The Syndicate

I need some balancing input from you seasoned players out there, because I thought this up after learning what a soup kill is and I want to give it a go. So....






For now let's call it a mountainous game for 15 players. The number of players can shift as needed per balancing conditions.

The game plays like a regular game- day phases and night phases. Day phase length can be 24 or 48 hours depending on player preference. Every day, someone gets eliminated from via the poll. Every night, someone gets killed by the mafia.

But- here's the twist: While everyone in the game is vanilla, everyone is also assigned to be an ingredient in a batch of soup (soup style yet to be determined and leaves the door open to this kind of thing being run again in the future with different variations of soups and the ingredients therein).

Every night, the mafia gets to submit a list of every player and their role. If they can match every player to their ingredient (aka role), then it activates a soup kill and they win with the night post.

There is also the possibility of a soup event for the civvies. Every night, all the players get to vote for someone to be the list-maker the next day.

THIS is the point that I need help with. I have two ideas in mind:

1) The list-maker can attempt to match players with their roles, effectively the same kind of soup list as the mafia submits. If successful at matching all of them, the mafia lose in a soup lynch/yeet/elimination/whatevertheheckitisbeingcallednow.

2) The list-maker posts an ordered lynch/yeet/elimination/whatevertheheckitisbeingcallednow list in the thread before the end of the Day Phase. If their list places all of the mafia members in the top half of the list, then we move to list-maker stage two. The next day, the next list-maker starts trying to match the exact roles to the mafia members. If a list-maker can succeed in matching all the mafia members to their ingredient roles, then it triggers the soup lynch/yeet/elimination/whatevertheheckitisbeingcallednow.

If neither the mafia nor civs can activate their respective soup feature, then the game proceeds as usual until one side wins the traditional way.

Ingredient roles will be revealed upon death. Both sides can then use process of elimination to work on their lists.

Mafia could potentially become the list-maker, thereby wasting a day for the civvies on purpose.


My concern with Option 1 is that a civvie list-maker would be outting his- or herself and help the mafia with their list-making.

My concern with Option 2 is that it might be too complicated to actually help the civvies win.

Thoughts?

hmm interesting concept! I don't have much more to say beyond that as I suck with balance stuff but I think there could be something to this

I don’t think there’s any incentive strong enough here for town to claim anything, so it almost certainly just plays out as a mountainous game unless the mafia get lucky with a blind guess.

NANOOKTHEGREATANDFEARSOME wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2021 4:07 am I don’t think there’s any incentive strong enough here for town to claim anything, so it almost certainly just plays out as a mountainous game unless the mafia get lucky with a blind guess.

So you think Option #2 would be the most appealing and productive one for the civs? Phase 1 get all the baddies in the top half of the list and then Phase 2 of trying to pick the right combo of players and roles as the baddies?

At a glance I don’t think option #2 would be incentive enough to use it instead of playing straight

Like OK you get all mafia in the top half, great...you don’t start claiming ingredients to narrow down which ones scum have, you just kill through the top half until you win.

It wouldn’t make the game full auto, but you’d only have to find one or two correct townreads in the half you know contains all the mafia.

Like playing it out, let’s say the game is 8/3 at start

D1 list has all the mafia in top half (let’s say round up to that being 6), you miskill someone in the top half of the list, then mafia NK in the bottom half. Now you go into D2 with 4 confirmed town (the rest of the bottom of the list), and 3 mafia in a group of 5 (the rest of the top of the list)

It makes infinitely more sense for nobody to claim ingredients and you just kill in the group of five, town has four kills at that point so one correct townread inside that group of five locks the game.

One thing I failed to mention is that the ingredient roles would all be listed, so both sides have a list to work with. There would be the baddie ingredients listed as baddie ingredients.

To modify things a little, would the civvies just need list-makers to peg the three mafia players to their roles to trigger their soup action? It seems easier from a probability standpoint for the civs that way, but maybe the baddies can get something in return, like a confirmed role match for every [insert arbitrary number here] of correct role matches on their list.

It isn’t tangibly easier

In that group of five scenario you’d end up with a situation where if you claim you probably have two people claiming one ingredient and three people claiming a second...and because you have to get it right in one try...you’ve got a 1/3 chance of winning and a 2/3 chance of losing.

Basically, if you try to win via soup you have to correctly identify both town in the group of 5, whereas if you try to win without soup you only have to correctly identify one.

(For context playing it straight gives you a ballpark 45% chance to win, versus 33% via soup. Obviously reads can effect this in practice)

Oh actually the soup odds are much lower than that even cause they’d have to match the scum to their exact ingredient, not just correctly identify the scum.

So yeah, there’d be clear benefit to using the first part of the list on Option 2, and clear benefit to playing it otherwise straight. List maker would obviously still submit guesses if it’s done in private cause why not maybe you get super lucky, but the group shouldn’t claim ever.

What if role claiming is prohibited? How would that change the mix?

G-Man wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2021 6:40 pm What if role claiming is prohibited? How would that change the mix?

You’d still never rely on the second part of the soup? Lol

you need to give some incentive for people to actually reveal their ingredients, so they have to choose between getting the advantage and revealing 1 ingredient

could be game events, conditional roles, whatever