[OLD] Open Setup Ideas and Discussion

[Ether]

I just noticed the Rebels in the Palace game. Isn't that basically 4:8 Nightless, a game town already has an advantage in, with weakened scum?

Also:

Fixed

(12 players)
3 mafia (2 goons, 1 tailor)
7 vanilla townies
2 cops
Day Start

The tailor's target has its alignment flipped for investigative purposes for the night.

SCIENCE

(7 players)
2 mafia (1 goon, 1 encryptor)
3 vanilla townies
2 daymasons
Day Start

Encryptor's survival permits mafia daytalking. (Of course, it doesn't matter which of them has that role.)

[Ether]

In Pick Your Poison 2, the encryptor was just a daytalker. We liked it too much, so Patrick tacked that janitor shit on to scare us, and called it a normal encryptor because hiding someone's role sort of fits the theme. But it's totally not canon.

You are a

mafia tailor

. You sew the fancy tuxedos the mafia like so much, but you can also make clothes for regular people, since, as of right now, those ingrates are the majority of your customer base. Every night, you can plant a suit in someone's house--one that it wouldn't normally wear. It'll fit perfectly, and any cops that check your target's house that night will get the opposite result from what they'd normally get. You may target yourself.

You win when all players belong to your mafia, or nothing can prevent this.

It's like a framer that can also make a mafiate show up as innocent.

[Ether]

This is the game BJ won in. It also had a framer.

I actually think tailors, framers et cetera are a bad idea outside of open games and possibly really large ones, unless the mod has a disclaimer or a reputation for using them. Guilty result, town lynches guilty, town wastes lynch...but with the standard reliability of a guilty result, the town's been punished for something that isn't bad play.

SCIENCE should probably not be in all caps; science just gets me very excited. I do think it's balanced. I could've sworn I'd had a different name for Fixed once, but I have no idea what it was.

[Ether]

SCIENCE is an inside joke. I'll just drag up a quote:

I follow a school of thought in which, in the ideal queue, there are different ruleset variations (such as deadline mechanics, alignment-only revelation upon death and daytalking) that don't affect the normality of a game, and it would be fairly trivial to get into a game with a combination of those you liked and still enjoy a fairly esoteric theme outside of them.

In English: science means mafia daytalking and it's awesome and Patrick and I like yelling about it.

Bad Tweed or Bad Suede might work as alternative named for Fixed, but eh. (Also, I kind of think mafia roles shouldn't be revealed on death; just their alignments. After a tailor lynch, scum would be in a really bad position otherwise. Dunno.)

[Ether]

Correct me if I'm wrong: a town has never won a mountainous 2:10, let alone a 3:9. 2:9 with a one-shot cop might be balanced.

[Ether]

Three lynches, two scum, wonky reveal mechanics, only one weak power role (plus the census takers, who in no way fully compensate for the reveal issues). On the contrary, I think this is pretty scumsided.

[Ether]

I'm still not wild about it. 2/11 seems better to me on paper (adding another census taker and another vanilla), but in practice I'd kind of expect the town to start lurking with a ratio like that.

It's probably bad that I want to see some sort of no-reveal/censustaker game now just to see how hard it screws with the town's morale.

[Ether]

Daytalk 2.0

(11 players)
3 mafia goons
1 watcher
7 vanilla townies
Day Start

All players can talk freely during the day. (Only scum can talk privately during night and twilight.)

The watcher is there as a role that can only get guilty results, so if it wants to give its information to a spokesperson instead of outing itself, it would have to choose someone to trust. The presence of a watcher would also discourage scum from killing obvtownies, so that would help, too.

[Ether]

The original (totally unbalanced) 3:9 game with universal daytalk was just called Daytalk 12.

I don't think there's a different term for universal daytalk (except, well, universal daytalk). Outside communication, I guess.

[Ether]

I guess replacements would probably need the transcripts, yeah.

[Ether]

Well, a QuickTopic for each individual to paste all of the transcripts it was involved in for replacements and nonplayers to read would work. Sending it to other players would defeat the purpose. (And be quoting private conversations, which would presumably still be against the rules.)

