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Legend of [Phalla] - Game Over. The Village Wins.

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  • Grunt's GhostsGrunt's Ghosts Registered User regular
    I feel like a broken record because I said this in Burnage's game but IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A BATTLE MECHANIC IN YOUR GAME, FOCUS ON THAT!!!!!!!!

    I disagree with this, however. The battle mechanic was meant to be a side offering in this game. Dungeon Crawling was the primary focus, and battle was meant to be brought in for those who felt they would rather take out others instead of trying to go for Ganon. I don't think it should be a requirement that every game that has battle mechanics focus solely on those mechanics. Maybe from a balance standpoint that's how it ends up needing to be for balance purposes but I feel like that kind of broad statement has the potential to stunt a lot of creativity in future games.

    I'd be lying if I said that after running this I have any strong desire to host again, but I also will be honest and say that a good portion of that is from the fact that it's just a lot of dang work hosting. I'm extremely impressed by those of you who do this regularly, because it certainly isn't all that fun to be on this side of it.

    If the Dungeon Crawl is the focus of the game, then don't have battle mechanics. You could have not had HP/ATK, gave the mafia powers to effect the Dungeon Crawl part of the game and it would have been a better game.
    Burnage wrote: »
    • Don't have Straight Vigs, Seers, or Guards in HP games. Give one player an ATK boost, Guards who can stop X damage, and Action Seers. No one, not the mafia, the village, or Serial Killer should ever have a straight up kill. No one needs to be automatically confirmed by a seer. Throw Thralls and Millers in there and keep the confusion going.

    I realise I'm slightly biased here but I don't understand why you feel this should be a cast iron rule. In a game of 30 or 40 players where everyone can attack for some damage, and one player can instantly kill someone... what makes that less fun or interesting than a game in which there's no standard vig?

    It comes down to stopping the village network from happening in Battle Phallas. In a normal Phalla once the vig goes "I killed X" the game becomes Trinity vs. the Mafia. The village stops thinking for themselves, for the most part, because they aren't going to have as much knowledge about the background of the game as the Trinity. And I know that we are suppose to look up vote records but beyond that, but we are still relying on the vig to give us direction. Look how many times this game Premium voted just to have a vote in and people took it as a network call and followed suit.

    In a Battle phalla, we are all on the same playing field, or we are suppose to be. But in Portland, there were 4 unblockable instakills; the vote, the vig, the mafia, and the ghosts; and 1 unkillable network head. And once Obifett couldn't died, it became Obifett vs. the mafia. I have a feeling that once Obi got big, my little kill squad that I was part of was the only people really hitting other folks. If you are doing Battle Phallas, everyone should feel like they are important, that they have things to do, that they are there to fight. No one should ever feel like they can just backseat it and let the network heads do stuff, or that there are too many instakills going around, what's the point of fighting. In a battle phalla, you should either be playing like a SK, knowing that if you are the last person alive the village wins, or getting kill squads and trying to uncover who is village and who is mafia by working with people and seeing if everyone is working together. If everyone can kill, there is no reason there should be an instakill. The vote maybe the only exception but in my battle phalla I'm not even letting the vote be an instakill but instead deal 1 unblockable damage to the person who receives the vote. Doesn't mean the vote will kill him or he won't be able to bounce back, but he'll see who wants him dead in a public way, encouraging battling and communication.

  • CythraulCythraul Registered User regular
    I think it'd be neat to do a Twitch Plays Phalla game where all specials weren't people, but voted for publicly. Give the mafia some form of vote manip, see how things play out.

    More things would need to be considered, but one neat way of getting participation is the dodgerblue vote that occasionally happens and a game revolving around that would be interesting I think.

    Steam
    Confusion will be my epitaph
  • 38thDoe38thDoe lets never be stupid again wait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered User regular
    If the vote doesn't kill someone I submit that its not really a mafia game. Not that it is really a problem, but I think that's a basic tennant of the game along with uninformed majority vs informed minority.

    38thDoE on steam
    🦀🦑🦀🦑🦀🦑🦀🦑🦀🦑🦀🦑🦀
    
  • BurnageBurnage Registered User regular
    edited September 2016
    I think there's room in Phalla's conceptual space for all of these games. Instant kills in a game with HP mechanics? Sure. Vote that doesn't automatically kill? Go for it. Standard game with a mafia, vig, guard and seer? Great!

    As long as most of your players are having fun, and the mechanics aren't broken to the extent that one side can't win, why not? Saying that things shouldn't be this way seems overly limiting to me.

    Burnage on
  • AustinP0027AustinP0027 Registered User regular
    Out of curiosity, has anyone tried combing the roles before as a means of limiting their inherent network ownership state?

    Like a seer/guard who can do one or the other each night? Or maybe seer/vig so they have to choose between growing the network or killing someone off?

  • MatevMatev Cero Miedo Registered User regular
    When people say it shouldn't, they're mostly saying "I don't like this method of playing" or "The meta doesn't really support this kind of play." Sure, you could make a game where the vote doesn't result in a death, but then what's the point of voting for people if that's the case? It certainly wouldn't feel like a phalla to me personally if people didn't die at all to the vote, and would take away one of the village's key forms of information and power. (Oooh, save that idea for US election phalla later, zing!)

