK'd) and one totally out of whack role. For example:

I'm a cop, doc, tracker, vanilla, or one-shot cocktail of vig, doc, and BP. One of those is true (this is an example, so none of those are necessarily true) and each morning I list what I did for each role, reporting truthfully for my real one, and trying to make up logical ones for the others.

Now, that will probably be useful to us, but it might be more useful to them, I'm trying to think DF on how to hijack this, but I'm not particular good at cutting up my own ideas. So everyone needs to look it over and try to find flaws, and come up with other ideas. Alternatively we can randomly accuse each other for a few days then lynch a townie, we don't have any clues and I'm not to optimistic about anyone making a day 1 blunder.

Another thing I would suggest, but people need to be careful with, is to embed your real role into a message, in some strong fashion, so you can point to it later for proof. It doesn't prove you're that role, but it does prove you committed to a role early on, just don't be too obvious or arcane about it, the former someone will find if they know to be looking for it and the latter no one will believe. Biggest advantage town has is that on day 1 the scum haven't coordinated yet, so it's in people interest to do it before day 1. I'm a little leery suggesting that because I can see someone using an overly-simplistic code but again, this sort of approach is typically a good idea.

Anyway, thoughts, criticism, etc, we need to explore our options. Typically ideas that seem anti-town really aren't suggested by the DFs so if we can bypass the "It's a trap!" worries, and everyone just chuck out ideas without fear of being lynched for a flawed one, I think we'll do better.