Good game though. Being my first game I didn't expect to last very long (which is silly, since villagers have the best life expectancy). If anyone has any feedback about how I played, would love to know how to improve.
You seemed like you knew your shit, and jumped int the middle of the game without missing a beat. Theres no way Im beliving this your first game :P
The concentration of mafia that ended up on the Malkor wagon the day Gaslight got voted out is kind of amazing.
Thanks for running this, Munkus! Hope you feel better ASAP.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Ok, I know this is long past over, but given that I fucking finished this asshole while I was in the hospital I wasn't really game on talking themes or mechanics. So I'm doing that now.
The theme for arcadia was supposed to be about Lies. But! BUT! It ended up being about Fear. It was an example of what happens in a game where nobody really knows what is going on, a community where everyone is afraid to stick their neck out.
I guess this is the exact opposite of that game. First and foremost: the Serial Killer role.
Serial Killer
I designed from the outset to give Infidel more than a fighting chance. I don't like talking about hidden mechanics in my games to keep people from trying to break things, but a little hint is that if I am giving power to a group I make 50/50 ties go in their favor. I'll flip a coin for villagers and mafia in this game, but if Infidel was ever the target of a tie vote then it would have never shot its load on him. Given that the vote is the only 50/50 thing in most of my games (this one also had the element of death priority, which was only an issue with the Vig and Infidel killed him) this did not come into play much. But other things did.
Infidel knew all of the spoken mechanics of the game, none of the secret ones, from Day 2. This was intended. He had an omni-shield that would redirect anything, except the vote, to his patsy target. The catch: It wouldn't work on village specials (i.e. them being the patsy). And if he chose a mafia as a patsy...he'd seer as mafia.
Sound broken? Well, he started at one kill a night. And he had to kill a special/mafia in order to keep the shield up. The flip side is, he got a seer that told him normal/special (not alignment) if he killed a special while his shield was up. And he could not change a patsy unless they died, and if he killed the patsy his shield would drop for the night until he reset his patsy. This was again a balancing act, as I did not expect him to get the vigilante that quickly. It was inexperience from the vig that screwed the village, and thus the RNG is a harsh, harsh mistress. I told him up front that the vig would pass to the mafia or the SK if they killed him. The mafia were set to find out about this piece of information at the end of Day 2, I'll get to that later.
Funny, funny story. One night Infidel was targeted with the guard spell, a mafia hit, and a seer. And I did have an answer for that, hidden somewhere.
Everything got switched to the patsy. The guard spell saved the patsy and the seer, making it so they seered the patsy instead of seering Infidel. Normally the seer would have just returned a result for Infidel. If the patsy was maifa he'd have seered mafia. If the patsy was a villager he'd have seered village. If the patsy was a special, he'd seer as the serial killer.
But if Infidel was guarded and seered, the guard would protect the seer from the false information and give them info on the patsy instead.
Balancing mechanic, why? In case Infidel tried to pretend to be a vig and get guarded + seered on a night. This ended up saving the village from losing their seer straight away, though from the PMs I was reading it seemed the seer contacted Infidel anyway. I have no idea why.
As many of you are aware, Infidel was the Serial Killer in the first game. So did the RNG give Infidel the 1/50 chance of a repeat? Close.
I drew up the RNG numbers for all the special roles, and Infidel came up as mafia. Since Infidel as mafia would know how the SK worked and how to get around its defenses, he wouldn't be able to use that info. On the flip side, he wouldn't be able to talk to them about it. It was a huge liability either way and it would be unbalanced. I could have dealt with him being village or a village special, but mafia? I didn't want to deal with that, so I moved Infidel's number to the SK slot which moved everyone else up one slot.
In the end, I think the balance worked out barely for the SK, but primarily due to luck. I liked the balancing of it in a strictly fun-to-watch game aspect, but I did not like it in the "Information is King" standard that I design my games around. I gave the SK abilities as I gave abilities to the village specials, so anything that affected the SK could be attributed to the village (plague immunity? plague vials! attacks redirected to someone else? guards can either guard or bus-drive!) Next time I run a game, I will be using an Uber-SK role but I will incorporate elements that allow people to actually discern who he is.
