IIRC, I was a DF at the time, it was game 9, yes? I always have traps out when I'm a DF.

However, context is important, what I mean by trap in this context is not the same as what my brand of personal traps is. Which is basically something that really does make sense to do but gives a secret extra profit, no real chance for backfire. ALternatively, it's setting up a situation in which there are two logical courses of action, and once introduced it's almost guaranteed people will take one of those two routes. Sometimes they are long term strateies too, aimed at future games. There always simple, they're usually win-win, and they can't really backfire - or at least that's what I aim for in design.

In that game, getting everyone to put forward an ambassador was a trap. That's how, as you may recall, come night 1 I was able to tell you and Hobo which houses everyone was in with the exception of two players who were either A in X and B in Y, or A in Y and B in X. That was a 'trap', it fed us way more info than the town got out of it, info that was more useful to us then them in any event, it had no real chance of backfiring. What else did it get us? Across the board our DF faction profitted hugely from that 'trap'. I was placed in position as a de facto regent, and basically was able to set the agenda from that point on, and that's power, because you can make it that almost everything that happens is either what you propose, or specifically not that, instead of something else someone else might suggest out of left field. That's a 'trap'.

But the traps I warn people about using are different. Springing MGD instead of MPD, that could be a trap, but not a good one, because most people don't constantly refer back to their NB and an innocent townie might say, yep, MGD #X without even realizing it, and in this case would have backfired. DFs had MPD too and would have been far more likely to be wary of a mistake there, would not have been caught by it even if their letters were different. But I bet a townie would have stepped into it. What was the trap? Another win-win, we'd know that whoever answered first was clean, but there was a backfire even on that, just not a big one, the first answer came from someone who had #14, the same number of players we had, and therefore would be in a much better position, DF or town, to assume every player had one from 1-14. Hence why Hobo is just a semi-prob-town in my book, had someone answered MPD #2 first, they'd have been prob-town. Yet even that was win-win because he couldn't claim 'def-town' from it, and that was the worst case backfire, a DF acquiring a patina of townie-ness, because there really weren't any numbers that could have done that and yet would be inclined to take the risk of answering first.

ANyway, I don't call my stuff 'traps' in my own head, they're strategies. I'm methodical and often write them down, mathemetician's bias perhaps, I think better on paper. Helps me find flaws easier too, look at the notes the next time and my own personal connection is gone, it's like someone else wrote them, and it's easier for me to see the flaws.

Since so many of them are things that are likely not to even happen, usually at the bottom I write 'Trigger' (that's right where it game from for game 8 ) and a lot of times the trigger event is something like 'a player accuses X based of Y' and what you do is you just scatter half a dozen or so of these through out the game and wait till someone steps in one. But specific 'traps', these tend to backfire a lot just because when someone puts all their energy into one thing, it's often pretty obvious they are up to something, sometimes you can even see what it is. Either way, DF knows to avoid the area if they pick up on that, and often the person is so invested into that trap that they can't bring themselves to see the flaws, or if they do they try to salvage it by making it more complex which only makes it worse. They also tend to put false info into them, which hurts the town and can hurt you if you're a DF too, the difference being a DF has no choice but to lie anyway, so they may as well risk it.

It's like this whole message, it's a trap, my style of trap, see if anyone can guess one of them, see how even figuring one out probably won't blunt the trap and may even assist it. Maybe I should call them 'tarps' though, since I think I mispelled it that ways every time I used it in this message (obviously corrected in preview). I like that though, henceforth I shall refer to them as 'Tarps'