I was idly considering a multiball setup based on Chosen Mafia. I've just thrown this together without thinking it through at all.
Upon writing this setup out, I've already got two obvious questions and one less obvious one:
Does anyone actually want to play this?
What's the correct value of T?
How can the mod select Chosen and Fated Townies fairly? (Or, for the mathematically inclined, how do we uniformly choose disjoint size-two subsets of {1,...,T-1} and {2,...T}?)
I think this is likely to play out just like a regular multiball game, except with even higher chances for crosskills.
As scum, leading a lynch on a chosen/fated townie paints a huge target on your back, and the odds of two chosens of one type surviving to endgame are very slim.
The best strategy is probably to just ignore the chosens but use the knowledge that they are town to help guide your kills (making crosskilling easier), and hope that one of them is either lynched or killed by the other scumteam.
Now, an idea might be to make one set of chosen townies that is common for both scumteams. That would eliminate one of the problems, namely the chance of a chosen being killed by the non-corresponding scumteam.
Hmm. If both factions share a group of Chosen, they may be able to identify one another by looking for people casting shade on Chosen, which would up the town win rate through increased crosskills.
No idea if it's balanced (it probably isn't, to be fair), but it's so screwy that it likely doesn't matter. Normally, a game's balance doesn't matter if it's heavily swingy (likewise, its swing doesn't matter if it's heavily skewed, its skew doesn't matter if it has extreme kurtosis…); in this case, the game's so screwy that I think all of balance, swing, skew, and kurtosis go out of the window. It might be worth trying to rework into a Mish Mash game, perhaps?
I think the chosen should be shared. So wolves and mafia submit a list of no gos, then two who are outside each list are chosen, and scum factions CANNOT kill any chosen at night while both survive.
http://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Mhsmith0
Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
I like the idea of scum working together to eliminate a set of townies. 3 chosen would be perfect. Scum have to work together to get at least two lynched. 2:2:3:5 as suggested by gamma emereld seems great.
Only two chosen is extremely easy for 4 scum to eliminate one of. When they need to get rid of twk, it's much more of a challenge.
Bumping this old thread to see if there's any more feedback on the 2:2:3:5 variant; if it's well-received I might try running it.
“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who say, ‘There are two kinds of people in this world: those who say there are two kinds of people in this world,
I'm not a huge fan of the near-Prisoner's Dilemma here. (It's in both scumteams' interests to try to get the other team to take out the Chosen, and look scummier for doing so. But if neither team does, they'll both lose, unless town mistakenly does it for them.)
Scum should be trying to cross-kill at night until two Chosen are lynched (hitting a VT is pretty much the worst possible option for them, maybe worse than a no-kill). So at least that removes one common bit of screwiness from multiball.
I'm slightly worried that optimal town strategy may be to act scummy in the hope of being nightkilled (although obviously that backfires if you're actually Chosen, so it probably isn't). It's rare to have a setup in which the death of VTs has a decent chance of benefitting town!
Bumping one more time since I never got much commentary on this variant; CFJ's comments were good but more would have been nice. (Contrary to them, though, I sort of like Prisoner's Dilemma-esque mechanics.)
Would anyone be interested in playing it?
Does anyone have an opinion on the balance?
“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who say, ‘There are two kinds of people in this world: those who say there are two kinds of people in this world,