Which brings me to the next group, and my biggest fuck-up due to my fever, the mafia.
[/center]The Mafia[/center]
The mafia was supposed to start out completely in the dark about the mechanics of the game, but slowly learn the weaknesses of the village and the Serial Killer. This was a good idea in theory, but I fucked up majorly along the way.
First I accidently sent them the guardian role PM because the RNG gave a mafia-man the guardian role. This was on my third roll for that role, so I missed that I had rolled a mafia yet again for the villager role. I deleted the message from their proboards and the person in question died immediately, so I hoped that damage control was done. I racked my brain on how I could change the role while still keeping with its previous theme, and the only thing I could think of was to let them have the ability to guard known specials if they charged the guard to be a bus-driver first. This would have been useful, had the vigilante not immediately died.
I didn't mention any of this at first to them because I had hoped they hadn't caught a good glance at the role PM and weren't using the information, but when it turned out they were I reminded them to not use the PM as gospel since I changed some things to compensate for it. When I looked back later, after the game was over, I realized that they were talking about someone guarding Infidel.
And the hilarious thing is that someone was guarding Infidel both times. Infidel was attacked 3 times by the mafia, once it was guarded, once it was busdriven by a guard, and finally it was redirected to the patsy.
The worst of it was that I left my sheet of paper with my infodump timeline at home when I went to the hospital and I forgot to update the proboards info-thread on more than one occasion. I fucked up on the mafia information distribution, but if I had had my timeline and hadn't been in the hospital...I think it would have worked out. I like the concept of strategic weaknesses that the mafia must learn about. After all, how else would they realize the guards couldn't protect outed specials?
Village Specials
First of all, many of you did good with the plague. You sent a PM with the orders instead of in the thread. The mafia, once they had the plague cure, could have used it to keep one of their guys from being targeted. Likewise, it was meant for the village to change the target of a plagued mafia-man. The plague vials did not work out well in practice at all. There was no point, really. Someone was gonna die, so it wasn't worth using nine times out of ten. I should have let it stop the plague entirely for a night, because publicly revealing the plague vial mechanic would be risky anyway. All in all, I still like the plague but hated the vial defense. I won't be using it in the next game simply because I don't want to get TOO predictable.
Also, the day 1 plague victim was determined due to a hidden mechanic that came into play unexpectedly when the intended target was guarded.
The vigilante role worked well enough, I think. In the context of the game, knowing that dying at the hands of the enemy would give them an extra kill should have made the vigilante wary of revealing at all, even without knowing the guardian weakness. But then the vigilante was bandwagoned on day 1 and took a risk to escape.
The guards actually were extremely useful in this game, they managed to block and confound the mafia numerous times throughout the game. The 'outed special' restriction worked nicely: if a person was the role they claimed to be, the guard simply would not work. The only notification of this failure would be if the target was killed that night. I think this worked out well in the end, with a clear village head impossible the village had to keep talking to figure out who was the mafia. And the guardians had to try to second-guess the mafia instead of guarding the same person ad nauseum. If I ever use guardians again, I'm gonna stack on the weaknesses like I did here. Maybe make it so they can't guard outed-specials and once they guard a person, they have to wait 2 days before they can guard that specific person again.
Anyone have thoughts or input about the game mechanics, balance, or setting?
Sorry that it took this long for me to post my postgame analysis, but I hope you let me know what you think
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
The inactivity was the real killer. Even though infi probably would have still won, the couple more days those extra bodies had would have helped the village immensely. Especially since inactivity is almost entirely a villager problem, stever's lawl and all, mafia are generally much better about not only meeting the posting requirements, but also seeking a replacement while there are still replacements to give.
I think the SK was overpowered and the mafia was underpowered personally. But I also realise the mafia was made up of dudes who werent really experienced being mafia, so we were kind of the blind leading the blind.
Nah, the SK would have been fine if it was anyone but infi, or INANTP had shared his not-seering a bit more. The mafia might have been a bit weak
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AssuranIs swinging on the SpiralRegistered Userregular
Inactivity really killed the village here. We lost specials to inactivity. The SK was strong, but honestly I'm not sure Infy could have won without taking my stuff.
