Mini 919: Quiz Show Mafia -- Game Over!

[Ectomancer]

vote CryMeARiver

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Vote: CryMeARiver

[Max]

With that CryMeARiver was revealed to be:

SCUM!!!

And town win.

Mafia

1. Sanhora
2. CryMeARiver
3. farside22

1 -> Evil Host (Manipulator)
2 -> Enforcer (Role Blocker)
3 -> Sacrificial Mobster (Sacrifices Self to kill 2 townies)

Town

4. The Inquisition -> Enraged Vanilla
5. Ellibereth --> Non-Discrete Cop
6. bv310 --> Veto Holder
7. Kirbyoshi --> Doctor (But all kills were unblockable so it was an inadvertent mountainous role)
8. DragonsofSummer
9. Cobalt
10. Doombunny9
11. Netopalis
12. Debonair Danny DiPietro

ACTIONS:

Ellibereth investigates DDD (No Result)
CMAR blocks Ellibereth
The Inquisition kills pretty much everything.

Slightly Psychotic Mafia

You are the "Slightly Psychotic Mafia".

Sanhora is the Slightly Psychotic Host who, upon the entering of a new phase can make me add one "Host Comment". Maximum 100 words. This will be posted when the next stage begins AFTER the 72 hour delay
This ability can be use once every lynch, or once every 2 Q&A phases.

CryMeARiver is the Slightly Psychotic Enforcer who can roleblock a player for the next 72 hours, as all active power roles have a 72 hour delay this means if that player has already sent an action it will be nullified.
This ability can be use once every lynch, or once every 2 Q&A phases.

Farside22 is the Slightly Psychotic Sacrificial Mobster who can sacrifice herself in order to kill two town members.
This ability can be used only once, and if you are targeted during your 72 hour delay you will die as well as the player(s) who targeted you.

You do not have a group kill and you win when the money-grabbing townies are eliminate

Money-Grabbing Town

You are an

enraged townie

. You may, once per game, send me a list of all live players in the following order:

Scum
Third Party - If Exist
Power Roles - If Exist
Town

You will go down the list and kill players until you reach an out of order result (e.g. Scum after Townie), where, instead, you will die yourself. Unlike other roles there is no delay for this.

Say if you guessed Scum, Third Party then Power Role then Scum then Vanilla you would kill the first three people.

If you guessed Vanilla, Vanilla, Scum, you would kill the two vanilla townies.

This role may mean you have some questions so send me a shout if you have any questions.

You win if all the anti-town forces are eliminated.

You are the Cop

All of your partners have said you are over the top with your investigations, but you strive for perfection.

During the first Voting Stage of a day you may choose to investigate a player instead of voting. You will receive a guilty result if they are mafia, or an innocent result if they are town.

Once you investigate correctly (mafia) you cannot continue with this dangerous career and revert to being vanilla.

You win when all mafia are dead

You are the Veto-Holder

Once per game you can protect a player from lynch for the rest of the next day. Once this has been done you revert to being a normal townie who intends to protect the players from the evil quiz-show players.

You win when all other quiz show players are dead.

You are the Doctor of the town.

You can protect players for 72 hours, preventing any attempts on their life made during this period. This ability cannot be used again until the following day.

You win when all mafiates are dead.

You are plain and simple town.

You kill the mafiates and you can go home. YAYAYAYAYAY!

You can kill the mafiates with an incredibly power, democracy... w00t!!! What can I say? Talk about power roles, eh?

You win if all anti-town forces are eliminated.

Comments

Mafia Host + Suicidal Killer

The slightly psychotic host was originally intended as a role not to mislead the town but to alter the towns perception of the game. I would have allowed posts that say "you may only post one question" for example. This discrete manipulation could have been a powerful tool for the mafia.

I felt that with this additional power that somewhere the mafia should be weakened, and with me having the not-so-discrete-cop I had to reduce the power they received from the kill. This suicidal killer is most useful in endgame, reducing safe town victory situations to lylo.

