Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[A Drowned Kernel]

So here's a setup that I've been thinking about, and I thought I'd put it out to the community for ideas/criticism. It would be an open setup, so there's nothing wrong with anyone who might play it seeing it. I'm obviously also as concerned about how fun/interesting it would be as I am about balance.

Groupthink Mafia, for 13 players

-3 Mafia Goons
-10 Townies

Normal night/day cycle, with one NK. Scum has daychat (for reasons that might become evident farther down).

Each night, every single night player has to choose one of four roles- Vigilante, Tracker, Bulletproof, or VT. The catch is that a sort of global effect goes into place based on which role is chosen by the most people, which negate the power of that role (or even make it worse than useless!)

If the plurality of the town players pick...

-Vigilante: all Mafia players gain BP for the night (so town players get killed but Mafia are fine)
-Tracker: all Trackers are given a falsified result: that the person they tracked targeted the Mafia's nightkill. This is the effect that I've had to think about the most, I'm still not sure if this is what I want.
-BP: all Mafia and Vig kills become Strongarm (so the BPs are all useless)
-VT: no effect

Ties would be decided by an order of preference, right now I'm thinking Vig>BP>Tracker>VT (but the middle two could easily be switched).

Also, mafia gets some control over and information regarding the effect. First, they get a certain number of votes toward which role “wins”, probably scaling with the number of living players. Right now I'm thinking 2 votes if 8 or more players are alive, 1 vote for seven or less. Second, mafia will be told at the end of the night which role “won”. This ties in with my reasoning for giving scum daychat; this would probably result in a very theory heavy game. Regardless of any plan town might make for how people choose their actions, there's no reason not to have everyone reveal their actions/results at the beginning of each day (since no one has a better PR than anyone else), so scum has to coordinate quite a bit to make sure they don't get caught in a lie.

A possible feature that might waylay any unfair town plans would be that town players can't pick the same option two nights in a row.

So is it balanced, and more importantly, would it result in an interesting game?

[liopoil]

D1: lynch someone, choose three most townie people. Instruct these people to all choose big, others choose tracker. Choose 3 scummiest people who weren't lynched and shoot them.

...right now town seems way OP with vig shots. You can even have a majority choose vig, others tracker and catch scum that way. (people who are shot and don't die are scum)

[liopoil]

Oh, and this is an excellent example of why vigs should shoot N1.

[scott_pilgrim]

Okay, first, I think this is interesting, at least on the surface.

Second, I think it's broken as it is right now.  Most importantly, you should always be super careful about public effects of the form "Mafia players get X bonus", because it will often be possible to deduce that they are mafia as a result of the bonus.  So in this case, the vig effect, all mafia players become BP, well now the vigs can reveal at the start of the day who they targeted and didn't die.  It's not sure to catch scum; at least some of the time I think scum can argue the claimer is lying, so it's narrowed down to one scum out of two, and other times, maybe that player just chose the BP bonus.

Here's a plan which I think is broken:
Everyone agree to use vig at night and target player X (everyone shoots the same person, sucks to be that person).  If that person doesn't die, we all know they are scum and lynch them the next day.

So basically, town gets two lynches (one at day and one at night) for every one mafia NK; with the exception that they have to use two of those lynches (sometimes) to kill mafia.  No PR's effectively, but still a good deal for town I think.  But it can also be improved upon by dividing everyone up to have two targets:
Divide everyone up into two groups.  Group A vig player X and group B vig player Y.  Now you effectively have 3 lynches for every NK (again, with the exception that you need day lynches to kill scum).

The only benefit mafia has here is that they can lie if they get several of themselves in the same group, but then they're really putting all their eggs in one basket (maybe they have to though).

You can probably do better, at least early on, with maybe three or more groups, not sure.  The idea behind multiple people shooting the same person is to make sure it's hard for scum to lie.


So anyway, I think liopoil's right and you need to come up with a different vig effect.  I'm not sure I like the idea of having multiple vig powers each night anyway, since it will likely make games pretty short.  Something to think about.

