[SETUP] Rule of Three

[MURDERCAT]

This is heavily inspired by Hectic's Death Curse. I don't really know if this would be fun in practice but I think it would allow for interesting dynamics between scum players. Also it changes the normal dynamic around miselims a bit because town is "punished" more for correct elims than miselims.

rule of three

13 townies

4 mafia goons

Each day is split into 3 phases. Each phase, players vote to add one player to the elim pool.
When 3 players are in the pool, the day ends. If 1/3 are scum, all the players are eliminated. Otherwise, nothing happens.
Mafia has a factional night kill.

Town gets 2 free failures to elim. According to simulations, this is balanced at basically exactly 50%.

[Awoo]

Town gets 2 free failures to elim.

What does that mean? At the third failure to kill, does town just autolose or sth?

[MURDERCAT]

I am talking generally, it is not part of the game mechanics.
Like in a 7:2 setup town has 2 free miselims and after that they would lose. Same here.

[Awoo]

13:4 -> 12:4 -> 11:4

[MURDERCAT]

Yup so it goes

13:4
miselim + nk
12:4
miselim + nk
11:4
miselim + nk (3rd miselim)
10:4
correct elim + nk
7:3
correct elim + nk
4:2
correct elim + nk
1:1

Town can't win from 10:4. It's kind of a silly setup because town miseliming 3 times in a row at the start leads to the game ending even while having a large numbers advantage but I like to explore the implications of weird setups like this.

[Awoo]

:/

[Jake The Wolfie]

The town have to put in exactly 1 scum?

What the fuck?

[MURDERCAT]

Lol yeah 1 of 3

[Jake The Wolfie]

Why would you want to encourage the town to try and intentionally kill itself though?

[MURDERCAT]

Because it's weird and different from how mafia normally works.
Don't think too hard about it it's more of a thought experiment

[JacksonVirgo]

From what I understand, this forces Town into three possible playstyles. Making associative reads with no flips (bad), forces Town to be 2/3 wrong in order to get one scum (bad) or causes a scenario where Town yeets 1/2 super townie town to get more accurate and less variant lynches (50% of getting a successful lynch if at least one mafia gets voted instead of a 33% of a successful lynch) and/or to accidentally lynch an unexpected deepwolf.

Percentages are likely wrong but I hope you understand.

[MURDERCAT]

The odds of getting 1/3 are actually a lot better than you would think. I just left the gym so I'm too tired to math but give me a bit and I'll show why

[MURDERCAT]

There is a strategy that involves putting 3 highly Town read members together on D1 to soft clear them which you shouldn't underestimate the power of as well.

[MURDERCAT]

So this setup is basically an exploration of the binomial distribution. On D1, the probability of getting 1 scum randomly is 4/17 ~ 0.235. So, using the binomial distribution, we get these possible outcomes (in terms of number of mafia) along with their probabilities of occurring:

0: 0.447
1: 0.413
2: 0.127
3: 0.013

Of course these probabilities change throughout the course of the game, but as you can see the odds of hitting scum on D1 are actually a lot higher than normal. Even in the case of 0 scum, town gains valuable info. But, because of the sequential voting system, I think scum has a lot of really interesting counter play. They can try to get 2 in the pool, which is high risk high reward, or they can play is safe but risk town getting 3 soft clears. Of course, town would then be tempted to use these soft clears to feel more comfortable with their later votes, so they aren't as powerful as they otherwise would be.

I think this setup has the potential to be kind of boring if scum gets ahead early and town never gets any traction, but if town does start to figure things out I think there is potential for it to play out in an interesting way that is pretty different from most other games. I think it might be a fun marathon game idea except that it would be hard to run a game of this size in a marathon

[Gamma Emerald]

Okay this is pretty cool
It takes the rule of three concept and turns it into an actual mechanic

[Gamma Emerald]

Although I think town has to play perfect to win as-is, since it seems like a successful mafia lim still results in the loss of 3 town that day/night cycle

[MURDERCAT]

Yeah I think this might be one of those things that is EV balanced but horribly unbalanced in practice

[Gamma Emerald]

I think revealing the alignments of the chosen 3 even if they aren’t removed would be good, at least in the case on either an all town or all scum group
If it’s possible to reveal scum I think revealing all scum without removing any should be an alternate town wincon
In that case it should not be allowed to submit the same person to be in the pool twice

I’m just tossing stuff out here

[MURDERCAT]

So like if no elim you get a 2 scum 1 town message in thread or something? 3 confirmed town is like super strong though

[MURDERCAT]

I like the alt win con that seems fun

[Sirius9121]

But if you think like this:
For each Mafia Goon to be eliminated, 2 Vanilla Townies must be sacrificed.
There are 3 nightkills in between the 4 eliminations assuing all of them are 1/3 scum.
So at most 1 miselim can be made (at most 1 time, the condition "1/3 of elim pool is scum' is false)

[MURDERCAT]

I'm not sure I totally follow, but see 4. Town isn't "punished" for being wrong like in a normal game, you actually are likely to get conf towns out of it.

[Jake The Wolfie]

You get 0 info out of being wrong, because it's either all town or 2+ scum.

[MURDERCAT]

rule of three

13 townies

4 mafia goons

Each day is split into 3 phases. Each phase, players vote to add one player to the elim pool.
When 3 players are in the pool, the day ends. If 1/3 are scum, all the players are eliminated. Otherwise, nothing happens.
Mafia has a factional night kill.
Alternate wincon: If, at any point, all the mafia are in the pool, town wins immediately.

Maybe adding something like Gamma's alt win con helps in the middle game then.

[Jake The Wolfie]

So basically if all the scum are in the pool, the town wins?