For actual communication, you'd really need to use AIM, PMs, unofficial QuickTopics, et cetera. Unless you decided to make 64 separate official QuickTopics (all of the two-person pairings, minus the scum ones, plus a three-person scum topic), which is just crazy.

[Ether]

Eh. I don't see 10 QuickTopics as a huge deal.

By the way, you should totally comment on the old setups I posted in this thread.

[Ether]

No, just 10. One for each town player and the scumgroup to log their conversations so that, if it gets replaced, then the replacement will have a record of those conversations. The players can handle communication with each

other

however they want; there's no reason it needs to be official.

[Ether]

Daymasons means daytalk, yeah.

If a tailor and a cop target the same player, then the cop gets a false result. I think PF and I agreed later that all dead mafia are revealed simply as

mafia

, so the town doesn't know when the tailor dies and there's always room for argument on the cop results. (In this version, I think the tailor can also target itself.) It's also been renamed Bad Tweed.

[Ether]

I don't think that's that bad. (It helps that, when a cop claims, it's dead.)

[Ether]

I guess you could add a second tailor. Eh. I still don't think it's unbalanced at all.

[Ether]

Start here.

(2:06:15 PM) CaffieneDeity: You should totally also comment on Bad Tweed.
(2:06:23 PM) kortskorts: it makes my head hurt
(2:06:39 PM) CaffieneDeity: Having a new forum, or a setup with two cops and a tailor?
(2:06:51 PM) kortskorts: the setup with the tailor
(2:07:00 PM) kortskorts: is the tailor a godfather with a goon reveal?
(2:07:27 PM) CaffieneDeity: No, all three scum just have an ambiguous "mafia" reveal.
(2:07:44 PM) kortskorts: so basically, the same thing that i just said
(2:07:48 PM) CaffieneDeity: No.
(2:07:57 PM) kortskorts: goons and the tailor will flip the same
(2:07:58 PM) CaffieneDeity: The tailor targets a player each night, and if any cops target it, they get the wrong result.
(2:08:04 PM) kortskorts: oh
(2:08:10 PM) kortskorts: the tailor's target
(2:08:14 PM) CaffieneDeity: Yes, they will flip the same.
(2:08:15 PM) kortskorts: i thought the tailor itself
(2:08:18 PM) CaffieneDeity: No.
(2:08:23 PM) kortskorts: okay then
(2:08:43 PM) kortskorts: why not have the tailor flip tailor?
(2:08:56 PM) kortskorts: successful lynch of the tailor should be rewarded with plus knowledge imo
(2:09:23 PM) CaffieneDeity: 'Cause then you have a setup with up to two cops and very little to stop them from breaking the setup in a day or two.
(2:09:35 PM) CaffieneDeity: And that could get ugly.
(2:09:35 PM) kortskorts: oh.
(2:09:41 PM) kortskorts: yeah, point taken.
(2:10:11 PM) CaffieneDeity: It could work just giving the whole mafia a tailoring ability instead of attaching it to one player. Less swingy.
(2:10:41 PM) kortskorts: one less townie
(2:10:47 PM) kortskorts: otherwise the town might have to no lynch
(2:10:54 PM) kortskorts: which gives cops another shot at investigating
(2:11:06 PM) CaffieneDeity: Don't mind that.
(2:11:17 PM) CaffieneDeity: It also gives scum another shot at killing a cop.
(2:11:28 PM) kortskorts: but there are two cops
(2:11:36 PM) kortskorts: two investigations, one kill.
(2:11:57 PM) CaffieneDeity: Hmm. True.
(2:12:23 PM) CaffieneDeity: I tend to assume town will hold off until 4-player endgame or so, but I see your point.

[Ether]

We talked about that, too.

I don't think it's a great idea.

[Ether]

Not likely. I'm not playing in games in general right now, and when I start again, they'll probably be mostly newbies (and a certain minitheme, when it comes up). Sorry.

[Ether]

I don't think that's true. You know how it's standard procedure in Pie E7 for the two power roles to claim on Day 2 if they're both alive? This is like that, only without the part where the power roles can confirm any other players like a cop can. (To be fair, they can't be counterclaimed, either.)

