[CHALLENGE] October Challenge

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October Challenge: Open Pandora's Box

You ever see a closed setup and think, hey, that mechanic in there, there's no reason that couldn't be used in an open setup, really. Why not?
This month we will try to adapt some concepts that have been used in closed setups over the past year into a playable open setup. For fun and profit. We will vote on the best setup, winner will get to make up the next challenge, but the real prize of the monthly challenges might be pops' propensity to go mod your game because she likes it too much, it's a real risk.

Anyone may post their setup submissions here. One setup submission per user.

October Rules

Restrictions:

• There may not be more players with the "Named Townie" quality than there are mafia. Usually any town power role functions as a type of named townie, but this can be subverted by things like unbeknownst-to-oneself roles or submitting a smalltown setup. Named Townies that are not Named Townies on day 1 but could become Named Townies later don't count against this (all three challenge options have good avenues for conditionally discovered PRs, as it happens). Also note, 2 Goons 7 Visitors would count as having 0 named townies.
  
• You can use a watcher. But it must at least be gated. Mafia watchers can be ungated.
  
• No Mafia Encryptors but the setup can have daytalk.

Meet one of these requirements:

Use Krazy's positional mechanic in an open game. You can use a grid, or a list, but somehow players must have spatial positions that affect either lynch or nightplay mechanics.
In this particular game, my movement in the playerlist was publicly noticeable and confirmed me as not-VT. In an open game this is an issue that will need addressing. You may potentially want to allow VTs to move or make repositionings a democratic process.

Use Oversoul's "crown on the ground" mechanic in an open game. Back in ancient times I played a Tarhalindur game with "masks from Majora's Mask" on the ground that also distributed power roles to players in a day process. You can use more than one "crown" and call it something else, you can use a different process for how the crown(s) are given to a particular player, and you can use a fixed power that is granted no matter who wears the crown rather than different abilities based on who wears it as it was in the Oversoul game.

Use some kind of HP mechanic, as used in Skygazer's Pokémon Fusion U-pick. Again, she's probably not the first, but this is a closed that ran this year and looked interesting. Whether it is by lynch, special day actions, or night powers, it must be possible to make progress on killing a player without completely killing that player. It must be possible for the

town

to incompletely kill players: while it's fine if there are ways to immediately remove all of a player's HP, there must be at least some ways that town controlled efforts to kill someone are incomplete, lest this be too similar to 1-shot BP.setup. You may keep the lynch sacrosanct and use HP vigilantism to satisfy this requirement if you like (which is what Skygazer did, incidentally). You may disclose player's HP to players. You can also use different "HP" mechanics following the "incomplete progress" principle, for instance a red vig and a blue vig who only cause a player to die if both vigs have shot that player once that game.

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Fourth restriction: TemporalLich can't submit multiball setups

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Yeah Liars and Millers would not be okay, there are more players with some kind of counterclaim dynamic than there are scum, even though it is not readily and trivially converted into IC status. I realize that when there is a large number of duplicate roles the named townie impact is very much weaker/different but we are looking to spotlight the mechanics in the 3 options here even to the extent that excludes well balanced/interesting massclaim setups like Liars and Millers that would become the focus in an interesting way.

Several past winners have met this requirement without setting out to do so, so I don't think it will be too restrictive.

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Yes Splash Damage meets this challenge.

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I'm going to say that's an ungated watcher, in addition to the other things that it is.

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99-shot watcher. Technically gated

S_S when I finally run Undertale Smalltown, if you /in, and then somehow you roll the Jerry role that usually doesn't get to play the game because town is strongly incentivized to lynch it
It will be 100% a sincere outcome from random.org
I promise

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Watcher plays nicely with HP mechanics. I wish I had been thinking about that when I was drawing up the challenge. I don't want to switch it now, but I definitely won't frown on generating a full watcher this way.

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Aside from charitable interpretations of the vigilante that make vigilante more accurate than lynches, nothing in Neighborhood watch ever hinders mafia's ability to perform a mountainous sweep.
Not saying it's a bad thing just an interesting thing.

@TemporalLich, at first I thought everyone shoots with the identity of their own color, now I've figured out that can't be it, because someone would have to shoot within their own faction to finish a kill.
It's kind of confusing to use exactly the 3 colors you used for alignments, the 3 colors could be anything (or could even be adjectives of some other kind). Couldn't you use, like, Purple, Orange, and Black?

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OkaPoka's is pretty interesting. If lots of players from the center of the matrix get eliminated, the mafia get more latitude over how to draw districts, right? Blanks are free?

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All the players are amphibious vehicles capable of flight.

To destroy one you must destroy their wheels, propeller, and wings.

Dream with your innermost mind.
Or you can just list the players in black font.
I think no one actually needs colors to understand that mafias and werewolves don't share common interests.
It just looks pretty.

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Yeah I glazed over his example, I find it all internally consistent if his example is flat wrong and his specification is correct.

1 5 09 13
2 6 10 14
3 7 11 15
4 8 12 16

with 13-16 as blank should make an initial districting look something like

1 5 09 13

2 6 10 14

3 7 11 15

4 8 12 16

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Or also:
1 5

09 13

2

6

10 14

3

7

11 15

4

8 12

16

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pink district is obvscum they seem to need lebensraum

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Yes; it's a smalltown setup.

