The New Newbie Game Setup

[mhsmith0]

Proposed role interaction resolution:

1. Should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   and
   Town Roleblocker
   target each other, the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will fail at making the night kill; should the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   not be assigned the night kill, there will be no other impact.
   
2. Should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   target a
   Town Roleblocker
   who targets a
   Town Jailkeeper
   who targets the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   , the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will not be blocked, but the two
   Town
   roles will be blocked. Similarly, should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   target a
   Town Jailkeeper
   who targets a
   Town Roleblocker
   who targets the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   , the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will not be blocked, but the two
   Town
   roles will be blocked.
   
3. In all other cases, Roleblocker actions will take precedence over
   Jailkeeper
   actions should that apply.

Basically this punishes town for having roles that block town, which I think is reasonable from a fairness perspective, since the alternative gives town a LOT of latitude to make bad decisions and get away with them.

[callforjudgement]

Does 3. apply even if the Roleblocker isn't targeting the Jailkeeper? (If so, it violates NAR.)
Your case 2. also violates NAR (although in that case it's probably possible to fudge the tiebreak so that it works).
That said, I'm not at all sure we should be using NAR; despite being "natural", very few people really understand it, and it's frequently modded wrong in practice.

[Toomai]

I was about to say that the first post already solves interaction problems, but I checked and it kind of contradicts itself.

Setup Specific Rules:

1. Mafia Power Roles may both use their night action and preform the kill.
2. Should a town roleblocker and a mafia roleblocker target each other, all actions preformed by both, including night killing actions, will be stopped.
3. This game always uses Natural Action Resolution to resolve night actions.
4. Roleblocker actions have priority over Jailkeeper actions.
5. The Mafia Private Topic is open at all times, including Day phases.

#3 and #4 here are in conflict. Are you using NAR, or are you saying Roleblocker always goes before Jailkeeper?

[mhsmith0]

#3 is irrelevant if not mutually targeting. Roleblocker doesn't override the protect side of jailkeeper (if they target same slot), and if they don't touch each other it doesn't really matter.

#2 inevitably violates NAR no matter how you slice it, so you basically need to choose an acceptable outcome and just make it clear to all mods, otherwise it's a blatant Rock Paper Scissors circle that CANT get resolved.

[mhsmith0]

3 and #4 here are in conflict. Are you using NAR, or are you saying Roleblocker always goes before Jailkeeper?

Isn't it still NAR if you declare one role to have precedence?

[Toomai]

Isn't it still NAR if you declare one role to have precedence?

I'd say "no" in the very technical sense, since they both fire in the "block" slot, and the NAR wiki page doesn't go any deeper than action type levels. But I'm nitpicking. Cross-blocking can only happen in 3/12 subsetups and will statistically probably only happen in a fifth of those.

On the various ideas for re-visualizing the setup matrix: While they look cool and are easy to understand the setup as a whole, I think there still needs to be a way for players to take it and quickly get a short identifier for each subsetup. Players currently say things like "okay we're either in setup 1 or A" and it's not hard to grasp/look up; I think it's important to have that available somehow. All the fancy tables with "or" in the cells and such don't offer that.

[callforjudgement]

#3 is irrelevant if not mutually targeting. Roleblocker doesn't override the protect side of jailkeeper (if they target same slot), and if they don't touch each other it doesn't really matter.

Not quite. In some action resolution methods (such as SNARF), {JK A blocks roleblocker B, roleblocker blocks goon C, goon C kills player D} will cause player D to survive. There are no mutual targets there. In NAR, player D will always die no matter how you do the tiebreaks, because the Golden Rule forces A's action to be processed first, and so B will always be blocked and C will never be blocked.

[mastina]

Isn't it still NAR if you declare one role to have precedence?

I'd say "no" in the very technical sense, since they both fire in the "block" slot, and the NAR wiki page doesn't go any deeper than action type levels.

Maybe not on the main page, but check out The Normal Games subpage of NAR.

Commute - Commuter

Blocking - Roleblocker, Rolestopper
Jailkeep - Jailkeeper

Protection - Doctor, Bodyguard
Miscellaneous - Neighborizer, Friendly Neighbor
Kill - Mafia factional kill, SK factional kill, Strongman, Vigilante
Role Investigation - Cop, Gunsmith, Role Cop, Vanilla Cop, Neapolitan
Action Investigation - Tracker, Watcher, Voyeur, Follower, Motion Detector

Jailkeep is below roleblock by Normal standards. Yes, Normal standards are not universal to the site but they're called Normal standards because they are

normal

for the site and this is not at all uncommon because once again, usually, I use the logic of "role trumps role variant", in this case, "roleblocker > roleblocker variant (jailkeeper)".

