Question about balanced scum-town ratio for a specific setup

[Greeni]

So yesterday I played this game for the first time (irl) and I want to do it again soon. But as I'm still a newb I'm not sure about the ratio of mafia to scum for a balanced (~ 50:50) game.

We are usually 7-15 people, and I like to play with 3 special roles:

- Detective (one check each round)
- Doctor (one protection each round, no successive protection of the same person)
- Vigilante (one shot per game)

(roles aren't revealed upon death)

How many mafia should we use to get a (fairly) balanced game? (yesterday we were 11 Players+mod and we had 3 Mafia and 8 townspeople, which seemed rather balanced)

[the worst]

Yay, welcome to mafia and to MafiaScum!!
Balance is an interesting one. To heavily simplify: at its core you need a list where town can mislynch a so-many times before the mafia makes up a majority. This is often done by determining if everyone used their night actions, lynched and mafia night-killed entirely randomly, how often would each team win?

For a really straight-forward application, have a look at this page.

In practice, the most common game sizes we use here would be about 2v7 or 3v10. Both of these are scum-sided assuming random lynches and nightkills, so town power roles can be implemented to set the balance back towards 50%. Then scum can be given powers to counter town powers, and so forth, as necessary.

Realistically any game size can be made to be balanced; if you have a look at that page I linked you'll get a rough idea of what I mean.

I'm not the greatest at balance and stuff; there are some super clever people here who regularly design and review open setups (all roles are known beforehand).



Do you have a particular setup you're thinking of?

[popsofctown]

Face to face mafia is much more townsided than forum mafia. So 3 v 8 is probably is good or even townsided.

[Lycanfire]

F2f town advantage seems wiped out by the flipless game. Scum will probably keep a straight face if they go down. Bonus points if they go down hard.

[Lycanfire]

If you're cop head starting consider giving a special random green check on n0. Otherwise go to evens, 3 scum minimum.
(or start on day 1 for the crazies that actually like playing mafia. which is vastly overrated as being shot on n0 is the only way to play the game.)

[callforjudgement]

Unlimited Cop + 1-shot Vigilante + Indecisive Doctor (with all three roles known to exist, a fact that gives town a large advantage) is more power than we'd normally have for a 10:3. That means that the correct number of town is probably smaller, likely 9:3 or 8:3, maybe 7:3 (although even and odd numbers of players play out quite differently).

Giving scum a fourth member is often very hard to deal with, though. In that setup, I'd expect scum to have the edge at 11:4 (although 12:3 would be far too good for town). It might not be possible to balance it at all in the 14-15p range.

At the lower end of the range, 6:2 is probably townsided (but likely close to balanced), and 5:3 obviously scumsided. 6:3 is still going to be scumsided, so a 9p would have to be played at 7:2.

I guess I'd put the correct ratios as (5:2), 6:2, (7:2), (7:3), 8:3, 9:3, (10:3), (11:3), (11:4), with the bracketed setups being of dubious balance. (The issue with the 5:2 setup, by the way, is not that it has too much scum but that it has too large a proportion of power roles for an Open, meaning it's likely to end up solved via process of elimination at some point.)

BTW, I'm assuming that you reveal alignments upon a lynch, even though the roles aren't revealed on a nightkill. If alignments are kept secret too that's a noticeable advantage for scum and you'll need to change the numbers somewhat.