Showdown Mafia

I'm going to talk a little bit about how I created/balanced this setup. I wrote this during night 1, so for the most part none of this has been influenced by how the game went. I'm not going to consider the possibility of double lynches in most of this discussion, as it complicates the numbers a bit. However, in general I would say that double lynches tend to help town more than mafia (since they can allow town to squeeze in an extra lynch in certain scenarios). The simplest of these cases would be a day with two town and one mafia left.

With 13 townies, 4 mafia, and a night 0 start (essential since 24 hours is very little time to decide on a duel), mafia require 4 mislynches in order to win. Having the number of mislynches=the number of mafia members is fairly common for mini setups. The two major exceptions are the popular 7-2 (mostly newbie games/BH also favors these I think) and 10-3 (c9++ and its derivatives are the most common). Those setups require one more mislynch than there are mafia members, but I didn't feel that was appropriate for this setup. Is 13-4 a reasonable ratio of town to mafia? Yes, it is. Many mini games (including the aforementioned) have a similar ratio.

Next I considered the roles. Standard protective (medic/jailer) and investigative roles (cop/tracker/watcher) would be too powerful in this setup, considering the duel mechanic. I also did not want this game to revolve around role usage, so I decided to give town weak roles.

The three roles that town has in this game are salesman (very weak, only useful for sparking some discussion, possible low chance of tricking a mafia into dueling someone rashly), suicide bomber (a weakened vigilante), and bodyguard (weak version of a medic as you end up dying if you use it successfully). There are no notifications in this game so bodyguard targets won't know whether or not they were protected. The town roles are fairly weak on the whole. Games of this size typically feature at least 3 strong roles for town(cop/vig/medic/jailer/vet being the most common). This game has 1 extremely weak role and 2 gimped versions of normal roles. As such, the mafia do not require roles to counteract the town roles (godfather/roleblocker/rolecop/framer/bus driver/medic are some of the common choices).

Instead, mafia were given a janitor and a substitute. They were also allowed to distribute their roles however they liked, as substitute in particular requires a stronger player in order to use it effectively. The janitor role is most useful on the night that the suicide bomber activates their role. In other cases, it can only sow minor doubts as town would instinctively think a single death must have been the mafia kill. There are some possibilities of mafia being able to combine a janitor usage with smart fake-claims in order to close out a game, but it requires town to already be in some disarray.

Substitute is an unusual role and I was initially reluctant to insert it as I did not want to mess with the duel concept too much. There are two major circumstances that I can see this role being used for; the first is to have a stronger mafia player cover for a weaker mafia player(very risky) and the second is to save a townie in a town-town duel (who they have a "town read" on). In both cases, there would likely be some backlash on the substitute for changing the duel. In the second case, a strong player should be able to fight back and use the popular "why would scum ever put themselves at risk" argument. If both townies involved in the duel happen to flip at a later time, the mafia player could even become "confirmed" from this! The last possible usage that I saw for the substitute role was outright deception. Town has no knowledge of how roles in this setup work apart from the lack of notifications. As such, a mafia player could claim that someone else must have inserted them into the duel. Using the argument that secret powers must be the work of mafia trying to save their buddy and get a townie lynched instead, a mafia player could then proceed to try to not only get their opponent lynched but also the person who was "saved". Ultimately though, substitute is a role that I chose to insert because it fits the general theme of the game - actions should be risky and put your own life in jeopardy.

Town's role strength is low compared to most other games. Since I've only run this game once before, it's difficult for me to say if the duel mechanic balances that out completely.

Lastly, the question of mislynch numbers and best-case/worst-case scenarios needs to be revisited after role creation. The best-case scenario for mafia is that suicide bomber kills a townie and mafia kills go off as normal. Mafia require 3 mislynches in this scenario. If suicide bomber either witholds their power or kills a mafia but are not shot themselves that night (by mafia), mafia will require 4 mislynches. Also if suicide bomber kills a townie, but mafia shoot the suicide bomber (or the suicide bomber's target) that night, it would still be 4 mislynches needed. The worst-case scenario (which is also very unlikely) is that the suicide bomber hits mafia and mafia happen to shoot the suicide bomber on the night he uses his power. This would result in mafia requiring 5 mislynches. This is not a scenario I want mafia facing, however I judged that the odds of this happening are very low (and are balanced out by the more likely possibility that mafia would only require 3 mislynches). The best-case scenario for town winning involves them getting a succesful suicide bomber and 3 straight correct lynches, which is acceptable.

On the area of modkills - was I harsh in this game? Yes, I was. In the past I have been very lenient (perhaps too much) when it comes to people doing things like: posting after a hammer in a game that forbids it (I only do this for instant majority games)/asking questions in the thread designed to make them look townie/outright asking to be replaced or modkilled in the thread. I have always forbidden these behaviors in the past but even after multiple warnings, people have chosen to disregard them. This time, I decided that with the exception of asking questions in the thread (which I would give a warning for), I would modkill players for breaking rules. If that impacted the game, then so be it. I was willing to pay that price.

I asked players not to post after hammer/duel in the OP, then later explicitly stated that this would result in a modkill, and then ended up having to modkill someone for doing this. There should absolutely not have been any violations after this. I fully support what my cohosts did and I would have done the same if I had been around.