[OLD] Open Setup Ideas and Discussion

[xyzzy]

Rapid Fire

2 Mafia
10 Town

Each day the town may lynch two people (one at a time), and each night the mafia may kill two people.

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The town only has a 31% chance of winning assuming random play, but I believe the fact that a town loss will involve 6 lynches and 4 mafia kills gives the town a pretty significant boost; 50% more kills via lynching than mafia killing is a pretty big deal.

[xyzzy]

It's convenient, then, that the setup I proposed can't go longer than three days, isn't it?

Also, I misspoke slightly, as Junpei pointed out -- a perfect mafia win is over in two days, but the town can get as many as six lynches as long as one of the first four is mafia. So between 1 and 3 days.

It's arguable that two lynches in a row without a night phase isn't really a single day, but I think the fact that there's no nightkill makes a big difference -- in mountainous, every lynch is immediately followed up with a death that can't be predicted. There's always a sort of fear of lynching too early, because if you make an error you lose two townies at once; the thing that makes the situation in Rapid Fire interesting is that you have decreased tension before the first lynch but increased tension before the second one, because instead of a monotonous 2 unknowns revealed at a time for the whole game, you have 1-3-1-3-1-1. I think that makes all the difference for players, because the importance of getting each lynch right wavers.

[xyzzy]

I feel like the mafia in Overrunned should possibly have daytalk.

[xyzzy]

They do.

Mafia only have night talk.

[xyzzy]

Shot in the Dark

2 Mafia
6 Townies

Lynching each day is mandatory. As long as both Mafia are still alive, each Townie may submit what they believe to be the identities of the Mafia, and if any individual Townie accurately guesses both identities in the same night, the town wins. Once either member of the Mafia dies, they lose this ability.

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If the guesses resolve before the Mafia kill resolves (i.e. the guess of the person the Mafia kills is included), then based on random guessing the town has a 41% chance of winning; this is reduced to a 32% chance of the town winning if the kill resolves first. It's been way too long since I've played for me to be able to reasonably judge how powerful this ability is, and therefore which of these figures is more balanced, but I imagine one of those probably is pretty close to perfectly balanced when the normal town advantage is accounted for.

The mandatory lynching is obviously a necessity to prevent the town from just using their power every night 4 nights in a row.

[xyzzy]

Revised C/9

10 Town players
3 Mafia players

Each town player has a 1/18 chance of being a cop, a 1/18 chance of being a doctor, and an 8/9 chance of being a vanilla townie; in other words, each town player has a 1/9 chance of having a power.
Each mafia player has a 1/3 chance of being a godfather.

this is a revised version of an open setup I devised several years ago. it was originally designed basically 99% as a moderately clever play on words, but I like the idea enough to have given some thought into improving it.

[xyzzy]

this would be a pretty significant divergence from the original idea, but one option that comes to mind is by having a vote for a player who finds out their color; each day, allow players to vote for both a lynch and for a color reveal, and once the day ends, the player with a plurality of color votes has their color publicly revealed (with no reveal if two players are tied). if the town has both a color cop and a color vote, they'll gain information at a slightly increased pace.

[xyzzy]

I don't have a clever idea for a name:

2 mafia
8 townies
1 public cop

the way the public cop works is that the PC chooses an investigation target and then the result is publicly revealed, but no name is attached to it. the mafia, in addition to a night kill, also have their own public cop ability. therefore, each day, the town is given a message with either "2 town", "2 mafia" or "1 town, 1 mafia". the public cop doesn't receive any additional information about the investigation results.

obviously, the mafia can manipulate their half of the results however they like, since they already know the alignment of anyone they investigate; if both investigations are for the same alignment, the PC can be completely sure of the result, so the challenge for the mafia is to try to predict who the PC will target and always target someone from the other faction (or just kill whoever the PC targets if it's a townie).

[xyzzy]

I don't really think "can go for a maximum of 8 days!" is a selling point in a 16 player mountainous game.

