Mafiascum.net

Sometimes when I mod games, I see players misread/misunderstand their role or the rules. They do not seek clarification because they don't see a reason for why their interpretation of the game is wrong, but from what they post in thread I find it very obvious that they are misunderstanding certain parts of the game.

This gives me the dilemma, should I intervene in such situations? I default to no, as it may compromise their alignment, and besides, it's the player's responsibility to properly check the rules and their role. However, I personally feel that it is only fair for every player to know the rules properly and shouldn't be punished for thinking otherwise.

In a game I recently finished modding, one player did not read their role PM properly, which led to their lynch when the town found that their claimed role did not match up with another player with the same role and a flipped role. At the same time, I knew he had misread his role PM from the start of the game based on some PMs they sent to me early game. I did not want to intervene there as I felt it would be bad intervention, but personally, I want to eliminate such accidents from happening because I believe this is out of the confines of the Mafia game.

There's the argument that this will prevent the Mafia from employing misreading their role as a strategy, but as I feel that strategy twists some confines of the game I have no problem with removing it as a strategy the Mafia can use.

I don't think the issue is that it prevents scum from claiming to have misread their role. The issue is that if someone claims they misread their role and the mod corrected it, they look genuine. Even if they're not totally trusted, they're better off for being dumb and not paying attention. That isn't right.

I think that, ultimately, it isn't your as a mod to babysit players and keep them from doing stupid avoidsble shit, but at the same time, I understand the sentiment-- it can kind of needlessly ruin the game that you put so much effort into.

I think the best solution is to have stricter confirming rules. If you had made slimer not just say "confirm" but actually spell out "confirm town charge tracker who can target a person and see who they've charged" then that wouldn't have happened. Ditto with any weird rules the game has.

Thanks for the tip!

In that game I actually made players confirm also with their role and alignment. However, some people were confirming their alignment only, and because I didn't want to sound fussy, I decided to let it slide.

In slimer's case he confirmed as "Town Tracker Charger", which was in fact a hint for me that he misread his role PM.

It looks like I'll have to accept the blame here this time, as I hadn't realise how important for players to confirm both their role and alignment.

I'm curious, what should I do to make sure they understand the rules? This came up in Micro 629 where I could tell Karnos didn't interpret the rules correctly.

I personally think that it's the player's responsibility to make sure that they understand their role. If they're not asking questions, there's nothing you can do. I briefly looked at your game and what I understand is that theslimer3 thought they were a tracker when they were actually specifically a tracker for the charging ability? That was on them. The role PM was very clear in making the distinction so it's their fault if they did not read it properly.

Mutant I understand what you are saying here, but I think you'll understand my rant more if something like that happened in your game. Trust me, someone misreading their role or the rules is NOT something you want to see in a game you mod.

I think if it's just something they're saying in thread, you shouldn't intervene, but if they try to submit an invalid night action -- like a doc trying to protect themselves -- the right thing to do is to reply "you can't protect yourself. if you want to protect somebody else, let me know." instead of just saying "night action received"

for the tracker charger / charge tracker thing, I think you're right that the best thing to do would be to reply to the confirmation with "actually you're a charge tracker" or something like that.

In post 6, Plotinus wrote:I think if it's just something they're saying in thread, you shouldn't intervene, but if they try to submit an invalid night action -- like a doc trying to protect themselves -- the right thing to do is to reply "you can't protect yourself. if you want to protect somebody else, let me know." instead of just saying "night action received"

for the tracker charger / charge tracker thing, I think you're right that the best thing to do would be to reply to the confirmation with "actually you're a charge tracker" or something like that.

Clarification that they got the name of their role wrong at the start of the game is perfectly valid intervention. With hindsight, that's the obvious soloution to the problem. However, BNL was still right not to intervene once the game started. When it comes to things like the way you deny false night actions, it's obvious that you can clarify things then. In fact, all it takes is to say "hey, you can't perform that night action" and the player SHOULD start questioning you which would lead to clarification on their own.

BNL, of course I wouldn't want that to happen in my game. When you make an effort to design a setup, it's always going to hurt when someone doesn't understand their role. But helping someone mid game is just a big no. If you had messaged them saying "hey, you got your role wrong" you would have changed the course of the game. They probably would have claimed properly and they wouldn't be lynched. The fact you would have made the decision to do that because of the events in the game makes it mod influence.

I normally pose a specific confirmation question – almost a quiz – that's designed to test the most potentially confusing parts of the player's role knowledge, so that I can get an indication as to whether the player is confused about their role. If they don't answer correctly, I explain via PM. This is what the confirmation process is for.

Additionally, if the potentially confusing mechanic is public, I tend to try to format the vote counts in such a way as to imply how it works. (For example, "The deadline " at the start of every deadline report, when using CFJ's Micro Deadlines.) That isn't moderator intervention because it's consistent from the start of the game and chosen before the first post is seen.

After confirmations have occurred, I don't intervene as moderator to correct misconceptions about roles, unless the player tries to take an impossible action or asks a question to me specifically.