General Rules Updates

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

General Rules Updates

[Sorry for lack of formatting!]

So it has been a long time, 3-4 years, since the base rules of MMG were written. Since those were written we have hosted quite a lot of games and more people have reached Mastermind Ranks where they can host outside of the base rules. In fact, so many people have wanted to host outside the basic rules that they are very difficult to apply to games these days. This thread is to discuss the Basic Rules and what we can change about them moving forward to better match our games today as well as just enhance them overall. You can find the current Rules thread at the following URL.

drmmo.proboards.com/thread/931/murder-mystery-general-play

To just provide my thoughts as I do a quick run through the Document:

Important Terms: I think everything here is fine, potentially we need to add more for trial related content.

The Map, Movement, and You: Movement has been experimented with but I don't think we have any intent right now of changing the basics of movement posts. So unless you guys think we just need new images or something, I think this area is fine.

Examination & Action: Simple and straightforward. PM the mastermind to do things. Potentially we could expand this section to be more open to RPing with the mastermind versus just encouraging generic I examine or I act messages.

:Game Mechanics:
Welcome to the Meat and Potatoes of what we need to change in my opinion. The general process of games has changed and these settings don't quite match our needs at times.

Phases: I still think Phases for games are acceptable. This calls back to Danganronpa with its Daily Life, Deadly Life, and Trial though we have different names. Potentially the contents of each phase may change, but the idea of phases I think is still fine.

Standard Phase: The Daily Life of MMG. People move, act, and murder. I think this may need to be split into sections that split out the Murder bit as Real Time murder hasn't been super successful. It certainly caused alot of tension, but it also really frustrated people at times. Maybe we split up the mystery and murder bits to let people focus on one of the two, then perhaps they still play like normal, but the examinations are toned down so the Mastermind can focus on murder.

Investigation Phase: Going to link this one into the following Trial Phase as these are some of the areas I think we need to change the most. Currently the Investigation phase is the arbitrary period of time for people to go look for clues to solve a murder. Normally. Nowadays we have this phase meshing with the Trial phase with people debating in trial and leaving to go find evidence and coming back. I think we need to explicitly create some kind of requirement to shift from Investigation to Trial. Perhaps its when each piece of evidence has been found by two different people(2 people per piece of evidence, not that two people each found ALL the evidence) or something like that. I feel the goal of murder in our games is to create interesting puzzles and mysteries to solve as well as to try and trick the other players. Currently the investigation phase just exists as long as it is necessary to find the culprit or until the mastermind gets bored.

Trial Phase: AND then after the bore of Investigating as the trial starts we get into the trial. Being open here, we have pretty terrible trials 90-95% of the time. Either the culprit is super obvious and someone pins them down in two posts or no one has any idea and trials just sputter out. Not to mention the Verbal Bullet System has pretty much entirely been dropped. No one in recent memory has used Verbal Bullets and made it work. Maybe we need to reconsider how the bullets work and rewrite them[addressed further in a later section]. Or we could abandon them entirely in favor of other systems like Colored Truth, which has been the vastly more popular option these past few games. So coming off the back of a semi broken system and a general lack of motivation, Trials also have difficulty ending. There is almost no set in stone method of ending a trial. We have tried time and again to create mechanics to bring down the culprit in final showdowns and solving mysteries, but each of them falls flat. We added these kinds of things to force peoples hands on votes or bypass them entirely due to people just troll guessing culprits like the Mastermind or something. Not sure how we should adjust it to avoid both scenarios. I think we need to reconsider how people are supposed to WIN in trials and how we play out the game in the event that someone wins and the game "ends." Potentially we go back to a one murder to win style but add in a "What If" rule where if the culprit does get away, they become the winner, but the game goes on as if they had been caught to let people continue enjoying the mystery or future murders. Let me know what you guys think on this.


The Art of Murder: I think we should adjust this to encourage creating interesting to solve murders, versus murders purely written to have little evidence and be difficult to solve.

The Body Discovery Announcement: Probably need to reconsider this system a tad. It should probably still exist, but may need to adjust specific rules to avoid people using it as a method of easily solving murders or excluding people.

Verbal Bullet System: This system had people finding Undeniable pieces of evidence for use in the trial. Turns out that it basically boiled down to a bullet saying something like
THIS BLOOD KNIFE EXISTS
but doesn't actually prove much as people could sidestep bullets with other possibilities. I think the bullet system is still potentially valid, BUT needs to be reworked. In my opinion I think that all trials should come down to a vote for who dunnit with no special rules. The verbal bullet system or any other system shouldn't force who people can or can't vote for. I think we need to have either a Verbal Bullet or a Color or some other system to help people debate in trial. I don't think the system should be HOW you win the trial, but rather just a tool to help you debate and get your point across. Bullets could become cornerstones of discussion as they are "relevant" to the case and people can fire them to bring up what may be important topics. Colors can help people better organize their thoughts and show others what they believe to be true and what they are theorizing. This kind of all boils together with my other ideas for how the whole trial bit should go.