I like the general idea of the set-up, I like games that are more about theory and coming up with plans rather than the social deduction aspect.  I would probably even play this as is even though I think it's broken, because it's interesting.  I'll think about it more later, I think there are other ways town can take advantage of the set-up.  I think it's really easy to catch scum in a lie with this set-up, even if scum plays perfectly, but it's also really hard for scum to play anywhere near perfectly in this set-up, because there's so much they have to think about, both from their own perspective and from town's perspective, and if town pressures them to post results/claims quickly I'm not sure they'll have time to come up with claims that are consistent with town claims.

[Archetype]

Hm. I don't think having everyone be a PR could work. Especially if everyone is the same PR. I mean, there is only so much you can investigate or do. And certain actions I don't think really work:

Tracker/Watcher/Follower/Voyeur: Too verifiable. People will claim the following day. If they say they all got the same answer, it was tampered with. If they didn't, the player they targeted was Town or very likely scum (if they targeted the dead player).
Vigilante: just too swingy. Especially if everyone is one.

But what if there were just three options?:
Roleblocker, Doctor, Jailkeeper

Mafia would then recieve the following bonuses:
If RB was chosen the most often, kills are Strong-Willed (can't be blocked).
If Doc was chosen the most often, kills are Strongman (can't be protected).
If JK was chosen the most often, kills are Strongman and Strongwilled (can't be protected or blocked).

There could be something broken there. If Town's too strong, Mafia could have a factional 1-shot SM and 1-shot SW. I'm not sure if it's workable, but I do like the idea of every Town player getting a PR.

[scott_pilgrim]

Hm. I don't think having everyone be a PR could work. Especially if everyone is the same PR. I mean, there is only so much you can investigate or do. And certain actions I don't think really work:

Tracker/Watcher/Follower/Voyeur: Too verifiable. People will claim the following day. If they say they all got the same answer, it was tampered with. If they didn't, the player they targeted was Town or very likely scum (if they targeted the dead player).
Vigilante: just too swingy. Especially if everyone is one.

But what if there were just three options?:
Roleblocker, Doctor, Jailkeeper

Mafia would then recieve the following bonuses:
If RB was chosen the most often, kills are Strong-Willed (can't be blocked).
If Doc was chosen the most often, kills are Strongman (can't be protected).
If JK was chosen the most often, kills are Strongman and Strongwilled (can't be protected or blocked).

There could be something broken there. If Town's too strong, Mafia could have a factional 1-shot SM and 1-shot SW. I'm not sure if it's workable, but I do like the idea of every Town player getting a PR.

Man, trying to figure out how to resolve all that roleblocking is like a mini-game for the mods.

I don't think there's anything broken with that set-up, but it doesn't seem as interesting to me with just protective roles.  It may even be relatively easy to solve with game theory, not sure.  Town would probably just choose some weighted random strategy to decide which action to take (nothing wrong with that though).

That being said, having lots of vigs I think is problematic, and you're also probably right that lots of investigative roles would be problematic too.


Hmm...what if you had more options, but only one player who does each option is successful?  Maybe RB (or JK?), doc, tracker, cop, vig.  Probably too powerful though, because that's almost like having each one of those powers.

Okay, what about, choose one of those powers (or none), and then if more than one player chooses the same power, all instances of that power fail.  But then you just announce beforehand which player should do it (and then it's easy to catch them in a lie too if they're scum).  Maybe you could do that, but then give scum the option to guess one player for each option, and if the guessed player takes that option, they die (or some other reward for scum), to prevent town from planning out who does what.  That might work, not sure how far from the original idea I've strayed.

[Archetype]

Maybe instead of having multiple actions chosen fail, you give it a chance of failing. The chance would half for each player that chooses it. If 1, then 100%. If 2, then 50%. If 3, then 25%. And so on. And instead of fail, Cop's could be they get Town result regardless of who they target. And then scum would get a bonus if that's the action that is chosen the most. (Cop = Godfather), (Tracker = Ninja), (Vig = Bulletproof).

I don't know what powers scum would have in this case. Maybe a factional Roleblock?

[XerxesPraelor]

What if Mafia gets a bonus if they guess correctly what is chosen the most?