[FEBRUARY CHALLENGE] Voting!

[callforjudgement]

Re: Tough on Crime, if a Parole Officer adds someone to the parole list, when does town discover that the player in question has been paroled? Start of the next day?

[northsidegal]

yes (i'll edit that clarification in).

[Bicephalous Bob]

Town could probably break the Face Eaters setup by dividing the roles into three groups of three, then having every player claim which group they're in. This gives town a huge amount of information, without giving the Face Eaters much additional opportunity to get a large set of guesses correct at once.

Does this really break the setup? It gives the town a huge amount of information, but all groups only have three players. It makes it easier for the Face Eaters to eat specific roles (i.e. the Vengeful Townie role and the Face Recognizer). I'm thinking of increasing town power and making face eater failures independent, but this increases swing on two levels: scum get less guesses as they lose members and roles are generally stronger.

[Bicephalous Bob]

If I do make failures independent, I should allow face eaters to eat their dead team mates' faces, gaining a second guess.

[Jingle]

Hmm. Guessing that scum will choose to put one member in each group of three, you get a 1/4 chance of lynching scum D1, and no chance of lynching the stronger power roles.

What do you mean making the failures independent?

[Not Known 15]

Town could probably break the Face Eaters setup by dividing the roles into three groups of three, then having every player claim which group they're in. This gives town a huge amount of information, without giving the Face Eaters much additional opportunity to get a large set of guesses correct at once.

No, not really!
The Face Eaters will simply all claim a different group... That gives the Face Eaters much info and the town... not enough...

[Bicephalous Bob]

you get a 1/4 chance of lynching scum D1

This is the default chance of lynching scum D1. Three out of twelve players are face eaters.

I think what CFJ is getting at is that lynching the face eater clears all players in the group, that teams are ruled out, etc.

What I meant by independent failures is that one face eater making a wrong guess doesn't impact the success of another face eater, meaning that face eaters get three shots at eating faces every night.

[Jingle]

I wasn't saying the 25% was inherently good or bad, just talking to myself mostly.

You also have the advantage of the day one lynch being on either scum or a powerrole you're not concerned about losing.

A thought occurs: Scum A and Scum B both target Player C and guess Player C's role correctly. Who get's the power? What if A also guesses D's role and B also guesses E's role?

[Bicephalous Bob]

That's something I did think of:

Face Eaters can't target the same player simultaneously, and the faces of the targeted players must still be intact.

[mith]

I need to remember to comment on these before the end of the month... running out of time.

[Jingle]

Bump to reminder that tomorrow is the submission deadline.

Do we know how the voting is gonna work this month?

I honestly don't see why we can't do it publicly. Winning doesn't have a prize and public feedback should mean a better idea of the kind of setups people like, which should increase quality in future months.

[the worst]

I think public voting is just generally better tbh

[Jingle]

Kay, I'm gonna vote and put thoughts on the setups now. If we decide against public voting just assume I've changed all of my opinions. Also, I'm leaving mine out.

In order from favorite to least favorite:

Tough on Crime - I ran this during marathon with nsg's help. It was awesome.

Rivalries - I want to play this. If it doesn't win, I'll probably run it at some point.

Romeo, Romeo (Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, Mercutio) - I like the idea of Mafia choosing the lover pairs. Honestly, I'm not sure Mercutio is as important to the setup as anything other than a named townie, but the discussions of who would choose who as their partner seems interesting to me.

House Party - I'm a fan of leaving power in the hands of the majority instead of having power roles, especially in opens.

Three Pods - I'm signed up to play a similar game run by BNL in the micro queue.

three strikes - Seems like an interesting setup for people who like dayplay heavy games. Not my cup of tea, but I'm not necessarily the target audience.

The Representative - I want to dislike this because it seems overly complicated, but looking at it I feel like it deserves to be run to see how things actually pan out. I think honestly the complication is more in the description than the running. I will say that I'm reluctant to endorse a setup where the lynch is decided by players who are basically already dead.

The Wilderness - I like it, but honestly I think it might be a little too complicated for an open.

City Council V3 - Probably balanced, but not a big fan of having a separate pool for vig shots mechanically built in. I'd play it with the right playerlist though.

