Playing with "communication outside the game" rules

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Playing with "communication outside the game" rules

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Sat Jul 14, 2018 7:05 am

Post by Umlaut »

I'm sort of interested in running a game or a series of games that messes around with the "no outside communication" rule, and I'm trying to figure out just what kind of changes I can make that will actually lead to interesting play. I'd love to get some ideas here and maybe some links to other games that have modified this rule with interesting results.

The two things I definitely don't want to mess with are
  • no communicating once you're dead, and
  • no communicating with non-players or where non-players can see.
Beyond those I'm wide open to possibilities.

As one example: for those of you who don't play Town of Salem, there is a means in that game to "whisper" to other (living) players during the day. Everyone is informed that Player A whispered to Player B, but not what was said. This seems like something that could be interesting here,
except
that I have no idea how to implement it... the only means I can think of would be to give every pair of players a PT and make an announcement in-thread whenever they use it, which sounds pretty extreme and ridiculous (a 13p game would require 78 PTs). Any better ideas than this?
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Sat Jul 14, 2018 7:15 am

Post by Umlaut »

Actually the whispering effect could be achieved without PTs, by allowing PMs between players so long as I get a copy. I worried for a moment that once I allowed PMs I'd have to worry that people might send them in secret, but I
already
have no way to stop people from sending PMs so this comes down to "either you trust the players or you don't"
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Sat Jul 14, 2018 2:57 pm

Post by ManateeDude »

Can confirm whispers are extrenely broken and town sided
and
terribly hard to mod
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Sat Jul 14, 2018 3:23 pm

Post by Ircher »

If a game mod explicitly allows communication of *their* game outside the game thread, then that's technically allowed, but the listmods would want to know (if it isn't something like typical PTs).
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Tue Sep 04, 2018 4:09 am

Post by Gamma Emerald »

In post 0, Umlaut wrote:I'm sort of interested in running a game or a series of games that messes around with the "no outside communication" rule, and I'm trying to figure out just what kind of changes I can make that will actually lead to interesting play. I'd love to get some ideas here and maybe some links to other games that have modified this rule with interesting results.

The two things I definitely don't want to mess with are
  • no communicating once you're dead, and
  • no communicating with non-players or where non-players can see.
Beyond those I'm wide open to possibilities.

As one example: for those of you who don't play Town of Salem, there is a means in that game to "whisper" to other (living) players during the day. Everyone is informed that Player A whispered to Player B, but not what was said. This seems like something that could be interesting here,
except
that I have no idea how to implement it... the only means I can think of would be to give every pair of players a PT and make an announcement in-thread whenever they use it, which sounds pretty extreme and ridiculous (a 13p game would require 78 PTs). Any better ideas than this?
Firebringer ran a Watch Dogs game with this mechanic where you PMed you message to the mod and they sent it
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Fri Sep 07, 2018 2:02 am

Post by Flubbernugget »

In post 2, ManateeDude wrote:Can confirm whispers are extrenely broken and town sided
and
terribly hard to mod
Can someone elaborate on how they are broken? I am not seeing it.
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Fri Sep 07, 2018 5:20 pm

Post by ManateeDude »

In post 5, Flubbernugget wrote:
In post 2, ManateeDude wrote:Can confirm whispers are extrenely broken and town sided
and
terribly hard to mod
Can someone elaborate on how they are broken? I am not seeing it.
Well to start off with, say there is a heavily townread player, a cop per se whispers to them telling them all of their checks, and after the cop dies they have town info with no risk.
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Thu Sep 13, 2018 5:48 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

In role madness, outside-game communication is normally used to break the setup via the "everyone agree on a likely townie, fullclaim, and have that townie tell everyone what actions to take" strategy. Even if you're just picking a player to do the coordination at random, they're > 50% to be town, so town effectively have a > 50% chance of winning using this strategy, making it optimal. (Of course you also have to take into account that the coordination isn't enough to win the game, but also the possibility that town end up winning through dayplay and the coordination is irrelevant.)

I think something like this could work if the game is sufficiently vanilla to make claiming-in-secret not very useful, though. (It's a mechanic that I think would work best with a symmetrical Open, in which all town are identical, all scum are identical, and townsided mechanics and victory conditions are used to balance the setup despite the lack of power roles.)
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town
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