On the note of the host I am disappointed they didn't get inventive, I liked the role. I liked the idea behind the role however I didn't want to make it clear what they could and couldn't use it for. It made the game potentially swingy enough, they could say "You can only post one letter answers to each question" and that would ruin the town, but once they got an idea that the town would take the host's words as they would eventually get the idea they were

literally

running the show.

Not-So-Discrete-Cop and Roleblocker

This idea is one I came up with when I had a conversation in MD with skruffs (I think) where in effect he said any role could have any flavour. I thought about this and realised that a potential weakening of the cop role would be that it's practically no secret that a role has acted.

Due to this obvious cop investigation I gave scum a counter role. In effect this pairing would negate each-other until one died. The cop would probably get no results, yet the RB would spend all their time blocking the cop.

Enraged Townie

So much maths I did to ensure this role would be fair. I did sums after sums of what could happen. Basically, this role was super swingy, the issue with the role and why I'm not using it again is that it was just that. For this game I felt something was necessary to speed it up. It takes a week to get any proper evidence against somebody. And if you want somebody to clarify something you waste effort posting.

If the role didn't exist I'm sure that this game would have got dull quickly. I, however, did not expect it to be used so soon. The amazing thing is that if Inquisition didn't nail scum then I would have expected many players to continue on.

The Useless Doctor + Veto-Holder

Both are roles I never expected to change the game much, claiming situations they may be believed but not cared about much anyway. The main reason for these was to allow more scope for error with the enraged townie. If it weren't for these scum would have won the game. Chances that he hit all power-roles in a row made it acceptably unlikely for game to end with a mafia win post killings.

Endgame Discussion Commences

On a side note, this game had been intended for a while to be a somewhat interesting game. I had some more roles I wanted in that have interesting pairings but I'm leaving those until a later date.

Comments etc.?

(I'm sure people think it's imbalanced and after the game so do I tbh)

[The Inquisition]

A few comments: let's be honest here. I got lucky. I nailed all 3 scum. I've played on this account and others over many, many games. The number of times I've known all the scum on the first day can be counted on zero fingers. Because I have never done that. I've certainly never been in a position to use my hunch to nail three. Furthermore, although I applaud myself for getting farside right, sanhora was a pure "lurker" scum vote, so I wasn't even all that suspicious. (when i say I got all three it's because I would have put Cry second or third if i had not wanted to provide town with an easy lynch after i failed with my role).

So yes, it's swingy. But so are many power roles if they happen to get as lucky as I did.

---
I thought the game was interesting. But I think people played it exceptionally poorly. Let's get something straight: starting discussion is not scummy. I was not "role fishing." Those who played on that were playing poorly. I'll take the rap when I fit the crime (I've been lynched quite a few times before when I've done something that in retrospect was an error andmy fault), but I honestly think you guys screwed up.

Elli, you especially need to look at your play. So you're the cop. So you have a voting restriction to investigate. But you did NOT have an answer restriction. There was no, I repeat, NO reason for you to pretend to have one. I think you played lazy and tried to play it off as role related.

For this game to work, people in general needed to pay attention to not only the questions directed at them and the questions they asked that were answered but questions posed to others.

---
Max, I think the mechanic is an interesting one, but I don't think it's reached its full potential. I think it might be best used as PART of another mechanic. For example, maybe incorporate it into a lawyer themed game: question and answer stage followed by 7 days of discussion followed by question and answer stage, but questions and answers can be objected to under a number of grounds (e.g. compound question, leading question, non-responsive, asked and answered, etc.) with either the mod or a player acting as "judge" with some penalty or reward for having an objection sustained.

But that's only one example.

[farside22]

Well I knew Eli had a PR by the way he behaved in the game. I'm most confused by the fact he checked DDD and said CMAR was scum with no fact behind it.
It really hurt the scum team and to think it was just mostly gut that he made that statement.
I almost used my power day 1 to kill eli and DDD. I wouldn't have made a difference for CMAR but maybe the inquister might not have used the ability.
And TI I still would have questioned your actions as a ruse town or scum but I still love you.