The Boardroom 3: Shredded Documents - I'm not a fan. Seems complicated, redacted flips, and I don't really like the idea of a lynch-in-private mechanic.

Guidance - As written, I think it's probably unbalanced. With that said, I know Buj has been working on a revision, and I think the setup has promise. I'm just not sure that the setup is ready as is.

Recruitment - Bigger than I'd prefer and I'm not a huge fan of redacted flips.

Face Eaters - I'm putting this at the bottom because it technically doesn't meet the requirements.

[mith]

I figure we'll do ranked choice voting. I'll figure out which particular flavor sometime today.

[mith]

Let's use Ranked Pairs.

I'll edit in a list of all the setups shortly.

Or just go here:

List of all setups

Please post a list of setups in order from favorite to least favorite. You may list as many or as few as you want. You may list tied setups (mark accordingly). Any setups not listed will be tied jointly at the bottom. You may list your own setup - I will assume everyone is voting their own setup as favorite unless you explicitly rank it otherwise.

Recruitment (Not Known 15)
Love 'em and Leave 'em (Jingle)
City Council V3 (Allomancer)
Rivalries (implosion)
House Party (RadiantCowbells)
Guidance (BuJaber)
Romeo, Romeo (Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, Mercutio) (irrelephant11)
three strikes (Something_Smart)
The Wilderness (BBmolla)
The Boardroom 3: Shredded Documents (Awoo)
Three Pods (BulletNLynchproof)
The Representative (califorjudgement)
Face Eaters (Bicephalous Bob)
Tough on Crime (northsidegal)

[implosion]

Not ranking my own so putting in its own tier at the top as per word of mith.

Spoiler: First list of tied setups

Romeo, Romeo, etc: this is actually a good idea/take on near-mountainous nightless. Mercutio is a good design.

Boardroom: I'd play this i think. Interesting small setups are always at a premium :p.

Three pods: I really like your recent spate of ideas like this. It's a very cool idea. I think the one downside is that for it to work, there has to be this "if scum dies d1 town wins" condition. But the idea of getting all the information except what you need is very cool.

Spoiler: next

Love 'em and Leave 'em: I think this is a cool idea. It's not like, amazing, but I would probably try it out.

The representative: I would not play this as a game of mafia, I think. It sounds like an interesting design for a social deception board game though! It's just a bit clunky. But it has very cool ideas. The reason I say it makes me think of a board game is that it feels like a two rooms and a boom style thing where there are actual rooms where each group convenes, they send a representative out to a central area, etc. I think with some minor modifications it would be a really cool thing to play physically.

House party: A neat idea. Scum will probably just no-kill later on to avoid massive info dumping, but it's interesting to have a setup that very explicitly rewards successfully building a town block, as at a glance I think shutting off the townblock from everyone else would be the play.

Tough on crime: played in the marathon game; I think it's a neat idea and I'd try it again at some point but I think it's probably gameable in a not-super-interesting way after enough plays. Maybe. Not sure.

Spoiler: next

Wilderness: neat idea, too complicated.

Recruitment: The concept is fairly innovative and interesting but I think the mafia literally just losing if they screw up the recruit is a bit punishing/would be anticlimactic as a town member.

Spoiler: next

City council V3: I think there isn't enough going on here to make it more interesting than mountainous for the VTs outside the council; I think there's a kernel of a good idea at least but mafia are probably pretty happy to just get rid of the entire council and just play it out from there and town will just lynch in the non-council and have the sergeant shoot every night until successful.

Three strikes: I don't think this would be especially interesting to play; the IC is serving no real design purpose and I think that it's probably in practice townsided. I feel like losing this as town would feel really bad while losing it as scum would also feel really bad.

Spoiler: next

Guidance: I think this is ill-formed? Don't understand how these two pairings occur/what incentive there is to not just massclaim pairings/how the setup works exactly.

Face Eaters: As mentioned current version doesn't fit specifications. Not my kind of setup in general though; feels kind of dracula's feast-ish. Too role madness-y for me.

