Live Action Mafia

A game of sneakiness and paranoia
It is currently Thu Mar 28, 2024 11:00 am

All times are UTC - 5 hours




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 12 posts ] 
Author Message
 Post subject: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 4:56 pm 
Almost everyone here has played before (hi Elaine! If you want to see generalized strategy tips, please see posts from past games) so I'll mostly talk about differences for this game:

1) Traps are a really, really big deal. The pool of roles is only 6 large so it's easy to trap by elimination. And there are 6 traps total in game if you add up all the factions. Those traps are only ever going to hit townies (in the dimension they're being trapped in), not mafia. So absolutely Do Not Share Role Information. Don't even tell someone "I'm not an X." Don't even tell someone "If I were an X I'd do Y," because if Y doesn't happen you're not an X. (Example: last spring it was easily deducible that I was a vigilante because people knew that if I were, I'd have vig killed dylanhen.) Don't tell someone you have a provable role. Don't tell your gay knight partner what your other role is, since they might be mafia in the other role.

2) Going with the above: make proxy chains LONG! If someone proxies to you, proxy that to someone else. (Probably about ~1/3 probability of actually posting it is good.) We don't want people to be able to kill off proxies to dig down to the investigator / GI / stalker / gravedigger.

3) Have a spreadsheet to organize information: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

4) Given the sheer fraction of bad guys out there, we know from werewolf that logic chains can get twisty and it can be hard to figure out what's true. Don't trust someone 100% even if you think you have (by some complicated logic chain) "proven" they can't be bad. (This was a major thing that went wrong for town in IAP 2017, and could even more easily happen here.)

5) Don't trust the following experienced players: uhhhh literally everyone in this game except Elaine (hi Elaine! I don't trust you either! You've watched way too many games to be a real newbie).

6) We discussed at kickoff that if any mafia wants to post publicly outing who all the mafia are, we'll happily help the first mafia to post such by executing all the people they named and then executing them last, so that they at least get 1 point. So, mafia, feel free to do that if you think you're down in expected value. :D

I'm sure I'm missing some stuff, so add your thoughts here!


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 8:03 pm 
**wasn't a vigilante (because I didn't kill Dylan)


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 8:15 pm 
"Those traps are only ever going to hit townies (in the dimension they're being trapped in), not mafia." I think that's false given "Clarification: Town Mafia and Mafia Mafia can set traps on each other by guessing the inner role "Mafia."".


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 8:23 pm 
Mafia Mafia probably doesn't waste their traps on Town *, but good point that Town Mafia can trap Mafia Mafia. We still shouldn't be allowing traps to hit us though.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 10:26 pm 
Yay strategy!

In terms of elected items:

-I don't see any reason not to have mayoral items filled ASAP (anyone who could sabotage could do so anyway by just destroying the item). I'll bring mine to ET when I go over tomorrow evening.

-We should make sure not too many people are on too many of the PO signature lists. I suppose that if game shrinks and completion fractions of the various tasers change a lot, we could force some people to switch their signatures to different tasers if necessary, but this seems like a big hassle. Then again, having ready tasers is nice, especially if, as the rules seem to imply, tasers have no warmup phase (and are in fact remote-activated???). So, maybe keeping them at ~1/2 filling is reasonable?

In terms of roles:
Limited roleset means disguising roles is pretty hard :(

-all investigative roles (investigator, stalker, dying GN) (within one dimension) should definitely keep things as ambiguous as possible. It's probably pretty easy to distinguish investigator target patterns from stalker target patterns (though maybe not if everyone's alibi is just "at ET"), so think about how to introduce ambiguity here (but obviously don't mention specific ideas publicly).

-I'm thinking that, unless specifically relevant, gravediggers should only give the alignment, not the role, of the people they dig (if they share at all), to avoid leaking Bayesian role info updates on living players. Also, dying GNs and people an IC revealed to before death should consider faking gravediggers to give the real gravediggers more cover.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 5:06 am 
sammyluo wrote:
Yay strategy!

