Ethics?: Trusting the Mod

[Fuldu]

Maybe I'm being dense here, but this death miller notion actually strikes me pretty hard as a pointless role. I honestly can't imagine why I would want to put one in a setup, so the fact that it also seems unethical is somewhat beside the point. But as a general rule, roles and mechanisms that turn the mod into a participant rather than an arbiter seem dangerous. A common refrain in mafia games is not to try to outguess the mod, and though I'm guilty of it on occasion, I think it's generally a good suggestion. Here, you're creating a situation in which outguessing the mod is not only useful, but practically required. And I guess that doesn't really sit well with me.

[Fuldu]

But as a general rule, roles and mechanisms that turn the mod into a participant rather than an arbiter seem dangerous.

Worse than the mod registering an alt and playing in the game himself as a neutral (ie, no wincon) character? I was considering doing that once...

...That was a long time ago.

No, I suppose that would be worse. Urgh. The way DP handled mod-as-participant in DP13 worked, mostly, because he had absolutely no volition. He did what the course of the day told him to do, and so was more of a mechanism than a player. But anything that puts the mod in the position to play kingmaker, whether on Day One or Day Five, is bad, bad, bad.

[Fuldu]

I think you people will like my bastard mod mafia And I WILL llie to you, shamelessly

Heh, and I've just been thinking how hypocritical I'm being with all this moralizing when Worst Role Ever Mafia broke a number of these ethical guidelines. Not this one, so much, as I don't believe I ever lied to the players, but from some of the other threads. I nearly had to change the setup midway through the game (fortunately, the player to whom that would have applied was lynched), I gave several players roles in which I told them to do something and then punished them for it, and there were a couple of instances of poorly-defined information leading players to draw game-losing bad conclusions.

[Fuldu]

And this drives us a bit further off topic, but if I flip a coin for every death and mark the deceased as town if it comes up heads and scum if it comes up tails, you'll also never be certain 'til the game's over. That doesn't mean it's a good mechanism.

All this role does, that I can see, is introduce additional noise into the system, which only serves to make the game less about skill and more about the vagaries of chance. If players don't know whether the deceased was pro-town or not, they can't use that to interpret the voting record. The more and more that the available information is useless, the more that it comes down to which roles are lucky in their targeting and whose personalities are more forceful.