Mafiascum.net

There's going to be an optimal strategy. The point is to make people fight over what it is in the thread so people can form reads off that, call people scumfucks, threaten to replace out, and tell people not to join games with them again. That's the real reason why mountainous sucks. It's a rehash of baggage contained to that one thread and nothing else to argue over, so you're just having the same argument from page 3 to page XXX.

Hmm... I need a way to incentivize roses from picking day 10000.

There has to be a gamble option for picking early day rose. Thoughts?

It's not obvious to me in the current setup why roses have specific days at all.

Right. Roses would just pick day infinity to avoid being outed as a rose.

Can you think of anything that would incentivize roses to pick an earlier day?

Or maybe just accept it as part of the game?

You pick a night + Gun or rose.

I think either the roses need an additional side-effect, or else to not be night-specific.

The current setup is effectively "town can choose at the start of the game to be a night-n vigilante or a VT; scum win by killing all the VTs". The core mechanic of "power roles don't count towards the town's wincon" is interesting. Getting a working setup built around that can be hard, though.

Oh, and I just realised a trivial way to stop town all picking N1 or whatever: don't reveal gun holders and rose holders, and let scum choose a night on which to be bulletproof. Town probably won't all pick N1 in case scum do.

Hmm, so if rose/gun are not revealed, then mafia needs to solve the game old-fashioned way, which can be ok. Scum being bulletproof will only fix the N1 cheese I guess, since the vig will just tell people that "hey this guy was bulletproof last night - he's mafia".

I think I want to explore some other options though.

I think there are many, many different directions you can take this idea in that are all very viable.

I slept on it, and I think a more elegant solution may be:

NO reveal on rose/gun - only when the player flips, they will be revealed their role
Guns pick a night and can shoot during that night
Rose pick a night and is bulletproof during that night

I think the setup is still missing something.

What if I made the number of town roses alive public?

That's probably a good idea for the same reason that people dislike no-reveal games.

I like it. It'll be hard to know where the balance lies, because there's so much WIFOM involved, but the core mechanic seems correct now.

I can run some EV calculations as soon as I know what kind of assumptions I can make.

I'm testing with low numbers to see the setup in action.