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Ah, yeah, smalltowns usually make roles public. "such as a smalltown" clearly refers to this category of ways you can remove named townie issues, and yes secret smalltown is totally fine.

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The submissions so far are really good

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Would it be scumsided for mafia to have full watchers

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I mean town pretty much has three vigs... so scum probably need ungated watchers lol

though scum has 5/3 kills...

So why didn't you give the mafia full watchers?

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x-shot is generally used to indicate that the role word that directly follows can only be used that many times. In this case, two uses of watcher, and after two uses that player cannot use the watcher ability for the rest of the game.

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In the wiki BP works a bit different tho

Thus, many times players are simply One-Shot Bulletproof - passively protected from only the first kill that would otherwise resolve on them.

So since its passive it is essentially a 2 hp role

I thought you were referring to TemporalLich's setup, not the 1-shot BP in general.

1-shot BP is an HP mechanic, it fits the "incomplete progress towards killing a player" rubric that I put in the OP. There must be town controlled kills for 1-shot BP to satisfy the other part of the requirement, though.

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Tiara on the Ground

This setup is 8/9ths Smalltown. One role, and only one role, is always given to town.

1 Town Omniscient LyLo IC
6 Townies

2 Mafia

Smalltown roles:
1 Self-Aware Commoner A
1 Self-Aware Commoner B
1 Anastasia Informed (Information: X and Y are Self-Aware Commoners)
1 Anastasia Fruit Vendor
1 Anastasia Psychologist
1 Anastasia Tracker
1 Anastasia Doctor
1 Anastasia Sane Cop

After the lynch each day, all players, including the lynchee, secretly vote on a player to wear the Tiara the following night. The player with the most votes wears the Tiara. Once a player wears the Tiara, they cannot wear the Tiara again for the rest of the game. Votes are secret and are not revealed, but the winner of the Tiara is revealed.
A player is not a valid NK selection while they are wearing the Tiara.
If there is a tie in the Tiara vote, the role listed earliest in the setup receives the Tiara, including that the Omniscient always wins ties.

"Anastasia roles" receive role PMs that inform them they are an Anastasia, but they do not know which Anastasia they are until they win the Tiara.
The Self-Aware Commoners receive a role PM indicating that they are Self-Aware Commoner A or B, confirming to them that there will be no benefit besides the one-night BP if they earn the Tiara.
The LyLo IC Omniscient is informed of the hidden power of all the Anastasias and who all of the Commoners are. The LyLo IC Omniscient's other power is that when the game enters LyLo, the moderator will confirm to the town that the player is not mafia.

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Cantidates:
Ircher post 13
OkaPoka post 11
TemporalLich: post 42
Not Known 15: post 46
popsofctown: post 48
student: post 49
Something_Smart: post 50

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popsofctown: I think electing a townread for a power is really cool/fun. I liked the concept of Crown on the Ground. I have a hot take that LyLo IC is a very underutilized role because it's not-vanilla, yet does not create "don't gotta prove myself" slot until LyLo when those slots often emerge in mountainous anyway, and it is impossible for the role to checkmate scum when the setup is designed correctly. In this case I used it in a special way to sneak partial information about the hidden powers into the setup.

Something_Smart: So this is really similar to my submission, but it uses PR secrecy instead of PR BP to resolve the EZ PR hunting problem. I like my solution better being the narcissist that I am. If scum can identify widely townread slots, those are the slots they want to shoot anyway, and it is not too difficult to shoot the PRs. There is lots of room for town to be tricksy and get around that, but I feel like it may be more enjoyable to have the freedom to townlock who you want to townlock and scumlock who you want to scumlock instead of thinking about the nightkill so much even when you didn't roll doctor.
All of this is pretty comparative this is like top 2% of percentile of open setup quality (since I designed the challenge I kind of set myself up for this kind of statement obviously) and I'd /in this pretty hard. It looks very low balanced and low swing without being mountainous.

student: I think this setup is a good example of how the Monthly Design Contest challenges can lead to interesting setups, because I actually think this setup is really good and looks fun in spite of (or, rather, because of) taking on more requirements than necessary to match the challenge. It is kind of the better way to do Ircher's setup since the VT ability to ping HP isn't governy. Admittedly the doctor in particular functions like a less democratic governor, but I'm less concerned about this setup becoming a "dayless" setup. I have some question marks about the balance here, I don't know if this is spot on or spot off.

OkaPoka: This is a really innovative setup with a very dayplay friendly core mechanic. My biggest concern with the setup is 4:2 6p being a very slow dayphase due to evensies being stacked on top of a group lynch (a group lynch that requires suicidality to tiebreak).

Ircher: My first impulse was that this setup is great, but afterwards are started to think and think and I have concerns. The town has a similar amount of lynching and governing power, essentially, and that can be an orange flag for how fun a setup plays, even if to be fair most governerish game throws are town's fault at the core.

Not Known 15: I like lots of things about this setup, but a potential early win condition seems like a bit much to me for an 11p. I'm more comfortable with instant win possibilities in smaller games.

TemporaLich: I am ranking TemporalLich last purely due to my relationship with multiball. The setup seems really well designed for multiball I just don't like multiball.

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I am the person who does the algorithm thing half the time or more and also the designer this month but my motivation about this is low right now.

If someone would volunteer, much love.