[Something_Smart]

Recruitment
Rivalries
Three Pods
Romeo, Romeo (Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, Mercutio)
Love 'em and Leave 'em
The Boardroom 3: Shredded Documents
The Representative
Three Strikes
House Party
Tough on Crime
The Wilderness
City Council V3
(Face Eaters)
Guidance

Spoiler: explanations

Recruitment - the more I think about this the more I like it. While the post is pretty unclear I'm assuming the game is 9:3, which is a decent ratio. It's townsided unless scum can pull off a successful recruit, which encourages the town applicant to play scummy in order to get picked... but if the town applicant gets mislynched then it's 7:3 which isn't townsided anymore... it's a very cool balance. Recruiting is a big risk but a huge reward if you hit right.

Rivalries - neat variant on the coalition idea. 1/8 chance of blindly getting it right, which is higher than coalition and therefore requires scum to interfere more to make sure it doesn't happen. 8:3 mountainous is extremely rough but town's got a fair amount of info from the first phase.

Three Pods - I feel like this is townsided, but it is interesting as it encourages scum bussing each other as hard as they possibly can without lynching each other. If even two scum get tied hard to each other it's game over regardless of how deepwolf the third one was, but scum can also manipulate the pods to obfuscate this.

Romeo, Romeo (Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, Mercutio) - this would be higher if I didn't think it was incredibly townsided. Barring scum/scum shenanigans, all town has to do is identify one townie, lynch scummy pairs until they hit Mercutio, and have Mercutio unpair that towny player.

Love 'em and Leave 'em - Solid setup, the JK targeting lovers is a bit random but does help to provide cover for if the scum lover is the last scum alive. (Not too much, though.) Lovers being simultaneously vengeful and unlyncher is cool.

The Boardroom 3: Shredded Documents - Probably a cooler version of 6:2 nightless flipless mountainous, a setup which is I think pretty balanced. This version helps town by giving them SOME flip-related info to work with, but it also helps scum because if they get selected, they can pick people sympathetic to themselves to increase their odds of surviving. (Whereas town, picking people they scumread, are more likely to just be lynched.)

The Representative - WIFOM city over here. Lynching mechanic is convoluted but cool. Only part I don't like is that the representatives are the ones who have the most power... but they're also essentially their group's chosen lynch, which means they should be the least trusted one in their group.

Three Strikes - not gonna lie, this was adapted from a 9p setup I came up with on a whim. Certainly not a high effort submission but I tried some ideas in my head and was not particularly satisfied with anything so I added an IC to a setup where it doesn't affect anything in the slightest and it shows. Was meant to be a somewhat quick dayplay-based game, ironically I don't think I would do very well or have that much fun playing in it myself. Definitely not going to let this mediocre setup be auto-ranked above all these ones that people put real effort into

House Party - I know exactly why RC suggested this one, and I think it's a decent idea but likely to be annoying in practice when people disagree on who exactly should be part of the townblock. Random resolution is definitely sub-optimal in that regard.

Tough on Crime - Seems like it will be mostly based around how good at PR hunting scum are. Parole doesn't seem to matter much until there's one scum left.

The Wilderness - 11:3 with no scum kills is likely to be townsided no matter how you slice it. Wilderness mechanic can probably be manipulated in town's favor to punish any scum who try to abuse it, and the headhunter/head mechanic is a bit random.

City Council V3 - doesn't seem that different from 13:3 with a vig who can only shoot in a small pool, with the offchance of confirming a couple of people as town. Optimal strategy is almost certainly to never lynch city councillors while the sergeant-at-arms is alive, and then it might just depend on how good at hunting the vig scum are.

(Face Eaters) - doesn't meet the requirements, and also seems very dracula's feast-y and unnecessarily complicated.

Guidance - Kills are likely to fail (scum can just guide townies to scum members if they wish), and if they do it's just a scumsided 8:4 mountainous. Claiming guiding order might help this, but it also kinda breaks it because a scumflip confirms both who guided them and who they were guiding. (If scum lie about guidances they're guaranteed to be caught because every scum is guided by a townie.)

[callforjudgement]

Favourite at the top. (For what it's worth, there are no setups here that really caught my imagination, including my own; the top of the ranking is more "null-to-good" rather than "this setup is great, it should be run".)

Rivalries

: I like the idea behind this one. I suspect that the numbers are wrong, though (although I'm not certain): even with the 12.5% instant-win chance accounted for, it doesn't feel like town have enough information to balance the setup. (However, the technique I used to check this is fairly experimental at the moment, without much rigour, and involves guessing at how some things would go, so my calculations may be off; at least, it doesn't seem ridiculously scumsided, and it's plausible that it could be balanced.)

