Can this ever work in town's favor?

[BuJaber]

I'm bored. Let's have a good old-fashioned strategy discussion.

This is an idea I've been pondering. Problem is I'm stuck thinking with only my perspective. I need someone to play devil's advocate or straight up tell me why I'm wrong.

Here's a crazy idea:
Every day phase every player claims they will target someone (without claiming their role).

Is that super op for town or what?

Any setup with PRs.

I'm guessing there's a flaw I'm not seeing or else it would become standard practice. It sounds busted to me and it probably would get old quickly though.

The idea is loosely based on the concept of Hypo-inno's: Town has a cop and everyone knows they have a cop or suspects they have one, so every day phase everyone claims they got an innocent on someone. Some people will be outed as not cop immediately to scum if they claim innocent on a scum player, but statistically most on average will inno a townie. Scum will not know who is the real cop, and if they shoot someone else, odds are they were hunting the cop meaning the person their target hypo-inno'd gets inno'd for real. I probably explained it badly.

Let me be clear I have never actually been in a game where this has been done. I do not know how effective it is. But it sounds like a good idea and it is a valid strategy used by some mafia players.

My idea is not exactly the same but

as long as the PRs are secret

, hypothetically town will have more and better information once people begin to flip.

Let's say player A is a bodyguard. Day 2 he claims he will target player B (without claiming bodyguard). In day 3 we find out player A and player E died. Player B is very very likely to be scum if no vig claims, etc.

You make it harder for scum to NK optimally, without really giving them any major info. Sure sometimes it might be bad if say player A is doc who claims he targeted player B and scum shoot player B they will know player B was protected somehow. But because a) everyone is doing it and b) nobody is claiming an actual role, there is a layer of WIFOM that protects town from giving too much info to scum.

For what it's worth I don't think we should necessary do this.. part of the fun of mafia is that stupid and unexpected things happen, but I'm very interested in discussing the hypothetical pros and cons of this.

[BuJaber]

Let's say player A is a bodyguard. Day 2 he claims he will target player B (without claiming bodyguard). In day 3 we find out player A and player E died. Player B is very very likely to be scum if no vig claims, etc.

I was thinking of weak not bodyguard. Ignore this.
Let's go with Player B very very likely to be TOWN if player A dies alone.

[BuJaber]

Trust Mastina to answer something like this!

Good answer.

What about PRs that are on specific nights. Wouldn't you gain some advantage? Say you are n3 vig. Day 1 and day 2 scum as you said will probably figure out you aren't anything but then n3 pow you vug them.
Specific night powers are too rare though.

Okay thank you this was short and sweet.

[BuJaber]

I'd say it in some situations it would be useful, where the benefit of added scumhunting accuracy would outweigh the risk of losing PRs. Because in the end an all vanilla town who knows all scum wins all the time. That's why guilties are usually outed instantly for a 1:1 trade. So I guess if you could reasonably estimate that the collective info gained by everyone hypo claiming is about equal to 1 guilty for every 1 'exposed' PR, it would be worth it.

I mean one of the things that sparked this thought was seeing how in some games town ends up getting distracted and making false assumptions about NKs or setup spec and it leads to mislynches. Obviously people can simply try to improve in that regard but it could well be that some element of that will always happen because it's in our nature to want to explain what happened or solve the puzzle.

But thanks to the insight from you all I now know this is far from OP and in fact may be closer to negative EV for town. I was stuck thinking about it from one angle only.