Scum still need only one mislynch at that point, and they have a vanilla with the potential.

[Ether]

So...Pie E7 with two extra townies and the cop weakened? I guess it doesn't have that Day 2 massclaim issue, but F11 still seems like a much better game. Why does it need a replacement?

[Ether]

The thing about vanilla F11 is that scum still have to act differently, and town gets stuff to work with from that. (Also, I think it's likely that

knowing

the setup to have no power roles demoralizes players in 2:10.) It isn't "REALLY" unbalanced, and I'm pretty sure 35% wins is much better than random. Its odds aren't dramatically different from the other three F11 outcomes, aside from Cop-doctor.

I think teaching our newbies to play "automatically assume the claimed power role is town if nobody has counterclaimed" is a much bigger issue, that all of those non-C9-style setups perpetrate. I like that F11 gives town more information to work with in vanilla.

Plus, in F11, the cop can't actually be followed unless the town lynches the roleblocker (not the goon) on Day 1 and doesn't manage to take the doctor down with it. Scum have to protect the roleblocker to keep that from happening. (It's argued that this is a feature, not a bug, though to be honest I just see it as a necessary evil.)

[Ether]

Actually there might be a perk to that setup in the fact that the tracker could also catch the ROLEBLOCKER.

Huh? I got that it can do that, but where's the perk?

[Ether]

For what it's worth, I complained about RitP in the Open Setup Certification Group in this post; I hadn't noticed it when it was in the setup discussion thread until it was too late and there was one in Little Italy.

Do you really think it's fair that scum got that close to winning that many times, only to have it snatched away because they were an uninformed majority? Do you really think a game like that would be

fun?

Have you ever actually played AitP as an assassin? I have (though not on-site), and it sure as hell ain't luck. It's actually pretty fun, since there's an informed opposing faction to crack. (I don't think AitP is mafia, though, so I'll stay out of that argument.)

[Ether]

Yet you consider it Mafia Enought to run as an Open?

I don't think Open is the ideal queue for it, but to be honest, it's a fun setup anyway and I like the fact that it's getting regularly run at all. You can campaign against it if you'd like. I'm just here to worry about the players' experience and shit.

[Ether]

I'm not 100% clear on what you're asking, but if you're looking for a place to play games with these ten people all the time, you might want to just start your own forum for that.

To mod a game on 'Scum, you'll need to stick around a few months, play at least one game, get your setup reviewed, and wait on a queue with other would-be mods for a while. There isn't a private spot you can go to on this site to only play with your friends, or only play with your friends with no delay. (Although you could arrange for all of them to be online at the same time and sign up when your game is up, in which case, all power to you.) First- and second-time mods are also restricted in the kinds of games they can run--and that's a good thing, frankly.

Anyway, this isn't really the thread for that. Unless you have a setup that's fully public knowledge before the game starts, and you want people to look over it, in which case this is the thread for that.

[Ether]

Yeah...

4:8 Nightless is townsided. This is 4:14, and while scum will get a few kills in it, they don't have a whole lot of control over which of those kills actually die, and when. It's probably optimal for the town to use pseudovotes until they've made a decision, and then either randomize who votes them (50% odds of bomb working; higher if two bombs are used on the same player, but of course that wastes a bomb) or force their scummiest members to vote the lynch target in a specified order (bomb more likely to work, because scum can predict this, but less likely to hit someone the town finds valuable).

Actually doing all of that in practice will make the game a slog, but not a slog that the mafia are very likely to win.

[Ether]

Of the six 4:8 setups run, town has won five of them. (Actually, one of those was a 4:7. Town won. The one game where scum won involved an inactivity modkill, a vanished mod, and a lot of apathy all around.)

The lack of control over who dies really gets to scum, and so does the fact that for every successful lynch, the scum needs two more townies dead to win. There's a point where it adds up to something insurmountable, where any reasonable game would have just been a scum win by that point.

[Ether]

-Townies visiting an armed player will both arm themselves for that night and die.