[Cobalt]

the question/answer restriction made it way too hard to scumhunt- very difficult to follow up on stuff and easy to get away with giving partial answers.

[Max]

The main purpose of this mechanic was actually to test the water for something I want to do that builds upon Q&A. See where the flaws lie etc. Once I see that the larger version will be better. I expect there to be a comment stage added after.

Question
Answer
Comment
Vote

The next possibility is making it sort of like you suggest - just not the same. You have a comment period then you have to accuse someone of a crime.

Attacking Case
Questions (to defender)
Answers (from defender)

Defense Case
Questions (to prosecutor)
Answers (from prosecutor)

Voting (either Accuser or Defender - ultimatum style)

I have a few others, but this will help in the future. I think this proves that a random question stage can lead to finding scum. As it has evidently worked.

Some other solutions I'm not going to go into as much detail with:
Continuous Q&A (You have your 11 questions and can use them over a prolonged period, not necessarily one for each player)
Chat Show Style (Question, Answer, Response to Answer, Response to Response continue then next question etc. This would allow some wifom to be induced do you respond to answers yourself or let a more adept scum hunter do so)
Interview with... (Player at a time, could be boring for other players though)

That's all I have. No doubt there are more though

[Cobalt]

I don't really think this was equivalent to the random question stage. For one thing, the mafia was heavily weakened compared to a normal game, and Inq's role also made a big difference. For another, people invested way more in their questions when they know that's the only shot at scumhunting they get, as opposed to the RQS stage where people often ask random theory questions etc.

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

I'm not really sure if this setup was unbalanced like Max suggests it was or if it was really just super-swingy which really makes it impossible to tell if it's well-balanced or not.

I think the modding needed to be a bit more active than it was, if you're going to run a game like this with very tight phases you need to be around to be indicating that the phases of the game are shifting and towards the end it feels almost like the players took over and simply advanced things when we got bored enough.

I thought the game was reasonably fun and The Inquisition's kill sequence was quite epic, but I'm not sure if I'd be interested in repeating the experience.

[Kirbyoshi]

Gee Max, thanks for giving me such a useless role, lol.

But seriously, one thing that seems to be understated is that The Inq could have just as easily hit Elli, bv, and me as Sanhora, CMAR, and farside, thus undercutting town's power (or at least perceived power), while giving scum a big confidence boost. Enraged Townie, even more so than Vig, is such a swing role that the potential benefit for town vs. scum is almost equal.

[Kirbyoshi]

EBWOP (ninja'd by 3D): I'd be interested in playing this type of game again, but like he said, with more active modding.

[The Inquisition]

Gee Max, thanks for giving me such a useless role, lol.

But seriously, one thing that seems to be understated is that The Inq could have just as easily hit Elli, bv, and me as Sanhora, CMAR, and farside, thus undercutting town's power (or at least perceived power), while giving scum a big confidence boost. Enraged Townie, even more so than Vig, is such a swing role that the potential benefit for town vs. scum is almost equal.

I agree with this, but the point of arguing against swinginess is not that a role is necessarily

unbalanced

, but rather that the effect of a role can cause strong swings in favor or against a particular team. Sort of like how when you invest for retirement, you think not only about the average returnn you might get by age of retirement with a strategy but the range of results. You might think that an average of 10% return is great, but if that swings between 2% and 18% and you can't survive on 2%, you might not pick that strategy.

[Max]

I think the modding needed to be a bit more active than it was, if you're going to run a game like this with very tight phases you need to be around to be indicating that the phases of the game are shifting and towards the end it feels almost like the players took over and simply advanced things when we got bored enough.

I agree with this actually, the way that work seemed to fall was unlucky, probably easier to run the sequel to this in the summer when more time is on my hands.

[MeMe]

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