[SETUP] Barely Informed Minority

[xyzzy]

2 mafia goons
1 mafia traitor
8 townies

the mafia doesn't have a factional nightkill; instead, a townie chosen at random dies each night. additionally, the mafia does not have access to private communication of any time before or during the game.

the goal with this setup is to look at the concept of an uninformed minority and reduce the information to an absolute minimum while still qualifying as an informed minority. the setup is also pseudo-nightless, since the random nightkill can happen instantaneously.

[Sukima]

Is town notified of this or does it look like a normal mountainous setup?

[the worst]

It's intended to be an Open so town would have to be aware

[Mathdino]

very scumsided

3:10 mountainous isn't scumsided because the mafia can choose good nightkills (remember that good nightkills is slightly countered by town's ability to NKA)

it's scumsided because it's hard as fuck to pull lynches on all 3 scum

[callforjudgement]

If the scum simply don't read their role PMs and assume they drew town, then they have an 83.5% chance of victory on the subsequent random lynches (as nobody can scumhunt under those circumstances).

With the amount of benefit that the scum get being so low, this is probably the correct strategy, which implies that the setup, in addition to being scumsided, isn't likely to be much fun to actually play.

[xyzzy]

If the scum simply don't read their role PMs and assume they drew town, then they have an 83.5% chance of victory on the subsequent random lynches (as nobody can scumhunt under those circumstances).

With the amount of benefit that the scum get being so low, this is probably the correct strategy, which implies that the setup, in addition to being scumsided, isn't likely to be much fun to actually play.

I was thinking this was covered under the site rules as a thing that isn't allowed, but I just double checked and couldn't actually find any reference to reading role PMs being mandatory. I require players in my games to include their role name and any non-vanilla attributes (abilities, players whose alignments they know, etc.) in their confirmations, which would mitigate that sort of thing.

[Mathdino]

one can argue (very well) that you can't play to win without knowing your wincon

however in this specific case not knowing your wincon IS playing to win

[Sukima]

Is that because if you don't know your alignment or allies, you look indistinguishable from town and thus reduce town's lynch% to random instead of them attempting to pick up on associatives?

[callforjudgement]

If you don't know you're scum and play as though you're town, then your scumplay and townplay should be identical. It's not just associatives, you can't be scumread directly either. So town's lynch accuracy is reduced to random.

It's a bad idea in 99% of setups (at least partly because you need to make the nightkill!); you can normally get more of an advantage as scum by trying to steer the lynch onto townies without the other townies realising what you're doing. But in a setup where random play is this scumsided, and the advantage you get from your scum role PM is so low, it's not worth trying to give town a chance to win.

[Irrelephant11]

What if the night kill is randomly chosen from the three mafia’s submitted suggestions? Like they each give a name to the mod and it’s one of those

No scum communication, but yes NKA.

Also all of the “just don’t read the role pm” ideas are weird because there’s a 8/11 chance before you’ve read the role PM that you’re on the team that benefits from reading the role PM

[Irrelephant11]

Oops this thread was older than I thought, I just discovered the Open Setup Discussion subforum