[Setup] The One Week Challenge (Aka MicroFortnight)

[C-Worl]

Setup

6 Vanilla Townies

1 Mafia Goon

There will be one dayphase, 6 days long, with plurality voting in affect. Majority eliminations still apply.

If an elimination is reached before deadline, the result will be posted immediately (when the mod notices)
If the person eliminated was scum the game ends and town wins.
Otherwise, the day phase will proceed to deadline with no additional eliminations, allowing discussion to continue for the full 6 day deadline.
Once deadline is reached the thread will be locked.
If the Mafia Goon remains alive the remaining townies will have 24 hours to submit personal guesses for who the Goon is.

If any living players have guessed the goon at the end of the 24 hours, the Goon will be eliminated and town will win.

However the Goon has access to a Night Kill, and can eliminate one player during this 24 hour period, nullifying their guess in the process.

If the goon survives elimination and avoids being guessed by the surviving Vanilla Townies they will win.

[Gamma Emerald]

I don’t know if this works as well with a single scum
Otherwise the idea seems neat

[northsidegal]

So first of all setups with only 1 mafia are generally not considered to be games of mafia at all: they lack partner searching and arguably don't

really

represent an informed minority versus an uninformed majority. All players in this setup share the exact same motivation of not wanting to be eliminated or picked in order to win, and without a partner there's really very little to distinguish mafia from town.

The nightkill nullifying a guess eliminates the breaking strategy of all players just guessing the next player in the playerlist, and without that I don't

think

there's a breaking strategy, at least not one that's obvious on a first pass.

[Gamma Emerald]

Depending on when the kill resolves, that could still be done?

[Enchant]

I wouldn't play it.

[Something_Smart]

Is there a reason there aren't two scum with one of them fleeing, like the regular Fortnight? I agree with nsg that it would be a lot more interesting with more than one scum.

[C-Worl]

Is there a reason there aren't two scum with one of them fleeing, like the regular Fortnight? I agree with nsg that it would be a lot more interesting with more than one scum.

I wanted a smaller version. Since the Fortnight had 2 scum in 17 people, I thought 1 in 7 would be similar in difficulty and balance

[Enchant]

Town should agree on pairs before elim.


So after elimination, 3 pairs will "vote" for their nominee.
Obviously one of pair contains scum, but then pair has never chance to guess scum so killing remaining townie is pointless).
And shooting other pairs is meh. You kill one, other from pair still guesses you.


It's always covers 3 players, which grants 50% chance to guess.

[Enchant]

Basically mafia has to survive elim, and then survive basically coin flip.

Fun?

[Something_Smart]

I wanted a smaller version. Since the Fortnight had 2 scum in 17 people, I thought 1 in 7 would be similar in difficulty and balance

I mean, it's different because it's a team game and Fortnight is individual. Fortnight has an extremely low winrate for all players, so I'm not sure that similar difficulty is really what you want.

You could maybe have it be 6:2 or 5:2 but say that a scum lim D1 isn't a town win, maybe scum have to confirm X players as town like Anuket Topaz? Then the game wouldn't be that much easier than it is now (if anything it might be even harder because scum can choose who flees).

[Bingle]

Enchant is right that it’s a coin flip even if town doesn’t win D1, and 1/7 for a win before that which benefits town greatly.

Personally SS’s suggestion seems valid to me, but it’s probably within playable limits as a 2/7 with a ‘nightkill’ (remove a townie if scum lim, remove a scum if town lim). The extra scum here is actually protown, the extra townie in the endgame makes the kill mechanic matter because you have an odd number of living players, and your EV is slightly below half for town

[implosion]

I think much of the sense of difficulty in fortnite derives directly from the fact that, after a lim on town, townies become third parties. Only d1 scum lims end in a town win; most games will be won by a small handful of players, either 2-3 (because of the bribe) if scum win, and at least one if a townie guesses right but from the fortnite games I've seen there tends to not be a huge consensus on who to guess (and even if there was, it wouldn't always be right!) Pure EV-wise, in fortnite, if you are town, your odds of winning are (2/17) + (14/17) * (1/14) which is about 18% (it's 14/17 instead of 15/17 because if you're limmed, you lose), and if you are scum, your odds of winning are (15/17) * (14/15)^13 or about 36% (there are 15 townies, one gets limmed, one gets bribed, so you have to dodge 13 guesses). When you sign up for a fortnite game, in terms of raw EV, you have roughly a 1 in 5 shot of winning, compared to a 1 in 2 shot in a typical mafia game, and even though scum are twice as likely to win by this measure it probably sure doesn't feel that way when playing it. It's also why, of course, no one has any reason to think about breaking strategies when it comes to guessing.

I think that third-party-ification is pretty fundamental to fortnite for that reason. With just 1 scum it would have to work like regular fortnite if you do that, pretty much. Here's a spitball idea for what you could do with 2 scum: if town is limmed d1, then the limmed townie loses (actually, a cool thing you could do here - and maybe regular fortnite should do too, honestly - is give that limmed townie a single chance to privately guess the

exact

scumteam as a shoot-the-moon way of still getting to win), a scum flees, and remaining town become third parties who have to guess the non-fled scum. Maybe scum gets a bribe too. If scum is limmed d1, then all the remaining townies become third parties who get

two

guesses; if either is right, you win, and scum have to avoid being guessed by anyone (except maybe a bribe). Scum are punished by giving everyone two guesses plus also having to deal with an extra person making guesses, town are rewarded by getting two chances to guess who the remaining scum is (even though they are guessing from a pool with one extra person in it). So there should still be plenty of incentive to play cooperatively.

Assuming scum get a bribe in either case, here are some EV calcs at 2:5:

Town EV: (2/7) * (2/5) to win from limming scum + guessing, and (4/7) * (1/4) to win from limming a not-you townie + guessing, and for the hell of it (1/7) * (1/15) to shoot the moon after getting limmed d1 for a total of about 27% (26% without the moon shooting mechanic).
Scum EV: (2/7) * (3/5)^4 to win after a scum is limmed d1, and (5/7) * (4/5)^3 to win after a tonwie is limmed d1, gives about 40%.

I think that's about where the numbers should be for a mini-fortnite, i.e., not quite as harsh but still much harsher than a typical setup.