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[Leafsnail]

The Time of Your Life

Every player in the game starts with a timer set to a particular number - that timer represents the time you have left.  At the end of every day or night phase, all players have the number on their timer reduced by 1.  If a player's timer is on 0 at the end of a phase, they die.

Most of the timers start with reasonably high values but your abilities will generally reduce the amount of time you have left.  You have to choose between a useful action you can use now or the ability to stay in this world longer.

The number on your timer you get represents a time limit, not a guarantee - you can still die in the normal ways regardless of how high your number is (for instance, if your timer reads "12" and you are lynched, you still die).

The setup would be closed but not at all bastard (everything in your role pm is true, no roles that seriously mislead the town and nothing wildly different from other mafia games bar the timer stuff).

[Mr.Person]

I think you'd be better off just giving everyone 1-shot powers frankly. Either you make the timers too generous and thus irrelevant, or you make them too stringy and you have what is effectively a bunch of 1- or 2-shot powers.

[Leafsnail]

Or you get the balance right and have it in the middle...?

[Mr.Person]

There is no middle ground. Think of it this way, to live through to D4, you need 6 ticks right there just to get that far, not even counting abilities. So let's assume everyone gets at least 6 ticks to live. If we throw in a single power that uses one single tick to activate, that's a two-shot. Using it once drops you to living til N3, so you might as well use it twice and live through D3 since living through til N3 is pretty much irrelevant to the outcome of the game. You'll die before the next lynch and the game is decided by lynches, not night abilities.

The problem is that most games will not last past D4. The optimal strategy is spam all your abilities beforehand so the game won't get that far. But if you don't give anyone the ability to live past D4 and the game does get that far, everyone dies and gets pissed off.

I can see it working with the right set of roles starting with one that gives out extra time, a mafia role (or even a cut cloth replacement for their kill) that steals time, ect ect. But this all has to be done correctly and you have to be aware of how long an average game will last. You then have to think of situations where the time limit can be exceeded and try to get rid of as many of those scenarios as possible.

Another issue I just realized, players having to juggle how much time they have left along with how much time they might need results in complex decision making to figure out if they can use a role power once or twice. Since it's clearly never correct to hold back all of your time, the choice is do you hold back some of your time or most of your time? Or none of it, if you've got a sweet power like vigging, but whatever, I digress. Here's a hint, the correct choice is to only hold back some time unless your power is terrible, then hold all your time to try to get to lylo.

[Leafsnail]

I was thinking you could have multiple powers, or powers which you can invest X points in (with the reward from the power being proportional to the amount you put in).  I'd also say that people would start with different amounts of time, and most players would probably use up at least some of it.

You then have to think of situations where the time limit can be exceeded and try to get rid of as many of those scenarios as possible.

Well, that's surely the risk you're running when you burn all your time early - that your limit will be exceeded and you'll die before the enemy.  If I make it so that isn't a possibility then yes, you might as well just fire off all your powers.

[Mephansteras]

You know what would be a cool theme for that? Netrunner.

[Mr.Person]

No no, I meant avoid scenarios where the town kills itself off through an overabundance of protections and RB's. I think avoiding making the mafia's optimal strategy "do nothing so they all die at once" would be good too, but hey, you do whatever. Just make sure that you tell the mafia to refrain from killing if you want them to do so since they may not think of the strategy on their own.

Just be aware that the town's optimal strategy is probably to instantly MC the time they all have left and then go from there.  Mostly this is just to avoid lynching people with short amounts of time left and just let time run its course for those people.

And I have been oh so very wrong about how fun certain setups would and wouldn't be in the past. Hell I'd probably join it, I just think the whole system is very convoluted and somewhat unnecessary. There's already a time limit in the game in the form of the mafiakill, I'm just not seeing what adding a second clock adds to the game. But all that does not mean the game would be unfun, just not as fun as it could of been.

[Leafsnail]

No no, I meant avoid scenarios where the town kills itself off through an overabundance of protections and RB's. I think avoiding making the mafia's optimal strategy "do nothing so they all die at once" would be good too, but hey, you do whatever. Just make sure that you tell the mafia to refrain from killing if you want them to do so since they may not think of the strategy on their own.

They wouldn't all die at once since they all have differently lengthed clocks.  Sitting there doing nothing as mafia would have advantages, but also disadvantages in that you'd be a lot weaker PR wise than you could be (so while the town is firing off inspects, protects and possibly kills you're not responding with protections, unblockable kills or inspection misleading abilities).  It's kindof about speed vs endurance.

Just be aware that the town's optimal strategy is probably to instantly MC the time they all have left and then go from there.  Mostly this is just to avoid lynching people with short amounts of time left and just let time run its course for those people.

If you do that, then yes, the mafia can kill the people with long clocks and wait out the people with short clocks (in the same way if you claim roles they can kill all the good ones).  Solution: don't massclaim times.

There's already a time limit in the game in the form of the mafiakill, I'm just not seeing what adding a second clock adds to the game.

Well, it's a time limit for each individual player which fuels their abilities (I was thinking of just having a "mana pool" type arrangement, but I feel this way there's more of a potential consequence for overdoing it).  In this there'd be a tactical choice about whether you can afford to use your ability or not and to what extent, wheras in a one shot game the tactic would generally be to fire it night one and hope for the best.

