House M.D. Mafia - Doctor Test Round - Feel free to jump in!

[FakeGod]

Anti you failed me

[kuribo]

I was focused on the OP which stated the dog was his, not the neighbor's. I was concerned he was being poisoned by improper application of flea control, which is why I also asked about the bug bite.

[Charloux]

Well the difficulty seems right. What would happen if someone kills the patient and then someone else puts him under the right treatment?

[Antihero]

Anti you failed me

I TOOK PHYSIOLOGY 5 YEARS AGO
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

[KuroiXHF]

Well the difficulty seems right. What would happen if someone kills the patient and then someone else puts him under the right treatment?

If you kill your patient, only 25% of the votes are necessary to lynch you.

Guys, I have one more idea: How would you feel about upping the votes required to 80%... or dare I say,

immunity

to the player who first diagnoses and treats the patient?

[Antihero]

Well the difficulty seems right.

i agree

[Shadow Dancer]

Would we be able to if there was a chance her health was in danger? Not get her in necessarily for the husband, but for possible contamination of the wife?

It wouldn't matter, you'd be breaking confidentiality. Especially considering you don't know for sure that she's been exposed to anything. You can't just toss his rights aside, then demand she come to the hospital for nebulous testing.

This is House flavour. Nothing is gonna stop us from doing nebulous and illegal things

[Shadow Dancer]

So "search his home" does not at all include any clues that his walls are falling apart?! I'd consider checking for mold and sources of toxins, checking the water etc. standard procedure for a House house check...

[KuroiXHF]

Oh, and another idea I had from a mod's point of view is a rolling of a dice (D20) to see how likely the action is to succeed, based on the risk.

Breaking into a patient's house: *Needs to roll a 5* *If you roll 4 or lower: You couldn't break through the lock.*
Lying to a patient and tell him if he doesn't let you do a dangerous test, he'll die. *Needs to roll a 13*
Being caught having sex with a patient's wife and the patient is the one who caught you - you convince him that he's dreaming. *Needs to roll a 20*

Let me know if you like this idea.

Preview Edit: There was a clue. The walls were crumbling and falling apart. I don't think they'd take a piece of the wall necessarily and I didn't say they took a piece of the wall and tested it.

[Antihero]

Guys, I have one more idea: How would you feel about upping the votes required to 80%... or dare I say, immunity to the player who first diagnoses and treats the patient?

whoever is better at the ddx mechanic is going to have a pretty significant upper hand in the mafia game.
getting a good diagnosis at lylo could be an automatic win for scum. conversely a townie fucking up and making themselves disliked at lylo is an autoloss (which would bug the shit out of me if i were town and lost that way).

come to think of it, it's pretty antitown to even engage the ddx mechanic at lylo. maybe drop that part of the game when it gets to that point?

[FakeGod]

[Shadow Dancer]

Lead paint is one of

the

most basic things they check for in basically any House episode (or at least regularly enough that you can assume they are doing it off screen when its not explicitely stated that they are doing it).
I don't know, I don't really like the idea of introducing a random element... Things usually tend to just work for House ;D. I think you should rather just set risk factors (allergies, cross reactions, police patrol checking his house, character and backstory of patient...) beforehand and just bring them into play when the situation arrives.
And I think you should be more clear about the whole searching the Home business, which actions are automatically included, which aren't (checking for mold? Lead paint/pipes? Asbestos? Diet? Drugs? Other household articles, like cleansers?). And there should be an option to state what one wants to sample right on the spot. It's probably alright to make that require a second action, though, since lab analysis of samples is of course needed as well. But just telling "here's are some samples of random dirt" is not really helpful...

[Shadow Dancer]

Guys, I have one more idea: How would you feel about upping the votes required to 80%... or dare I say, immunity to the player who first diagnoses and treats the patient?

whoever is better at the ddx mechanic is going to have a pretty significant upper hand in the mafia game.
getting a good diagnosis at lylo could be an automatic win for scum. conversely a townie fucking up and making themselves disliked at lylo is an autoloss (which would bug the shit out of me if i were town and lost that way).

come to think of it, it's pretty antitown to even engage the ddx mechanic at lylo. maybe drop that part of the game when it gets to that point?

Not ddxing probably means the patient dies... I guess if no one does anthing about it, every one should end up hated ;P

[Charloux]

How about one of us is chosen randomly to be the patient, and if we kill the patient he dies?

[Antihero]

How about one of us is chosen randomly to be the patient, and if we kill the patient he dies?

ew....

[TellTaleHeart]

Yay! ^_^

[Dierfire]

Hurrah, we saved the patient!

I think that the mechanic and flavor are very fun.

I agree with Antihero that, mechanically, it might work best to have no patient during a *LYO phase (this would require that the number of Mafia players be public knowledge).

I'm concerned about an incentive to delay actions. As long as all results are given at the same time, and all actions refresh after results are given, there should be no major advantage to delaying actions, but there might be a minor one in that some players might still try to wait and see what angles the others are pursuing before writing orders. If there is an issue with players trying to submit actions last in order to have the most information, it might be possible to fix that by making only one player Hated/Loved (or one of each) at a time, such that there's an incentive to be first to balance against the incentive to see what the others are doing.

I'm not in favor of the random element.

