[REVIEW] Open Setup Reviews

[callforjudgement]

PGO = Paranoid Gun Owner = player who passively kills anyone who targets them.

[callforjudgement]

Turns out that the week or so of effort I put into breaking Picking Simplicity relied on the SK being bulletproof as well as inv-immune, and it isn't. It was a pity, too; it was quite a nice breaking strategy. (It might still be salveageable, but it seems much less likely to persuade the SK to go along with it than in the bulletproof version.) The strategy itself, incidentally, involved an outed cop with a hidden doctor and SK, with the SK's kills being directed by the town, the cop acting like a Kingmaker-style King that only nominated players who he didn't have results on for the lynch or SK kill, and people claiming before being lynched/SK killed, with VTs occasionally fakeclaiming Doctor with a small probability. The idea is that the cop tries to keep as many confirmed players alive as possible and confirm more, revealing all after the Doctor dies, at which point connection analysis should help catch all the remaining groupscum, and planning to eliminate all the groupscum before the SK gives the SK an advantage compared to town's typical strategy (hunting the SK first), which should be enough to persuade them to go along with it. With the SK not bulletproof, though, the SK's win chances under the strategy become much lower, to the extent that it would be hard to persuade them to play ball unless they were found early.

I wouldn't call inv-immune SK a "false result" for the Cop, incidentally. Innocent is the result that the cop probably wants on the SK in that sort of game, at least in the earlier stages, and he probably won't be alive later.

Like most breaking strategies involving claims, giving the Mafia a Roleblocker tends to be a simple way to break the strategy without changing the game too much in the case where people don't claim. I suppose the minimal change would be a Roleblocker who only blocked Cops, but that's not a trivially simple role…

[callforjudgement]

JK is more useful as an investigative than a protective role IMO, so it might make quite a difference to the playstyle. Not sure what it does to the balance, though.

[callforjudgement]

callforjudgement, are you an alt? Or did you play elsewhere or something?

I'm not an alt. I've played quite a bit of Mafia elsewhere, though.

EDIT: Re CES, I believe that hunting the SK first is considered the best town strategy in Picking Simplicity, based on the games of it that I've read. A hidden SK that isn't helping the town is incredibly dangerous; and the SK's optimal strategy is to align fully with the town once forced to claim (and to claim SK, rather than fake-claim).

[callforjudgement]

An SK who claims VT at L-1 is probably going to get lynched. Almost certainly, in fact. That's never good strategy as an SK.

An SK who claims SK, the town generally makes the following deal: "If you act exactly as we tell you every night, then if the game goes to a 1:1:1 endgame, we'll allow you to win over the Mafia." (With a bulletproof SK, a town win in 1:1:1 is impossible, but town gets to choose who wins.) "If you don't act exactly as we tell you, then if the game goes to a 1:1:1 endgame, we'll let the Mafia win." As town can't win in either scenario (again, if the SK is bulletproof; with a non-bulletproof SK they can use Prisoner's Gambit, no-lynching in the hope that scum will be prisoner's-dillemmaed into a crosskill), they have no reason not to agree to throw the game to a specific faction in advance in order to gain an advantage if the 1:1:1 endgame doesn't happen, and a known SK can only win via a 1:1:1, 2:1:1, or similar unwinnable-for-town endgame. 1:1:1 is also at least drawable with a non-bulletproof SK without Town's help (optimal scum strategy there is to lynch the townie then crosskill each other for the draw; the townie will be obvious as their only chance to win will be to try to force a no-lynch).

If the SK isn't bulletproof, it's possible that they'll consider taking the risk of claiming VT (at L-1 with a threatened hammer) and hoping they aren't lynched immediately, above taking the risk of allowing themselves to be directed by town and hoping for a 1:1:1 anyway; the first option potentially leads to a win, the second at best a draw. That's what I meant by saying that the SK would be unlikely to help town if not bulletproof. However, the reason a player is forced to claim is that they'll be hammered if they don't claim a power role (a player's best strategy if they

won't

be is to not claim at all), so the SK claiming VT seems a bit unlikely there, and in fact I think it's playing against their win condition. They should claim SK, and follow the town's direction until lylo (to avoid being lynched to avoid the erratic SK behaviour), and simply hope that the town's direction of them is bad enough to get to 1:1:1…

[callforjudgement]

That reminds me, I've been meaning to start hypocopping in Normals too. (More hypobreadcrumbing: "If I have a role who would want to make a breadcrumb, I breadcrumb <name of player>.", regardless of what my role is.) I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work just as well in a Normal as it would in an Open.

