The Syndicate

S~V~S wrote:If I played my ass off for 10 days, got NKed night 10, and my civs won day 11, I deserved to win.

True, and most players who have played here longer than the last 9 months have probably experienced a game where they played their hearts out and played well, but didn't win with their faction merely because they died.

JaggedJimmyJay wrote:

S~V~S wrote:I think it is better to give a win to 10 people who did not deserve it than to deny it to one person in the winning faction who did, tbh.

Agreed. Could you imagine if you and I were the only winners at the end of Talking Heads Mafia? We were the only two players to survive. That would have been devastating to many who did deserve it.

And there are ways to punish players that just don't participate at all. There's Participation Rules. Hosts have the option of modkilling players. They can also just deny the win to a player that cheats or breaks the rules, or is being a clear asshat. There's still plenty of discretion there.

Epignosis wrote:

Law wrote:I will never host a game where Townies or Mafiosos need to be alive in order to win.

That type of win-condition belongs in 3rd party/Independent faction, not the main two. Sometimes sacrificing yourself is the smart play, and you should win with your team.

I'd rather take wins away from players who stayed alive but didn't deserve to win than those who played hard for their team, but got killed for it.

That depends on the setup. In an open setup in which information is in play (role checker, lie detector, civilian BTSC, etc.), having to be alive in order to win keeps civilians from getting Mafia lynched just because they dump info into the thread. There's an art to lynching Mafia without drawing the Night kill yourself. It's one I myself have not mastered and probably never will, but I think it keeps blabbermouth civilians from ruining the game for the Mafia.

No info or a closed setup? That's different.

Your teammates would be much less willing to let you bus them if they knew they couldn't win. :P

Epignosis wrote:

Dragon D. Luffy wrote:Public lie detectors as a whole, honestly.

A non-public LD is essentially a weaker cop, so it can be dealt with even if it can be used every day.

A public one is so OP it hurts.

I have a standing rule that I refuse to make statements for the purpose of being checked by the lie detector- my alignment matters not.

When I am mafia, I enjoy making obvious lie-detectable statements with the expectation that the lie-detector will not call my bluff.

I agree with SVS, that's a neat idea, and would be more awesome if the game didn't just end, and any cult members that don't get lynched have something else to play for.

Dragon D. Luffy wrote:Also has there ever been a games with jesters in the syndicate? I've never seen people here talk about it.

We do have a tendency to not use the traditional names of roles on this site, so if there was a jester, it wouldn't be obvious.

In Watchmen, my win con was to get nightkilled. A variation of the standard jester.

I can't recall a regular Jester cropping up anywhere, but I'm sure it has.

Turnip Head wrote:My Warcraft game definitely won't be a traditional mafia game since it features two identical teams of equal strength. But I think it will retain enough of what I consider to be the central concept: which players should I be trying to lynch/kill? I think people will figure out how to play it while they're playing it, which is very exciting to me as the host

I'd love to see this play out (though I know nothing of Warcraft). SVS and I started but never really got going on a Baseball Mafia that was going to have a similar type setup: two identical teams pitted against each other.

G-Man wrote:Yikes. Given the general disdain for resurrections and recruiting, I may scrap that hybrid idea I posted earlier.

Having been away from the game for a few years, I'm trying to give every mechanic and role type the benefit of the doubt as I encounter them anew or for the first time. A lot of the success or failure of these mechanics depend on how the host implements and manages them. Throwing cool ideas you saw elsewhere can be a recipe for disaster if you don't take time to thoroughly think through how that mechanic interplays with other elements of your game. If you only know it on a surface level, I'd say be careful. You have to have a higher understanding of some mechanics to use them well.

I think a game based around it is not the same a game that includes a single instance of it.

And as long as we're not running recruitment games every other month, people will still enjoy the freshness of it to an extent.

Dragon D. Luffy wrote:On the rezz + recruit thing, I once made a cult where every member of it was a ressurected, immortal player, but nobody was allowed to vote except for the cruit recruiter. So it was balanced. It was a vampire cult.

Does this mean that the cults' ability to win was entirely dependent on the survival of the initial recruiter?

Turnip Head wrote:No, I'd say rezzes are either pro-town or null. Nothing like bringing back a confirmed civ, especially if you have a protection plan in place. At worst the mafia has to waste a kill on them.

