Town should never quickhammer

[callforjudgement]

Uncaring, unthoughtful quickhammering I would argue is against the spirit of the game, regardless of alignment.

Accidental quickhammering, though unintended, unfortunately does happen and while regardless of alignment it puts the game in an awkward position, it can't be easily prevented and the presence of genuinely accidental quickhammers makes it a little harder to prove the presence of deliberate, uncaring, unthoughtful quickhammers.

Quickhammers with direct thought put into them, carefully weighed and decided, are within the spirit of the game, because the player making the quickhammer was, in their view, playing towards their wincon. However, the presence of this as a legitimate play call

also

makes it harder to prove the presence of deliberate, uncaring, unthoughtful quickhammers.

As a moderator, I'd really like to be able to eliminate accidental quickhammers in a way that doesn't lead to worse problems (such as continuous stupid fakehammer gambits).

I'm not sure whether eliminating intentional quickhammers would be a gain or loss; I think it depends on your playerlist. (It's probably a gain to allow scum to quickhammer in lylo, at least, but that's a special case as they don't care about being caught as long as the hammer goes through.) In smaller games (definitely Micro, probably even Mini), it'd likely be a net gain as one townie who decides to take a gamble can ruin the game for everyone else if it fails (arguably even if it succeeds, in a different way); a day 1 quickhammer is effectively adding a large amount of swing to the game.

For what it's worth, I was surprised by the "hammer rule" when I joined this site. All the places I'd played previously had a countdown to allow players to change their votes before a hammer was "locked in".

(Now this thread's got me brainstorming what Mafia without lynches would look like. Town would use night actions in an attempt to eliminate the scum, and days would end when the players voted to end the day or when deadline ran out.)

[callforjudgement]

Has anybody entertained the idea of a grace period for the rest of the town to override a quick hammer?

One way I've seen it done offsite is that players who are already on the wagon can cancel the hammer by unvoting (i.e. the hammer doesn't lock in existing votes). You need some sort of fixed time delay between the hammer and the thread lock in order to give people an opportunity to do that, though, which can be logistically awkward.

Sites with very short deadlines (on the order of a few days) typically don't use hammers at all, and just draw every day out to full length.

[callforjudgement]

Wouldn't that allow townies to use quickhammers to confirm themself as town?

As a corollary, any hammer

other than

a quickhammer would become incredibly bad play, as it'd be denying town the free investigation.

(The fun thing about this, as opposed to most public-town-investigation mechanics, is that you couldn't decide on a player to quickhammer in advance, because then it by definition wouldn't be a quickhammer.)

[callforjudgement]

If we're talking about quickhammers that won the game, this was a potentially unique case. (The last remaining scum self-voted to L-1 in post #700 and immediately got quickhammered for the win in #701.)

I think my main concern with quickhammers are hammers that happen before town can get useful information for future days. Those can quite easily ruin the entire game. Quickhammers made later in the game are much less of an issue.