[callforjudgement]

So, I think I found a breaking strategy for scum in Scumhunters 8p. Day 1, one of the scum claims in-thread.

I know this seems ridiculous; but Lovers' Mafia (4:2 nightless white flag) is considered balanced; and if the claimed scum gets lynched (which they probably will be, because town has no motivation to claim scum), the game becomes 4:2 nightless white flag, but with the strongest townie missing (they get NKed), and weakest scum missing (because that's who the scumteam will sacrifice). So scum can drive the game to a scumsided setup without much of a problem. Also, scum claiming D1 means that there's no way you can use D1 play to tell who the scum are because everyone has the same information.

Town

might

be able to defeat this by lynching someone else instead, in which case the setup is effectively 5:2 nightless in which the town win outright on a correct lynch D1. I think this is also scumsided, but am less sure. Also note that the lynch threshold is higher by 1 day 1, due to the claimed scumbag (who is presumably trolling and refusing to vote, or self-voting, in order to not give away information). This probably doesn't really matter so much, though, unless the game goes to plurality lynch (in which case it definitely does).

[callforjudgement]

You could make both scum completely bulletproof, I guess. Crosskilling by mistake is bad enough as it is, and it'd enable one of them to learn the other's identity if there was a kill missing. But I'm still not sure I'd like the setup even with that.

[callforjudgement]

Anyway, I'm asking for opinion on this update to PYP, since Scott Brosius is up soon and wanting to run it.

Won't town just force a mass slotclaim? Especially for things like the cop slot (which scum cannot reasonably claim to have taken as anything other than a cop).

Also, is this 2:6 or 3:5? A 2:6 version seems townsided with all the power roles flying around, whereas 3:5 starts in mylo, potential lylo if scum have vig shots, and so town won't get to use them, so it's highly scumsided.

[callforjudgement]

Oh, right, I forgot it had VTs as well, typically I expect smalltown/pyp to be vanillaless.

[callforjudgement]

I think the chamber version is a definite improvement, but I don't think it fixes the fundamental issues with the setup. (As well as being even more demoralizing for scum.)

[callforjudgement]

So, I came to a realisation recently (while reviewing someone else's closed setup), and I think this is the appropriate thread.

Specifically, it's about mountainous; I've decided that 2:7 is probably more townsided than 2:11.

I know this seems absurd. But my reasoning goes like this: town early in the game have low information, and so are going to find it hard to catch scum, especially with only two targets among so many players. Meanwhile, the scum have all the information necessary to help them aim their kill from the start, assuming any of them know anything about meta (which is quite likely; many players do). So, going from 2:7 to 2:11, town gain the advantage of being significantly ahead if they hit scum in their first two lynches; but this is kind-of difficult to do. Meanwhile, scum gain the advantage of, if town miss twice, being able have killed two of the best townies, while meanwhile, town will have been aiming for the players who look scummiest, rather than the weakest players. I have a theory that the town's advantage if they guess right is smaller than their disadvantage if they guess wrong.

(FWIW, I don't feel that 2:7 mountainous is balanced. My guess is that the town win rate would be around 20 to 30 percent in practice, which is awful, but 2:10 and 2:11 seem worse.)

There is an obvious strategy for town to improve their win rate in 2:11, by the way, if this theory is correct: policy-lynch twice at the start of the game without attempting to scumhunt. (The lynches should be on players stronger as scum than town; this tends to describe VIs the most accurately, who typically do great as scum, which is just a nice side-effect.) Not only does this get rid of two of the players who would hurt town most, while scum are getting rid of the players who would help town most, but town has a couple of additional advantages here: first, they might actually hit scum (because with an honest mod, it's random what alignment the worst player will get), and second, scum don't have a free choice (they can't shoot their buddies, and may have to avoid always shooting the very best townie because of WIFOM) and town do.

Who knows, it might even make 2:11 actually fun to play…

[callforjudgement]

Wow, nobody's posted here since August?