Alternative way to think about it:
A roleblocker is a roleblock.
A jailkeeper is a roleblock + a doc.
A roleblocker is higher than a doctor in NAR.

A jailkeeper therefore is higher than a doctor in the chain, but lower than a roleblocker in that chain. Because it is BOTH roles, it is therefore an average of both, rather than favoring one aspect of the other. Because if you elevate jailkeeper to the level of roleblocker you are favoring its roleblock aspect over its protective aspect; if you lower jailkeeper to the level of doctor you are favoring its protective aspect over its roleblocking aspect. Having jailkeeper be midway between the two just makes the most sense.

[callforjudgement]

Even the main NAR page says "if the Golden Rule doesn't apply, use the list; if the list doesn't apply, use any fair tiebreak". Working out the tiebreaks in advance is fair (and that's what Normal NAR does).

Incidentally, in RAR (which effectively uses NAR's Golden Rule but has a different tiebreak), blocking cycles entirely cancel each other out; all the blocks in the cycle fail, and any other actions taken by players in the cycle (e.g. the protect half of a Jailkeeper action, a Mafia Roleblocker's kill) continue to function. That said, although I'm happy with RAR as a system, I'm not happy with the way I explained it on the wiki; there must surely be a simpler way to explain it.

[mastina]

I should word that better.

When I run a game, I use the following:
First, check to make sure there is a conflict. If there is no conflict, then resolve the roles in the way they should be resolved. (There's no reason a roleblock on a jailkeeper should fail if the roleblocker isn't roleblocked or jailkept, for instance.)

Second, if conflict does exist, check the wording of the role PMs in question as written. Exact wording can make the difference in how the roles/resolution is handled. This step is unlikely to be important RE: the new newbie setup, so for the point of this exercise I will be skipping it.

Third, if conflict was not resolved by step #2, I use the action chain provided in NAR. In that if one role is listed as having a higher priority than the other, that role will resolve first.
Fourth, if conflict was not resolved by #3 because they are listed as equal priority, I use the standard that a role will trump a variant on the role.

Alternative fourth, same basic idea: If two roles are listed as equal priority, then if one of them is a variant on the first, I will average the variant role's aspects. In the case of a jailkeeper (a role variant of roleblocker), if a jailkeeper is listed as equal to a roleblocker in NAR, then I will break it down into being a roleblock + doctor. And since doctor is below roleblocker, a jailkeeper averaging the two is therefore below a roleblocker.

Fifth step, if two identical roles cause conflict (in this case two roleblockers), I use an alternative method of solving it. In the case of any Normal game I'd ever run, this would be resolved as the mafia role trumping the town role, because the mafia role has a strong site history of taking precedence over the town role.

I imagine this doesn't take neatly care of literally every possible RB/RB/JK interaction (and even if it does, then there's the question of whether that's acceptable for balance), but it deals with most of them.

[mastina]

Fifth step, if two identical roles cause conflict (in this case two roleblockers), I use an alternative method of solving it. In the case of any Normal game I'd ever run, this would be resolved as the mafia role trumping the town role, because the mafia role has a strong site history of taking precedence over the town role.

For what it's worth in the event of not using the "mafia trumps the town" rule, I'd instead use the cancelling method. I'd never use the town-trumps-the-mafia rule. I don't really have a rational explanation for why I'd never use it, but it just feels

wrong

to me to use in general. (The closest I can find to an objective reason to...well, object...to a town-trumps-mafia rule is that it is not the standard way we usually resolve actions on mafiascum and we should be teaching newbies the standard way we resolve actions on mafiascum. Mafia-first or blocks-cancelling are both more common overall.)

[Something_Smart]

I don't really have a rational explanation for why I'd never use it

I have the same feeling, and I think a good explanation is that if the mafia RB is the only scum alive and the town RB is the only town PR alive, the scum's roleblock would be completely useless if town RB had priority.

[Alisae]

I can Photoshop a triangle if that could help

[Virtuoso]

Proposed role interaction resolution:

1. Should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   and
   Town Roleblocker
   target each other, the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will fail at making the night kill; should the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   not be assigned the night kill, there will be no other impact.
   
2. Should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   target a
   Town Roleblocker
   who targets a
   Town Jailkeeper
   who targets the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   , the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will not be blocked, but the two
   Town
   roles will be blocked. Similarly, should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   target a
   Town Jailkeeper
   who targets a
   Town Roleblocker
   who targets the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   , the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will not be blocked, but the two
   Town
   roles will be blocked.
   
3. In all other cases, Roleblocker actions will take precedence over
   Jailkeeper
   actions should that apply.

Basically this punishes town for having roles that block town, which I think is reasonable from a fairness perspective, since the alternative gives town a LOT of latitude to make bad decisions and get away with them.

