Time Travel Mafia; Interest?

OK, so I came up with an idea that I'd like to try out.
Rather than only making actions that affect that particular night, roles can choose a night, past, present or future, for their ability to resolve on.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the concept is with an example:
Mafia kills a random VT Night 1. There is a tied vote Day 2, leading to a no lynch. The doctor on Night 2 sends their protection back to protect the random VT on Night 1. Therefore, the VT never died Night 1, and they are able to retroactively send a vote back to Day 2, assisting in the lynch of a player (as the vote is no longer tied).
As you can anticipate, one of the players available to be lynched might have been the doctor. So what happens if the random VT lynches the doctor who saves them in the past? A paradox ensues! The current plan to resolve this paradox to create an action out of nowhere to stabalise the system; either an unattributed vote on the doctor (result: VT died N1, Doc lynched D2) or an unattributed doc-save on the VT (result: VT survived N1 to lynch the doctor D2). Suggestions on how to resolve paradoxes are welcome.

Another aspect would be players themselves travelling through time; either vanishing from the game to reappear later on (travelling to the future), or sending retroactive votes and actions to take place on previous days (travelling to the past).

The game would not be over until the other team/s are conclusively defeated, even if all other players are dead at some particular point (ie all remaining players are town on Day 3, but a time-travelling SK is set to arrive on Day 4 from Day 2).

I think I've got a viable 5-player setup; number of factions and people in each faction withheld for now. I've still got to run some tests.

Any takers?

/in.

The doctor.

/in... just /in

start the game now! people can retrospectively vote once they join!

I think having players vanish is a bad idea. Constrain it to returning at the same moment they left at.

Although, it could be a situational protection. You can't kill me tonight if I travel straight to tomorrow morning.

Make stuff one-shot (or at least limited). Can the shot be undone? Only if you include roleblockers I guess.

Paradoxes in popular media always resolve as if scripted that way (because, you know, they are). If you go multiple universe solution, you run into issues of "correctness", ie this paradox works because it was by person from a universe with a different history, interacting with everyone else as if something was different, but the other universe still exists. Which do you play out?

Narratives follow a finite number of stories (most commonly 1), and have a scripted resolution where the threads reconverge. This is very difficult from a game-mechanics perspective.

I suppose you can work through actions in sequence, but you'd have to alert players to each one, so they could decide how they would have acted in the newly created "universe". For example, if the doctor goes back in time to save a player, the mafia might want to kill them again in the here and now (as if they'd been blocked in a normal game), whereas if they had succeeded, they wouldn't try to kill a dead person.

They would definitely want to go back and change their target, which requires time travel mechanics (and is why time travel should be limited somehow). It's untenable to keep all possibilities available simultaneously (like asking each player to write conditional actions, or situational instructions), so it would need to be played slowly and deliberately, with actions being changed dynamically.

Realistically, players would have no recollection of the previous scenario, since they have lived their lives in the current scenario (excepting the current traveller). How would we manage that?

Then you get to the really hard stuff: Future travel. If a person goes to the future, they will see something, even if that something changes with the myriad of time travelling actions between now and then. What do you show them, as the game master?

Also: This comes to philosophy - when did the present change? Following it logically, the current chain of events has been happening since as far back as our universe cares about. If one was to change it, does the change occur as soon as they come to the decision to change it? Wasn't that choice inevitable anyway, given the specific circumstances? Trace it back further, it follows that the time travel was always going to happen, in this universe at least, and the time travel already happened, and changing it is futile; or that it travelled sideways, leaving this universe as if the traveller had just disappeared, and they live their life in another one.

But when do we switch, mechanically?

/in all the way. It is inevitable

Day1: Choose your actions (ie vote, kill, protect, talk, etc).

OK, 1 action has been resolved, here's the new history. Resubmit your actions (if they're different).

New chain of events; send in new actions. [This means ALL actions]

etc

The problem here is that it falls to you to resolve each action, and then either guess at player history and decisions, or replay the game from the change point onwards.

That won't work though - lynch townie Day2, traveller goes back and saves them (by not voting, by shooting, by whatever), but you can't erase the knowledge from players' minds. If the townie was somehow saved Day2, the town wouldn't know their alignment (or that they'd been saved, depending on the action taken), and might conceivably lynch them Day3. Yet, we all know what happened.

So, upon further thought, players will be aware of changes as they happen, and can only react to the changes. I don't know how this would work, I've only read it done with a single protagonist (and they often have to convince people they once knew to believe them, since NPCs aren't special). But how do you do that with players?

Players, alive and dead, will have to account for actions as if they were alive in the here and now, voting and whatnot. Role reveals would need to be carefully decided upon. Perhaps only give a traveller/not status? If mafia is killed, there's no use reviving them if they've been ousted.

But then, what if this mafia player dies Day1, chooses their kill for Night1 as if they were alive, chooses a gullible townie. Since the mafioso is dead, the townie lives. Turns out this townie can travel in time, and goes back to save the mafioso from dying (convinced by crafty partner perhaps?), who lives, then kills the townie before they can save them, paradox ensues.

Similarly, townie lynched Day1, Day2 they are convinced of someone's guilt and silently votes for them at L-1. This person doesn't get lynched, but goes on to save the first townie. Same deal. One solution is to invalidate an action, and ask for resubmission, but which? The one that happened first (ie the vote), or the one that resolves first (the save)?

Puzzling.

what alex said

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*buys headache tablets*

/in ... btw eggs can you share those tablets please ????

/in I guess

I think you just shouldn't do death reveals it is the only way this is goin to work.

and you should make all voting secret, don't post it in thread PM the Mod directly.

Also if you travel back in time and meet a past version of yourself will the Blinovitch Limitation effect kick in?

I'll have to read over this; we won't be starting until my holidays end in any case.

Flips are a problem, but they can be mitigated (I think). Note that this won't be a normal Mafia game; I think it will be more working out how to kill people than who to kill; an excercise in game theory.

when does this start???
SO, our holidays are over... over a week now

'My' holidays; I had uni games last week. Thread and PMs forthcoming...