What, so a line or circle of townies would all die?

[Ether]

I used an RNG to chart out a possible night phase:

Townie 1 visits Townie 6; is visited by 7. Arming him will kill 7 & 5.
Townie 2 visits Townie 4. Arming her will not kill anyone.
Townie 3 visits Townie 4. Arming him will not kill anyone.
Townie 4 visits Scumbag 1; is visited by 2, 3, 8, 10. Arming her will kill 2, 3, 8, 10 & 14.
Townie 5 visits Townie 7. Arming him will not kill anyone.
Townie 6 visits Townie 11; is visited by 1. Arming her will kill 1, 7 & 5.
Townie 7 visits Townie 1; is visited by 5. Arming him will kill 5.
Townie 8 visits Townie 4; is visited by 14. Arming her will kill 14.
Townie 9 visits Scumbag 3. Arming him will not kill anyone.
Townie 10 visits Townie 4. Arming her will not kill anyone.
Townie 11 visits Townie 13; is visited by 6. Arming him will kill 6, 1, 7 & 5.
Townie 12 visits Townie 13. Arming her will not kill anyone.
Townie 13 visits Scumbag 2; is visited by 11, 12. Arming him will kill 11, 12, 6, 1, 7 & 5.
Townie 14 visits Townie 8. Arming her will not kill anyone.

Average deaths from this configuration: 1.57.

If the scum can't target each other, you can at least use it to try to confirm people. Of course, announcing your targets beforehand makes it easier for scum to maximize their kills. (Or get a large number of kills while leaving room for WIFOM.) With no power roles, I don't think this is clearing people fast enough to make up for the advantage it gives scum, and town doesn't have anything else going for it.

[Ether]

...So if there's one goon left and one townie left everyone else is cult, and the cult recruits the last goon, the town wins and the cult loses?

A recruited goon is functionally worthless for the purposes of preventing other win conditions, but recruiting it is also bad for the cult?

The cult can only win when all living players are recruited, but the town wins when all living goons are recruited?

Those win conditions don't make any sense, and if they were anything approaching normal, then the town would stand no chance at all. It'd just be a scramble to get culted quickly instead of being lynched or nightkilled early for what is functionally an autoloss.

[Ether]

I don't know about balance, but it sounds...really, really boring to play. Most 7-player setups are imbalanced, but at least associative tells exist.

[Ether]

These are both from 2008, but I ran them for this marathon and wanted to draw attention to them. (The Eclipse is Norinel's, not mine.)

The Odds

(10 players)
2 mafia

vs.

7 vanilla townies
1 doctor

Normally that would give each player a 20% chance of being scum, but in The Odds, different people have different chances ranging from 5% to 35%, and their chances are on public display on the front page. (If who gets what percentage is decided nonrandomly, I don't think that detracts from the game at all. Some people like a certain alignment more, or like the danger of having higher odds, and will find the game more fun if they have a say in it.) The doctor is weighted the same way, so a player with a higher percentage is much more likely to be scum or the doctor.

To figure out the scum, I'll roll two numbers between 1 and 40. Each percentage corresponds to different numbers:

• 5% - 1
  10% - 2-3
  15% - 4-6
  15% - 7-9
  20% - 10-13
  20% - 14-17
  25% - 18-22
  25% - 23-27
  30% - 28-33
  35% - 34-40

(Note that even the player most likely to be scum still has about 2 out of 3 odds of being town.)

I sort of want to rename it to something that's easier to search for.

---

The Eclipse

(8 players)
1 Demon King

vs.

6 vanilla townies
1 hunter

The Demon King is a cult leader, as well as a king in the AitP "its side loses if it dies" sense. It recruits a thrall every night, including pregame. Thralls know who the Demon King is, but don't know who else has been recruited, and can't communicate in private.

The hunter, who becomes an assassin analogue later, has a single bullet it can use at any time, including as a vengekill. It can't be recruited, but dies if the Demon King tries. In that case another townie becomes the hunter, as long as there are other townies and it hasn't shot yet. The hunter has to take a vengekill if it's killed/lynched as the last townie in the game, but otherwise it'll pass its bullet on as long as there's still a bullet to pass.

