The Syndicate

Spacedaisy wrote: ↑Sat Dec 05, 2020 3:44 pm As a side note, I would encourage you all to remember that a host is not an impartial person in a game. They have created the game, they are invested in it. Game facilitators (or game mods as they are still called sometimes) are there for both player disputes and player/host disputes. If you believe a rule in place breaks the game, or a lack of a rules in place breaks a game, Or that a host action is breaking the game, talk to the facilitator. They absolutely are an impartial person. It is easier for them to look at the whole situation and diplomatically discuss it with a host if they think there might be a problem. If a player takes this on, there are emotions involved on both sides. The facilitators are an excellent tool for resolving all kinds of problems and they have no stake in the game so they will be fair and do everything they can to make the game a success and ensure everyone has a fun experience.

This is a moderator task that doesn't get touched on much. Usually when we introduce ourselves as the mod for a game, we highlight emotional conflicts.

G-Man wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 6:51 pm I post a variation of the following in every game that I host. Given this thread’s focus, I’d like some feedback on it after all these years. What’s good about it? What’s bad about it? What’s unnecessary? What content does this mafia dinosaur need to change or update?

Spoiler: show

G-Man wrote: ↑Sun May 31, 2020 8:46 pm RULES AND WHATNOT

This partially-open setup game is for 15 players. As a Heist, there are only three power roles in the game. I will be using the following standard G-Man Game matrix:

	1	2	3
A	LOL	OMG	WTF
B	FFS	Free Space	JFC
C	GTFO	YCBS	STFU

Gameplay
1) Days are 48 hours long. I will do everything in my power to keep poll deadlines consistent.
2) Nights are 24 hours long.
3) Only those players who have BTSC may communicate with each other outside of the game thread but ONLY in designated BTSC threads or chat rooms. For everyone else, no game-related discussion is permitted outside the game thread.
4) Votes in the poll are the only votes that count. It's helpful but not mandatory that you declare your vote in the thread in a way that stands out to your peers and the host.
5) All votes are changeable all the way up to the deadline.
6) A tied lynch will result in no lynch. Votes matter. (This is a politics game for goodness' sake!) There will be no coin flips to determine lynch results.
7) Standard alignment wincons are in effect unless otherwise stated.
8) Dead is dead; you don't get to come back from that. Dead players are stripped of their BTSC rights.
9) Roles will be revealed upon death.
10) Additional gameplay elements will be added/revealed on an as-needed basis.
11) A tied night poll will result in no doors being unlocked and no letters being revealed.


Rules
1) Respect your fellow players, your host, and your Facilitator/MOD.
1a) Don't be an asshat.
1b) Don't get butthurt.
2) If you feel like another player is out of line or making/taking things personal/ly, contact the Facilitator/MOD, Dunya.
3) No BTSC regarding the game outside of the game thread(s). Players are told in their rolecard if they have BTSC. If you don't have it, don't engage in it. Violating this rule will result in a modkill.
4) No editing or deleting posts.
5) Self-voting is prohibited.
6) Double-targeting is prohibited.
7) Info-dumping is allowed, but do so at your own risk. Sharing is caring, but it can also get you killed.
8) Off-topic posts should be in OT Green.
9) Dead players are to post in Dead Red.
10) Non-Players should post in Non-Player Blue.
11) This is the host's color. Do not post in this color.
12) Participation is polite to everyone involved. If I feel you may not be paying attention to the game, I will reach out to you. Replacements and modkills may be employed if necessary. If you sign up, please play. If you can't play, request replacement.
13) Additional rules will be added/revealed on an as-needed basis.

I believe I copy & pasted a version of your rules into the first game I hosted here. I think Rule #13 is a good way to cover unforeseen events and I've added something like it to games in the past as well. You can't foresee everything that will happen during a game, so being able to adjust on the fly is useful.

This thread is a Rule #13 for the entire site.

if you're not all thrilled by the idea of an entire set of guidelines written in that style then i can't help you.

G-Man wrote: ↑Sat Dec 05, 2020 9:27 am Would there be any benefit to send game rules to players with their role cards? Or perhaps even send the game rules first and require a response before following up with their role card?