Anyway, I'm planning to run Black Flag Nightless when my turn in the Open queue comes around, and we accidentally reviewed it in the other thread, rather than here. So if there are any Open reviewers who for some reason are watching this thread, but not the Open discussion thread, here's your chance to air your views!

[callforjudgement]

You post it in Open Setup Discussion, if it hasn't been posted there yet. Then you post it in this thread, and if nobody complains for a while, you take it into the queue. (In order to do this, you need enough modding experience to run a Theme, but in your case that shouldn't be a problem.)

[callforjudgement]

I guess it's up to the listmod. (In the past, it's been a week or so. Maybe two.)

[callforjudgement]

Btw, I'm pretty sure that if you have a targeted ability with no idea what it does, you should point it at a scumread. Not entirely sure if it should be aimed at your personal scumread, or the town's generic main scumread.

[callforjudgement]

This seemed balanced when I proposed it (months ago) in the Open Setup Discussion thread, so I'd like to have it properly reviewed here (if I have enough time – which isn't confirmed yet – and it's reviewed as OK I'll run it).

Vote For Town Mafia

• Nightless
  
• 6 Vanilla Townies
  
• 2 Mafia Goons
  
• Win conditions are
  reversed
  from normal:
  • Town wins if they lose control of the lynch vote (i.e. town = scum)
  • Scum wins if all scum are lynched
• Players cannot self-vote, except to hammer; self-hammering is legal

EV is 50% exactly, although the game plays out sufficiently differently from both a regular game and a Nightless that it possibly isn't that useful a figure.

[callforjudgement]

Yep! It's the opposite from the way Mafia normally works, but there's still a bunch of scumhunting going on. You find scum, then you lynch someone else.

[callforjudgement]

It's not the same as a Jester game, because in a Jester game, the Jesters are trying to look like scum in order to be lynched.

In this game, the scum are trying to look like town, because town lynch the towniest people rather than the scummiest people. If the town figure out who one of the scum is, they can simply refrain from lynching them (and, if they're correct, will win the game as a result).

[callforjudgement]

I'm fine. I was going to run it myself but am not sure I'll have the time, and someone else running it means that it gets run/tested and I don't even have to put in any work myself.

Based on discussion in this thread, I think you should make clear (in role PMs or flavour) that it's not a Jester game; each faction is trying to appear town, in the hope of being lynched.

I made a wiki page about the setup: Vote for Town Mafia. You can link that as your setup advertisement if you want.

[callforjudgement]

Setup is broken, assuming scum don't have a nightkill (there isn't one listed). The Roleblocker can't block the Healer, thus if the town massclaim and direct all actions then the scum will never have any ability to kill or lynch any town power role. Town forces an NL/NK cycle until everyone has been investigated. PEDIT: OK, I see you disclaimed this already; I was writing this post while you were writing yours.

Thus, I'm assuming you meant to give scum a nightkill. At 13:4 town would be relying a lot on their power roles to balance the game, either via claiming to confirm themself or more directly via stopping the scum poison. (Town are in huge trouble if they lose their Healer to an NK, or to a lesser extent, being roleblocked; before that point, directing the Poisoner makes it double day, but as soon as the scum get the ability to kill then town are behind.) Apart from the double day ability (which is genuinely powerful), Town pretty much have only the Variable Cop (who is an even-night-plus-confirmations Cop odd-night Rolecop) for power, with the other roles all cancelling each other out. That said, the Variable Cop is a very powerful role; the setup is clearly scumsided without it (as having any PRs revealed is devastating for town, so they can't really claim-to-confirm) but I'm not great at reviewing Larges and am not sure if this would balance it. The setup is at least clearly very highly swingy, possibly unacceptably so, because all three town PRs represent a major amount of power and the town will be set back a long way by losing any of them to factional nightkill or repeated roleblocks.

[callforjudgement]

"Town are in huge trouble in they lose their Healer to a NK" - how so? if they want to slow down the rate of death, they can just have the town poisoner holster. or is there another concern?

It gives an extra scum-controlled kill. Town-controlled kills aren't really harmful, even if they hit townies, because they have a chance of hitting scum and are likely to hit mislynch bait even if they don't (maybe saving town a mislynch, because they can use the lynch they would have used on the kill target on someone else instead). Scum-controlled kills have a tendency to hit supertownish players who were never going to be mislynched. So they rapidly reduce the timetable town have to win by without giving any advantage.