Romeo, Romeo

: I'd expect this to be townsided, but again, I like the general idea behind it. A 9:3 nightless is townsided, and I don't think that scum can scumside it far enough with the pairings (especially as Mercutio can act as an Innocent Child if necessary, although the unpair power is probably more useful if it ends up triggering when Mercutio's partner is lynched); but maybe I'm wrong on that! In a way, the pairing mechanic is a method of giving scum compensation for the lack of nightkill, as they can pair themselves (or scummy-looking townies) to powerful town players.

The Representative

: I still like the idea behind my own setup, but it's a bit clunkier than I'd like, and I was unhappy with the details even when I posted it; I just couldn't find a combination that worked better. (Maybe it'd be better off working this sort of idea into a Large Social Game rather than Mafia?)

Recruitment

: I think this is townsided. With a successful recruit, scum make this into 9:3 White Flag – a somewhat scumsided setup – but failing the recruit makes them lose outright, and the setup is basically equivalent to an 8:2 Lovers setup without recruiting (as the applicants cancel each other out). Incidentally, it's to the scum applicant's advantage not to claim, and the town applicant's advantage to pretend to be a scum applicant (!), so it's likely that scum won't have any basis better than chance to select their kill.

House Party

: I dislike the general idea of this; throughout much of the game, scum are highly likely to have a kill that they can make safely (i.e. without giving away too much information). As such, it's comparable to a White Flag where the town has a small number of factional JKs available (probably on the order of 2 to 3). It's probably balanced, but the mechanic feels like it'll feel pointless from town's point of view and frustrating from scum's point of view, until late game where it may end up randomly winning the game for town. Incidentally, this is likely to be very comparable in how it plays out to Tough on Crime, but I've placed it higher because some players may like a game in which the strong townies can be protected for a while.

Tough on Crime

: Surprisingly similar to House Party; again, it has a mechanic that won't matter through much of the game, but can become very relevant at the end. I believe this is probably townsided, due to a combination of town's power roles and town's endgaming power. I ranked this below House Party because paroling can't be used to much effect earlier in the game (it sometimes restricts who

makes

the scum kill but scum normally have a lot of choice in that), whereas partying at least does something (restricting who the scum kills).

Three Pods

: Not new, this is basically a minor tweak on Rarefaction to run with 10 players. It may well be better than the original, but Rarefaction isn't massively popular as a setup, and I've ranked this setup lower because I think the monthly challenge would be better as a breeding pool for new mechanics.

The Boardroom 3

: I think it's still possible for town to work around most the mechanic? Town work out who they want to lynch, first, then select a player who's responsible for implementing the lynch, sending that player to the boardroom (who then invites someone they believe to be town, and also the player that town wants to lynch). The lynched player self-votes (if they refuse to, the extra player votes them), and the implementor hammers. If the wrong person ends up dying, then either the lynch was on scum and the implementor invited scum (which would be a pretty inept thing to do, although not impossible), or else the implementor is scum. So scum do get something of an advantage from the mechanic, but not much of one, and it may not come up in any given game. I expect the setup to be balanced, but the mechanic to not be running to its full potential.

Love 'em and Leave 'em

: Probably townsided. The presence of the JK helps to alleviate the usual skew problems seen in a 10:2 (in that they give a plausible "partial good result" for town that falls short of a lynch, making the average case more distinct from the perfect-for-scum case). However, this is still nonetheless a 10½:2 (almost equivalent to a 10:2 or 11:2 based on which scum dies first) with a couple of confirmable townies and the chance to block kills and push the setup back onto odds, and that seems likely to outweigh the normal town disadvantages in 2-scum Minis.

City Council

: Isn't it correct for town to just systematically shoot inside the Councillors, lynch outside them? That seems to break the setup; if the Sergeant-At-Arms survives long enough, town need only make a single correct decision (kill or lynch), with all the others being incorrect, and still manage to end up in a 3:1 lylo. (Not to mention that if the scum Councillor dies early, the town Councillors become Masons.)

