Baton of Desperation

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Baton of Desperation

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Fri Sep 10, 2021 7:24 am

Post by Kerset »

7
Townies

2
Mafia


On pregame one random player becomes Baton Holder.
During day phase Baton Holder has to post in-thread HEAL: player to another player of their choosing. The player chosen will then pass it to another player who has not yet been selected, and so on until only one player has not been passed to. The last player will be eliminated and has to select player, which will commute during following night and become first Baton Holder during following day.

Town wins, if both scum gets eliminated or one scum gets eliminated during day 3.
Mafia wins via parity.
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Tue Sep 28, 2021 3:56 am

Post by Jingle »

Balances almost exactly the same as Desperation Day given EV assumptions, but is very slightly more scumsided. (Scum just have to have any scum get the baton before the last town player in XLO.)

Given that DD is historically scumsided (3/4) and theoretically scumsided (~44% Town EV) I'd bet the setup is slightly more scumsided than that (Maybe 40% Town EV) but not outside the realm of fair, especially given the townsided meta. Also, Baton Pass style games are +Fun because players have additional personal control of the game.
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Tue Sep 28, 2021 4:36 am

Post by Kerset »

Did you include the fact that commuted player can't NK? If last scum happen to be baton holder then he can't kill (it might decrease scum winrate).
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Tue Sep 28, 2021 5:07 am

Post by Something_Smart »

Doesn't it just balance like mountainous? The only way scum gets eliminated in 3:2 is if the two scum are the last two unpassed players, which means the desperation wincon doesn't actually mean anything as town would be guaranteed a win even without it. And if scum starts with the baton going into lylo they automatically win.

The only buff town gets is the force-commute. The effect of it is a little different depending on how you model it, but it might balance the setup just on its own. There's probably a high amount of swing based on the D1 execution though.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Tue Sep 28, 2021 7:21 am

Post by Jingle »

In post 2, Kerset wrote:Did you include the fact that commuted player can't NK? If last scum happen to be baton holder then he can't kill (it might decrease scum winrate).
I didn't consider that, no. Without exhaustive searching, I think there are probably more cases where ScumRemaining = 1 and TownRemaining >= 3 (in which case scumLose has a 2/N Probability instead of a 1/N Probability) than there are cases where TownRemaining = ScumRemaining + (1 OR 2) which is the case where the additional scumwin chance matters.

Whether that translates into a higher or lower scumwin EV would be better solved using iterative casing and coding (not my forte) so I'll leave that for someone else if they want to work it out, but it DOES mean that as long as your desperation day is at 3/2 presumptive the Desperation Day bit doesn't come into play.

My suggestion to 'fix' this would be to move the Desperation Day to day 2, although I'm not sure exactly how that effects the balance of the game from a numbers perspective. If someone wanted to mock this up using coding it's actually a pretty simple set of variables to represent.
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Tue Sep 28, 2021 7:29 am

Post by Jingle »

In post 3, Something_Smart wrote:how you model it
I would argue that

{Scum kills if possible; 1 IC if Scum = 1 on previous day; Random Eliminations on non IC player}

Is the most accurate model. Scum No Kill gambiting is possible, but probably -EV barring subjective influences.
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Tue Sep 28, 2021 7:31 am

Post by Something_Smart »

No-killing isn't necessarily a gambit; it widens the execution pool since town can't no-exe.
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Tue Sep 28, 2021 10:57 am

Post by Jingle »

I meant gambit only in the broadest sense that it is an unexpected action, although that raises the question of how deadlines work.
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