Am I correct in that Mafia falls into the Paper-Rock-Scissors category of game, in that there is an optimal strategy (lynch randomly) that guarantees a 50% probability of winning; to do any better requires that you psych your opponents out, but that can by nature be detected and backfire?
Lynching randomly (in a properly-balanced game) would result in a 50% chance of winning, but the difficulty is that lynching requires the action of everyone, and not everyone has the same motives. If every Townie votes randomly, but the Scum don’t vote randomly but say they are, then Scum will win every time. Unless you coordinate your votes, but then, who do you trust to do the coordinating?
You’ll get better results by lynching whoever looks scummy, and then considering people voting on bases other than who looks scummy to themselves look scummy.
It is beyond belief that anyone would think I, as Scum, would vote last minute to save Scummate Hi, Neighbor! from lynch on Day 1. How could anyone think that beyond being the rankest newbie? I stand by my suspect list. All four of the players who have played with me before cannot be all Scum. But I suspect two of them are. I don’t know what to make of the other two.
I owe you two apologies, Stranger. One I should have given you the benefit of doubt for playing. If I had to vote for a newbie last minute, I should have voted for the one posting less even with the tie-breaking rule. It is the rare newbie Scum who is not timid.
And I did not take your suspicions of SNF seriously. That’s on me.
A newbie Scum would change a vote at last minute to try to save a teammate. Biotop isn’t a newbie, so he wouldn’t do that. But a Scum Biotop would totally do something so Scummy that “Scum wouldn’t be so obvious” in a convoluted attempt to build Townie cred.
But no, I wouldn’t. I know how to build Town cred better than that in a game with several newbies.
Which makes more sense, the silly Biotop/HN conspiracy theory or that Biotop is on vacation with his wife and can only play sporadically but would try to show up at EOD to make a difference?
Count me in on the next iteration of this…
Have you ever played before?
Interesting question; not so much in a live game, but certainly on-line, it should be possible to concoct a cryptographic scheme that ensures that everybody votes randomly (it could be as straightforward as using stock-market figures) without having to trust anyone. So 50% is eminently achieveable in practice.
Equilibrium logic seems to apply to lynching the scummy too, because scum know that and, again assuming perfect players, could not risk doing anything scummy, again forcing them to lynch randomly along with everybody else.
In practice, getting mafia players to agree to any plan or scheme is impossible.
What I’d like to see is, if we have games both here and Giraffe, that new games would start at the one place about halfway through the other game at the other place. That way we could encourage new Mafia players at both sites and give players who are removed from one site a chance to go and play at the other.
Especially when the payoff is only a 50% chance of victory. It’s tough enough to get folks to agree on a guaranteed-victory plan.
But that’s OK. Players not agreeing is the very essence of Mafia it seems to me.
No, but I have played other social deduction games (Avalon, Cuba de Mafia, One Night, etc), though not online.
No apologies necessary. And for the record, I didn’t have any particular reason to suspect snfaulkner; I was just staking him out in hopes of attracting scum, which is something I’ve done in games of Godfather to good effect.
Next time I am going to build a Markov chain model, although I’m not really sure how to define and modify weighting parameters beyond prior experience.
Stranger
Great. Welcome. I am very happy Chronos has resurrected Mafia on the SDMB.
In my first Mafia game I was gung-ho too. I wanted to make a difference and it was a lot of fun. But I was NEVER 65% sure of anything, much less on Day 1. I couldn’t see how you could be.
My Mafia Town weakness is I always assume everyone will play like me. And I have to keep finding out the hard way that this is not so.
Sorry, 'bout doubting you, Biotop. But that sweep in at the last minute and save Hi, Neighbor! vote was very startling.
That’s the sort of thing I expected from you, when I saw you sign up.
And there are some significant differences between playing a game like this face-to-face versus online. On the one hand, in a face-to-face game, you can get valuable cues from things like facial expression, body language, and tone of voice, and we’ve evolved a heck of a lot of brainpower dedicated to interpreting that sort of thing to find lying (and also a heck of a lot to trying to fool it). Most of that is missing online. On the other hand, here, we’ve got both a permanent record of the exact wording of everything everyone has said, and the time to analyze all of it looking for inconsistencies. You can’t get away with saying “I never said that”, or “Well, I thought it was a good idea at the time, but I wasn’t the primary one pushing that”.
Scum don’t startle.