It wasn't written in role PM, but maf roleblocker cannot target the same player on consecutive nights (I think that's generally not a thing here; but it is where I play).

Oh, that changes things a lot. The main purpose of a roleblocker in the Opens we play here (and even many of the Closed games, although ofc mods like doing weird stuff in closed games) is to allow the Mafia to neutralize a claimed power role, thus deterring the power roles from claiming. If you have a non-consecutive-targeting roleblocker than they can't do that, so the roleblocker becomes a lot less useful. (That said, there are no roles in this setup that block the scum nightkill, so they could just shoot the suspected PR instead.) Probably it reduces the swing a bit to have the non-consecutive targeting, as scum get fewer opportunities to deal with the town PRs.

I don't think it's that swingy, honestly. You're getting a minimum of 3 game days. (A vanilla 17er at 13:4 has a minimum of 4 game days).

When town's power is mostly concentrated in a few power roles, like happens here, the potential swing is comparing the situation where they die to the situation where they survive. If the Variable Cop dies day 1 or night 1, town aren't getting any more clears/guilties (and anyone who clears themself via announcing their role will just get NKed, thus claiming to save yourself on day 1 is pretty much equivalent to being mislynched). If the Healer dies day 1 or night 1, scum get two kills a day from then on. If the Poisoner dies day 1 or night 1, town only get to kill half as many players. In all these situations, Town is much better off if a VT dies D1 and N1, and better off still if they kill Mafia with their
D1 lynch or N1 poison (or both!).

It's not so much about how fast the game ends, but about how much the early-game actions can change each faction's victory chances.

Also, you're assuming "ideal" play with town coming to a consensus on poison target. In my experience, you have individuals saying who they'd poison, and you have a poisoner who may just do whatever the f they want, because they trust their own reads over others'/consensus (paranoia that maf are influencing the target, and general hubris inherent in a good percentage of people playing this game).
It's rare that there are "true ideal team players" in a game to the point that ideal play can be employed.

I normally balance Opens on the assumption that town play optimally; they normally do. Sometimes they screw up and don't try to break the setup, but this usually leads to a justified scum victory. At least here, the Open queue tends to attract the sort of player who's willing to go along with a breaking strategy. (This may work differently on sites which only have one game running at a time, or don't have separate queues; there definitely are players who don't follow this sort of strategy, but at least over here, there are plenty of non-Open games they can play.)

I've never been in a setup which is known to have a town-controlled kill where the players don't at least try to direct it, and the player who controls the kill normally does go along with town's choices. (It's a different matter if the presence of the kill isn't known; the player who controls it will normally lone-wolf it rather than ask for help.)

I very much appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback! And would gladly take suggestions for adaptations.

As I said, I'm not an expert in balancing setups of this size, and there isn't anything obviously broken about it. I just suspect that the early days will have a much greater influence on the result than the later days.

[callforjudgement]

I'm pretty sure that's allowed. I'm not sure if there are any numbers where it works offhand, though (although if pressed, I'd start it at 2:9 in the understanding that it's likely going to be somewhat scumsided).

[callforjudgement]

I'm pretty sure that's allowed. I'm not sure if there are any numbers where it works offhand, though (although if pressed, I'd start it at 2:9 in the understanding that it's likely going to be somewhat scumsided).

What would make it scum-sided?

Basically it's that town don't have any information besides dayplay, and yet scum still have a kill. The vote-to-save mechanic prevents scum eliminating one player of town's choice, but they can still eliminate the second-strongest townie, so we'd expect the playerlist to become full of players with more scumsided playstyles over time (i.e. harder to read / worse at scumhunting / more commonly mislynched). Numbers where this sort of setup are mathematically balanced are completely absurd in terms of town:scum ratio, and lead to a very demoralising game in which town get a huge number of mislynches and are expected to use most or all of them (which means that much of the game will be spent making no real progress for either faction), and so smaller numbers are likely to lead to a better game, even though you have to acknowledge that scum will probably win most of the time.

[callforjudgement]

Choosing a winner beforehand is the least screwy option.

Incidentally, in a 1:1:1, the roles of town and scum are basically reversed; the townie knows who all the scum are, but the scum don't. This alone is enough to make the endgame fairly screwy.

