The Council (mafia + nomic) - thoughts?

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I think the best way to make this runnable is to remove the factional slant of the Observer entirely. It's entirely alright to have the goal of that particular role be to make the game as interesting as possible, which will then lead to them veto-ing things that aren't fun instead of things that benefit town.

I'd also let mafia privately submit proposals.

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I feel like that would just remove half of what makes the game interesting, since the negotiation and such would be dumbed down quite a bit if The Outsider has no stake in the proceedings. at that point, why even have an Outsider if the neutral mod could technically just do everything

I mean… that’s kind of my point. The mechanic just doesn’t really work with an outsider who wants to win. Either they don’t play to win con or they don’t allow anything that benefits town, which is just a really boring game.

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FWIW, I would never play this if I didn’t know for sure who the outsider was before signing up, and as described the outsider has perfect setup knowledge so there’s no reason for them to not also be the moderator.

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viewtopic.php?t=73390&hilit=“Mod+is+mafia”

Might want to look at this for a similar if different game.

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Not really. Town can then just approve a bunch of proposals that would destroy the game. (I propose all scum players get immediately modkilled.) which the outsider then has to veto and then speed lik anyone who makes a reasonable proposal. It’s a guaranteed town victory.

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I think the solution is to just tell people to play for fun and NOT to try and break the game for either alignment

The problem there is that there will always be players who disagree with you on what makes the game fun. Some people will want to break the game, because they derive their pleasure from winning. If your solution to a game being unbalanced is “Well just trust the players to have fun anyway” that’s not good game design. It’s hoping to have a group of players who mesh well together. It’s the equivalent of solving FTC by mod killing cop claims.

I really do think the solution here is to have the moderator and the observer be the same person, because primarily the moderator is there to make the game fun. If you think that there’s too much work for one person to moderate that, you could 100% have a mod team or comod situation.

Also, look at it this way: a game where I’m an observer is going to be a fundamentally different game from one that dragon is an observer is going to be a fundamentally different game from one where isis is an observer is going to be a fundamentally different game from one where FL is an observer.

We publicize who reviewed/designed setups so that people can join setups they think they’ll enjoy. If I joined a setup and then a week later you told me notmafia was the observer when he wasn’t even in the plist when I signed up I’d be pissed, despite the fact that I’d probably have signed up for a game where notmafia was the observer.

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this looks neat, the limited number of hours reminds me of the flow of the ToS live game, where you technically have 3 chance to deliberate on a player's guilt or innocence but from what I've seen you'll only ever see 2 of those trials maximum happening a day. I also like the idea of the scum-aligned publicly known player, reminds me of the Guilty Child Treestump used in some games, but the influence it's allowed here feels like

Pine's role in Alisae vs. Pine.

The comparison is an apt one, as much as I despise you for bringing up that trainwreck of a game I modded. You 100% could make this game work by having a pseudomod (Maybe even an uninformed scumsiding pseudomod) who was the one doing the veto-ing. Like, I could mod the game, resolve actions, and post VCs while Lend did just the council stuff, and that would be perfectly okay.

I think not telling the observer alignments and letting them be a treestump is an interesting design space, but I maintain that (like in AliPine) you'll want the Observer to be a known quality prior to signups.

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what if there's an anonymous chat between the outsider and the scum, and said anonymous chat is published every 48 hours or something along those lines? would still make it so the outsider has to stay more-or-less uninformed

Workable, but a lot of extra work for the mod. Periodically publishing anonymous message is more work than it sounds like for the mod. If you wanted to go that route, I'd probably just go secret alt as treestump hydra of scumteam for ease of implementation.