Wingdings

[Ümläüt]

TBH, I even ban breadcrumbing in the games I mod.

Basically, if a pair of players doesn't have daytalk, it should be impossible for them to communicate during the day without the other players knowing what is being communicated. The public thread is not the place to exchange private info. Cryptography, invisible text, unreadable fonts and breadcrumbing all allow players to put information in the thread without the other players having clear access to it. They allow players to daytalk who should not have that ability, and are therefore banned in my games.

I wonder how far this goes. What about 'codes' in the most basic sense, e.g. saying in advance in the private thread that "If I call you Michel I'm just acting, but if I call you MS I'm really trying to tell you something"? Is this still against your rules?

[Ümläüt]

As an example: In a game I played a couple of years ago, I was a mafia role cop, and had claimed role cop publicly. I knew I was going to claim a fake guilty on a player, and I knew there was a significant risk of that play backfiring. So I decided a simple rule with my mafia partners: If my investigation that night was vanilla, I would start my first post that day with a vote. If my investigation showed powerrole, I would end my first post with a vote instead. There is simply no way for town to spot that difference. "Vote [player], I have a guilty" and "I have a guilty, therefore Vote [player]" are both completely logical ways to write such a post. Yet my scumpartners would get to know the most crucial part of my investigation. That is the equivalent of a private exchange of information.

The thing for me is that there's nothing at all 'unrealistic' about this exchange of information. It's the sort of thing anyone could set up in real life and then use in real life. According to legend, actual mafiosi introduce new people as either "a friend of ours" or "a friend of mine" depending on whether they're in the loop or not. When they are arrested and charged, the prosecutor doesn't add "And furthermore he used a secret code, which is

totally cheating, you guys.

"

I realize Mafia is not exactly a simulation of reality, but somehow this point still seems relevant.