[OLD] Open Setup Ideas and Discussion

[Leafsnail]

There's no solid information of any kind to base the lynch on, and not enough time in which to discuss things. Maybe 4 Townies with 1 Mafioso who has to make a kill. Then again, there's no informed minority in either of them, and depending on who you ask that makes them non-Mafia.

I disagree... some of my irl games are 3p, and it's a pretty similar principle to other mountainous games (find the one who's scummy, lynch him).

I'd say the mafia is still sortof an informed minority, as he knows who's in the mafia (him) and who he's got to kill (the townies) to win, while the townies don't.

[Leafsnail]

When you say "anytime" for the cult recruiter does that include day? Because it'd be kindof lame to correctly lead a lynch on scum and become an SK with no kill for your efforts. Other than dickmoves the cult also feels a little toothless somehow even with the powerful recruitment ability - no kill means they're going to struggle horribly against the mafia, and if one of them dies their chances of winning are virtually nil.

[Leafsnail]

It doesn't seem very fun though. The mafia has a moderate chance of having a kill randomly stopped (or a small chance of being hit by a cop if the town decides to go that route) and can just fakeclaim whatever they like.

[Leafsnail]

The Redirecter is more like a one-way busdriver, isn't it? What happens if he redirects a jailkeeper to himself?

e: You could have one "player" and invite the general public to interview him and decide whether he's scum. Two player mafia where there either is or isn't a mafia member would work fine too.

[Leafsnail]

Well yeah, but let's say that B is the redirecter himself, and the Jailkeeper targets player A. Is A roleblocked or not?

[Leafsnail]

I guess it would be a mafia win under normal rules - the day would time out and there'd be no lynch.

[Leafsnail]

How about if the time runs out, its draw to everyone.
How about make Townie and Scum have double votes.

If you made it 3 to hammer it would always go to a draw - the jester will never vote for anyone other than themselves. If it were 2 to hammer it would come down to which of the mafia and town want to take the random potshot first, which I guess would at least be kindof entertaining.

[Leafsnail]

5p: 2 Masons, 1 Jester, 2 Mafia.

Mafia wins if they are 50% of the town. Jester doesn't win if his lynch results in a mafia win (only town win or deadlock).
How does that look?

As far as I can tell nobody except the mafia can win if there's a kill, and the town can't win if there isn't a kill. In particular if a mafia member is lynched day one then it's a draw since there's no way to get a consensus on the second day's lynch.

[Leafsnail]

Ascension Mafia

4 Elder Townies
2 Mafia Goons

Nightful.

If an Elder Townie is lynched they return to life and are immune to nightkills. Note that this confirms them as town.

The mafia win condition is to make up half the town (townies immune to nightkills can obviously be endgamed). The town win condition is to eliminate both mafia members.

The game has a town EV of 0.375, which seems pretty decent to me when you factor in the advantage of a confirmed townie after a mislynch. There is a possible problem of reverse policy lynching on day one, but in my opinion you'd be far better off aiming for scum since hitting a townie day one drops your EV to 0.25.

It's pretty simple so it might've been done before but I didn't see anything like this on the wiki list.

[Leafsnail]

You only get 3 tries total even if you hit a goon first.

Day one: 2 goons, 4 townies

(lynch scum, mafia kills a townie)

Day two: 1 goon, 3 townies

(lynch town (revives), mafia kills a townie)

Day three: 1 goon, 2 townies (one of these two townies is confirmed)

[Leafsnail]

Is it? Your previous statement isn't true - if you hit a goon day one you have two tries to find the second one, and if you don't then you can't afford to miss again. Obviously hitting a goon day one is a big advantage, but I don't think that's any more true for this setup than others featuring two scum.

I was considering giving scum daytalk for at least part of day one incidentally, to give them a slight boost for day one if it's necessary.

[Leafsnail]

One. To put it simply: you can mislynch once in the entire game.

[Leafsnail]

The day doctor would never want to act except to clear themselves, right? Unless they feel like blocking a town decision.

[Leafsnail]

It's not really a good way of achieving that, because you're putting it in the hands of a town player who should never use it. It's not exactly unbalanced, it just seems strange to have a redundant role.

I see the GF claiming dayvig if selected to be the target, in order to draw the real dayvig out.

[Leafsnail]

If the dayvig dies early it becomes a really painful mountainous game.