This is rather confusing to me and IMO will result in a lot of mod errors

[fferyllt]

I think whatever visual is decided on, it needs to be pretty clear to the mafia team what PRs are safe to fake-claim. Conceptually, each die linking 1 scum/2 town roles together accomplishes that. There are probably other ways to illustrate the safe claims.

[N]

three sided dice are impossible???

[callforjudgement]

A d3 is normally a d6 with the same number on opposite sides.

It's possible to construct a fair dice which does have exactly three sides (basically you start with a triangular prism and then curve the sides to meet at a point at each end), but people rarely bother.

[mhsmith0]

Proposed role interaction resolution:

1. Should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   and
   Town Roleblocker
   target each other, the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will fail at making the night kill; should the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   not be assigned the night kill, there will be no other impact.
   
2. Should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   target a
   Town Roleblocker
   who targets a
   Town Jailkeeper
   who targets the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   , the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will not be blocked, but the two
   Town
   roles will be blocked. Similarly, should a
   Mafia Roleblocker
   target a
   Town Jailkeeper
   who targets a
   Town Roleblocker
   who targets the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   , the
   Mafia Roleblocker
   will not be blocked, but the two
   Town
   roles will be blocked.
   
3. In all other cases, Roleblocker actions will take precedence over
   Jailkeeper
   actions should that apply.

Basically this punishes town for having roles that block town, which I think is reasonable from a fairness perspective, since the alternative gives town a LOT of latitude to make bad decisions and get away with them.

This is rather confusing to me and IMO will result in a lot of mod errors

There needs to be a rule for what happens in the theee blocker Rock Paper Scissors scenarios. Nit sure how to make it clearer tho.

[Alisae]

Okay I didn't do photoshop stuff yet (mostly because I'm addicted to an mmo leave me and my mmo alone)
but I thing the best way to put this in a diagram would be through a triangle, and if you can find a good way to do that with using forum features then good luck.

But if it were to be an image it would be fairly easy to make

[mhsmith0]

Triangle mode activated

[Alisae]

hey man
whatever floats your bote

[Not Known 15]

I did find this forum only recently, but I have experience in some other mafia-like games although arguably more on the side of what you all would call role madness. I have read the concepts tho. So I might not be correct in what I say, but I might be correct... and I am not going to predict winrates, but differences
Ok, the 12 possible setups are:

1. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Tracker, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
2. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Roleblocker, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
3. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Tracker, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
4. Mafia Goon, Mafia Roleblocker vs. Town Roleblocker, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
5. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Doctor, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
6. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Doctor, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
7. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Rolecop, Town Cop, 5x Town Vanilla
8. Mafia Goon, Mafia Rolecop vs. Town Rolecop, Town Jailkeeper, 5x Town Vanilla
9. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Doctor, Town Tracker, 5x Town Vanilla
10. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Doctor, Town Roleblocker, 5x Town Vanilla
11. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Rolecop, Town Tracker, 5x Town Vanilla
12. Mafia Goon, Mafia Goon vs. Town Rolecop, Town Roleblocker, 5x Town Vanilla

And these 12 setups should be somehow balanced(Not exactly balanced, but no outliers like a 70% town winrate, especially on all setups combined)
Ok.
First the Mafia Roleblocker setups(1-4)
Power roles: Tracker, Cop. The mafia Roleblocker cannot be roleblocked. It is of high importance for the mafia that the power roles die early enough. A tracker is in 2 of the games, so roleblocking is dangerous- if a tracker spots it and the other Power Role reveals itself then the Roleblocker dies. If the Cop gets a guilty result N1 with Tracker alive(or the Tracker with the Cop alive on N1) or if a Mafia dies early by lynch its near Game Over... for the Evils.

Power roles:(T)Roleblocker Cop
Clearly weaker than the previous setup. A roleblocker can target the cop and stop them(terrible) target the night killer(good) target the roleblocker who roleblocks a vanilla(meh) or roleblocks the cop(good). As long as Roleblocker does not stop the kill twice it is not giving the town another possible mislynch and it is worse than a tracker because the tracker always incriminates while the Roleblocker does not.

Power roles:Tracker Jailkeeper
The Jailkeeper can protect good people at the expense of their abilities or stop bad people. It is more flexible than the cop but also arguably not that strong.

Power roles:(T)Roleblocker Jailkeeper
Apart from these cycles that cannot be resolved via NAR we have two people who can roleblock. There is a high chance that one action won't get through... and possibly more as both roles are stronger at the end of the game.
(1-4) internal conclusion: There is some swing when setups differ, but it might not be that decisive. Win rate has to be found out by trial and error

Mafia rolecop setups(5-8):
Power roles: Doctor, Cop
Again, these power roles are quite strong and arguably Mafia has got the rolecop to find them fast before they run havoc. Still the Rolecop results cannot be used for killing before night 2!
The presence of Doctor and Cop makes a claim strategy possible. Large amount of what you call positive feedback.