Also, a question about this OGI stuff. We’ve had a general habit of not crossing the beams with live games already. Is an authoritative OGI prohibition applicable to all live games in full, regardless of which players might be dead already? Or does an OGI prohibition only apply to players who are still alive in other games?

Furthermore, how far do you want to take OGI prohibition? Once a game is over, what would have been called ‘OGI’ now becomes ‘player meta.’ If you really want to prevent other game information from influencing live games, how far of a leap is it to say that meta reads constitute something that is out of bounds of the context of the current game?

If you want live, concurrent games to exist in a vacuum from each other, why shouldn’t they also exist in a vacuum from all the games that have come before?

Could you give an example of why or when Oh Gee Eye would be applicable toward a dead player in a game?

I think your questions raise a good point about some of the gray areas (and this is part of the reason why I'm wary about trying to have a strict law code), so it's probably good to talk more specifically about what is meant.

I think typically the stigma against "OGI" if we must use the acronym disappears once a game is finished. For example, if Players A & B are in two concurrent games with each other, Games 1 & 2, it is underhanded for Player A to make comments in Game 1 about the differences between Player B's behavior in Games 1 & 2. Both games are still ongoing, so raising such an issue in one game can (and often will) bring influences into each game from outside the sphere of what is usually considered acceptable. Player A's opinion of Player B spills from Game 2 into Game 1 and infects everyone else's reads in that game, and possibly Game 2 as well if there is any more crossover. Neither game should have anything to do with the other. As the game is still ongoing, alignments and information are still not public knowledge, so even if Player A is dead in Game 1 and Player B is not, it is unethical for Player B to comment on it in Game 2 because we don't know Player B's alignment in either game yet, and this crosses streams. It becomes trickier if both players are dead in Game 1 and alive in Game 2. My personal rule when I'm playing in concurrent games is to leave each game out of the other until one is finished, even if I have been dead in Game 1 for weeks.

However, once a game is finished it becomes part of each player's record. Results of a game are logged (in the Hall of Fame here) and everyone can see how Players A and B acted and what their alignments were. It is not seen as underhanded to access that information to inform a read in Game 2. Likewise, it's impossible and absurd to ask people to try to discount familiarity and personal awareness of one another. If a game started tomorrow and everyone in this thread was playing, I wouldn't treat G-man and tutuu exactly the same. I have different expectations of what each of them will bring to the game. There is no realistic way for me not to play with informed opinions of their personalities unless we require players to undergo severe memory loss upon signing up for games. Jay tries to propose this idea in the admin board about twice a month but we always have to tell him it's unethical.

But then if we get into things that aren't in the realm of mafia, it becomes another gray area. A lot of us here know things about each other personally, and sometimes that naturally informs our reads on each other. If G-man or Epi or Jack says "my kid is sick" and then disappears for a while, we're all like "Yeah, that checks out. Feel better kiddo." If I were to say that, you'd all eye me skeptically. No one objects to things like that. In the Champs Finale we'd have people say things like "My husband is looking at me, I should probably go make dinner" and it was groovy. But once we're in that realm, it becomes possible for people to manipulate information about their life to sell a point about their alignment, or for people to seek out information about a person that can inform their read in a game, intentionally or not. I never know where to draw the line, but I think it's obvious when certain things cross it. Other things are more ambiguous. If a player, let's call them Ike, tells us that they have a close personal relationship with the player Coppercoyote and that Coppercoyote SWEARS ON THEIR LIFE that they are town, that is clearly yucky and drags the game down.

When it comes to things like this, I've adopted nanook's policy of prohibiting "excessive appeals to emotion." That phrasing doesn't explicitly outlaw and and all excessive out of game influences on reads, so perhaps it can be updated and clarified. It is not concrete, but I would rather have that rule in place without a clear, firm line so that issues can be discussed and judged individually if and when they pop up, rather than swinging an axe around without prejudice and making the players fear a modkill without a moment's notice. I think this fosters a healthier thread environment and opens a line of communication between player(s) and host. Rather than tiptoeing nervously around the banhammer, players can police themselves and each other, and if they have any questions then they can reach out to the host in private to ask if X behavior is acceptable to talk about. They know to be cautious, but can also anticipate (hopefully) that the host will be reasonable and fair if an issue arises. This is a good example of where I think it pays not to have a strict rule code.

