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

In order to allow time for the mod to process all actions and the players to submit actions slightly behind schedule, many mods who run this kind of setup invoke a 24-hour Twilight period following the lynch/deadline. 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.