In post 8649, callforjudgement wrote:I thought about that but decided that there wasn't much of a reason not to leave it up to the moderator. It doesn't have a balance effect, just an effect on town activity, so it falls into the realm of moderator discretion.
I'll explain why i asked then, because it kinda forces an anti-fun game mechanic.
Basically the best case for scum is trying to force out the no-lynch as early as possible to either get rid of the scummy person OR get rid of the person with the least/best tells.
So the scum would try and force a no-lynch on Day 1 in this case, but that kinda ruins the spirit and makes it kinda anti-fun for the scum that has to actually die off for this to work.
Returning win rate: 4/1, 80%
In the process of creating a game to mod, we will see what it holds.
I don't think scum can force a nolynch D1 in this setup any more easily than they can force a nolynch D1 in any other setup. (Let's face it, they would if they could even in something like White Flag or Matrix6.)
The fact of tying a new mechanic to something like no-lynching is not the best idea IMO, if only because this encourages stalling. Early for scum as to avoid having to bus later on (or worse, when they're alone), late for town as they can get a sure-kill on scum.
Waiting for the day I can come back and mod games.
Hmm, perhaps we should mandate a plurality lynch at deadline (in addition to hammers ending the day early, as usual) in order to get around these problems, then. I don't think it affects the setup's balance, but if people
think
it does, then that'll be enough to throw the balance off by itself.
Plurality lynch at deadline also encourages stalling to some extent (which is why it's unpopular) but it would at least work around this problem.
What's the limitation on using the cards? Once per night at night? Without any limitation it's clearly very townsided as passing one card between every player will reveal both scum and scum will give themselves away if they try to break the chain.
OK. So in the most common scenario (scum aren't lynched day 1 or day 2), the players have the choice of claiming results day 2 or waiting until day 3. If you claim day 2, one of the people who was investigated is likely to get NKed (both because they'll be at least somewhat confirmed, and to prevent anyone learning what their N2 investigation result was). This effectively means that in an average situation, town has a 3-way Parity Cop result D3. That's townsided if all the claims are truthful, but take into account the possibility that scum got the cards and fakeclaimed their results, and I think this is in the ballpark of balanced. If I had to guess at a possible imbalance I'd say it's townsided (because if it goes to D4 scum are highly limited in who they can kill without giving their identity away through night actions) but I might well be wrong on that.
I think it may be a good idea to have the players who originally got the cards D1 announced by the moderator. This means that if scum do get a card D1, they can't use the strategy of claiming they didn't get it (which is undisprovable/unobservable as townies will claim that too), thus effectively removing the card from play. (Even if you make using the cards compulsive, they could just pass it to a buddy.)
Is it worth using some different sort of flavour than Sane/Insane? Because you can just swap the results from one card and it should always be clear which card is which from night to night (except in the unfortunate case where the same player gets investigated by both cards, which should be avoidable via town coordination) it's mathematically equivalent to there being two cards, each of which give results that have unknown meaning but are consistent for a given faction. For example, we could do the setup like this, which is a little more flavourful and a little simpler:
Mafia will figure out which of them is the vig very quickly, at which point they basically have two kills per night, + will be able to protect their vig from the town vig. I don't think the town PRs compensate for this.
EDIT: That said, the Town have a ton of power too; the Cop will be self-aware by D2, and has a backup so that they can safely claim. The Vig will probably also be self-aware by D2. I still don't think it's enough to compensate for the scum controlling two kills, but it'd be enough to unbalance any normal setup (especially because Follow the Cop is possible by D3; you get one of the remaining town PRs to claim, the other protects the Cop, there's a 50% chance it's the Doctor, or a 50% chance it's the JK in which case the Cop can claim being blocked, the Doctor probably gets NKed, then the (hidden) Power Grabber takes over the Doc role).
I don't know if that will ever really have a balance because of the non-knowledge of PR's, Fun maybe but balanced is iffy.
Realistic night 1 is 13 members, and 6 PR's.
Town;
Cop can instantly identify himself because he gets a result.
Vig can possibly identify himself if he gets lucky and misses the 3 protection roles and doesn't hit his target, which may make him assume he is the protective role.
Doc and JK will know their target didn't die but won't know if they are able to only protect or able to protect and roleblock.
Mafia;
Assuming they don't hit a Protection target, each PR is identifiable instantly.