Hally wrote: ↑Sat Dec 05, 2020 3:30 am one thing i would suggest if it’s going to be up to the host what rules/guidelines/etc they’ll implement for their game is to have all the rules the host will be using for their game be announced in the signup thread (whether that be quoting the recommended rules or writing their own thing)

this way players will know when they sign up what will or won’t be allowed in that game and if they have an issue with that set of rules or lack thereof they can choose not to sign up

it also would give players time to ask the host clarification on rules before the game starts so that the host can clarify them before any problems can potentially arise and potentially make announcements at the start of the game with those clarifications

I think this is a good courtesy to extend to players.

This time I am speaking as Sloonei the Administrator. I am not the whole admin team, but I am one voice in that group.

First and foremost I appreciate all of you for caring about the Syndicate and trying to help preserve the fun and integrity of our games. Thank you for this conversation.

There are a couple of areas of discussion I want to touch on. Let's begin with the Syndicate itself. Epi touched a bit on the historical context of this community: we have not traditionally had a lot of problems with in-game rules violations. But it's likely that some of that can be attributed to the fact that those games were usually made up of an insular group of players who'd all been playing together for years, always with the same familiar set of guidelines and a generally consistent community ethos. Rules like "No infodumping" never needed to be elaborated on because everyone understood what that meant.

But games on the Syndicate are not so insular anymore. We've gone from being a bit of an obscure Mafia backwater to an open port, and a relatively popular one at that. The result of this has been an influx of players from different backgrounds. That's a boon for the community, but it also necessitates some adjustment. Things that never needed to be defined suddenly need to be. Questions that have never been asked are going to be asked. This should not register as an attack on our customs, but just an adjustment as new members arrive and settle in. I think this is part of the reason why we have had an increase in violations, ambiguities, and gray areas in recent games. This very conflict was what inspired me to design Radiohead Mafia the way that I did; I wanted a game that would preserve some of the traditional Syndicate flourishes while also incorporating newer elements brought in from elsewhere that would be more familiar to a more diverse roster. But even that game was not without its bumps in the road. So I am in favor of setting out to define our terms more clearly.

Where I hesitate, however, is in calling these newly defined terms "rules". This is the point I was trying to make in my initial post, but looking back over it I feel it was not worded well enough, though I think tutuu understood the crux of what I was saying here:

tutuu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 6:28 pm Like, (from my understaning of what sloonei said), he is not opposed to some guidelines being written in a hosting thread that ppl need to look up themselves

I would be happy to write these guidelines myself (with help from all of you guys, and the rest of the admins), and my intent in doing this would be to offer future players and hosts alike some more solid ground when designing, running, and playing games to avoid situations where players cross a line they didn't know existed, or hosts find that a player has broken their game and they are powerless to fix it. I just don't want to call these things site-wide rules, if that makes sense. Because, like I said before, something that I value both personally and in my capacity as an admin is that the Syndicate encourages hosts to be free and to experiment with game design. I do not want there to be a standardized way to play mafia on The Syndicate, and in general I am averse to trying to define things too uniformly. If we begin to dictate what is or is not allowed to be included in any and every game, then we may end up with a law code on our hands that is overbearing and convoluted, and that could stifle us.

But I am absolutely in favor of providing clearer guidelines for hosts: recommendations, clearer explanations of terminology, and general expectations of hosting and running a mafia game. So, for instance, taking Epi's Hosting Guidelines post as our basis, we could just add sections that identify and define certain issues that can arise when hosting.
Let's continue using "angleshooting" as our example. We can offer a definition of what that term means in the context of mafia, and we can provide a recommendation for how it might be handled by the host in games as well as an explanation for why it can be damaging to the integrity of the game. I'd even be willing to go so far as to offer a "recommended set of rules" for standard mafia games, and hosts would be free to either plug that set of rules into their own games or tweak it as they see fit, or ignore it completely if they want to get real wild. But I would want to continue to make clear the point that these would not be absolute rules that everyone must follow when they are hosting games here.

In the meantime, I'll make a simple request to anyone who might play or host a game in the near future: be careful and direct. If we are worried about accidental rules violations or ambiguities in legality, then the safest course of action is to reach out and make sure we are all on the same page. As a host, that means trying to have your game's rules defined to your satisfaction. As a player, that means checking with the host if you are unclear on anything or fear that you might be inadvertently wandering into murky territory. I do not think the onus is squarely on the host to prevent players from violating rules.