I don't know how I feel about the guards, honestly. I think I'd rather have suicide guards than guards who can't protect outed specials. Just seems like a really harsh penalty. Maybe they can't guard the same person twice in a row or something instead.
I think Day 1 really changed the entire dynamics of the game. If I'm not the vig, the village doesn't lose two specials by the end of day 2. That is pretty game changing.
Some things you can't (or shouldn't) really account for, though. Yeah it sucks that you got bandwagoned early and were our vig, but I still think mechanics that force vigs to rethink revealing to the thread are a good idea, it just backfired on us this time since you were unlucky enough to be targeted by the vote.
And then you not being guarded gave infidel the early 2nd kill. We waited a day because we figured youd be guarded but it turns out you were wide open!
Posts
Thanks for running this, Munkus! Hope you feel better ASAP.
The theme for arcadia was supposed to be about Lies. But! BUT! It ended up being about Fear. It was an example of what happens in a game where nobody really knows what is going on, a community where everyone is afraid to stick their neck out.
I guess this is the exact opposite of that game. First and foremost: the Serial Killer role.
I designed from the outset to give Infidel more than a fighting chance. I don't like talking about hidden mechanics in my games to keep people from trying to break things, but a little hint is that if I am giving power to a group I make 50/50 ties go in their favor. I'll flip a coin for villagers and mafia in this game, but if Infidel was ever the target of a tie vote then it would have never shot its load on him. Given that the vote is the only 50/50 thing in most of my games (this one also had the element of death priority, which was only an issue with the Vig and Infidel killed him) this did not come into play much. But other things did.
Infidel knew all of the spoken mechanics of the game, none of the secret ones, from Day 2. This was intended. He had an omni-shield that would redirect anything, except the vote, to his patsy target. The catch: It wouldn't work on village specials (i.e. them being the patsy). And if he chose a mafia as a patsy...he'd seer as mafia.
Sound broken? Well, he started at one kill a night. And he had to kill a special/mafia in order to keep the shield up. The flip side is, he got a seer that told him normal/special (not alignment) if he killed a special while his shield was up. And he could not change a patsy unless they died, and if he killed the patsy his shield would drop for the night until he reset his patsy. This was again a balancing act, as I did not expect him to get the vigilante that quickly. It was inexperience from the vig that screwed the village, and thus the RNG is a harsh, harsh mistress. I told him up front that the vig would pass to the mafia or the SK if they killed him. The mafia were set to find out about this piece of information at the end of Day 2, I'll get to that later.
Funny, funny story. One night Infidel was targeted with the guard spell, a mafia hit, and a seer. And I did have an answer for that, hidden somewhere.
Everything got switched to the patsy. The guard spell saved the patsy and the seer, making it so they seered the patsy instead of seering Infidel. Normally the seer would have just returned a result for Infidel. If the patsy was maifa he'd have seered mafia. If the patsy was a villager he'd have seered village. If the patsy was a special, he'd seer as the serial killer.
But if Infidel was guarded and seered, the guard would protect the seer from the false information and give them info on the patsy instead.
Balancing mechanic, why? In case Infidel tried to pretend to be a vig and get guarded + seered on a night. This ended up saving the village from losing their seer straight away, though from the PMs I was reading it seemed the seer contacted Infidel anyway. I have no idea why.
As many of you are aware, Infidel was the Serial Killer in the first game. So did the RNG give Infidel the 1/50 chance of a repeat? Close.
I drew up the RNG numbers for all the special roles, and Infidel came up as mafia. Since Infidel as mafia would know how the SK worked and how to get around its defenses, he wouldn't be able to use that info. On the flip side, he wouldn't be able to talk to them about it. It was a huge liability either way and it would be unbalanced. I could have dealt with him being village or a village special, but mafia? I didn't want to deal with that, so I moved Infidel's number to the SK slot which moved everyone else up one slot.
