Live Action Mafia

0. There's no God. If you die, you report your own death and are responsible for answering investigations on it. (Once someone dies who feels like helping with God-related stuff, they're welcome to.)

1. Everyone RNGs their own role with an online RNG. You have probability p of being a serial killer. Independently, you have probability p of being an investigator.

2. Investigators (who may also be serial killers) RNG each day whether they have an investigation, with probability q. If they do, they may PM one dead player that day (whose death they have not already investigated) and ask them whether one other player killed them, and get an honest answer.

3. Serial Killers RNG each day whether they have a kill, with probability q. If they do, they may kill a player (normal bang mechanics). If a serial killer attempts to kill another serial killer, then the latter disarms the former and neither dies but the former loses their kill for that day. If a serial killer doesnt use their daily kill, they don't keep it, but they are not otherwise penalized; they RNG afresh the next day.

4. Lynches occur each night at day end by random ballot. Every player submits a vote by posting it on a lynch thread in forums. Each night after submitting votes, one player is provably randomly selected, and the player they voted for is lynched. Voting No Lynch is an option, and is the default if a player forgets to vote.

5. There are no items.

6. Day 0 is on Sunday. Day 1 is Monday. Kills may be made starting 8:00 on Monday. Thereafter, day rollovers are at 23:00, but day is extended an hour past any kill that happens in the last hour of day.

7. If at any point there are no serial killers alive and at least one non-serial killer alive, game ends and all non-serial killers win and all serial killers lose. If at any point there are no non-serial killers alive, game ends and all non-serial killers lose and all serial killers win.

8. No provable randomness other than that specified in the rules, cryptography, faking incants, or other shenanigans generally outlawed by mafia.

9. Kills cannot be made in Dorm, or on players who are currently driving (defined as being in the driver's seat when the van is not in park OR not in a parking space).

10. p = q = 3/10. To randomize, each player goes to www.random.org and generates three numbers in the range [0,10^8) and concatenates them, adding leading zeroes if they have less than 8 digits (CHECK YOUR LENGTH!). For example, 209002769825222899384575. They then perform a SHA1 hash on this number at www.sha1-online.com (this example would get f549925ccfb756cdf2975a2c1696d8c49a6c502d) and post this hash on forums for post-game accountability; nobody will try to break it. Then, town provably randomly generates two random numbers in [0,10), and each person looks at the next 2 numbers in their private number, and adds the public numbers to them mod 10. If the number is 0, 1, 2 it's a yes, otherwise no. The first of these is the serial killer probability and the second is the investigator probability. On day 0 this is the probability of being that role, and for each day thereafter it is the probability of having that ability if they have that role. For example, on day 0 the town RNGs 9 and 4, and the person adds these to their numbers 2 and 0 to get 1 and 4. So they are a serial killer but not an investigator. The next day the town RNGs 7 and 2. The person adds to get 6 and 2. They don't get a kill that day (because 6+9=5 is not 0, 1, or 2) and they don't get an investigation (because 2+0=2 would get an investigation, BUT they're not an investigator). And so on. Town RNGs the numbers for a day 24 hours before the day will start.

Rules modification proposal:
let q be the SK kill probability, and r be the investigation probability.
we keep r=.3 for the entire game.
however, to make sure that kills keep happening at a roughly constant rate all game, q will increase as follows:
n q
17 .3
13 .4
10 .5
8 .6
7 .7
6 .8
5 1.0
where n is the number of players. We use the number of players alive immediately before a lynch to determine the value of q for the next day.

^ What Josh said.

Also, player list (18):

achester
blumberg
brunnerj
dylanhen
ecd
jamb
jordanh
Justin
kmath
ksedlar
Linus
Lucy
lukesci
mayars
peppet
pravinas
ritagram
sammyluo

Kmath is not playing. I feel like my soul has been torn in two. :'(

nguyenin is playing.

If there are no kills by day end, I suggest the following mid-game rules changes:
1. Serial killers die if they fail to kill on 3 of their kill days.
2. Everyone informs an NP of their role. If there are 3 or fewer serial killers, the NP randomly decides on townies to convert to serial killers such that there are 5 serial killers (expectation is 5 or 6). The NP doesn't say whether or not a change needed to be made.

I dislike this on the following grounds: (a) I still think rules shouldn't be changed midgame, (b) this game was advertised as stupid, so if there's only, say, one serial killer I think that fits with the "stupid" theme , (c) that causes SKs to not be independent-at-random anymore which is sad.

That said, if people do think that we need to implement a penalty for serial no-kills, I think this is a relatively fair implementation because it allows a couple of days when serial killers just don't manage to make a kill. But I think that being disarmed shouldn't count as failing to make a kill on a kill day. (i.e. if a SK is really unlucky and gets disarmed thrice, they shouldn't die.) And I think it should be 3 days *going forward*, so days where a SK has already failed to kill don't count against them. Otherwise, I think it's too biased of a rules change to make mid-game.

If we do decide to do #2, should we have kmath be the NP? Also, should we have the NP do something probabilistic (making each townie into a SK with probability p such that the expected value is 5, or something like that)?

I think rule change 1 is reasonable (because it means that not both sides can stall forever) and suffices (now the game has finite expected length).

Rule change 2 feels inelegant and no one who knows their own role can fairly argue about it.

++++