[Leafsnail]

I like the game balance. It avoids the swinginess inherent in a regular cult setup fairly well.

But it is still a cult game. Being converted to the side you just did a bunch of damage to is very frustrating.

[Leafsnail]

There is a third town PR, an innocent child.

I can't see any reason the game would be unbalanced, but there might be some no-brainers in there which would undermine the setup. Like the town really needs to ban the Double Voter. The rolecop is also nearly strictly superior to watcher/tracker for the mafia as far as I can tell. Maybe it'd work if it told you whether someone had a role or not.

I guess you could test it by having mock runs with someone playing the town captain and someone playing the scum captain, and see if they inevitably end up choosing the same things every time.

[Leafsnail]

As far as I can tell it's optimal play for the mafia to try and get one of themselves lynched day one. Assuming both mafia players survive each day they have ~0.3 chance of losing night one and then a ~0.4 chance of losing night two. And that is assuming that the townies don't all discuss in advance who is going to pick which pair, and use those established pairs to eliminate possibilities for the following night (which they have no reason not to do). The mafia members will also be forced to abandon their own fake suspicions by being forced to pretend to choose them in the night, giving them another hit.

Compared to that a 5v1 mandatory lynch looks a lot better for the mafia.

[Leafsnail]

That does sound like a reasonably interesting setup. The analysis seems solid other than at 3:3 - I think the optimal strategy there would be to identify the scummiest player and just get everyone to shoot them (if you nominate the towniest player that just adds a risk of that player being scum).

[Leafsnail]

I think it's very interesting. There's something of an issue in the fact that the town basically only have 3 directed lynches, though.

The mafia have reduced flexibility in their nightkills and there is a confirmed townie D1, but I'm not sure that makes up for the fact that 2/9 is already fairly scumsided and that the town basically lose the day 3 lynch.

e: actually didn't consider the possibility of sandwiching a mafia member day 2, that might help balance it. Can the mafia self-target with their kill?

[Leafsnail]

Town has to lynch bottom right

No they don't. They can just lynch the mafia member. If the mafia member is dead they can't complete the tic-tac-toe game.

On the other hand I'm thinking it may actually be better to go for a near corner. That

kindof

gives you a fourth lynch but you can only aim it in a specific place (the mafia is forced to play between your two moves, effectively "lynching" the person in the middle. This means you can hit 3 people on a line and then have one more lynch to hit any other scum).

If this setup appears too scum-sided I think the easiest balancing measure would be to guarantee that one mafia member is on a side and one on a diagonal. That would basically split the game into two four player cells, that might be too pro-town though.

[Leafsnail]

I'd say let the mafia decide it if it comes to a tie, otherwise plurality?

[Leafsnail]

I'm not sure anything's really 'weaker' except roles that are stupid for this setup, like Jester/Miller.

Death

Miller

[Leafsnail]

Come to think of it Death Miller sadly wouldn't work due to the vengekill mechanic. Therefore! If the death miller gets lynched day one the mafia get a vengekill. Perfect right??

(no this is actually a really bad idea)

[Leafsnail]

He'd still get to be a sooortof "named townie", admittedly at a rather severe cost.

[Leafsnail]

Yeah, but if he knows he's a Death Miller, then he's not going to get lynched, which goes back to 2:4:Named.

There is a difference - scum can counterclaim, and unlike with a named townie you wouldn't know if you've lynched the right one or not. That would definitely effect EV, although I'm not entirely sure how much by.

[Leafsnail]

Yeah, I feel like all of this is drifting farther and farther away from the point of the original game (Inverted Vengeful). Any role we add is likely to distort... can we play with the number of Townies instead?

Yeah, I'll go make my own open setup with blackjack and death millers. 40% is probably fine really, considering the popularity of Vengeful.

[Leafsnail]

The EV probably works out since the town get 7 lynches out of 13 players. On the other hand I would not want to play a game as scum where 6 people have to be mislynched before I win simply due to boredom.

[Leafsnail]

I'd normally agree but I feel like the scum would get equally apathetic after like the 3rd mislynch.

[Leafsnail]

I guess it's slightly different if there's a "You have been blocked" message.

[Leafsnail]

No. It's nothing like that, at all. What are the penalties if they break the rule? You can't remove the posibilities of people revealing their "real account" via typing style, there'll always be subtle things that drop through.