In the end, I think the balance worked out barely for the SK, but primarily due to luck. I liked the balancing of it in a strictly fun-to-watch game aspect, but I did not like it in the "Information is King" standard that I design my games around. I gave the SK abilities as I gave abilities to the village specials, so anything that affected the SK could be attributed to the village (plague immunity? plague vials! attacks redirected to someone else? guards can either guard or bus-drive!) Next time I run a game, I will be using an Uber-SK role but I will incorporate elements that allow people to actually discern who he is.
Which brings me to the next group, and my biggest fuck-up due to my fever, the mafia.
[/center]The Mafia[/center]
The mafia was supposed to start out completely in the dark about the mechanics of the game, but slowly learn the weaknesses of the village and the Serial Killer. This was a good idea in theory, but I fucked up majorly along the way.
First I accidently sent them the guardian role PM because the RNG gave a mafia-man the guardian role. This was on my third roll for that role, so I missed that I had rolled a mafia yet again for the villager role. I deleted the message from their proboards and the person in question died immediately, so I hoped that damage control was done. I racked my brain on how I could change the role while still keeping with its previous theme, and the only thing I could think of was to let them have the ability to guard known specials if they charged the guard to be a bus-driver first. This would have been useful, had the vigilante not immediately died.
I didn't mention any of this at first to them because I had hoped they hadn't caught a good glance at the role PM and weren't using the information, but when it turned out they were I reminded them to not use the PM as gospel since I changed some things to compensate for it. When I looked back later, after the game was over, I realized that they were talking about someone guarding Infidel.
And the hilarious thing is that someone was guarding Infidel both times. Infidel was attacked 3 times by the mafia, once it was guarded, once it was busdriven by a guard, and finally it was redirected to the patsy.
The worst of it was that I left my sheet of paper with my infodump timeline at home when I went to the hospital and I forgot to update the proboards info-thread on more than one occasion. I fucked up on the mafia information distribution, but if I had had my timeline and hadn't been in the hospital...I think it would have worked out. I like the concept of strategic weaknesses that the mafia must learn about. After all, how else would they realize the guards couldn't protect outed specials?
First of all, many of you did good with the plague. You sent a PM with the orders instead of in the thread. The mafia, once they had the plague cure, could have used it to keep one of their guys from being targeted. Likewise, it was meant for the village to change the target of a plagued mafia-man. The plague vials did not work out well in practice at all. There was no point, really. Someone was gonna die, so it wasn't worth using nine times out of ten. I should have let it stop the plague entirely for a night, because publicly revealing the plague vial mechanic would be risky anyway. All in all, I still like the plague but hated the vial defense. I won't be using it in the next game simply because I don't want to get TOO predictable.
Also, the day 1 plague victim was determined due to a hidden mechanic that came into play unexpectedly when the intended target was guarded.
The vigilante role worked well enough, I think. In the context of the game, knowing that dying at the hands of the enemy would give them an extra kill should have made the vigilante wary of revealing at all, even without knowing the guardian weakness. But then the vigilante was bandwagoned on day 1 and took a risk to escape.
The guards actually were extremely useful in this game, they managed to block and confound the mafia numerous times throughout the game. The 'outed special' restriction worked nicely: if a person was the role they claimed to be, the guard simply would not work. The only notification of this failure would be if the target was killed that night. I think this worked out well in the end, with a clear village head impossible the village had to keep talking to figure out who was the mafia. And the guardians had to try to second-guess the mafia instead of guarding the same person ad nauseum. If I ever use guardians again, I'm gonna stack on the weaknesses like I did here. Maybe make it so they can't guard outed-specials and once they guard a person, they have to wait 2 days before they can guard that specific person again.
Anyone have thoughts or input about the game mechanics, balance, or setting?
Sorry that it took this long for me to post my postgame analysis, but I hope you let me know what you think
I don't know how I feel about the guards, honestly. I think I'd rather have suicide guards than guards who can't protect outed specials. Just seems like a really harsh penalty. Maybe they can't guard the same person twice in a row or something instead.
I think Day 1 really changed the entire dynamics of the game. If I'm not the vig, the village doesn't lose two specials by the end of day 2. That is pretty game changing.
Don't get voted for next time! :P