In post 23, Ramcius wrote:You don't need to know - just block every proposal that isn't beneficial to your wincon
This is possible in regular Nomic too, where you keep blocking proposals. In this case it would only be advantageous to scum
You do need the right p-list for such a game, where there's at least initial momentum on accepting weird proposals.
@Mastina: That does somewhat sound like what I have in mind! In my imagination players would be able to propose and vote on novel mechanics as well. If you ever do run such a game I'll be curious to in/spectate
In post 23, Ramcius wrote:You don't need to know - just block every proposal that isn't beneficial to your wincon
This is possible in regular Nomic too, where you keep blocking proposals. In this case it would only be advantageous to scum
You do need the right p-list for such a game, where there's at least initial momentum on accepting weird proposals.
@Mastina: That does somewhat sound like what I have in mind! In my imagination players would be able to propose and vote on novel mechanics as well. If you ever do run such a game I'll be curious to in/spectate
What makes you think that setup will be in scum favor to begin with? It can be townsided and It'll just keep status quo in town favor. By blocking proposals you keep people in game and force them to play game of mafia instead of trying to backstab each other and get away before too many players achieve their wincon and rest are left with nothing.
Every achieved wincon is a free scum kill from gamestate standpoint, so to make game more or less balanced, you need to limit how many these "free kills" you want give scum team to still keep game fair for town. Goal in my opinion should be to have both wincons - if you can't achieve yours secret wincon, work for mafia wincon - even if couple people leaves, rest of them still can win, if they deal with all scum
If everyone blocked everything it's advantageous to scum, as it's a mountainous setup.
There is no "starting setup".
And sure, but that's an implementation detail for a system I've not really thought about too much my curiosity is to whether the core elements of these games could be combined in a manner that allows for gameplay that resembles both games individually. I think some of the proposed systems (especially NotAJumbleOfNumbers' one) come close to this. Nahdia did point out a couple of valid criticisms of it, but I think that's a much more useful starting point anyway.
In post 27, Auro wrote:If everyone blocked everything it's advantageous to scum, as it's a mountainous setup.
There is no "starting setup".
And sure, but that's an implementation detail for a system I've not really thought about too much my curiosity is to whether the core elements of these games could be combined in a manner that allows for gameplay that resembles both games individually. I think some of the proposed systems (especially NotAJumbleOfNumbers' one) come close to this. Nahdia did point out a couple of valid criticisms of it, but I think that's a much more useful starting point anyway.
You don't have to block literally everything, some things might be beneficial for you, so you want them to go through. Or things like roles, you can't predict who gets those, so it's not like it will help other players directly
Well, that depends on what is your goal - numic mafia or numic mafia-like social game. If it's former, it's tough, cause game must follow core mafia rules and must be mafia game at it's core, but if you go for latter, then it's much easier, you can just use some of mafia's features and simply give mafia feel for your game without turning it into full blown mafia game
To be a little bit more specific - there are 2 big problems:
1. Secret wincons are not very compactible with uninformed minority forced to work together to eliminate informed minority (and 3Ps, but that's optional). Therefore Secret wincons can't be main thing, only some alternate wincon that doesn't get in the too much
2. Balance - it should be as close as possible to 50/50 win chance for both sides, 60/40 is kinda acceptable, but not for everyone. So you need find a way to keep it balanced, but with people proposing and voting for features it's difficult task
I've played in Werewolf-based nomics in the past (which started from nomics that added in Werewolf mechanics, rather than Mafia/Werewolf games that added in nomic mechanics). It doesn't play out at all like you'd expect a typical Mafia game to go. In particular, it's very common for players of opposite factions to cooperate with each other, relying on the fact that nomic win conditions tend to be somewhat individual (the basic idea is for a coalition to have at least one member on each team, so that they can manipulate someone from the coalition to win based on individual victory regardless of which faction wins the factional victory).
In the instance when I came closest to winning, I was town, and needed to coordinate all the townies to push through an action before the wolves would push through one of theirs; otherwise, with the rules at the time, the wolves would almost certainly win even though I strongly suspected who they were. But they weren't all online at once, and the wolves did indeed end up winning. I would probably have been able to win solo if the game had come down to a town victory (based on the various tiebreakers to determine who within a faction wins).
Incidentally, most of the players had no idea how to scumhunt, but I found scumhunting via proposal votes to be a very effective method of figuring out who the scum were.
(As a side note, nomic relies on having at least three independent win conditions to work; otherwise, proposals will never pass because the game is zero-sum, so something that's good for one team will be bad for the other team.)