[xyzzy]

3/4 Wager

a series of 3 person mountainous games with a total of 4 players in the setup--each round, one player is out of the game (with an ordered cycle to which player isn't in the game at any given time), and that player is told the identity of one of the town players at random.

each player begins the game with 5 points, and any time the town wins, each town player receives 1 point, and any time the mafia wins, the mafia player receives 2 points.

after the player not in that round is told the identity of a town player and before voting begins each game, each player in the game may wager 4 points that they will win that game. if a town player wagers that they will win and is correct, they will receive an additional 6 points at the end of the game, and if they are incorrect, the mafia player will receive an additional 4 points; if a mafia player wagers that they will win and is correct, they will receive an additional 12 points at the end of the game, and if they are incorrect, each town player will receive an additional 2 points. the player not in the game may wager 3 points on whether the town or mafia will win, and if they are correct, they will receive 6 points at the end of the game. players may not wager points that they do not have.

the first player to 30 points wins the game. if two players reach 30 points in the same game, the player who has the higher score wins. if both players have the same score, the one who won more wagers wins. if both players won the same number of wagers, the player who won the most games wins. if both players won the same number of games, both players win.

thoughts???

[xyzzy]

what happens if the mafia choose the serial killer as the chosen one?

[xyzzy]

Copmaker

2 Mafia
7 Town

At the beginning of the game, a random townie will become the Copmaker, who gets to select one player each night to receive an investigative result. If the Copmaker dies, a new random townie will be selected as the Copmaker.

The Copmaker will not have their identity revealed as such when they die. If the player the Copmaker targets is also targeted by the Mafia factional kill, that player's identity as the Cop for the night will not be revealed.

[xyzzy]

Who chooses which player the investigative result is about?

Anyway, I suspect this is townsided, because the Copmakers can prove their towniness via claiming (or else end up in a 1v1); they don't have to fear being NKed by scum as that doesn't actually hurt town's chances, so they can just claim as soon as they get the role. It has a lot of similarities with the closed/semiopen setup Cop + 6 VT vs. 2 Goon (which is known to be balanced); both have one investigation result per night, and one player who can claim and is either counterclaimed by scum (leading to a 1v1) or confirmed. The difference is that there's no way for the Cop to die early here (they can only be suppressed for one night), so some of the worse possibilities for town are much less likely, and that probably makes the setup townsided overall.

the player the Copmaker selects decides who to investigate; if I were running this, if just have each townie submit a result for who to investigate if they get chosen.

another factor is that it's possible for the mafia to be chosen by the Copmaker; if a townie is lynched D1, for instance, then N1 there's a significant chance that no living town player gets a result. I forgot to mention this in my original post, but one crucial detail is that the mafia knows if they're selected by the Copmaker, which makes fake claiming investigative results more interesting—in particular, claiming a town result on your partner is actually feasible here, because there's less of a guarantee that a player who is "confirmed" town will be killed at night because of some WIFOM-y interplay between the mafia and the Copmaker (if you're the Copmaker, do you pick the "confirmed" player and hope they don't die? if you're mafia, do you kill someone who's for real confirmed, or do you pick a town player you think the Copmaker will select?).

[xyzzy]

Delayed Kill

2 mafia
7 town

night start

whenever a player is killed by the mafia during the night, that player doesn't immediately die--the town is informed that they will die at the end of that day, they cannot be lynched, and they have a vote. so, for instance, on night 0, the mafia choose player A to kill; during day 1, player A has a vote, and because there are 9 players alive, it takes 5 votes to lynch. as a side effect of this, the town has assurance that player A is town. lynches aren't delayed in any way, which means that if player B is lynched, then players A and B will die at the same time.

I haven't bothered figuring out whether these numbers are balanced or not, so it's possible they're not remotely balanced, so this is obviously flexible to fix any issues there. another alternative would be to start the game with an even number of players and base the threshold for a lynch on the number of votes that would be needed if the killed player was completely dead--for instance, start with 2:8, and on day 1, it takes 5 votes to lynch. that might be worse! again, I haven't actually tried looking at how these numbers would play out, which would obviously be necessary before actually running this.