The Council (mafia + nomic) - thoughts?

[lendunistus]

I floated the idea of running this here over a year ago, but it never went anywhere. thought I'd ask for people's opinions

https://kevan.org/games/thecouncil

basic premise: there's an informed minority and an uninformed majority, but one player is The Outsider whose identity is known to everyone and who is not part of the main mafia game. The Outsider wins with the informed minority. during the day, any player may put forward a proposal to change the game in some way (adding a new mechanic, eliminating someone, etc). if the proposal is approved by a majority of the living players, its effects are applied. however, The Outsider may veto any proposal (except "physical" proposals that change stuff that's already in the game, e.g elimination) with no explanation whatsoever, in which case that proposal immediately fails. each day has 12 in-game hours, which are spent by proposals. elimination proposals spend 6 hours, other physical proposals spend one hour and non-physical proposals spend any amount of hours that the outsider and the players can agree on. once all 12 hours have been spent, the night phase begins and scum may kill someone, after which a new day starts.

I like the concept and I've played a bit of it myself, but there's definitely a lot of things that just wouldn't work with MS's playerbase. here's some of my own miscellaneous thoughts:

- do we have a deadline or no? there's a lot of open-ended discussion here and the core of the game would definitely be compromised with the addition of a deadline, but at the same time, it'd prevent the game from stalling out (plus I don't even know if I could queue a game without a day deadline)
- what town-to-scum ratio would work here? the games I've played were 7v2 and 6v2, which anyone here would call scumsided
- there's definitely a concern that the fun would be drained out of this pretty quickly - after all, the safest strategy for The Outsider is to just veto everything. I think it depends on the players themselves and that it's a "run it and see" situation, but I'm still a bit worried
- should it be allowed to have multiple pending proposals simultaneously? if the answer is no, should there be some kind of queue or proposing order?
- the document mentions that nightkills are decided by The Outsider, but I think it'd be safe to let the scum decide as well
- if I were to run this, I'd probably just be a neutral moderator (handling proposal resolution and such) and The Outsider would be randomly picked from within the players

what do you think? I'd like to see the perspectives of the players as well, since I haven't really had the chance to discuss this with anyone who has experience with forum mafia
thanks for reading! (this thread might've been more fit for Open Setup Discussion but this is quite a drastic modification so I think MD is better)

[lendunistus]

thanks for the suggestions!

Given the examples on the webpage you linked, it seems like the Outsider fits more as the Moderator of the game rather than another player in it

my idea was to take, say, 14 signups, pick an Outsider from there and then put the rest in an 11v2 (with numbers substituted as necessary, of course)

with something like 7vs2 at least, the first one-shot cop or a doctor type proposal would be fair game

proposing power roles wouldn't work since the Outsider's goal is to make the mafia win. putting power roles in the starting ruleset is an option, but that just feels kind of... wrong? probably just me though

Though also, given that elim proposals take 6 hours rather than the full day, 11vs2 might be a bit many players on the town side as well if town wants to only elim twice a day instead of making new rules

one of my thoughts actually was to either cap eliminations at one per day or make them end the day immediately, would probably make sense to do so if we're playing with a more mafia-oriented crowd

I don't really see how the game would be compromised with a real-life deadline?

my main concern would be people not being able to get their proposals voted on or there just not being enough time to discuss/vote. two and a half weeks might be enough time to alleviate that, but I'm still unsure on that

[lendunistus]

veto restrictions really aren't a good idea in my opinion, giving town freebies just isn't how I think encouraging proposal gameplay should go

see here for the games the origin community has played, you can still pull off a fair bit even if the outsider is technically incentivised to veto everything

[lendunistus]

fair enough, I'll consider it, even if I still disagree for now

some other things:
- maybe we can have a sort of 48-72hr "day 0" where The Outsider has been determined, but nobody has gotten their alignment yet? it'd allow for people to make starting proposals without having to be concerned about alignment (see The Heist game on the page I linked for an example)
- how would dead players be handled? since a rule allowing for interaction with dead players could be passed at any time, should a dead PT be a thing? or should the players decide that? if we want to allow spectators inside the dead PT, do we just have to straight out ban all interaction with dead players?
- do we reveal alignments upon death? I assume the answer here would be an obvious yes, but doesn't hurt to ask

[lendunistus]

What if you did like

Once 1 maf 1 town is dead the dead players submit proposals secretly.