Power roles: Doctor, Jailkeeper
If the jailkeeper has to claim then it can be protected by the Doctor. Although that only happens in a bit less than 50% of the setups its still a major concern for evils, especially with two protection roles running around. But this one has no cop so at least no evil will find itself in an untenable position even with good play.
Power roles: (T)Rolecop, Cop
The rolecop is a limited cop for the enemy rolecop... which means that the mafia power role is more endangered than the goon. The rolecop should probably claim if the other rolecop dies because they arent useful anymore. Which means that if the Mafia rolecop dies early you will have a claim cycle: "Rolecop claims plz". If no one claims Rolecop then there is a doctor and the cop can reveal... Or the... Jailkeeper, even(see above)

Power roles:(T)Rolecop, Jailkeeper
Arguably the weakest combo. Rolecop cannot see much, Jailkeeper gets more powerful the longer the game goes and (M)Rolecop can find out power roles

Internal Balance (5-8) Cop is better than Jailkeeper, especially when there is a Mafia rolecop running around and preventing the Jailkeeper from reaching later nights. Because Rolecop gets at least 1 result, and has definite knowledge of whats evil and whats not they are probably not weaker than the doctor here, except for the possible concerning combos.

No Mafia Power roles setups(9-12)

Power roles:Doctor, Tracker
These roles are not that strong like full cops and jailkeepers, but if the Tracker finds one evil then they might be protected by a hidden doctor... and then it looks grim for the Evils. On the other hand every nolynch could be met with a nokill, dragging out the game endlessly. And there is no (M)Rolecop or (M)Roleblocker to deal with these power roles.

Power roles:Doctor, (T) Roleblocker
A doctor can protect the roleblocker, if it comes down to 1 evil and the rber is alive. I am unsure how strong this combination is in this case, because they have at least 1 synergy: They both stop kills so 2 kill stops(aka 1 more mislynch allowed) are possible. In the unlikely event that the blocker targets the doctor who targets the victim the blocker is bad, but they are still useful more than detrimetal

Power roles:(T)Rolecop, Tracker
The Rolecop is basically a named townie here, except when they try to out the Tracker.
This setup is clearly worse than its doctor counterpart. No synergy possible.

Power roles:(T)Rolecop, (T)Roleblocker
No synergy. The unlikely bad combination is no more, but the power drop is still high. Same problem as above, except that Roleblocker is worse than Tracker except in a few MyLo cases(where you have one more chance as opposed to the tracker)

Internal balance(9-12)
Setup 9 is much better for town than setup 11 and 12. The same can be probably said for setup 10 as well(much better than...) The Rolecop/Doctor dice is clearly imbalanced when you have rolled Goon before. Obvious internal imbalance.

Overall balance(1-12)

Roleblocker and rolecop are mitigators, they decrease the average effect the enemies have. I am unsure how this will play out Like I said its mostly trial and error anyways probably... as the setup knowledge is also a factor.
BUT
This has pairs of roles. The pairs should ideally be close to strength. The Cop/Jailkeeper difference is ok, even if cop is a bit better. You can't balance perfectly.
The Roleblocker/Tracker pair is arguably not equal, but the difference could -

could

- be not that bad.
The Doctor/Rolecop pair is... not so good. If paired against an enemy rolecop the difference isn't high. Ok. But against goon the balance is upset.

In the setups 9-12 we have a glaring imbalance.
Setups 9 and 10 are way, WAY better than setups 11 and 12.
If this setup is to be tested then there will have to be some changes to fix an imbalance there, but I don't know which way.

[Virtuoso]

How about this?

	A	B	C
1	Town Jailkeeper	Vanilla Townie	Mafia Rolecop
2	Mafia Roleblocker	Town Cop	Town Doctor
3	Town Universal Backup	Mafia Goon	Town Tracker

Alternatively

	A	B	C
1	Town Jailkeeper	Vanilla Townie	Mafia Rolecop
2	Mafia Roleblocker	Town Cop	Town Doctor
3	Town Roleblocker	Mafia Goon	Town Tracker

[Virtuoso]

Adding the rolecop to column C completely destroys the follow the tracker strategy. The rolecop also balances out the Jailkeeper, which is quite strong especially when one scum dies.

A town roleblocker gates the tracker by possibly blocking the tracker.

A town universal backup in the first example would be able to inheret the mafia roleblockr ability if he is lynched

I'm just not sure about column in the second table

[Virtuoso]

	A	B	C
1	Town Jailkeeper	Vanilla Townie	Mafia Rolecop
2	Mafia Roleblocker	Town Cop	Town Doctor
3	Town Backup (if A) Town Roleblocker (if 3)	Mafia Goon	Town Tracker