I think the best means of enforcement would be to give the mafia some kind of ability whereby they can daykill someone if they know their username.

Here are some setups I've been developing on paper when I was bored. Have fun.

Pick Your Poison

3 Mafia Goons
1 Cop
1 Doc
1 JK
7 VTs

Every day, mafia chooses whether the cop or both doc and JK will be active the next night. An inactive cop will get a random result, an inactive doc's/JK's action fails silently.

This is quite interesting. Although I think the cop's inspections would go untrusted the vast majority of the time.

[Leafsnail]

For Join or Die you better disallow no-lynching, otherwise joining is a death sentence with the cop still alive.

[Leafsnail]

I really like the general idea but it seems kindof swingy (potential D2 town minority).

[Leafsnail]

I'd say it'd be pretty hard to win as town when over half of the players in the game aren't on your side, even if they to some degree work against each other.

[Leafsnail]

I like it. Does janitoring someone give mafia their flip?

[Leafsnail]

Yeah that sounds better. I like the idea of creating doubt through a janitor kill but potentially having two unknown flips in a row seems too harsh for a newbie game.

[Leafsnail]

So I guess you could call it a...



...cop block.

[Leafsnail]

Make it so the cop can't act N1? That way the werewolves get earlier kills but also earlier inspects.

e: Or seer headstart if you think that would be too scumsided maybe.

[Leafsnail]

"Forced cooperation"

2 Mafia A Goons
2 Mafia B Goons
7 Vanilla Townie
2 Power Roles (to be determined - i'm considering a pair of masons right now)

I think it's pretty cool, I've always been drawn to the idea of forced negotations between rival teams. My guess is that you'd have each team in the scumchat fire off three suggestions and come to an agreement based on the overlap between the two.

[Leafsnail]

Or a suicide pact of hiders?

[Leafsnail]

I like the idea, but as the setup stands I don't think the scum would ever want to take anything (except maybe the daytalk). You're giving the town another role (all of which except Bodyguard directly help in killing scum), and in return you receive something that can slightly negate some specific roles that may or may not be in the game (bulletproof, JOAT) or allow you a little bit more knowledge of their roles (role cop).

[Leafsnail]

Having double matchers being knocked right to the bottom seems to make the second set of numbers meaningful.

[Leafsnail]

The Writing on the Wall

9 players. 7 town, 2 scum. Mafia have compulsive nightkills.

Each name on the following list is assigned to a player. Names are alignment independent.
Anna
Ahab
Alec
Bianca
Bob
Baldric
Clarissa
Caleb
Cormac

One of the following two mechanics will be randomly selected at the start of the game. Nobody is informed which one is in use.
1. On night one, the

first

letter of the mafiakiller's name is revealed. On night two, the

last

letter of the mafiakiller's name is revealed.

2. On night one, the

last

letter of the mafiakiller's name is revealed. On night two, the

first

letter of the mafiakiller's name is revealed.

In the case that one mafia member dies the other mafia member can perform a kill using their dead partner's name

once

, providing their partner has not already performed a kill.

The idea is that the mafia has to provide some information about themselves, but they get to choose what that is. There's plenty of space for WIFOM and nightkill analysis.

[Leafsnail]

Pick Their Poison?

[Leafsnail]

Talk at length about your hobbies

[Leafsnail]

It's an interesting idea but I think it gets kindof confused when you combine it with a mafia game. I'd be tempted to just make a mish-mash game along similar lines (get a bunch of people to try and pretend to be someone, audience has to guess who the real one is).

[Leafsnail]

An unkillable confirmed townie just strikes me as something you really shouldn't have in a game. Making him convertible would solve the issue.

[Leafsnail]

The Circus

7 Clowns
1 Mafia Goon

Clowns can either win with the town or by being lynched.

Lynches and nightkills are compulsive. The game ends if it's 1v1 (ie the last surviving clown can't win by being lynched by the mafia).

[Leafsnail]

If town were lynched day one you'd always want to intimidate that person, wouldn't you? Either you're reconfirming an already confirmed town player or having your action blocked (and thus not revealing anything).

[Leafsnail]

That helps.

[Leafsnail]

Checks if the player is vanilla or not, I think.