In practice, if only townies are lynched, the cult will take the majority on Day 3, and probably speedlynch someone AitP-style. The hunter will be forced to take its shot on Night 3 in that case; otherwise it'll probably have until Night 4, when the Demon King can hit it through process of elimination. That's assuming that the Demon King isn't stopped earlier, while the town is still in control.

[Ether]

No it isn't. CPR doctors are pretty much vigs.

[Ether]

Eight games of modern Chosen have been run, or 10 if you count marathon games. Town won 3/8 of them (or 4/10). A single game going differently would have meant perfect 50/50 balance. The sample size isn't really enough to say that it's scumsided based off of that. The town does have information--it just comes in the form of forcing scum to behave even more differently than they normally do, instead of in the form of power roles.

Switching the chosen without the mafia knowing is completely terrible. The governor doesn't really

do

much, outside of being a named townie, and I'm not really convinced yet that the game needs one of those.

(And yeah, expecting three different keyholders to all be lynchable is way too much to ask of the scum in Keys of Destiny, even if the game ends when they're finally lynched. I doubt scum would ever win.)

[Ether]

Okay, a follower and a tracker are pretty much the same for balance purposes: they're looking for kills. A voyeur is very close to useless even in closed setups: basically they just tell people what sorts of roles are in the setup, in very vague inconsistent terms, and in an open setup you already know what's going around every night. A vanilla cop is, uh...it can catch fakeclaims, but in this setup there really isn't any reason to fakeclaim, and that's pretty much all it's good for. The vanilla cop and voyeur can at least be named townies, but again, scum has a fakeclaim that weakens even that.

Trackers/followers are fairly weak, vanilla cops and voyeurs are nigh-useless, and that means the universal backup will also get something useless 2/3rds of the time. That's before getting into the fact that only three of those roles even go to town. This town needs a major boost.

[Ether]

You mean nine players, right?

That isn't close to balanced. Town needs something better than "maybe two people will be confirmed innocent sometimes in half of the games if there is a mafia neighbor and you lynch it first" to work with.

[Ether]

I can't give a full answer on how valuable lone doctors are in 9-player setups--the lone doctor variant in F11 actually got about 4% more town wins than the lone cop variant for some reason, but F11 statistics are wildly different from Matrix6 versions of the same setups and I have no idea why, or what that means for games like this--but my gut says this still isn't great.

[Ether]

http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Chosen_Mafia

You'd want a different name for it.

(It's not a good setup beyond that. Replacements are so ubiquitous that letting the scum choose their target directly has a chance of going south fast. It's an 11 player nightstart game with two kills per night and no power roles for the town that could randomly end with a town loss at any time, including Night 0--in Chosen, the chosen ones leave a lot of useful information if one is lynched, but here lynching one just ends the game with a town loss. The town here doesn't appear to be anything but a battlefield for the scum factions.)

[Ether]

The paint mechanic here is taken from Cheetory6. (EDIT: speaking of which, his game needs a replacement! Go join it!)

Paint the Town

(9 players)
2 mafia goons

vs

7 vanilla townies

All mafia players start out colored red. All town players start out blue. On every night, including Night 0, mafia get to choose one townie to paint red. (This is permanent, and the townie isn't notified about the change.)

The day phase is split into two halves. During the first half, the town can choose a player and learn its color. (So blue players are guaranteed to be town, since there's no blue paint in this setup, but red players could be either scum or framed townies.) The second half is just a standard lynch--on death, a player's color is revealed as well as its true alignment.

I don't know the exact EVs yet, but running it on a simulator 100,000 times suggests that it's very, very close to 50.5%. (Obviously that assumes random lynches. It also assumes that the town will automatically lynch anyone revealed to be red, and scum will always kill confirmed blue townies.

Although teeeeeechnically it assumes that last thing by using two loopholes in the code that cancel each other out.

) Town might do better in practice, since if scum always kills confirmed townies, then they're killing whoever the town decides to confirm. I'm not necessarily convinced that's a bad thing, though.