[CHALLENGE] April Challenge

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Activity and interest seems high already so let's try one month

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Was really hoping for something I could submit Undertale Semi-Open revisions into to steal some reviews :X but I like this challenge a lot, in particular how Kerset made sure it's accommodating towards multiple attitudes towards hydras/midgame player additions

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Crystal Rainbow

6 Townies

3 Vengeful Mafia

Each day before 50% of the deadline is reached, players must grow a crystal. The player chooses its color, and whether it is

townie

or

scummy

inside (town have little reason to choose the latter). There is

red

,

orange

,

yellow

,

green

,

blue

, and

violet

. Players can't grow crystals in a color they already have. Crystal color is public but crystal alignment is not.
Players cannot be lynched directly, but their crystals can be lynched. Lynching a crystal destroys it and reveals its alignment. When a

scummy

crystal is lynched all other crystals with the same owner are destroyed and the crystal's owner is lynched.
Crystal growth is mandatory, if a player forgets to grow a crystal, the mafia pick one matching that player's alignment to be grown.
Night zero and each night, instead of a kill, the mafia may choose a town player whose crystal grown that day will be hollow. Hollow crystals aren't counted towards win conditions. If they are lynched, it isn't shown that they were hollow, just

townie

.
The mafia wins when there is a

scummy

crystal of each color at the end of a night phase.
The town wins when there are two

townie

crystals of each color, owned by townies (townie crystals in mafia possession don't count for anyone, just like hollow crystals.) at the end of a night phase. Scum wins ties.

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I tried really hard to balance but it is a difficult conceit to deliver and maybe a bad one? The hope is that you can see potential scumteams from the color choices. Possibly breakable

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Fixed

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Yes, if a scum aligned crystal is flipped, you know the controller is scum. The game would mostly devolve into lynching that player's crystals over and over once you have confirmation of that, which is why I specified that the player gets killed off, and vengefully takes one down with him for some balance.
Scum can sometimes create town crystals in hopes their town crystal will get lynched and that they will get treated as locktown for the rest of the game. But if they do this too often they will slow progress towards their wincon so much they may lose the race.

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I reworded that part to make it a bit clearer too.

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Crystal Rainbow

I may be misunderstanding, but wouldn't D1 be LYLO?

Day 1 each scum makes a different crystal color. If none of them are lynched, they each make a different crystal color D2 and win. If one of them IS lynched, anyone who made the same crystal color D1 is softcleared.

That means you functionally have to leash crystal colors D1 to all be the same color, meaning you can only lynch 1 scum per day.

Or is the intent that you only check winconditions at the end of the night?

intent is that you only check winconditions at night, I'll edit.

That means mislynching town twice can lose town the game, still, which is somewhat harsh, but there is information about who scum is in the crystal colors if the scum grow in a manner to blitz the n2 win.

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I don’t think it really matters since there’s no incentive for town to do so.

One, that isn't a good reason because town players will sometimes do things they have no incentive to do out of stupidity or spite. So there should still be a ruling regarding it.

And two, it's the only way a town player can forcibly prove themself as town (by getting themself killed), if they believe that helps their win condition for whatever reason (for instance, "go after X, Y, and Z after I flip town").

For 1:, anytime someone submits an action that in the totality of the circumstances overcomes reasonable doubt that a player isn't playing to their wincon, the action should be rejected and the player should be forcereplaced. So I don't think griefing gives the ruling relevance on its own. In the dark, if someone as a townie PMs the mod that they'd like to grow a scummy blue crystal and the setup says they're not allowed to do that, it's kind of not relevant whether they're allowed to since they should probably be forcereplaced either way.

2 seems like a gambit people should be allowed to try if they want to. It will generally be possible to tell the difference between 1 and 2.


For Jingle's comment I gave tiebreakers to scum since it sounded easier for town to engineer the outcome.