[SETUP] The distribution

[implosion]

This is a patently terrible idea but might be interesting as a thought experiment. And I'm on a mountainous-like stint.

3 Mafia Goons
10 Town Point Keepers

During setup, the mod rolls 20d10. E.g.:

Original Roll String: 20d10

20 10-Sided Dice: (8, 7, 4, 9, 4, 7, 7, 5, 10, 10, 4, 3, 10, 4, 8, 1, 6, 5, 8, 10) = 130

They count how many times each roll appeared. Every townie is assigned a different number from 1-10 (which they don't get to know, of course), and is given a role PM saying something like "you are town, and you have X points," where X is the number of dice that landed on their number. So the sum of all the numbers told to all the townies will be 20.

In the eventual massclaim, town would be able to figure out one piece of information: exactly the sum of the numbers claimed by mafia. From this they'd be able to do a good amount of team hunting. Of course, once two scum are dead, the setup is almost like white flag, as the number claimed by the third scum would be known to all.

[implosion]

For instance, for the die roll above, the distribution of numbers given to townies would be:

1
4
5
1
2
2
1
3
0
1

[RadiantCowbells]

Uhh this is probably not balanced

[implosion]

I don't claim that it's balanced at these numbers. I'm not sure where balance would lie. 3:10 is probably quite townsided via a comparison to white flag (but it's not strictly white flag, and it might play out in a way where scum are incentivized to keep people with the same numbers as them alive).

[Awoo]

massclaim d1 and get a computer to figure out all possible scumteams then just start eliminating scenarios starting with the most common culprits?

doesn't seem like you're going to immediately rule anything out but uh yeah

[implosion]

"all possible scumteams" is going to be a lot of scumteams.

Take the example distribution above, and suppose scum fakeclaim 1, 2, and 3. Normally, there would be 13 choose 3 = 286 possible teams.

All of the claimants together form a mass of:
1 0
5 1
3 2
2 3
1 4
1 5

With this information, the number of possible scumteams would be the sum of:

5 (0-1-5)
12 (0-2-4)
1 (0-3-3)
10 (1-1-4)
30 (1-2-3)
1 (2-2-2)

which is 59.

So it is a lot of information; purely from the number of teams it eliminates, it's comparable to giving the town 5 innocent children (56 possible teams) or giving the town 1 confirmed mafia member (66 possible teams). However, it's more heterogeneous than that would be, and therefore harder to directly reason about.

[implosion]

You could then calculate how many scumteams each person will be on.

The baseline would be 13-14 (59 * 3 / 13). So anyone with a number whose number is above that is more than average likely to be scum.

0: 18 (5 + 12 + 1)
1: 11 (1 + 4 + 6)
2: 15 (4 + 10 + 1)
3: 16 (1 + 15)
4: 22 (12 + 10)
5: 5 (5)

While these are fairly skewed, it's not necessarily a bad thing; it gives the setup a feeling similar to the odds. Which is even more true because these probabilities change from a given person's perspective; for instance, the player with the number 4, if town, knows that the players with numbers 3 and 5 are actually more likely to be scum than baseline would suggest, since their knowledge of their own town-ness eliminates a bunch of scumteams where 0s, 1s and 2s are scum, but none where 3s and 5s are.

In the extreme, in this case, the player numbered 5 would be confirmed town to the player numbered 0, if they are town.

[RadiantCowbells]

I think there's better versions of games where you have more information about teams than individuals personally?

[RadiantCowbells]

This game seems like a massclaim D1 game, total up all the orders, list all the viable scumteams, and just slowly eliminate them

The best way to play this game doesn't involve reading much at all tbh

[implosion]

On the one hand, I don't think that's quite true, because there aren't going to be a small number of viable teams early; later on it will somewhat evolve into that, but since it happens later it'll be colored by reads.

On the other hand, that is basically the reason that I included the first line of the OP~

[Awoo]

And yeah while it is unlikely, you can literally get 0-0-0-0-0-0 ... 20 .. 0-0-0-0-0 in which case the mafia should literally just get endgamed as soon as the game starts

[implosion]

And yeah while it is unlikely, you can literally get 0-0-0-0-0-0 ... 20 .. 0-0-0-0-0 in which case the mafia should literally just get endgamed as soon as the game starts

The odds of this are comparable to the odds of winning the Powerball lottery jackpot three times in a row.

That said, one way to mitigate the luck factor would be to give scum inside knowledge of what the distribution is during pregame (possibly but probably not including who has which number), so that they can choose which buckets they want to be in. Also puts in an element of WIFOM into what they're claiming.

It also might be a good idea, particularly if that's being done, to "auto-massclaim" by making each scum commit to a number in pregame and then posting all the numbers in the day one opening post.