Instant Night

Instant Night is a variation of the typical Night/Day dynamic and a popular hybrid of Deep South and Nightless structures.

Ordinarily, following a lynch or deadline players will send in Night choices during a Night phase. In Instant Night, during the day players must submit their night choices before night falls. Night then occurs immediately after the lynch (usually in the same post). Players are usually allowed to switch their night actions as many times as they wish during the day.

Advantages

• Long Nights can kill a game's momentum because it is a time when players are completely disengaged from it once they have submitted their action.
• There is no down time in the game other than the brief period where the mod has to write the lynch result as well as the night result.

Disadvantages

• From the moderator's perspective:
  • This is a more difficult game to run. Players will often change their minds multiple times a day, which will mean many more PMs coming in. This increases the complication factor as a mod, and increases chance of making a mistake.
  • Timing becomes more important because the longer the game is left open, the more can change.
• From a player's perspective:
  • It is no longer possible to decide on an action based on a particular player's "flip" from a lynch.
  • Timing becomes more important because if a lynch is made and you weren't on to see it happen, you may have missed a crucial bit of information running up to that lynch that would have altered your night choice.

Variation

As in Deep South games, some Instant Night games employ different methods of Action Resolution for different roles. For instance, most of the time investigative roles resolve at the end of the Day (where Night would be). However, killing and protective roles may instead resolve immediately upon receipt - so a kill on a player would normally go through as soon as it is sent, but if someone sends in a protect on that player beforehand, the kill is stopped. Players are still allowed to change their actions until they resolve.

If this sort of mechanic is employed, the first several hours of each game Day is called Morning. All actions submitted during Morning resolve simultaneously. This is to prevent silliness like a Doctor racing to beat the Mafia to protecting an obvious kill target as soon as the Day begins.

In addition, many mods who run this kind of setup invoke a 24-hour Twilight period following the lynch/deadline in order to allow time for the mod to process all actions and the players to submit actions slightly behind schedule. This does affect strategy slightly as the lynchee can be known at the time of action submission. While most mods currently allow lynchees' actions to resolve and even be submitted during this Twilight, the wisdom of this practice is open for debate.