P-Edit: what CfJ said.
Returning win rate: 4/1, 80%
In the process of creating a game to mod, we will see what it holds.
In post 8659, callforjudgement wrote:Mafia will figure out which of them is the vig very quickly, at which point they basically have two kills per night, + will be able to protect their vig from the town vig. I don't think the town PRs compensate for this.
EDIT: That said, the Town have a ton of power too; the Cop will be self-aware by D2, and has a backup so that they can safely claim. The Vig will probably also be self-aware by D2. I still don't think it's enough to compensate for the scum controlling two kills, but it'd be enough to unbalance any normal setup (especially because Follow the Cop is possible by D3; you get one of the remaining town PRs to claim, the other protects the Cop, there's a 50% chance it's the Doctor, or a 50% chance it's the JK in which case the Cop can claim being blocked, the Doctor probably gets NKed, then the (hidden) Power Grabber takes over the Doc role).
The mafia doesn't have a group NK. Also I don't think mafia will always shoot day 1. The vig may think he is a doc and kill his own teammate.
In post 8660, JasonWazza wrote:I don't know if that will ever really have a balance because of the non-knowledge of PR's, Fun maybe but balanced is iffy.
Realistic night 1 is 13 members, and 6 PR's.
Town;
Cop can instantly identify himself because he gets a result.
Vig can possibly identify himself if he gets lucky and misses the 3 protection roles and doesn't hit his target, which may make him assume he is the protective role.
Doc and JK will know their target didn't die but won't know if they are able to only protect or able to protect and roleblock.
Mafia;
Assuming they don't hit a Protection target, each PR is identifiable instantly.
P-Edit: what CfJ said.
Yes but that is where the power grabber comes in, he doesn't know who what or what power he may be accepting.
In post 8661, drmyshottyizsik wrote:The mafia doesn't have a group NK. Also I don't think mafia will always shoot day 1. The vig may think he is a doc and kill his own teammate.
Oh, I missed that. In that case it's highly townsided for reasons I mentioned earlier.
Also, scum will definitely shoot night 1. They'll just shoot two different townies, one with the vig, one with the doc. Doc'ing a townie you aren't killing has very little downside for Mafia. This isn't enough to make the setup not-townsided, though.
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.
The setup you have there is close to balanced if mountainous (given that Mafia can only kill once). As such, I suspect giving the town power roles, even relatively weak ones, makes it townsided.
If I misinterpreted you and you mean that the Mafia collectively have one kill per night, it's scumsided; I don't think town gets colour investigations quickly enough to be able to conclude much from them. (The best case for town is if all the investigated players are the same colour, but that's vanishingly unlikely.)
I suspect the best way to balance the setup would be to give the Mafia one factional kill every night and to make some but not all of the townies colour-aware. I'm not sure how many would have to know their own colour, but I suspect that there's some value that is balanced. (You could potentially even make the "colour investigation" a town factional ability, controlled by voting in the thread, rather than relying on power roles; this would avoid the "named townie effect" which lets power roles clear themselves by claiming. That'd make the setup more scumsided, but it could be balanced around, and would make the setup purer in a way.)
Claiming your colour hardly makes you confirmed. Think about it this way: if every player knew their colour, you'd basically have three games of Mafia running in parallel, a "red game", a "green game", and a "blue game" (with a final victory calculated on the winning margins town/scum had in each of the three games). Vi has run setups similar to this in the past. If you consider the example of a 2 red town/2 green town/2 blue town/1 red scum/1 green scum/1 blue scum setup, you basically have three independent LYLOs where town needs to win two out of three to win (because they only have one mislynch). The main reason that this setup doesn't work (and why Vi never ran it exactly like that) is that because the three pods are independent you don't really get associative tells.
Having some players know their colour, and other players only discovering later, is a really good way to get around the associative tell issue, and also allows for a lot of fine balance tuning simply by changing the number of self-aware townies. As such, I'm convinced that there is an interesting balanced setup along these lines, and would like to see it played/become successful. That said, I don't know the specific numbers at which it would be balanced; if all the townies are self-aware it's clearly townsided, if none are I believe it's scumsided, and so the balance lies somewhere in between but I'm not sure where.
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.
Oh, I was seeing it as a cleaner version of Triplicate (that neatly handles balance, and associative tell issues); perhaps not in its original form, but once it's been cleaned up a bit.
