Mafia Nomic

[Kappy]

Here it is!
I thought this was interesting. Maybe someone would mod it?

[Ircher]

Nice, but probably ridiculously unbalanced.

[Kappy]

I know. it's a clever idea, though.

[Randomnamechange]

It would work assuming the mod was putting enough effort into it. It would need a rule that made sure one person can't spam all of the rule changes each day. Could be fun to give everyone a 1-shot compulsive vig shot

[callforjudgement]

I was going to say, I've seen testruns of this offsite (and participated in some), but then saw the article already mentions it.

I don't think it works, and am surprised that the original testrun worked (I remember that it did, but the sequels didn't really, with the most recent attempt coming down to a scum win as a result of them getting in actions faster than the town could because they had fewer players to coordinate). The problem is, if players are meant to play to their win condition, how do you stop town voting to just give town the win? It'd be very scumsided to vote against that, after all.

The solutions to this sort of problem that were attempted involved a "spirit of the game" agreement, veto mechanics, and a moderator who vetoed things that were too imbalanced. None of it worked, though, really, in the later tests; the game just ended up revolving around the veto mechanics. (I remember an instance in which I tried to push through a highly townsided proposal while all the scum were offline and thus didn't have the ability to veto it; the scum had a retroactive veto to deal with the situation, but the proposal would have removed the retroactive veto.)

I should also note that the original testruns were single-winner (rather than resulting in a win for a faction), which lead to a lot of win-condition-related play that you might not expect. The most recent test of the setup gave the win to whichever townie had acted in the most scumsided manner (if town won), or whichever scum had acted in the most townsided manner (if scum won), with "townsided"/"scumsided" defined objectively. I successfully caught the entire scumteam because they weren't playing scummily enough, but by that point had no ability to lynch them. (Not that scumhunting was at all normal that game. At least one player, and possibly more, pretended to be scum in order to try to construct a "town/scum alliance" when in fact every member was actually town. Such alliances ended up doing pretty badly because they didn't have access to the scum powers that they thought they had.)

[Gammagooey]

Yeah, if all of the mechanics are laid out at the start I'm not surprised it turned into outgaming the game itself instead of trying to counter what the other team was doing. It could mayyybe theoretically work with a more hidden, asymmetrical system where town has more control over it in general but the scum have a few specific hidden ways of stopping them that the town has to guess at and specifically find out about in order to counter, but by the time you lay enough rules down to make it fair it's kind of become something different than the original concept anyway.

The closest thing we've had on here are probably Lucid Dreamer games, where each player can make whatever action they want at night given certain guidelines and a moderator veto for anything too powerful. An example's here- http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=65559
usually wackier games like that happen during marathon weekends a few times a year where games only last a few hours and everyone's online at once, as trying to play games that can accidentally wind up being completely imbalanced over the courses of a month or two like normal can tend to leave people a bit...infuriated.

[callforjudgement]

Yeah, if all of the mechanics are laid out at the start I'm not surprised it turned into outgaming the game itself instead of trying to counter what the other team was doing.

Doing that isn't really in the spirit of Mafia, but it is

definitely

in the spirit of Nomic. I think I was the only person who was actually trying to scumhunt (I correctly identified every scum player, and the only player I was unsure about turned out to be a town player who was pretending to be scum to gain some sort of complex advantage in negotiations).

Although combining Mafia and Nomic sounds like a great idea, I'm increasingly convinced that the combination doesn't actually work in practice. Nomic is very much a game of temporary alliances, whereas Mafia is very much a game of fixed teams, and combining the two causes one or the other to mechanically break.

[Kappy]

Ugh... trying to think of a fairer way... I JUST CANT DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!