Spoiled discussion

[Pleonast]

I'm very curious to see how bids go on Night One.

[Pleonast]

PM from sachertorte on SDMB:

Hi Pleonast,

I'm really terrible about checking my PMs. I only see them if I happen upon a thread where I decide to post something.

That said, your setup for Auction Mafia looks very very good! I'm eager to see how it plays out. My initial thoughts are:
Winning an investigation (or tracking or watching) then dying from it complete obliterates the power. That's not so great, especially since those are the 'town-friendly' powers. On the other hand, kill, obfuscate and protect are more scum friendly powers and even if the winner dies from winning the bid, the power is at least still useful. That puts Town in a bit of a pickle.

On the other hand, with only 3 scum, Town begins in a good position where they can 'spend' more to get powers/deny powers from scum.

This looks terribly difficult to balance. Clearly there is a good balance point somewhere, but I have no idea where that would be.

I wonder what will happen.

If I were Town, I'd be most concerned about the kill power. Extra kills for scum are way powerful because scum know who is town and who is scum. Town winning the kill has a high chance of killing Town anyway. I'd probably bid on the kill power simply to keep it away from scum. I'd probably also bid on the protect power and target the same person. That's pretty insane though.

I'd also be concerned about obfuscate. The mere existence of that power is anti town. Town winning it hurts town. Scum winning it hurts town. That's a really sucky situation. Would I bid on it to keep it out of scum's hand, but know that results could get messed up? I guess I would reveal my bid so that town knows what is going on, but since death is a problem, I think Town should have the option to win obfuscate and NOT USE IT! Come to think of it, Town should be allowed to win kill and not use it too.

I hope Town realizes that they need to bid on items they don't want!

[Pleonast]

My reply via PM:

Thanks for your thoughts! Would you like to be spoiled? I'll post this in my spoiled comment thread if you don't mind.

I am also very uncertain how to balance this. So I've mostly thrown up my hands and gone with the default 25% scum baseline.

By my thinking, there's 2 pro-town powers (investigate and protect), 2 pro-scum powers (obfuscate and kill) and the rest neutral. You've homed in on the trick about the "aligned" powers: winning does nothing for the wrong team, except prevent the other team from using it. I decided to require powers be used to force players to make tactical decisions--making a bid requires deciding the cost and a target.

Bidding will be very interesting. How much is a power worth to a player? A team could very easily commit suicide with too-high bids. But too-low bids gives a huge advantage to the other team. I think my starting point for bidding is the expected length of game: about four complete Day-Night cycles. So 1/4 = 25% seems like a good starting value for a bid.

The other important difference in this game is that powers cannot be eliminated. There's going to be an investigation every Night, and a claimed reveal every morning. Scum cannot really stop that.

[swammerdami]

Thanks for the great game, Pleonast! I think bidding for Powers is the best new invention I've seen in my Mafia playing.

It did seem like the Day 2 discussion of bidding led to some strong Town leans on several Players, exposing Scum by process of elimination. I hope we have more Auction Mafia games see to how it plays out with more experience.

[Pleonast]

PM received:

Dec 30, 2013 9:52:42 GMT -8 @sachertorte said:

Pity that randomness got scum caught so early.

I'm shocked at the pushback on Captain Klutz's plan. Okay, I'm not really shocked; but his plan is solid - like super-duper solid. Town can totally game the auction now and force a win. Captain Klutz is proposing a system where any scum interference confirms town! That is a huge price for scum to pay to win an extra auction. So huge that I doubt scum would do it. A townie-Meeko would though

I'm baffled at the resistance.

[Pleonast]

Dec 27, 2013 22:52:06 GMT -8 swammerdami said:

Thanks for the great game, Pleonast! I think bidding for Powers is the best new invention I've seen in my Mafia playing.

It did seem like the Day 2 discussion of bidding led to some strong Town leans on several Players, exposing Scum by process of elimination. I hope we have more Auction Mafia games see to how it plays out with more experience.

I'm glad you like it. I hope to use it again, if there's enough interest. And there's no reason others couldn't run it.

I thinking the bidding really captures the essence of Mafia: trading numbers for information. But the other key ingredient in the game is it's pure vanilla. There's no claims to parse.

[swammerdami]

There may be good ways to tweak the rules. For example, Scum and/or Town "Powers" might have a few points subtracted from their winning price before the death dice are rolled.

And some way has to be found to cope with Klutz's ingenious strategy when Scum is down to 1. One way might be to give the Scum team a few extra anonymous bids each Night.

[Pleonast]

I think tweaking the costs might make it too complicated. The bidding system is designed to capture the the "market" price of a power. Tweaks will make some powers more or less useful than they should be. I guess a designer might want that, but I prefer simplicity.

There doesn't need to be any adjustment for Klutz's tactic, I think. Depending on who's watching/tracking who, scum can simply scum-kill or not whoever they want with no risk. That is, they should play as if they're town, and let mislynches do the rest. Scum's problem is their numbers rather than town's tactics.

Although scum have ended up doing poorly this game, I don't think the rules are biased against them. story getting investigated was luck and/or great insight and isn't something that should be adjusted for. gnarly simply won too many bids at too high a price, which is a tactical mistake that also should not be adjusted for.

And of course, see sach's comments on how the rules can be used in scum's favor.

[Pleonast]

Dec 31, 2013 7:47:33 GMT -8 @sachertorte said:

I understand. Thanks. It's also a pity that this game is being decided over the holiday week.

Bill is kind of bothering me. He seems really off this game. He serves up storyteller then goes into bury head in sand mode. The paranoid part of me wants to think Bill bussed storyteller. He's really not making much of any sense. But bussing storyteller makes even less sense.

With storyteller and gnarlycharlie having barely participated in the game at all, gaming the system is pretty much all Town has left. Storyteller was served up by investigation, so there is no meaningful vote record. gnarlycharlie died at night, so no record there either. A single scum isn't going to reveal much of anything. Captain Klutz seems to be the only one trying to do anything.