Night Communication

[Wacky]

1. Why is communication not allowed at night except for mafia + masons?

2. no page six in theme barometer?

3. What are your views on Twilight? I feel that sometimes timezones cause some people to get their last words in whereas others die before they reveal that crucial bit of info.

[mole]

1. Because one of the two big perks that comes with the mafia role is the ability to strategise and coordinate your strategy before each day. Giving that power to townies would make life a lot harder for them - eg. a cop could easily organise a large block of innocents and have them all vote the same way. Which is (I think) what happened in a game on the departed boards in which anyone was able to communicate privately at night...

If you let people discuss stuff in the thread during the night, you allow the town to get away with bad play, and this also hinders the mafia. Another example that actually happened: Two masons (A and B), A is accused and almost gets lynched because confirmed mason B didn't turn up and help him. At night, mason B thinks "You know, I'm probably going to die tonight, and then A will be lynched..." and he tells people not to lynch A in the thread. Which annoys the mafia considerably, as they

had

planned to capitalise on the B's mistake and lynch A.

I won't go in to why they were in that situation, suffice to say it was my fault - a bluff the serial killer saw through. I was dead by the time of the above paragraph though.

Or imagine a case where you lynch the doctor, so the cop posts his list of innocents before he dies.

2. Someone's deleted a post, and so the pages don't line up properly. If you post there again it should make a new page properly. Or we could ask mith/jeep nicely to reset the post counts.

3. I think twilight is a bad idea, for the reason you posted. It's the town's fault they were too impatient, they have to stick with the decision, as above.

[PolarBoy]

Yeah, that's where the third-last vote buffer comes from. If you only put someone two votes away from a lynch before demanding a defense, then the mafia have to both get on the bandwagon to speed-lynch. Whereas if you allow the votes to go up to one away, a mafia can jump on and push it all the way without revealing his buddy. Also if you push it to one away the likelihood of a simpost lynch is greatly increased.

[Dragon Slayer]

At first I like Full Communications Mafia, though after the game once I got to thinking, it turns out that the rules or roles would have to be refined to make it easier for the mafia to win.

-DS

[PolarBoy]

I've always thought it would be neat to have roles that could somehow "listen in" on private conversations. I think it would take the subforum system being implemented to make it practical though.

[Fishbulb]

Yeah, that is a neat idea. And the "eavesdropper" wouldn't know

who

they were, just what they were saying. That would be tough to work, but that is an interesting idea for a role.

[mole]

It might work with a "blind" game, if the mod keeps the passwords to all the accounts... that opens up lots more possibilities - players could impersonate others in PMs, for instance. :)

[PolarBoy]

I had an idea once for a blind game that I was calling "Brains in jars" where the players would have abilities like "Password Hacker" and could get access to someone elses password. I think there might've also been a roll called "Paranoid" that could change his password (With limitation) throughout the game.

I stopped writing it when I discovered that people don't like blind games.

[Fishbulb]

Yeah, I was toying around with a blind game idea, but like you said, a lot of people don't care for them.

[Norinel]

It's not so much people not caring for them, it's more that this forum software makes it impractical.

And I think a Fulcom game would be interesting if it had roles that affected/were affected by communication.

And password-thievery games can get a bit interesting/ugly, since you have to consider stuff like access to pms and trust/order the players not to change the account's password or e-mail.

A weird idea I just had: A doubleblind game, where everybody has an primary alias (Which could be the player's true identity, to simplify things) and a secondary alias, with the password-tweaking stuff just dealing with the secondary alias and the primary alias being a safe place to have roles and private communications and stuff.

[Antrax]

I've always thought it would be neat to have roles that could somehow "listen in" on private conversations. I think it would take the subforum system being implemented to make it practical though.

Heh, I've been toying with the exact same idea for a LONG time. Haven't quite found the game where to use it, though. Too much burden on the mod
Antrax

[PolarBoy]

Actually I was thinking that, in the blind scenario I mentioned, the player's role information and investigations would go to his normal inbox, but any private communications he would do through his alias. Yes, you would definitely order the players to not change their profile unless there role allowed it. I've never much worried aboutn trying to prevent people from cheating though for two reasons:

1.) You can't stop cheaters if they really want to. No matter what you do they'll find some way around you, especially on the internet.

2.) People who cheat at no-stakes games are realy cheating themselves, and are going to either learn better or get bored. Either way, they won't mess up the game any more.