[SETUP] Orbital Dynamics

[Something_Smart]

10 Vanilla Townies

4 Mafia Goons

Pregame, the players are grouped into 7 pairs. These can either be random, or chosen by the players prior to alignments being randomized. Then, alignments are distributed, with a 50% chance of 2 Mafia-Mafia pairs and 5 Town-Town pairs, and a 50% chance of 4 Mafia-Town pairs and 3 Town-Town pairs.

Then, the main phase of the game begins. There are no nights or executions; instead, players may take the following actions, all publicly:

• Shoot
  your partner. Your partner dies and flips immediately. If your partner was Town, you become
  Disgraced
  ; if they were Mafia, you become a
  Hero
  . If the Mafia are paired together, they may not Shoot each other.
  
• Kill
  a Disgraced player. This can only be done by a player with a living partner, and it requires the agreement of both partners. The Disgraced player immediately dies and flips.
  
• Use a
  Bullet
  . Only a Hero can do this, and each Hero can do this only once. This kills any paired player, resolving as though they had been shot by their partner.
  
• Vote to
  Blow Up the Lab
  . Any paired or Disgraced player may do this. (If there is a Hero in the game, nobody may do this, as it is guaranteed to result in a town loss.) If a majority of living players vote to Blow Up the Lab, and the Mafia players are
  not
  paired with each other, the Mafia win immediately. If the Mafia members
  are
  paired with each other, then all Disgraced players immediately die, the Mafia must choose one of their pairs to escape and flip, all remaining pairs become lovers, and players vote to eliminate pairs normally.

The Town wins if all Mafia players are eliminated. The Mafia win if this becomes impossible; this can happen if:

• The Mafia are not paired with each other, no Heroes have any Bullets left, and there are no surviving Town-Town pairs; or
  
• The Mafia are not paired with each other, and a majority of players vote to Blow Up the Lab; or
  
• The Mafia are paired with each other, and there is only one Town-Town pair remaining.

[Isis]

pre-in

[Isis]

It seems extremely bad not to leash this mechanic

Like if you are not collectively pseudovoting pairs and demanding someone in the pair shoot the other, then blowing up the lab if they hard refuse to, it is very throw. Serendipitous shootings will give so much less information about the setup.

[Isis]

Which is kind of :/

The herobullets can be un-leashed without significant loss of EV and that is kewl but similar to the last variant of Triad Conspiracy I played it is very important to leash the setup (I won as town when I participated in leashing the setup harshly against my own reads, lol)

I kind of think it is preferable setup design to pre-design leashing in in cases where leashing is dominant. I mean there are setups where the leashing isn't

that

dominant and you can expect towns to play sloppier than they could and to have more fun in the process the way Why Gun? went but I'm not sure this is a setup that would play out that way.

[Isis]

With the leashing automatically incorporated the town would vote on pairs, and when a pair is hammered if it was a scum pair they would vote to blow up the lab and the pair they hammered would naturally always be the one to escape you wouldn't really have to ask.

If the pair was T-S you automatically flip the scum in the pairing.

If the pair was T-T you gotta decide which player dies somehow, flip a coin, have each player keep on record that they're cool with dying or not if they're pair is T-T as a mutual thing, rock paper scissors, whatever. It might be desirable to have some method that functions even while one or both players is V/LA for game tempo.
I guess I have to rescind my pre-in, I think I'd be frustrated, I expect an average of one couple per game to ignore the leashing strategy and everyone else to participate, and I'd be too frustrated about the lost couple.

[Kanna]

holy schnitzel, this looks SO FUN

[Kerset]

The Mafia are paired with each other, and there is only one Town-Town pair remaining.

that's hard to achieve, i am pretty sure that in 2x2v2x2 townies will enforce a draw by refusing to shoot

[Isis]

I think just in general when towns refuse to bring the game to a conclusion it should be declare a mafia win

[Something_Smart]

that's hard to achieve, i am pretty sure that in 2x2v2x2 townies will enforce a draw by refusing to shoot

Yes, this is true. Actually on thinking about it if the scum reduce the town to two intact T/T pairs before town can blow up the lab they win automatically as they can just kill all the disgraced people and reach 50%.