My thought process: A player commits a murder, they do so in some manner which may not necessarily be the most efficient, but is a complicated and interesting murder. They investigate with the others and intentionally locate certain bullets related to the crime, but that incriminate others. Everyone comes to the trial and combined have all the bullets, but each person is more inclined to think its not the culprit as they only have some bullets and the culprit tried to make sure no one person picked up the bullets linking it to them. The plan works and after a serious debate the vote occurs and the culprit gets away with it. As the rules state, everyone but the culprit gets executed and the culprit gets an epilogue describing their victory. Then the game shifts back in time and WHAT IF's the scenario to be where the person was caught and executed. The game continues onwards, though the winner has already been decided.



Mastermind Ranks: So, ALOT of people just ask to be temporarily bumped up the Mastermind ranks to host more complicated games. I think there should still be a rank where one gets their own board as thanks for hosting multiple games, but I am not sure if we need all the ranks. I do think we need to not leave it completely open so that everybody and their brother doesn't try to host without any effort, but potentially we lighten up limits on gimmicks. Very few people ACTUALLY hosted base games without gimmicks and in many cases I have to close my eyes and ignore things or get blindsided by them. If everybody wants gimmicks then I don't think I should be hammering people that they CANT DO ANY OF IT, but potentially we could tone this down to be more open to new hosts with creative ideas.

[Chatt]

I'm a bit short on time so I'll just weigh in on the murder part of this.

I've been a murderer (or attempted lol) in almost every season I've been a part of. And most of the time I will not take the most efficient method, often trying to give people solving the crimes interesting corpses, clues and having them scour the area in order to find everything related to the murder. I do not do this to win the game. I've only "won" a single season through this method and that was with extreme cooperation from like half of the cast.

And that's the crux. Making an interesting murder doesn't win the game. Making an efficient one does. Leave as little evidence and make it as annoying to find as possible. Bank on the fact that normally 2-4 people participate in a trial. I believe the reason so few people attempt murder is because if they fail, it removes 2 people from the season. The victim, and the murderer. Which is a problem. So, it takes a weird person to do those interesting murders. They have to not want to win, and simply want to provide something interesting to solve.

As for the proposed "what-if" scenario, I like it. It works better than what we have now which could result in the game and plot (which someone puts a lot of effort into) ending early. But ... then no one else can win right? We already have an issue with a bunch of players dropping during a season, and this probably wouldn't help. At this point it's playing just for the plot. Plus, no one else is going to even bother with murder without a specific plot need.

For me, I love the tension of not knowing if someone is going to kill you and taking precautions for that. Or plotting my own murders. This would kind of feel like removing half of the tension of the game along with my own purpose for playing. Ofc, all this feedback is well and good. I don't really have anything to propose in its place however. Murder needs to have serious repercussions if the player fails to do a good one, ofc. You're literally removing a player from the game. Same with winning through it. Cuz then you're removing everyone from the game.

Some random thoughts that popped through my head while writing this: We could have multiple winners? As in: 3 murder winners, a plot winner etc. Another idea is we take this like a slightly weird game in that we give people multiple chances. For instance, everyone has 2 lives. If I murder someone and fail, we both go down 1 life but stay in the game. I'll add more to this after I get home and have time to write lol.

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

I can certainly agree with the whole murder victory condition and will cite my first murder victory to show it even more so. In Season 3 Saku and I committed a team up murder where he performed everything EXCEPT the killing blow. We killed the only real person who was participating in trials(sorry C) and I hid so as to not have to talk at all in trial while Saku acted EXTREMELY GUILTY. It wasn't a fun murder to solve by anyone, because the whole goal was to force a coin flip on the players part. Even if they could figure out what happened, the goal was to prevent there from being a ****ing piece of evidence and rely on the trick working and if it failed, luck.

Efficient and minimal murders are the most effective for "winning" and tend to incorporate no real motives beyond wanting to win. You suggested multiple winners and the main rule preventing that at the moment is my One Trophy per game rule. Some people have asked me and I have allowed them to declare separate Murder and Mystery winners, but I only allow one trophy to avoid flooding the forum. In fact, I am pushing in that direction with my next season, with the Murderer and Victim winning as a Team(I haven't decided how to handle Trophies). Potentially we could change games from having set winners to be progress towards milestones. Maybe I setup trophies where you get 1 for getting away with your First Murder, then another for getting 3 and so on and potentially one for just being the Murderer or Victim. Then we Twist the meaning of the Mystery victory to just be to survive until the end and escape and add a milestone count to that so you get a trophy when you escape your 5th murder game or something. Heck, we already do this to an extent with a mastermind like C hosting X number of games and becoming an Ultimate Mastermind. I could do something like that and still allow masterminds to hand out one unique trophy per game to a player who didn't necessarily win, but accomplished something the mastermind wanted, say being the one who unveiled the major plot twist, or committed the most plot relevant murder.