[Masquerade]

That lylo-thing is actually a good point. But it does force scum to help diagnose to make themselves loved, and we didn't play the mafia aspect but if scum post to diagnose then they should also post thoughts and reads and they could also try to mislead players into doing things that could hurt the patient. I think it will work itself out.
I know home searches shouldn't point immediately to the solution, but I think there could be some more accurate hints. For me personally it's not natural to make a bridge between his job and his home, like storing stuff or painting the house with that old paint. I'm thinking maybe put in a rule that there has to be a global house search where there's a predetermined set of uncovered stuff and then once that's been done there's a cooldown of a period (or more?) before someone can go back for specified house search. And for the specified house search the player can choose a room to investigate. That way, hints can be a little more accurate without immediately spoiling the case.

[KuroiXHF]

Masquerade, I have a bit of a tough time understanding what you mean. Could you possibly provide an example?

Dierfire, did you find an incentive to delay actions? I don't see myself giving one. If anything, I would penalize them. "A patient that is not being treated will get worse." (And I will make an exception for when players are on V/LA.)

Also, what is a LYO Phase?

Also, I think I'll scrap the D-20 idea.

[Masquerade]

I'll try.
So in this case we had a house search and it didn't really have any hints about the disease. The hint was in the man's job, and we could have deduced without the house search he could have found lead-based paint and painted his house with that. But I was thinking adding, for instance, that the paint was cracked and there's a paint can/stuff from garage sales stored, it would have become more clear there could be lead-based paint in the house. However, saying that will point to the diagnoses and makes it easier to solve the case, and that's not really what you want, right? So I was thinking the more specified stuff could come up in a second house search, and to make sure players don't figure out what the diagnosis is in 2 periods (1 period for global search and 2nd for specified search with more clear clues) I was thinking putting in a cooldown of at least 1 period (but maybe more) so that players will also have to do tests on the patient and can't fall back too easily on clues from the searches.
Then a second search, where a player will have to specify what to look for or where to look, could turn up more clues.

In this case it would be something like what you wrote for the first search, then someone thinks of fungus and needs to go back to check the damp places for mould and the fridge and stuff like that. Maybe the first search could hint to 'a damp house' and then the 2nd search would turn up fungus. Maybe also the first search would never include samples, samples will have to be specified in a next search. I mean, the house search came up in the first period and you don't want it to be case-solving but I do feel in this particular case we played it didn't bring much information. Maybe you wanted it to be distracting, if so then I said nothing

I'm not sure if it's a good idea though, I'm looking at this from my own perspective and maybe it's not necessary.

[KuroiXHF]

Well I left more than one clue. Granted, the house was the largest clue, but the "cheapness" was also a huge clue. Someone who would be willing to save a buck by buying only cheap deli meats and McDonald's would also be the person to use cheap tools and would have a shortcut to their health. Mixing that with the symptoms, lead poisoning shouldn't have been such a large leap. I'm pretty sure the house wasn't a factor to TTH when he diagnosed and set the patient on the correct treatment.

And you're right. I don't want the answer to be so easy that the doctor would walk in and find a can of paint, test for lead and there you go. A cooldown period does seem nice. The thing is that the specified search is kind of how I already have it. Titus, on the second try, said that she wanted to go back and search specifically for the paint chips.

But I do like, "Oh you're using an action period to search the house? OK. This is what you find." And the second search could lead to, "You took samples of the tap water, the mold on the bread and liquid underneath the sink, etc."

But on the other hand, if brain surgery lasts one action and if you can do an MRI and get the results within one action, why does the house search have to be longer?"

[Clumsy]

Short list of ideas and criticisms that I came up with. It needs to be much more clear about what is and is not being done with investigations, like the house for instance. It needs to be very clear what the rules are on certain things like that, or with certain things and how that will affect gameplay, like the confidentiality thing. It's a house flavor, so some people might expect that to be okay, what others think the medical side of it makes it not OK, and it can cause some confusion. Also, I'm against the D20 thing. It would work for something like a tabletop house game, but not for a for Mafia game, random this is probably bad here. Also, last question, how does this actively tie into a game of Mafia? Is the mafia attempting to get the patient killed? Because unless they are, I don't really see how this mixes with Mafia all that well. Diagnosing the patient becomes much more important to everybody that catching scum is, and if there is no opposing goals to the alignments, there's no real way to figure out who is scum. I think there has to be some kind of conflicting goals between the mafia and the town.

[Masquerade]

Well in my view mcD isn't cheap. I mean, I can buy standard quality burgers, potatoes and lettuce at the grocery store for the same price and have food for days.

But on the other hand, if brain surgery lasts one action and if you can do an MRI and get the results within one action, why does the house search have to be longer?"

Well it would only have to be if the house search points to something very specific. Like, with the pigeon guano episode in mind, if we come back with the guano from the first search it would already be pretty obvious we'd have to look there. In the episode they did have to go back to look again because the first time they didn't find anything. Maybe the cooldown is too much, if someone goes to look for something specific that's already pretty smart thinking I guess.

[TellTaleHeart]

I'm pretty sure the house wasn't a factor to TTH when he diagnosed and set the patient on the correct treatment.

The house was a factor. I was taking the cracked walls and peeling carpet as signs of age. Older houses tend to have lead-based paint and lead in the pipes.

I think the system of checking out the house and giving a general description, then having to specify something in order to do a "search" is a good one.

[Masquerade]

Maybe hated-status can come from all bad outcomes, not just death? Like you put him on penicillin but failed to ask for allergies and now he's seizing so you're hated, your hated status will be removed if you do something helpful to your patient or when he gets cured. Hated from death can't be reverted because well, the patient is dead.

When someone at L-1 gets hated, does he insta-die?