Live Action Mafia

Okay, now that I know I'm town-aligned I can start a town strategy post And, uh, serial killers, ignore everything I said on the other advice thread, that was all misleading and horrible advice. You should make all your kills publicly.

If you're an investigator, don't tell people. If you have a result you need to report, pick one person and ask them to proxy it for you. If someone else asks you to proxy, consider double-proxying (picking a second person and sending the result to them, as if you were the original investigator). Don't let the serial killers figure out who the investigators are, or else we'll be a sad and investigation-less town. Similarly, if you're *not* an investigator, don't tell, because you want to be targeted instead of the real investigators. Everyone should pick a proxy now, even non-investigators, so that nobody can tell who's an investigator and who's just asking for a proxy anyway.

If you see something, say something. Please report suspicious behavior to the TSA. Or, um, the section of forums were we post about mildly sketchy things. This might be, "I saw X waiting in some place they normally wouldn't be, maybe they were there to make a kill, but aborted when they saw me?" or "X was defending Y rather strongly to me before Y got lynched, maybe they're both serial killers?" The vast majority of things on this thread are false alarms, and that's totally fine - don't be embarrassed to mention mildly sketchy things.

I'm thinking that if we see a negative investigation on a person it won't actually mean much, because that could just as easily have been a serial killer faking (or being) investigator and making up results. So probably investigations should randomize among people with bad alibis, including people who have already been "investigated," when deciding who to investigate. I'm open to debate on this.

There's now an interesting phenomenon where random lynching isn't actually helpful. It's not hurtful either, but it's something to be aware of.

On the plus side, lynch mobs are less likely to be mafia-influenced

Why is random lynching helpful in normal games but not here?

Random lynching is helpful here.

A SK kill kills a random player who is surely not a SK.
A random lynch kills a random player.

So given the choice, we'd rather a random lynch than a SK kill.

In a regular game there are provably innocent roles which you end up not lynching if you randomly select them for a lynch. In a vanilla game, the number of townies increases exponentially with respect to the number of mafia.

Random lynching here will not decrease the proportion of serial killers to less than the starting proportion, which it does in other setups. I'm also not sure how the increasing kill rate factors into this, but it seems like it would make random lynching worse if anything. Obviously serial killers making kills are worse than random lynches, because kills are bad and lynches are neutral. Being better than bad doesn't make a thing good.

As a result of this, serial killers have zero incentive to make the first kill. (On later kills, no kill days allow extra town investigations). This seems like an unfortunate consequence of the game setup.

The first SK kill gives us a murder to start investigating, which I think is a bigger deal than the 3/10 of a serial killer we'd kill by randomly lynching.

I think that's enough of a factor that if a kill has been made, even one so perfect that our priors on who did it are uniform, then random lynching would beat no lynch.

Remember that each investigator can investigate a kill at most once, each player has a 0.21 chance of being a investigator who's not a serial killer (so expected ~4 townie investigators), and negative investigations tell us very little since they're easily fakable. So we're not actually that likely to get a positive investigation if our priors on the culprit are uniform.

I agree that kills give us more info for lynches, but mostly through alibis and positive investigations; if we have neither of those (as in the case achester mentions) then I don't see how random lynches are any better than they are now.

Oh I didn't realize investigators could only investigate each kill once. People yesterday seemed to indicate otherwise. This is pretty tricky then.

Let's suppose there are A townies and B serial killers.

If SKs make the first kill, then there are now A-1 townies and B serial killers.

If town makes the first kill (by random lynching), then there are now EITHER A-1 townies and B serial killers (P=7/10), OR A townies and B-1 serial killers (P=3/10). This is strictly better.

Therefore, it is in our best interest to lynch early and often. In the hypothetical extreme case where we can lynch as many people as we want, we'd rather start by lynching everyone except one random person, getting an immediate 7/10 chance of victory.

FYI, I will treat everyone who wants to No Lynch for reasons other than the meta "I want people to have fun" as confirmed SK.

Just realized that the chance of lynching a SK is not actually 3/10. Because of the weird voting system, it's AB/(A+B)^2, which is likely closer to 2/10. I think this weird voting system gives scum a nontrivial advantage? I'm sad that I wasn't scum to start with. Either way, all that matters is that it's more than 0.

Sorry for the triple post, I don't think you can edit posts on this forum.

Linus' math is true iff all the serial killers know who each other are (or at least, each know who someone is who definitely isn't a serial killer). Otherwise there's a higher probability of SKs getting lynched (though still <= 0.3).

I think I've been convinced that we should lynch. (But I'm still glad we didn't last night.) Should we just have everyone RNG a target and submit it? I'll start a lynch thread.

Confirmed that you can't edit forum posts. This is a feature, not a bug. (We don't want SKs editing their posts later to make themselves look better... and this removes any possible benefit from someone going to the effort to screenshot the whole state of the forum and check whether anyone has changed things. Or any possible loss from not looking at the forums until later. We want forum info to be permanent.)

If you guys insist on random lynching (which I'm not convinced is actually good), the best possible thing is for us to vote in a cycle. That way a truly random person gets lynched, and we have a 0.3 chance of hitting a SK, better than if we all vote for who we think is "sketchy" or we all decide independently at "random."

Wait ok I agree that a purely random lynch is strictly better than a random successful kill by an SK. However, I also think that a purely random lynch is strictly worse than nothing happening, given that it doesn't reduce the proportion of SKs in the population in expectation, gives no information, causes increased SK kill chances, and gives less time to react to future kills before endgame occurs. Random lynching before anything happens is basically restarting the game with the same parameters (except more SK killing frequency) and one fewer player.

I agree that purely random lynch is strictly worse than nothing happening: killing a random person doesn't change the expected fraction of mafia but does decrease the number of players, which is a disadvantage for town. I think a random successful kill by an SK is hard to compare to both of them, since it gives information both by alibis and by investigations, and probably is better than both.

I don't think Linus is much more suspicious for pushing for a random lynch.

If both sides think they don't want to make the first kill, we might have to change the rules eventually, or just let the game continue as a zombie game.

++ Sammy.

I also suspect that correct play is for neither side to kill anyone, which is problematic.

Why do people think that SK's shouldn't make kills?

It seems to me that each side should have a correct thing to do and that they should be different (Citation needed. I think I remember Linus pointing out a scenario in table-top mafia where that isn't true, so maybe that's just an invalid assumption).

It's also hard for me to believe that it would be correct for SK's to not make kills.

Therefore, I think we want to no lynch?

Q: as townie, would I rather be SK'd or lynched? I think SK'd.

Maybe a silly Q, but would this mean I should make it super easy for ppl to kill me?

Er, no. We specifically want kills that give information (which means forcing SKs to kill people in contexts where there are limited numbers of suspects).