MoreOnVoting
From Barbelith
In the event of a tie, (increasingly unlikely in the later rounds) a re-vote is triggered, where only the tied players are eligible for accusation.
A second tie isn't supposed to happen, as long as there's an odd number of Villagers during the Day. Sometimes a Doctor (see WhatIsADoctor) can affect the number of villagers, or sometimes you just start out with the wrong number.
If it's a tie with everyone voting for only two candidates, my instinct tells me to lynch them both. The more death, the better!
(grant) We're going to need to discuss the current "waiting game" strategy that's in danger of side-tracking the current game (Mafia 2: The Early Years). I'm not yet objecting to it enough to try figuring out something to do about it on my own, but it seems clear that some mechanism needs to be put in place to coax votes out of a recalcitrant Village.
There seem to be several options:
No vote, no lynch - After a set amount of time, Day just comes to an end, and the Mafia and Detectives do their thing. This seems unfair, and *very* upsetting to the balance of power in the game. On the other hand, it's obviously a very big stick with which to threaten the Village.
Mandatory voting order - At this stage in the game, as suggested by the players (and the whole strategy, if you think about it), a mandatory order could give unfair advantage to the Mafia by disguising motives or concealing voting bloc behaviors. I was toying with the idea of a variation: mandatory first voter, which can alter the Village's "read" of voting behaviors, but not by much. However, two people have already voted and the rest of the Village are still draaaaggggggging it out.
Mayoral fiat lynching - If the Villagers can't decide on a victim, the Mayor does. It'd have to be random, and the Village would have to trust the Mayor not to play favorites. This seems like it could take the fun out of a game pretty quickly.
Trial by the dead. - If the living Villagers can't decide on a victim, maybe the dead can. This option is full of a lot of chaos -- I have no idea how closely the dead follow a game after they've been whacked or lynched, or how likely they are to learn secrets that regular villagers don't know ("Sorry about that - you should never have trusted me. Better luck next time, sucker!" - PM from Player X). This would also only make a real difference later in the game, when there are more than three or four dead to vote. It seems like dead Mafia should be able to vote along with dead innocents, although the patterns of their voting could be telling.
Abstention - (Qalyn) I think the reason the "waiting game" happened is because there's no hard time limit on voting. Grant seems unwilling to issue one because missing the deadline means disqualification. But if you allow a player to abstain from voting in a round -- there's lots of conceivable reasons to -- you can enforce the time limit without unfairly penalizing the players. The player would have to say, "I'm abstaining from this round," and the first vote should probably be mandatory. (grant): This seems fair, but does add a layer of obfuscation to voting patterns. I'm also not sure who'd be *willing* to abstain, especially at this point in the game. I get the idea people want to vote, but don't want to vote for the wrong person even more.
Option to change vote - (Todd) - The main argument against letting people change their vote is that the Mafia seems to have an advantage this way. Additionally, the possibility that the game will be further dragged out by dithering milquetoasts is increased. What I'd like to propose would be a half-measure: Perhaps each Villager can get one chance, during the course of the game, not on each vote, to change hir mind. This would certainly give reticent villagers the impetus to cast a vote, and not give the Mafia too much of an advantage. I suppose it would work like this - all votes in a round are cast, and then the Mayor would announce a window of opportunity for Villagers to change their votes (or hold their peace). Granted, this adds a small accounting burden on an already-overworked mayor, but the village can elect to compensate hir with treats of their choice. I suggest - beer.
Secret Ballot - And/Orr? also brought up this possibility: Villagers PM votes directly to the Mayor. This seems a fair solution, although I have a nagging suspicion it gives Mafia an advantage (in general, public information helps the Village, and secrets help the Mafia). Thus far, this seems like the best option.
(grant): Well, the secret ballot certainly got people voting, and the Mayor revealed who voted for whom immediately after all votes were in. And an innocent villager got lynched instead of one of the mafia. Would a public ballot have changed this? In this case, it might have -- since two potential mafia voting blocs had been identified and challenged to vote first publicly by one of the villagers. No villager was willing to vote until the potential blocs had gone, and the potential blocs were unwilling to vote first, since they could need to use their votes in self defense. Oddly, though, the two prime suspects voted in public first (against each other), which pretty much shaped the election process. And, from the village's perspective, the wrong one lost by a single vote.
Other thoughts?