Though there's always exceptions, like the one time that a civvie with info was rezzed, then misinterpreted his info, made it obvious that he had info, and then ran a lynch train on me, his fellow civ

Or there's the case of rezzing the civ with info, then not believing the info, and ultimately second-guessing yourself as a result and trying to lynch said civ with info.

Golden wrote:And you also need another chart "Pro-casual" and "anti-casual", because my favourite thing about non-changeable votes is when I don't have to check in 5 minutes before lynch to know I'm not being lynched.

In that sense, I think changeable votes are among my least favourite mechanics... even though I value their strategic worth.

I'm a big fan of changeable votes. But role-powers that are dependent on specific voting outcomes can make things a little tricky (see timmer's death in World Reborn). As such, holding votes in polls where one could make a vote without being tracked can also be bothersome. But the polls are so much more convenient for tracking player votes, that I still think it is the most ideal way to do it. The only downside is when votes are not changeable, when someone misclicks and votes the wrong player. One wouldn't make this mistake just posting in the thread.

Of course, the JTM method isn't bad either, creating a vote tag for votes, and having an alternate account track votes. This wouldn't be easy to implement, and has potential for shenanigans.

Turnip Head wrote:I also don't care for lynch switches as a baddie power. Lynches should be the domain of the civs, and to give the baddies a way to completely overrule that process is frustrating.

I also prefer lynch switches to only be able to be targeted at players that have votes. It's the worst when a super-civ gets lynched in a game where they would never get a legitimate lynch-vote, because they really have no right to. I don't know if this is a common mechanic, but this is one that I would use with lynch switches, regardless of which alignment gets them.

JaggedJimmyJay wrote:

Turnip Head wrote:

JaggedJimmyJay wrote:Has The Syndicate ever had a game with hammer voting?

We've had games where votes weren't changeable, so a lynch post could come early if the result was a foregone conclusion. But no hammer in the traditional sense that I know of.

Maybe I can bring that beautiful mechanic into a future heist game for experimentation.

For those who may not know, hammer voting refers to a majority-based lynch. Lynches aren't decided by the player who has the most votes at the deadline -- they're decided when a player reaches a requisite number of votes (usually half of the living players plus 1 or rounded up). When that hammer vote is dropped to secure the lynch, the day phase ends immediately. A lot of sites that employ hammer votes don't even implement deadlines into their day phases -- they are perpetual until a hammer is reached.

I probably wouldn't go that far, deadlines are usually necessary for sanity. But I love me a hammer vote.

This was a mechanic I initially learned mafia through. Our deadline were not dependent on time, but who reached the majority votes, so they could last days or even weeks.

I don't think we called them hammers though, but I can't remember tbh.

Dragon D. Luffy wrote:

Turnip Head wrote:I wouldn't say role claiming is really a mechanic, so that's a cheap answer :P And most hosts tend to be very strict about it here because everyone hates it. I have a game in the queue that will allow it, but I have mechanics in place to make it risky.

The Syndicate is the exception.

Elsewhere, people will be quick to tell you the reason you are not allowing role claiming is that you are a lazy host who could not balance your game the proper way and is trying to hide that by removing a fundemanetal mechanic from mafia.

And I disagree with that. Some games are only balanced if they don't have role claiming, yes, but you are missing so many cool game possibilities if you limit yourself like that.

As for cop reveals, I'm more neutral about that. I think allowing people to dump information is okay as long as they don't say how they got that information in the first place. But hosts need to be careful to make sure the game can't be solo'd by cops. Like adding godfather/miller roles and such.

I agree with this.

There's so many ways to negate the overpowerness of cops and rolecheckers. In one game on this site, I was the cop, and red-checked 3 of the 4 baddies in the first 4 nights (we still lost anyway, but that's neither here nor there). But my belief has changed to now that sort of thing should not happen. Hosts can avoid punishing players for info-dumping and role-claiming by just giving the information less credibility in the first place.

I'm also jaded against recruitment. I've only been recruited once on this site, and that was in the Recruitment game, and even then, I was recruited by my role, not by name. I believe folks tend to recruit the people they like and know. I would do the same thing. So in a game where the recruiter is over-powered, there are some players that stand no chance. This is just my opinion though.