[SETUP] Caught in the Middle

[callforjudgement]

I was thinking about multiball a while back, and it struck me that it'd work rather better if town and scum wins weren't mutually exclusive; that way, scum don't have any incentive to avoid crosskilling, making optimal strategy a lot more predictable and removing some of the excessive negative feedback. I haven't tried to finely balance this yet, but here's the general idea:

Caught in the Middle

• 8 Vanilla Townies
  
• 3 Mafia A Goons
  
• 3 Mafia B Goons
  
• Day Start, standard nightkill mechanics (both factions get a kill)
  
• The game ends if
  either
  Mafia faction is eliminated entirely.
  
• Town as a whole win if there are at least 4 townies alive when the game ends. This does not prevent a Mafia faction winning.
  
• Even if town as a whole do not win, any surviving townies still win. (If town as a whole wins, all townies win, alive or dead.)
  
• A Mafia faction wins if it outlives the other Mafia faction. This does not prevent town winning.

It's impossible for all three factions to win, but joint town/scum victories are likely to be very common. Given that everyone here is trying to kill scum (town want to kill scum from the smaller faction, scum want to kill the opposite faction), a player being lynched

or

nightkilled means that they weren't playing very well; thus, giving townies a bonus for surviving isn't broken like it normally would be. A mechanic like that is necessary, incidentally, to cut down on the amount of kingmaking involved (you can't eliminate it entirely but this eliminates most of it).

I'd expect the larger scum faction not to claim. Even though that would prevent them being lynched immediately, it'd make them obvious nightkill targets for the other side, and they might not stay as the larger faction forever (the smaller faction are harder to hit!).

Interestingly, the flavour here works out rather better than typical Mafia flavour; the scum are trying to get rid of each other, the town don't really care but just want the scum to stop shooting them. That makes more sense than a group of bloodthirsty Townies trying to root out the entirety of the Mafia by killing anyone they vaguely suspect of being scum.

[RadiantCowbells]

Any surviving townies still win is a horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible idea

[callforjudgement]

Better than having living townies who can't win.

It'd be a horrible idea in setups where scum are trying to nightkill good townies. Here, though, doing that would be against their wincon; they're trying to nightkill scum, as their chances of winning depend really strongly on how often they can crosskill.

If it's still a problem, though, it's likely that multiball doesn't actually work at all (which, admittedly, wouldn't be a surprise to several players here).

[RadiantCowbells]

You create a setup where the most important thing isn't your play in the game but your reputation outside of it: I would never /in to this game because if I roll town I'm always going to lose

surviving to endgame strongly rewards people who are not going to be eating bullets

[callforjudgement]

Why would people shoot you just because you were good? They'd only shoot you if they thought you were scum. In fact, you'd be way more likely to lose as scum because then there'd be someone actually wanting to kill you. (Besides, you can still win as a dead townie unless town starts doing badly.)

[Mathdino]

My initial guess is that scum at L-1 should just claim scum and argue that town shouldn't lynch them because the other team will burn a NK on them instead of town. Town will take this offer because their wincon relies on staying alive. Town can then try to direct that scum's NK I think.

It seems like it's essentially a game with all town and teams of vig survivors that can't win with each other.

[Something_Smart]

I see why you have the rule that surviving townies can win. And I don't believe that the game will necessarily be broken as a result.

But I think it's dangerous. Inherent in the town wincon is the ability to betray one's fellow townies, which undermines the team aspect of the game, and some really really nasty stuff can happen with 4 townies alive.

One bad feature about normal multiball is that if the scumteams fail to kill each other the town can end up utterly screwed. Of course you have introduced an incentive for scum to avoid hitting town, but that doesn't change the fact that if they do, their mistake is harmful to the town.

Thinking of Perpetual MYLO, one possible route is to say that town loses after three mislynches. If this occurs, each scumteam takes one more shot, and then all townies are immediately endgamed and whichever scumteam has more players wins. (If they are equal, they both lose-- this is to prevent them from agreeing to a draw.) No-lynches should be either barred or counted as mislynches.

In this case, it's actually really nice for townies to die at night (though it's still bad for the scumteam that shot them).

[mith]

I don't hate this idea. I don't love the surviving-townies rule, of course, but I don't see a more elegant way to do what you're trying to do yet. It can be a bit arbitrary whether town wins as a whole or not, but there is big incentive for town to look town (both avoiding lynches and crosskills). Then again, it's harder to "look town" if both scum groups are scumhunting the other group.

My initial guess is that scum at L-1 should just claim scum and argue that town shouldn't lynch them because the other team will burn a NK on them instead of town. Town will take this offer because their wincon relies on staying alive.

This isn't true with the proposed "survival" rule for town. Townies should probably claim scum too if they won't be lynched immediately, especially if there is only one scum left on either or both of the teams and the number of town is at or near the dead-townies-win condition cutoff.

I'm not sure it's necessarily true even if town didn't have incentive to fake claim scum (and they definitely do if there are only 4 left, because the lynched townie there loses); at least it likely depends on the counts available. (Obviously at 1:1:T they should just lynch because it ends the game.)