In terms of elected items:

-I don't see any reason not to have mayoral items filled ASAP (anyone who could sabotage could do so anyway by just destroying the item). I'll bring mine to ET when I go over tomorrow evening.


I agree
sammyluo wrote:

-We should make sure not too many people are on too many of the PO signature lists. I suppose that if game shrinks and completion fractions of the various tasers change a lot, we could force some people to switch their signatures to different tasers if necessary, but this seems like a big hassle. Then again, having ready tasers is nice, especially if, as the rules seem to imply, tasers have no warmup phase (and are in fact remote-activated???). So, maybe keeping them at ~1/2 filling is reasonable?

I think keeping them about half filled is good. We should try to keep them disjoint; never have anyone sign all 3 PO lists.
sammyluo wrote:

In terms of roles:
Limited roleset means disguising roles is pretty hard :(

-all investigative roles (investigator, stalker, dying GN) (within one dimension) should definitely keep things as ambiguous as possible. It's probably pretty easy to distinguish investigator target patterns from stalker target patterns (though maybe not if everyone's alibi is just "at ET"), so think about how to introduce ambiguity here (but obviously don't mention specific ideas publicly).

Agreed. I think stalkers/investigators should maybe not reveal whether they're inner or outer.
sammyluo wrote:

-I'm thinking that, unless specifically relevant, gravediggers should only give the alignment, not the role, of the people they dig (if they share at all), to avoid leaking Bayesian role info updates on living players. Also, dying GNs and people an IC revealed to before death should consider faking gravediggers to give the real gravediggers more cover.

I don't think gravediggers should announce their results at all. I just don't think it helps town. I also think gravediggers should phrase their gravedigs as "I want to do it at 10:59 PM", so that if a relevant gravedig comes up the gravediggers are available.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 1:18 pm 
aok wrote:
Agreed. I think stalkers/investigators should maybe not reveal whether they're inner or outer.

This has the problem of giving false innocent results with probability 1/2 on guilty people, and the consequent problem of making it very easy for mafia to give false innocent results without repercussion.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 1:43 pm 
sammyluo wrote:
aok wrote:
Agreed. I think stalkers/investigators should maybe not reveal whether they're inner or outer.

This has the problem of giving false innocent results with probability 1/2 on guilty people, and the consequent problem of making it very easy for mafia to give false innocent results without repercussion.


There will likely be fake investigations either way; this way, we could just treat every investigation as a bayesian update. I agree that there will be costs, but the cost of letting mafia set traps is really high.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 2:05 pm 
In a game where investigations are infallible, treating them as just 1/2-Bayesian updates seems kind of wasteful (especially if we get the wrong kinds of investigations to stack on a single target, which, since there are only two values for the subset of investigations which give no information on any given day assuming no traps, probably happens pretty frequently). I think we can mostly deal with the trap problem by going with jamb's suggestion of extending proxy chains with probability 2/3.

Maybe I'm mis-estimating the likelihood of fake investigations in each case and the ease of tracing them back, though. I'd like to hear more people's thoughts.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 2:18 pm 
Imagine you were town mafia; how many fake investigations would you add into game? What if you were mafia town? I think the answer is a lot in both cases. Long proxy chains make it easier to weasel out of investigator claims; just pin the fake investigations on a dead player, or get in a beef with a living player.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:40 pm 
aok, I still think you're overestimating the prevalence of fake investigations, and underestimating the value of specific-layer real investigations. I'd encourage everyone to specify the level when reporting investigations. Before officially encouraging this, though, I'd like more people to voice their opinions, to make sure I'm not the only one who thinks this is worthwhile. The last thing we want is a partial reveal of layers.


Top
  
 
 Post subject: Re: Town Strategy
PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:50 pm 
Sorry, I meant to make a follow-up post here. I have reversed my opinion, because of the following argument. Town mafia wants to fake inner investigator, but not outer investigator. The only reason they'd want to fake outer investigator is if they wanted to weasel out of a fake investigator claim. So, we should make investigators choose one or the other, to tie down fake investigations.


Top
  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 12 posts ] 

All times are UTC - 5 hours


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
cron
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group