If at least 1 proposal passes mafia gets a small bonus. If the townie's proposal is passed, town gets a small bonus

Thats the best way I could think of to try to get some stuff passes

eh, I don't think that works. it'd limit the amount of proposals being passed quite significantly (unless you're saying it should be an addition to the regular proposal gameplay).

I honestly can't think of any real solutions to the proposal problem except for relying on player goodwill (which, yes, is quite far from ideal). the best way I've seen the game being described is "a nomic with a Mafia superstructure". thinking about it, maybe running this on a mafia site isn't the best idea, but I'd still like to try

[lendunistus]

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 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
(also, you'd be relying on another player to make "fair" decisions, which would result in quite a few complaints, I imagine)

[lendunistus]

like I said in the OP, I believe it's just a "run it and see" situation

[lendunistus]

so the only way to make this playable for an audience who "plays to win" is to either:
1. handicap The Outsider (which I can't think of any good way of doing)
2. remove The Outsider's factional slant (which would result in a game that's, frankly, in my opinion, both too much work for the moderator and just plain not fun)

would be nice to hear other ideas about what can be done, I suppose. I'll think about it myself

[lendunistus]

maybe a way to balance the veto power would be to actually make the outsiders work like the outside players in Radio Buzz where there's an assortment of objectives.

"my objective is to have two players killed by means other than elimination, I will let you have a gun with two bullets"
and once the objective is fulfilled, there's no incentive for the outsider to not just let "town wins" pass

third party outsider with objectives won't work imo unless you either make bulletproof objectives or give mafia an anti-claim mechanic, and even then I don't think an objective like that would be fun to play around in a game as open as this

[lendunistus]

you'll want the Observer to be a known quality prior to signups.

that's a fair concern, easy enough to just take pre-ins and pick the observer from there before entering signups

slightly warming up to the impartiality idea, still not 100% sold on it
i'd probably end up seeking approval from mafia for everything regardless of my alignment (and I'm sure quite a few others would as well), so I'm not sure if there's even much of a difference.
might still be worth trying (especially if there's no good way to gimp the outsider), just not sure if it'll work

[lendunistus]

having a scum-aligned uninformed outsider is quite an interesting idea. however, I think them still having the ability to communicate with scum is crucial

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

[lendunistus]

eh, actually, don't really know if that would fix the veto problem, especially since the outsider being uninformed might give them an even better reason to just "play it safe"

I'll get to drafting a starting ruleset in the meantime, still have to figure out some of the more procedural stuff (what to do with dead players, proposal resolution, deadlines, etc)

[lendunistus]

mmm, but if you let scum have a hydra, then the outsider becomes largely meaningless since they'd want to have scumteam approval anyway

[lendunistus]

alright, got to talk a bit about this with some other people and another idea popped up that I thought was interesting

instead of players being able to make proposals freely, people have to write up their proposals and The Outsider can select proposals to be put up for a vote. each day, at least one of the proposals they select has to be authored by scum - otherwise, town wins/scum gets some kind of debuff/whatever

this would incentivize The Outsider to let proposals through more readily, since it's tied to an investigative ability. I'm a bit concerned about it being exploited in some way, although there are a few things we could do (eg debuff doesn't apply if zero proposals pass, outsider gets some limited amount of vetoes)

[lendunistus]

okay, on further thought, the idea I was talking about is probably too exploitable

I might just run it with the neutral outsider then whenever I feel like it, will figure out the rule unknowns some time