[callforjudgement]

Please review...

Hollywood Mafia 13p

10v3
x4 celebrity
x6 VT

x1 mafia celebrity
x2 mafia goon

Celebrity:

Your celebrity status is confirmed at the start of the game

For balance purposes. The thread may have useful information for starting points on game problems and EV calculation.

This is mostly being discussed in the setup's own thread, but I believe it's scumsided as written.

[callforjudgement]

Sheriff sounds like a terrible role to play. You could at least let them talk in the neighbourhoods.

I also believe that this isn't nearly enough town power to balance a 13:4, given that town have none of the usual Open advantages (because role and alignment are effectively randomized separately, except in the Sheriff's case, setup knowledge isn't very useful to figure out who's on which team).

[callforjudgement]

This is still massively scumsided. It's clearly much more scumsided than 13:4 Double Day with an innocent child is. Double Day is normally run at 13:

3

, i.e. starting town a full scum lynch ahead. So this is much more scumsided than a setup that's much more scumsided than one of our approved Opens.

You're basically suffering from a near-total lack of town power. The Sheriff role simply is not powerful enough.

[callforjudgement]

Add an Innocent Child who cannot be killed normally until mylo to a regular setup with no killing/protective roles and an odd player count, and unless it's a strong player, you'll actually have very little balance impact whatsoever. It's nice in terms of helping the dayplay but it doesn't change any of the nightplay dynamics.

This isn't exactly the same, but the general principles are similar.

[callforjudgement]

The Elite Bodyguard effect you have genuinely is powerful, but it's not enough to balance a setup by itself. (Also, the chances that it hits on any given night are fairly small, especially when scum know it exists.)

[callforjudgement]

Double Day is cheating because it throws the even/odd maths off :-) I get the point that this setup is more similar to Double Day than a normal Day Start, but the unpredictable nature of the kills is going to throw even/odd (or in the case of Double Day, modulo-3) maths off in its own right.

For a more Normal comparison, 2:7:1 Day Start (where the 1 is an Innocent Child) has an EV of 29.8%, whereas 2:7 Day Start has an EV of… 29.8%. I think this correspondence holds for all Day Start Vanilla setups, where by "Day Start" I mean a normal day/night setup with no Double Day or the like. (Note that by "add" I mean literally adding the IC to the setup, not converting a VT into an IC.)

This setup's going to end up somewhere between the Day Start version and the Double Day version, and it's hard to predict exactly how the parity will work out due to all the partially-effective kills. The effective BP IC is going to help some amount between "not at all" and "fairly useful", but it's going to be hard to tell exactly how much.

[callforjudgement]

It's not broken, just unbalanced.

[callforjudgement]

What's the day/night cycle like? In particular, how does the timing work on Desperado shots; if a player gets the role replicated onto them during the Day, can they shoot immediately that Day? If a player shoots scum, can they shoot again that Day or do they have to wait for night first?

The setup reminds me somewhat of Popcorn Mafia. The numbers you need will depend on the exact behaviour of the day/night mechanics.

[callforjudgement]

OK, so this is basically equivalent to Popcorn Mafia except that after hitting scum, town get a chance to make a regular lynch in addition to the Desperado kills – but that if scum hit the Desperado overNight, the setup becomes vanilla. As such, it seems likely to be more townsided than but swingier than the original; I think regular Popcorn Mafia would probably be more fun.

[callforjudgement]

I'm considering running Lynchpin with 9 townies and 3 scum.

As this has more than 9 players, and it hasn't been run at these numbers before, it needs approval. Does anyone have objections to putting it in the queue?

[callforjudgement]

There's a breaking strategy for town in Enter's setup.

First off, the Activators claim. As they're bulletproof, they have no reason not to. This removes them from the lynch pool.
Next, players, including Activators, unofficially vote (using FoSes or whatever) on a non-Activator player they believe is town. Then all the Activators choose that player as the player to activate.
Next, players, including Activators, unofficially vote (using FoSes or whatever) on a non-Activator player they believe is scum. The Activated player is forced to vote for that player, on pain of outing themself as scum. Likewise, if scum kill, this will out them as scum.
If an Activated player doesn't violate the breaking strategy, they should be chosen as the Activated player the following day, unless they're the desired lynch for the day.