Three Strikes

: 5/7×4/6×3/5 = 2/7 chance of town missing all three times, so town EV is 5/7. That's way too high as it is, and the Innocent Child has no influence on the setup and is clearly just there to make up the numbers, making it rather inelegant. Additionally, this is functionally a no-flip setup (because a scumflip would end the game), which is dubious in its own right.

Guidance

: It took me some time to even work out how to count the number of setup randomization possibilities for this one (what we're looking for is a derangement of the players for which no scum maps to another). Anyway, it's unclear what a "co-jailkeeper" is, but as scum control the jailkeeps of half the town, any plausible meaning allows scum to arrange the jailkeeps to block their own kill (unless town try to organize to all target the same player, in which case the kill will fail for a different reason). That in turn means that this is effectively a vanilla setup in which town know that certain players can't be scum together, but that isn't nearly enough information to balance an 8:4.

The Wilderness

: Broken for town. Every day, no-lynch, and vote a scummy-looking player into the Wilderness. The game is now equivalent to 11:3 Nightless (maybe 10:3 if the scum guess the Headhunter correctly). (When a player is alone in the Wilderness, they have no actions that don't commit suicide. You forgot to add in the "Shoot air" action from RAF. Even fixing that, though, the game is still townsided unless the Mafia Head can guess the Headhunter.)

Face Eaters

: Doesn't comply with the challenge restrictions. Also, I expect it to be broken, but haven't spent much time looking at it (beyond what I've already posted in-thread) because invalid entries surely have to come last.

[Jingle]

Adding my own:

Tough on Crime - I ran this during marathon with nsg's help. It was awesome.

Rivalries - I want to play this. If it doesn't win, I'll probably run it at some point.

Love Em and Leave Em.

Romeo, Romeo (Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, Mercutio) - I like the idea of Mafia choosing the lover pairs. Honestly, I'm not sure Mercutio is as important to the setup as anything other than a named townie, but the discussions of who would choose who as their partner seems interesting to me.

House Party - I'm a fan of leaving power in the hands of the majority instead of having power roles, especially in opens.

Three Pods - I'm signed up to play a similar game run by BNL in the micro queue.

three strikes - Seems like an interesting setup for people who like dayplay heavy games. Not my cup of tea, but I'm not necessarily the target audience.

The Representative - I want to dislike this because it seems overly complicated, but looking at it I feel like it deserves to be run to see how things actually pan out. I think honestly the complication is more in the description than the running. I will say that I'm reluctant to endorse a setup where the lynch is decided by players who are basically already dead.

The Wilderness - I like it, but honestly I think it might be a little too complicated for an open.

City Council V3 - Probably balanced, but not a big fan of having a separate pool for vig shots mechanically built in. I'd play it with the right playerlist though.

The Boardroom 3: Shredded Documents - I'm not a fan. Seems complicated, redacted flips, and I don't really like the idea of a lynch-in-private mechanic.

Guidance - As written, I think it's probably unbalanced. With that said, I know Buj has been working on a revision, and I think the setup has promise. I'm just not sure that the setup is ready as is.

Recruitment - Bigger than I'd prefer and I'm not a huge fan of redacted flips.

Face Eaters - I'm putting this at the bottom because it technically doesn't meet the requirements.

[BNL]

Will rank later but I like Boardroom 2 much more than 3

Another thought crossed my mind: Since we're playing by an honour system with public voting, is there a reason the setup creator (mith) cannot submit to his own contest?

[mith]

I thought about submitting something, but honestly I have been so busy this month I haven’t had a chance to think about setups. ~shrug~

[Irrelephant11]

[Boardroom 2, if we can vote for it
Romeo, Romeo]

Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em

[Three Pods
Rivalries
Tough on Crime]

[Recruitment
Three Strikes]

[City Council
House Party]

[The Representative
Boardroom 3]

[The rest]

[Awoo]

Yeah just pretend I submitted boardroom 2 - 3 isn't quite right

[BuJaber]

Yes indeed I did work on revision of my setup at some point, but since I submitted I haven't followed up on the thread at all.

I wouldn't mind being left out of this one because I couldn't put in the time to revise my setup.

Else I will try to rank the setups as soon as I can.

[Jingle]

Yeah just pretend I submitted boardroom 2 - 3 isn't quite right

Probably wouldn't change my position, tbh. :shrug: