The Council (mafia + nomic) - thoughts?

[lendunistus]

maybe a way to balance the veto power would be to actually make the outsiders work like the outside players in Radio Buzz where there's an assortment of objectives.

"my objective is to have two players killed by means other than elimination, I will let you have a gun with two bullets"
and once the objective is fulfilled, there's no incentive for the outsider to not just let "town wins" pass

third party outsider with objectives won't work imo unless you either make bulletproof objectives or give mafia an anti-claim mechanic, and even then I don't think an objective like that would be fun to play around in a game as open as this

[Jingle]

this looks neat, the limited number of hours reminds me of the flow of the ToS live game, where you technically have 3 chance to deliberate on a player's guilt or innocence but from what I've seen you'll only ever see 2 of those trials maximum happening a day. I also like the idea of the scum-aligned publicly known player, reminds me of the Guilty Child Treestump used in some games, but the influence it's allowed here feels like

Pine's role in Alisae vs. Pine.

The comparison is an apt one, as much as I despise you for bringing up that trainwreck of a game I modded. You 100% could make this game work by having a pseudomod (Maybe even an uninformed scumsiding pseudomod) who was the one doing the veto-ing. Like, I could mod the game, resolve actions, and post VCs while Lend did just the council stuff, and that would be perfectly okay.

I think not telling the observer alignments and letting them be a treestump is an interesting design space, but I maintain that (like in AliPine) you'll want the Observer to be a known quality prior to signups.

[lendunistus]

you'll want the Observer to be a known quality prior to signups.

that's a fair concern, easy enough to just take pre-ins and pick the observer from there before entering signups

slightly warming up to the impartiality idea, still not 100% sold on it
i'd probably end up seeking approval from mafia for everything regardless of my alignment (and I'm sure quite a few others would as well), so I'm not sure if there's even much of a difference.
might still be worth trying (especially if there's no good way to gimp the outsider), just not sure if it'll work

[lendunistus]

having a scum-aligned uninformed outsider is quite an interesting idea. however, I think them still having the ability to communicate with scum is crucial

what if there's an anonymous chat between the outsider and the scum, and said anonymous chat is published every 48 hours or something along those lines? would still make it so the outsider has to stay more-or-less uninformed

[Jingle]

what if there's an anonymous chat between the outsider and the scum, and said anonymous chat is published every 48 hours or something along those lines? would still make it so the outsider has to stay more-or-less uninformed

Workable, but a lot of extra work for the mod. Periodically publishing anonymous message is more work than it sounds like for the mod. If you wanted to go that route, I'd probably just go secret alt as treestump hydra of scumteam for ease of implementation.

[lendunistus]

eh, actually, don't really know if that would fix the veto problem, especially since the outsider being uninformed might give them an even better reason to just "play it safe"

I'll get to drafting a starting ruleset in the meantime, still have to figure out some of the more procedural stuff (what to do with dead players, proposal resolution, deadlines, etc)

[lendunistus]

mmm, but if you let scum have a hydra, then the outsider becomes largely meaningless since they'd want to have scumteam approval anyway

[lendunistus]

alright, got to talk a bit about this with some other people and another idea popped up that I thought was interesting

instead of players being able to make proposals freely, people have to write up their proposals and The Outsider can select proposals to be put up for a vote. each day, at least one of the proposals they select has to be authored by scum - otherwise, town wins/scum gets some kind of debuff/whatever

this would incentivize The Outsider to let proposals through more readily, since it's tied to an investigative ability. I'm a bit concerned about it being exploited in some way, although there are a few things we could do (eg debuff doesn't apply if zero proposals pass, outsider gets some limited amount of vetoes)

[Gypyx]

"hey you, that one guy town finds suspicious, make a proposal"

i think the easiest idea is to make it mandatory for each player to submit one thing

the most important part in making sure this doesn't get exploited too much is forbidding talking about what you proposed, and making proposals anonymous

[Jake The Wolfie]

We could steal from BotC and make the Observer role akin to that of a DM. Their goal isn't for one side or another to win, but to regulate and control the bounds of gameplay.
Proposals that would break or derail the game substantially could easily be regulated and dismissed by a competent and unbiased Observer, who's main interest is providing a fun and engaging game experience.

[lendunistus]

okay, on further thought, the idea I was talking about is probably too exploitable

I might just run it with the neutral outsider then whenever I feel like it, will figure out the rule unknowns some time