Despite all that, EV is only 31.97%, because if scum is chosen on the first vote, their optimal strategy is to lynch the wrong player and nightkill another, even though they'll be outed in the process. Jingle wasn't kidding when he said extra kills were hard to balance.

For what it's worth, if you take the breaking strategy into account, the number of Activators is irrelevant, and the following ratios of homies:scum appear to be balanced (assuming I haven't made a mistake in the EV calculations or missed a better breaking strategy): 2:1; 3:2; 5:3; 7:4; 9:5. I'm not sure that the game would be much fun to play when broken, though.

[callforjudgement]

Does this mean that they're aware of which actions are being sent? Because otherwise, two of them could submit the same target coincidentally.

With multiple different activations forced, the analysis is similar to the one I just did, but much more scumsided as preventing the scum kill will be almost impossible. So you'd need a much larger homies:scum ratio than you have there. The setup's a bit more townsided than an all-vanilla game is, but I'd expect the balance curve to have the same shape, just with different numbers, meaning that the number of homies needed to balance three scum is probably in the double digits. (Note that scum would probably have to strategically miss kills every now and then to avoid confirming all the activated players as town; the setup would end up fairly similar to Resistance.)

[callforjudgement]

EV-calculating this is version of the setup is basically impossible because it contains WIFOM (in whether scum kill when they have the opportunity).

WIFOM is hard enough to follow when you're just thinking about it qualitatively; trying to factor it into an EV calculation causes huge complexities even in the most trivial cases.

[callforjudgement]

AFAICT, town have no incentive not to lynch the jesters, and nor do the Mafia. So why don't the jesters just claim and allow town to lynch them?

Also, the town/mafia balance is off, it's scumsided at 4:2 nightless.

[callforjudgement]

Nightless games tend to win above EV, but we don't need theoretical calculations in this case: we have lots of actual results for 4:2 Nightless White Flag. Scum have won over 68% of the time, so without the White Flag modifier, town have very little chance.

[callforjudgement]

Simplest boost is a fifth townie. That shouldn't have a noticeable impact on the Jesters.

[callforjudgement]

I think it's broken via leashing most players to not act. Having, say, 3 or 4 players publicly assigned to motion-detection every day would give you a huge amount of investigative information, with no counterplay available to the scum (if the fruit vendor claims, false positives are impossible, so every "motion" result creates a 1v1 and every "no motion" result sets up a "detector is scum and/or target is town" relationship).

[callforjudgement]

Send for Help

• 7 Town, 3 Mafia, no power roles
  
• No normal lynching or nightkills. Instead, each Day, the players vote for one player to "send for help". That player leaves the game (but continues to win/lose as a member of their faction). There are no Nights.
  
• Town win if 4 Town players are sent for help.
  
• Mafia win if 2 Mafia players are sent for help.

This is basically just Black Flag Nightless with reversed wincons. I'm really excited by this combination: the Flag mechanic seems to fix the worst problem with the Vote For Town mechanic, and vice versa (and Vote For Town is one of my favourite setups to play as it is).

Are there any big issues with this setup that I'm missing?

[callforjudgement]

I was intending to have flips as normal. (You could run it as flipless if you wanted a flipless game, but I don't see any reason to.)

[callforjudgement]

What are the hypothetical win rates if all lynches were random?

50%. The easy way to see this is to imagine that you continue lynching random players even after the game's over. Then you have 10 lynches, and each player is equally likely to be lynched in any of the 10 "lynch slots".

If you have two scum in the first half, scum win. If you have two scum in the second half, town win. By symmetry, those two possibilities are equally likely, so it's 50% likely for scum to win.

FWIW, Vote For Town (which is also nightless and reversed-wincon) has a 50% EV and, so far, a 50% practical win rate, although the sample size is very small. I suspect that reversed-wincon Nightless games have a much lower town win rate than a typical Nightless.

[callforjudgement]

It's maybe worth pointing out that this setup has a bizarre possible anomaly: it's possible for a Mafiosi to decide that it's the best play to lolhammer a partner to go off for help without any plan whatsoever of convincing the town it was a town lolhammer. And then you have an evil child hanging around the setup which is weird.