Re: leashing the mechanic, that seems like probably a decent idea, given that if people don't want to leash they don't have to. However, the way you proposed doesn't work because town has to leash a specific player to kill their partner; the results are not the same if either member of a partner kills the other.

Here's a version with leashing, if people want to see if this feels better:

Orbital Dynamics, with Leashing

10 Vanilla Townies

4 Mafia Goons

Pregame, the players are grouped into 7 pairs. These can either be random, or chosen by the players prior to alignments being randomized. Then, alignments are distributed, with a 50% chance of 2 Mafia-Mafia pairs and 5 Town-Town pairs, and a 50% chance of 4 Mafia-Town pairs and 3 Town-Town pairs.

Then, the main phase of the game begins. There are no nights; instead, players may take the following actions, all publicly:

• Shoot
  your partner. Your partner dies and flips immediately. If your partner was Town, you become
  Disgraced
  ; if they were Mafia, you become a
  Hero
  . If the Mafia are paired together, they may not Shoot each other.
  
• Vote to
  Execute
  a paired player. Any living player may do this. If a majority of living players vote to Execute a paired player, that player dies and flips, as if they had been shot by their partner. If that player was part of a Mafia-Mafia pair, instead this is treated as an automatic successful vote to Blow Up the Lab (see below), with the voted pair escaping.
  
• Kill
  a Disgraced player. This can only be done by a player with a living partner, and it requires the agreement of both partners. The Disgraced player immediately dies and flips.
  
• Use a
  Bullet
  . Only a Hero can do this, and each Hero can do this only once. This kills any paired player, resolving as though they had been shot by their partner.
  
• Vote to
  Blow Up the Lab
  . Any paired or Disgraced player may do this. (If there is a Hero in the game, nobody may do this, as it is guaranteed to result in a town loss.) If a majority of living players vote to Blow Up the Lab, and the Mafia players are
  not
  paired with each other, the Mafia win immediately. If the Mafia members
  are
  paired with each other, then all Disgraced players immediately die, the Mafia must choose one of their pairs to escape and flip, all remaining pairs become lovers, and players vote to eliminate pairs normally.

The Town wins if all Mafia players are eliminated. The Mafia win if this becomes impossible; this can happen if:

• The Mafia are not paired with each other, no Heroes have any Bullets left, and there are no surviving Town-Town pairs; or
  
• The Mafia are not paired with each other, and a majority of players vote to Blow Up the Lab; or
  
• The Mafia are paired with each other, and there are two or fewer surviving Town-Town pairs before a vote is made to Blow Up the Lab; or
  
• The Mafia are paired with each other, and there is only one Town-Town pair remaining after a vote to Blow Up the Lab.

And yes, instituting a decision deadline is probably a good idea; just like if nobody dies in 5 days or something (7 for the first action), the scum automatically win.

This version is definitely more townsided. I'm not really sure what the balance looks like, so I'm not sure if that's warranted? A middle ground would be to have the mod track votes and indicate when a player has been hammered, but still require their partner to shoot them as well; this re-introduces the possibility that the partner is stubborn, though now that I think about it if someone is stubborn that's just gonna lead to the lab being blown up and them almost always losing if they are town, so we should probably just eliminate that possibility entirely.

Also, I came up with this setup at like 2am last night and I thought the name was a clever pun but it really just sucks. Any ideas for alternate names are appreciated.

[Isis]

I probably wouldn't play because I would get made at people not repeatedly using the Execute option because it just seems the besterest. But I think it's an objectively good setup.

After playing too much Hearthstone I want it to be called "Lab Partners".

Spoiler:

You are a hero if you kick this guy out of your chemistry group

[Something_Smart]

I like Lab Partners as a name.

I feel like the version where scum are unpaired is more townsided than the version where scum are paired.

There might not be much of an incentive to ever keep disgraced players alive, now that I'm thinking about it... if scum are paired, then disgraced players are just going to die anyway when the lab is blown up, and if scum are unpaired, then all that matters is that town doesn't lose its town-town pairs. So this might just be a dance game with extra steps...

[the worst]

ego

[Isis]

Maybe you should make a version of this that is more agnostic to how many T-M vs. M-M pairs there are. Like, you shot eachother until you've eliminated however many T-M pairs there are, and town has to guess when they're finished dealing with all the T-M pairs and switch to blowing up the lab. MM MM or TM TM TM TM or MM TM TM.

