Necro-bump! I'd like to try fleshing this out again.
What about the following version?
- 2 Mafia, 6 Town. (I can raise or lower these numbers depending on what seems fair.)
- The Mafia has no nightkill (so town gets at least 3 miselims and possibly 4).
- Plurality elimination.
- Each night, the Mafia must choose two living players (or else two will be chosen for them at random). There is no restriction on repeating themselves.
- The mod chooses randomly (by rolling 1d2) which player to report truthfully about, then chooses randomly again (by rolling another 1d2) whether to report the other player as innocent or guilty.
- If there are somehow no legal pairs left for the Mafia to choose, there will be no more investigations.
- To avoid town trying to read into things that shouldn't be informational, the mod should explicitly publish the two results in signup order (e.g. "Player 2 is innocent
or
Player 5 is innocent," rather than the other way around).
I think this might work better than some of my other versions. It does have a random element, which I understand many people dislike on principle, but it's a fairly contained random element that can be reasoned about. As mith pointed out, if the Mafia have precise control of results they would never want to report someone as guilty, which sort of degenerates the setup, and this fixes that. It's also just cleaner and simpler to give what control exists to the informed minority, and randomize the rest, rather than trying to have town vote on it or something.
If there are two confirmed innocents, nothing stops the Mafia from just choosing those two players for all future investigations, and this seems like a feature rather than a bug since having two confirmed innocents means the Mafia have almost lost anyway. If there is only one confirmed innocent, the Mafia probably
don't
want to include them in future investigations since there's a 25% chance it reveals the other subject's alignment outright. If there are none, town can stop the Mafia from repeating themselves indefinitely by eliminating one of the two, and potentially confirm the other's alignment in the process.
If Mafia include themselves in the investigation, there is a 25% chance of a double-guilty result which is a worst case scenario for them. This gives some WIFOM potential around their choices, since 25% to me seems just high enough to be scary but not high enough to completely overwhelm the fear of being PoE'd if they
don't
include themselves.
“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who say, ‘There are two kinds of people in this world: those who say there are two kinds of people in this world,
and the other kind,
’ and those who
don’t
say. Well, then there’s me.” — J.R. “Bob” Dobbs