I think the correct fix to this is to allow lynches (that don't advance town's wincon) in addition to sending players for help. It'll normally be a bad option, but it'll be good for getting rid of guilty children and the like. (I agree that in a reverse flag setup, exposing yourself as scum can occasionally be good play, although my guess is that it won't be most of the time.)

[callforjudgement]

Even with no-lynching at night effectively banned, I can't see any reason why the town wouldn't just direct the night vote onto a particular player, outnumbering the scum + their redirects in the process. Just like most scumsided voting mechanics, town can get back to regular voting mechanics via pseudovoting and then all massively piling on the same player.

[callforjudgement]

Assuming Open (given the thread it's in), it isn't obviously broken (and I really like the choice of scum roles). I'm not sure whether it's going to be win-loss balanced (large mostly-vanilla Opens are a genre that we don't have much data on yet, and appear to have substantially different win rates on different sites), but presumably if it isn't, it'd be fairly easy to tweak to balance it (e.g. if it's scumsided, you could add a VT, or make the Vigilante Vengeful, or the like). One issue is that it'll be hard to collect much data on the balance because it'll depend a lot on how skilled a player the Vig is.

[callforjudgement]

The way to turn a vig into a lower agency role is have it as a "Double Day Enabler"

That would cause notable changes to the balance of the setup, though, because a town vig can "counterclaim with a bullet"; if scum claims your role, you just shoot them, keeping your identity hidden. If you're a double-day enabler and scum claims your role, then you have to either stay quiet or counterclaim publicly.

[callforjudgement]

What matters for strategy in that setup is not so much the specific player you place the trapdoor under, as the concentration of town in that area of the playerlist (therefore, the "can't choose the same person twice in a row" doesn't have a huge balance impact, because placing it next door won't usually make much of a difference). There's likely to be a lot of swing-from-randomness because the scum have a clear advantage if they happen to be bunched up in the playerlist (repeatedly trapdoor the player opposite, and town need to play almost perfectly to win).

It's hard to know exactly where the balance lies. For full flexibility in voting, town would need 5+4+4+3+3+2+2+1 = 24 moves, and giving them half that initially seemed about right in terms of making the mechanic relevant, but in practice town may well not run out at all (especially as the game won't necessarily reach a 3p ending); the average movement is going to be less than half the maximum possible movement, I think. Perhaps the game would benefit from an additional townie, making the mechanic more relevant and probably helping out with win/loss balance too (it feels a little scumsided just in terms of the 7:3 nightless numbers, given the restrictions on voting).

I strongly suspect, though, that the Mafia's best play is to aim at the same area of the playerlist continuously all game, which might rather negate the idea you had for the mechanic. That means that players at the opposite end of the playerlist will always be expensive to vote for (less so late, but still more than they could be). Moving it around just gives town the opportunity to optimize their move expenditure by waiting for a player to be near the trapdoor before removing them.

[callforjudgement]

It's slightly more townsided than a 15:5 vengescum setup would be. mith puts the balance of the vengescum version at 45.98%. As a Nightless, it would be 50%. So the EV is clearly between those two values.

I think that, given the mechanics, the EV should be a bit lower than that to produce a balanced setup. Maybe 13:5 is about right. (That said, I'm less good at balancing Larges than Minis.) Perhaps 14:5 would be better in order to avoid the potential for screwy endgames (you probably don't want a player count divisible by 3).

[callforjudgement]

Giving scum a dayvig has a larger balance impact than might be expected. On the other hand, in this setup, that might be a good thing, making it easier to get the right balance from a 15:5. I think it might be worth a try.

[callforjudgement]

5:1 night start (i.e. 6:1 with a scum kill) with a Mason pair and N0 vig shot is exceedingly townsided. As a consequence, if scum is eliminated day 1, they will recruit their buddy (and thus themself) to the town in order to try to maintain some sort of hope of winning.

A consequence of this is that town would prefer to eliminate a townie on day 1 than to eliminate scum (the setup ends up the same in either case, except that eliminating a townie gives you an extra Mason and eliminating scum gives you an extra VT), which is weird (especially in a setup where you're aiming for scum the rest of the days, so don't want to get rid of anyone who's

too

townish). In particular, I'm pretty sure that the optimal D1 strategy is to policy-eliminate the person with the most anti-town playstyle, without any discussion (to make it harder for the scum to aim their kill).

This probably isn't a desirable way to start off the setup.