Proposal: Fish and Fowl and Good Red Herring
Self Killed. Failed by Derrick.
Adminned at 23 Jan 2019 13:35:53 UTC
Add before “** If the Search Result is 6 or above”:
**If the Search Result is a 1 or lower, the detective finds a Red Herring
Add to the paragraph in clues starting with “When a Detective finds a Clue”:
When a Detective finds a Red Herring, the Chief selects a Possibility at random and privately informs that Detective of that Possibility: if the Possibility is a Quality of the Murder it is described to the Detective as “Disproof”, otherwise it is described as “Proof”. The Chief does not inform the Detective whether the Detective found a Clue or whether they found a Red Herring.
This is intended to incentivize verifying your clues, and to enable plausible deniability: did he lie because he got a red herring, or is he trying to deceive me?
Comments
Kevan: he/him
The false negatives (where you find some proof but are told it’s nothing) seem very harsh here, to the point where I think everyone would choose to become Observant to avoid this. “Verify your clues” is exhausting if you have to verify all the disproofs.
derrick: he/him
Well, some basic statistics changes all the verifying. Almost all red herring are proofs rather than disproofs, whereas almost all clues are disproofs rather than proofs. So you really need to verify proofs rather than all clues (about 1 in three “proofs” will turn out to be true).
The “observant” quality might be a little too good in this situation though, as it makes you immune to red herring. applying the herring before the roll is modified may be desirable, to not overly punish alcoholics or reward observants.
pokes:
Kevan: he/him
[derrick] If the goal of the dynasty is “pinpoint the murder details”, missing a genuine Proof is a big deal and hard to recover from, because it’s lost among your many Disproofs.
Perhaps by definition a “red herring” should only ever be something that looks like the thing you’re hunting, but isn’t - never the other way around.
pokes:
In an information theory sense this more than halves the value, as measured by mutual information between the Quality and the Clue, of a Clue; being an Alcoholic more than halves it again.
Trigon:
derrick: he/him
Lets move on, and I’ll try again sometime.