[SETUP] Poison Bomb

[BNL]

I thought of a variation to Marked for Death:

2 Mafia Poisoners
7 Vanilla Townies

The Mafia have spent years working on a poison, which causes their target to die one day after ocnsumption. But these years in the lab have made them more vulnerable to the poison itself...

Every Night and pregame, the Mafia may poison someone. Poisoned players die at the end of the next Night phase, and are not informed they are poisoned. However, if a poisoned townie dies through physical means (i.e. lynch, not poison), a poisonous gas would be released that would kill all the Mafia (but not the townies).

The Mafia not only have fix their kill in advance, but make sure that their victim doesn’t die beforehand. This can be a problem if the Mafia fail to read the townie’s stances or if the townies change their reads. I have seen a few games where the Mafia fail to kill a player some Night, and town almost lynch that player the next Day.

If town are confident, they can also try to lynch the poisoned player for the win, but it’s probably a bad idea to do so because it doesn’t help town in their pirmary wincon if they’re wrong.

Another variation can also be played with one less VT and removing the pregame poison, as in Marked for Death.

Would this be fun to play? I feel like it’s awkward that town want to lynch either the scummy players or their towniest player.

[BNL]

The EV for this is actually interesting to calculate

In comparison to Marked for Death, this seems to have a townier EV because there's an extra player in the lynchpool whose lynch is an immediate town win

In practice this is unlikely to happen, and with the lack of a conftown to organise things this probably has a lower winrate in practice
Not to mention that before 1:2 lylo scum's strategy is to no poison as they can simply delay the poison to next Day after getting vote control

In fact scum may no poison before 2:3 but idk if that's ideal

[BNL]

Could I get some feedback on this?

[Something_Smart]

This feels scumsided... town either lynches scummy players and it's basically mountainous, or they lynch towny players and get buried under a pile of WIFOM.

[the worst]

I'd concur with scumsided - it's really ideal for town to just poker face it and ignore the gas mechanic. The odds of guessing the scum nk are low, at best, save like Mylo where it's likely best for scum to just not poison to avoid high chance of gas death.

is 2v9 or possibly even 2v10 closer to balanced? It's more or less mountainous with a lessened incentive for scum to NK closer to XyLo I think

It's an interesting spin on the kind of idea proposed by Marked for Death but I'm not sure if it's something I'd play

[BNL]

I understand that this is probably scumsided, but I'd counter it with: Because the player dies the next Night, there is now more information and anyone who was defending that player is more scummy.

Town should probably play this like mountanious, I agree, but the extra information from protecting the NK could be valuable. Think of this setup as a cross between Marked for Death and Lynchpin.

[the worst]

I don't feel those are factors that strongly swing it back to a non-scumsided position but that's probably different perspectives on how much e.g. balance matters (though the chance of blocking the NK does get higher later in the game so that's a thing)

If you feel it's not scumsided I'd probably encourage just seeing if people would play it tbh it does sound like a fun enough variation!

[popsofctown]

I think this setup concept sounds really interesting. I think the "criticism" that it plays really similarly to a mountainous might be valid but mountainous =/= bad.

Maybe you could bring it closer to 50% by dabbling into the mechanic a little deeper: 2 Mafia Poisoners
6 Vanilla Townies
1 Town Crazy Ex
Crazy Ex: poisons one person each night, but when their jealous rage wears off, they slip antidote into the same person's dinner the next night. The targeted player will burst into a mafia-destroying poison fog just like a poisoned one if lynched during the 1 day of poison exposure. (The mafia are informed who was targeted) (I can't figure out a flavor justification for that this is already a flavor stretch to begin with lol)

[Irrelephant11]

If I'm reading that suggestion right, the crazy ex could just pick a random player, announce their target, and win the game for town d2

[popsofctown]

If I'm reading that suggestion right, the crazy ex could just pick a random player, announce their target, and win the game for town d2

Yeah I didn't think that all the way through huh.