.. does that affect the value of disgraced players? I'm not sure.

[Something_Smart]

Another idea I had for making disgraced players more important is allowing two of them to pair up to form a new pair. This has the neat effect of boosting town equity when scum are paired (because if the lab is blown up, reformed pairs are conftown) while not affecting it too much if they aren't.

Generalizing the alignment distribution is interesting but it seems like it would make knowing when to blow up the lab extremely hard. We'd have to change the penalty to something less severe than autoloss in that case.

[Isis]

Right, yeah, it'd be some kind of different setup, not instaloss

[Kerset]

Maybe disgraced pl should be removed from the game and placed in separated PT. Once Lab gets blow up everyone gets killed and disgraced players are resurrected.

[the worst]

aren't disgraced ppl conftown in the m-m variant tho?

[Something_Smart]

Orbital Dynamics v3

10 Vanilla Townies

4 Mafia Goons

Pregame, the players are grouped into 7 pairs. These can either be random, or chosen by the players prior to alignments being randomized. Then, alignments are distributed, with a 50% chance of 2 Mafia-Mafia pairs and 5 Town-Town pairs, and a 50% chance of 4 Mafia-Town pairs and 3 Town-Town pairs.

Then, the main phase of the game begins. There are no nights; instead, players may take the following actions, all publicly:

• Shoot
  your partner. Your partner dies and flips immediately. If your partner was Town, you become
  Disgraced
  ; if they were Mafia, you become a
  Hero
  . If the Mafia are paired together, they may not Shoot each other.
  
• Vote to
  Execute
  a paired player. Any living player may do this. If a majority of living players vote to Execute a paired player, that player dies and flips, as if they had been shot by their partner. If that player was part of a Mafia-Mafia pair, instead this is treated as an automatic successful vote to Blow Up the Lab (see below), with the voted pair escaping.
  
• Kill
  a Disgraced player. This can only be done by a player with a living partner, and it requires the agreement of both partners. The Disgraced player immediately dies and flips.
  
• Use a
  Bullet
  . Only a Hero can do this, and each Hero can do this only once. This kills any paired player, resolving as though they had been shot by their partner.
  
• Request or accept a
  Pairing
  . Only Disgraced players may do this; they may choose another Disgraced player to request to, and if the player they chose agrees, then both players become paired and cease to be Disgraced.
  
• Vote to
  Blow Up the Lab
  . Any paired or Disgraced player may do this. (If there is a Hero in the game, nobody may do this, as it is guaranteed to result in a town loss.) If a majority of living players vote to Blow Up the Lab, and the Mafia players are
  not
  paired with each other, the Mafia win immediately. If the Mafia members
  are
  paired with each other, then all Disgraced players immediately die, the Mafia must choose one of their pairs to escape and flip, all remaining pairs become lovers, and players vote to eliminate pairs normally.

The Town wins if all Mafia players are eliminated. The Mafia win if this becomes impossible; this can happen if:

• The Mafia are not paired with each other, no Heroes have any Bullets left, and there are no surviving Town-Town pairs; or
  
• The Mafia are not paired with each other, and a majority of players vote to Blow Up the Lab; or
  
• The Mafia are paired with each other, and there are two or fewer surviving Town-Town pairs before a vote is made to Blow Up the Lab; or
  
• The Mafia are paired with each other, and there is only one Town-Town pair remaining after a vote to Blow Up the Lab.

[the worst]

You are a hero if you kick this guy out of your chemistry group

I never took a moment to acknowledge that this made me smile - I just smiled at it again.

I think that variation is good. The pairing mechanic is a lot more spicy.

[Isis]

This seems very good for not-me people to play

[Jake The Wolfie]

If a majority of living players vote to Blow Up the Lab, and the Mafia players are not paired with each other, the Mafia win immediately. If the Mafia members are paired with each other, then all Disgraced players immediately die, the Mafia must choose one of their pairs to escape and flip, all remaining pairs become lovers, and players vote to eliminate pairs normally.

How would this mechanic not guarantee a town win, assuming Mafia are paired together? As in, wouldn't all players be forced to claim their pairing, and any disagreement gets killed?