[SETUP] Desperados

[Hoopla]

This is a 16 player setup (4 mafia vs. 12 townies), where each player has a unique role. Usually in open setups handing out unique roles to players that can't be counterclaimed runs into the problem of massclaim breaking the setup. In this setup there is a mechanic to deter town players from claiming, making this a game of hidden information.

The mechanic? Each mafioso is a desperado. At any time during the Day, a mafioso may submit a player's name + role title. If they correctly guess that player's role, it will be killed. If the mafioso guesses wrong, they will suicide. There is no limit to the amount of times a mafioso may kill during the day. If they keep guessing correctly, they will stay alive.

At night, there is a normal nightkill that mafia are free to use. Desperado kills can only be made during the Day.

The Setup

4x Mafia

1x Godfather Desperado

(you will investigate as innocent to the Cop)

1x Spy Desperado

(choose a town ability - you will receive a list of which players have been targeted by this ability and on what night)

1x JOAT Desperado

(Jailkeep/Roleblock/Watch/Commute)

1x Goon Desperado

* Mafia are not multi-tasking.
* Desperado day-kills are submitted privately to the mod
* Nightkill acts as normal

12x Townies

1x Cop
1x JOAT

(Jailkeep/Roleblock/Doc)

1x JOAT

(Watch/Track/Voyeur)

1x Psychologist
1x Vengeful
1x 1-shot Vig
1x 1-shot PGO/1-shot Commuter

(choose which night to activate one of these powers)

1x Bodyguard
1x Miller Friendly Neighbour
1x Miller Fruit Vendor
1x Encryptor

(enables scum daytalk while alive)

- The possibility of scum being able to shoot correctly identified townies acts as a barrier against town-players massclaiming their roles, which makes this a game of hidden information. Many players have the ability to learn alignment-information about other players, but have to keep it to themselves at the risk of being shot.
- Cop/Psychologist has some false positives/negatives to deal with to prevent them from claiming a guilty and forcing a 1:1 trade with scum.
- Encryptor is the only role that has the dilemma of claiming its ability. Claiming D1 could be a viable strategy for the Encryptor, as scum may not want to sacrifice daytalk early in the game. So, this role has the potential of acting as an Innocent Child for the first 2-3 days (or for however long scum wishes to keep daytalk)
- With the existence of a potential PGO, some town roles may choose to not use their action. Town may even request that the PGO not activate itself until later in the game to remove the risk of losing multiple townies at night.
- Friendly Neighbour is also a role that might not use its role more than once as it risks revealing itself to the scumteam, giving them a free daykill.
- The mafia spy exists to give mafia information on where certain powers have been used. For example, choosing "Cop" on N3 will tell the mafia where the Cop has visited N1/N2/N3 - though it won't discover who the Cop is. This is useful to see things like who is confirmed to a Cop/Friendly Neighbour etc. and can help inform PR-hunting.
- For the purposes of Desperado-kills, the two town JOAT's need only be guessed as "JOAT's" for a successful kill. These are powerful roles, so I like the idea of them having better odds of being killed.

~~

Some things I'm still working out:

A game of chicken will likely occur when the town puts a player to E-1. If a mafioso at E-1 is highly likely to be executed, it

could

use its desperado kill on the chance it can get a free town death or two before it goes down. A lack of a desperado attempt at a player sitting at E-1 could imply that player is town. A counter to this for scum is to not shoot, which may see their wagon dissolve. The mafioso risks being hammered, though.

So,

Should towns ask for a roleclaim when a player is at E-1? If a claim occurs and mafia shoots them, this creates a scenario where town are getting multiple targets executed by their choice during the Day before mafia can choose someone at Night. What is mafia's counter to this? Should mafia sometimes

not shoot

a town role that has claimed at E-1 in an attempt to frame them? If mafia is at E-1, should they claim a town role instead of going for a desperado kill (or a sequence of desperado kills)?

Lets say mafia claims a role at E-1. Town cannot know this is a true claim or not without the townie having this role sacrificing themself. So, if town asks for a claim from a player at E-1, scum can always trade their life for any town role of their choice. Should a townsperson who has the role being fakeclaimed actually counterclaim or insta-hammer? Maybe? Probably depends on the gamestate. If townies shouldn't always counterclaim, it means that a townie who claims their role at E-1, allows for the possibility of scum not shooting them in attempt to frame them, perhaps causing someone to hammer and thus ending the day?

- Should a scum's suicide end the Day? I'm leaning towards yes, but need to think about it more.
- Should scum have the option of a town Day-Kill ending the Day? This is also a viable rule consideration to prevent town's from forcing scum to kill their top target, which can effectively turn the Day phase into a Double-Day if their first target is a mis-execute.

Are there other ways to break or game this setup?

Setup name is also uninspiring. Creative title suggestions also welcome;)

[Isis]

Miller FN, Miller FV, 1 shot PGO/commute, 1-shot vig are

Don't check me, purple group

Investigative JOAT, Cop, Psychologist, and Encryptor(Encryptor just for even numbers) are

investigative group

The remaining players are

Blue, protective group

.
Claiming only color would grant mafia 25% accuracy shots (even on JOATS which conveniently don't want to share a group anyway) while forcing mafia to counterclaim membership into the groups early on, giving town some pretty good edge in narrowing down the mafia; a color with 6 claimed members should be targeted first, a group with exactly 4 members is 4 ICs.
The way these groups were constructed, the town gets extra edge on night action strategy, the protectives loosely can protect investigatives more and the investigatives can loosely avoid investigation resilient players more.
The tradeoffs are complex but I think this type of strategy is more powerful than playing the setup "normally".

