Provable randomness

[Magua]

In addition to what hito says about breaking strategies:

In a game where the majority of the focus is on the actions and reads of the other players, allowing a player to take an action that is provably uncontrolled is antithetical.

A lot like how "To confirm, reply via PM with the name of your role" became a thing after Quagmire, it's really there to keep up at least a pretense that people are actually playing the game, instead of trying to meta-play the game. Someone can RVS vote someone else for any reason, but if they can point to a dice tag as the reason for their vote, they have complete abdication of their action.

[Magua]

My ultimate take is verified randomness should be heavily discouraged but not banned.

In a sense, someone who uses the dice tag to prove themselves has thus said 'my vote does not matter and I have 0 opinion on anyone. In my view this is scummy in itself.

Thus if the dice tag is heavily discouraged but someone uses it anyways, than that person runs the risk of being scum read right there.

Also, if the town uses the dice for voting, it basically eliminates actual information in the game. Why should anyone talk if everyone uses the dice tag?

At this point, it's actually exploitable with the mafia.

Your point of view is fine (and, as a mod, you are free to allow dice tags if you wish), but does not match up with experience.

[Magua]

You've just outlined exactly why some mods don't allow them.

[Magua]

Code: Select all

[dice]3d6[/dice]

Original Roll String: 3d6

3 6-Sided Dice: (3, 6, 4) = 13

[Magua]

If only there could be some rule that could be made so that the game could still be played as intended!

[Magua]

Doesn't really matter if you think it's good or not, does it? It has been pointed out that there are instances when town players quite legitimately felt this was the best way to play. TBM even linked Dollhouse.

[Magua]

So....you'd modkill someone for doing something rather than just tell them not to do it?

And if your rule is "This is fine on D1 but not on D2" then I think your rule is not well thought out, tbqh. In the same way that "Here's information X, Y, Z. You can't claim this" is a terrible thing to put into a role PM.

[Magua]

I don't see the problem with randomness. If they choose to play with dice, what does it break?

Reading the thread, apparently?

---

Vampirate: If you think it's terrible and town should never do it, why do you feel an exception needs to be made to allow it D1?

[Magua]

Many times when people are talking about EV, they are talking about mountainous setups that do not include any PRs at all.

[Magua]

Many times when people are talking about EV, they are talking about mountainous setups that do not include any PRs at all.

You can EV setups with PR's.

1. "Many times"
2. Not reliably, outside of things like Innocent Children. At best you can approximate things like "Cop claims with guilty or with two innocents," but even that's more complex than EV calculations I've seen.

[Magua]

Expected Value (of a town win). 2:11 mountainous has a 39.5% EV, so if town lynched randomly the entire game it would win 39.5% of games.

[Magua]

You keep saying things that are your opinion like they are fact.

You may be surprised to learn that there are people who do not share the same opinions as you.

[Magua]

The town scenario isn't "where everyone does it randomly," it's "when one everyone follows the same random order." Big difference.

Again, if your rule is "This is ok in small doses, but bad in big doses," then it's not really a good rule imo.

[Magua]

Assassin in the Palace springs to mind as a game that has an EV > 50% based on random lynching.

Of course, AitP is a terrible setup so no one plays it anymore.

[Magua]

My apologies. AITP is townsided if:
1) The first person each Day chooses someone other than themselves to lynch (who is not the King if the person in question is the guard or the King), and
2) No one chooses a lynch again until everyone still alive has chosen one

So I was wrong when I said provable randomness. (But still a broken setup.)

We've talked about this before.

Texas Justice is a hugely townsided setup if you just randomly shoot, and I do believe that Town did randomly pair people up to shoot there.

[Magua]

ok I have a question. You have a chart with (Minimum Day Assassin Will Lynch vs Town Win %)

That chart has town win chance start at 60% and increase to 64%. Why would town get a better chance at winning each day? Logically the assassin should get a better chance each day as there are less and less wrong answers for him to choose from. So is your chart backwards? Because if its not, then I think your math is wrong

Also is the fact assassin and king being last 2 alive makes Assassin win getting factored into your code? Because it should get factored in

Yes, it would make the assassin leading a lynch more effective -- however, it also means the assassin is more likely to end up lynched before then. Eg if the assassin waits until D5 then that means that there are four lynches that could possibly hit him. If we assume those four lynchers are guards, they're not lynching themselves, and they're not lynching the King, so it's a 1/7, 1/6, 1/5, and 1/4 chance that the assassin is lynched each of those days: that's 1 - (6/7 * 5/6 * 4/5 * 3/4) = 58% that the Assassin has already been lynched before D5 begins. That's a little high because it's slightly lower if the King is one of the lynch leaders, but not by much.

Assassin/King in 2 player is always an assassin win, because it will always end with either the Assassin leading a lynch on the King (assassin win) or the Assassin getting lynched and shooting the King (assassin win).

[Magua]

So your plan is not true randomness but rather loosely guided randomness since you have lyncher's picking lynchees. Correct?

So I was wrong when I said provable randomness. (But still a broken setup.)

So your code is only trying to find the odds the assassin gets lynched? Or does your code have anything that factors assassin's chance of making the right suicide bomb once he has been lynched?

The assassin gets a shot after he is lynched, which is 1/(number of remaining players) successful. So the 58% chance of assassin lynch by D5 does not mean 58% town win. But it does mean that the assassin wasted a "shot" by not leading a lynch before being lynched, which is why the town win% goes up as the assassin waits longer.

[Magua]

The math gets stupidly complex. That's why I wrote the Monte Carlo simulation.

[Magua]

I believe that would be an improvement -- either the assassin picks the first lynch, or they never get to choose a lynch.

[Magua]

Town consistently out-performs expected value in every setup ever played. expected value is the damn definition of your odds to win if all actions are random.

If only this were actually true.

[Magua]

42% would be the chance that the assassin isn't lynched (6/7 chance they're not lynched D1, 5/6 chance they're not lynched D2, etc). 1 - 42% => 58% would be the chance the assassin is lynched.

[Magua]

Any data set we use aside from newbies is going to be too small to be statistically significant, but there's the often-used statistic that of the 11 instances of 11:2 mountainous (40% EV) games run on mafiascum, town have only won one.

[Magua]

Mmmm. You're right that I may be thinking of the 10:2 era. But 10:2 still has an EV of 35%, which actual play was falling far, far, far short of.

[Magua]

Not sure that town in WitP benefits from a randomly determined lynch, because the odds of a random person being on your team are < 50%, unlike AitP where the odds of a random person being on your team are (x-1)/x.

Most strategies fall apart because town has an incentive to lie about their allegiance.

[Magua]

This should effectively limit discussion to zero outside day 1. And the assassin has even less means of protesting their lynch as it only take one player to eliminate the assassin with the disease. This version of AITP truly is a lottery.

What are you intending to get out of this?

[Magua]

@vettrock:

That is bad for the same reason every single "Here's a role, you can't claim anything about your role or you'll be modkilled" role is terrible. It's very, very difficult to have a rule based on subjective interpretation.

@Pokerface:

Good luck.

[Magua]

A little of column A, a little of column B?

I don't think AitP is a good setup or worthy of being played as-is (for the same reason I don't think 8 town:1 SK would be a good setup), but you're running an experiment and I can respect that and don't want to piss all over it.