Maybe if we split it that way players are more inclined to go for any path without strictly murdering just for the sake of Winning. That way people can steadily build up trophies just by playing and not necessarily committing a really boring murder or having to be the person who finds all the plot. This potentially also resolves your point about Tension in the What-If scenario, people can still be tense as they may be aiming for specific "victory scenarios" to get closer to the Mystery or Murder or Victim milestone even after a player has achieved what would have resulted in a full conclusion of the game.

As to your multiple lives thing it falls into the same boat as the What-If flips. Yes people can still be super stressed because when they get down to their last lives that's it, but I think its dangerous. Ain't gonna deny this, but we be trolls sometimes and I would expect the number of lives to be common knowledge. I wouldn't put it past someone for intentionally trying to burn out someone's last lives to remove them from the game completely. And if that happens we get two or three murders on the same victim and that player now has had to sit out of multiple trials and had their emotions bashed in. Then we get polite players who are going to intentionally avoid burning people's last lives to avoid people getting pissed off, so it almost just turns into nobody dying anyway.

So it boils down to the tension of being fully removed from the game through some means. I think we need to consider how to replicate that tension and find a method to let everyone continue to enjoy the game even if they end up being that one person who gets killed first. Thought! We have had Ghost systems in the past, so what if we implemented a kind in base games where the dead literally operate as ghosts in the game. They can move and post and examine, but they can't achieve a Win condition at that point, be it milestone or our norm. These ghosts get to wander around and find plot, chat with other players about their demise or something depending on whether the current host is fine with ghost RP or something. Potentially all chat would just be non canon and just for silliness. Perhaps we turn this into a tool for making trials more interesting too. Ghosts can participate in Trial, but they cannot investigate...at all. So they are literally having to provide blind chatter(lol) into the trial. Perhaps we go a step further and forbid them from using Verbal Bullets, Color, or whatever system we come up with. That way they don't get to break anyone's alibi or anything.

Death and losing need to be frustrating to maintain our tension, but perhaps with a ghost thing we can lessen how bad it hurts since they can still enjoy the game for the most part and Hagakure meme over everyone else in the game.

[Chatt]

Yea, multiple lives is probably a bad idea. Just save that one for a gimmick season lol.

I do however like the milestone idea. It definitely provides incentive to go for murders. It also allows for people to just try and survive to the end, and just promotes all the general playstyles which is always nice. If we're going to go with it, I think mystery should be separate from surviving. In most of these games surviving itself is quite a feat. And the mastermind getting the choose the most impactful player also sounds very appealing.

This doesn't solve the whole "efficient" murder just ending the game with the base rules. But ... I honestly can't think of a fix for that. Murder should have a significant payoff given the risk and, again, removing a player from the game. Perhaps collecting some volunteer murderers + victims before the game starts? Like perhaps people that before the game starts pm the mastermind that they'll be busy or they won't be able to play that much so they're willing to sacrifice themselves for the trial? They'll offer to leave the game early by doing an entirely solvable, but interesting, murder. I would probably be up for this role every once in a while. That's the only thing that comes to mind at this current moment. But yea, honestly I feel like this murder issue is the biggest one affecting us right now because we're kind of missing out on half of our gameplay with it. "murder Mystery" without the murder lol.

Moving on from that Investigation Phase: ... Strange how they all connect back to that murder thing. In the current state of the game, yea investigation can either be really fun, or just a pain. It depends on the murder. In my own season, I had the murderer yelling at me to end the investigation/trial phase while the 2 people investigating were screaming to keep it open. It was completely at my discretion. Which I don't mind ... it's just really open? There should probably be a hard rule on this like: "If every verbal bullet has been found" or "After a day of actual hard investigating by everyone that's going to try to investigate" So as to not punish the killer too hard if they hid the evidence/bullets well.

Which completely ties into Trials: Depends on the murder again ... But yea the verbal bullet system. I tried and failed pretty hard to get this to work in my season, so I guess I'll just post feedback on this system? This is an extremely difficult system to use properly. Because making these can either result in a completely useless bullet or a bullet that points wayyyy too obviously toward something. Like ... how would this one person know these footprints would be useful to the trial? They wouldn't, so those can't be a verbal bullet .... or can they? Because the footprints are there, so it's not deniable ... but would a normal person think that they have anything to do with a trial? They wouldn't until I literally gave the bullet to them. No one looks at footprints unless they're specifically looking for them, so just a general survey shouldn't reveal this or give a verbal bullet right?