The setup quickly turns into

Cop
Vig
IC (not public)
7x VT

vs

GF
2x Goon

It's not really an IC, it's more like a named townie since scum can contest the claim.

[Leafsnail]

For the town's wincon, do you mean less than or equal to? Otherwise you can have a situation where nobody's won if the town revives a mafia member in one group and all the townies in the other groups.

Also, re: Duck Duck Goose, which just had a game run:

Optimal strategy for this game has got to be for town to wait for MYLO to use their shots. Looking at everyone who shot pre-MYLO (and thinking on my modded game), town are bad at perceiving when they'll get NKd.

I think Lastsurvivor may be onto something here. Saving your shots so that you can definitely get an extra lynch probably outweighs the fairly small chance of catching a mafia member with your shot.

[Leafsnail]

Scum not killing that night still gives the town an extra lynch, and a definite extra lynch may be worth more than the very unlikely possibility of a scumkill.

[Leafsnail]

Is VT's are compulsory in every open setup? or Is it just formal so that it gives a balance since mafia is only 20-30 percent in total

It's not so much that you need VTs, but for a standard setup the majority of townies should have the same role (eg, in Duck Duck Goose the 1-shot PGO role effectively replaces the townie role). This might not apply if you have weird mechanics or a smalltown setup, though.

[Leafsnail]

That looks scumsided to me, a guilty result would basically mean nothing and the cops would get it more often than not.

[Leafsnail]

I'm intending to run an offsite Jungle Republic game, and I had a couple of ideas for rule changes/ clarifications. If anyone could give me their thoughts on them that would be great.

1. Win Conditions
The current Jungle Republic win conditions are a bit complicated, and also leave a case that I think is bad. Here is another version of the win cons that result in the same endgame rules except in that one case.

Town: You win if all threats are eliminated and at least one town player is alive. If you are the only surviving town player and there are still threats alive you will commit suicide. e: The suicide should probably only trigger in the morning to avoid changing some of the endgames too much.

Mafia: You win if at least half of the living players are mafia.

Wolf: You win if at least half of the living players are wolves, unless there are an equal number of wolves and mafia members alive.

The one situation that's changed by this is 2 mafia, 2 wolves, 1 townie. Previously the game would keep going and the townie could act as kingmaker (or the werewolves could shoot for a mafia member). Under these rules, it's a mafia victory, which seems more consistent with the wolf/mafia/townie endgame. This is a slight boost for the mafia, but I don't think it's too significant.

2. Lynching
Should lynching be compulsive even while there are still wolves alive? My instinct is yes, but I'm not sure if there are any absolute deadlock situations I've overlooked. If not, how does one resolve a stalemate?

[Leafsnail]

Trouble Communicating seems a bit weak to meta reasoning. Like if someone stated they'd always protect the top two townies on the list or something.

[Leafsnail]

I finally fixed it!

Trust Mafia

2 Players

1 Mafia False Day Vigilante

1 Town Day Vigilante

or

2 Town Day Vigilantes

(50% chance of each setup)

• At any time, a Day Vigilante can either shoot the other player to kill them or shoot the sky. They can only shoot once.
  
• A False Day Vigilante can only shoot the sky.
  
• The game ends when either both players have shot the sky or when one player has shot the other.
  
• The town wins if there are no mafia members alive and no townies dead. The mafia wins if a mafia member is alive at the end of the game. If a player doesn't fulfill their win condition at the end of the game then they lose.

This seems like it could be pretty fun, and also works well statistically (as a townie shooting the sky and shooting the other player are both actions which have a 33% chance of making you win, so it comes down to your judgment). It would also be easy to run without a moderator (put 3 red cards and 1 black card in a pile, randomly give one to each player) so you can now play mafia with just two people!

[Leafsnail]

It's similar to conspiracy, but I think it retains the key elements of mafia. In conspiracy your only goal is to work out whether the other players are mafia - it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of you. Here you have to also convince the other player not to shoot you, if you think they're town.

I'd also say it is effectively an informed minority. The mafia clearly has more information (they know the exact setup) and they're essentially a "non-voter", meaning that the town is basically the majority which the mafia has to try and trick.

[Leafsnail]

That is true, but it's meant to balance the fact that shooting a mafia member is a 100% win, while not shooting a townie isn't (they could still should you).