On that note, I am here to listen. I have my own personal opinions about what rules I prefer to have included in my own games, but I'm currently speaking as an administrator so I'll continue to hold off on that for now.

tutuu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 8:05 pm

Epignosis wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 8:01 pm

tutuu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 7:58 pm

Epignosis wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 7:55 pm

tutuu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 7:48 pm the definition of poker angleshooting is not the same as the mafia definition of angleshooting, the way most people use it. most people believe that angleshooting is against the rules, they use the phrase in that way (in mafia)

The way mafia players use "angle shooting" is however they want without regard to what it actually means. It's a specific thing, and if you want to call me a Prescriptivist, I don't care. Angle shooting is a very specific thing that the Mafia community didn't make up. If you can't define it, then you can't solve it. If you want to call whatever you want angle shooting and disrespect the poker community, then I'll accuse you of cultural appropriation.

tutuu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 7:48 pm i do not believe martin's game is the only game that had integrity issues

off top of my memory:

radiohead by sloonei - a person violated the "no infodumping rule" and the host gave compensation to the mafia team
simpsons by sloonei - a person violated the "dont claim your identity" rule and the host had to warn that he would start modkilling for it
escape from russia by g-man - a person violated the "no infodumping rule" and the host had to warn them and was considering modkilling them
philosophers mafia by tony - he had to modkill two people, one for violating an infodumping rule, another for going over the post count out of frustration
lion king by dunya - she had to modkill a person who contacted another person by discord and talked to them about the game

Pretend you were the host in each of these. What would you have done differently?

im listing these games that have had integrity issues in response to your claim that the syndicate has no problem with integrity in its games

I don't know what you want me to do with that information. I have been more or less retired as a player during this time. I swapped in in The Simpsons. You're not explaining what the integrity issues were in the games. Were they not resolved fairly or correctly?

i am arguing that those issues wouldn't have popped up in the first place if there was a standard set of rules that clearly defines what's ok and what's not ok

I hear you and am currently reading every post in this thread as I prepare my own response to things, but I want to make this point RE: The Simpsons:

The violation that occurred in that game was caused by a player neglecting to read an unambiguous rule.

I accept my share of the blame for the Radiohead incident. I worded a role in such a way that would have made sense only to a seasoned Syndicate veteran, and then gave it to a player who is relatively new here without offering a more clear explanation of its restrictions.

I do not speak on behalf of the entire admin/community team here, but these are my thoughts as both someone who is an administrator here and a member of the community with lots of mafia experience. I’m refraining from commenting on anything specific for now.

One of my favorite things about the Syndicate is that it’s always been a place that allows hosts to get creative, to experiment with game design and mechanics. To help foster that environment, we have never set out to clearly define many rules for hosts to follow. We have community rules about behavior, conflict resolution, and respecting one another. But as for the game itself, our standard policy has always been to leave the game to the individual host. Leaving things to host’s discretion helps to ensure that the person designing the game can be comfortable with the amount of control they have over their own product. That said, once a game becomes active, the hose cedes some (most) of that control over to the players. The best thing a host can do, then, is to be as comfortable as possible with their game prior to its start.

We do have a post laying out some general Hosting Guidelines provided by Epignosis, and I would encourage everyone to look at that, both for the present discussion and for future hosting experiences if needed. We can make updates to that post to reflect the shape of how mafia is played today, both on the Syndicate and elsewhere. But I would not expect any sweeping changes or firmly dictated rules about what hosts can or cannot allow in their games (beyond the scope of our community rules).

That said, I like that this conversation is happening and want it to continue. It promotes new ideas and increased awareness of the delicate ways that the balance and integrity of a game can be swayed by simple accidents of decisions. I personally would not object to adding certain “guidelines of consideration” in the post I linked above to help prospective hosts consider issues like “angleshooting” or unintentional host information appearing in the thread. But I would hesitate to try to concretely define those things in any sweeping sense for the purpose of outlawing them. That becomes a slippery and ambiguous slope. But these are definitely issues that impact the game and we owe it to ourselves as a community to be aware of them.

We are discussing this.