These kind of thoughts would just rattle around for a while. I will admit I'm terrible at making verbal bullets. But making a verbal bullet for these footprints is so specific and would need to trial to go to those footsteps and someone attempt to deny the footprints. Only then do the bullets come in handy. In effect verbal bullets force people into a certain path. Which is what their intention was in the DR games, but these are not linear murders. Which is why I find the colored much better. It's not made by the Mastermind which opens up the thought process much more. Of course ... I've never used the colored system. So maybe I'm looking at it from the "grass is greener" perspective.

Body Discovery: another murder bas --//shot Ok umm no clue on this one. What strikes me is that in most DR games it's the main character that finds the body, then the body is announced, right? Which is actually a huge issue in our games ... in DR they have the main character who can't be murdered (lol). Then they have all the side mooks that get merked at first opportunity. We're kind of trying to treat everyone like the main character. Which doesn't really work. Anyways, I have no idea what to do for this one.

Mastermind Ranks: I personally very much enjoy the mastermind ranks we have now. Although I am kind of skipping 2nd star ... but it gives a clear sense of progression (what I like about milestone progress on trophies) and shows what I need to work for. Season LIFE was hosted under very clear 1 star Mastermind rules, and it definitely helped me learn a lot about the game. Especially map. And we're fixing the only issues I had as a 1 star mastermind with this discussion here. If we're gonna revamp the mastermind system is should probably be after we change the base rules just to see what it's like for anyone hosting at the base level again. After the revamp I'll probably end up hosting one at base rules for fun so ye.

This post is long enough already but I might make another one comparing our games to the base Danganronpa games. That actually seems like a fun comparison to make. As in: What happens if everyone is a main character and doesn't want to get mooked off?

[King V]

My general perspective on this subject is that only the investigation and trial rules really need to be changed, everything else is fine. We might need to clarify some things like how long a standard investigation phase should last, or how the body announcement works (3 people finding the body has become more difficult in more recent games).

For the trial rules, I'm inclined to agree with Eclipse, we should have a trial system to assist people in debating, but it shouldn't be a defining aspect of the game. My main problem with this, however, is that this makes alliances a much bigger problem. We haven't had any recent games where alliances have been a huge problem, but in almost every game I see a bunch of people grouping up with one another, and just sticking together for the entire game. In this case, it'd be extremely easy for those people to cover for one another in trial and just never vote for people in their alliance no matter who the culprit could be. In a game like RBG, for example, without a system limiting who could vote for who in trial, I would've been voted down in the first murder purely because the SK/Satori/Ghost alliance didn't like that I was trying to accuse one of them, despite none of them actually finding any condemning evidence against me. I think we had a discussion about this at one point, where the main argument was that if you don't have a valid theory on why someone might be the culprit, there's no reason you should vote for them. And random other people voting randomly isn't a good reason why the culprit should get caught.

I'm obviously biased here, but I think we should just replace the verbal bullet system with colored truth, as it seems to be the most effective system right now, despite having a few major flaws (there's nothing you can do about 2 conflicting purple truths for example). In a broader sense, we could have a list of trial systems that have been proven to work for the mastermind to choose from in the ruleset, although I think having one standard system for new masterminds to work with is probably best.

On the topic of mastermind ranks, I think our current system is fine. If people really like gimmicks, then maybe make a minor change like 1 star being able to host games with 1 gimmick, 2 star being able to host games with multiple gimmicks but still following all the basic rules, and 3 star being able to do whatever you want. I'm not really informed on this topic, but I have seen games where masterminds aren't able to handle their gimmicks properly at times, and have to fall back on the basic rules for support (I've done this sometimes too), so I do think limiting what masterminds can do based on their ranks is worthwhile.

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Oh boy Alliances. It is frustrating that they exist and returning to a pure vote system would invite them to return. It wouldn't work in games where everyone dies if they get it wrong, but in other stuff it would be problematic. Honestly I don't see a good way out of this without either making a convoluted trial system to force theories and so on or by introducing some kind of gimmick with the season, like everyone dying for getting it wrong or some other serious punishment. That or maybe add some kind of minimum post count into a trial to get voting privileges and if you don't meet the minimum it just assumes your vote went somewhere it didn't matter. At bare minimum that forces people to do stupid banter.

I agree that in our current situation, wholly swapping Verbal Bullet for Color would work best. I don't want to abandon bullets wholeheartedly, but they require more work on the host so they can take a role in higher ranked seasons for those who want to try them. We would need to have an explicit list of colors to put in the rules so to Clarify those would be:
Blue: Theory
Red: Truth
Purple: Alibi
Green: Mastermind/World/Flume