The Syndicate

Could do panel reads too where you try to tell jokes that the judges will find funny based on what you know about them to get an award. Lots of potential for wacky hijinks in thread which seems like what you are trying to go for

It also lets players who don't have the time to commit to fully playing participate in a lighthearted and low pressure way by serving on the panel.

Maybe the "most realistic roleplay" award could let you copy that player's abilities. Could lead to some clown fiesta stuff. I'm a doctor and I heal X, only to receive a roleplay award for mimicking Y, which makes me kill X instead for copying their role... and now I have to figure out if Y is a Vigilante or Mafioso.

tutuu wrote: ↑Sun Nov 01, 2020 5:15 am @Alison woah

well, thanks for the feedback haha

do u have any suggestions on how to achieve the objective of - have players be incentivized to roleplay as each other, and tie that to a game of mafia thats somewhat balanced?

without needing to resort to these third part party programs and other weird stuff

A panel of judges spectate the game and award prizes for best/funniest/etc. roleplay, with in-game effects. A "funniest roleplay" award given to a mafia member could let them roleblock a player by distracting them with a hilarious joke, while given to a town it could allow them to invite another player to their comedy show, thus forcing that player to Watch them, etc. This would also create interesting mech elements. eg. "So tutuu was doc healed, but still died. That means the mafia might have a strongman kill. Who do we think won roleplay prizes yesterday?"

Another thought: I know there are programs out there that can detect whether X and Y texts were written by the same person. eg. a similar program was used to detect that Robert Galbraith was a pseudonym of J.K Rowling based on computer analysis of the average length of words. It follows that by figuring out what methods such programs use to detect similarities in writing style, you could design posts to fool those methods, eg. by artificially varying the lengths of your words at random. Obviously this is an oversimplification of how the program actually works but if there's a program to detect X and Y are written by the same person then I'm willing to bet that there's a program that obfuscates it.

Note that the mafia have no reason not to use this program and get 100% confirmed NKs every time if you don't engage in obfuscation methods yourself. So unless you actively work to stop the mafia from using textual analysis programs to match puppet to player then you're going to play in a pretty scumsided game by default.

It's harder to tell who's who if everyone tries to talk in the same, specific, unreadable tone rather than each try to adopt their own unique, person-specific tone. So the game mechanics encourage less "roleplaying your socky" and more "artificially using algorithms (random word replacement, etc.) to disguise your identity". If you were willing to go even further you could do stuff like randomly reorder words (eg. taking a sentence like "we should exe Alison" and turning it into "Alison should be exed") or erratically switching between passive/active voice or various tenses to make it impossible to decipher who you are and completely conceal any posting or typing style you might have. If we all commit to using this strategy I'm reasonably certain that the mafia would have a very low chance of successfully nightkilling, which is an advantage that would more than compensate for being less readable/general confusion caused by erratic tense switches etc.

I'm pretty sure there are certain tone/posting styles that are trivially easy to fake and also incredibly difficult to guess the identity of. For instance if we were to all agree to type incredibly loquaciously by consulting thesauruses before every post and replacing random words with obscure synonyms that would be very difficult to reverse engineer the true identity because any posting or typing indicators of identity would be wiped away by the random replacement.