[Mr.Person]

No, you're not getting it. The individual player clocks are irrelevant, the only clock that matters is the town's. Specifically, the point where enough clocks run out that the town has lost. Sure, there might be 3 or 4 townies running around, but if there's 3 or 4 mafia too, then who cares how much time the townies have left?

So if you're a townie, you always spam abilities if you have more time than the game will last. That's obvious and I'm hoping we all knew that. But you see, if you're not surviving to the end of the game anyways, you might as well spam off all your abilities ASAP. By lasting longer you're only delaying the inevitable. Breaking lylo on D6 and breaking lylo on D4 are the same loss, except in one case you have all these abilities used that might of helped you catch a scum. Point is, there's simply no room between "will die after the game ends so it's irrelevant" and "dies before game ends, breaking lylo and losing the game for the town, game ends with a loss". Well, I guess if a townie and mafia player ran out of time at the same time things would be fine, but then you have to make sure that both the sacrificial lambs have a purpose, had fun, and contributed to their team somehow.

If MCing time left screws over the town, statistically, the town would wind up randomly losing more games than I would consider acceptable to lose via random chance. If there's even two townies in a 13p game with gimped timers that run out before MC, that's borderline too many. Worst case is running out ON lylo since then the town loses no matter what it does.

[Dariush]

What do you think, guys, would the setup work if we have a scum team who don't know each other's identity and may only communicate by PMing the mod with a message (possibly with a limit of 2-3 messages per person per day) they want to send who then removes all the verbal tics, typical grammatical errors and such from the message and relays it to the other scum (obviously, the message can't contain any revealing information), while there's a couple of roles who can work on this mechanic (blatantly listening on the scumteam plans, two people thinking they're scum but only being able to speak between themselves, blocking target player from sending and receiving messages, etc.)?

Woah, I fit all that into one sentence and it's even intelligible. I really need to sleep more.

[webadict]

What do you think, guys, would the setup work if we have a scum team who don't know each other's identity and may only communicate by PMing the mod with a message (possibly with a limit of 2-3 messages per person per day) they want to send who then removes all the verbal tics, typical grammatical errors and such from the message and relays it to the other scum (obviously, the message can't contain any revealing information), while there's a couple of roles who can work on this mechanic (blatantly listening on the scumteam plans, two people thinking they're scum but only being able to speak between themselves, blocking target player from sending and receiving messages, etc.)?

Woah, I fit all that into one sentence and it's even intelligible. I really need to sleep more.

Several problems with that:
1) No scumteam coordinaton. It loses its informed minority vs. uninformed majority. You can't play as a team.
2) Listening in on the scumteam is BAD. Scumkills would be frustrating to pick, and anyone listening could eventually deduce players, especially since they don't know who's on their team. A good example of why this is bad is the Paranormal game with a PM-reading Watcher.
3) It's a lot of unnecessary work. There's a reason we use Quicktopic. It's because we like not finding 20 new PMs every day. Not only that, but you're also relaying these message unnecessarily. Doing secret messages is fun, but not with the scum team.

[Dariush]

Well, crap. Okay, a modification: what if scumteam has a QT as normal, but there's a pro-town role who can also read it? It would be in the scum's interest to hide their own identities, plus there would be much fakeclaiming awesomeness. And after this agent is killed, it would be safe for the scum to reveal themselves in QT.

[webadict]

Well, crap. Okay, a modification: what if scumteam has a QT as normal, but there's a pro-town role who can also read it? It would be in the scum's interest to hide their own identities, plus there would be much fakeclaiming awesomeness. And after this agent is killed, it would be safe for the scum to reveal themselves in QT.

This one still has all the faults of issue 1 and 2. What happens is that the scumteam simply doesn't post in it. It might as well be a bunch of sks working together.

[IronyOwl]

It's in the planning stages.

This means it's going to be ridiculous, I hope. Maybe three separate, overlapping realities, each with its own rules and consequences?! Traverse reality, a simulation, and the dream world in a roving quest to defeat your adversaries on all fronts!!!

Maybe?

This has continued to seem like more of a good idea the longer I think about it. I was just joking at first!

Anyway, Phase Mafia. There's three phases/worlds/designations, and different abilities interact with and affect different phases or qualities thereof differently or at all. At its most basic, a Phase 1 Nightkill might not affect a Phase 2 Player, for instance.

What phases a player or ability belongs to could get more complex, but something similar to Paranormal's set of Goals could work, in that it's a combination of what a player is and what they do that night. So for instance, a player could, by default, belong to Phase 1, but when using a Phase 2 Nightkill, switch over to and count as Phase 2. Whether they'd go back to being Phase 1 when not using said ability is another matter, and might vary between players/abilities.

Ideally, the end result is a sort of cat and mouse game where players have to balance doing what they want to do with being where they want to be. This would be more obvious if the phases had actual effects associated with them- immune to nightkills, can't be lynched, etc- but so long as there was some way to estimate the effects (knowing killing roles are "more common" in a given phase, for instance) it could have more substance than just randomly hopping around.

As an extreme variant, these things could be changeable or ever-changing, maybe even structured as a card game rather than being run with preset roles.

[Leafsnail]

As an extreme variant, these things could be changeable or ever-changing, maybe even structured as a card game rather than being run with preset roles.

Suddenly... Bring Your Own Cards Mafia comes into my mind.