    Personally, I strive for a game where everyone feels like the contribution they make to the game has meaning towards helping their team win. A network can help towards that goal, but as stated above, it can also lead to a few players essentially playing the game for rest, which isn't terribly fun for most if you aren't those key players.

    Take this game for example, once premium called his kill and came through, what reason was there for the guard to guard anyone other than premium? Without a way for the mafia to get around that guard, Premium then can safely drive the village until either the mafia is dead, the guard is killed, (If the mafia can figure out who they are via soft networking, but why pull off your confirmed vig to guard someone unconfirmed?) or he loses because they're in the minority (Which gets lesslikely as he gets more info and can make better decisions about how to move the game) The options for mitigating this kind of play are many, but that's up to the host (and any people assisting them) to notice and decide how they want to proceed.

    "Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
    Hail Hydra
  • PhyphorPhyphor Building Planet Busters Tasting FruitRegistered User regular
    A mafia seer or village-colored mafia vig once in a while is okay to keep the village from falling too much into called shot & seer instant network combo but they are risky to include too ofte

  • BedlamBedlam Registered User regular
    38thDoe wrote: »
    @38thDoe

    Hey! Thanks for the mention!

    I will be taking a break from phalla. I got a new job and they don't hire on first so I will be going to second shift and hoping to transfer after a bit.

    Sorry I didn't reply sooner. Things have been kind of hectic.


  • discriderdiscrider Registered User regular
    edited September 2016
    Eh.
    All this talk around the trinity (seer/vig/guard) seems to be missing the point a bit.
    A vig is usually necessary unless the game is a battle phalla just due to kill calculus.

    From what I've gathered you want games to run for like 7-8 days (if everyone were to die). Longer games favour the village and shorter games favour the mafia or at least are random kill-fests.
    So you take your player count, divide that by 7 or 8, and that will give you how many deaths should occur each night.

    So for a 30 player game you're looking at about 4 kills per night.
    One will be the vote, another the mafia.
    But with the other two, you can do what you want.
    But when it comes down to it, you have to ask whether giving anti-village or neutral factions 3 kills to the vote's 1 is really balanced?
    If not, and I'd suggest it's not, then there will be a villager controlled kill out there, and that person will normally be the vig.

    You can do other things, like dispersing the kill load among attacks in a battle phalla, but the vig is the easiest way to implement this.

    If you have a vig, then you'll need a guard, unless you specifically tell the vig not to out themselves in their role PM.
    Otherwise you'll just have an angry dead vig.

    And then there's the seer, who a lot of people don't like for the flat confirmation but who a lot of people see as necessary.
    Basically, in these games, no-one really talks enough.
    If you could read people better, then maybe you wouldn't need a seer.
    But a lot of people are inactive most of the time, so adding a seer puts information into the game that the village desperately needs.

    It is pretty hard to move away from the standard three, and there are ways of doing it.
    But I'm not surprised most hosts do not.

    discrider on
  • WACriminalWACriminal Dying Is Easy, Young Man Living Is HarderRegistered User regular
    discrider wrote: »
    Eh.
    All this talk around the trinity (seer/vig/guard) seems to be missing the point a bit.
    A vig is usually necessary unless the game is a battle phalla just due to kill calculus.

    From what I've gathered you want games to run for like 7-8 days (if everyone were to die). Longer games favour the village and shorter games favour the mafia or at least are random kill-fests.
    So you take your player count, divide that by 7 or 8, and that will give you how many deaths should occur each night.

    So for a 30 player game you're looking at about 4 kills per night.
    One will be the vote, another the mafia.
    But with the other two, you can do what you want.
    But when it comes down to it, you have to ask whether giving anti-village or neutral factions 3 kills to the vote's 1 really balanced?
    If not, and I'd suggest it's not, then there will be a villager controlled kill out there, and that person will normally be the vig.

    You can do other things, like dispersing the kill load among attacks in a battle phalla, but the vig is the easiest way to implement this.

    If you have a vig, then you'll need a guard, unless you specifically tell the vig not to out themselves in their role PM.
    Otherwise you'll just have an angry dead vig.

    And then there's the seer, who a lot of people don't like for the flat confirmation but who a lot of people see as necessary.
    Basically, in these games, no-one really talks enough.
    If you could read people better, then maybe you wouldn't need a seer.
    But a lot of people are inactive most of the time, so adding a seer puts information into the game that the village desperately needs.

    It is pretty hard to move away from the standard three, and there are ways of doing it.
    But I'm not surprised most hosts do not.

    This is one reason I liked the mood in Burnage's game. For the most part, people were of a belief that almost anything could happen, any configuration of powers and alignments might be present. So nobody turned their brain off, nobody (even Obi, who literally could not die) ever got completely comfortable with the state of the game.

    I'm not saying every game needs to be like that, or even can be like that. But it's definitely one of the many, many good things that can potentially appear in a Phalla game.

    I enjoyed this game, Austin, even if I do agree that it was imbalanced in some ways.

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