I guess if you'd made an out of game agreeement with the other player/ players in general to not shoot whenever you're a townie that's a problem, but I'd argue that that's violating the "play to win this particular game, rather than to increase your winrate overall" rule.

e: The statistics on this are kindof confusing me, actually. Your chances of winning if you shoot the sky depends on the chance that your opponent will shoot you afterwards, but it seems like the chance of them shooting you back is also based on the chance of you shooting the sky in the first place (since the chance of you being mafia from their perspective increases once they know you aren't shooting them).

So I guess that makes it vulnerable to meta-manipulation, since if there's a meta to not-shoot then not-shooting is correct, while if there's a meta to shoot then shooting is correct. I'm not really sure how you could fix this problem.

[Leafsnail]

Do you mean tracker or watcher? Watcher seems like it could blow the game wide open by forcing everyone to target the same dude.

[Leafsnail]

Re: Popcorn mafia:
http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Popcorn_Mafia

You win when all threats to the town have been eliminated.

You win when all members of the town have been eliminated or nothing can prevent this from occurring.

Under a strict reading of these win conditions the mafia cannot possibly win because they have no way to kill the last townie (barring a modkill). This should probably be fixed.

Also, I was thinking of running a version where the mafia get to choose the next gunbearer after they're shot (kindof like a vengekill). Has anyone ever run a setup like that, or alternatively, does anyone have any tips for calculating win probabilities more easily for such a game? My initial instinct is that something like 8 townies vs 3 goons would be roughly balanced, but I can't say I'm entirely sure and I'm not sure if there's some shortcut I could use rather than crunching every scenario.

[Leafsnail]

Giving mafia gun would just end up with them giving it right back to whoever shot unless you are also going to modify rules to allow scum to be gun bearer

Oh, I guess I didn't clarify: the gunbearer always dies after they shoot. So townies and mafia are effectively in the same exact boat (when scum have the gun I'd probably close the thread though, since there's no real point in pretending they're town when they're already doomed). That's why the setup would need some additional townies.

[Leafsnail]

Yeah I'm not expecting mafia to ever pass the gun to each other, it's basically a vengekill afterall. I thought giving the scum a chance to fire back like that would reduce the possibility of them being curbstomped by, like, a pair of obv townies or a single very good gunbearer. Plus I kindof like the simplicity of "the gunbearer must choose a new gunbearer, then die, always".

The idea of allowing mafia to predict mis-shots is interesting though.

e: and thanks for those numbers, Plessiez, the setups do seem to be equivalent EV wise.

[Leafsnail]

It's hard because you're basically trying to balance a game with a 4+ scumteam which normally kills twice. You might be able to have a reasonably sized game if you had odd night wolves and even night mafia?

[Leafsnail]

Maybe the "off" scunteam can also submit a kill, and that kill only happens if they're targeted by the "on" team? I guess there'd still be no kill if the scum both went for each other but that's quite unlikely.

[Leafsnail]

The EV is actually 66% town win - is that acceptable? It seems really punishing for the scum.

e: since the town has a 33% chance to win day one, and then another 50% chance to win day two if they fail.

[Leafsnail]

It's townsided, as Leafsnail points out (and, since there's no communicating mafia faction, I think it's not really mafia?). But it's also misnamed, surely. Wouldn't a better fit for the name "Monty hall mafia" involve the mod revealing that one of the players

not

on the lynch was VT, and then giving the players the chance to switch or not switch from the original lynch? (This has the same problems though, as far as EV goes.)

I guess it would be pretty funny to see the mafia subtley jestering

[Leafsnail]

I'm

Town

Mafia!!

I think the problems identified in this thread could be solved by
1. Making it so that the mafia can't kill the traitor
2. Making it so that the traitor cannot self-vote after they're revealed

The main issue remaining is that the traitor would probably want to jester day one, but that kindof seems like a natural part of the setup anyway.

This would also put the EV over 50% so there'd need to be a slight numbers shift or something, maybe make it 6 players instead of 5.

e: At 6 players the EV is 44%, which is pretty good. Although again bear in mind that the traitor basically wants to get lynched day one, which potentially screws up the purpose of this setup a bit.

e2: Also I forgot that 4p is different to 3p, you'd have to mess with the voting mechanics on day two as well if the traitor is alive

[Leafsnail]

Day 1 is not like mountainous in an open game due to claims (this also applies to non-open games with confirmable roles).