Even if that's not adopted, it's worth noting that if town wants to tryhard they mass hypoclaim investigative guilties and innocents without outing their role, so their investigation results will be meaningful if they perish. This can be kind of a chore.

Like Masons and Mafia the idea of playing this kind of setup stresses me out a lot but just because it stresses me out doesn't make it inherently bad, it maybe doesn't stress other people out. If I were designing something like this, I think I'd dodge the weird hammer racing and E-1 WIFOM's by making it a mechanic that functions at night, like, "when you make the factional nightkill, you may guess the role of the player you're killing. If you're correct, your kill is Strong and you may immediately kill again, if you're incorrect the player performing the kill perishes also"

[Hoopla]

That is the sort of convoluted breaking strategy I like seeing. Does it work, though? Hard to say. My counter strategy as scum:

- Scum surely must split themselves across all three groups.
- I probably put two non-GF scum in the purple group as that's where the millers/PGO provide cover against the Cop.
- I put one scum each in orange and blue, with one of them being GF. This gives the Cop a 1/9 chance of getting a cop guilty and a 1/9 chance of getting a false positive.
- Hypocopping could provide the town with an innocent result or two - but it runs the risk of the Spy choosing to see where the Cop's targets have been, and exposing itself. If on N2, the Spy discovers the Cop has been to player 4 and 7 - that almost certainly reveals the Cop's identity, giving mafia a free daykill.
- Whichever scum is likeliest to deepwolf submits the first NK to safeguard against Psychologist. They shoot within the group that has the worst town:scum ratio to keep things balanced.
- If scum are split across three groups in a 2:1:1 formation, the town has better odds of hitting scum within the 2 scum group, but a correct execution won't give you any IC's.
- So, should scum go for the 1 in 5 chance of hitting scum within a 1 scum group to try and get 4 IC's? Probably not. Lets say they do nail scum in this group D1 - well, firstly the wouldbe D1 scum target should go for the 1/4 chance of daykilling a townie within their group. If they miss, the rest of the scumteam learns that piece of information. scum then shoot a different target in that group N1, which narrows down the remaining slots identities within the group to a 50/50 + 33/66 + 33/66. These slots are confirmed innocent for D2, forcing scum to kill there N2. Once town is down to two IC's on D3, it's likely that they'll be able to deduce the who is who in the last two slots, giving them two free kills. So, even if town can force a situation of two or three IC's, once scum kills there, they can catch up quite quickly with rapid kills. Scum probably need a Strongman in their JOAT package instead of a Watcher to safeguard against town executing through a non-protective group first, and using protection roles to maintain it.
- In saying all that, it's probably not optimal to execute the 1/5 chance over the 2/6 chance, so the above branch of the tree shouldn't manifest very often.

This is just a response to a D1 group claiming strategy, but I think towns should be wary of narrowing player's identities down too much. Scum have some level of control over which groups get narrowed down more with their NK and situations in the mid-to-late game could arise where scum are getting really good odds of hitting 2+ townies in a row. Each dying scum could very easily take down a townie or more with them, and even a wrong shot helps improve accuracy for other scumbuddies' future shots.

There are probably ways to brute force an advantage as town using groups like this, but getting a couple of confirmed innos at any point simply forces scum to NK there, and they can catch up in a phase or two once they have deduced who is who within the remainder of the group.

A single scum can easily come from the clouds in a 1:5 or 1:7 situation with double or triple kills. that is, if they can maintain enough coverage within their colour group.

The question is, if/when town forces a couple of IC's, can they make the most of their short-term PoE advantage before scum wipes out that confirmed corner of the game?

[Isis]

Hm, I think it's correct to hypocop anyway and just let the cop die. Because it's hypoinvestigative, not hypocop. 2 investigations is an insufficient tally, you have everyone in town claim a target and "incriminating" or "not incriminating" (a watcher who saw more than one thing has to stick with just one guess, or if you want to really tryhard I guess everyone can use a watchesque list with a leading name). So assuming the protective JOAT is used investigatively, I'm counting 8 total results being traded for the cop's life. With the JOATS and Psych exhausted, you probably stop hypoclaiming there, but having 8 investigations on the books to use as players get NKed seems worth the cop, especially when it's a hobbled cop who cannot clear herself by explaining her role and how she's been using it like a normal cop and generally has trouble sharing her results. I think it's not a stretch she's worth less than eight checks.
Hm. Maybe she's worth more, they aren't full decks admittedly, it's a 2/3rd and 1/3rd from the psych, two 1/3rds from the protective joat, a 1/3rd and a "how does one value watcher" from the other joat.
That comes out to ~5? Eh I think you want that.
You can immediately just shut it down by adding a spy, I think you then lose enough players that it's clearly not worth it.

[callforjudgement]

What about this for a break: vote on the scummiest player, have them claim, check counterclaims. If there are no counterclaims, the player is confirmed town. Scum will shoot them,

but

this doesn't end the day. If there is a counterclaim, you have to go through with the regular Day vote. This basically turns into a Nightless except scum get two vengekills (which is probably more townsided than regular Day/Night mechanics), and in the case where the game does go to Night, you have night actions on top of that. I'm not sure if this break drives the town winrate high enough to properly break the setup, but I think it's a better strategy than playing it normally.

As a side note, this setup contains some role interactions unresolvable by NAR (e.g. two players cross-jailkeeping). This probably doesn't matter much, but might be worth clarifying.